Fiction in Schindler’s List

In the “Author’s Note” to Schindler’s List Keneally writes:

To use the texture and the devices of a novel to tell a true story is a course which has frequently been followed in modern writing. It is the one I have chosen to follow here; both because the craft of a novelist is the only craft to which I can lay claim, and because the novel’s techniques seem suited for a character of such ambiguity as Oskar. I have attempted to avoid all fiction, though, since fiction would debase the record, and to distinguish between reality and the myths which are likely to attach themselves to a man of Oskar’s stature. 

Keneally’s attempt to use the novel’s techniques while abstaining from fiction creates a unique narrative style. At no point do we believe the narrator is anyone other than Keneally, and he asserts this fact in almost every chapter, where he almost apologetically reminds the reader that the novel is a reconstruction. We are told “we do not know in what condition of soul Oskar Schindler spent March 13th, the ghetto’s last and worst day” (p.209). Likewise, thoughts and expressions of emotion are always attributed to some later reflection: “Dresner’s account, given later in life…” (p.369); “Later, Oskar would describe…” (p. 374). Keneally repeatedly denies the omniscience the third person voice usually promises in historical fiction.

The notion of a historical novel, as Keneally states, is not particularly alien, but the notion of a non-fiction novel (a fact made even less clear by its winning The Man Booker Prize for Fiction), although not new, was still an oddity and used generally within America in the New Journalism of Wolfe, Capote, Talese, Southern, Didion, Thompson and others. But there is more to this subtle link than may be readily apparent.

Although New Journalism tended to focus more in the US, and focus in particular on its less grand inhabitants (bikers, murderers, vagrants, drug users) Keneally’s novel is not only international (an Australian novelist writing about a Sudeten German in Poland and dealing with the global subject of the Holocaust) it likewise focuses on more traditional novelistic fodder: a larger than life character who did extraordinary things.

Although sharing the aim of telling a true story in a creative format, they approached the techniques differently, often from opposite ends. Where New Journalists would adopt the creative writing techniques of a novelist to add flare and interest, Keneally attempted the neutrality of a journalist or, more accurately, an oral historian. He interviewed anybody he could, studied documents at the Yad Vashem, and referred to these openly within the narrative, and placed these around historical events like the Liquidation of the Kraków Ghetto. And where New Journalism attempted to remove the “beige Narrator” through  different voices and shifts in point of view, Keneally draws back narration, nullifying personality, with its pretence of authority, and using a shift in characters (rather than point of view) to again destabilize any kind of certainty.

A prime example is with dialogue. Where New Journalism brazenly included full, detailed conversations in an attempt to create authenticity, Keneally almost apologetically includes these to meet novelistic conventions but added a disclaimer removing any sense of authenticity. An early example, when Oskar is partying with those he considered genuine friends, we are reminded that “though it is impossible to say exactly what the members of the party talked about that night, it is possible from what Oskar said later of each of these men to make a plausible reconstruction” (p.71).

Also, unlike New Journalism, Keneally shifts character rather than point of view. “From the faces of his own workers, Oskar could read something of the ghetto’s torment”, (p.139), or when “Goeth estimated the distance the women had to carry the frames to be some three-quarters of a kilometer” (p.178). These utilize novelistic techniques, telling the information from a different perspective, but both give information without affecting our understanding of the character’s emotional state or contributing to our understanding of that character.

However, in the scene where Amon Goeth wagers Helen Hirsch to Oskar in a game of Blackjack, Keneally’s abstinence from fiction falters. “Amon wanted to think about it”, and Keneally ventures to understand Goeth’s attachment to Helen: “When he’d thought of an end for her, it had probably always been that he would finish her by his own hand, with personal passion.” We are then told that Oskar “did not ask himself by what right he made a bid for the girl”, and that “he did not see, in his offer to Amon, any parallel with God and Satan playing cards for human souls” (p.303).

The latter sentiment is a striking use of novelistic technique, solidifying the narrative role between two prominent, opposed characters that has been developing throughout the novel (Keneally repeatedly asserts the similarities in physique and tastes of the two). It is the first sentiments of the two, Amon’s hesitation and his personal desires about Helen, and the certainty of Oskar’s lack of reflection on his activities, that blurs the confines of creative non-fiction that are establish in the rest of the novel. The action, we understand, is not fictional, but its narrative framework of a wager between two imaginary beings, places it outside of traditional representations of history, and provides the emotional and psychological aspects suited to novels.

The Novel as Decay

It is not useful to talk about the ‘death’ of the novel. Although fitting, given the general unease with their craft that seems unique to fiction writers, the novel has always been a dead object.

To be fair, all objects are of course dead. Where the novel distinguishes itself is that even if read it is not necessarily resurrected. Unlike a film, or a composition, or a painting it does not reveal itself externally. It does not impact the light, or reverberate in sonic waves. It is only apparent once ingested.

This is why writers are those who experience extreme doubt surmised by the simple (and rhetorical) “why do I write?” Even the  most reflective directors never ask the meaning of their craft; composers do not lament the folly of their activities; painters, sculptors, or installation artists do not questions their validity (or if they do these thoughts, as others have pointed out, are distinct from the work itself).

Perhaps it has to do with the illusion of audience. A filmmaker can determine his work based on the numbers who see it. The sculptor by how many visit the gallery or site. None of these determines understanding of the work, but indicates an audience. Novelists and short story writers have no such indication. Even book sales can be misleading, as how many of us have books on our shelves that we have purchased with the intent of reading yet have never glanced at a single page? Poets, given the public nature of their work (it is meant to be read aloud) and the increasingly insularity of their professional world may be spared this neurosis. (Perhaps something of a parallel is the prevalence of literary festivals that are increasing writers connection with their audience and perhaps—I hesitate to make this an assertion—reducing the self doubt of novelists, perhaps to our own misfortune).

Thus it is perhaps better not to speak of the death of the novel, but rather  the decay of the novel (or rather the novel as decay) as its natural state. Perhaps this is why the novel is best suited to express decay, loss, atrophy. One list of greatest books (granted literature should not be ranked) include Anna Karenina, Madame Bovary, Lolita, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Hamlet, Gatsby, In Search of Lost Time, and Middlemarch (I have removed The Stories of Anton Checkov as it would be incorrect to characterise the collective under a single theme). What all these titles do have in common are either attempts at reliving past idealisations or creating new lives removed from the drudgery of reality only to be faced with the devastation that these are either not possible, or unable to be relieved.

As well as premature, observations of the novel’s death miss its point, miss its strength as a object that has within its DNA decay, loss, atrophy. It is contradiction, best clarified by Maurice Blanchot in “Literature and the Right to Death”, that defines it:

 Literature professes to be important while at the same time considering itself an object of doubt. It confirms itself as it disparages itself. It seeks itself: this is more than it has right to do, because literature may be one of those things which deserves to be found but not to be sought.

It’s the very acceptance that it is dead, that all it has left is its decay, that gives the novel value, that resurrects it, even if that is never guaranteed.