Pierre Gascar's "The Season of the Dead": Fairytale Forests

               

      When I read this story, I am awed by the author's depiction of the forest, this space of discarded Jewish corpses and this projection of nightmarish fears. The forest--and the characters' interaction with this space--remind me of forests in fairy tales, which has led me to consider the fairy tale and how it works to, then, gather additional insight into this story. 
      In order to keep impending death at the surface of the story and to continue in the dreamscape mode, Gascar borrows some elements from the fairy tale genre. Echoes of fairytales reverberate throughout the text. He gestures toward this intertextuality when Ernst tells Peter that he has read his books by the German writer, Klemens von Brentano (130), a German author of fairytales. In particular, Gascar incorporates the forest motif, a prominent feature in the Brother Grimms’ fairytales. Jack Vipes considers the role of the forest. He explains: “The heroes of the Grimm’s tales customarily drift into the forest, and are rarely the same people when they leave it. The forest provides them with all they need, if they know how to interpret the signs” (73). Often the heroes enter the forest of enchantment and encounter something mythical which transforms them. Consider the forest looming on the edge of that liminal space in which Peter resides and in which he must enter despite the threat it poses to him. Peter comes to the edge of the forest and he says, “But now the forest was opening up in front of me: that forest which hitherto I had known only in imagination, which had existed for me by virtue not of its copious foliage or its stalwart tree-trunks but of its contrasting gloom, the powerful way it shouldered the horizon and above all its secret contribution to the darkness that weighed me down” (126). He projects his fear onto the forest so that it becomes the embodiment of his nightmare. 

Creepy forest

The forest is a threat to Peter because it encroaches on his beloved graveyard, and its allegiance remains dubious. He notes that “the forest in which, only a minute before, spring flowers had awakened childhood memories, now emerged as though from some Hercynian flexure, darker, and denser, more mysterious and more ominous” (122). We know that the forest contains many secrets, especially discarded corpses. Later, we see Lebovitch’s reluctance to go into the forest, for he is unsure if it is a safe place with the Partisans residing there (138); yet it is in this forest where Lebovitch finds protection when he is hunted by the Germans. In the forest Peter comes upon the Jewish graveyard which in many respects is a confrontation with the supernatural, the transcendent. He is “overwhelmed by the symbolism of [the] graves” (128). He notes the broken branch symbol on the tombstones—an indication that the person died young; most of these tombstones were inscribed with a broken branch. Peter considers “the symbolism of these graves” (128). As Vipes said, he must “interpret the signs” (73).  He believes that he will hear the dead men’s cries even after death and Ernst insists that they will be “sleeping peacefully in the light” (129).

Jewish graves in a forest

Peter rejects this theology: “That’s just to make us feel at peace” (129). Ernst says, “Don’t torture yourself . . . In any case, neither you nor I is to blame” (129). After leaving the forest, he returns to his “pretext”—that is his tending to the graveyard, which as he says is his “badge of innocence” (129). Nevertheless, in the forest he has encountered death in its rawness, and he is forced out of his delusion that his graveyard adornments somehow soften the reality of death. The fairy tale elements—especially the enchanted forest—of the novella enhance the dreamscape mode which keeps the precipice of death at the edge of the text.      Another feature of the fairy tale is the significance of and the personification assigned to nature. Peter refers to “the lady-bird’s carapace and the red umbrella of the toadstool”

Toadstool

which were a part of his childhood spring (121), plants that certainly belong to the world of fairy tale. His description of the pond also resonates with a fairy talesque rendering of nature: “There, the radiance of the sky reflected in the water enfolded us so vividly, lit up both our faces so clearly” (121). Often Peter romanticizes nature, languishing in its idyllic bosom. He recites a taxonomy of flowers, whose symbolism does not go unnoticed; the “dwarf forget-me-nots” are a kind of admonition not to forget, but they are dwarfed, hardly sufficient enough for this task. Peter’s graveyard is just as tenuous, despite the tremendous care he applies to it; it is inadequate for the task of memorializing the dead. While Peter’s illusions of nature lull him into a reverie, it is also the bleakness of nature which abruptly shatters his dream and jars him back into reality. He explains:

Sometimes the sun hid. But we could not stir, for we had fallen out of our dream to such a depth that our task—watering a few clumps of wood-sorrel in a remote corner of Volynia—appeared absurd to the point of unreality, like some Purgatorial penance where the victims, expiating their own guilt or original sin, were forced to draw unending pails of water from a bottomless well, in a green landscape, tending Death like a dwarf tree—just as we were doing here (121).

Peter and his companions attempt to beautify the graveyard to create an aesthetic and lush memorial space for the dead they are forced to bury. At times, like when “the sun hid” they realize the futility of their situation: they cannot redeem the “original sin” of the Nazis. Their perceptions are influenced by their natural environment: clouds, forests, and so on.

Zipes, Jack. “The Enchanted Forest of the Brothers Grimm: New Modes of Approaching the Grimms' Fairy Tales.” Germanic Review 62:2 (1987): 66-73. Web. 12. Dec. 2009.