The American Muse dictates its own terms of refashioning reality, and almost always these will take a highly personal, even solipsistic turn. One prominent example of such turning is William Styron's Sophie's Choice, ostensibly an attempt by one of our major novelists to come to grips with the meaning of Auschwitz but actually, as we shall see, a much different kind of book.

Sophie's Choice is not an historical novel and, despite its fascination with Auschwitz, is at bottom not even primarily "about" the Holocaust. Its core subject is an aesthetic one, not an historical one, and as a result its essential concerns are chiefly those that belong to the Künstlerroman, or that category of novel that portrays the artist as a young man. As it happens, this particular young man's artistic and sexual drives attach him to a woman survivor of Auschwitz, but her story, while time and again moving, is largely sub-ordinate to his, and in the last analysis she serves him the way any female muse figure serves an aspiring writer: she excites his imagination and leads him on to express the finer tones of feeling that belong to the artistic life at its most fervent. History's involvement in such business is peripheral; the history of the Jews under the Nazis, largely irrelevant. (p. 43)

The drift of [Styron's] revisionist views, all of which culminate in Sophie's Choice, is to take the Holocaust out of Jewish and Christian history and place it within a generalized history of evil, for which no one in particular need be held accountable. Auschwitz may have been a great horror, "a supreme horror," as Styron puts it, but one "on the part of the human race." "I do not believe it is true," he says, "that you can damn a whole nation, Germany, in this case, for the concentration camps." It is as if Auschwitz achieved itself, helped along by modern methods of technology, to be sure, but otherwise, to quote the kind of elevated language that Styron loves to use, the apotheosis "of the titantic and sinister forces at work in history and in modern life that threaten all men, not only Jews."

Disease, smog, and inflation may threaten all men, but Auschwitz was established to murder Jews. (p. 44)

To generalize or universalize the victims of the Holocaust is not only to profane their memories but to exonerate their executioners, who by the same line of thinking pursued above also disappear into the mist of a faceless mankind.

Not surprisingly, that is where Styron prefers to see them, for he holds strongly to the view, set forth in Sophie's Choice and elsewhere, that it is "inexcusable to condemn any single people for anything," as he has one of his characters say, "and that goes for any people … even the Germans!" In one of his interviews, Styron has even gone so far as to say that "if you examine Nazi Germany, one of the remarkable things about the whole story, one of the most moving parts of the story, is the number of Germans who stood up and became martyrs because of their opposition to Nazism." Such a view of Nazi Germany goes beyond apology and enters fiction as a new and extravagant mythology, for the facts of the Holocaust, as any credible history of the period will bear out, simply do not support Styron's praise for the German citizenry under Hitler. A few genuine heroes and martyrs there doubtless were, but the vast numbers of Germans, far from opposing Nazism, either remained conspicuously quiet or ardently threw Hitler their support.

Fiction, or "story," as he twice refers to it in the quotation above, gets a bad name when it confronts history in so fanciful a manner, yet it is probably the case that, owing to its affective powers and its ability to satisfy certain mythological cravings we all have, fiction can make a more immediate and pervasive impact than history. For this very reason, fictional representations of the Holocaust need to be judged against a particularly careful standard of truth…. (pp. 44-5)

It is not possible here to separate out the many co-minglings of fact and fiction in Sophie's Choice, but a few prominent examples need to be looked at. (p. 45)

The most troublesome of Styron's Nazi portraits … [is] someone called "Hauptsturmführer Fritz Jemand von Niemand," an S.S. doctor at Auschwitz. Dr. Jemand von Niemand is assigned to the platforms of the camp where, like his infamous historical prototype, Dr. Mengele, he could decide on the spot and with the merest wave of a hand who might live and who would die. A drunken, degenerate sadist, he toys with Sophie and forces her to choose between her two children: one will go immediately to the furnaces, the other will live awhile longer. "Which one will you keep?" he taunts her. Such things happened at Auschwitz, and, repellent though they may be, it is imperative that they be recorded and remembered. To invent them as part of a fiction, though, is obscene. Moreover, to fictionalize them as the handiwork of a Nobody—which is more or less how "Jemand von Niemand" translates—is, through the workings of abstraction, to all but dismiss them…. In [his] liberal manner—taking the large-hearted, spacious, Christian view—Styron unfolds his novel of the Holocaust as an extended parable of all men's travail.

"All men" in Sophie's Choice are represented chiefly by a woman—Sophie Zawistowska, a Polish Catholic survivor of Auschwitz. Why choose Sophie as the representative victim of the camps? "Although she was not Jewish," the narrator tells us, "she had suffered as much as any Jew who had survived the same afflictions, and … had in certain profound ways suffered more than most." To make that point graphic, poor Sophie has to be put through hell, not only in Auschwitz, where, as expected, the Nazis cruelly mistreat her, but, after her liberation, in New York, where, in "the Kingdom of the Jews" (by which Styron means Flatbush), others can abuse her as well.

Chief among Sophie's post-War oppressors is her Jewish lover, a brilliant but mad fellow who strikes one as an inspired cross between Othello and Svengali and who bears, surely not by accident, the same first name as that black terrorist bogey about whom Styron devoted an earlier novel—Nat Turner. In Nathan all the white man's fears about black potency come together with the Christian's fears about an imagined Jewish diabolism. (pp. 45-6)

"Call me Stingo," the narrator of Sophie's Choice starts out, parodying John Wayne ("Call me Ringo") parodying Melville ("Call me Ishmael"). This opening note carries through much of the novel, which is, by turns, a parody of the Southern novel, as written by Faulkner, Warren, and Styron himself; the American Jewish novel, as written by Roth, Malamud, and others; the novel of Sexual Initiation, written by just about everybody under the sun; and even—such being the state of American letters—the novel of the Holocaust. Styron, a gifted and accomplished writer, has little trouble managing these elaborate imitations, some of which are very well done. The question is, Why do them at all? Who is this Stingo, and what is he up to?

In brief, and without a lot of camouflage to hide the fact, Stingo is Styron, the author/narrator of this emphatically autobiographical novel (if there is still another level of parody here it involves the autobiographical fiction of Thomas Wolfe, even down to the ill-spirited anti-Semitic portraitures of some of the minor characters). Stingo/Styron wants two things out of life—to write a novel and finally to break through a long and unwanted virginity and know a woman—any woman, so long as she can relieve the ache in his loins. In short, he wants to grow up. What do such desires, it may be asked, have to do with Auschwitz? On one level, of course, nothing at all, but with respect to some of Styron's deeper symbolic interests, quite a bit.

Styron's subject, like so much of the subject-matter of Southern fiction, grows out of an irrepressible and emphatically regional fascination with the elaborate interconnections among race, sex, and death. At one time, the South itself was a potent fictional breeding ground for the imaginative workings out of these powerful and always destructive obsessions, but Southern fiction, which played so important a role in American literature a couple of decades ago, has since given up the ghost and for the most part is no longer alive enough to sustain such strong imaginings today. (pp. 46-7)

As Sophie's Choice works it out,… Poland is a stand-in for the American South, a place where all shades of social violence and perverse eroticism can be indulged. The prose that Styron uses to describe the country is lush and romantic—High Southern, as this mode of rhetoric is known—and endows the novel with a tone as burnished and lofty as any found in the pages of a Faulkner novel…. (p. 47)

Stingo's contest with Nathan is not on one but two levels—the first sexual, the other vocational and literary. Both are fraught with the anxieties of regional, religious, and racial competition and, to go right to the heart of the matter, probably define better than anything else what motivated Styron in writing large sections of Sophie's Choice. As the innumerable love scenes portray her, Sophie is choice, deliciously so as Stingo views her and wants her, but her desires bring her to choose Nathan, one of the chosen. In that situation, Stingo gets passed over, an erotic mischoice that he tries to correct at one point by imagining himself a "fictive Jew" and, at another, by "feeling" himself Polish. Neither, of course, works for him, for his origins and fate are both other. A different history spawned him and gave him another kind of story to tell. (p. 48)

The Holocaust, as William Styron knows and has said, is "a central issue, the central issue of the times," and has "altered forever our consciousness of evil." For this very reason, most writers have been helpless before it and reluctant to touch it. Styron, though, feels that "no event could be so hideous that it would defy a novelist to trespass upon it" and sees the Holocaust as "the ultimately challenging subject for a novelist."

That it may indeed be, in the same manner that the silence that attends the finality of death challenges the sensibilities of the living. When the death is mass death—the result of an unparalleled and systematic destruction—the silence enters history, consciousness, language and cannot be brought into words through novelistic invention alone.

There is no doubting Styron's facility as a writer of fiction, but Sophie's Choice shows that more is needed to penetrate so extreme a history than a transposition of erotic and aesthetic motives onto a landscape of slaughter. The Southern novelist's slave society categories of sexual oppression do not hold for Auschwitz, just as his artistic preoccupations with the growth into writerhood likewise are seriously misapplied. Styron wants to beat the Jews at their own game, but in telling us his story of the Polish girl who stole a ham and forever after suffered sexual, moral, and psychological abuse, he has written not so much a novel of the Holocaust as an unwitting spoof of the same. Reducing Hitler's war against the Jews to a literary war, he has turned the tables on his competitors and given us the Holocaust in whiteface, de-Judaizing Auschwitz and making it the erotic centerpiece of a New Southern Gothic Novel.

Fiction of this sort, no matter what the extent of its earlier horrors, will predictably conclude on a note of easy restoration. The punishments of history aside, the mode, and the particular strain of American imagination that produces it, calls for catharsis and recovery. At the end of Sophie's Choice, Sophie is dead, Nathan is dead, six million Jews, two million Poles, one million Serbs, and five million Russians are dead, but Stingo/Styron is healthy, awake, and ready to begin a new day. "Blessing my resurrection," Stingo says, "I in scribed the words: 'Neath cold sand I dreamed of death/but woke at dawn to see/in glory, the bright, the morning star.'"

And that is the end of the matter: Auschwitz as a bad dream, to be shaken off with the coming of a new day and the writing of some maudlin poetry. As Styron wills it, the South will rise again, even if it has to do so on the ashes of the dead. (p. 49)