Stuck between a rock and a hard place. Sophie’s Choice by William Styron.
Spoilers alert! But seriously, read this book.
Does anybody really know anybody? I think it is hard to. But Styron tried his dammest to throw a light upon Sophie Zawistowski, a Polish Auschwitz survivor who after the war, had found her way to New York. Perhaps in our callousness, we are quick to judge strangers in the street — it is more convenient, it is faster; but is it fair?
Sophie’s Choice has a right to sit in the literary shelf as a classic. Some might find it overwritten, and it is. Yet, some of the mastodons of literature are unashamedly overwritten, and some of my most favourite books too. And I think it has to do with the purpose (or at least perceived purpose) of why the author wrote. The amalgamation of words, rolling and melting from one paragraph to the next is a literary vomit from the author’s pen. But it is borne more than anything else, out of necessity.
Proust wrote In Remembrance of Lost Time under the candlelight, desperate to pen his semi-fictional opus before he expires. Kerouac often revisits episodes of his life, rewriting the same events in different books, not mincing words. This desperation is the necessity of the author’s work. Styron may have little similarities with Stingo, his 22 year old narrator, but Stingo is writing to make sense of Sophie, clutching straws, to redeem his own guilt. And it is wonderful to read.
Stingo arrives to the pink house below the rooting of his upstairs neighbours
We meet the Southern-born Stingo in 1947, who after losing his job as a junior editor in New York decided to become a full-time writer, moving from his humble Manhattan abode to a Jewish neighbourhood in a house better known as the Pink Palace for its gratuitous use of the colour on its walls inside and out. This is where he first heard Nathan and Sophie, the latter being his upstairs neighbour, smashing like rabbits hours and hours on end. After going at it that way, they go at it verbally, Nathan screaming at Sophie leaving her sobbing away.
He eventually met them, and they strike up an ominous friendship. Nathan is all touchy about the South and how African Americans are treated there, being a Jewish minority himself and having the wounds of the holocaust still fresh. Nathan is older than Stingo, he has a nice job in Pfizer (so we are made to believe) and is well-read. Sophie is attractive, docile to Nathan, but at a glance there is a heavy air about her. On second glance, you might see a tattoo on her arm, then you’d definitely know that she’s been through something.
But what we assume first correctly — that Sophie was a Polish holocaust survivor, would also derail our next assumption: that she’s a Jew. In fact, Sophie was brought up Roman Catholic by an actively anti-semitic father who ironically, was part of the academia that was exterminated at the arrival of the Germans in Poland. Overtime, we learn more about Sophie and the layers of trauma that she had undergone.
Stingo acted as a balancer between Nathan and Sophie, calming Nathan down from his rotten tempers and allowed Sophie to be more human, more interactive, slowly opening her up. It doesn’t help though that Stingo’s hopelessly in love with Sophie, lusting after her as any early 20s kid would do. And that Nathan, who can be lucid or lunatic is slowly losing his grip.
The scars from Auschwitz on full display
The fact that Sophie was a holocaust survivor raised many questions from the beginning: how did she get there, how did she survive, who did she lose? These questions will be answered eventually and very gradually as we get to know Sophie, or as the book would have it, as Sophie recounted Stingo her story.
Stingo, by this time, we can assume, is already a mature and successful writer who had finally had some time in his hands to try and make sense of his experience: those few months of being the third wheel between Sophie and Nathan. Those years for Stingo would be formative: being a virgin hankering and hungering for sex, for love, for success, for knowledge, for the good life that New York has to offer but he could not really afford.
And in this way, though we read the book as the writing of a more mature man, the thoughts are still of a man of twenty-two: meandering, inconsistent, a vomit of stream-of-consciousness. But there is a measure to this, and despite its seeming waywardness, that we acquaint ourselves with Sophie linearly. Thus, it’s not until the final pages of the book do we know the choice that Sophie had to make, the choice which ultimately defined her person after she left Auschwitz.
Sophie made many choices in the book. She chose to be with Nathan, she chose to try and drown herself, she chose to give Stingo the best night of his life. Some of these choices are voluntary, and some we may argue are not as voluntary. Was her affair with Nathan a force of her own biology, as she was propelled by her sexuality to be involved with Nathan, regardless of his violence, his flirting with death? It’s watching an inevitable train wreck knowing that the relationship with Nathan would not come to a good end.
The choice at the epicentre of Sophie’s personality is the choice of sacrificing her little daughter instead of her son. Impelled to choose the death for all or the death for one, we argue that she had chosen rightly. But what a choice. The tragedy of this choice was whether it had made any difference in the end, as she did not know whether the child she chose to survive made it through Auschwitz:
“Is it best to know about a child’s death, even one so horrible, or to know that the child lives but that you will never, never see him again? I don’t know either for sure… Would that have changed anything?”
In the end, Sophie answered herself: “Nothing would have changed anything.” It is a nihilistic outlook on our perception of control: that we steer our own fates based on our choices, yet regardless of the choices we make that the outcome would have been the same. In the paradox of Sophie’s choice, having chosen to sacrifice her son, or both, or herself would amount to the same thing. Similarly, would Stingo, if he had arrived at the Pink Palace earlier before the couple’s tragic end would have made a difference? He might have only delayed the inevitable, but the outcome is most likely to be the same.
So why make choices then, if there is no point to it? At the end of the novel, Stingo fell asleep in his drunkenness and sorrow after the funeral of his friends, only to wake up buried by the sand on the beach by rude little children. But there is an enlightening salvation to this, that it is still a new day, that though the outcome for everyone is the same (that is, death), he could still find meaning in what he does today:
“This was not judgement day. Only morning: excellent and fair.”
There is a shade reminiscent of another work by a true holocaust survivor: Viktor L. Frankl’s Man’s Search of Meaning, who wrote the book to make sense of his own experience. Yet, Frankl did manage to find meaning to his experience. In developing logotheraphy, that is to use symbols as a placeholder for your perceived purpose, the patient would be able to get themselves out of the rut, offering themselves a path to their own salvation. In the story, for Stingo, it had seemed that the purpose of his life was to write Sophie’s story.
Taking refuge under the roofs of sexuality
Despite its heavy themes of the holocaust, death and suicide, sex is the other side of the same coin. For Sophie, sex is an escape but also an abandonment of her humanity and a way to reclaim life:
“Sophie’s lust was as boundless as my own, I’m sure, but for more complex reasons; it had to do, of course, with her good natural animal passion, but it was also both a plunge into carnal oblivion and a flight from memory and grief. More than that, I now see, it was a frantic and orgiastic attempt to beat back death.”
“To beat back death” is jarring when I read it. Thus, with her orgasms Sophie would reclaim the life that she had lost, and regardless of when she dies, the summit of her sex is the peak of her experiences. It is for her, life at volume eleven.
But overall, sex in the book is not just about Sophie and Nathan, or Stingo not being able to get some. It is the period of time in America where sex is at its transition. By the time of the book’s publication in 1976, sex would have been less of a taboo than it had been when the Allied troops had won the war. By 1976, hippies would exercise their right of free love perhaps too liberally, and parents presumably would be encouraged to have more conversations with their children on the matter.
But it is a time when the young were still grappling with their own sexuality, and where it has the place for them in their society. From Stingo’s experience, the image of sex and the lack of the knowledge of it creates hypocritical nymphs: relentless cockteasers but would run away with a scream at the real possibility of getting fucked, as Stingo replies to Leslie’s psychological tosh:
“I see, I see,” I yawn, roaring, “this word vocalise, you mean you can say fuck but you still can’t do it!”
But we need to also look at the voracity of Nathan’s sexual appetite, as it contrasts greatly from Sophie’s abandonment of reality. For Nathan, sex with Sophie is a from of avengement, instead of abandoning reality, he is trying to construct his own. Sophie, at the worst of times, is the representation of the Third Reich. Though perhaps Nathan did not know about Sophie’s decision to sell her sexuality for the life of her son, Nathan saw Sophie as an instrument to a Nazi bureaucrat in the extermination of the Jewish people. Perhaps then, it is a new reality where the Jewish triumphs over the Third Reich in a small form of retribution.
The echoes of Arendt’s Eichmann ringing in the belfry
Arendt, in her book Eichmann in Jerusalem, exposes the true nature of evil, not as people might have normally thought as an active hatred, but more a passive tendency to abide. Eichmann, a bureaucrat responsible for the logistics of the extermination, would be more upset if the weather slows down the transport of a Jewish train to Auschwitz, as it derails his efficiency to his purpose.
He was no different then than the project managers chasing their OKRs for their performance reviews, without really having a second look of what their action entails especially from an ethical and moral standpoint. But the consequences of his indifference is all too real, causing damage far beyond the deaths of those who perished in these camps, Jewish or otherwise, but also beyond. Sophie’s eventual death is a result of this passive indifference that we equate with evil.
In Sophie’s recollection of her time with Höss, Eichmann’s subordinate, she was the typist and translator for this practical clone of Eichmann. Höss was more concerned about keeping the peace with the local parish priest, and patted himself on the back for finding a resolution for justice to the theft of the church’s relics. Yet, he was clearly missing the bigger picture when a more insignificant injustice was literally blazing downstairs. Höss’s letter to the parish is therefore an empty act of hypocrisy in a more sickeningly comical part of the novel.
Sophie’s choice of offering her daughter as a sacrifice is rooted in this same, passive evil. The man who impelled her to choose, drunk at the time, and perhaps having made her choose for his own amusement, was a devout Christian who was on the verge of becoming a seminarian. It is chilling therefore, to think that ordinary people, who have strong religious tendencies is capable of committing the most heinous evils. The Milgram experiments come into mind.
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And gosh, we’re barely even scratching the surface. Sophie’s Choice is a multi-faceted novel with each component clashing, complementing and consequential to each other. We have not even begun to mention the role music plays in the novel, or language, or the American identity. Styron covered a lot of ground with each facet worthwhile to dig into, and to study how they relate to the overall essence of the novel.
Yet, it is a novel which might leave one feeling empty. Its soft and almost jocular ending fails to appease us from the doom and gloom which Stingo, buried under the sands in New York, experiences along with his hangover. But as readers, it is a book which perhaps can make us kinder. Do we really know anybody? No, we don’t. For this reason alone we should be kinder.
