The Reach of Fiction: Narrative Technique in Styron's Sophie's Choice

In Sophie's Choice, the telling of the tale is contrived to display the capacity of fiction to illuminate a subject that baffles ordinary inquiry and to test the claims of art against perhaps the extreme form of knowledge: the meaning of The novel also makes imperious demands on the reader, who is lured into constructing a text of the Holocaust--a process which, while productive of insights that are perhaps available in no other way, comes at the cost of a painful imaginative involvement. An essential part of the argument of Sophie's Choice--and of the implied claims for fiction which are embodied in it--is that the direct and unmediated encounter with the heart of darkness is not only dangerous, but may, by its very nature, prevent comprehension. (1) Given a subject which cannot be confronted without danger of engulfing the viewer, the controlled distancing of art may be a necessary component of understanding. Accordingly, the novel alternates between intense glimpses of its subject and moments of great psychological distance and abstraction, drawing the reader into a rhythm of confrontation and evasion. One of the primary means by which the reader's encounter with is controlled and manipulated is through the alternation of complementary but quite different narrative perspectives. Stingo's point of view provides a direct though naive experience, approaching more or less accidentally and unwillingly. Through Stingo, the reader has a direct glimpse not of Auschwitz, but of the delayed effects of on another. Stingo's experience is supplemented by the point of view of the mature authorial voice of the narrator, who offers a retrospective, frequently satirical reconstruction of his younger self's encounter with Sophie and her past. This retrospective view is informed by a broad scholarly rumination on the records of and commentary about the Holocaust, including extensive quotations from both victims and Nazi officials. In this way the book gives expression to many voices (no one of which can presume to capture Auschwitz) even as it assimilates them to its own ends. I The subject of the Holocaust represents a test case for exploring the limits of what we conventionally call It is hard to The experience of the camps exists so far outside normal human frames of references that the very facts of the case are, in a sense, unimaginable. (2) As Styron himself has asserted, Auschwitz can be compared to nothing (3); Auschwitz must remain the one place on earth most unyielding to meaning or definition. (4) Moreover, the mind has defenses against such horror which are not easily overcome. It is no small task, then, to attempt to link the incommensurate with the familiar, to bring what lies at such an extremity within range of our ordinary powers of vision. What can be known of the phenomenon of industrialized mass murder is also complicated by the different senses by which we understand the word knowledge. One kind of knowledge is the historian's, which is abstract and retrospective--its value deriving in part from its very distance from the events themselves and from the extent to which the events can be processed (interpreted) for general use. Quite another kind of knowledge is, of course, to have been there: Only survivors of know what it meant to be in Auschwitz. (5) Such knowledge is untranslatable and incommunicable; it not only transcends interpretation but defies attempts to make sense of it. Between the former kind of knowledge and the latter, of course, lies an enormous distance which the novel invites us to contemplate. As Stryon was aware, formidable commentators like Elie Wiesel have advised that fiction writers not even try to deal with the subject--that to make it a subject of fiction is somehow a desecration of the memory of the victims. Similarly, George Steiner has asserted that the only proper response is silence. …