Last week, I got a letter from a postgraduate student at Melbourne University. She’s conducting research into my novel, The Hand that Signed the Paper, and wanted me to answer some questions. To date I haven’t replied, which seems churlish of me, but I get these requests – on average – about once a month, and the amount of detail they want is often considerable. It’s fair to say the quality of my responses varies, too, although they’ve crystallized over the years. This process was helped when I found some notes I wrote to myself while I was writing the book. Under headings like ‘what effect am I trying to achieve?’ and ‘How much violence is okay?’ I’d tried to work out my own system.
Requests used to come more regularly, and from time-to-time I’d get a batch of thirty similar questions. These would be from high school students, usually year 12, sometimes younger – the book was obviously a set text somewhere. The youngest group to write in was a class of year 10s, and I have to admit I confirmed with their teacher that the students’ emails were ‘approved’. You see, I wrote a determinedly NC-17 book. I did so because I thought (and still think) that the Final Solution was an NC-17 sort of event. My answer to the ‘how much violence’ question was as follows: lose anything that doesn’t drive the story; don’t hide what’s left; readers don’t necessarily have darker imaginations than writers.
No more gas in the rig – can’t even get it started
Also last week, I learned that John Boyne‘s fascinating The Boy in the Striped Pajamas has been made into a film. Having written what I did, I’ve since dipped into various literary interpretations of the history – Boyne’s is just the most recent. Some of this material is – obviously enough – written by survivors, some by perpetrators, some by bystanders. It varies from the excellent – like Primo Levi’s or Pery Broad‘s writing – to the dreadful, which I will not identify. Other stuff has been written by just plain old writers – people like John Boyne. Or me. It tends to be similarly uneven, although usually readable. The readability comes about because (despite what dills like Adorno tell you), the Holocaust is surprisingly easy to write: the historical events impose a conventional tragic narrative arc on one’s writing. This tends to work rather well in practice. The neatest definition of tragedy I’ve ever heard comes from my niece (a Goth and serious Macbeth obsessive): ‘first there’s an exciting story, then everybody dies’. This applies to the Holocaust as much as to Macbeth. I remember when I wrote The Hand that Signed the Paper I despaired at my inability to make the sections set during the Ukrainian Famine ‘fly’. ‘It’s harder when they’re just starving away’ wrote Bruce Dawe, years ago. ‘Digging a hole in the not-so-good-earth’. No exciting story first, I guess. In the end, I gutted the historical context and opted for a Tarantinoesque discontinuous narrative. At least it gave my characters motive, apart from driving the story forward.
Nothing heard, nothing said – can’t even speak about it
As you no doubt know, I think that most of us are rational. That includes criminals. Heath Ledger style Jokers are pretty damn rare, although I did encounter one true agent of criminal chaos when I was writing. He’s known to history as ‘Ivan the Terrible’ (no, not the Russian Czar), and his reputation is richly deserved. Like Gitta Sereny, I’m also most interested in perpetrators and bystanders (spot the future criminal barrister, natch). Because I appreciate the fundamental rationality of criminals and their capacity to respond to incentives (however perverse) I’m in awe of one character in Boyne’s novel: SS Lieutenant Kotler. He’s so artfully constructed I despair for the actor (Rupert Friend, Mr Wickham of Pride & Prejudice fame) who has to play him in the film. Cinematic advertising focuses almost exclusively on Bruno’s improbable friendship with Shmuel, one of the camp’s inmates. Friend appears at various points in the trailer (and appears physically well cast, even though he’s 25 and has to play a 19 year old). I’ll see the film next week and report back on how he goes.
Put on your brake lights, you’re in the City of Wonder
For those unfamiliar with Boyne’s novel, it’s told largely from the perspective of nine-year-old Bruno, the Camp Commandant’s son. Bruno is unhappy about being uprooted from his comfortable home in Berlin and then sent to the boondocks of rural Poland with mum, dad and his 12 going on 21 sister Gretel (‘The Hopeless Case’). From the moment the family arrives, the beautiful but sinister Kotler wages a one-man ingratiation campaign on the women of the household, seducing the Commandant’s wife and zeroing in on the (by now) 13 year old Gretel. Boyne writes Kotler out of the narrative thirty pages from the end, perhaps because his presence was turning what is a relatively simple moral fable into Cape Fear in a concentration camp. I must admit when I read the scene where Bruno interrupts Kotler charming his sister (he’s even partially stripped off), for an instant I expected to see Max Cady’s backful of Biblical tattoos.
It’s like the darkness is the light
Unable to exert his sexual charm on Bruno (who is astoundingly stupid, but fundamentally morally decent) Kotler systematically makes the boy’s life miserable. This process starts slowly, with pointed teasing about Bruno’s reading preferences (can’t have the Boss’s son reading that perfidious text otherwise known as Treasure Island). It culminates in the destruction of his friendship with Shmuel and the killing of Pavel (one of the household servants) in what is one of the most impressive (and understated) scenes of intimate violence I have ever read. Invited to a dinner-party in the Commandant’s quarters, Kotler overreaches with his sexually-charged inveigling and then really goes to town when creating a diversion.
Understatement in Holocaust fiction (both cinematic and literary) impresses me, because it’s so seldom well done. Usually, it allows the reader to substitute anodyne Hollywood images for what (bleakly) happened: a clear case of the reader’s imagination rendered weaker than the writer’s. Much of this stems from a tendency for films and books concerning the Holocaust to be constructed with their audience’s moral improvement in mind. The Boy in the Striped Pajamas is no different, although (thankfully, in terms of literary skill), Lieutenant Kotler almost gets away on John Boyne.
A disease of the mind, it can control you
Kotler works thanks to Boyne’s deft handling of his sexuality. I think it’s fair to say that most Holocaust fiction doesn’t address the sexualised evil Nazism traded in, despite the fact that the reference is well understood in popular culture (think of the kinky Herr Flick in ‘Allo ‘Allo or – if you can stand it – Max Mosley’s recent escapades). Susan Sontag pinged it in 1974 in a famous essay (Fascinating Fascism), and Spielberg sailed close to the wind when casting the rather ‘pretty’ Ralph Fiennes as the notorious Amon Goeth (no Oscar for Mr Fiennes that year, despite the fact that he stole the show). Sontag observes:
A clue lies in the predilections of the fascist leaders themselves for sexual metaphors. Like Nietzsche and Wagner, Hitler regarded leadership as sexual mastery of the “feminine” masses, as rape. (The expression of the crowds in Triumph of the Will is one of ecstasy; the leader makes the crowd come.) Left-wing movements have tended to be unisex, and asexual in their imagery. Right-wing movements, however puritanical and repressive the realities they usher in, have an erotic surface. Certainly Nazism is “sexier” than communism (which is not to the Nazis’ credit, but rather shows something of the nature and limits of the sexual imagination).
Of course, most people who are turned on by SS uniforms are not signifying approval of what the Nazis did, if indeed they have more than the sketchiest idea of what that might be. Nevertheless, there are powerful and growing currents of sexual feeling, those that generally go by the name of sadomasochism, which make playing at Nazism seem erotic. These sadomasochistic fantasies and practices are to be found among heterosexuals as well as homosexuals, although it is among male homosexuals that the eroticizing of Nazism is most visible. S-M, not swinging, is the big sexual secret of the last few years.
The acuity of Sontag’s comments is remarkable in light of the growing interpenetration of gothic/s&m imagery in popular culture, not just among subcultures. The clip for Rihanna’s Disturbia is a signal example. Even as recently as 10 years ago, only metal/gothic/industrial outfits would deploy this kind of imagery. Rihanna is a fairly conventional R&B singer with Caribbean tinges (she’s Bajan); the song is uptempo and poppy, albeit with creepy lyrics (mildly NSFW):
Spielberg, however, was trapped by his own weakness for saccharine endings and Hollywood’s general fear of the dreaded NC-17. Memo to moviemakers and writers: books and films don’t morally improve (or degrade) people. If you want to learn something off the box, take out a subscription to Discovery Channel. No-one has ever found a link between cinematic/literary/televisual violence and violent crime. There is a link between the introduction of television and minor property crime – various studies noted burglary rates climbing as television first swept across Britain and the USA. And in those days people were watching Dixon of Dock Green. Dangerous and subversive telly, what what.
All my life on my head (don’t want to think about it)
One of the reasons I wrote The Hand that Signed the Paper the way I did was to do what horror writers do every day: horrify and – if possible – frighten. An effect of Hollywood (and fiction’s) ‘morally worthy’ treatment of the Holocaust is that we’re now in the absurd situation where IT and Misery are scarier than Auschwitz. This is self-evidently ridiculous. Stephen King makes shit up. Auschwitz is true. Sure, I remember drama classes where I was told about Greek tragedy and how all the nasty takes place off stage. This (allegedly) was based on the idea that the viewer’s imagination is worse than that belonging to Messrs Sophocles and Euripides. What this forgets is that Greek audiences knew their own culture’s literature backwards, and Homer and friends don’t spare the reader (listener). If you are unfamiliar with Homer’s penchant for lashings of the old ultra-violence, I suggest you read the Iliad.
Two directors (both with solid reputations) approached me with a view to optioning my novel. If I recall correctly, my response to both was along the lines of ‘Wear your RC (refused classification) with pride!’. I suspect this would still be the case, even though I’ve maintained contact with both. At the time, I remember being irritated when various critics described what I’d written as ‘a pornography of violence’, but I’m rather more sanguine about the descriptor these days. Watching critics complain about the impossibility of a major premise in Boy in the Striped Pajamas (a pre-teen not going straight to the gas chambers) or registering shock at ‘light’ treatments like La vita e bella or Jakob the Liar has convinced me that it’s not possible to use fictionalised genocide as a means to moral improvement. Worse, doing so robs it of its horror, actively weakening the effectiveness of understatement and irony in other contexts. This doesn’t only apply to WWII-era films: it was also a major flaw in Hotel Rwanda. Seriously, a million people died in 90 days, killed with Chinese-made machetes imported especially for the purpose. And we turned it into PG-13.
Your mind’s in Disturbia
Since I’m more interested in cinema than literature – I write with reels running in my head, bathing what I write in what one critic described as ‘television’s cold, cathode light’ – I’ll use movie metaphors, but I think the principles apply equally to writers.
For me, if people want to mine the Holocaust’s tragic narrative arc, it’s time they stopped running in fear from the old NC-17. Some focus on perpetrators would also be welcome – think of the creepyfying power of the perps in Se7en or Goodfellas. People seem to think that their natural good fortune will save them from becoming victims. What, however, will save them from being Lieutenant Kotler? Or the brutal but hapless Vitaly in my own book? I think a conscious decision to be less precious about the subject is also on. This means admitting that gangster films (Colors) or straight-up war pics (Saving Private Ryan) or science fiction (Alien) can teach us a thing or two about pure terror. Borrowing metal’s use of gothic imagery and sound may also come in handy – System of a Down shouldn’t just be scoring sci-fi flicks. It’s fair to say that the Nazis first used stadia in a way that rock would recognise – playing on that link has real potential. This isn’t a call for historical accuracy, either. As I said earlier, if you’re into that, watch Discovery Channel. It is, however, a call for honesty in our appreciation of just what makes the Final Solution or the Rwandan genocide significant. It’s the violence, stupid. Violence that is more often than not ritualised and sexualised, creepily attractive as well as utterly repellent.
13 Comments
Sorry,
historians wish to ….
DEM – Original FICTION
No you are lying.
This is the greatest crime ever perpetrated by anyone ever. Forget the Holocaust, forget the pogroms, forget the gulag, forget the Inquisition (the Inquisition dah dah dah)…
This was much much much worse!
It made fools of those noble, fine, upstanding fighters for truth, justice and the anti-American way.
It made a mockery of the righteous cause of literary critics who know man. (What do they know?).
They know that a book’s value doesn’t lie in stupid things like words on the page. A book’s value is judged soley by the locale of the author’s parents’ birth.
And this made them look… well, like they are. My God! Have you no human feeling? They don’t deserve this. They were trying to change the world into a really nice place by writing copy for the Green Guide.
They didn’t expect this.
I am at a loss to understand why modern day historians which to interpret history through some over arching theoretic paradigm.
You should know John, that history serves two functions: The first and primary function is to create a myth by which present day society justifies itself; The second: the accurate interpretation of the facts of past activity, is relatively new.
The contemporary vogue for blatantly ideological history is a consequence of the slow dawning on us of the inevitability of the first function. The ‘postmodernists’, having looked at the ‘scientific’ history of ‘bourgeois’ capitalism have (to some extent) shown it to be ideological as opposed to ‘objective’. And they therefore set out to produce their own critical view of history – the Story of Oppression.
This has produced the inevitable backlash – the Story of Great Great Things.
I tend to prefer the earlier historians of this critical mode. The pre-postmodernists like EP Thompson and Eric Hobsbawm. They made silly excursions into Stalinism in private but as classically educated, well-disciplined (and Marxian) scholars they’ve added to the historical arts (ironically by producing history in the scientific mode).
Facts before ideology. Social History before Ideological History. The history I was taught in high school was the history of the elites.
I am fascinated by how people lived way back when. Why the social structure of those times existed should be only be investigated after being informed about how people lived in those times. Would I be correct in saying that modern history teaching predominantly seeks to explain the why and too often ignores the how of how people lived?
Would I be correct in saying that modern history teaching predominantly seeks to explain the why and too often ignores the how of how people lived?
Nuh. There’s the ‘historians’ of the CultiWars. But it’s a field and like most academic fields it’s not given to making its practitioners famous. The art and science of history is quite alive despite the attempts of the ‘latest coolest trend’ in whateverism to trump it.
The thing about Thompson and Hobsbawm is that their history is ideological in the sense that they’re both telling the ‘other history’ ie the history that’s not about the elites and their Great Figures.
But it’s not propaganda it’s proper scholarship. They might be commies but they were wired English first.
Funnily enough I think that Capitalist societies got much better value out of Marx than Communist ones. Something to do with competition I guess.
Don’t look now Adrien, but you seem to be channelling Graeme Bird.
Nup. You can’t Torquemada anything…
John H,
“I am at a loss to understand why modern day historians which to interpret history through some over arching theoretic paradigm.”
John, you have raised a few issues here. The first is that all scholars try to synthesise seemingly chaotics pieces of information, whether they are physicists, statisticians, archaeologists, linguists, neuroscientists, etc. Your phrase “interpret history through some over arching paradigm” captures a great deal of what is debated at the ‘pointy end’ of historiography. The burden on the historian who consciously chooses a priori a “theoretical paradigm” must immediately be expected to be able to validate that choice.
Unlike Mathematics, which can rely on reason, science which can rely on controlled experimentation, history and social sciences do not have recourse to some fabulously reliable epistemology. So whenever an historian makes a decision to include this or that and exclude this or that, some epistemological context emerges, even if the historian is not aware of it.
In fact, historians have obdurately refused to bring their discipline into line with other social sciences by adopting explicitly theoretical frameworks. This began to be challenged by Marxism in the early to mid 20th century.
Adrien
“You should know John, that history serves two functions: The first and primary function is to create a myth by which present day society justifies itself; The second: the accurate interpretation of the facts of past activity, is relatively new. ”
Adrien I hear where you are coming from, but I am going to slightly disagree. I think it is true to say that Herodotus and Thucydides were very explicit in developing history writing as a new and distinct ‘scientific’ enterprise with different aims and methods than poetry and mythology. Neither was necessarily motivated to transcend myth. I think they were quite happy for myth to play a role in Greek culture and society, but historiography was designed for different purposes.
Now, of course it is a fantasy to think that even in the modern world these two can be so easily demarcated. Thus, I argue that concern with objectivity and facts were the defining features of the birth of history-writing 2,450 years ago and have been a constant ever since, the recent attempts to re-merge myth and history over the past thirty years or so by the post-structuralists.
“The contemporary vogue for blatantly ideological history is a consequence of the slow dawning on us of the inevitability of the first function. The ‘postmodernists’, having looked at the ’scientific’ history of ‘bourgeois’ capitalism have (to some extent) shown it to be ideological as opposed to ‘objective’.”
I am not so persuaded by the triumphalism of the postits to have exposed the innate ideology of ‘scientific bourgeois history’.
Firstly, the notion of ‘bourgeois’ history/well-anything-really is a Marxist judgement, and thus reliant on the cogency and legitimacy of that Marxist epistemology. I am not persuaded that the Marxists achieved much more than
wow, look. None of these ‘bourgeois’ historians ever said that capitalism and modernity suck. None ever said we need a proletarian revolution, so ha, Gotcha! They are clearly ideological windbags blind to realy ‘objective’ historiography, which of course, as everybody knows is only achieved by application of historical materialism.
Don’t get me wrong I have an immense amount of respect for Marxist historiography. Having been raised an atheist, historical materialism was the first real guide to “life, the universe, and everything” and I was thus a Marxist from the age of 17 to about 25. But it has some major, major problems:
It is basically Judeo-Xianity with a few substitutions:
1.Rather than heathen/pagan/Jewish masses who need to be ‘shone the light’ and accept Jesus Christ as their saviour before Christ will even think of returning, the Marxists see their mission as evangelising the proletariat. It is only the proletariat who represent the suffering of everyman, and it is only when they shed their false consciousness that the Garden of Even of communism can come into being;
2.Pre-communist life is always a vale of tears;
3.The past is always ignorant, just like Jews and pagans were to Xians, and everybody to the Muhammadans. Just as Xianity’s utopian eschatology provided succour for those doing it tough, so Marxism’s promise of the Revolution kept the proletariat from topping themselves.
Of course, depite the marxist’s leaders constantly banging on about this “immiseration of the masses,” the great unwashed never shared this enthusiasm preferring “footballs, meat pies, Holden cars, airconditioning, overseas holidays, nice clothes” and so on. Enter the postit Luvvies.
Oh crap, someone’s at the door. I’ll finish up anon.
Of course, depite the marxist’s leaders constantly banging on about this “immiseration of the masses,” the great unwashed never shared this enthusiasm preferring “footballs, meat pies, Holden cars, airconditioning, overseas holidays, nice clothes” and so on. Enter the postit Luvvies.
Under capitalism the great unwashed have seen their living standards raised almost beyond measure. A very small minority go without the necessities of life but for most the gains have been great and satisfying.
We all aim to be happy, and if meat pies, sport, and holidays make people happy that is a good thing. My personal tastes are different, I have long since lost my enthusiasm for sport and overseas holidays hold no real attraction for me. However I am most certainly not refined and cultured!
It is not beholden on anyone to become more “cultured” or more “refined” in their tastes. This is what I previously touched on regarding the Latte Left, under all that pompous talk there is too often a disdain for those who enjoy the simple things of life. Stuff ém, better to be happy than cultured and refined.
The Marxists were sadly mistaken, they never could accept that for a great many the goal was not for everyone to be equal but for everyone to be able to enjoy life. Perhaps the Marxists were the forerunners of the Latte Leftists for both presumed to know what constituted the “good life”. Most people are much wiser than that.
John G, I agree that there is a religious aspect to Marxism. I once went to a debate between modern Leftists and old-fashioned Marxists. At the end of the debate, some Marxist guy came up to me and started trying to convert me to his gospel. I felt slightly panicky, and realised that the last time I felt like that was when a Student for Christ cornered me in the University cafe. There is a definite “redemptive” feeling to both streams of thought.
Anyway, I ran away from both the Student for Christ and the Marxist. I hate people attempting to proselytise me.
I think we all presume such knowledge the difference is do you make that presumption for yourself only or for others as well.
There’s a lot who do the second and they’re not just of the Left. Unfortunately the Left is plagued with ’em however.
Who Me Adrien?
………
…. 16 year old Satsu, Hakuin had given her a lesson in a difficult sutra and he asked,
“Do you understand?”
“Please, could you explain it again?”
Then, just as he was about to open his mouth, she got up and left the room, leaving behind a laughing Hakuin who shouted,
“I’ve been made a fool of by this girl!”
……….
Life: a collection of molecules furiously shaking their fists at the second law of thermodynamics.
Who Me Adrien?
No. Why would you think that?
Life: a collection of molecules furiously shaking their fists at the second law of thermodynamics.
And thereby accelerating the process that law describes.
And thereby accelerating the process that law describes.
Ironically the more I read about longevity the more I realise that energy expenditure could be a key component. The more energy we expend, the more oxidation we create, the quicker we die. This is why I am inclined to the view that our very culture, while giving us the tools to live long and prosper, demands a lifestyle that guarantees we can’t.
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