Abstract
Julia Menzel’s assiduously researched and carefully argued study expands the growing field of scholarship on German-Jewish scholar and author H. G. Adler with a close reading of Adler’s most poetically charged novel Eine Reise, which Menzel examines, through the lens of Ricoeur’s Time and Narrative, as a ‘Zeit-Roman’: a novel both of time and of its time (8).
Structured in three parts, Holocaust, Zeit und Erzählung mimics the arc of Ricoeur’s narratology by being loosely mapped onto his threefold mimetic structure of interpretation, according to which reality is prefigured through existing expectations and frameworks (mimesis1), then configured in narrative in a way that leads to potential new meanings (mimesis2), which are finally refigured into the experience of the reader (mimesis3).
The tripartite structure is set up in an Introduction, which illustrates the primacy of time in Eine Reise and puts forward Menzel’s premise that Adler’s novel not only makes Holocaust victims’ traumatically disrupted consciousness of time the object of its narration but, in the process, demonstrates that the ‘limits of narratability’ in Holocaust literature are intrinsically connected to this experience of ‘broken’ or ‘suspended’ time (4). In reading Adler through Ricoeur, the study offers itself as a contribution both to Adler studies and to the study of time in literary criticism more broadly (15).
Part I of Menzel’s monograph introduces the reciprocity of time and narrative through Ricoeur to ask what happens to narrative in the context of a traumatized disruption of temporal experience. After a first chapter providing an overview of largely German-language scholarship on narrative temporality in general, and on Ricoeur’s circular mimetic hermeneutic in particular, Menzel explores in Chapter 2 how the reciprocity of time and narrative is complicated by the introduction of trauma and asks what literary strategies a narrative might draw on to foreground, rather than smooth over, the traumatic fragmentation or suspension of temporal linearity (57). In Chapter 3, Menzel proposes to render Ricoeur’s primarily philosophical interest in the relationship of time and narrative productive for literary analysis by outlining six categories through which the practical configuration of time in Adler’s work, and its refiguration in the reader, will be explored (82, 74).
Part II, comprising Chapters 4–9, represents the study’s longest section and applies Menzel’s six categories to Eine Reise, with a chapter devoted to order, duration, and frequency in the novel (Chapter 4), to its temporal perspectives (Chapter 5) and to its figurations of time (Chapter 6), before asking in Chapters 7 and 8 how Adler’s text reflects the historical period from which it emerges and can, therefore, also be read as a reflection of and on its time more generally. Chapter 9, modelled on Ricoeur’s mimesis₃, returns to the reader and enquires into the capacity of Adler’s work to enhance our understanding of the historical past, shape our perception of temporal processes, and prompt a refiguration of how the reader experiences the world (307–308).
The study is rounded off with a brief Conclusion and Outlook which summarizes Adler’s poetics of time as read through Ricoeur and proposes that the findings derived from the analysis of Eine Reise might productively be expanded across the rest of Adler’s oeuvre, including his academic writing.
Menzel’s ambition of using the representation of Holocaust time to expand existing scholarship on time and literature is compelling and has real potential to contribute to the recent (re-)turn to the study of time in literary criticism, which over the past two decades has given us, among many, Wai Chee Dimock’s ‘Deep Time’ (2006), Elizabeth Freeman’s ‘Queer Temporalities’ (2010) or Anthony Reed’s ‘Freedom Time’ (2014), though this broader theoretical context is not introduced in the monograph. The dynamic dialectic of Ricoeur’s virtuous circle points to the coexistence of linearity and non-linearity, of retrospection and prospection, as a central, rather than marginalized, feature of narrative temporality, which not only subverts teleological progress narratives but also helpfully moves us away from narrowly trauma-theoretical readings of the non-linear as pathological or aberrant. This observation in itself would constitute a significant intervention in both Holocaust literature and narrative time studies and would have deserved to be addressed more emphatically, not least since it also promotes Menzel’s claim of reading Adler’s novel as a ‘Zeit-Roman’ in more than one respect: not just as a novel about time and about the Holocaust but, in a broader sense, as an epochal novel in its engagement with the clock time of a totalizing modernity. Again, this is a connection Menzel makes, for instance in passing references to Adorno (e.g. 241, n. 153), but does not spell out as firmly as the material would have warranted.
As it stands, the study’s first, theoretical part is thorough and meticulously compiled and weaves its way lucidly through the wealth of secondary sources the author has consulted, but more in the manner of a compendium of existing and primarily German-language scholarship on literary-theoretical conceptualizations of time, or of Holocaust literature studies more narrowly, than an expansion of either. In fact, when Menzel returns to her theoretical framing at the end of the study, the accumulated scholarship seems, frustratingly, to have sapped her conviction in her own project, to the point where, in the Conclusion, she comes close to talking herself out of its very premise. Conceding that ‘zeitpoetologische Überlegungen’ [temporal-poetic reflections] are not ‘übertragbar’ [transferable] (cit. Hühn 2018), she concludes that any ‘transfer of individual analytical findings to further novels by Adler himself, let alone to other Holocaust literature’, therefore ‘verbietet sich’ [is out of the question] (326), before ending on the suggestion that a comparison with other Holocaust literature and with the rest of Adler’s oeuvre would still be valuable (327).
And yet, Menzel’s direct engagement with Adler in the study’s central section argues clearly in favour of her more ambitious introductory contention. For where Menzel’s study really shines is in her analysis of Eine Reise, especially in Chapters 5 and 6, devoted, respectively, to Adler’s integration of different temporal perspectives and to his visualization of time as chronotope and metamorphosis. Here, Menzel contributes perceptive and thoughtful close readings of a text that has been crying out for closer scholarly attention, and her in-depth assessment adds important nuance to existing Adler scholarship (including Krämer 2012 and Gwyer 2014). Expanding this section to accord more space to the author’s original findings on, for instance, the use of free indirect discourse to capture the text’s dual temporality, or on the shifting use of deictic pronouns, not just in Eine Reise but across Adler’s work, would have been very welcome and would have strengthened the overall argument.
Adjusting the theoretical frame of Part I, to make Menzel’s own, direct engagement with Ricoeur more prominent and integrate it more extensively with the second half of the study (where he is initially displaced by a focus on Genette and Bakhtin and features barely at all until Chapter 9), expanding Part II to redress the imbalance between theoretical embedding and original argument, and developing the author’s reflections on ‘refiguration’ in Part III to bring out more clearly how reading Adler in this theoretical context has the potential to shape our understanding of time against the backdrop of international research on narrative temporality, would all have allowed Menzel to make her own, key findings the central focus of the study and would have made her case all the more compelling. This book indicates relevant and timely avenues of exploration that merit being followed boldly.
