GRGR: Todorov and Clendinnen on the Holocaust

[rj]

Two interesting pieces side by side in Saturday's *SMH*, one a review of
Tzvetan Todorov's 1991 *Facing the Extreme: Moral Life in the
Concentration Camps* (translated and available in North America since
1997, only released here in the last few months), the other an article
about Inga Clendinning's *Reading the Holocaust* which won a prestigious
General History Award here last week, and received a laudatory review in
the *NYTBR*.

According to A.P. Riemer, Todorov's "remarkable" and "superb" study is
not to be regarded as "merely another book about the Holocaust .... "
Todorov's main theme is that "except in its scale and mechanised
efficiency ... the Holocaust is far from unique", and his study
concludes with the argument that "its victims and their descendants are
not inevitably the best qualified interpreters of the Holocaust." 

Riemer discusses "Todorov's insistence on applying moral criteria to
every facet of behaviour" in the camps, and how the author "dissents
from several widely held beliefs about the camps and also about the
differences between the Nazi laagers and the Soviet gulags." Todorov
"argues that the camps revealed an environment where common human
characteristics were driven to their extreme but never beyond the
universally human." From the existing documentation, he judges the
"guards, the captors, the functionaries, the tormentors and the
executioners" and their actions on a case by case basis, insisting
throughout on "the moral responsibility of each individual, irrespective
of the individual's status as victim or tormentor. So the Auschwitz
guard who was executed for helping a few prisoners to escape was more
worthy of compassion than the inmate Alma Rose, the conductor of the
camp's women's orchestra who subjugated her humanity to her art -- even
in the shadow of the smokestacks."

Riemer concludes by saying that although many may find the book
"irresponsible", "disrespectful", "uncomfortable", perhaps even
"intolerable" ..., "*Facing the Extreme* is a most eloquent
commemoration of the century's greatest outrages that presents,
moreover, an unanswerable argument why they must be remembered at all
costs -- though without hate, rancour, lust for revenge or without an
arrogance that may render victims' attitudes morally indistinguishable
from their oppressors'."


>From the article about Clendinnen's book (she is a Melbourne-based
academic whose previously-published work and area of scholarship is the
Inca and Maya civilisations and cross-cultural encounters with the "New
World" in the C.16th), it appears that it is just such a reevaluation as
Todorov advocates:

"History counts, says Clendinnen. It is a form of analysis and writing
that belongs to the moral realm, as fiction and poetry do. The
difference, however, is that while fiction and poetry are about people
like us, history is about us, people who existed, 'whose blood is real
and whose deaths are final and cannot be cancelled by turning back a
page'."

Clendinnen: "If we are to learn about ourselves, we cannot say it was
something abstract like 'those who did it were evil'. This means
nothing. It lets us off the hook .... "



For me, *GR* particularises the personal and historical situations of
its various characters in a similar way, and likewise demands the
reader's moral participation in the narrative. While Pynchon's text is
unarguably "fiction" -- and thus its content is somehow less than or
inferior to the 'truths' supplied by texts of history or scripture (is
it?) -- it "changes his reader's life-views", as Mark Douglas aptly
expressed it, through a type of "magic", just as history and scripture
do. And, it is a magic which is being worked at the interface between
the reader and the text.

best

ps  Sorry if the Todorov book is old news on-list. (The archives aren't
particularly helpful at present.)