Escaping the conflagration

I've just finished reading The Conflagration of Community: Fiction before and after Auschwitz by J. Hillis Miller, and what a peculiar book it is. He proposes what he calls Miller's Law: "If Holocaust novels get more complex, more 'interest bearing,' narratologically and rhetorically, the closer the author was to direct experience of the camps, at the same time the rendering of the conflagration of community becomes more pronounced. Those novelists further away are most likely to want somehow to affirm that community survived the conflagration of the crematoria."

Interesting, but he bases this law on analysis of only four books. Give me four books on any subject and I'll bet I can come up with some broad generalizations about all books on that subject, except no one would pay any attention to Hogue's Law.

But I am not J. Hillis Miller, who in this book frequently repeats himself, cites Wikipedia while admitting its unreliability, and takes every opportunity to move smoothly from insightful literary analysis into extended political rants. His readings of Kafka's unfinished novels are immensely readable (even when he repeats himself), but why write about Kafka in a book focusing on Holocaust fiction? Because "Kafka's novels are uncanny premonitions of Auschwitz." He explains:

Though of course I do not believe in telepathic foreshadowings, any more than did Freud and Derrida, so they claimed, nevertheless it almost seems as though Kafka must have had some occult telepathic premonition of what the genocide would be like, though he got the details a little garbled....

I love that "of course," and his "so they claimed" could be applied to Miller himself. Miller claims that Kafka couldn't complete his novels because he saw his protagonists moving inexorably to a conflagration to which Kafka could not bear to deliver them; indeed, Miller all but implies that Kafka himself died to avoid the Holocaust his work somehow foreshadowed. Neat trick, that.

Miller makes a compelling argument for the importance of literature in helping us understand the Holocaust, but the book's digressions interrupt and ultimately weaken the argument, which is a real pity. I won't soon encounter another such charmingly telepathic Kafka.