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Walter Abish’sDeconstruction of theHolocaust in HowGerman Is It Reiko Nitta2011 год

Walter Abish’s Deconstruction of the Holocaust in <i>How German Is It</i>
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Аннотация: Walter Abish’s Deconstruction of the Holocaust in How German Is It Reiko Nitta Walter Abish as an Innovative Writer Since his first startling novel, Alphabetical Africa (1974, hereafter, AA), Walter Abish has always been recognized as a provocative writer who challenges the limitations of language and literary expressions. His literary experiments can be easily observed in How German Is It (1980, hereafter, HG), too, though it adopts a far more realistic narrative than AA. Jerome Klinkowitz, who recognizes Abish’s unique usage of realism, calls it “a superrealism” (“Walter Abish and the Surfaces of Life” 419) or “an experimental realism” (“Experimental Realism” 63). HG, for example, begins with an interrogative sentence answered by questioning: What are the first words a visitor from France can expect to hear upon his arrival at a German airport? Bonjour? Or, Guten Tag? Or, Ihren Pass bitte? (1) Thousands of people arrive at a German airport every day. It is a familiar scene that should not alarm anybody. However, the questions in this opening passage disturb the reader and make him or her wonder if there is something wrong in this familiar scene. Such destabilizing narrative is one of the most distinctive literary devices Abish adopted in HG and gives the initial impression that the book represents a new type of fiction. Another example of this kind of narrative is observed when Anna Heller, a school teacher, one day asks her pupils, “What is familiar?” (119). She explains to [End Page 60] the children, “when something becomes terribly familiar we stop seeing it” (120). Then, the narration adds: “But why would Miss Anna Heller spend so much time discussing the familiar, unless she had some doubts, some reservations regarding the familiar, day-to-day events of her life” (121). Without a question mark, this interrogative sentence functions as more than a simple question and raises an alarm so that the reader cannot help but wonder with the children if there may be something important in the reader’s own familiar daily life that he or she fails to recognize. The nature of Abish’s narrative in HG is aptly represented by the book’s title, How German Is It. Its interrogative form without a question mark offers the reader a subject to consider while refraining from supplying him or her with any authorial opinion. It thus functions both as affirmation and interrogation. Besides the unique use of interrogation, HG also assumes the characteristics of postmodern narrative, which Jean-François Lyotard describes as follows: The narrative function is losing its functors, its great hero, its great dangers, its great voyages, its great goal. It is being dispersed in clouds of narrative language elements—narrative, but also denotative, prescriptive, descriptive, and so on. (xxiv) The characteristics listed in this passage are what Lyotard describes as the conditions of the “delegitimation” of grand narratives in a later chapter (37–41). As a typical postmodern work, HG in fact lacks a “great hero,” an authorized protagonist. At the beginning, Ulrich Hargenau may look intelligent, conscientious, and observant enough to be a protagonist who represents Abish’s point of view. Later, however, he turns out to be completely blind to what is happening around him. At the end of the book, he even escapes into “a pleasant mindless state of inactivity” (235). He is simply another unreliable character, and the initial impression of his reliability is an intended fallacy, one of the tricks Abish uses to emphasize that nothing in this book is what it seems. HG also lacks “great dangers,” “great voyages,” and a “great goal” and is an assortment of only loosely connected elements. Just as Lyotard says that World War II “has shifted emphasis from the ends of action to its means” (37), so Abish places more emphasis on how the story is told than on what it contains. In other words, he is more concerned with how the reader experiences the book than with the text’s superficial message. What is more, HG employs another postmodern characteristic, “peripeteia,” which, as Frank Kermode explains in The Sense of an Ending, is “a disconfirmation followed by a consonance; the interest of having our expectations falsified is...
Год издания: 2011
Авторы: Reiko Nitta
Издательство: Penn State University Press
Источник: Studies in American Jewish Literature (1981-)
Ключевые слова: Literature and Cultural Memory, Postmodernism in Literature and Education, Contemporary Literature and Criticism
Другие ссылки: Studies in American Jewish Literature (1981-) (HTML)
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