The choice between surviving and dying
Refusal, by Soazig Aaron

Sam Haddow
posted 13 March 2008

First things first. Random House needs a severe admonishment for the presentation of this novel. If I’d seen Refusal in its current incarnation on the shelves in a bookshop, I would have passed it by and never thought about it. This needs to be seen to. What is, in fact, a profoundly embittered and searingly problematic story of the severance of history from the capacity of human endurance, looks from the outside like a run of the mill chick-lit exploitative weepy. I hate it when publishers do this – it’s a classic case of over zealous advertising locating a target-audience-demographic, aiming for bulls-eye but then shooting themselves in the back. So change it, Random House, please!

That said, this book is beautiful. It’s the story of Klara, a Parisian Jew who has returned from Auschwitz, as documented in diary form by her friend Angélika, another Jew who changed her name in order to escape being sent to the camps. Klara, after her eventual release, wandered around Europe for two months before coming back, and now refuses to see her daughter, or stay in Paris for any longer than necessary. Her experiences, she says, have made it impossible for her to return to the life she had once led, and she plans to emigrate to America, leaving her daughter in Angélika’s care. The narrative takes place in the short time between Klara’s return, and her eventual departure.

In choosing Angélika as a narrator, Aaron neatly sidesteps the issues of ‘unknowability’ facing any author attempting to write about the Nazi holocaust. As a defector of sorts, potentially a coward, but at the same time rational – she altered her identity to protect not just herself, but her husband and the children entrusted into her care – Angélika is as oblivious as the reader to what Klara calls her ‘extreme’ knowledge. The assertions of Theodor Adorno and Primo Levi that there could be ‘no poetry after Auschwitz’ have since been disproved – here the belief that genocide instigates a proliferation of perennial experiences after the fact for both those not involved, and the manifest attempts of those who were to articulate their experiences, is given corporeal form. Aaron is not, thankfully, attempting to write an exploitation novel, and the few glimpses the reader is given of ‘Oswiecim’ – Auschwitz’s original Polish name, are sparse, and serve only to further distance Klara from the life she left behind; from the narrator. Yet Klara’s willful obliteration of her former ‘self’ becomes an object of frustration in Angélika , who eventually owns up with the words ‘I want her to go!’ This may be taken as a sign of non-compliance with the unknowable tragedy, or simply an exercise in frustration – either way Aaron is clearly not interested in letting the narrator or the reader off the hook. If genocide cannot be ‘known’, then to what extent can it become part of a history, to what extent can, or should, anything be learned from it?

Klara’s response is understandably maddening: ‘It’s a knowledge without a future because it’s not stable, it’s not transmissible, and can’t be handed down’. Well-meaning as Angélika is, she herself becomes a nuisance to her own story as she constantly tries to glean, infer and ‘understand’ the suffering Klara underwent, by inviting Klara’s recollections into her own, functional and relatively sedate world. This, needless to say, proves impossible, since even whilst Klara tells her story, Angélika finds herself less and less able to cope with what she hears. The act of reliving, for Klara, is not so much a catharsis as a carbolic schism – the last act of severance, whilst for Angélika it forces her into a compliance and torment she thought she’d avoided.

Having a full critical response to this sort of book is difficult, largely because the experience of reading seems too personal to articulate objectively. There are problems here, naturally: Aaron flirts with melodrama at times, and her epistolary form is occasionally given to narrative gaps which could be seen as laziness.

Part of the problem is the way Klara refers to the ‘gypsies’ in the camps, and states that they, above everyone else, suffered the most. There is, as indeed there should be, a wealth of literature, film, analysis, history etc written about the Jews in the Nazi holocaust, but how often do we hear about the others – the homosexuals, mentally disabled, trade unionists, Arabs, gypsies? Klara’s recognition of the unrepresented imbues them with strength, as she herself knows the futility of trying to convey her ‘extreme’ knowledge. Their silence, in her eyes, is a form of dignification.

She doesn’t see herself as a survivor (the term she uses is sousvivor), and says that all ‘humans’ who had retained their ‘human’ feelings died in the camps; something Adorno refers to when he called genocide the ‘ultimate integration’ and locates the notion of recounting it within the concept of the ‘bestiality of representation’. The choice between surviving and dying comes to symbolize everything Klara cannot articulate to Angélika, and is the reason, perhaps, that we ourselves read Klara’s story through the filter of another ‘outsider’. Removed of the ‘actual’ experience, it becomes Angélika’s writing that guides us, and the notion of an aesthetic rendering of Klara’s story is eventually hers to tell. This accession, along with one of the most satisfying, powerful and disturbing endings I have ever come across in a novel, made for an astonishing experience which I can well recommend.