Futurity: Contemporary Literature and the Quest for the Past by Amir Eshel

Abstract

Reviewed by: Futurity: Contemporary Literature and the Quest for the Past by Amir Eshel Abigail Gillman Futurity: Contemporary Literature and the Quest for the Past. By Amir Eshel. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2013. Pp. 355. Cloth $43.00. ISBN 978-0226924953. Sometime around 1900, the century of history gave way to an age of memory. Modernist thinkers and poets—Nietzsche and Freud, Proust and Hofmannsthal, Schnitzler and Kafka, Benjamin and Agnon—not only wrote about memory, they developed poetics of recollection, creating a set of forms and ideas that became all the more vital over time. By the 1980s, terms such as trauma and postmemory, testimony and countermonuments, virtual memory and, of course, Lieux de Mémoire, were ubiquitous. Our thirst for stories and films and histories, and for new and creative forms of remembering, has not abated, in particular with regard to the Holocaust and the Nazi period, and most recently, to slavery and civil rights. In his fascinating study Futurity, Amir Eshel proposes that within our culture of memory, a parallel tradition of fictional and nonfictional works has sought to draw out ethical and political lessons from catastrophic events. Such works challenge our tendency to take the moral high ground when confronting the problematic past. They go beyond mourning and memorialization, and focus on how living human beings behave in times of extremis, with the goal of teaching us something about what we can and must do in our time of extremis. Such works disturb us by forcing us to look beyond the fixed images of the past. But they also give hope by mitigating fatalism, giving us “maps of the world in its becoming.” Eshel focuses on two areas: German fiction about Nazism and the Holocaust written after 1945 and since 1989; and Israeli writing about Al Nakba—the expulsion of the Palestinians from the land of Israel in 1948—mostly published since the 1980s. Wisely, he also includes works from the Anglo-American tradition by Ian McEwan, Paul Coetzee, Paul Auster, Phillip Roth, Cormac McCarthy, and others, thereby highlighting the relevance of German and Israeli quests for the past to world [End Page 437] literature and to an Anglophone readership. Because the topic relates to ethics, Eshel draws ideas and vocabulary from Hannah Arendt, Richard Rorty, Slavoj Žižek, and Alain Badiou. He also builds upon theories of the postwar novel developed by Terry Eagleton, Frederic Jameson, Andreas Huyssen, Walter Benn Michaels, Judith Ryan, and Amy Hungerford. The diversity of sources helps the reader of this book nail down its elusive central concept. The title of the coda, “Toward a Hermeneutic of Futurity” (245), best captures the contribution of the book as a whole. Futural works have three criteria: they provide a vocabulary, or a set of narratives, that are constitutive of individual and communal identity; they present “ethically and politically ambivalent situations” (4); and they illustrate the power of human action (for good and for bad) in frightening times. With regard to their audience: futural works do not preach or moralize; they give answers and pose questions in the same breath. They remind us that “what is a factual or objective circumstance is not to be mistaken for necessary” (227). Unlike futurism, which exudes confidence in human potential, the futurity of futural works hinges present, future, and past, using the past subjunctive: Had I known A, I would have, could have, should have done B. We are not in the domain of Rainer Maria Rilke’s “you must change your life” (“Archaic Torso of Apollo”) but rather of Paul Coetzee’s are we prepared to act, and “who is this ‘we’ in whose name we should act?” (172). Futurity is that quality of art that gives us our own agency as a gift, a key, a provocation. Where is futurity to be found? Following Eshel’s interpretive method, one can conclude that futurity is not simply plot driven; it inheres in interstices and gray areas, in parody, gestures, motifs, material objects (photographs, maps, sketches), experimental forms, polyphony, and repetition; in symbolic and parabolic episodes. Like Kafka’s Odradek, it is an uncanny hybrid of the old, the forgotten, and the repressed. It is not expressed...