The memory of judgment: The Holocaust, witnesses and mediocrity in William Gass’s Middle C

Abstract

Abstract The memory of judgment and the Holocaust is of great interest in postmodernists’ writings. The relationship between postmodernism and the Holocaust is always paradoxically juxtaposed. William Gass, an American postmodern writer and critic, touches the topic of the Holocaust in his masterpiece Middle C (2013). Gass tends to trivialize fascism to every man and every ordinary life, to disrespect the “sacred”. The novel has the skill in faking the identity or the details of its putative history. Is the Holocaust a subcategory of war crimes or the inhumanity of genocide? Is there any reliable way of establishing the reality of the Holocaust either through the memory of groups or individuals? Are genocide and occasional or no systematic atrocities the inevitability of a state? In this paper, we tend to explore the collective memory and individual memory of witnesses of the Holocaust presented in Middle C and the puzzlement of judgment as a war crime or inhuman genocide, thus arguing the ethos of history and shock of mediocrity in our daily life.