A Thousand Darknesses: Lies and Truth in Holocaust Fiction by Ruth Franklin (review)

Abstract

A THOUSAND DARKNESSES: LIES AND TRUTH IN HOLOCAUST FICTION By Ruth Franklin. Oxford University Press, 2011. 272 pp.The scholar James E. Young once observed, in speaking about representations of Holocaust: there is a line between fiction and fact, it may by necessity be a winding border that tends bind these categories as much as it separates them, allowing each side dissolve occasionally into other. If a critic accepts Young's claim, as many would, where is she left? How is she read work of, say, Primo Levi or Elie Wiesel simultaneously as fiction and memoir? Is it her task distinguish falsifications of historical record born of intellectual or aesthetic exigency from self-serving omissions and embellishments? What, moreover, about Holocaust literature that comes from authors who aren't witnesses? Those authors often see themselves as having special obligations their material; do we agree? Does Holocaust somehow complicate relationship between historical fact and historical fiction?Ruth Franklin doesn't ask her readers take Young's words heart until half-way-point of her important, if very uneven new book, but they would have been an apt opening; for questions that Young raised make up thematic core of A Thousand Darknesses. Instead, Franklin opts for a somewhat less direct approach introducing challenges we face when we write about Holocaust writing: she begins by maintaining that we haven't put ourselves in a position meet them. This move turns out not serve her audience well. With its mix of sweeping judgments and weak argumentation, Franklin's introductory essay invites resistance, point of being hard get past.Take essay's invocation of Fragments affair, which comes on its first pages. After winning praise and awards in mid-1990s, Fragments, Binjamin Wilkomirski's memoir of surviving Holocaust as a child, was exposed as a fabrication. The success of this fake was no fluke, according Franklin. What it shows, she insists, is that we have brought Holocaust memoirs a surfeit of credulity, one that stands out even amidst our general readiness embrace memoirs of woe. Never mind that Wilkomirski displayed a talent for prevarication; that we're all capable of falling for work of gifted liars; or that it's often easy find their stories preposterous minute they're revealed be untrue (we tend, after all, want facts of memoirs sound like stuff of fiction). Leaving such issues unmentioned, Franklin intones: pathetic fraud perpetrated by Wilkomirski was inevitable consequence of way Holocaust literature has been read, discussed, and understood-in America especially, but also in Europe-over last sixty years.As she tries back up her big point about how Holocaust literature has been received, Franklin gives us more of same. For instance, she takes for granted canonical status of Theodor Adorno's claim, to write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric, while abruptly asserting that how we use phrase illustrates flipside of our attitude toward Holocaust memoirs: our sloppy suspicion of Holocaust art. Sloppy, Franklin tells us, because original context of Adorno's dictum (of 1949) is a brand of highly ideological Marxist literary criticism, which very few of those who approvingly cite it would be likely accept. In other words, most of critics who go around quoting Adorno's epigram don't know what he was-and by extension, what they are-talking about. The very fact that they lean on Adorno's line proves this, since its true nature would appall them. Franklin, as intimated, doesn't provide examples of critics she has in mind. Apparently, there's no need to. Yet later in book, Franklin herself puts forth a very different view of Adorno's standing-without saying how we might square it with her earlier one. Indeed, she does nothing less than describe Adorno's statement about writing a poem after Auschwitz as the straw man of Holocaust studies, who is, these days, invoked in order be knocked down. …