Editing Sophie's Choice (novel) (section)

====At publication====
''Sophie's Choice'' generated significant controversy at time of its publication. 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 (miniseries)|Holocaust]]'' (1978), engendering a period in American culture where "a newly-raised consciousness of the Holocaust was becoming a forefront public issue."<ref name=Mathe04/> Mathé says:
{{blockquote|sign=|source=|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.<ref name=Mathe04/>}}
(By "limit event" the author is referring to the nature of, and magnitude and violence of acts in, the Holocaust, characteristics of that "event" that challenged the civilizing tendencies of and the foundations of legitimacy for the moral and political fabric that defined its affected communities.<ref name = LimitEventNote>Here, paraphrasing Simone Gigliotti, see following. 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". It is 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 later, oft-cited formulation of Simone Gigliotti). 
* For Friedländer, see {{cite book |last1=Friedländer |first1=Saul |author-link1=Saul Friedländer |year=1992 |chapter=Introduction |editor1-last=Friedländer |editor1-first=Saul |title=Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the "final Solution" |url=https://books.google.com/books?isbn=0674707664 |location=Cambridge, MA, USA |publisher=Harvard University Press |pages=1–21 (esp. 6) |isbn=0-674-70766-4 |access-date=7 November 2015}} 
* For Carroll, see {{cite book |contributor-last= Carroll |contributor-first=David |date=1990 |contribution=The Memory of Devastation and the Responsibilities of Thought: 'And let's not talk about that' [Foreword] |last=Lyotard |first=Jean François |author-link=Jean François Lyotard |title= Heidegger and "the Jews" |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=9Nd1XHpMtQUC |language=en |translator1=Andreas Michel |translator2=Mark S. Roberts |pages=vii-xxix |isbn=0-8166-1857-7 |location=Minneapolis, MN |publisher=University of Minnesota Press |quote=Quote: [T]his indeterminacy has special significance when it comes to the Shoah, this limit case of knowledge and feeling, in terms of which all such systems of belief and thought, all forms of literary and artistic expression, seem irrelevant or criminal.}} 
* For Gigliotti, see {{cite journal |author=Gigliotti, Simone |date=June 2003 |title=Unspeakable Pasts as Limit Events: The Holocaust, Genocide, and the Stolen Generations |journal=Australian Journal of Politics and History |volume=49 |number=2 |pages=164–181, esp. 164 |publisher=Wiley-Blackwell |doi=10.1111/1467-8497.00302 |quote=Quote: A 'limit event' is an event or practice of such magnitude and profound violence that its effects rupture the otherwise normative foundations of legitimacy and so-called civilising tendencies that underlie the constitution of political and moral community.}}</ref>)

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"<ref name=Rosenfeld79/>)—has Styron, through the novel, his interviews, and essays:
* Acknowledging Jewish suffering during [[the Holocaust]], while attempting to reorient public perception away from [[Nazi war crimes]] and [[genocide]]s being solely aimed against the Jews and towards also acknowledging the experiences of Slavs, anti-Nazi Christians, political [[dissident]]s, and the disabled (hence Sophie's ethnicity and Catholic upbringing); that is, it has him insisting on seeing Auschwitz in particular in more universal terms as "a murderous thrust against 'the entire human family.'"<ref name=Mathe04/><ref name=Rosenfeld79/> 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 peoples and Christians were also caught up in its program of forced labour and extermination) disproves the unsupported/irrational/bigoted idea of universal Christian [[collective guilt]] and challenges historical arguments blaming all previous Christian anti-Semitism as the real cause of the Holocaust, and 
* Suggesting that concentration camps, in using slave labour, justifies the comparison of Nazi war crimes (e.g., in the writings of Rubenstein) with the [[Slavery in the United States|American institution of slavery]] and allowed the latter to be viewed as the less inhumane institution of the two.<ref name=Mathe04/><ref name=Rosenfeld79/>

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",<ref name=Rosenfeld79/>{{rp|44}} and it is this specific revisionist thrust that is the substance of the novel's initial and persisting ability to engender controversy.<ref name=Mathe04/>