Young and Free by Faulkner Joanne;

Author:Faulkner, Joanne;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Unlimited Model
Published: 2012-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Nazis here become ‘grown-ups,’ with their ordering logic, and the child’s fragmented perspective—marginalized by an epistemology that values consistency and rigor—is conflated with Wilkomirski’s disjointed ‘recollections.’ The reader’s demand for clarity or accuracy thus allies them to the Nazis, who operate according to a ‘grown-up’ logic. Likewise, doubt becomes tantamount to Holocaust denial.

Readers are thus corralled into an uncritical identification with the child-Wilkomirski. Yet such identification has its own dividends and is not merely coercive. The simplistic moral landscape of Wilkomirski’s world is attractive, yielding excessive moral figures through which readers may divest themselves of uncertainty regarding their own stake in those events. The guileless child-protagonist is pitted against all manner of callous adult. The choice is easy which figure offers itself as an attractive locus of identification and which should be repulsive to the reader. The audience is encouraged to dissociate from adulthood, to take the child’s part, which is unequivocally good. Through the child, the adult reader finds her way ‘home’ to an interiority untouched by the exigencies that lead to moral ambiguity.

Yet, as psychoanalysis teaches, identification is never so simple: This conscious repulsion against these adult figures indicates unconscious identification has taken place through a process of ‘abjection’ or ‘projective identification.’ This signals a deeper and more complex investment in the other, strongly motivated by feelings of guilt, shame, ambivalence, and uncertainty.[5] The figures of moral excess in Fragments, then, give rise to multiple identifications in the reader all at once: The child elicits feelings of parental protectiveness but also beckons to a sense of one’s own innocence, vulnerability, and loss. More intriguing is the sense of shame in the face of the child’s perspective, revealing one’s adult position of privilege and motivated, perhaps, by an unacknowledged identification with the adult agents of Binjamin’s suffering.

This darker identification also indicates the more complex ethical implications of such events as Auschwitz, addressed by Primo Levi in The Drowned and the Saved. Written shortly before Levi’s death by suicide in 1987, this book speaks to the vagaries of memory and feelings of shame and guilt that characterize survival and what he calls the ‘grey zone’: the complicated social landscape the Nazis invented in the camp. It is, he writes, ‘that zone of ambiguity which radiates out from regimes based on terror and obsequiousness.’[6] Levi criticizes the Manichean structure of Holocaust memorial, exposing instead the implication of Jews in their own extermination through the allocation of minimal privileges and functions that prolonged individuals’ survival. The Kapos (prisoner-thugs allowed to beat other prisoners), Sonderkomandos (‘special squad,’ who administered the gas chambers), and even Levi’s own position as chemist manufacture a humiliating complicity in victims that robs them even of the consolation of innocence. The corrupting factor in this scene is the security it offers in setting some even minimally apart from the rest. Levi laments that those internees, himself included, who were able to fulfil a purpose for the Germans disproportionately survived. Survival is contaminated by the shame of having had an advantage over others.

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