Karla Grierson (review)

Abstract

754 Reviews sion of other figures is also without context. (For instance, she criticizes Kant fornot having a concept of tradition, but does not mention Hamann, who was making this criticism in the 1780s, or Frederick Beiser's various books on intellectual develop? ments in the 1790s.) This weakens her case, because it means she makes some abstract claims about tradition without being able to say how they relate to similar work on Benjamin, and without putting her theory of reading into practice. It is either a bold and interesting thought or just a truism to say that history exists only in a form of collective unconscious being constantly reactivated and remoulded in the emotional life of the present. Rauch does not help to give the truism the sharpness and air of unfamiliarity that Benjamin's style could, in its best moments, produce. Worcester College, Oxford Ben Morgan Discours dAuschwitz: litterarite,representation, symbolisation. By Karla Grierson. Paris: Champion. 2003. 526 pp. ?85. ISBN 2-7453-0722-3. This book has all the advantages and disadvantages of starting out as the author's doctoral thesis. The advantages include the detailed analysis of a wide range of Holo? caust survivor testimonies (or 'narratives of deportation', as Karla Grierson prefers to call them), from a number of differentcountries, including familiar names such as Elie Wiesel and Charlotte Delbo but also others, such as Maurice Bachka, Ebi Gabor, and Lilli Segal, who have either never been studied before or have received very little critical attention. The work also benefits from serious and detailed scholarship in the narrative qualities of testimony. The disadvantages are the over-formalized structure and the exhaustive listing of examples. Critical approaches to Holocaust represen? tation, from Adorno and Blanchot to the American critics Langer and Young, are dealt with too summarily and much of the text consists of description from the cho? sen works. However, the exhaustive treatment of the discursive features of survivor testimony offersa comprehensive grid (even a sort of inventory) for understanding the literary (as opposed to the political, ethical, religious, or philosophical) nature of these works. The major elements that make up this nightmare world, and which appear and reappear in these works, concern the body, time and space, nature, the role of objects, and, of course, the endless questions of survival and annihilation, life and death. Grierson has located some powerful examples of each, such as Camille Touboul's description of the absence of natural life on the plain around Auschwitz mirroring the murderous nature of the camp, and Fred Sedel's portrait of a fellow in? mate whose skeletal remains evoke his dehumanization. However, the study as a whole would surely have benefited from a sharper analytical treatment of this material and from more sustained argument. For example, Grierson shows clearly how the pre? sence of objects in these narratives frequently serves as a bridge between the ordinary and the extraordinary, the inside of the concentrationary universe and the outside. But she does not pursue the wider aesthetic significance of this defamiliarization of everyday objects. Similarly, the major debates on fiction and the real, representation and the unsayable, which have dominated critical discussion of Holocaust testimony and fiction in recent years are presented schematically at various times but are often overwhelmed by the number of textual examples. Grierson's book is thoroughly re? searched and is founded on a fascinating corpus. Its importance for others working in the field of Holocaust and genocide studies will probably lie more in the breadth of examples of narrative 'figures' of testimony than in breaking new ground in the theory and analysis of testimony itself. University of Leeds Maxim Silverman ...