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Dialogues@RU is published
annually
by the
Writing Program at
Rutgers, The State
University of New Jersey
Volume 4
Fall 2005
Page 6
By Jennifer Flynn
Wiesel's work is exceptional for its innovation, but Night is largely significant for having been written at all. There was a pronounced lack of writing about the war in its aftermath. In her essay, "Fact, Fiction, Fascism," Holocaust scholar Barbara Foley introduces her interesting explanation by stating, "During the two decades after 1945, the great majority of writers simply avoided the stage of history" (331). Foley believes that writers felt unable to properly address the Holocaust. Genocide was so unfathomable that man lacked the thought process necessary to comprehend it, and consequently, writers lacked the language to discuss it. For support, she cites literary critic George Steiner who states, "What man has inflicted upon man in very recent time has affected the writer's primary material - the sum and potential of human behavio- and it presses on the brain with a new darkness" (330). Because man's potential for evil exceeded all previously estimated boundaries, writers no longer knew how to accurately represent man.
Foley believes the impact on writers was especially intense for autobiographists. She claims that prior to the Holocaust, these writers presented their lives as examples of what they believed to be the typical path of man, the "journey toward self-definition and knowledge" (333). Their works were modeled upon and shaped by this view of humanity. However, after the stability of this ideology was destroyed, they could not firmly believe man's fundamental path was evolution towards a higher plane of existence. In his essay, "Trivializing Memory," Wiesel agrees by stating, " Auschwitz represents the negation of human progress and casts doubt on its validity" ( Kingdom 166). He feels the existence of death camps raises doubts that progress is man's driving force. For autobiographists, the consequence of this uncertainty was extreme. Once confusion about how to view themselves arose, writers lost command of the genre. In his work, Altered Egos , G. Thomas Couser explains that autobiographists generally enjoy "a natural, inevitable and relatively secure authority over their texts because they initiate and control them as well as serve as their subjects" (16). Because he is the key player in his tale, the autobiographist is assumed to be the foremost expert on his own existence. However, after the Holocaust, this status was lost as writers no longer understood their subjects, i.e., themselves. At this point, Foley argues, with the quest for enlightenment no longer a realistic representation of the species, autobiographists began searching for a new and more accurate perspective from which to write about themselves as men.
Prior to Night, those who felt compelled to bear witness to their Holocaust experience displayed this loss of authority by writing in a testimonial style. These documents, while highly detailed about places and events, were not explicit about the self. Wiesel fell in with this group, following examples of "Yiddish Holocaust memoirs [that] modeled themselves on the local chronical ( pinkes ) or memorial book ( yizker-bukh ) in which catalogs of names, addresses and occupations served as form and motivation" (Seidman 5). Without an appropriate philosophical foundation, these reports were all that could be produced. As Foley writes, it is "not that the Holocaust is unknowable but that its full dimensions are inaccessible to the ideological frameworks that we have inherited from the liberal era" (333). In other words, while survivors knew what they had lived through, they lacked a frame of reference with which to explain its "full dimensions." Yet, while survivors could not fully express what had happened or why, they recognized the importance of preserving the memories. While the atrocities would not be immediately understandable, survivors knew they must not be forgotten. They therefore concentrated on places and people involved in the tragedies. In this way, their testimonies fell short as autobiographies because they did not address individual psychological or emotional journeys.