The philosopher Berel Lang offers powerful arguments for the conclusion that there can be no useful fictional treatment of the Holocaust. However, he notes that three writers (Celan, Appelfeld, and Borowski) escape the force of these arguments. Lang is prepared to grant that, in such cases, “literary and moral genius” may enable a writer to “transcend” the “supposedly intrinsic” limitations suggested by abstract philosophical argument; but leaves open the question what such “genius” consists in. This essay is an attempt to provide an answer to that question for the specific case of Aharon Appelfeld. Appelfeld’s fictions introduce their readers into the fabric of Jewish life in Central Europe immediately prior to the catastrophe, to the extent of allowing them to feel in propria persona, and thus to attain knowledge-of, rather than merely knowledge-about, the tensions constituting the situational framework within which those lives were lived. Appelfeld’s fictions offer a way of recovering the individuality, as persons rather than numbers, of those whom the Shoah destroyed, because individuality displays itself, inter alia, in the varying of individual response to a common situation. Such recovery is relevant to our moral understanding of the Shoah, it is argued, because what is morally important about the representations of the Shoah is not merely the destruction, but also the nature of what was destroyed. The essay concludes with brief discussions of the relative merits, in this connection, of fiction and memoir, and of the criticisms levelled against Appelfeld’s work by M. A. Bernstein and others.

Written in Polish in the form of a long poem accompanied by 17 illustrations, The Legend of the Prince was created in Leon Glazer’s tailor workshop in the Lodz Ghetto, and was found in the ghetto’s ruins after the war by a survivor, Abraham Wolf Yasni. Designed in the form of an album for presentation to the Ghetto’s Elder, Chaim Rumkowski, the legend is told from the perspective of those having the good fortune to work in Glazer’s tailor ressort.  However, within the bright illustrations and rhyming, metred verse that carries the legend from start to finish is buried the tragic story of the September 1942 Sperre.  This essay argues that the story that is offered in the spirit of a light-hearted and diverting fairy tale and tribute, fictionalizing the trials and tribulations of the children working in Glazer’s workshop, is in fact a sophisticated memorial act, registering for its creators the trauma of the mass deportations of children, the sick and the elderly which took place over eight days of mandatory curfew in the Ghetto.
        Following a pattern of visual and narrative instabilities in the album's self-presentation, I attend to moments in which The Legend points not only to the events in Lodz Ghetto of which it must not speak but also to familiar works of children's literature, such as Alice in Wonderland and The Pied Piper of Hamelin, which contribute to the "logics" by which the album might be read.

This essay discusses the element of length as the shared basis that forms the epic tradition in its various transformations of the narrative and heroic modes. Length preserves a certain quality that other terms (such as “heroic” or “narrative”) are meant to express. What is at stake here is our understanding of narrativity, its relation to length in the epic tradition, and the narrative facet of the tradition itself. The article delineates a tentative narrative of a tradition of long poems that narrate past values as an ideal. Latent in the question of these poems’ length is the question of multiplicity and unity: what are the relations between the poem’s parts and how – or whether – they create one poem. The long poem of the epic tradition is the fruit of the attempt to contend with the relationship between multiplicity and unity; it is the expression of this attempt — either by searching for an option that does not make these two concepts mutually exclusive or by pointing to another world, where such a worldview apparently existed. In this sense, the narrativity of the long epic poem preserves the past and turns it into a utopian future.

The essay creates a dialogue between two disciplines that are rarely brought together: narratology and analytical philosophy. In interpreting Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day, it points to similarities between the recent interest of analytic philosophers in self-deception and the interest of literary scholars in narrative unreliability, showing that a better understanding of self-deception can be achieved by a mutual illumination of philosophy and literature: the reading of Ishiguro’s novel relies on distinctions used in analytical philosophy, but the novel, in its turn, provides a further contribution to philosophical discussions.   

As Ishiguro’s novel shows, narratives in which the narrating character is self-deceived tend to create an oscillation between (at least) two tenable versions of the story: one that imputes self-deception to the narrating character and one that accepts the plausibility of his version. They also tend to give rise to two hypotheses concerning the motivation of the narrating character to perform the narrative act. One hypothesis is that the motivation is to reinforce self-deception; the other is that the act of narration is motivated also by a (partly unconscious) desire to reveal the truth and comprehend the course of events that has led to self-deception.

When both motivations of a self-deceiver’s narration are operative, the verbal expression of self-deception is considerably complicated. The butler Stevens’ words, like the words of self-deceivers in general, both disclose and conceal, express guilt and deny it, try to comprehend the incoherence of his beliefs and to blur it. Works of literature remind us that self-deception is not a constant state of mind or the final stage of a process but a constituent of many mental processes that may be transitional and dynamic.

Barbara Pym’s novels of the 1950s are generally devoted to the representation of the life of educated single gentlewomen, but when she does choose to depict men, they do not conform to contemporary ideas of masculinity. This paper demonstrates Pym’s ambiguous treatment of several types of male characters and the traditional association between homosexuality and the Anglo-Catholic faction of the Anglican Church. Although in her presentation Pym refers to popular cultural attitudes and clichés, which were clear to her target audience but have to be explicated today (more than 50 years later), this use of stereotypes does not amount to moral judgment or condemnation. On the contrary, in a decade when homosexuals were outlawed and demonized, Pym represents them sympathetically and their lifestyle as a legitimate and somewhat intriguing choice.

The paper argues for a post-metaphysical reading of Jorge Luis Borges, a reading that would situate the writer’s work in a dimension of substance, presence and space, instead of understanding it exclusively in terms of discursive, metaphysically-anchored meaning. Borges’s poetry is viewed as anticipating the current turn in the humanities, from hermeneutics to the study and cultivation of a sense of the presence of the world and of art -- visual, verbal, or other.

Leon Trotsky’s account of his birth and childhood in his autobiography reverses the pattern of Freud’s “family romance.” If, according to this pattern, when the child fantasizes that his parents are not his real parents, the fantasy entails the image of the “real parents” as being of higher social standing, the symbolic undercurrents of Trotsky’s autobiography, implicitly downgrade his Jewish wealthy-farmer father and replace his actual origins by a transnational proletarian affiliation, more exalted in terms of his ideology. 

In the aftermath of 9/11, dystopian nightmare has become a fact, no longer a cautionary tale of the imagination. But fantasy of destruction is embedded in Western culture, and apocalyptic disaster becomes a re-visioning of familiar cultural paradigms and scenarios. Indeed, postwar America as satirized by Don DeLillo was a site of catastrophe before the planes struck the WTC. The attacks on New York can be seen against the background of postmodern aesthetic theory expounded by Jean Baudrillard and Paul Virilio. Frédéric Beigbeder, Ian McEwan, and Jonathan Safran Foer respond to 9/11 in novels that grapple with the implications of that event and its aftermath for representation and for the novel form. What 9/11 has shown is that the relation of the real and the imagined in dystopian fiction has been reversed, as both lived experience and hypermediated image.