(University College London)
Good People, Capitalist Networks and Storytelling: Complicity in the work of Nir Baram
The malleability of storytelling is a central theme in Nir Baram’s work. He depicts its significance in enabling the process of ethical compromise and imagining alternative ethical spaces, often with violent consequences. He is interested in how the encounter between an individual’s ethics and those of other bodies can result in ‘good’ people collaborating or being complicit with violence. In Good People, both protagonists are gifted story tellers. A market researcher under Nazism and a literary editor of confessions for the Stalinist regime, they excel at manipulating narrative to facilitate the construction of a new reality, be that in relation to state policy and ideology or how they interpret their actions to themselves and others. Baram is fascinated less by coercive measures of the Nazi and Stalinist regimes than by the success of ideologies through their promise of individual reward, particularly the sophisticated allure of capitalism. In World Shadow Baram thematizes the unique problem posed by capitalism for understanding complicity: it cares about exploiting talent, and knows even how to harness opposition. Ordinary people are part of networks in which protest becomes another form of self-promotion and reinforces the status quo. Literature, too, affirms the capitalist model by profiting from its own critical stance. In Baram’s work, telling a good story is not aligned with a moral outcome. Fiction’s value lies in its ability to offer a new perspective and pose questions, which is also a form intervention in political discourse. It is interesting that he shifts to reportage in A Land Without Borders, to consider complicity in relation to the West Bank and East Jerusalem. He moves from the realm of ethics, in which the nature of the good is questioned, to making a moral intervention. He directs questions of complicity and the possibility of protest to himself, Israelis and Palestinians.
Who are you? Complicity and the second person in Yishai Sarid’s The Memory Monster (2017) and Tsitsi Dangarembga’s This Mournable Body (2018)
This paper considers the significance of the second person address for exploring different types of complicity. In The Memory Monster, the narrator’s report to the Chairman of the Board of Yad Vashem assumes a conventional ‚you‘, in that the addressee is evidently a separate individual. Although the main body of the novel is the narrator’s account of his career as a tour guide at Nazi extermination camps and of his increasingly self-destructive obsession with Holocaust memory, the ‚you‘ raises the question of wider complicity. At a personal level it raises the question of the Chairman’s duty of care to an employee who is increasingly affected by the history of the genocide. By directing the report to the Chairman of Yad Vashem, the novel questions institutional complicity in memorial practices that have become central to contemporary Israeli national identity, and that raise uncomfortable questions about anti-Arab hate speech. Finally, the ‚you‘ exceeds its designated addressee to ask the reader about their relationship to Holocaust memory. This Mournable Body adopts a more radical form of address, in which the narrator, protagonist and narratee seem to be the same. Here the addressee is Tambudzai Sigauke, addressing herself in the present tense throughout. This undermines any attempt to ascribe a temporal distance to the implied ‚I‘ and the ‚you‘; a present Tambu speaking to her past self from a position of privileged knowledge. Rather, the ‚you‘ points to a split within the subject, which creates an ambivalent effect of both intimacy and distance. The reader assumes a type of double vision of interior and exterior, through which Tambo’s position as victim of colonial, anti-colonial and post-colonial violence and perpetrator of violence is explored. The duality of victimhood and complicity is formally inscribed in second person address, which also insists on the confluence of empathy and judgement.
Relevant Publications
Bird, Stephanie. 2019. “Perpetrators in Literature”. In S. Knittel and Z. Goldberg (eds.), Routledge Handbook of Perpetrator Studies. New York and London.
―. 2018. “Nazis Disguised as Jews and Israel’s Pursuit of Justice: The Eichmann Trial and the Kapo Trials in Robert Shaw’s The Man in the Glass Booth and Emanuel Litvinoff’s Falls the Shadow”. Holocaust Studies 24.4: 466-487.
―. 2016. Comedy and Trauma in Austria and Germany after 1945: The Inner Side of Mourning. Oxford: Legenda.