Foregone Conclusions: Against Apocalyptic History (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Foregone Conclusions: Against Apocalyptic History Françoise Meltzer Foregone Conclusions: Against Apocalyptic History. Michael André Bernstein. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. Pp. 181. $22.00. Michael Bernstein’s Foregone Conclusions makes a powerful argument against what he sees as the ethical and political consequences of foreshadowing. Bernstein persuasively shows that literary/textual foreshadowing frequently goes hand-in-glove with a superior hindsight; and that it can consequently give apparently trivial events predetermined, foreboding heaviness in a way that keeps reader and author nodding fairly contemptuously over the heads of the characters. Such hindsight, which Bernstein calls “backshadowing,” is a pervasive and especially pernicious variant of foreshadowing. I might add that this is precisely how Sartre formulated (in The Words ) the limitations of biography: as a predetermined “plot” that the author and reader winkingly share while the protagonist is left to struggle with what he or she thinks are random, open-ended incidents in a life. Indeed, predetermination is what Bernstein decries brilliantly and forcefully (and a bit repetitiously, one of the few real weaknesses in the book) precisely because, like foreshadowing—its narrative equivalent—it destroys the random and the everyday aspect of life and turns everything into necessity within the confines of a closed universe. Hence, Bernstein writes his book against what has become an “apocalyptic history.” To this supersessionist approach, Bernstein suggests “sideshadowing,” a term coined by Gary Saul Morson (who in turn gets it from Bahktin). Sideshadowing is the reminder of all the counterstories that might have occurred; of all the human narrative’s diversity and unpredictability. Thus sideshadowing resists the overdetermination and history-as-foreseeable-pattern that characterize foreshadowing/backshadowing. Sideshadowing, Bernstein argues, is between the “teleological determinism” of Marxism and the “radical undecidability” [End Page 137] of deconstruction. 1 It maintains the claims of both the event that did occur and the “unrealized alternative” that was just as plausible an outcome. The book, then, refutes narratives that reduce the individual to a passive victim moving ineluctably toward a preordained fate hinted at by signs and events, events that will be seen as inevitable and obvious within the scornful gaze of backshadowing, but which in fact can only be known retrospectively. Bernstein is at his most compelling when he describes the ethical and human consequences of backshadowing in narratives of the Shoah. Events in the past, he reminds us, were once in the future, and to fault the victims of the Shoah for remaining blind to “prophetic” signs around them is both to demean them and, given the predetermined universe that backshadowing delineates, ultimately to disallow grief itself. Bernstein convincingly argues that Shoah narratives, armed with such a sense of historical inevitability (at times unintentionally), fault the victims with a lack of prescience, thus trivializing both their lives and their fates at the hands of the Nazis. But those victims, Bernstein persuasively shows, just chose the “wrong prediction” at the time, an alternative prediction just as plausible as the one that ultimately was “right.” Bernstein’s point, made movingly and in powerful prose, is that the communities obliterated by the Shoah need to be rescued from the condescension of backshadowing. Thus just as it is ridiculous to see Kafka’s cockroach (Gregor Samsa) as a prophet of the Nazi period, so it is obscene to fault Hitler’s victims with a willful refusal to “see it coming.” Human existence may be a complex balance between freedom and necessity, but for Bernstein, to err on the side of necessity is to demean the horror of the Shoah and the significance of each individual life it annihilated. Bernstein goes on to show that after the Shoah, Israelis engaged in a strident callousness toward the refugees, seeing them as passive victims weakened by their life in the Diaspora, or by their futile fantasy of assimilation, and consequently unable and/or unwilling to see the “writing on the wall” (a metaphor that could serve as the motto for backshadowing). Even a writer like Aharon Appelfeld, who is himself articulate about the shocking Israeli attitude toward refugees of the war (an attitude that he himself, as a refugee, had endured)—even Appelfeld’s work ultimately demonstrates the same...