Pierre Gascar's "The Season of the Dead": The Pastoral and the Sublime

In my last post I introduced Gascar's lengthy short story "The Season of the Dead" and I noted how Gascar uses a range of rhetorical devices to mediate the historical events of the Holocaust--the mass genocide gripping a nation and the personal and generational trauma tormenting survivors and their families--and through his text opening up a space for the Holocaust dead to be memorialized. It is a beautiful text, really. I mentioned how he creates a dreamscape mode throughout the story, so that the characters seem only half-conscious, a reasonable response to dealing with the immensity of their trauma. Not only are these characters operating in an illusive dream space, their graveyard recalls the Pastoral. Against this Pastoral, Gascar juxtaposes scenes of  murdered babies and dead children--scenes that arouse the sublime.

Gascar’s rhetorical devices include his diction which one would associate with a nature scene from the Pastoral. For example, Peter and Cordonat “linger . . . gazing at [their] surroundings” (121) as though they exist in a time of leisure and beauty. Peter imagines himself as a mythical being found in a painting of the idyllic: “A man sitting beside a clump of anemones, another cutting grass with a scythe; water, and somebody lying flat on his belly drinking, and somebody else with his eyes turned skyward, drawing water in a yellow jug . . . the water was for me and Cordonat” (121). Gascar is revealing Peter’s psychological detachment from the reality of his situation, which emphasizes the dreamscape mode of the text. It also suggests the hallucinating effect dehydration and malnutrition might have on the victims in the concentration camp, causing the delirium that makes him believe he is being offered a jug of water. The text, which is not interested in mimesis, conveys a compelling psychological rendering of the concentration camp experience.

Cole Thomas The Course of Empire 

            It is absurd that Peter can imagine his situation as idyllic; yet the artistry of the graveyard is equally bizarre, considering the context of the concentration camp. Gascar foregrounds the artistic quality of the graveyard, emphasizing the purity of its aesthetic makeup. That is to say that it has been fashioned entirely from the natural world and not from human structures and monuments. This distinction is highly important to Peter (and to Gascar). When the Germans have culled the tombstones from the Jewish grave, Peter is adamant that they will not occupy his graveyard. He describes the aesthetic quality of the graveyard: “With its ever green turf, its flowerbeds, its carefully sanded paths edged with small black fir-trees which we had transplanted, with its rustic fence of birch-boughs, against the dark background of the forest verge, our graveyard seemed an ‘idyllic’ place as the Germans put it” (149). 

Beautiful greenspace, perhaps what Peter sees

He says that they came out to photograph it and that its fame was “like that which carries crowds to gaze at certain baroque works of art or at others which, devoid of art, are yet prodigies of patience and time” (149).  While Peter is wary of the ethical implications of setting up the Jewish stones, he is most insistent on maintaining the purity of the graveyard’s construction. It possesses a sacred quality like the Hebrews brought to the construction of the Ark of the Covenant on which no tool was to be used.  Gascar is gesturing to the reader to consider the integrity of his own aesthetic representation of the Holocaust, whose construction offers a beautiful memorial in honour of the dead, a beauty which is always tempered by the horrors contained within its prose.

Gascar recognizes the literary constraints of representing the Holocaust, which causes him to assess narrative strategies and discursive practices. Peter considers the magnitude of suffering experienced by Lebovitch and the Jews:

They took you into a universe which perhaps had always existed behind the solid rampart of the dead, and of which the metaphors of traditional rhetoric only gave you superficial glimpses; where the bread was literally snatched form one’s mouth, where one could not keep body and soul together, where one really was bled white and died like a dog (138).

Metaphor breaks down when it tries to represent the Holocaust. Language which was once full of hyperbole has become a reality for the Jews.  Peter demonstrates how words, mere signifiers, are loaded with such power because of Nazi rhetoric that they actually swallow them up in their meaning. Peter explains: “Like novice sorcerers inexpert in the magic of words, we now beheld the essential realities of hell, escaping from the dry husks of their formulae, come crowding toward us and over us: the black death of the plague, the bread of affliction, the pride of a louse” (138). Gascar illuminates how words are subject to cultural meaning; these quaint idioms he quotes contain hellish reality. Certainly, Gascar’s attention to discursive practices is an indictment against Nazi propaganda which uses words to deceive and control, but it also reveals his own reticence at narrating this piece of Holocaust fiction.

In the midst of Peter’s idyllic graveyard, Gascar infuses elements of the sublime as a way to foreground the singularity of death against the backdrop of mass killings. By employing the sublime he retains the veracity of representation. Peter is always aware of the overwhelming horrors unfolding in the camp and at the train docks; yet he mostly pushes these aside and occupies himself with weeding and transplanting. However he can’t always avoid horrific confrontations. When he comes upon the mass grave, these hastily buried corpses pit the extraordinary truth of death against his abstractions of death. Here he confronts the abject:

I was overwhelmed by the sombre horror of it and the truth it revealed—these liquefying muscles, this half-eaten eye, those teeth like a dead sheep’s; death, no longer decked with grasses, no longer ensconced in the coolness of a vault, no longer sepulchred in stone, but sprawling in a bog full of bones, wrapped in a drowned man’s clothes, with its hair caught in the earth (142). 

He can’t dress up death here. Gascar provides another subliminal departure from the dreamscape of Peter’s sensibility when he focuses in on the train dock: the German guards toss dead children on to the roofs of the vans. This train scene breaks up the dreamscape again and Peter zeroes in on the singular experience of a woman. He recounts:

High up in the wall of the van, a little to the left in the narrow opening, there was a face; it seemed not living, but painted—painted white, with yellow hair, with a mouth that moved feebly and eyes that did not move at all: the face of a woman whose dead child was lying above her head (145).

This face, this countenance, makes an impression on Peter and he confesses: “Death can never appease this pain; this stream of black grief will flow forever” (145). Peter realizes that the burials, the funerals, all his efforts to honour the dead will never remove the pain, the grief, the memory of a monstrous history. Gascar’s instances of the sublime force Peter, and the reader, to confront the abominable reality of the Holocaust. Just when he lulls Peter back into his dreamscape, he erupts the text with the sublime.             Gascar depicts the agonizing experiences of those forced to dig graves, of those forced to bury the dead, of those forced to witness travesty. Through diction and syntax and rhetoric, he creates a dreamscape mode that he, then, disrupts with the sublime. And, it is uncomfortable, but reading about the Holocaust isn't about being comfortable. It's about never forgetting. 

    In my next post, I'm going to discuss the way that Gascar incorporates fairy tale generic conventions into his story. 

Memorialisation and the Holocaust: A Textual Graveyard in Pierre Gascar’s “The Season of the Dead” Part One

     I have recently reread a number of stories from When Night Fell: An Anthology of Holocaust Short Stories. This collection considers the ethical position of those writing the Holocaust. What captivates me again is the forty-six page story (novella?) called "The Season of the Dead," by Pierre Gascar. This story serves as a memorial structure, 

in which the Holocaust dead are given a formal burial ground. Gascar provides a comprehensive description of the narrator, Peter, his methodical construction of the graveyard. Throughout the narrative, Gascar details grave positions, flower arrangements, boundaries, and so on. These excessive descriptions are signposts to the reader, which point out the narrative strategies Gascar employs to construct his textual graveyard. The character Ernst draws the comparison between the literal and the textual graveyard: “I mean that this ancient, traditional burial-ground, close by your own fresh and improvised one, is rather like the upper shelf in a library” (128). Gascar’s novella is a composite of many of the literary conventions one might locate on that library shelf. Indeed, Gascar employs elements from the film framing technique Dreamscape, from the fairy tale, from religious texts. He incorporates the abject and the sublime and he infuses the text with characteristics of Surrealism. Gascar uses very specific rhetorical devices to mediate the historical event in such a way that the dead are always at the surface and the text becomes their textual graveyard.   

I have taken three grad courses that were explicitly Holocaust literature courses or dealt significantly with Holocaust literature. We extensively discussed the ethical implications involved in writing about the Holocaust. Indeed, many scholars have considered ethical and historical considerations of representing the Holocaust. In addition, some scholars have considered artistic representations of the Holocaust; however, few have delineated any substantial set of narrative and rhetorical strategies employed by Holocaust writers. They may have identified pervasive modes of narration; yet they have not identified the techniques used to convey these modes. I am not suggesting that there is a formula or a single set of conventions for writing about the Holocaust. What I am suggesting is that the focus of critical inquiry into Holocaust literature has been dominated by the ethics of representing the Holocaust—as important as that is—and has been deficient in considering how the aesthetic work’s construction mediates the historical events. I am interested in how a text, such as Gascar’s "The Season of the Dead, attempts to memorialize the dead primarily on a textual level.  

In constructing a memorial site for the dead, Gascar is attentive to features of a memorial. James E. Young explores the function and successes of many Holocaust memorials, explaining that “the raison d’être for Holocaust monuments is ‘to never forget’” (173).  This dictum is in direct defiance to the intention of the Final Solution, which would have obliterated Jews from history and memory. Young Jeemphasizes that memorials are not, themselves, the memory; rather, it is in the “reflective space” the memorials occupy and open up that we remember (189). Peter opens up a graveyard in the narrative, which also opens up a textual space for us to remember. Not only does the text contain a physical graveyard, it maintains a graveyard-like atmosphere. That is to say that death is either at the surface or just beneath the surface of the text. Peter exists in a liminal space which creates a feeling of tentativeness throughout the narrative. We are always aware of death’s immanence for any of the individuals in the story. Even at Peter’s commission to construct the graveyard, the N.C.O. says, “There is to be a graveyard here . . . your own” (116). This designation hovers over the text and over all that Peter does.  Gascar keeps the temporality of the text right at the precipice of death, which is certainly commensurate with the feelings of those in the concentration camp. He describes the Jewish people, motionless, “driven there by some somnambulism of fear,” caught up in a nightmare from which they cannot awake:

“To Jews . . . going and staying were equally intolerable fates, and they would advance timidly towards the edge of the road or the barbed wire, take one step back and move a little to one side, as though seeking some state intermediary between departure and immobility.  They would stand on the verge of imagined flight, and in their thoughts would dig illusory tunnels through time (130). 

Gascar attempts to recreate the feeling of the Jews in their state of indecision, when they imagine they have choices. Gascar suggests that the victims escape through acts of the imagination; in other words, they psychologically distance themselves from the reality before them. Gascar’s narrative makes the same kinds of departures from realism in its rendering of the historical event. It gets caught up in a Kafkaesque world with disorientations and surreal distortions. 

Peter imagines himself as an ethereal figure in the surreal and bizarre space he is forced to occupy. He explains: “We belonged to another world, we were a team of ghosts returning every morning to a green, peaceful place, we were workers in death’s garden, characters in a long preparatory dream” (120-1). Peter describes his experience as a dream. In his dream world he does not have to assimilate the horrors occurring in his reality.  While the entire text has a dream-like quality to it, Gascar shifts between dream spheres. After tending the graveyard for so long Peter relates this impression: “our continual contact with death was beginning to open for us a sort of wicket-gate into its domain” (155). Through the persistent vis-à-vis with death, the text takes on a transcendent quality which resembles a kind of dreamscape one might encounter in a film. The dreamscape technique offers a way for Gascar to mediate the disjointed spaces—the stark and brutal world of the concentration camp and the peaceful and lush world of the graveyard—occupying the narrative. Gascar uses the dreamscape technique to convey Peter’s “reverie” (154). He continually reminds us of the surreal nature of the text with references to “mirages” (122) and illusory images (122). An example of the way in which Gascar emphasizes the dreamscape quality of the text is his metaphorical description of the landscape. He explains that the landscape is “deprived of radiance by the subdued quality of light; but it exuded a kind of stupor. At first, you noticed nothing” (122). In addition to the hazy sky—a result of smoke from the gas chambers?—he is also describing the inassimilable reality of life in the concentration camp. His description parallels with the deprivations imposed by the Nazis in order to stun the prisoners into complicity. Mass killings, hunger, thirst, and cruelty shadowed their understanding of their reality, so that they find themselves in “a kind of stupor.”  Peter is caught up in this disorienting reality.  

Anemones in the graveyard they dig.

In part, Gascar creates the dreamscape through purposeful rhetorical strategies, with the underlying intention, always, of memorializing the dead. He gestures toward such rhetoric in the opening of the narrative, when he describes the dead: “Theirs is not the only memory involved; they enter into a seasonal cycle, with an unfamiliar rhythm—ternary perhaps, slow in any case, with widely spaced oscillations and pauses; [emphasis added] they hang for a while nailed to a great wheel, sinking and rising by turns” (114). Indeed his writing contains “an unfamiliar rhythm,” unfamiliar because it is not always conducive to the mood one would experience in a concentration camp. He creates long, multi-phrased sentences with lulling rhythms, as in this abridged sentence: “Sometimes the earth, dried by the early spring sunshine, was blown so high by the wind that the horizon was darkened by a brown cloud, a storm-cloud which would break up into impalpable dust, and under which the sunflowers glowed luminously” (117).Throughout the text he recreates these undulations in syntax, often by using a cumulative sentence structure, its succession of phrase and clauses creating swells that soothe the reader. For example, in describing the phenomenon of fear, he creates this long sentence:

Fear shared their lives, and when we walked past with our sentries beside us it was Fear, that tireless companion, that began in a burst of lunatic lucidity, to count the pebbles dropping into the hole in the pavement, trees along the road, or the days dividing that instant from some past event or other—the fête at Tarnopol or Easter 1933, or the day little Chaim passed his exam: some other spring day, dateless day, some distant day that seemed to collect and hold all the happiness in life (123).

His syntax echoes back to the “oscillations” of memory (114) with its “bursts” and “[drops].” Not only is he attentive to the “oscillations” of memory, he is also conscientious about the “pauses” of memory.  He devises such pauses with his single-sentence paragraphs, such as “It was not until much later that somebody died” (119). By isolating the sentence, he gives more weight to its subject—the dead individual. Another example is the sentence, “I did not understand,” again causing the reader to consider the weight of these words. Gascar’s syntactical constructions catch the rhythm of Peter’s moods in his camp experience.

     In my next post, I will discuss the sublime and the way that the story borrows from the fairytale genre.