Sophie's Choice (novel)

Sylvie Mathé notes that Styron's "position" in the writing of this novel was made clear in his contemporary interviews and essays, in the latter case, in particular "Auschwitz", "Hell Reconsidered", and "A Wheel of Evil Come Full Circle",[2] and quotes Alvin Rosenfeld's summary of Styron's position, where Rosenfeld states that:[3]

(1) while [Styron] acknowledges Jewish suffering under the Nazis, he insists on seeing Auschwitz in general or universalistic terms, as a murderous thrust against "mankind" or "the entire human family"; (2) in line with the above, he sees his own role as "correcting" the view that the Holocaust was directed solely or exclusively against the Jews by focusing attention on the many Christians, and particularly the Slavs, who also perished in the camps; (3) … Auschwitz was "anti-Christian" as well as "anti-Semitic", and hence assertions of Christian guilt are misplaced and perhaps even unnecessary; (4) since he rejects historical explanations of Christian anti-Semitism as causative, Styron is drawn to the view, set forth by Richard Rubenstein and others … that in its essential character Auschwitz was a capitalistic slave society as much as or even more than it was an extermination center; and (5) viewed against European examples of barbarism and slavery, epitomized by Auschwitz, the American South's treatment of the blacks looks pretty good and "… seems benevolent by comparison".[2][3]

Rosenfeld, summarizing, states, "The drift of these 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."[3]^:44 Mathé reinforces Rosenfeld's conclusion with a quote from Styron himself, who stated in his "Hell Reconsidered" essay that "the titanic and sinister forces at work in history and in modern life… threaten all men, not only Jews."[4]^:114 She goes on to note that Styron's choices to represent these ideas, and to incorporate them so clearly into the narrative of his novel, resulted in polemic and controversy that continued, at least into the early years of the new millennium (see section on Controversy, below).[2]

Sophie’s Choice is partly based on the author's time in Brooklyn, where he met a refugee from Poland. He visited Auschwitz while researching the novel.[5]

A central element of the novel's plot, the personally catastrophic choice referred to in the title, is said to have been inspired by a story of a Romani woman who was ordered by the Nazis to select which of her children was to be put to death, which Styron attributes to Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem.[2] However, Ira Nadel claims that the story is found in Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism.[6] In that book, Arendt argues that those who ran the camps perpetrated an "attack on the moral person":

Totalitarian terror achieved its most terrible triumph when it succeeded in cutting the moral person off from the individualist escape and in making the decisions of conscience absolutely questionable and equivocal. (...) Who could solve the moral dilemma of the Greek mother, who was allowed by the Nazis to choose which of her three children should be killed?[7]

Arendt herself cites Albert Camus' Twice a Year (1947) for the story (without providing a pinpoint reference).[8][9] Twice a Year was a literary book which contained in its 1946/1947 publication the text of Camus' essay, The Human Crisis, wherein four moral contradictions and dilemma are exampled, the Greek mother's exposure being one. Camus read this, his essay complete, at Columbia University March 28, 1946.[10]

In his review of the novel in the New York Times, John Gardner takes it as an example of Southern Gothic and writes that it "is a splendidly written, thrilling book, a philosophical novel on the most important subject of the 20th century. If it is not, for me, a hands-down literary masterpiece, the reason is that, in transferring the form of the Southern Gothic to this vastly larger subject, Styron has been unable to get rid of or even noticeably tone down those qualities — some superficial, some deep — in the Southern Gothic that have always made Yankees squirm."[11]

Sophie's Choice won the US National Book Award for Fiction in 1980,[12][note 1] against competition from Just Above My Head by James Baldwin, The Executioner's Song by Norman Mailer, The Ghost Writer by Philip Roth, and Endless Love by Scott Spencer (where the Pulitzer for fiction and the Nobel for literature for that year went, respectively, to Norman Mailer for Executioner's Song and to Czeslaw Milosz for his body of poetry and other work).[13]

Sophie's Choice generated significant controversy at time of its publication. It was banned in South Africa, censored in the Soviet Union, and banned in Communist Poland for "its unflinching portrait of Polish anti-Semitism".[14]

Sylvie Mathé notes that Sophie’s Choice, which she refers to as a "highly controversial novel," appeared in press in the year following the broadcast of the NBC miniseries Holocaust (1978), engendering a period in American culture where "a newly-raised consciousness of the Holocaust was becoming a forefront public issue."[2] She goes on to note that with regard to the Holocaust:

Styron's ideological and narrative choices in his framing of a novel touching upon the "limit events" of Auschwitz, considered by many to lie beyond the realm of the imagination… spurred a polemic… which, twenty-five years later, is far from having died down.[2]

Here, the reference to a "limit event" (synonymous with "limit case" and "limit situation") is to a concept deriving at least from the early 1990s—Saul Friedländer, in introducing his Probing the Limits of Representation, quotes David Carroll, who refers to the Holocaust as "this limit case of knowledge and feeling"[15][16]—a concept that can be understood to mean an event or related circumstance or practice that is "of such magnitude and profound violence" that it "rupture[s]... otherwise normative foundations of legitimacy and... civilising tendencies that underlie... political and moral community" (the oft-cited formulation of Simone Gigliotti).[17]

The controversy to which Mathé is specifically referring arises from a thematic analysis which—in apparent strong consensus (e.g., see Rosenfeld's 1979 work, "The Holocaust According to William Styron"[3])—has Styron, through the novel, his interviews, and essays:

• acknowledging Jewish suffering under the Nazis, but attempting to reorient views of the Holocaust away from its being solely aimed against the Jews, toward its encompassing Slavic and other Christians (hence the Sophie character's nationality and Catholic heritage);

that is, it has him insisting on seeing Auschwitz in particular in more universal terms as "a murderous thrust against 'the entire human family.'"[2][3] Styron further extends his argument, again with controversy:

• proposing that this more general view of the barbarism of Auschwitz (and in particular the fact that Slavic Christians were caught up in its program of forced labour and extermination) obviates the need for Christian guilt and sets aside historical arguments for Christian anti-Semitism as a causative agent in the Holocaust, and
• suggesting that the camp's role in forced labour justified its comparison (e.g., in the writings of Rubenstein) with the American institution of slavery, even allowing the latter to be viewed more favourably.[2][3]

Speaking of Styron's views as set forth in the novel and his nonfiction work, Rosenfeld refers to them as "revisionist views" that "culminate in Sophie's Choice" with an aim to "take the Holocaust out of Jewish and Christian history and place it within a generalized history of evil",[3]^:44 and it is this specific revisionist thrust that is the substance of the novel's initial and persisting ability to engender controversy.[2]

In 2002, Styron received the Auschwitz Jewish Center Foundation's Witness to Justice Award.[5]

Sophie's Choice has been banned in some high schools in the United States. For instance, the book was pulled from the La Mirada High School Library in California by the Norwalk-La Mirada High School District in 2002 because of a parent's complaint about its sexual content.[18] However, a year after students protested and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) sent a letter to the school district requesting that the district reverse its actions, students were again given access to the book in the school library.[19][20]

The novel was made into a film of the same name in the United States, in 1982. Written and directed by Alan J. Pakula, the film was nominated for Academy Awards for its screenplay, musical score, cinematography, and costume design, and Meryl Streep received the Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance of the title role.[21]

The British composer Nicholas Maw wrote an opera based on the novel, which was premiered at the Royal Opera House in London in 2002, and has also been performed in Washington, Berlin and Vienna.[22]

• Styron, William (1979) Sophie’s Choice, New York, NY, USA: Random House, ISBN 0-394-46109-6, ISBN 978-0-394-46109-0, see , accessed 7 November 2015.
• —. (1998) [1979] — (Modern Library 100 Best Novels Series), reprint, revised, New York, NY, USA: Modern Library, ISBN 0679602895, see , accessed 7 November 2015.
• —. (2004) [1979] — (Vintage Classics), reprint, London, ENG: Vintage, ISBN 0099470446, ISBN 9780099470441, see , accessed 7 November 2015.
• —. (2010) [1979] — authorized e-book, New York, NY, USA: Open Road Media, ISBN 1936317176, ISBN 9781936317172, see , accessed 7 November 2015.

The following of Styron's works have been collected, per Sylvie Mathé, as relevant to the author's philosophical framework with regard to his constructing the history and characters within his novel.[2]

• Styron, William (1974) “Auschwitz,” In This Quiet Dust and Other Writings, 1993 [1982], pp. 336–339, New York, NY, USA: Vintage.
• —. (1978) “Hell Reconsidered,” In This Quiet Dust and Other Writings, 1993 [1982], pp. 105–115, New York, NY, USA: Vintage.
• —. (1997) “A Wheel of Evil Come Full Circle: The Making of Sophie’s Choice,” The Sewanee Review (Summer), Vol. 105, No. 3, pp. 395–400.
• —. (1999) Afterword to Sophie’s Choice, pp. 601–606, New York, NY, USA: Modern Library.