Sunday, 27 April 2014

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. 

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