Psychoanalysis and the Problem of Evil: Silvano Arieti's Parnas and the Holocaust - analysis

Judaism, Spring, 2001 by Harvey Peskin

In Memory of Odette Sarah Meyers

"OF ALL HIS BOOKS, THE PARNAS WAS THE ONE DEAREST to him." [1] This, from James Arieti speaking at a 1998 symposium honoring the works of his father, the renowned psychoanalyst, Dr. Silvano Arieti (19141981). But except for his son's personal reminiscence, The Parnas: A Scene from theHolocaust-Dr. Arieti's short Holocaust novel and his only listed work either of fiction or about the Holocaust-went publicly unnoticed by the other speakers at the symposium. (The Parnas was later drawn upon by Arieti in his only other thematicJewish work, Abraham and the Contemporary Mind.)

Was the symposium's exclusion simply a case of professional tunnel vision indifferent to any other genre of discourse but its own or, otherwise, did it suggest Arieti's own reserve about pronouncing the book's importance for himself? There is a tone of loneliness in Arieti's introductory remarks that rather suggests unsureness about how his novel would be received: "It was not easy to collect tears that I neither shed nor saw in others but that still burn in my eyes." [2] Alluding to his story as a work of unwept tears perhaps signified that it would somehow remain within the solitude of his own heart.

His son may well have been sharing a father's confidence that itself indicated a gulf between how much Arieti felt for his novel and how much of it he allowed himself to disclose. Intriguingly, this gulf reprises the book's own powerful leitmotif: the struggle by the leader-the parnas--of Pisa's Jewish community to keep back what he knew from being openly acknowledged and confronted. What was kept back by the parnas was his knowledge of evil.

In a brief introduction, Arieti discloses that his novel was a return to a broken-off journey; he had let "long stretches of time pass during which I refused to think about the subject." [3] But what Arieti avoided in his own flight from Italy and from memory, he comes "to live over and over again" in writing this Holocaust novel. If such ajourney can never end, The Parnas must at least have brought a measure of deliverance from his long evasion of "the claims being made on my soul." [4] His self-absence and self-exile give way to a transforming sense of himself as a survivor and witness with the "obligation to reveal what he came to know." [5] This emergent Holocaust consciousness--a journey, first, from not knowing to knowing, then, from knowing to the obligation to reveal what one has come to know-is immeasurably accelerated in the parnas' own fated psychic change over a few short days of doomed hiding.

The novel's early acclaim quieted after its initial 1979 printing. Having been called "a rare event in publishing" by Primo Levi, and "one of the most extraordinary stories yet to reach us from the bitter ashes of Nazism" by The New York Times, The Parnasnevertheless stayed out of print until the year 2000. It remains to be seen whether the public and Arieti's profession, presumably both more steadfast after 20 more years of Holocaust disclosure and witness, will be less inclined to retreat again from the searing anguish that makes The Parnas still a transfixing, even an uncanny experience.

Adding irony to its disregard of Arieti's prized work, the 1998 symposium, like the novel, took place in Pisa, Arieti's birthplace. Itwas his home until he decided, as a new physician, to leave Italy for America in 1939 at the early signs of the Nazi onslaught. Arieti left behind the dearest person in his life, the esteemed president of the smallJewish community of Pisa, who was murdered by the Nazis in 1944. The book novelistically fulfills the parnas' actual hope that Arieti might someday return with the skill to cure the animal phobia that so obsessed and incapacitated him and, in making flight impossible, likely led to his real murder.

Fact, Narrative, and Fiction

Arieti launches his narrative from the documented facts of the parnas' phobia and his massacre with six otherJews in hiding. Between these two facts, the author conjures an unbelievable yet finally credible tale because it plunges the reader into the boundless reaches of conscience that is present in us all. Even after his paralyzing phobia is overcome in the tale, the parnas chooses to remain in his home at the risk of death lest he give up his newfound will to denounce the evil from which his mind had fled for a lifetime. The final scene of mass killing presents the parnas as the apotheosis of courage. Now he has mythic powers to infect the killers, even after his death, with his own hallucinatory revelation: Homo homini lupus-a human being has become a wolf. The animalized features of the Nazis are not only triumphantly real to the parnas in his dying, but traumatically real to the youngest of the Nazis as they murder. To these few spellbound Nazis, this delusion of their brutish bodies will forever bear human witness to their subhuman crime.

The surprising literary talent that Arieti reveals to imagine this sainted man's cure-not on the veritable analytic couch but in the virtual and preternatural reconstruction of the last moments of massacre in the basement of his Pisa home-was a skill apparently beyond the symposium's mandate. But it need not have been. For the novel was arguably the right genre for a culminating work of Arieti's lifetime project, long respected by his profession, on the roots and rise of creativity. One does not catch sight of TheParnas itself in Arieti's earlier writings on creativity. But the novel harmonizes so well with his ideas on the aesthetic process in myth, mysticism, and religion that one can fairly suspect his conceptual works helped prepare the way for The Parnas. Far from being an anomaly or dalliance (dearest merely in the sense of fond or indulgent affection), The Parnas momentarily brings psychoanalysis to existential depths where case history method can point us but simply cannot take us. The realms of death and evil, especially as they come together in violent death, are at such depths. These realms have survived better in the psychoanalytic novel than in psychoanalytic theory and practice. D. M. Thomas' The White Hotel and R. Davies' Manticore are exemplars. Freud himself drew on the myth of the primal horde's murder of the father to imagine the pre-history of Oedipal guilt. Arieti's story of the parnas' murder is the primal horde revisited as a squad of Nazi soldiers whose crime sows conscience. Ultimately, The Parnas mythologizes the fate of conscience in a post-Freudian and post-Holocaust world.