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"Testing the Limits of the Middlebrow: The Holocaust for the Masses."
It’s a great pleasure to be speaking here today and sharing the agenda of the Middlebrow Network. Like you, I’d like nothing more than to bring critical attention to all those books and films we always knew deserved a place in the limelight of modern culture. In order to bring the Middlebrow in from the cold shadows of guilty pleasure, our mandate has been to be inclusive. No way do we want to share the exclusivist hallowed ground tilled by the Leavises or the dismissive mockery of Virginia Woolf, for to do so would be to deprive ourselves of the books and movies we love to talk about – in short, deprive ourselves of an adventure into making “mischief,” to misquote Woolf. To demonstrate where I stand in relation to these self-proclaimed arbiters of high culture, I’d like to share a story from my childhood that I was reminded of by the quote from the BBC, which defined the Middlebrow as “people who are hoping that some day they will get used to the stuff they ought to like.” This reminded me of my own initiation into the unhallowed ground of the Middlebrow, of how much I was intimidated as a youngster when I went to my friends’ houses and discovered on their parents’ shelves, those beautifully boxed Book of the Month Club editions of Proust, Thomas Mann, and Eliot’s Four Quartets.
I didn’t know and it didn’t matter whether these were ever read or whether my friends’ parents ever got used to the stuff they ought to like. What made me cringe was the epiphany that my own home and family occupied a much lower cultural and social rung by dint of the books that regardless of the fact that they were read voraciously, didn’t deserve to be boxed. Our bookshelves were filled with monthly selections from the One Dollar Doubleday Book Club, featuring such luminaries as C.S. Forester, creator of Captain Hornblower, Frank Yerby’s steamy bodice rippers of the antebellum American South, and Samuel Shellabarger’s historical epics of illegitimate Renaissance princes and princely pirates. By the time I was 12, due more to lack of supervision than to progressive parenting, I graduated myself from reading every color of Andrew Lang’s rainbow coalition of Fairy Books to the tomes in my parents’ library of dubious cultural capital.
If my parents’ books made mischief with my sense of social standing, that also included my intuition that reading represented a world without limits, except for what writers could imagine. I did move on from Frank Yerby to Emily Brontë, and with no small measure of cultural superiority. But it took a little longer to feel confident that it wasn’t necessary to move on to find literary value and intellectual challenges in non-canonical writers who according to their original reviews, deserved only sneers. For example, a review of Storm Jameson’s 1936 dystopia, In the Second Year, accused her of abandoning literary value to her fears of seeing Nazis everywhere. That the voice of fiction could express political anxiety led me to discover links between Frank Yerby and Emily Brontë that extended beyond their affinity for Gothic heavy breathing. It happened when I read that Frank Yerby had died in his villa on the French Riviera in 1991. He had lived there as an American in exile, still shielding himself from public knowledge that he was a black man writing about interracial love and abuse, byproducts of slavery and racism. He had transgressed the social and cultural limits of what represented even trashy romance or the lowbrow, and as a result had been consigned, not even to the moderate and guiltless Middlebrow mainstream, but to its unboxed lower depths.
That racial politics and history are now central to literary study comes as no surprise. If the dangers Storm Jameson saw in the rise of international fascism couldn’t elevate her literary value in her own time, we now know how prescient she was both historically and in terms of using literary experiments to express her political engagement. Despite all our efforts, however, the mix of the Middlebrow and political engagement remains vexed. If in Jameson’s day, narrating political crises was a sign of non-serious Middlebrow melodrama, today signs of the Middlebrow render political engagement as non-serious. I’m going to explore a category of Middlebrow cultural production that has not made its way into our expanding Middlebrow catalog but is related to my tale of Frank Yerby. Just as his romances brought attention to a history of racial persecution to readers unaware of what they had bought for their dollar a month, so mass audience Holocaust novels and movies have been luring audiences, according to their ads and previews, with promises of “Life IS Beautiful,” or that in the recent film “Defiance,” “War and destruction has never been so captivating and moving.” As reviewer Owen Gleiberman assesses this phenomenon,
the
Owen Gleiberman
Owen Gleiberman is a film critic for EW
old line on Holocaust dramas was that no film, regardless of how serious, could ever truly capture the horror. These days, you would have to look far and wide to find a Holocaust movie that even tries to capture the full, unimaginable horror. The subject may be survivor's guilt gone mad (Adam Resurrected), a mission impossible to assassinate Hitler (Valkyrie), or a death camp guard's […] sexiness and secret shame (The Reader), but in this season of grimly hooky Third Reich parables, it's hard to shake the feeling that the Holocaust has turned from the ultimate furrowed-brow movie theme into a genre, with its own built-in flowers-of-evil mystique. Rarely has genocide been put to the service of so much unabashed...entertainment. (Entertainment Weekly Jan. 14, 2009 http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,20252492,00.html)
My talk today will focus on two Holocaust movies, one an adaptation of a novel, that have both won widespread audience acclaim and critical notoriety. I want to explore what difference Holocaust representation for the masses makes to our thinking about the Middlebrow and what difference the Middlebrow makes to thinking about Holocaust representation. Using Glieberman’s term, “grimly hooky” Holocaust films and fiction may win reverent applause on Oscar night and hushed audience approval, but it is precisely because of this that they have become suspect. In January, a New York Times article noted that it may not have been a coincidence that with Hanukkah having just been celebrated in December, commemorating an ancient Jewish victory, and with Holocaust Memorial day being observed on Jan. 27, a spate of Holocaust movies opened within the month, including “Defiance,” “The Reader,” “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas,” and “Valkyrie.” With all their popularity, each and every one of these has been criticized for exploiting the horrors of the Holocaust “to create a narrative of redemption.”
Several of these movies share characteristics that coincide with conventional definitions and criticisms of the Middlebrow, including exploitation of historical events “to create a narrative of redemption.” In the historical plot of “Valkyrie,” Count von Stauffenburg may have preferred a German aristocratic autocracy to the Third Reich, but in the movie, we’re only shown Tom Cruise’s self-sacrificing plot to assassinate Hitler. Such plotting includes other shared conventions attributed to the Middlebrow, including characters driven by universalized motivations like greed or the will to power, or by contrived circumstances, like uncanny resemblances between hero and villain, and whose reactions seem to originate in a grab bag of stock emotions: terror, fury, tears, sexual passion. Psychological complications or development are conveyed through strobe lighted acts and symbols. For example, if Amon Goeth in Schindler’s List is a monster, it’s because he acts like a monster. When Oskar Schindler’s character converts from Nazi opportunism into self-effacing rescuer, instead of process, we’re treated to a Technicolor symbol of moral epiphany -- his sighting of a toddler whose red coat is spotlighted in an otherwise black and white film. Love too, as in The Reader, is transgressive and a matter of spontaneous combustion; it erupts from a glance. Settings are dark and shadowy to register an ominous turn, or sunny to indicate innocence. The most popular Holocaust films, intended for mass audiences, are plot and action driven, emphasizing suspense and unexpected turns of chance and fate, mystifying rather than explored or explained. The protagonist’s actions are bathed in the romantic glow and tensions of heroic adventure.
So I ask: What difference does it make to studying and evaluating the Holocaust for the masses if we view its film and fiction as integral to Middlebrow culture? How might their shared conventions offer critical opportunities to rescue mass audience Holocaust artifacts from the indictment of being “grimly hooky” horrors? We can begin by reviewing how we have turned criticisms of Middlebrow conventions into analyses that reveal narrative experiments that reside in a parallel universe with modernism and postmodernism. Whether they’re seen as subversions and revisions of traditional forms of realism or as critiques of literary history itself, the compressions and condensations of realism into non-realist narrative strategies have called attention to the critically complex uses of realist and experimental forms to depict cultural, historical, and social conflict and crisis. But can these critical conclusions be applied to the crises represented in middlebrow Holocaust representations? One response comes from Holocaust scholars who maintain that both popular appeal and narrative experiment are tantamount to Holocaust revisionism, not open invitations to wide ranging social and cultural interpretation. There are several profoundly important reasons for this which I’ll summarize, but I’ll then be making a reflexive argument: that the Middlebrow and popular Holocaust novels and films offer us opportunities to interpret and question persistent categories of criticism and therefore their own cultural status.
A major cause for concern about focusing on heroism and redemption emerges with stories of successful resistance and survival, as in “Defiance” or “Schindler’s List.” For many critics, such stories risk leaving audiences understanding the Holocaust story as a chilling but satisfying thriller – carrying the message of the triumph of hope over adversity, of innocence over evil. The problem is that such lessons and moral pieties betray how exceptional these stories are; they betray the realities of 6,000,000 Jews and an additional 5,000,000 others who never had a chance to resist or to be rescued. For a long time now, Holocaust scholars and philosophers have worried a great deal about mass audience artifacts violating what they call the “limits of representation,” limits that are not imposed by criticism of art about any other subject. For example, to imagine or fictionalize the Holocaust beyond adherence to historical fact is to risk falling into traps set by a type of critic we don’t find in any other subject: Holocaust deniers. Other limits: to glamorize, sentimentalize, and eroticize Holocaust representation is to trivialize the atrocities and suffering endured by people who were constructed as a race to destroy. Victims of the Third Reich were imprisoned and murdered in the camps, in ghettoes, and in hiding – all for the purpose of constructing the Master race. Extermination of the poisonous subhuman races of the Jews and gypsies or damaged species such as homosexuals constituted a purification ritual. An example of defying the limits I’ve listed is The Kindly Ones by Jonathan Littell. This newly minted novel is described by one reviewer as “a fictionalized memoir of a remorseless former Nazi SS officer, who in addition to taking part in the mass extermination of the Jews, commits incest with his sister, sodomizes himself with a sausage and most likely kills his mother and stepfather” (NYT B1). Some reviewers call the novel a work of genius, others accuse Mr. Littell of “being a pornographer of violence,” and the publisher and booksellers just hope a little controversy will go a long way in sales.
This example illustrates connections between the Middlebrow and the limits of Holocaust representation. I think we can argue, even without having read it, and I haven’t decided whether I will, that The Kindly Ones seems to add human complexity to the portrait of a sexually violent perpetrator. On the other hand, this complexity begs critical questions: Does the novel’s first person narrative, with its psychological and experiential revelations, humanize the perpetrator to a point beyond understanding and possibly even sympathy, but of feeling empathy? Does this thousand page tome invite readers to identify with him? Do we worry that readers will be titillated by the notoriety engendered by the novel’s advertising and find the racialized sexual violence appealing rather than compelling us to read critically? If we connect these issues to those about Middlebrow criticism, we might ask: How do we factor audience appeal into our revisions of the Middlebrow? Given how much interpretive freedom we’ve asserted in our Middlebrow work, way beyond authorial control, how far do Holocaust texts allow us to go?
I’d like to begin my responses by exploring the popular acclaim of John Boyne’s 2006 novel The Boy in the Striped Pajamas and the 2008 film adaptation. Boyne calls his novel a fable, a simple tale whose moral lesson is forecast in such chapter headings as: Bruno Makes a Discovery, and The Dot That Became a Speck That Became a Figure That Became a Boy. The plot follows this trajectory. Having been promoted to Camp Commandant, an SS officer moves his wife, eight year old son, Bruno, and twelve year old daughter, Gretel, from their gracious Berlin home to one just beyond the gates of Auschwitz. Denoting his innocent ignorance, Bruno calls the camp “Out –With” and their leader “the Fury” (116). Deprived of school and friends, both children are beset with loneliness, but the perspective from which the tale is spun is Bruno’s and, typically for middlebrow fiction, family and home. One day, as fables will have it, Bruno leaves the sanctuary of his home to discover a garden door from which he wanders and discovers a barbed wire fence with a “dot that became a boy” on the other side (104). Emerging from this metamorphosis is Shmuel, a Jewish boy in striped pajamas. [SHOW FIRST MEETING] Among Bruno’s many discoveries is that they share the same birthday and that both boys have had to leave their nice homes and friends behind. As the boys’ friendship intensifies, so does the momentum of the plot, which carries them inexorably along to their shared tragic end. Discovering no difference between the boys and their fates, both the plot and Bruno make sure he digs a hole under the fence, dons a pair of striped pajamas, and the boys are swept away, hand in hand, to the gas chamber.