Washington Post Book Reviews
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Monday December 6, 2010
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THE FIERY TRIAL: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery
Eric Foner
Norton
ISBN 978-0393066180
426 pages
$29.95
Reviewed by Fred Kaplan
The value of Eric Foner's "The Fiery Trial" lies in its comprehensive review of mostly familiar material; in its sensible evaluation of the full range of information already available about Lincoln and slavery; and in the deft thoroughness of its scholarship. "Fiery Trial" does well what has already been done before "but ne'er so well expressed." It's an advantage, though, to have the record, and its uses and misuses, all in one place, and this will now be the book of first convenience to go to on the subject. Not surprisingly, its greatest strength is in context, not foreground. This follows from Foner's belief that "the private Lincoln will forever remain elusive."
As Foner and most Lincoln scholars recognize, Lincoln's moral position was clear from the start: He detested slavery. He had, though, a deep respect and absolute fealty to the Constitution under which slavery was legal. He never changed his view that pro-slavery state law must be respected until forces beyond his control gave him the opportunity he had done everything possible to avoid. From the start of his political career and up until about late 1862, he wanted only to prevent the spread of slavery, to look toward eventual emancipation through a change in public opinion, to solve the "Negro problem" by colonization (sponsoring emigration back to Africa), and to avoid bloodshed.
What gives the book its major spurt of energy and freshness is its account of the complicated political and social context in which Lincoln's views on slavery were formed and the large number of people and movements that helped create the dominant attitudes toward slavery in early and mid-19th-century America. The book "is intended to be both less and more than another biography," Foner claims in his preface. Actually, it's not a biography at all. It is different from a biography, and consequently neither "less" nor "more."
What "Fiery Trial" does have in common with biography is that it is a chronological account of Lincoln and slavery. This has the advantage of giving it some forward pace but the disadvantages of repeating what has already been done by numbers of estimable biographers in less limited narratives of Lincoln's life and of discouraging intellectual history and analysis. The book functions almost entirely as a narrative of Lincoln's attitudes toward slavery as a politician, providing more surface than depth. Foner's approach, though, is probably essential to his thesis: that "Lincoln's career was a process of moral and political education and deepening anti-slavery conviction ... that the hallmark of Lincoln's greatness was his capacity for growth." True?
Probably not. Foner's justification for "Fiery Trial" is that "there is value in tracing Lincoln's growth, as it were, forward."
"As it were" reveals a nice hesitancy or qualification that the book as a whole doesn't maintain. Foner's basic claim is at least an exaggeration, if not wrong. A stronger argument can be made that Lincoln hardly "grew" at all on the issue of slavery, that he responded to changing circumstances that he himself did not create and that brought him into a public role in which he could not avoid taking the positions that led to the Emancipation Proclamation and the 13th Amendment.
But Foner's progressive narrative schema almost requires that his main character develop morally. "Fiery Trial" maintains this thesis throughout despite the facts that the book narrates. And it may be that the paradigm of moral growth and its importance to Foner (and, of course, to others as well) actually precedes an examination of the record. To give credit to Lincoln for moral progression seems beyond the facts and unnecessary for our appreciation of this arguably greatest of all American presidents.
"Fiery Trial" gives brief attention to Congressman John Quincy Adams' prescription in the 1840s for overcoming the constitutional obstacle to legal emancipation. Adams believed that, since it would be impossible to attain the legislative votes for altering the Constitution, only the exercise of the president's war powers, granted by the Constitution, could eliminate slavery. Adams predicted that would happen. Did Lincoln, who was on the House floor in 1848 when Adams collapsed and who was appointed to the funeral committee, read or even know of Adams' speeches before they were brought to his attention in 1861? It was, in effect, not Lincoln but the Confederate South that initiated emancipation, as Adams anticipated. It did so by seceding, which Lincoln calculatingly labeled "rebellion." That activated his constitutional war powers as president. The rest is history, "as it were."
Fred Kaplan is the author, most recently, of "Lincoln: The Biography of a Writer."
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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A THOUSAND DARKNESSES: Lies and Truth in Holocaust Fiction
Ruth Franklin
Oxford Univ
ISBN 978-0195313963
256 pages
$29.95
Reviewed by Susie Linfield
Addressing the Holocaust -- in literature, in films, in music, in paintings -- presents writers and readers, artists and audiences, with an irresolvable paradox. Any attempt to describe the suffering of the victims will fail, yet we must not forget the suffering of the victims. Any attempt to make the event linear and coherent is false, yet the event must be understood. There is something creepy about turning mass murder into art. "To write about atrocity is impossible," Ruth Franklin admits in "A Thousand Darknesses," an illuminating meditation on the special obligations and thorny contradictions of Holocaust novels. "Yet not to write about it -- though to do so is absurd, obscene, repugnant, insect-like -- is equally impossible." The moral nobility of Franklin's book lies in its willingness to confront this impossibility head-on -- and blissfully free of dogma, guilt and sanctimony -- without offering comforting, false or easy solutions.
Franklin considers a range of narrative approaches to the Holocaust, including the alienating realism of Polish journalist Tadeusz Borowski, the understated irony of Hungarian novelist Imre Kertesz, and the humane rationalism of Primo Levi (though the Levi memoir on which she focuses is not fiction). She looks at each work with fresh eyes rather than imposing predetermined theories on them. Franklin is especially adept at analyzing how a book works -- how it creates trust, or sorrow, or disquiet in the reader. Of Elie Wiesel's "Night," she observes: "By refusing to add the rationality of explanation or the cynicism of hindsight, Night takes us back to its terrible story with something resembling innocence." This is an innocence, of course, that Wiesel's readers must and will lose.
But Franklin's aim is larger than literary criticism. She wants to rescue us -- writers and readers -- from a tangle of related, pernicious ideas: that it is wrong to make art out of the Holocaust; that survivor testimony is the only authentic -- and nonexploitative -- way to approach it; that the survivors and their children -- or, perhaps, all Jews -- "own" the experience; and that the event is essentially untouchable. In literature, the major proponent of these ideas is, in fact, Wiesel (in film, it is Claude Lanzmann), and Franklin is sober but gutsy in her critique of him.
Wiesel, she charges, has removed the Holocaust from history -- which is to say, from the human -- and transformed it into metaphysics.
"The result has been the casting of a kind of mystic spell upon the Holocaust. ... There is something priestly about Wiesel's insistence in guarding the Temple against those who would desecrate it, but there is also something totalitarian about it."
It is time, Franklin writes, to stop regarding imagination as a form of sin, analysis as a form of blasphemy, criticism as a form of denial.
Franklin argues, too, against the equation of suffering with insight or goodness. In this light, she is repelled by some of the writings by children of Holocaust survivors, who, she charges, cannibalize the torment of their parents and have created a literature of didactic kitsch. She is almost apoplectic in her discussion of the writer Melvin Jules Bukiet, who is guilty, in her view, not just of bad writing but of taking an "outrageous ... deranged pride" in his parents' trauma.
There are a few places where Franklin falters. She makes the odd, easily refuted claim that "no memoir can be at once an unerring representation of reality and a genuine artistic achievement." She writes that Hannah Arendt was "incredulous" that the seemingly prosaic Adolf Eichmann "could have been responsible for such extraordinary crimes" -- when it is precisely this incredulity that Arendt scorned and upon which, she believed, the Eichmann trial faltered. (Nor did Eichmann mount a Nuremberg-style defense, at least in Arendt's telling.) And Franklin's observation that literature can restore the victims "to life -- although in somewhat different form" is strangely evasive, for no matter how many books are written, the murdered remain murdered, forever unredeemed.
But Franklin explicates her central ideas with a piercing, graceful lucidity. Fiction, she insists, contains its own kind of truth, one that connects us -- or at least begins to connect us -- to each other's histories and each other's pain; to write novels after Auschwitz is therefore anything but barbaric. Great literature is always specific, yet it negates the concept of the unique, for "literature ... ultimately makes a case for universality. Art makes comparisons; it encourages empathy."
"A Thousand Darknesses" demands that we remove the artistic and critical do-not-enter signs that have been erected around the Holocaust. Ruth Franklin has written a beautiful book that addresses the ugliest of subjects, proving, once more, that it can be done.
Susie Linfield is the author of "The Cruel Radiance: Photography and Political Violence." She directs the Cultural Reporting and Criticism program in the journalism department at New York University.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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