Elie Wiesel’s Night is a poignant cry in the night, a record of a nightmare, and, ultimately, a work of historical fiction. After all, who could remember the words of so many strangers under such horrible conditions? Body and spirit were nearly ground to dust. Moreover, Night, like every testimony of history, is first and foremost a testimony of the author’s state of mind at the moment of writing.
Is Night literature? It is an artistic reflection on the Holocaust, but can any amount of art turn a disaster into something healthy? Why healthy? At least, we can expect literature to be healthy. But Night is more likely to spawn nightmares and stain and corrupt the word “night” so much so that the word will have to be replaced with a new word.
One does not overcome history by turning back to reflect on it, as Lot’s wife did when she turned back to look at the fires of Sodom, for in doing so she turned into a pillar of salt—a synechdoche, perhaps, for tears. Nor does one overcome history through ignorance.
In Ulysses Stephen Daedalus says he is trying to escape the nightmare of history, and he fails, but in Finnegan’s Wake he succeeds, he succeeds by vanishing from a narrative that is not a narrative, a narrative that cannot accommodate human beings, at least, not the illusion of persons who exist as unchanging identities. And that movement may well be Stephen’s promised moral for humanity: destroy the illusion of stasis, of identity, of unchanging phenomena.
The “hero” of Night, Elie Wiesel, is transformed by the Holocaust experience. He loses his faith and seems to grow stronger because of it. Unfortunately, the Holocaust hardly provides the conditions necessary for human beings to grow strong enough to grow healthy and whole and free of illusions. For that one must have ideal conditions: schools, at least teachers and an atmosphere largely free of stress.
Ironically, the pivotal moment in Elie’s loss of faith, i.e. in his loss of illusions, is his hallucination/vision of the Angel of Death. Why does this angel come during the Holocaust? Plenty of Jews and others lose their faith under much more humane circumstances. I lost my own freely, under conditions of plenty. The truth is that the very Jewish Angel of Death (excuse the personification) is always waiting for us, waiting to be confronted and understood. And perhaps it is precisely our refusal to own up to Death, a Death freed of religious trappings that prevents us from understanding the universal, that prevents us from changing and paradoxically brings upon us the deadly, mortifying Revenge of Psyche wherever humanity destroys itself.
I am not suggesting that we forget the Holocaust; I am suggesting that we strip it of its historical dressings so that we can better understand the universal, the kernel. Only in the shallowest sense does that mean we forget the Holocaust.
In his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, Elie Wiesel identified Israel as “the only nation in the world whose existence is threatened.” How dated that claim sounds in the age of global warming, rising oceans and … well, meteors. In arguing for the preservation of any nation, Elie Wiesel does us no favors. Nations have always served the forces of division and borders are largely the products of empire building. Nationhood itself will one day be a dated concept, replaced, pehraps, by a nobler construct, something more flexible, rational and humane, something born not from greed, or, in Israel’s case—desperation…
Some peoples do not even have “nations” – I speak of the world’s coming artists, comedians, philosophers and all children of joy… They too are being liquidated, aborted, every day, by the forces of the world, since the beginning of civilization. Who will speak for them?
