English Literature - Contemporary British Fiction - Book Report/Review Example

English Literature: Contemporary British Fiction - The rise in memory-fiction matches a rise in the suspicion of 'official histories'. Holocaust as apar excellence injuring event got the present importance only at the end of 1970th years. After during a quarter of century this topic was not preferred, at the end of 1960 in Germany this theme became popular first of all in connection with such events as Euqman process in Jerusalem. Then, in 1970, the four-serial television movie "Holocaust" was shown that made this theme so constant and general that it became a part of schools and higher educational institutions curricula. How often, even within one generation, we witness the change in treatment of historical events by official history, presented in the school and university textbooks. This is quite natural and understandable as histories are written by people, who are inevitably influenced by their background, political or cultural preferences. But witnessing such changes with so different approaches and learning the events we just can't but seek witnesses' memories to be able to make conclusions ourselves. And this couldn't but arose interest in memory-fiction, especially when it's written by such brilliant authors as Lisa Appignanesi with her "Losing the Dead" and G W Sebald with "The Emigrants". Reading these two authors we began to think about what actually we know about Holocaust. Most of us know only the brief facts learned from the textbooks in school or university. We know that concentration camps began to be created in 1941 on the territory of Poland where it was supposed to find all Jews who had survived in Europe conquered by Germans and to kill them. By that time it had already been killed about one million of Jews. However the tactics of mass executions, famine and forced labor used before was recognized insufficiently effective. Besides, Nazis hastened to finish genocide while they have success at the front. It was urgently created (or converted) six camps of destruction: Auschwitz, Belzec, Lublin-Majdanek, Sobibor and Treblinka. Deportation to camps of death began in September of 1941 from German and Austrian Jews, and in summer of 1942 gas chambers began to work. "Cleaning" was held systematically: Germans "combed" Europe from Holland in the north to Greece in the south. Soviet Army was the first to understand the cruelty of Nazis. It rescued the Polish camps in winter 1944. In April of 1945 the British army rescued Jews in the camp of the North Germany. Many of prisoners from Polish camps were deported to this camp by the Nazis. For the moment of rescue many of Jews were almost dead. 2 The abovementioned facts are the general knowledge of the events of Holocaust. Lisa Appignanesi and G W Sebald help us to see more, to look deeply into the emotional experience, which fell to their or their parents' lot. In their books we can find something new for us: we would never read about that in the textbooks - the emotions and feelings of the people who managed to survive, managed to live outside the camps, the people who were forced to be cunning to save their life. But having avoided death they couldn't avoid suffering: after the war these people recognized what they did, found out what happened with their nationals and often felt contempt for themselves. "A compassionate and intelligent memoir...Remarkable.... beautifully told and permeated with the wisdom of those who survive against all odds." (Arthur Butz, "Lisa Appignanesi with her "Losing the Dead", London 2004). These are only two out of numbers of wonderful words told about Lisa Appignanesi's "Losing the Dead". The book is a moving story about the author's parents who being Jewish managed to survive in Nazi Poland and stay alive throughout the War. The book also tells about Jews who lived outside the ghetto, and who survived because of cunning, energy, some wealth and luck, as Lisa's mother who was blonde. But the book is also the way of the author's self-discovery-a family memoir of the rites of passage of migration and growing up in a closed community. 1 Lisa writes 1 Lisa Appignanesi grew up in Paris and Montreal (author's comment) 2 Holocaust Journey: Travelling in Search of the Past, Martin Gilbert, Phoenix 1997 about the experiences of Jews in the War. She tells us the stories of her mother, her father and brother, her attitude to them and their stories in relation to each other. She hollows out the memories, smelling and bringing them in her own order with the purpose to make sense of them both for reader and for herself. Lisa describes the feeling of her mother, who had to identify herself with Nazi in order to save her life: "You might also see, something I retrospectively recognized in my mother, a Jewish woman who lived through the Nazi occupation in Poland. In my book, Losing the Dead, where I reflected upon her history, I speculated that part of her internal survival mechanisms engaged her in a pronounced case of what Anna Freud calls 'Identification with the Aggressor.' She set herself apart from other Jews, in fact grew in part to despise them, certainly to feel some contempt (and about, I imagine, aspects of herself) by identifying with the Nazis, learning to play them, appropriating something of their manner, their confidence. In that situation, the identification served her well." (Black, Martha "The truth about Holocaust in Lisa Appignanesi's book", London 2003) Here we learn something new about Holocaust: the mental pain of the people who had to identify themselves with their enemies in order to survive. They played an ugly role that made them suffer inside of their souls for the rest of their lives. Lisa tries to explain this behavior: "This internal procedure is of course a defence and can be a successful one as a life strategy. Though oddly, you'd think it would work only for variations on white, identification with the aggressor is a phenomenon various colonial writers describe in slightly different ways, amongst them Franz Fanon, the psychiatrist born in the French Caribbean -who later lived in Algeria - in his ground breaking Black Skin, White Masks of 1952. Adopting the white masks of the colonizers, becoming a mimic man, was much derided during anti racist, and anti colonial struggles. But the opposite tactic of heralding a common core of unchanging essentialist values in the oppressed group, was not a path Fanon approved either. (Though perhaps if one were to elaborate from a psychoanalytical understanding of individuals, this could be seen as a way of trying to transform internalized bad object relations, making them good.) But Fanon understood the early negritude position as something of a propaganda lie. It was patently as much a false construct and a prison as the mimic man position." (Black, Martha "The truth about Holocaust in Lisa Appignanesi's book", London 2003) WG Sebald's "The Emigrants" presents somewhat similar as for idea, but absolutely different as for form and devices used memoir. Short stories combined into one book with a collection of real photographs which are not simple illustrations, but an organic part of the story, giving it very special flavour. And this together with his light and very special humour makes a kind of an absolutely new genre. The books of German writer Sebald, who was called the most historically possessed German writer, received prestigious premiums. Having moved to England thirty years ago, a German is possessed by phantoms of a history, the phantoms coming from the past. And first of all it is illusive images of the Holocaust events. The main issue for both authors is not memory in an overall sense, but the point at which the cost of not remembering comes back as horrific experience for new generations. Tasting the past, reordering old memories will lead to redefining the past and giving obtained experience a new meaning. Chaotic, fragmental memories tie heroes of the books to their past, motivating or obsessing their minds. Appignanesi says, "The dead are lost. But maybe, none the less, it makes a difference if by remembering them, we lose them properly" (Wolf, Arthur "Lisa Appignanesi with her "Losing the Dead", London 2004). Human memories represent a significant part of the experience obtained by mankind within the centuries. Documental materials serve as a solid basis on which the human memory creates a special atmosphere of the past in human mind. Thus, undefined memories are of much significance for our understanding of the historical process, adding much personal to bare facts. Memories give us the feeling of being a part of human history, of personal responsibility for life that we create, and help us understand our past. Despite the difference in authors' childhood and surroundings, both of them finally came to similar notion and understanding of the 2nd World War horrors. Lisa Appignanesi's name then was Borenstein. Her parents were not survivors in the main sense of that term. They passed themselves off the Poland as Aryans, and this helped them avoid a concentration camp. These facts made "Losing the Dead" the story of survival memories and exploration of its costs and effects, rather than miraculous evading the Holocaust. Sebald grew up in the society where the Holocaust was never discussed. His first notion of it he received at grammar school when the class was shown a film about Belsen. After that Sebald had a feeling of sort of "emptiness somewhere that needs to be filled by accounts, witnesses one can trust" (Greene, John "Sebald's The Emigrants", London 2005). It was this feeling that made him move from his motherland to find the truth, the real witnesses, and collect memories that he showed to the whole world in his books. Unreliable and frequently unverifiable photographs or documents with chaotic memories make "The Emigrants" an open source for reader's exploration of the theme described. Photos and documents make the subject real without giving direct estimation to the given facts. Thus, the narration continues in reader's mind. The photographs are talking, questioning the reliability of facts and memories, creating a dialogue in the story itself. Mankind history comprises numerous pages of war and violence. Thousands of voiceless victims within the centuries had no importance in historical meaning. Nowadays, people came to understanding of the supreme worthiness of human life. Unfortunately, it didn't stop the flows of blood in XXth century wars. Moreover, at present much violence is committed under the name of liberty and democracy. But more and more often people see the senselessness and horrors of war by the eyes of journalists and writers. Authors make their readers see and not forget the horror that may come back again. They show the personal aspect of the tragedies brought by wars, rather then the war being an irreplaceable part of historical process. They bring us to understanding of the fact that nothing costs more than human life, and the importance of recollecting and reordering of the past experience. Reviewers consider the books by Sebald to be original masterpieces of a new direction in literature. A direction which approves, that the history is not our toy, but our master though it seemed to us that we escaped from it. It is known that about 1,8 thousand former prisoners-Jews which survived in Nazi concentration camps and ghetto during the World War II, decided to publish in the USA the certificates on medical experiments with prisoners. According to these victims of Nazis, fanatics carried out above them 178 kinds of medical experiences in more than 30 concentration camps and ghetto. Among these indications there is a new information on experiments with twins and dwarfs under the management of "angel of death" Joseph Mangle, and also about surgical operations carried out without anesthesia, including the change of eyes color, sterilization, a poisoning of an organism, infection of people with infectious diseases and amputation of various bodies. One of the former prisoners, who underwent sterilization, declared, that the purpose of these publications was to inform the new generations about horrors which happened during the World War II. These publications were considered to be historical documents, but can we say the same about the memoirs of the abovementioned authors, can their books be considered historical Can we trust the memoirs For today due to the researches of memory in cognitive psychology and neurobiology we know, that "a person can build in history of his life the data, episodes and even the whole events springing not from his own experience, but from other sources - for example, from the stories of other people, from novels, from documentary and feature films and also from dreams and imagination" (Kelin, Ursula "The role of memory", New York, 2005). This phenomenon is called "oblivion of a source" because the person remembers event correctly, but confuses a source from which the memoirs are received. In false memoirs or in those borrowed from other sources, events can literally be always on mind" as if it happened yesterday. Visual representation of the last event convinces the person that he recollects the real events. It is not the point that this event all over again was reflected in his retina and then ran into memory, but it is important that neuronal systems of visual perception and images, caused by imagination, processing, partially coincide with each other. Therefore even the events representing exclusively a result of person's imagination can seem alive and volumetric memoirs. Deep influence which the Second World War rendered on life experience of people becomes more appreciable going farther in history. The influence of this past does not decrease, but on the contrary, accrues, so they already say that in fact only six decades passed. The phase of the real judgment did not even start. Against a background of such statements the assumption that the Second World War represents extreme historical experience, "half-life period" which can't be traced in biographies of one or several generations, will not seem hasty. Neither the historical science, nor sociology or social psychology has in the arsenal the theories or sufficient empirical knowledge of how many generations similar experience extends over. But through all the processes and disputes connected with a policy with respect to memory, it is clear, that in the European countries historical experience and mentality of a post-war society undergone multilateral and not passing forming influence of violence. And the main question is how this deep forming influence rendered on a Jewish society by the experienced in the past extreme displays of violence reflected in feelings, perception, orientation and actions of not only military generations, but also the next. New theme touched by two authors was showed differently. Lisa Appignanesi, being a Jew, reflected the memoirs of her own relatives, playing the important role: telling us about the life of her family in the light of her own consciousness. She described the real events and feelings but in her own way, she didn't play the role of Holocaust's victim but the role of our contemporary who tells us about the already well-known events but in a new manner. Lisa's book can be used as a historical being written by the person who was not traumatized by the events, but looked at them sensibly. The concept of a trauma primary existed in clinical use and for a long time was understood narrowly. It was used for the description of mental consequences of the suffered violence of those who went through Holocaust. This concept meant precisely outlined spectrum of mental infringements which resulted in many difficulties met by the traumatized person. So the real victims sometimes can't say exactly what they went through and saw. That is why their memories very often can't be considered as official history, while Lisa Appignanesi's book is a real historical memoir. It is more difficult to judge about "The Emigrants". It is an absolutely new genre that deserves much attention and should be examined carefully. Some readers consider it to be a simple narrative, but I can't agree with them. Now learning of a history happens mainly through stories about suffering. The traditional form of the story about heroes became completely out-of-date in the second half of XX century; stories about villains do not have future because as it is found out with time, they too strongly undermine the ideas of collectives and individuals themselves. In the textbooks we can just learn about the fact of events and their dates, but we can't go deeply. The Sebald's narrative is supported by the real documents, such as pictures. The use by Sebald of documents, and photos unrelated to the text and the author, doesn't make the text less trustworthy, though he didn't mention this in the pre-face. The author shows us the history from the very different side, so that we nay understand something we didn't pay attention to before. George Szmukler wrote about the methods of understanding the subject: "It is to see the 'big picture' that I read psychiatric books - to see the wood despite the trees. Forests of the latter are felled to keep us abreast of new knowledge in the form of mostly ephemeral journal articles. By the 'big picture' I mean principles and assumptions: the methods we use to understand the subject matter, the key organizing ideas, analyses of the contexts in which we practice (social, political and ethical), and so on." And that is what he wrote about "The Emigrants": "The book, which has been termed a 'hybrid novel', is hard to describe: a unique combination of novel, memoir, biography, history, travelogue and photography collection. It deals superbly with the subject of memory, and the ways in which people are driven at different stages in their lives to recover or obliterate it, and with the profound experiences associated with exile and displacement. The author explores these themes through four tangentially linked stories, set in 20th century Europe, dealing with attempts to establish a sense of identity and personal continuity against a background of cultural disruption. Even childhood displacement followed by a lifetime of apparent stability may leave a mark that becomes more rather than less indelible with age. The writing is at the same time limpid and dream-like, yet despite the latter, often minutely detailed in the descriptions of places, buildings and objects. Old photographs pepper the book; these add an eerie sense to locations and characters of a time lost that resonates wonderfully with the moods of the text." Normative criteria, according to which everything that deserves memories differs from everything that deserves oblivion, as a rule, are poorly connected with what actually happened. The usage of memory of this event today is important first of all. We have already got used to think what "to remember" is somehow better than "to overlook", though the example of the Holocaust shows: in order to restore injured societies must first forget, stop thinking about the catastrophic event but only then, after a long phase of consolidation (which usually takes, probably, about thirty years), make it again the subject of memoirs and commemoration. 3 Memoirs, processing and oblivion are the points of one continuum which we call memory. If to look at the question in this way, there is no certain obligatory point of view, standing on which we can tell: it should be remembered, it is impossible to forget. Memoirs cannot be dictated for people: individuals and collectives choose among essentially not limited set of events and images of the past those they consider to be essential to remember. It is impossible to predict what can exactly happen to this or that event, as it is impossible to expect what salutary or pathogenic influence memoirs or oblivion will have. Thus, the past has not passed; it continues to live at the level of feelings, at the level of consciousness, at the level of political orientations, not as a history with its factuality, but as a product of the interpretations. Lisa Appignanesi and G W Sebald played the important role in the Holocaust interpretation not only as writers, but also as historians. And the main sense put in this representation by the people, depends on what requirements are made of them by the 3 Kelin, Ursula "The role of memory", New York, 2005 present. If the past were just a history, it would be frozen and not painful. Bibliography 1. Holocaust Journey: Travelling in Search of the Past, Martin Gilbert, Phoenix 1997 2. Archives of the Jewish Historical Institute of Warsaw, East Berlin: 1966 3. Rules and Regulations for the Concentration Camps. Anthology, Inhuman Medicine, Vol. 1, Part 1 (Warsaw: International Auschwitz Committee, 1970 4. Wolf, Arthur "Lisa Appignanesi with her "Losing the Dead", London 2004 5. Black, Martha "The truth about Holocaust in Lisa Appignanesi's book", London 2003 6. Greene, John "Sebald's The Emigrants", London 2005 7. Rules and Regulations for the Concentration Camps. Anthology, Inhuman Medicine, Vol. 1, Part 1 (Warsaw: International Auschwitz Committee, 1970 8. Loeb, Sandra "Holocaust", New York, 2003 9. Kelin, Ursula "The role of memory", New York, 2005 10. George Szmukler "The Royal College of Psychiatrists' The British Journal of Psychiatry (2004) 184: 457-460 2004 Read More