LangLit

IMPACT FACTOR – 5.61 ISSN 2349-5189

An International Peer-Reviewed Open Access Journal

ALL THE LIGHT WE CANNOT SEE
A MIXTURE OF RELATIVIZING AND AESTHETICIZING

DR SUNIL V. PAWAR
Principal
S.M.D.M. Mahavidyalaya,
Kalamb Dist Osmanabad

ABSTRACT

All the Light We Cannot See is a war novel written by American

author Anthony Doerr, published by Scribner on May 6, 2014. It won the
2015 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the 2015 Andrew Carnegie Medal for
Excellence in Fiction. Sergeant Rumpel is not the only villain to telegraph his
wickedness by his ugliness. There is the one-armed sadist who leads exercises
at Werner’s military academy, the cock-eyed soldier who is only following
orders, and the French collaborator with bad breath and a weight problem.
Eye trouble, on the other hand, indicates virtue in Doerr’s aesthetic, but also
the kind of torments that stigmata portend for a medieval saint. Apart from
blind Marie-Laure, the only other child with a conscience is Frederick. He gets
pulped by his fellow cadets for hiding his myopia, and Marie gets bombed by
the Americans. When World War II is reduced to a conflict between
technological determinism and innocent children, the difference between
aggressors and defenders is erased. We see no evil, only “normalized”
reflections in the Sea of Flames. Sometimes, the aesthetic is merely an
anaesthetic.

All the Light We Cannot See is a war novel written by American author Anthony Doerr,
published by Scribner on May 6, 2014. It won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the
2015 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction.

From the highly acclaimed, multiple award-winning Anthony Doerr, a stunningly ambitious
and beautiful novel about a blind French girl and a German boy whose paths collide in
occupied France as both try to survive the devastation of World War II. Marie Laure lives
with her father in Paris within walking distance of the Museum of Natural History where he
works as the master of the locks (there are thousands of locks in the museum). When she is
six, she goes blind, and her father builds her a model of their neighborhood, every house,
every manhole, so she can memorize it with her fingers and navigate the real streets with her
feet and cane. When the Germans occupy Paris, father and daughter flee to Saint-Malo on the
Brittany coast, where Marie-Laure's agoraphobic great uncle lives in a tall, narrow house by
the sea wall. In another world in Germany, an orphan boy, Werner, grows up with his
younger sister, Jutta, both enchanted by a crude radio Werner finds. He becomes a master at
building and fixing radios, a talent that wins him a place at an elite and brutal military
academy and, ultimately, makes him a highly specialized tracker of the Resistance. Werner
travels through the heart of Hitler Youth to the far-flung outskirts of Russia, and finally into
Saint-Malo, where his path converges with Marie-Laure. Doerr's gorgeous combination of

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IMPACT FACTOR – 5.61 ISSN 2349-5189

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soaring imagination with observation is electric. Deftly interweaving the lives of Marie-Laure
and Werner, Doerr illuminates the ways, against all odds, people try to be good to one
another. Ten years in the writing, All the Light We Cannot See is his most ambitious and
dazzling work

Set in occupied France during World War II, the novel centers on a blind French girl and a
German boy whose paths eventually cross.

In 1934, Marie-Laure LeBlanc is a six year old blind girl living in Paris with her father, the
master locksmith at the Museum of Natural History in Paris. She hears stories of the
purported Sea of Flames hidden within the museum, which is said to grant immortality at the
cost of endless misfortune to those around the owner. Allegedly, the only way to end the
curse is to return the stone to the ocean, its rightful owner. In Germany, 8-year-old Werner
Pfennig is an orphan in the coal-mining town of Zollverein. Werner is exceptionally bright
and has a natural skill for repairing radios and after he finds a broken one with his sister Jutta,
he fixes it and he uses it to hear science and music programs transmitted across Europe.

When Germany invades France in 1940, Marie-Laure and her father flee to the coastal town
of Saint-Malo to take refuge with her great-uncle Etienne, a recluse and shell-shocked veteran
of the Great War who spent his time broadcasting old records of his dead brother across
Europe. Unknown to Marie-Laure, her father had been entrusted by the museum with either
the Sea of Flames or one of three exact copies, made to protect the original gem. Months
later, while building a model town of Saint-Malo for Marie-Laure, Marie-Laure's father is
arrested. He is not heard from again, leaving Marie-Laure alone with Etienne and Madame
Manec, Etienne's longtime maid and housekeeper. Meanwhile, a Nazi gemologist, Reinhold
von Rumpel, begins to search for the Sea of Flames, seeking its purported immortality, to
save himself from dying an untimely death due to his spreading cancer.

Werner's skill earns him a place at the National Political Institute of Education at Schulpforta,
a boarding school teaching Nazi values. Werner is obedient and highly efficient in technical
work. His age is wrongly increased in the papers to put him out of school and is soon placed
in the Wehrmacht, client tracking illegal enemy signals alongside Volkheimer, a large yet
gentle soldier from Schulpforta. Werner becomes increasingly disillusioned with his position,
especially after a young girl is killed by his group after incorrectly tracing a signal.

Meanwhile, Madame Manec participates in the Resistance along with other local women.
These activities have some success, but Madame Manec becomes ill and dies. Marie-Laure
and Etienne continue her efforts, transmitting secret messages alongside piano recordings and
important Morse code information. Etienne's signal is traced, and Werner's group is told to
track the broadcast. Werner finds the source of the signal, but the piano recording Clair de
lune, which Etienne plays after one of his broadcasts, makes him recognize it as the same
music he had heard as a child after those enthralling science programmes, and does not
disclose its location.

As the Allied forces lay siege to Saint-Malo, Werner is trapped beneath a pile of rubble,
where he stays alive without food or water for days just by listening to Marie-Laure's radio
broadcasts in which she reads from her Jules Verne novel, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under

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the Sea which was in Braille. At around the same time, Marie-Laure opens the model of
Etienne's house and finds the diamond.

After being trapped for several days, Werner escapes and heads for Etienne's house, in pursuit
of Marie-Laure as well as the Frenchman whose broadcasts had filled his bleak childhood
with hope. There he finds von Rumpel in pursuit of the jewel. After a brief standoff, he kills
von Rumpel and meets Marie-Laure, who had hidden in the attic to escape Rumpel and
protect the stone. Although only together for a short time, they form a strong bond, Werner
finding himself falling in love with her. As they flee from Saint-Malo, Marie-Laure places the
Sea of Flames inside a gated grotto, the key to which was handed to her by the crazy Hubert
Bazin, flooded with seawater from the tide, returning it to the ocean. She gives the key to
Werner, who sends her away into safety but is captured himself and sent to an American
disarmament center where he becomes gravely ill. Just as he begins to recover, he
accidentally steps on a German landmine at night in a fit of delirium and is immediately
killed.

Thirty years later, Volkheimer finds Jutta and gives her Werner's belongings at the time of his
death; including the model house which contained the Sea of Flames and tells her that
possibly Werner had been in love. Jutta travels to France with her son Max, where she meets
Marie-Laure in Paris, now working as a marine biologist at the Museum of Natural History.
Marie-Laure opens the model and finds the key to the grotto. The story ends in 2014 with
Marie-Laure, now 86 years old, walking with her grandson, Michel in the streets of Paris
where she grew up.

“The more sentimental, the better,” reflects Werner, the albino Nazi child prodigy in Anthony
Doerr’s surprise bestseller, All The Light We Cannot See. Here, as in the war, Werner picks the
wrong side. Sentimentality is a potent and cheap smokescreen. It shelters us from the barrage
of deeper emotions, and spares us from their ethical implications. It substitutes surfaces for
depths, and glamour for complexity. A failure of taste is always an ethical failure, too.

Doerr’s novel is the impeccably implausible tale of two children caught in the violence of
World War II. One of them is Werner, who, being an albino, is preternaturally gifted at
assembling radios. His paramour, Marie-Laure, is a blind French girl, who, being blind and
French, is prone to vague musings on the wonders of nature. The Nazis, who are handsome
and dastardly when they are not crippled and humane, assign Werner to the task of hunting
down the hidden radios of the Resistance. Members of the Resistance, who are more interested
in French recipes than French resisting, hide a radio transmitter in the house to which Marie-
Laure is evacuated, in the conveniently attractive seaside town of Saint-Malo. The plot grinds
toward the meeting of Werner and Marie-Laure with the subtlety of a Tiger tank. The story
ends with multiple detonations of high explosives and twee sentiment.

The blond leads the blind. Werner leads Marie through the rubble to safety, but dies by
stepping on a landmine. After enduring so many of Werner’s trivial reflections, we are spared
his final thoughts. They might resemble those of the reader, trying to identify fragments of
actual history as they whizz past like so much fictional shrapnel. A novel is not a historical
document, but it does become one, regardless of its author’s preference. Our entertainments
reflect their times: how we choose to remember historical events, and how we prefer to

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remember them. Especially the worst of times, World War II, becomes material for the lightest
of entertainments.

Historians call this sort of thing normalization, or, if they are

German, Vergangenheitsbewältigung, coming to terms with the past. Normalization is integral
to memory and is always with us.

Rosenfeld identifies three types of normalization relativization, universalization, and

aestheticization. The relativizers want to diminish the moralistic aura that comes with
exceptionality, the taint of particularly appalling actions. Recent practitioners include not just
the obvious nationalist politicians, but also writers who, like Anthony Doerr, equate the Allied
bombing of German targets with the earlier German bombing of everyone else. The
universalizers want to inflate the aura of exceptionality and liberate it as a license for present
ambitions, especially humanitarian intervention

The third circle of normalizing Hell is reserved for the aestheticizers. The West, Rosenfeld
writes, has a tradition that “historical events should be depicted from a realistic perspective.”
Realism respects “a prevailing desire to preserve the integrity of the historical record.” This
desire has “clear moral underpinnings,” even if, as with many of our moral underpinnings, we
observe the principle in its breach. Many of those breaches are inspired by another tradition,
more recent in origin, but now familiar to the point of tedium: the revolt against realism and its
ethical implications. If the past can be shorn of its historical reality, it sheds its historic
traditions, and the ethical demands they place on the present. Not all "relativizers" set out to
neutralize the past. Many "relativizers" adopt new forms of representation in the hope of
expressing "deeper moral agendas.” Sometimes they attain them. Chaplin and Mel Brooks
prick the vanities of Nazism by ridicule. The fractured narrative of Elem Klimov’s 1985
film Come and See is a devastating recreation of the trauma of a child in the path of
the Blitzkreig.

For Rosenfeld, all three forms of normalization distort the historical record. Yet
aestheticization is especially risky. It is less about the moral dimensions of the past than the
artistic challenges of representing it. There is an inherent risk of sacrificing substance for
superficiality; of falling for surfaces over depth, and for simplicity over complexity. Over
time, this preference for form over content empties out the past. The willful amnesia of
normalization smoothes out the abnormal discomforts of memory. Only the pretty, reflective
surfaces remain. Beauty, Oscar Wilde wrote, reveals everything, because it expresses nothing.

Doerr's novel is an unsavory mixture of relativizing and aestheticizing. As a relativizer, he

presents all violence, Nazi or Allied, as equivalent: the product of amoral, deterministic forces.
This mechanization might dumb the moral sense, but it raises the aesthetic value. As an
aestheticizer, Doerr admires the shiny boots and tailored uniforms: Fascism, as Susan Sontag
noted, always fascinates. There is, though, little depth to his reflections.

Ethical dilemmas, sadistic violence, technological cruelties, and sexy uniforms are all splendid
sources of period style and emotional intensity. But, like rations of ersatz coffee and powdered

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egg, they are ready-made substitutes for the real thing. Realism brings us closer to the past,
and to an understanding of its difference. The aesthetic perspective distances, and flattens
difference. Instead of horror or heroism, we see only a lazy reflection of our own preferences
and prejudices. Doerr’s German children speak like modern American children: they “do math
on their fingers”, and call each other “gimp” or “pussy.” Doerr’s narrator speaks of “skunked”
wine and “taffy-colored” hair. The difference between past and present has vanished.

Moreover, Doerr's writing is pompous, pretentious, and imprecise. Every noun is escorted by
an adjective of reliable but uninspiring quality. Eyes are “wounded.” Brown hair is “mousy.”
Absurdly, Wehrmacht recruits are “greyhounds, harvested from all over the nation for their
speed and eagerness to obey.” I always thought greyhounds were bred, not picked like fruit.
But then, I’m not a scientist. And neither is Doerr. He clutters his novel with technological
whimsy about time, speed, and connectedness. Every event, especially a fatal one, is
“destined” for reasons too mysterious and complex to explain. Science is an object of gawping
wonder, but its merits remain beyond description, venerated but incommunicable.

“The incommunicable,” Sartre observed, “is the source of all violence.” There is a lot of
violence in this novel. Most of it is sexualized and sadistic, slick with the voyeurism of horror
films and pornography. Trapped in an attic for days, Marie-Laure is tormented by her
imminent rape or murder at the hands of the man who has broken in downstairs; outside, the
war machine approaches, “grinding and grinding its inhuman truth into the floor”.

The boys at Werner’s military academy chase their weakest members across the fields, then
beat them with a thick rubber hose. The narration strokes the monstrous implement of
punishment—“black, three feet long, stiff in the cold”—and savors the pain it causes. When
the boys discover that dreamy Frederick has hidden his weak eyesight, they force-feed him
eye charts, then beat him into a vegetative state. There are mock executions, and the ritual
killing of a Slavic prisoner who is tied to a stake and freezes to death after repeated dousing in
cold water.

Did I mention Doerr’s Sea of Flames? Apart from being a Wagnerian metaphor, the Sea of
Flames is a diamond with magical powers. Marie-Laure’s father must hide it from the
diabolical Nazi jeweler, Sergeant von Rumpel. We know he is diabolical because he walks
with a limp, wheezes a lot, and has uncharitable thoughts about Jews.

Sergeant Rumpel is not the only villain to telegraph his wickedness by his ugliness. There is
the one-armed sadist who leads exercises at Werner’s military academy, the cock-eyed soldier
who is only following orders, and the French collaborator with bad breath and a weight
problem. Eye trouble, on the other hand, indicates virtue in Doerr’s aesthetic, but also the kind
of torments that stigmata portend for a medieval saint. Apart from blind Marie-Laure, the only
other child with a conscience is Frederick. He gets pulped by his fellow cadets for hiding his
myopia, and Marie gets bombed by the Americans.

When World War II is reduced to a conflict between technological determinism and innocent
children, the difference between aggressors and defenders is erased. We see no evil, only

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 LangLit
IMPACT FACTOR – 5.61 ISSN 2349-5189

An International Peer-Reviewed Open Access Journal

“normalized” reflections in the Sea of Flames. Sometimes, the aesthetic is merely an
anaesthetic.

REFERENCES

Main Source:

1. Doerr, Anthony. All the Light We Cannot See. New York: Scribner 2014.

Secondary Sources:

1. Vollmann, William T. (May 8, 2014). "Darkness Visible". The New York Times
Book Review. Archived from the original on March 13, 2018. Retrieved June 18,201.
2. Callil, Carmen (May 17, 2014). "All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr
review – a story of morality, science and Nazi occupation". The
Guardian. Archived from the original on April 22, 2015. Retrieved June 18, 2018.
3. Freeman, John (May 3, 2014). "'All the Light We Cannot See' by Anthony
Doerr". The Boston Globe. Archived from the original on June 28, 2017.
Retrieved June 18, 2018.
4. Vaill, Amanda (May 5, 2014). "'All the Light We Cannot See,' by Anthony
Doerr". The Washington Post. Archived from the original on December 21, 2016.
Retrieved June 18, 2018.
5. Jeresova, Leah. "Anthony Doerr's "All the Light We Cannot See": All the history the
novelist cannot see". www.wsws.org. Retrieved 2019-06-22.
6. "Hardcover Fiction Books - Best Sellers - November 27, 2016 - The New York
Times". Archived from the original on May 25, 2018. Retrieved 2018-05-24.
7. "The 10 Best Books of 2014". The New York Times. December 4, 2014. ISSN 0362-
4331. Archived from the original on September 23, 2015. Retrieved September
26, 2015.

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