Fugitive Pieces, Anne Michaels

N.B. from 2004 -- a response paper from my Holocaust Studies grad seminar

Is it possible for a novel about the Holocaust to be too beautiful? Anne Michaels’ Fugitive Pieces is a kind of fantasia on the Holocaust, almost, one wants to say, a valentine to it, a tale so awash in richly lyrical prose that it seems more enamored of the gorgeous effects it produces than in articulating the historical depth of its troubling subject. Like many virtuoso turns, the book is drenched in a technique that all but strangles the pathos it aims for. The darkness of the Nazi terror and the ethical responsibility which it imposes on a writer is airbrushed to a self-serving burnished, lapidary glow, as if beautiful sentences alone were sufficient to counter the apocalypse.

The question at stake here is whether or not such writing constitutes an abuse of history. Probably not, since the writer’s motives seem sincere. On the other hand, sentimentalism abuses both literature and the reader. The unintended irony of the text within a text’s title, “Bearing False Witness,” seeps into and taints the entire novel. The deeper currents of the book, however, offer tantalizing, if intermittent, reflections on language and translation, memory and identity, and how the awful pressures history exerts warps and reshapes them. When not waxing nostalgic or merely self-indulgent, Michaels can be quite compelling on this point. As the protagonist Jakob observes early on, language has both the power to destroy and to restore. However, Michaels never focuses her heady prose on this theme in a sustained way and the result is that the novel comes off as precious, mannered, and attenuated, in love with the sound of its own voice.

Perhaps the most problematic aspect of the novel is the way it valorizes the idea of an earthy, primal Hellenic ur-world as the antidote to the terrors of the Holocaust. This return to a putative origin of the West, more chthonic than classical, is presented with a gushing and feckless transparence that verges on the deeply cynical. Michaels’ treatment of this theme calls to mind Derrida’s remarks, in his essay on Levinas (“Violence and Metaphysics”) that “we live in the difference between the Jew and the Greek, which is perhaps the unity of what is called history” (153). Yet despite the novel’s provocative meditations on this Joycean dialectic of jewgreek/greekjew, the idea that ethics is best promulgated by the syntactical switch from “they” to “we” never receives a fully embodied or clarified treatment.

The play of historical tensions, represented most fully in the often seemingly capricious accumulation of cultural details like Athos’s reading interests, never amounts to more than an outline for a theme. The bricoleur method founders in the book’s prolonged dalliance with spectrality. Its real failure however is that the Holocaust is simply fodder for a lyrical brutalism that reduces it to a merely literary tragedy.