Molly by Blake Butler

Author:Blake Butler [Butler, Blake]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781648230387
Publisher: powerHouse Books
Published: 2023-02-15T05:00:00+00:00

Upon returning home from Poland, Molly dove head-on back into work. She seemed to have been humbled somewhat, and clearer-purposed, if also newly ignited by a more incorrigible mode of inner rage. She’d gone to stand on hallowed ground, looked baldly back into the pit of Holocaust from which she’d come, and now returned to endless updates of our own country in its own crisis, debating borders, human rights, state-sponsored murder, and even the very nature of information, its manufacture. It felt like living under psychic siege, even on “normal” days, hidden in spin, pulled up at the roots, with little remaining clear consensus on what was true, what might be true tomorrow, but the need to froth more, to get online and run your mouth. Meanwhile, people were saying it was the golden age of television, backed by corporations so well armed with data-driven branding that there seemed less and less a choice to stand apart. Molly, as usual, couldn’t help but want to turn it on herself, in stark contrast to the ongoing spectacle of social media’s spastic version of social justice, where everybody just seemed to want to blame everybody else. She knew as well as anybody, at least theoretically, what happens to repressed trauma—how it ends up getting passed on further down the line, multiplying, taking new form—and yet her experience simultaneously didn’t seem to serve her but as renewed desire to hold her own hand to the flames. “It made me sick,” she wrote of coming home. “I could see my family’s story of being rescued by America, the story of the American Dream, truly as a farce, a dark and pain-filled comedy against the context of the past and everyone else who did not make it. We did nothing to deserve our rescue.”17 I find myself thinking here of Holocaust novelist Imre Kertész’s response to Schindler’s List, a sentiment Molly and I had shared an awe for: “I regard as kitsch any representation of the Holocaust that is incapable of understanding or unwilling to understand the organic connection between our own deformed mode of life (whether in the private sphere or on the level of ‘civilization’ as such) and the very possibility of the Holocaust.”18 Isn’t that what had driven her to want to write about her father, from whom she clearly learned more than she thought, with such compassion, when the whole rest of her family refused to give him the time of day? Wasn’t that what she had gone in search for, back to the primal scene of her family’s origin, smack in the middle of the most massive atrocity of all time? “We are mostly bad,” Molly ends up concluding. “The world is mostly cold and tough, and those who come to any genuine understanding of it tend to be the same. It is in this context that kindness has meaning.”19

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