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 emphasizes
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.
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