‘“But will I write disgustingly?” The Shock of Transmission in Martin Amis’s The Zone of Interest’
This article explores the way British writer Martin Amis approaches the issue of the transmission of the trauma of the Holocaust in his novel The Zone of Interest (2014). Amis offers to engage once again with the genre of perpetrators fiction as the novel adopts the point of view of Nazi officials a...
محفوظ في:
| الحاوية / القاعدة: | URI:https://journals.openedition.org/ebc, |
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| المؤلف الرئيسي: | |
| التنسيق: | Article ou chapitre numérique |
| اللغة: | Anglais |
| منشور في: |
Études britanniques contemporaines
2024
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| الموضوعات: | |
| الوصول للمادة أونلاين: | Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM |
| الملخص: | This article explores the way British writer Martin Amis approaches the issue of the transmission of the trauma of the Holocaust in his novel The Zone of Interest (2014). Amis offers to engage once again with the genre of perpetrators fiction as the novel adopts the point of view of Nazi officials and recounts the daily lives of officers working in a nameless camp meant to resemble Auschwitz. Amis thus returns to a literary tradition that has long been reflecting on the possibility and ethics of writing about the trauma of the Shoah. This article will recontextualize the publication controversy that erupted after Amis’s French and German editors refused to publish the text. It then intends to follow Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer’s injunction to ‘scrutinize the “acts of transfer”’ so as to identify the narrative mechanisms used in the novel to transmit the horror of the Holocaust. This paper will examine how Amis uses the paratext of his novel to question his approach to the memory of the Shoah and to situate his position regarding the matter. Yet the publishing controversy suggests that Amis’s intention of creative transmission might be threatened by the very way of telling history. In light of Rita Felski’s work on the reader’s engagement with a text, this paper will therefore determine how Amis resorts to using shock and disgust as a way of letting something of the Holocaust ‘pass through’ while challenging the aesthetic pleasure one might experience in reading those testimonies. |
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