See under: Shoah : Imagining the Holocaust with David Grossman [1 ed.] 9789004280946, 9789004280953

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See Under: Shoah

The Brill Reference Library of Judaism Editors Alan J. Avery-Peck (College of the Holy Cross) William Scott Green (University of Rochester) Editorial Board David Aaron (Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, Cincinnati) Herbert Basser (Queen’s University) Bruce D. Chilton (Bard College) José Faur (Netanya College) Neil Gillman (Jewish Theological Seminary of America) Mayer I. Gruber (Ben-Gurion University of the Negev) Ithamar Gruenweld (Tel Aviv University) Maurice-Ruben Hayoun (University of Strasbourg and Hochschule fuer Juedische Studien Heidelberg) Arkady Kovelman (Moscow State University) David Kraemer ( Jewish Theological Seminary of America) Baruch A. Levine (New York University) Alan Nadler (Drew University) Jacob Neusner (Bard College) Maren Niehoff (Hebrew University of Jerusalem) Gary G. Porton (University of Illinois) Aviezer Ravitzky (Hebrew University of Jerusalem) Dov Schwartz (Bar Ilan University) Günter Stemberger (University of Vienna) Michael E. Stone (Hebrew University of Jerusalem) Elliot R. Wolfson (New York University)

VOLUME 41 The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/brlj



See Under: Shoah Imagining the Holocaust with David Grossman Edited by

Marc De Kesel Bettine Siertsema Katarzyna Szurmiak

LEIDEN | BOSTON

Cover illustration: The photo shows a sculpted stone in an ordinary European town, as there are thousands of them everywhere. It symbolizes the ‘White Room’ in Grossman’s novel, i.e. that ‘unheimlich’ and ‘banal’ Black Box of imagination, the box from which imagination has to retake even the horror of the Shoah—as does See Under: Love. (Photograph owned by author, Marc De Kesel.) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data See under: Shoah : imagining the Holocaust with David Grossman / edited by Marc De Kesel, Bettine Siertsema, Katarzyna Szurmiak.   pages cm. — (The Brill reference library of Judaism, ISSN 1571–5000 ; volume 41)  Includes bibliographical references and index.  ISBN 978-90-04-28095-3 (hardback : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-90-04-28094-6 (e-book) 1. Grossman, David. ‘Ayen ‘erekh—ahavah. I. Kesel, Marc De., editor. II. Siertsema, Bettine, editor. III. Szurmiak, Katarzyna, editor.  PJ5054.G728A973 2014  892.43’6—dc23 2014024632

This publication has been typeset in the multilingual ‘Brill’ typeface. With over 5,100 characters covering Latin, ipa, Greek, and Cyrillic, this typeface is especially suitable for use in the humanities. For more information, please see brill.com/brill-typeface. issn 1571-5000 isbn 978-90-04-28095-3 (hardback) isbn 978-90-04-28094-6 (e-book) Copyright 2014 by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Nijhoff, Global Oriental and Hotei Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill nv provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, ma 01923, usa. Fees are subject to change. Brill has made all reasonable efforts to trace all rights holders to any copyrighted material used in this work. In cases where these efforts have not been successful the publisher welcomes communications from copyright holders, so that the appropriate acknowledgements can be made in future editions, and to settle other permission matters. This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Contents Contributors  vii Introduction  1 Marc De Kesel and Katarzyna Szurmiak   Summary of the Novel  5 Jan Ceuppens

part 1 Language from Over There 1 Quod Vide, or the Displacement of Meaning in the Narrative Construction of Love  11 Dany Nobus 2 Guerrilla War with Words—The Language of Resistance to the Shoah  26 Olga Kaczmarek 3 Grossman’s White Room and Schulzian Empty Spaces  59 Katarzyna Szurmiak

part 2 Dying Over There 4 The Laugh of a God Who Doesn’t Exist  77 Marc De Kesel 5 The Perpetrator  98 Bettine Siertsema

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part 3 Memory and Identity 6 Diasporic Remarks  115 Dirk De Schutter 7 The Holocaust’s Muses—On Voices, Appropriation and Misappropriation in Grossman’s Novel and W.G. Sebald’s Prose Fiction  126 Jan Ceuppens

part 4 See Under: Political 8 The Novel Form and the Timing of the Nation  145 Pieter Vermeulen 9 Torag, Dolgan, Ning, Gyoya, Orga: Diaspora under the Sign of Salmon  162 Ortwin de Graef 10 On Some Adornean Catchwords  178 Erik Vogt Bibliography  197 Index  205

Contributors Jan Ceuppens is lecturer of German at the Applied Linguistics department of HUBrussel, Belgium. His fields of research are 20th century German literature, literary theory, rhetoric and translation studies. He is co-editor of the journal Germanistische Mitteilungen. His Ph.D. thesis on W.G. Sebald was published in 2010 (Vorbildhafte Trauer. W.G. Sebalds Die Ausgewanderten und die Rhetorik der Restitution. Eggingen: Isele). Ortwin de Graef is Professor of English Literature and Literary Theory at the University of Leuven, Belgium. He is the author of two books on Paul de Man and has published widely on Romantic and post-Romantic writing in various collections and journals, including Victorian Literature & Culture, ELH, EJES, Partial Answers and Occasion. His current research engages with aesthetic ideologies of sympathy, science, and the State in Victorian and post-Victorian modernity. Marc De Kesel is Professor of Philosophy at Saint Paul University in Ottawa, Canada. His field of his research covers continental philosophy, Lacanian theory, Shoah studies, and theories of religion. Recent books: ‘Eros & Ethics: Reading Jacques Lacan, Séminaire VII ’, Albany: SUNY Press, 2009; (in Dutch) Goden breken. Essays over monotheïsme (‘Destroying Gods: Essays on Monotheism’), Amsterdam: Boom, 2010; (in Dutch) Auschwitz mon amour (on Shoah, Fiction and Love), Amsterdam: Boom, 2012. Dirk De Schutter holds a doctorate in philosophy from KULeuven and is currently full Professor at HUBrussel, Belgium. He translated works by Jacques Derrida and Hannah Arendt into Dutch. He publishes on 19th- and 20th-century literature and philosophy. Olga Kaczmarek is a PhD candidate in Culture Studies at the University of Warsaw. She received MA degrees in Culture Studies and English Literature. Her areas of academic interest include Polish-Jewish relations and memory, anthropology

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of the word, orality-literacy theory. In 2012–2013 she was a visiting fellow in the Department of Philosophy at Pennsylvania State University. Her dissertation is devoted to the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, postmodern anthropology and the theme of countertextuality. Dany Nobus is Professor of Psychology and Psychoanalysis, and Pro-Vice-Chancellor for External Relations at Brunel University London, where he also directs the MA Programme in Psychoanalysis and Contemporary Society. In addition, he is the Chair of the Freud Museum London, which houses everything the founder of psychoanalysis and his family were able to bring with them when, in 1938, they were forced to flee the Nazi Occupation of Vienna. He is the author of Jacques Lacan and the Freudian Practice of Psychoanalysis, and Knowing Nothing, Staying Stupid: Elements for a Psychoanalytic Epistemology, and has published numerous papers on the history, theory and practice of psychoanalysis. Bettine Siertsema wrote her PhD thesis on Dutch autobiographical texts on the concentration camps, with special attention to religious and ethical dimensions (Uit de diepten. Vught: Skandalon, 2007, in Dutch). She is now a researcher at the Faculty of Humanities of VU University in Amsterdam. Her fields of interest are Dutch and international Holocaust literature, and the interface of religion and literature. Katarzyna Szurmiak is a historian currently working in education. She specializes in Jewish history and culture. Her research interests focus mostly on Yiddish language and culture, history of Jews in Poland and memory of the Shoah. Pieter Vermeulen is Assistant Professor in American literature at the University of Leuven. He works in the fields of critical theory, the contemporary novel, and memory studies. He is the author of Romanticism After the Holocaust (Bloomsbury/ Continuum 2010) and of Contemporary Literature and the End of the Novel: Creature, Affect, Form (Palgrave Macmillan 2015). He is currently working on edited volumes on world literature, recent developments in memory studies, and on the notion of “the creatural.”

contributors

Erik Vogt is Gwendolyn Miles Smith Professor for Philosophy, Trinity College, USA; Docent for Philosophy at University Vienna, Austria. He published books on Sartre, Derrida, Adorno, Žižek, Fanon, aesthetics, monstrosity, the limits of experience, and Wagner (forthcoming). His research interests are contemporary continental philosophy, political theory, aesthetics, and literature.

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Introduction Marc De Kesel and Katarzyna Szurmiak David Grossman’s novel See Under: Love is beyond doubt one of the masterpieces of twentieth-century literature. In his peerless style, the author initiates us both in the cruel universe of the Shoah and in the no less cruel world of its remembrance. While reading the novel, we face not only the distressed minds of holocaust survivors, but also those of their children traumatized by their parents’ disturbed memory. Although David Grossman is strictly not a ‘second generation’ holocaust survivor (his parents emigrated to Israel years before the Nazis came to power), his novel is nonetheless an example par excellence of this type of Shoah literature. It is a novel about memory: about memory incapable of remembering the atrocities one has hardly survived, but also about the incapacity of imagining such memory for the ‘second generation’ and all those who have not witnessed the Shoah’s hell. Yet, have the first generation holocaust writers—Primo Levi and Elie Wiesel among others—not warned us against the risks of imagination? Does imagination not misleadingly allow the reader to think he can experience full empathy with the Shoah victims and, so to say, ‘live’ the death camp from within? Does it not create an illusion that the unimaginable can be imagined, the unrepresentable represented or even made present? Claude Lanzmann has launched his movie Shoah (1978) precisely to avoid such error, and to warn against all future attempts to ‘imagine’ the Shoah.1 The least one can say is that this warning has not been taken up by David Grossman. His novel is in all respects an apotheosis of imagination. However, the problem of the unimaginable is far from being absent. In fact, by fully embracing imagination’s power, the novel offers a profound reflection on how the twenty-first century can assume the heritage of the Shoah and remember the ‘unmemorable’ in a proper way. In order to do this, appreciating the role of imagination is crucial. Although inherently ambiguous and at times absolutely dangerous, imagination is nevertheless indispensable for whoever wants to relate to the complex and traumatic heritage of the Shoah. This is all the more true for a generation that soon will no longer be able to appeal to the living testimony of survivors. It is no coincidence that imagination is a core theme in the Shoah novel See Under: Love. More precisely, the novel is one long reflection on the relation between imagining and remembering the Shoah. 1 Lanzmann 1995; Liebman 2007.

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All the essays gathered in this volume reflect on this one novel and its core theme, though each from its own angle. In a deliberately multidisciplinary approach, the volume tries to intervene in the many years’ discussion about the allegedly inconceivable and unspeakable nature of the Shoah. Focusing on one single novel is an excellent way to show the surplus value of a multispectral reflection on one central problem. The first section, entitled Language from Over There (‘Over There’ being the name the survivors in Israel used in the fifties to indicate the places in Poland and Ukraine where the genocide took place), counts three essays. The first one, entitled ‘Quod vide’ (i.e. the ‘see under’ from the novel’s title), raises the question about the authority one can have—or not have—to talk or write about the Shoah. It is the most basic question organizing all narrative lines of Grossman’s novel, as Nobus shows. He also connects that issue to the more general question ‘What/Who am I?’. Making use of the Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, i.e. the trauma theory emphasizing the linguistic base of human identity, he interprets See Under: Love as a novel about ‘the constructive force of narration [and of identity-formation] in the face of horror, death and destruction’. In the second chapter, ‘Guerrilla with Words’, Olga Kaczmarek inquires into the issues of linguistic performativity, orality and literacy in See Under: Love. Referring to Levinas’ philosophy, she discusses the problems of the ethical quality of language. One of the novel’s explicit questions is whether a language is possible in which it would no longer be possible to say: ‘You killed my Jew, so I kill yours’ (as happened to the Polish writer and visual artist Bruno Schulz, inspiration of and a character in Grossman’s novel, who became a victim of this kind of Nazi thinking). Kaczmarek’s emphasis is on the novel’s search for ethics/language which ‘would culminate in the inherent impossibility of murder between people’ and deals with the question whether literature can be of help in this search. Bruno Schulz is the central figure of the third chapter, by Katarzyna Szurmiak. She looks more precisely for links between the metaphor of the White Room, which is crucial in Grossman’s novel, and the concept of ‘empty spaces’ and parallel branches of time which play an important role in the prose of Bruno Schulz. To what extent can the postulate of the creation of an entirely new language expressed by Shlomo in See Under: Love be associated with how relations between form and matter are described by Bruno Schulz? Assuming that language and form belong to the same category of factors which impose conventional shape and order to reality, Szurmiak asks whether the Schulzian concept of “empty spaces” might be the ultimate clue to understand the meaning of the metaphor of the White Room. The second section, Dying Over There, treats the theme of death and horror in Grossman’s novel. Yet, this does not imply that the novel is not full of

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humoristic situations and characters. Even in his moment of dying in the gas chamber, Shimon Zalmanson cannot stop laughing. And when his friend Anshel Wasserman, a former author of children’s stories, is supposed to meet with the same fate in that chamber, it turns out he is characterized by an uncanny incapability to die. Later on he even succeeds, simply by telling stories, in ‘converting’ the Nazi camp commander, which in this case means: at the end driving him to suicide. In the fourth chapter, ‘The Laugh of a God Who Doesn’t Exist’, Marc De Kesel shows that these uncannily humoristic aspects of the novel have a specific historical background: Hasidism. Within this kind of Jewish culture, which was popular in the shtetls, hometown of many Shoah victims, it was not a mere contradiction when one prayed to the Almighty and laughed to ‘a God that doesn’t exist’. It could even be interpreted as the acme of Jewish religiosity. The fifth chapter, ‘The Perpetrator’ by Bettine Siertsema, concentrates on the figure of Herr Neigel (the one whom storyteller Wasserman ‘converts’) and compares his portrait in Grossman’s novel with the way real victims have written about their perpetrators. Irony turns out to be a common characteristic, but in the novel the irony is more situational, whereas the autobiographical texts use irony as a stylistic device. Siertsema also makes a comparison with the historical figures of concentration camp commanders—Rudolf Höss and Franz Stangl. From the biographies of both these men traces can be detected in the Wasserman-part. She closes her analysis with some remarks on the (potentially) redemptive power of literature. The essays in the third section deal with the issue of ‘Memory and Identity’ in Grossman’s novel. In a crucial passage of chapter six entitled ‘Diasporic Remarks’, Dirk De Schutter reflects on a particular expression occurring in the novel: ‘the Nazis—may their name be blotted out’. How can one obliterate something that is mentioned all the time, in and out of season, the author asks. Why would one bear in mind something that one wants to destroy? Why keep in memory something that needs to be gotten rid of? Supported by references to Hannah Arendt’s theory of totalitarianism as well as Anselm Kiefer’s visual art, he reads that question as elaborated in Grossman’s novel and discusses shame and humor as two attitudes dealing with this aporia. Though ‘unthinkable’ and unrepresentable, the Shoah cannot stand a ‘religious’ approach that would ‘elevate it to the order of a mysterium tremendum et fascinosum’. Thus, the main thesis of chapter seven, in which Jan Ceuppens gives his reading of two ‘Holocaust muses’: Grossman’s novel and the prose fiction of W.G. Sebald, especially The Emigrants and Austerlitz. In spite of the many points of divergence between the two authors, a comparative reading of them is enlightening to understand the intertwining of memory and imagination in dealing with the Shoah. His reference to the ‘Wandering Jew’ and

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to Kafka’s Gracchus the Hunter as another couple of ‘Holocaust muses’ gives Ceuppens’ reading a broader context. The fourth and last section of the volume collects essays focusing on ‘the political’ in Grossman’s novel. In chapter eight, ‘The Novel Form and the Timing of the Nation’, Pieter Vermeulen concentrates on Israel’s national imaginary. He makes use of Benedict Anderson’s theory of ‘imagined communities’ to explain the role of (Zionist) myth and diasporic past in Israeli identity building, he inquires how the Shoah together with ‘diasporic awareness of […] coming from somewhere else’ intermingles in the national narration with the cult of heroic action and ‘myths of autochthony’. In the second part of Grossman’s novel, Bruno escapes the Nazis by becoming a salmon among the salmons . It is not the easiest part to read, if only because of its specific salmon terminology with words such as ‘torag, dolgan, ning, gyoya, orga’. If this is the title of the nineth chapter, by Ortwin de Graef, it is not only because of his explanation of these words. According to the author, these idiosyncratic terms can also be read as symptoms of a cryptic ‘nationalistic’ reflex at work in Grossman’s fiction. His reference to the uncertain land Over There hides the certainty of the land Here, the land On This Side. As de Graef puts it in his introduction: ‘No voice on the Shoah shall ever be free of its site, of the distance that separates it from eretz sham, the land of there, Over There. For David Grossman, that site must always be eretz Yisrael, the land that goes not without saying.’ If Auschwitz is not merely a ‘concept’, it neither is ‘some indivisible unity located in a site beyond the concept’, Erik Vogt states in the tenth and last chapter, entitled ‘On Some Adornean Catchwords’. Referring to Adorno, he explains that Auschwitz has ‘to enter into constellation’, i.e. into ‘figurative language’ which, unlike pure concepts, is ‘spoiled’ by imagination. Vogt chooses five of such ‘catchwords’ extracted from and corresponding between Adorno and Grossman in order to explain how ‘the urgency for both authors to ‘comprehend the incomprehensible’ is rendered tangible. Organizing his reflection around the terms ‘anti-theodicy’, ‘survival/afterlife’, ‘human/animal’, ‘remembrance’ and ‘literature’, Vogt shows how two different approaches converge: ‘While Adorno’s Federal Republic of Germany hallucinated both a supposedly clean break from its immediate political past for the sake of a new Realpolitik and a deep continuity of a cultural tradition that, after the ‘short perversion’ during the thirties and forties, simply had to be re-actualized and re-cultivated after the end of the war, Grossman’s ‘young state of Israel’ believed ‘that its strength depended partly on its ability to forget so that it could cobble together a new identity for itself’.’ His chosen ‘Stichwörter’ allow Vogt to read Adorno in Grossman and vice versa.

Summary of the Novel Jan Ceuppens David Grossman’s novel See Under Love, originally published in Hebrew in 1986 under the title ‘Ayen ‘erekh: ahavah, is considered by some critics the ultimate holocaust novel.1 It consists of four parts, which approach the topic from different angles and in different stylistic and narrative modes, seemingly getting closer and closer to the actual thing that is the holocaust. The first part is set in the Jerusalem area of Beit Mazmil in 1959 and recounts a few months in the life of nine-year old Shlomo Ephraim Neumann, whose nickname Momik gives this first part its title. The story starts with the arrival of a ‘new’ grandfather, actually Momik’s mo­ther’s uncle, who has just been released from a mental institution, to live with his last remai­ning relatives, who until then believed him dead, a victim of the Nazi extermination camps. Momik decides to accept the man, Anshel Wasserman, as his grandfather, especially as he knows him to be a writer: Wasserman had published a series of children’s stories about a youth band called Children of the Heart, which Momik copies into his ‘spy notebook’, sen­sing Anshel’s arrival may change some things in his existence. And so it does: from the little sense he can make of the deranged Anshel’s continuous monologue, he assembles an image of the things that went on in the land ‘Over There’, which his parents and other adults have been so secretive about.2 Indeed, whenever his grandfather goes out, he attracts a number of other camp survivors who are in different states of mental derangement. Through them, Mo­mik learns more of the land ‘Over There’, the Nazi Beast, the curious number codes on so­me people’s arms and even a strange commando fighter called Sondar (S 28). Momik decides to sa­ve them and everybody else retrospectively, a mission for which he needs to conjure out the Nazi Beast they are always referring to. To this end, he collects a number of animals in the ba­sement of his parents’ house, expecting one of them to grow into the beast given the proper care. When this doesn’t help, he 1 Ulrich Baer calls it ‘arguably the most significant Holocaust novel to date’ (Baer 2005); in an almost euphoric review essay, Gershon Shaked calls it ‘revolutionary’ and states that ‘the revival and renovation of the subject and its literary recollection or creation’ is probably the reason for its success (Shaked 1989). Similar appraisals can be found in: Eisenstein 1999; Yudkin 2002; Schulte Nordholt 2006. 2 Symptomatically, Momik’s parents never leave their home except once a year: on Holocaust Day (S 26) [S is the abbreviation for the novel’s title: See Under: Love (Grossman 1999)].

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decides to round up the survivors—whom he now just calls ‘the Jews’—in the basement, hoping this bait will prompt the Nazi beast to come out. When this last terrible experiment fails, Momik seems cured from his strange interest; his parents send him to a boarding school, and his grandfather disappears as suddenly as he’s arrived. While the first part was narrated in the third person, but from Momik’s child perspective, the second part is by and large narrated by grown-up Momik, now married to Ruth, but in an affair with a woman called Ayala. This story of relationships—or, rather, their impossibility—is inter­twi­ned with Momik’s new literary experiment: the construction of an imaginary life as a fish for Polish author Bruno Schulz—hence this section’s title, Bruno. Prompted by both women to write after Auschwitz—Adorno is actually quoted here—, Momik travels to Poland in search of facts about Schulz and the new life he envisages for him. Instead of being killed by an SS-man called Günther, Bruno will take to the water at Danzig/Gdansk and turn into a salmon, following a school of his species on its way to its breeding grounds. Here, however, the story is partly narrated by the Sea itself, from whom Momik hopes to find out the truth about Bruno—and in the process, the truth about himself as a writer. In the end, this turns into a fight with Bruno, who leaves his school and becomes a loner. In this section, dialogue becomes an important narrative device: Ayala, Ruth, the Sea, and Bruno Schulz himself are introduced as counterparts of the narrator, Momik. Also, the third and fourth parts are already preluded in part two, as Momik tells Ruth and Ayala of this attempts to write his grandfather Anshel’s story. This story is most explicitely told in part three, entitled Wasserman, which is set at the concentration camp. The Jew Wasserman, who had worked in the camp’s latrines but had been selected for extermination, survives all at­tempts at killing him and is brought before the camp’s commander, SS-Sturmbannführer Neigel. Neigel shoots Wasserman, but to no avail—in the ensuing conversation, Neigel dis­co­vers that this is the Wasserman who wrote the stories he read as a child—in fact, apart from the Bible and Karl May, they were all he read. And so he decides Wasserman will stay as his ‘Haus­jude’ and tell him new adventures of the Chil­dren of the Heart in exchange for his life. This way, Wasserman will live up to his pen name, Sheherazade. Wasserman only agrees to this when the deal is turned upside-down: every night, after the story has been told, Neigel will try to shoot Wasserman again. So begins a long and torturous exchange of ideas between the two, in which both keep to their end of the bargain, only to find Wasserman still alive after each execution. The story he now designs for Neigel, however, clearly differs from the earlier ones. The Children of the Heart are now adults, the deranged camp survivors from the

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book’s first section suddenly appear as new characters in their story, and gradually, Wasserman re­vea­ls that the band is now in fact fighting the Nazis. By the time this is disclosed, Neigel is so taken with the story that he hardly protests, having fallen into the trap that Wasserman has set for him: the trap of human identification. Gradually, Neigel acquires a conscience—something normally reserved for the Jews—and has problems ful­fil­ling his hench­man duties, until finally, he is pressured by his second in command, Staukeh, into com­­miting suicide. Upon which Staukeh tries to kill Wasser­man once more, but fails and is drawn into the same fight as his com­mander. As can be expected, large parts of the Was­ser­man-section are dialogue, not only, however, between Neigel and Wasserman, but also, interfering with this diegetic level, between Wasserman and Momik, the very reluctant first-order narrator. The fourth and final section, entitled The Complete Encyclopedia of Kazik’s Life, is rendered by an anonymous instance identified as ‘the editorial staff’. It is an encyclopedic survey of the life of a new character from Children of the Heart, named Kazik, left behind as an infant at the band’s hiding place, who suffers from a disease called progeria or rapid aging, which will compress his whole life-span into just one day. In this section, some of the omissions from the previous parts are filled in, but in the fairly random way of seventy-five encyclo­pe­dia entries. The entries sometimes contain definitions (of historical, philosophical and literary concepts such as ‘Hitler’, ‘Justice’, or ‘Plagiarism’), some­times they offer exemplary por­tions from Kazik’s life story and The Children of the Heart (where detailed biographical information on the new characters introduced in the previous section is given), but in other cases one learns nothing at all about the word in question. Thus, one can find a blank space after the entry ‘LIFE, THE MEANING OF’, and the first entry, LOVE, contains only a cross-reference: ‘see under: SEX’. If one checks there, however, the first paragraph is another cross-reference: ‘See Under: Love’. This last reference, and therefore the title, can be read as a sign of hope, but also as an ironic avowal of failure and autoreferential play. And this, one could claim, is the stake set by Grossman.

part 1 Language from Over There

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chapter 1

Quod Vide, or the Displacement of Meaning in the Narrative Construction of Love Dany Nobus It was like this, a few months after the International Psycho-Analytical Association (IPA) had decided that he should be defrocked as a traininganalyst and therefore barred from analyzing and instructing psychoanalytic trainees, Jacques Lacan resumed his seminar, in another location, on a fresh topic, with a newfound vitality. He did not choose to be victimised, did not wait until the psychoanalytic establishment gave him a second chance, but exploited instead his intellectual and institutional connections in order to continue his mission somewhere else, in front of a different, larger and younger audience. Announcing that he intended to talk about the fundamentals of psychoanalysis (les fondements de la psychanalyse), Lacan actually started with a question concerning the fundamentals of his own position as a teacher: ‘Am I qualified to do so?’, ‘Wherein lies my authority?’ (en quoi y suis-je autorisé?).1 And so he recalled how, despite the fact that he had been delivering a seminar as part of a psychoanalytic training programme for ten years, the IPA had treated him in the same way a Rabbinic council treated Spinoza on 27 July 1656: issuing an institutional excommunication, without the possibility of cancellation, on the grounds of ‘heresy’, similar to how the philosopher had been irrevocably excluded from the Jewish community through the Talmudic writ of cherem (‫)חרם‬.2 It was like this, a few months after I had accepted to participate in an ‘expert meeting’ on David Grossman’s See Under: Love, I started asking myself the same question Lacan formulated on 15 January 1964. What, if anything, authorises me to talk about this book? In what way am I qualified to do so? From what place could I be justified to speak? Who am I to claim any form of expertise in the matter? Needless to say, the questions did not lodge themselves in my mind because I had been the subject of an institutional dismissal, psychoanalytic or otherwise, but almost for exactly the opposite reason: I had been identified by an academic institution as an ‘expert’, which had resulted in me receiving an invitation to be included in the programme, and I had kindly accepted the 1 Lacan 1994: 1. 2 Lacan 1994: 3–4. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���4 | doi ��.��63/9789004280946_��4

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offer to speak. What, if anything, gives me the authority to do so? I have never run any seminars on the Shoah, or the plight of the Jewish people during and after the Second World War, let alone on the so-called ‘Holocaust-literature’ (Elie Wiesel, Primo Levi, Imre Kertész, Robert Antelme, etc.). I am not Jewish and was born in a predominantly Roman-Catholic country whose citizens, although they suffered tremendously at the hands of the occupier during the early 1940s, were never subjected to the same horrifying ordeal as the Jewish people in Central and Eastern European countries. As teenagers during the Great War, my parents no doubt witnessed or at least heard about what the Germans were doing to the Jews, but they never told me about it. As a teenager I myself attended a Roman-Catholic boys’ school, where I learnt about the Holocaust in the history classes, and I remember being puzzled and bemused. At the age of 21, I saw Claude Lanzmann’s ‘film-essay’ Shoah, and remember being shocked and horrified. At the age of 40, when enjoying my Summer with friends at a house in the vicinity of Krakow, I spent a day at AuschwitzBirkenau, and remember being sad and weary. Do these scattered experiences and confrontations, and their associated states of mind, qualify me to talk about See Under: Love? It was like this, a few months after See Under: Love was published in Israel in 1986, David Grossman was taken to task by Holocaust survivors for daring to write about circumstances and events he had not experienced himself. ‘[S]omeone who had not been there did not have the right to write about the Shoah’, Grossman recalled them as saying.3 In an article published in The 3 Grossman 2002: 43. In an extensive review essay of Grossman’s novel, Gershon Shaked commented that ‘[f]or some Israeli critics it was the destruction of a taboo, a sacrilege, for an outsider to enter the secret palace of horror and to succeed in leaving it without being hurt and with a powerful description of the process of this confrontation’. In this case, the argument that only ‘survivors’, i.e. those who ‘had been there’, should be allowed to write about the Holocaust not only represents a restriction of authority to autobiographical memory, but also a refusal of literary fantasy and narrative imagination in favour of historical veracity and authenticity, as if truthfulness can (and should) exist outside the fundamental fictional dimension of all story-telling. In other words, it is proclaimed that one cannot write truthfully about something one has not experienced personally and, vice versa, that only lived experience may generate (and allow for) the production of a truthful account, which is not contaminated by fictional interpretations of circumstances and events. Without entering into any detail, here, about the complex relationship between lived experience and autobiographical memory, the publication of and subsequent controversy surrounding Binjamin Wilkomirski’s Fragments during the 1990s demonstrates that fiction may easily appear as truth, and that truthfulness does not exclude (and may even require) a consistent structure of fiction. See Shaked 1989: 311–323; Wilkomirski 1996; Maechler 2001.

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Guardian in 2007, Grossman disclosed that after the book came out in Israel certain critics actually mentioned that he was the son of Holocaust survivors and thus ‘second generation’, undoubtedly in order to endow his narrative with a higher degree of legitimacy, credibility, acceptability.4 Of course, as he himself has always indicated, Grossman is not the son of Holocaust survivors. He was born and grew up in Israel in the 1950s. His father emigrated from Poland to Palestine in 1936, first working as a bus-driver, and then becoming a librarian in Beit Mazmil, an area in the South West of Jerusalem—Momik’s neighbourhood—which was rebuilt as a housing estate to accommodate new immigrants and renamed Kyriat HaYovel (Jubilee Town). His mother was not a Holocaust survivor either, and not even an immigrant. She was born in Palestine, before the creation of the state of Israel. In light of this, one may indeed feel tempted to ask: What, if anything, authorises David Grossman to write about the Shoah? What makes him qualified to do so? In the aforementioned article in The Guardian, he himself offered an answer. ‘I am not [a Holocaust survivor]’, he admitted, ‘And yet I am. I am the ‘son of Holocaust survivors’ because in my home, too, as in so many Israeli homes, a thread of deep anxiety was stretched out, and with almost every move you made, you touched it. Even if you were very careful, even if you hardly made any unnecessary movements, you still felt that constant quiver of a profound lack of confidence in the possibility of existence.’ Further on in the text, Grossman explained how his personal circumstances prompted him to write: ‘As I grew up, I became increasingly aware that I could not truly understand my life in Israel, as a man, as a father, as a writer, as an Israeli, as a Jew, until I wrote about my unlived life, over there, in the Holocaust. And what would have happened to me had I been over there as a victim, and as one of the murderers.’5 Much like Lacan in January 1964, who categorically opposed the institutional edict declaring him unfit to practice and teach, Grossman decided not to comply with the ruling that, on account of a lack in his ‘lived experience’, he should be prohibited from writing about the Holocaust. As such, he authorised himself to write, giving free rein to the creative powers inside himself, refusing to become a victim of his ‘unlived life’. As he put it at a symposium on ‘The Future of the Holocaust’ in 2001: ‘This book [See Under: Love] was for me—among other things—an attempt to discover how I will no longer be a victim.’6 Victimisation aside, when I read about Grossman’s personal history, his growing up as a Jew in Israel a mere ten years after the Holocaust, I felt that this 4 Grossman 2007. 5 Grossman 2007: 2. 6 Grossman 2002: 6.

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was close enough an experience of the genocide and its aftermath to warrant the writing of See Under: Love. Personally, I did not feel any more authorised than before. And then I read Edmund White’s remarkable review of the book’s English translation, published in the New York Times of 16 April 1989. ‘Undoubtedly “See Under: Love” is one of the most disturbing novels I’ve ever read’, White confessed in the opening line, yet instead of attributing his unease merely to the book’s subject matter he went on to explain how his subjective response was much more determined by the style of the narrative: ‘Best of all, worst of all, this is a book that tricks us into thinking once more about the most painful subject of modern times, one we thought we’d exhausted or that had exhausted our capacity to suffer, to remember, to relive—the Holocaust. (I keep saying ‘we’ instead of ‘I’ because a novel of such epic strength commands a collective, not a personal, response). An advance comment about this book tells us it’s not just a ‘novel of the Holocaust’, but in fact it is the supreme Holocaust novel, because it is precisely an investigation of the difficulty of imagining pure horror, talking about hell-on-earth requires a re-examination of narration itself.’7 I could not agree more, and in agreeing with White’s observation, here, and situating myself within the collectiveness of the required response, it gradually started to dawn on me that, however much the book’s contents and structure may have been inspired by the Shoah, the fate of the Jewish people during and after World War II is somehow secondary in the author’s (and many of his characters’) creative project. For the latter is crucially geared towards an exploration of the significance of story-telling per se for the recuperation of a life that is worth living, in which it is possible to love—crucially geared also towards the invention of a new language, in which life can be loved, and love is brought to life. Realising that See Under: Love is not just, or even primarily about the Holocaust, but about the constructive force of narration in the face of horror, death and destruction, I suddenly felt more comfortable talking about it. For even if, like me, one has not experienced human evil on the same scale as the Jewish people, whether directly or indirectly (as in the case of Grossman), questions concerning the meaning of human existence, the nature of humanity, and the redeeming power of love in a world that seems to thrive on interpersonal violence can and should be posed, regardless of faith and ethnicity. Armed with my newly acquired authorisation, I revisited the book, and started to discover things I had not really noticed before. Obvious though it may appear to many a reader, I never really appreciated how the novel is essentially a story about someone (Shlomo Efraim Neuman aka Momik) who is 7 White 1989.

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telling and writing stories about story-tellers (his great-uncle Anshel Wasserman, Bruno Schulz and, of course, also himself), whose stories have disappeared in the mist of time and the creases of history (Anshel’s serialised ‘Children of the Heart’, the revival of the ‘Children of the Heart’ in Neigel’s barracks, Bruno’s ‘The Messiah’, and Momik’s own failed attempts at writing the stories of Anshel, Bruno and the children’s encyclopaedia of the Holocaust). As such, See Under: Love is hugely complex, multi-layered and, indeed, disturbing, the more so as the narration, with the exception of the last and longest section (‘The Complete Encyclopaedia of Kazik’s Life’), is largely presented as Momik’s internal monologue. If there is any form of dialogue in the first three sections of the book, it constitutes a conversation in which the narrator either does not play an active part in real time (conversations with Ayala, for example, are only ever remembered), or only interacts with personified natural phenomena (the sea and the waves in ‘Bruno’) and imagined historical personae (Bruno the fish; Anshel the undead prisoner). In addition, the style of the narration differs radically from one section to another: the stream of consciousness in ‘Momik’ shifts towards magical realism in ‘Bruno’, changing again to ‘historical’ reconstruction in ‘Wasserman’ before settling on semantic description and explanation in the ‘Encyclopaedia’. Yet none of these styles is followed through rigorously and consistently. ‘Wasserman’ contains strong elements of magical realism and stream of consciousness, just as much as ‘Bruno’ is partly a ‘historical’ reconstruction of Bruno Schulz’s life as a salmon after his escape from the Drohobycz ghetto. And ‘The Complete Encyclopaedia of Kazik’s life’ is neither complete nor an encyclopaedia nor, strictly speaking, about Kazik’s life. Furthermore, the English translation of the novel includes a small glossary at the end, which explains key (but by no means all) words in the language of ‘Over There’, as it is being used by the Holocaust survivors who live in Momik’s neighbourhood. Given the significance of the language of ‘Over There’ in the first section of the book, the glossary may become as much part of the novel as its four constitutive sections, and should therefore not be regarded merely as the author’s (or translator’s) concession to the non-initiated. As a newly authorised reader, I also wondered why the book does not have a glossary of ‘salmonese’, explaining terms like ‘torag’, ‘ning’, ‘dolgan’ and ‘gyoya’ to the nonfish amongst its readership.8 8 The original Hebrew version of the book does not include a glossary of the language of ‘Over There’, and many translations do not have the glossary either. In a personal communication, David Grossman pointed out to me that the Momik section was written last, and that the book originally contained a fifth section, which was subsequently dropped. It should also be noted that Betsy Rosenberg’s English translation—the only one available—is seriously

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Perhaps more importantly, my ‘authorised’ revisit of Grossman’s novel also allowed me to see how the aforementioned questions, about the meaning of human existence, the nature of humanity and the redeeming power of love, find their most poignant expression in its characters’ relentless exploration of who they themselves are, of what they mean to themselves and others, of the place they occupy in their own personal history and the world in which they live. This persistent self-questioning is represented in its most radical, dramatic and unsettling form by the character of Ilya Ginzburg, the ‘Diogenes of the Warsaw ghetto’, who is considered to be one of the 36 righteous people or lamed vavnik (‫)ל'ו ַצ ִד ִיקים‬. Ginzburg is only capable of expressing himself with the endlessly repeated chant ‘Who am I?’, ‘Who am I?’, ‘Who am I?’ (pp. 35, 316).9 Interestingly, annoying and infuriating as it may be, Ginzburg’s mantra does not leave his interlocutors unaffected. Even Fritz Orf, the sadistic SS interrogator at the Paviak in Warsaw, whom Ginzburg decides to visit because it has been brought to his attention that the Nazis know exactly how to extract the truth from people, no longer seems to know who he is and what he is doing, when the horrific torture of his wilful victim, whose enjoyment only seems to increase as the ‘interrogation’ becomes more brutal and painful, merely results in an echo of his own initial question. ‘Well then, who are you?’, Orf exclaims. ‘Who am I! Who am I!’, Ginzburg responds. ‘Now who are you?’, Orf asks again. ‘Who am I? Who?!’, Ginzburg repeats. Eventually, Orf’s anger and frustration give way to bewilderment: ‘There were moments when Orf thought the Jew had come to him in order to help him discover it [the hidden objective truth in the world]. And then he experienced a singular feeling of sympathy and compassion [q.v.], as if the two of them had conducted a difficult new experiment in this room.’ (p. 321). When Ginzburg is taken away by Otto Brig, Orf feels simultaneously relieved and confused: ‘But as Orf watched Otto walk away supporting the bleeding wreck by the waist, he sensed with anguish that perhaps he hadn’t understood what had happened in the interrogation room at all, that perhaps the terrible Jew had, in some strange and unintelligible way, uttered man’s deepest truth.’ (p. 322). Yet ‘Who am I?’ is not just Ilya Ginzburg’s question. The first words Kazik pronounces when he wakes up from his ‘adolescent dormancy’ are ‘Am I—who am I—who—am—I?’ (p. 337). Less explicitly, but equally persistently, the question ‘Who am I?’ also pervades flawed, not only in its choice of words, but also insofar as it is severely truncated (and edited) in places, with entire passages missing or having been ‘summarized’ and ‘synthesized’. 9 Further page references for direct quotations from the book will be included in the body of the text.

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Momik’s quest. From the moment when, as a nine-year-old boy, he is desperate to record and translate his grandfather’s gibberish, to the moment when, as a thirty-four-year-old man, he reveals to the sea that he has finally succeeded in writing Wasserman’s story and the story of Kazik, and is now finishing the story of Bruno, Momik is exclusively driven by the desire to understand who he is, where he is coming from, what he represents as a single, unique, never-to-bereproduced human being. And it is precisely through the telling and writing of the stories of others—Wasserman, Kazik and Bruno—that he endeavours to tell and write his own story, with a little help from his female friends Bella Marcus, Ayala, Ruthie, the sea . . . At a higher level, the question ‘Who am I?’ also presided over David Grossman’s own decision to write See Under: Love. As he explained in 2001 in San Francisco: ‘I wrote this book because no other book that I had read on the Shoah gave me the answer to the question: What would have happened to me had I been there? . . . What would I have done had I been there? As a victim, but also as one of the murderers. What would I have done to maintain my individuality in the face of this total obliteration of me as a human being? What process would I have had to undergo to be transformed into part of the engine of destruction?’10 In light of this admission, one would be tempted to ask Grossman whether he himself succeeded where other books were so manifestly found lacking. Did the writing of See Under: Love generate some kind of answer? Did it help him in solving the puzzle about his own individuality and identity? If so, how exactly did the answer emerge? And, at a more intimate and personal level: What is the answer, then? Exacerbated as it may be by a (direct or indirect) experience of human degradation and extreme interpersonal violence, the question ‘Who am I?’ actually transcends religious, ethnic, social, cultural and political boundaries, to the point where it is, purely and simply, a reflection of the ontological instability and inconsistency of human subjectivity, in its determination by what Lacan designated as ‘the function and field of speech of language’.11 In his seminar Le transfert (Transference), Lacan argued that the unstoppable series of questions with which young children tend to embarrass and infuriate their parents—‘What does it mean to run?’; ‘What does it mean to be cross?’; ‘What is an idiot?’—is not so much evidence of the child’s budding curiosity, its ardent desire to understand the meaning of terms and expressions, but rather an index of a subjective retreat (un recul du sujet) with regard to the usage 10 11

Grossman 2002: 43. Lacan 2006b: 197–268.

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of the signifier, words, language. The child’s questions are less geared towards obtaining a satisfactory answer—and anyone who has attempted answering them will have discovered that answers simply generate more questions— than towards questioning the significance of speech and language as such, whereby the child also expresses its own incapacity to master the symbolic configurations in which it is embedded. Yet in the course of its ‘pseudo-philosophical meditations’, Lacan emphasized, the child will inevitably arrive at the question ‘What am I?’ (que suis-je?), for which it is radically unprepared and to which the standard response of ‘I am a child’, much like any other categorical description, is purely metaphorical and merely constitutes an effect of adults’ eagerness to differentiate themselves as ‘mature grown-up people’.12 There is no reason to assume, however, that the metaphorical responses to the child’s question ‘What am I?’, which capture existence at the level of being (essence) and thereby reduce lived experience to a conceptual element of thought, would be any different when the question arises in the adult. In other words, the inadequacy of the knowledge included in and conveyed by the answer is not conditioned by the ‘fragile’, ‘innocent’ and ‘vulnerable’ existence in which the child is placed, physiologically as well as psychologically. The epistemological inadequacy of the response is characteristic of the human condition, insofar as the symbolic order of language (what Lacan called the Other) does not allow us, as human beings, to fully express our real, unique particularity in any kind of universal.13 In a sense, the inadequacy of the response, here, follows from the fact that the question ‘What am I?’ is indeed but the manifest expression of a much more fundamental problem, namely ‘Who am I?’. In other words, the response will remain forever unsatisfactory precisely because it only describes the ‘what’, without ever reaching into the underlying ‘who’. ‘To [the question] what am I?’, Lacan claimed in his seminar Le Transfert, ‘there is no other answer at the level of the Other than let yourself be [laisse-toi être]. Any precipitation given to this response, whether in the order of dignity, child or adult, is but a way for me to escape the meaning of this let yourself be.’14 12 Lacan 2001b: 286–287. 13 It is the recognition of this fundamental inadequacy which underpinned Lacan’s critique of both Hegel’s notion of ‘absolute knowledge’ (the conjunction of universality and particularity, of the word and the thing) and Descartes’ cogito ergo sum (the conjunction of thinking and existence), and which prompted him to explore the significance of ‫( אהיה אשר אהיה‬Ehieh asher Ehieh, ‘I Am That I Am’, or ‘I Am the One Who Is’), God’s famous words to Moses in Exodus 3:14. Lacan 2006b: 679–680; Lacan 2006a: 343–344; Lacan 1990: 81–95. 14 Lacan 2001b: 288.

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Lacan’s proposed answer, here, is distinctively circular, but also wholly selfreferential, because it pinpoints subjective existence as a state of loneliness and isolation, in which even self-love seems difficult to sustain. And yet, ‘as the psychoanalytic experience has allowed us to unveil’, Lacan continued, the question ‘What am I?’ (or ‘Who am I?’) generally appears under the guise of a ‘What do you want (from me)?’15 Hence, the subject endeavours to find an answer to the question about his or her own subjective existence through an investigation of the Other’s desire. More concretely, the question ‘What is the meaning of my subjective existence?’ is transferred onto the Other as ‘What do I mean for you?’, ‘What place do I occupy in your desire?’, ‘What does it mean for you to acknowledge and appreciate my subjectivity?’. The way in which these ‘Other questions’ are formulated reveals that they are predicated upon the establishment of an emotional bond or, alternatively, upon an attribution of knowledge, and therefore upon a certain pre-supposition that the Other is in possession of a certain knowledge (about me), and has the power to articulate it.16 Yet if the emotional bond and the attribution of knowledge are real, their full realisation is as much an illusion as it is an impossibility. For the Other is equally incapable of generating unequivocal answers, assuming that answers to the questions are being generated in the first place. It is as if the Other can only respond with an echo of the question. ‘What do I mean for you?’ ‘You are meaningful to me.’ What the Other wants (from me), whether the Other just wants to be wanted, or wants more than that, will remain elusive and will only ever receive an (unsatisfactory) answer at the level of the subject’s fantasy which, for Lacan, is no more no less than an answer to the desire of the Other.17 How does all of this relate to love? What’s love got to do with it? What’s this thing called love, in the context of the ontological instability of subjective existence? Is love but a name for a certain type of fantasy? Is it the name for a fantasy which, owing to its psychic consolidation as an exclusive answer to what the other wants (that is to say ‘me’ and ‘nothing but me’), becomes difficult to reconcile with passion, eroticism, sexual attraction? How does all of this 15 Lacan 2001b: 288–289. 16 Anyone familiar with Lacan’s definition of transference as sujet-supposé-savoir (subject supposed to know, or supposed subject of knowing), will now understand the relevance of this discussion of the ‘What am I?’ for the topic of his 1960–61 seminar. 17 In Seminar XI, Lacan ‘decomposes’ the fantasy into two logical operations, alienation and separation, and situates the question ‘What does the Other want?’ at the end point of separation, which does not ‘complete’ the fantasy, but which, on account of its ‘impossible’ answer, throws the subject back into the realm of alienation (to the symbolic order), thus constituting the fantasy as a constitutive rather than constituted mental function, which is perennially unfinished and always open to revision. See Lacan 1994: 203–215.

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relate to Grossman’s See Under: Love? It is not my intention, within the space of this essay, to engage in a lengthy, detailed discussion of Lacan’s theory of love, which shifts from love as a fantasmatic expression of desire (in Seminar VIII) to love as a kind of writing that substitutes for the absence of a sexual relationship (in Seminar XX), but rather to re-examine the question ‘What/Who am I?’, and its corollaries, from the perspective of the narrative construction of love in Grossman’s novel.18 Would Lacan’s theory of love, which is predominantly a theory of desire, have been different had it been based on a reading of See Under: Love, rather than on Plato’s Symposium? What can we learn about love, and the relationship between human subjectivity and the symbolic order, from Grossman’s novel that is original, new, different from Lacan’s theories? What I am proposing, here, is therefore not the application of (Lacanian) psychoanalytic theory to a work of literature, in this case See Under: Love, but the application of the literary text to the field (and the accumulated knowledge) of psychoanalysis, through which the doctrine of psychoanalysis may appear, profitably and productively, as an intrinsically unfinished and ‘unfinishable’ knowledge, or what Lacan himself designated as a ‘knowledge in failure’ (savoir en échec).19 It was like this, a few months after I started working my way through See Under: Love I decided to read Grossman’s previous and subsequent novels, as if I was somehow hoping to be better equipped and more authorised in my commentary on the book’s internal logic when situating it within a broader series of narrations. With hindsight, I am not convinced that my ‘contextualisation’ made me feel any more confident and competent, yet it did help me understand how See Under: Love, as a story about the narrative construction of love in its multiple storytellers’ stories, extends and develops, without repetition or duplication, many of the themes that run through Grossman’s other novels. The Smile of the Lamb, Grossman’s first novel (originally published in 1983), tells the story of how a young Israeli soldier (Uri) serving in the occupied West Bank attempts to come to terms with the questions presiding over his own life-history through his relationship with an old 18 19

See Lacan 1998. Lacan 2001a: 13. In this text, Lacan also suggests that psychoanalysis should not be applied to literature, but that the opposite operation, literature being applied to psychoanalysis, is eminently sensible, given that the ‘mystery’ (what needs to be explained and clarified) is not on the side of literature, but on the side of psychoanalysis. For an astute critical response to this principle, which is not devoid of its own inconsistencies, see: Bayard 2004. For more mainstream psychoanalytic readings of Grossman’s book, see Baum 2000; Bernstein 2005.

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Palestinian storyteller.20 Hence, the figure of Momik in See Under: Love, whose stories are culled from and constructed through a dialogue (often taking the form of an internal monologue) with mystical, mysterious and often ambiguous characters (Wasserman, Bruno, the sea), and who uses these stories in order to define his own identity, somehow refers to Uri in The Smile of the Lamb. And in showing how both Momik and Uri, despite the different personal circumstances they have to face, are animated by the same quest, and manage to find some form of answer through a similar process, Grossman demonstrates again that the permanent search for subjective truth (and the redeeming power of love) detailed in See Under: Love does not just inhabit those people who have been directly or indirectly affected by the Holocaust. Yet See Under: Love can not only be cross-referenced to The Smile of the Lamb. Five years after the former book was released, Grossman published The Book of Intimate Grammar, in which a young boy (Ahron Kleinfeld) tries to heal sick, ‘polluted’ words by admitting them to hospital, where they are being subjected to complicated ‘purification rituals’, so that their true meaning can be restored.21 One is involuntarily reminded, here, of Bruno’s obsession with the ‘fabulous dawning of the Age of Genius’ (p. 126), ‘the day the world would shed its scales like a fabulous lizard’ (p. 90), which he communicates to Momik from his Sanitorium [a kind of hospital] under the Sign of the Hourglass (p. 170). The project is tantamount to the re-creation of language (p. 175), to its re-invention as a set of words that are no longer mere fragments, and it crucially rests upon an act of love, which is why Bruno appears to Momik as the ‘Don Juan of language’, the ‘ingenuous architect of a singular linguistic experience’ (p. 165). And then there is Grossman’s Be My Knife, originally published in 1998, in which a thirty-threeyear-old married bookseller by the name of Yair Einhorn falls in love with a mysterious woman called Miriam at a class-reunion.22 Yair decides to write her a personal letter and when, much to his surprise, he receives a response, the angst-ridden man and his equally troubled lover embark upon a lengthy, disturbing, and transformative epistolary affair. Yair’s relationship with Miriam conjures up Momik’s relationship with the sea, who is both distant and near, kind as well as cruel, simultaneously selfish and hospitable, at once hermetically closed and perfectly accessible. But the way in which Miriam’s words become mingled with Yair’s, the intimate correspondence (in both meanings of the term) between the two lovers, their joint effort at finding each other in their mutual confessions, their desire to write a new, joint story together, 20 21 22

Grossman 2003a. Grossman 1994. Grossman 2003b.

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and their search for the purity of meaning, also bring to mind how Momik’s inventions become entangled with Wasserman’s—‘‘Perhaps you wonder,’ said Anshel Wasserman at last, ‘why I am so generously allowing you [Momik] to mix your own creations into my story?’’ (p. 226)—and, once again, Bruno’s anticipation of the Age of Genius.23 What emerges from my brief exercise in comparative literature, here, is that See Under: Love can easily be cross-referenced to other novels by Grossman and vice versa, as if the ‘quod vide’ (the ‘see under’; ayen erekh (‫ )עיין ערך‬in the book’s title does not just refer to its prevailing theme, but also invites the reader to explore the narration and the narrative construction of love elsewhere, in other books, those written by David Grossman, but no doubt also those crafted by numerous other writers. Yet the displacement of meaning suggested by this very ‘quod vide’ of course also, and most crucially, refers to the way in which the book’s internal narrative is being unfolded, by Grossman as well as by his characters. As I pointed out above, See Under: Love, is immensely complex in its multi-layered and stylistically diverse approach to the narration of Momik’s story. Yet at the same time the writing (Grossman’s as well as Momik’s, Bruno’s and Wasserman’s) does not follow a linear pattern of exposition, which implies that the reader can enter, leave and rejoin the book at any given point in place and time. Although, strictly speaking, the Momik section comes first, there is no reason as to why the reader cannot start with the Bruno section or, indeed, with Wasserman and the Encyclopaedia, the latter two pieces having been finished (or so he says) by Momik when he visits the sea at Tel Aviv (p. 98). One may even be led to contemplate the possibility of the reader starting with Bruno, observing how Momik reveals to the sea how he has finished Wasserman and the Encyclopaedia, and interrupting her reading of Bruno to start with the Encyclopaedia, in which the first entry is love (p. 305), following the ‘quod vide’ to sex (p. 376), only to see that the sex entry first of all states ‘See Under: love’ before describing a seemingly irrelevant or at least rather unexpected discussion between Wasserman and Neigel, whose context can only be appreciated after reading the Wasserman section. Despite, or perhaps by virtue of its stylistic complexity, the book is therefore intrinsically cross-referential. Although the ‘quod vide’ only appears literally, that is to say textually (and as one would expect) in the Encyclopaedia section, without therefore cross-referencing consistently all of the terms–the word ‘decision’ in the entry on ‘suffering’ (p. 389), for example, is not cross-referenced to the actual entry on ‘decision’ (p. 331)—all of the other sections, including the 23

For Grossman’s personal reflections upon the various elements linking his novels, see Wheelwright 2002.

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glossary of the language of ‘Over There’, are saturated with implicit quod vide’s. All of the key characters wandering around Momik’s neighbourhood re-appear in the Encyclopaedia, including the child Kazik, who first appears to Momik during an illness-induced state of hallucination (p. 78). Hence, if the displacement of meaning that is generated by the quod vide in the title See Under: Love transports the reader to other texts, outside the book’s narrative space and time, this centrifugal semantic transportation also crucially reflects a key feature of the narrative construction of love inside the book. Because the words of the narration are preceded by quod vide, it may appear as entirely circular and self-referential, yet I would prefer to argue that whatever self-referential elements the composition may contain—for ‘love’ see ‘sex’; for ‘sex’, see ‘love’—it moves beyond self-referencing in its constant addition of new layers of narrative and innovative swathes of meaning, without this semantic accumulation ever resulting in ‘meaning’ itself becoming finished, final, complete. Bruno’s ‘Age of Genius’ is never realised; the world never fully sheds its scales; words will always remain but ‘fragments of primeval stories’ (p. 90); the ‘singular linguistic experience’ is never fully accomplished (p. 165). Full meaning can only be reached at an asymptotical point, in endless anticipation of a place and time that will never really come to pass. If the ‘Age of Genius’ is Bruno’s take on Hegel’s absolute knowledge, then Grossman’s is a fictional attempt, driven by the act and style of narration rather than by the contents of the narrative, at demonstrating the fundamental and irreparable failure of words in capturing the meaning of human existence. Grossman does not merely echo, here, Lacan’s critique of Hegel’s ‘end of history’. For if Lacan’s answer to the ‘ontological instability of human existence’, which takes the question ‘What/Who am I?’ into the realm of love as fantasy, and therefore as a determined answer to the whimsical, meandering, indeterminacy of the desire of the Other—as a ‘secondary’, ‘Ersatz-like’ response to what is essentially an irremediable gap in subjectivity—Grossman’s perspective is almost exactly the opposite, and therefore much more optimistic about the redeeming power of love. For Lacan, (the discourse of) love follows desire, whereas for Grossman desire follows (the discourse of) love. Talking about his wife Sarah to Momik, Wasserman concedes: ‘[S]he, too, had swallowed my stories in her childhood, and because of them she came to me . . .’ (p. 258) Endowed with the power of destruction rather than the power to create, Neigel nonetheless tries to awaken and sustain his wife’s desire by sending her Wasserman’s stories, as if he himself had written them and was sending them to her as a gift of love, only to discover that his ‘crime of plagiarism’ has the opposite effect: instead of falling in love with him again, his wife decides to leave him. Similarly, Momik is unable to sustain Ayala’s desire because he

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cannot commit himself to the narrative construction of love. Desperate, forlorn and embittered he cannot enter Ayala’s ‘White Room’, where ‘there are no ready-made answers’, where ‘nothing is explicit’, where ‘it’s all merely possible’ (p. 124), where ‘everything comes out of your own self, out of your own guts’ (p. 210), and which is as empty as the notebook from which Wasserman reads his stories of the revival of the Children of the Heart to Neigel (p. 252). Only after Ayala has given him Bruno Schulz’s The Street of Crocodiles (p. 99) does Momik pluck up the courage to enter the White Room, spurred on by his grandfather’s insistence that it is necessary, very necessary (p. 279). And the continuous displacement of meaning in the narrative construction of love does not make the narrators weary about the value of their efforts. If anything, the fact that the language of the narrative will only ever approach the Age of Genius, without ever realising it fully, makes them feel more alive, more aware of the invaluable opportunity to endlessly create and re-create. Initially lost for words, Momik suddenly finds direction in his narratives of Wasserman, Kazik and Bruno, narratives through which he creates himself as much as he creates his characters, yet the realisation that meaning is constantly displaced does not make him stop in his tracks. If anything, he starts to move more than ever before, moving himself and others in the process, and whereas he was once ‘trapped in Zeno’s paradox’ (p. 105), immobilized because of his recognition of the impossibility of movement, he is now able to experience a passion for the future. Much like Bruno the salmon, who re-enters the cycle of life animated by a mysterious, yet ineradicable ning—this unique life-force which Grossman has elsewhere captured with the Jewish legend of the luz (the small bone at the tip of the spine which represents the essence of the human soul)—Momik begins to regain his appetite for life, whereby the transformative power of the journey and the process of finding one’s direction far outweighs the risk that the endpoint will never be reached, or that it will only be reached at the risk of sacrifice, pain, suffering and death.24 When Ayala tells Momik ‘Not See Under: Love, Schlomik! Go love! Love!’, the injunction does not curb the displacement of meaning in the narrative construction of love—and this is precisely, I think, why Grossman did not decide to stop his novel there—but it forces Momik to see the quod vide as a special opportunity. It forces him to start the process of narration, not just as a rewriting of the past, or as a way to give shape to the past in the reconstruction of his own personal history, but as an iterative, cyclical story-telling that will shape the future, his future and the future of all those people who are capable and willing to love. And because the narration is not just a way to give shape 24

Grossman 2007.

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to the past, its historical accuracy is less important than the direction it gives and the desire it awakens. Just as much as Wasserman has to confess to Momik that he has never been very accurate and precise in his stories (p. 248), the narrator—Momik, but also every one of us, human subjects—who embarks on the project to go and love should not be concerned about the errors in the story.25 Errors, too, are opportunities for correction, although in correcting them more errors may be committed, ad infinitum. Grossman’s answer to the question ‘Who am I?, then, is as simple as it is creative, in every possible sense of the word: ‘I am the one who wants to love . . .’ 25 In Living in the End Times, Slavoj Žižek makes a similar point with regard to the function of narration in the two novellas included in Grossman’s Her Body Knows. The way in which Shaul (in the first novella ‘Frenzy’) and Rotem (in the second novella that also gives the book its title) tell their stories of jealousy and betrayal demonstrates ‘the transformative power of storytelling’, but also that ‘what actually happened is beside the point’ and becomes irrelevant on account of ‘the need to construct alternate fictional realities’. Historical accuracy is not particularly relevant, here, and one could even say that the lack of consideration for historical accuracy is a necessary pre-condition for the language/ discourse of love to unfold. See Grossman 2005; Žižek 2010: 57.

chapter 2

Guerrilla War with Words—The Language of Resistance to the Shoah Olga Kaczmarek 1

The Literary Performative and Its Subversive Power [. . .] Momik can translate just about anything. He is the translator of the royal realm. He can even translate nothing into something. Okay, that’s because he knows there’s no such thing as nothing, there must be something, nu, that’s exactly like Grandfather Anshel, who also eats like a bird, peck and gulp, only slightly more frightenedly than Grandma Henny, probably because they had to eat so fast Over There, like the Jews in Egypt on the eve of Passover. (S 35)

Momik interprets compulsively. Just like his Grandma Henny and Grandfather Anshel eat with haste and fear, both of them Holocaust survivors. Anshel Wasserman is in fact a distant uncle, but in the fragmented reality of Jewish relationships after the Shoah, where Momik’s numerous names, the real ones and the ones Grandma kept calling him, are all in the memory of ‘So-and-So’, any chance of creating a sense of family immediacy is grasped by the boy, while met with a sense of doom by his mother. She is taken by fear at the sight of another messenger form Over There in blue striped pyjamas threatening the weak balance of her new life. A non-existent balance really. Just like the state of Israel at the time (as many commentators emphasize), in the late 1950s, the Neumans are trying to avoid openly discussing the Shoah and limit their interest in the world of their origins to the daily ritual of listening to the radio programme helping new immigrants find their relatives. This is as much as little Momik is allowed to comprehend of all this—that maybe some of the names on the list given to him by Papa will appear on the radio. They never do. Nevertheless they are a part of the disconcertingly incoherent linguistic reality which surrounds Momik. The reality he is continuously trying to translate. The term ‘linguistic reality’ may sound misleadingly detached here. But this novel, so very conscious of its wordly character, both exists as part of a certain logosphere and parasites on it, along with the Bakhtinian formula of the

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relationship between literature and the communicative reality.1 The language seems to be preconceived here as the medium through which the boy enters the world and is expected to settle in it—but fails to do so. This becomes even more evident when this sphere reveals cracks. The Hebrew of the everyday life turns out to have blank spots, is filled by the boy’s parents and neighbours with words which seem void, sounds which do not resonate for Momik with an immediate meaning and because they are forbidden to him, they become menacing. If the reality of words which he lives in should function as a home, not only a tool for organizing the external chaos, but the very ground for beingin-the-world, then here it seems draughty. I let myself be led by this image of language which is home or at least suggests itself in this function, for various reasons, one of them being the association with Bruno Schulz’s short story. The presence of the language of Over There within the language Momik knows, has a quality to be found in The Gale, the last but one story in The Street of Crocodiles. While it might seem that the house is protected from the menacing gale outside, it is draughty. The gale originated from the fermented darkness in the attic and then flooded the town, while ‘our rooms trembled gently, and the pictures rattled on the walls, the windowpanes shone with the greasy reflection of the lamp. The curtains swelled with the breath of that stormy night.’2 When people enter the house from the outside, they let the wind in for a moment. ‘They spoke almost incoherently of the terrible darkness, the gale. Their fur coats, soaked with wind, now smelled of the open air. They blinked in the light; their eyes, still full of night, spilled darkness at each flutter of the eyelids.’3 The language Momik lives in is under a similar siege of the ungraspable external reality which finds its way into it too. As the first part of See Under: Love continues, the boy tries to tame this threat—the result of it being that

1 I am building here largely on the interpretation of Bakhtin’s term ‘logosphere’ produced by Agnieszka Karpowicz in her book in progress Słowa, obrazy, rzeczy, działania. Codzienność w sztuce—sztuka w codzienności. In this perspective logosphere is constituted by the entirety of the linguistic experience of a subject within a certain community or society. This includes dialogues, texts, adverts, announcements, notes, as well as silences and the context which participates in constitution of meanings. Literature is then but one of the elements of the logosphere. It does not occupy a central position in it, but it draws on whatever can be encountered in such broadly understood reality of communication, ‘it is not a substance, but an unceasing movement, a relation to something, which takes on a material form’ [translation mine]. 2 Schulz 1979: 120. 3 Schulz 1979: 121.

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Over There and the Nazi Beast shall blast out the fortress of the Neuman home from within.4 Momik’s parents, just like other older inhabitants of his eerie neighbourhood of Jerusalem, are haunted by Over There, which comes back in the hasty, abrupt way in which they eat, the nightly screams of the father, his aversion to touch, the mother’s nervousness. They all have strange numbers on their forearms, which ‘weren’t written in ink and they couldn’t be washed off with water or spit’ (S 18). None of this however is explained to Momik. Neither are the presumably more positive memories of his Grandma—the names, the places, the people on pictures, the books. Instead his mother tries to build a wall of words around him, to make sure she spells out all the threats that can await him in his everyday life, to ensure his safety. ‘Don’t open the door to anyone.’ ‘Don’t turn on the heater, even if it gets cold.’ ‘Don’t drink soda out of the refrigerator.’ With all the child’s acute sense of observation and certainty that there is a whole world concealed from him, Momik plays his parents’ game eagerly, to a certain point, even singing the Israeli national anthem in his pretended sleep to make them see how secure he is and how distant from Over There. Despite this child’s pretence, Momik is a constant translator. He notes down all the little traces of the reality he increasingly identifies with Over There, segregates them, checks up in the encyclopaedia. Piling up, the words call for meanings and some logic is always to be found behind them. The focalisation through the little boy justifies the characteristic style which echoes all the linguistic clichés Momik is exposed to from the public sphere: the names of parties, Ben-Gurion, whom Papa hated for being in power, ‘Our Sages of Blessed Memory’ and ‘Dr. Herzl, Seer of the Nation at the Twenty-third Zionist Congress’. The stylization typically resembling the speech of a child developing in an intensely political environment mixes up with the words and phrases in Yiddish (many of them particularly striking for the Polish reader of the English edition, like pshakrev or pojomkes ‘which could in fact be yagedes’), themselves remnants of the life Over There, as well as the words of which Momik only gets the sounds and tries to reconstruct both their spelling and the meanings. ‘Sondar of the Commando’. ‘Herrneigel’. ‘The camps’ and ‘the Nazi Beast.’ In order to understand the strange language, the boy produces a stunning—if incoherent (‘So much was missing. The main thing was missing he felt 4 Małgorzata Smorąg-Goldberg treats The Gale as a codified impression of a pogrom, not necessarily a direct testimony, but a metaphorical pattern rendering the experience of a pogrom. This interpretation brought me to the comparison of the narrative of Schulz’s story with the intrusion of the language of the Shoah into Momik’s world. Cf.: Smorag-Goldberg 2008.

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sometimes’, S 29)—heroic narrative of his father as the commander in a war against the Nazi Beast Over There. Then he himself sets out on a war with the Nazi Beast. The literary effect or the disturbing power of the child’s attempts at understanding the words haunting him, draws of course on what the reader brings in with him or her. In other words, the narrative operates here always with reference to the reality that is not explicitly laid out in the novel and is in fact being contradicted by the text. The most elementary literary principle employed in See Under: Love is then the constant tension between the stories Momik tells himself in the first part or the ones he narrates in various forms in the following parts on the one side, and the already told reality of the Shoah on the other, closed and determined. Thus See Under: Love is a novel permanently permeated with self-consciousness, an auto-commentary, but it also seems to define this external reality, which at every stage is explicitly or implicitly the novel’s point of reference, in textual terms. In the first part, Momik, the implicit presence of the Shoah within the logosphere takes up a form of not so much a text, but, as we have seen, undefined words and expressions, as well as silences. However the following parts involve adult Shlomo, around whom the noose of texts about the Holocaust, all the books, articles, documents and personal accounts found and read in Yad Vashem, has already tightened. They have the quality of an unalterable menace. From the historical facts it is translated into the structure of the fixed, unquestionable texts, which Shlomo has read in order to know all about Over There, in an attempt to comprehend. This is the point when the dense and oblique metaphor of the White Room calls for being mentioned—for the first but not the last time. When Shlomo spends his first night with Ayala, who ‘does not write, but she does write her life’ (S 123), she tells him about the White Room which was squeezed into being in Yad Vashem Institute. She says it is: ‘a tribute from all the books, all the pictures and words and films and facts and numbers about the Holocaust at Yad Vashem to that which must remain forever unresolved, forever beyond our comprehension. And that’s the essence of it [. . .]’. (S 121) All this content ‘flows out of the corridors’, as she described it, and is ‘projected into it’ (S 124), becoming a source for individual reflexion upon the Shoah. At this point it can be said that the White Rooms as a literary trope encompasses the clash between the external language I discussed before and the internal language of the novel in its fictional aspect. The White Room is exactly where such tension between the hard facts and their imagined contestation originates and turns out to be necessary. The inhumane irreparability and finality of the death of Bruno Schulz is formulated in this novel in the often repeated phrase of the SS-man, Felix Landau: ‘You killed my Jew. In that case

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I will now kill your Jew.’5 What the narrative is desperately trying to achieve is creating a space in which this irreparability can be resisted and reversed, a space where language is no longer definitive. The unique enterprise undertaken in See Under: Love can be better understood if we observe the way the words and sentences generally operate in novels. Applying the speech act theory to literature, Richard Ohmann writes: It may seem odd to claim that illocutionary acts play a part in our constructing the fictional world of a novel [. . .]. But of course the very estimate that they are to be taken as facts, and held in mind as part of the fictional world, is an estimate of illocutionary force. [. . .] We might say that the building of a fictional world to accompany a novel, play, poem, or other fictional form is an exchange between writer and reader through the medium of illocutionary acts. In fact, the imitation of reality that takes place in literature can only happen in this way.6 If the essence of literary fiction is to create its own world of reference, then it has to do so through speech acts.7 The basic condition of felicity of such illocutions is the reader’s eagerness to accept every sentence as constituting this world and possibly having inferable consequences. This mechanism is of course also the basic layer of the way sentences function in Grossman’s novel. However, right after this new fragmentary reality of Momik and other characters is accepted into being, in the specific ontic status literature offers, it is put into struggle with the facts as we know them from the outside. I would venture to say that yet another kind of performativity is involved here. Since whatever has been said about the Holocaust is equipped with a very strong quality of finitude, of inalterability, any attempts at fictionalizing some aspects of it, creating situations that are parallel to the real ones, but fantastic, meet with resistance. Such fantasy is almost blasphemous.8 Therefore whenever the narrative 5 David Grossman ascribes these words to Felix Landau, the SS-man, under whose charge Bruno Schulz was at the time of his death. The story comes from Jerzy Ficowski’s book on Schulz Regions of the Great Heresy, which tells the story slightly differently—it was Landau who killed a Jew working for another SS-man, Karl Günther, and it was him, who uttered the phrase—and later shot Schulz. Grossman himself mentions this version of the story in his article on Bruno Schulz (Grossman 2009). 6 Ohmann 1972: 55. 7 An elaboration of the notion that unlike stories told in oral cultures, literature itself creates its own world image, which justifies it, can be found in Godlewski 2008: 377–382. 8 The evidence of that are the numerous Holocaust accounts which caused shock and were rejected, once it was established that they were fictitious. Similar doubts were raised on the

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includes a speech act such as ‘I woke out of a sound sleep and knew for certain that Bruno had not been murdered in the Drohobycz ghetto in 1942. He had escaped’, it clashes with all that is known of the writer’s death. In this case the illocution is preceded by a lengthy description of Bruno’s escape to Danzig and his jump into the sea. The laboriously built up story is suddenly undermined, and yet it goes on—Shlomo continues telling it. This is an example of a literary performativity in what can be described as a dynamic sense, where the words construct the literary reality but can never achieve an easy felicity. They are not simply infelicitous though. They keep being undermined by what really happened and yet this fictitious world holds on. Such relationship between the language of fiction and the facts outside it is intentionally subversive. The Holocaust cannot be reversed or ignored but it can be coped with through local acts of opposition to the discourse of it—one of which being the linguistic act which is the novel. This same act, written out on the voices of numerous characters, is Shlomo’s narrative of his subjectivity. Through a structure of prosopopeia, as it should perhaps be described, his chaotic actions and impulses, seemingly lacking in a common thread are consolidated around the issue of the Shoah. Paul Ricoeur writes that identity splits in experience into two separate spheres of selfquestioning, ‘what am I?’ and ‘who am I?’.9 The first one allows for creating a static self-image in terms of personality, the other—the continuity in action, incomparable to the former and inherently ethical. What allows us to build a bridge over this abyss is the narrative identity. As such, it can be said to be of literary character in the way in which literary narrative manages in retrospective to encompass the unpredictability of events into the final necessity of the story. This short and simplified exposition of Ricoeur’s concept offers perhaps a frame to understand how the novel performs the self-definition of Shlomo. He says he finds himself in Zeno’s paradox, where he cannot move from one moment to another, unable to find any continuity. However, through the story he tries to transgress this impasse. I would not venture to say that he achieves any full unity of his self through the story though, no one grand narrative. It implies that there is no final self-knowledge, which seems quite clear from the way the story keeps evading his authority over it. There is no teleological structure to this subjectivity, no absolute truth of his identity, which he could attain

occasion of the appearance of Jonathan Littell’s novel Les Bienveillantes. However, this might also be considered a more common and private reader’s experience—we expect only truth to come from the mouth of the victims. 9 Ricoeur 1992: 140–168.

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in the movement.10 The only unity seems to lie in embracing the fragmentation. Such vision corresponds with the concept of linguistic performativity I discussed before—it is dynamic and such subjectivity is in constant need for ever more speech acts, it can never be fixed once and for all. One of the ways to distinguish between the parts of See Under: Love is through their relationship to the reality outside the novel. As I have shown before, in Momik the little boy is trapped in the cognitive process—not understanding the words around him, he explains them using the heroic framework he has at hand and tries to act against the threat as he sees it. The narrator remains close to his perspective and the contrast with the real meaning is at once seemingly unintentional and relatively safe. The figure of a child makes the fantasies of the royal realm Over There quite justifiable. However, the next part brings in adult Shlomo, who decides to wade in the fantasy, knowing all the facts already.11 The principle of the reaction to them presented in this part is flee from reality, radical negation of it. He starts with the denial of Bruno’s death. He does it through a subjective statement—he says he woke up and knew. The story of Bruno jumping into the sea and becoming a salmon, which is told by Shlomo and the Sea to each other, when he goes to Poland, is never disclaimed as a dream, fantasy or hallucination. It becomes an individual linguistic act of opposition to the language allowing the sentences starting with ‘You killed my Jew . . .’, an act which denies both the murderous element of it and the terrible appropriation of a human being contained in it. Shlomo liberates Bruno both from death and from being in possession of Landau. The sea becomes the space of changeable forms, where fate is abolished. And it is with Bruno that Shlomo tries to learn to produce a speech act of absolute freedom. ‘Because what more can a mortal do than decide his own destiny? (I can say things like this with such a deep inner conviction that they sound sincere to me.) This is a desperate decision and the chances of succeeding are slim indeed, but your chances, Bruno, no longer interest you: they belong to other realms. To the realms of the first personal plural, where one is weighed on 10

11

In that respect I disagree with Peter Vermeulen’s suggestion (see chapter 8) that Encyclopeadia might be the part closing the circular process of self-realization. Especially as the temporality of the novel is not parallel to the sequence of parts. Throughout this chapter I consciously refrain from closing the novel within frames of a psychoanalytic interpretation, which might suggest itself as obvious considering the presence and importance of motifs typically interesting from such perspective. I am of the opinion that it would result in a more schematic reading, rather than one revealing the original complexity of Grossman’s work. Nevertheless psychoanalytic approach has been successfully employed in reading this novel (Baum 2000).

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scales: ‘My Jew for your Jew’; ‘According to my calculations, I killed only two and a half million.’, etcetera’ (S 165). The Sea, another grand metaphor of this novel, is both jealous and full of contempt for ‘her’, the Land, where meanings and acts are finite. The Sea has the quality of potentiality which does not determine anything ultimately and does not allow to pass authoritative judgments on others. It dissolves time— Bruno spent ‘an eternity and a half’ in it. It leads to the radical consequences of Bruno’s return to Drohobycz, to which I shall come back later. However, at this final point it fails to narrate Shlomo and, as was mentioned, he desperately needs that. At the last moment the Sea tells him: ‘you like to wade in sometimes, but you prefer to stick close to ‘her’, in case of danger [. . .]. Yes, Neuman, you are a cautious one. I would say definitely a peninsular type.’ (S 184). If we want to interpret the sea as the sphere of absolute freedom of the creative force of literary language, which can in fact even defeat the pressure of the facts of death and give Bruno this full unrestrained existence, then Shlomo is unable or unwilling to carry it fully. The next part, Wasserman, reinforces the language as dynamically opposing the reality of the death camp. If Bruno was based on one act of utter denial, escape from the circumstances, time and space into fantasy, the part entitled Wasserman contains a whole sequence of little acts of opposition within the constraints of a real situation. The first one is, again, the denial of death. Shlomo enters the reality of the camp, encrusted with all the meticulously collected historical details, accompanied by or in fact accompanying Grandfather Anshel. From this point on he will observe him entangled in a bizarre rapport with the commander of the camp, Obersturmbannführer Neigel. Anshel turns out to be unable to die, he has survived the gas chamber, the gas truck, the shooting. The paradoxical effect of this situation is the essence of the humor of this part. Anshel explains Neigel’s shock and fear to Momik: ‘A Jew who cannot die! What if other Jews were to catch on to undying now?’ (S 191). He even tries to console Neigel, offering him the German passion for statistics—what is one undying Jew when millions die without fail. The grotesque potential of such sentences lies in a confrontation of the unquestionabilty of the Jewish fate in the camp with a similarly authoritative power literature can have. I say it can have it because in a way the Austinian category of felicitous and infelicitous speech act is at stake here. The narrative challenges the power of the real Shoah with the power of literary words to create a sphere of resistance, to say that Anshel is unkillable and to show the consequences of it. It is as if the objective was to probe the limits, see how far we can get in literature with denying. This potential felicity is translated to the plot, to which I shall come back later, but it is also the felicity of the speech act in face of the reader, who might accept this

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kind of blasphemous fiction and start this struggle with the Shoah or reject it. It may be reduced to whether the reader will read the novel or put it down, but is also a question of whether he or she will agree to enter the White Room and make this experience his own, as Alaya demands from Momik, or will he or she decide to remain on the level of facts. Taking away Wasserman’s ability to die is the fundamental act behind this chapter, but it is also alike to what Wasserman will go on doing throughout. From now on he will embody the literary performative both flirting with and struggling against Neigel’s pressure. The story within a story structure of this part allows for further exploration of this subversive power of literature. Wasserman, Scheherezade à rebours, reverses the position of Neigel too. The omnipotent commander is forced to subordinate to the story. When Anshel suddenly changes the setting from the lepek mine to the Warsaw zoo, he cannot object. The fiction becomes rigid but not in its logic of verisimilitude but in its absurdity. Wasserman ruthlessly deprives Neigel of continuity and plausible time and space relationships, but he does not entirely violate the conventions of the children’s story he is supposedly telling. Wasserman is exactly taking up his old conventions of The Children of the Heart, thus granting the story the basic felicity, and the stretches the conventions to their limits. He agrees to tell the story but informs Neigel that the characters have aged and are now sixty five or seventy and their adventures will be even more fantastic (S 209). The performative again has two layers. First, Wasserman is creating a framework of the world or in fact is operating upon the one Neigel remembers from the childhood book. Second, however, he will go on modifying it step by step, despite Neigel’s growing opposition. While Neigel presumably seeks childish carelessness and a right to naivety, Wasserman gradually infuses the story with the reality of Nazi occupation and a sense of decay. Constantly exposing his listener to the arbitrariness of fiction, he contradicts himself. He brings back Otto, Paula and Fried, only to soon state that Otto is ill. Having persuaded Neigel that it is unavoidable, he says: ‘Other than poor Otto, you will no doubt be happy to hear that all the others are in good health’ (S 234). However, soon the narrative ventures another contradictory twist—another character, Paula, is dead. Neigel’s desperate appeal to the continuity of the story—Paula was cooking soup just a moment earlier—is useless again. ‘Good hot soup our Paula prepared for us, every evening she prepares it, thick as porridge; only she died’ (S 235). The conventional perception of time in the story is thus disturbed, Paula both is dead and lives. It is a metaphor of the victims of the Shoah—who perish but at once can never be quite buried, because no adequate mourning process was ever accomplished. It is then perhaps a metaphor of the work of memory of those who survived.

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However, again the words operate on two levels here—they set the reader on a track of deciphering the metaphor, but within the narrative Neigel is confused at the lack of logic in the story, it is almost a failed literary performative. And yet Wasserman does not give up. He does once surrender to the commander’s fury and backs out from the idea to locate the story in the Warsaw ghetto. Neigel shouts: You, like all people in love with words and talk, think everyone else is susceptible as you are to their magic power. [. . .] You’re waging a guerrilla war with words! Hit and run! Feints and harassments. [. . .] Pity you. If you had a knife in your hand, even a little jackknife, it would be a lot more convincing and effective than the millions of words you’re going to chatter here. (S 285) The power of the speech acts produced by Wasserman seems laid out here— but Neigel fails to appreciate it and is easily fooled by the return of the story to the zoo. The words do carry a guerrilla war here, but not on the referential level, not through a probable story of Jews in the ghetto. The war is not the war to kill but the war to awaken the spark of humanity in Neigel, as Anshel sees it. It is a subversive war carried not through a narrative with a classic structure, but exactly through the incoherencies, the flexibility, the openness of it. ‘You build something and challenge it again and again, build it and challenge it a thousand times!’ says Anshel at one of those turns. While Wasserman’s speech acts seem felicitous as it concerns forcing Neigel to get out of his fixed constraints of logic and categorizations, Momik again feels his performative fails to help him finally define himself. He finds himself at a point where the power of the performative begins to leave him behind. He can no longer carry on with the story and remain a subject in authority over it. The words push him out until finally almost whole sentences appear in inverted comas. ‘A certain person’s powers are utterly drained. [. . .] Only when the activity takes place is there any “vitality”. In the fingertips’ (S 290–291), the narrator writes. He lost his identity which was vividly present in the narrative before. Unlike in Ricoeur’s view, shortly outlined before, the narrative outgrows him. After a taste of what can be found, induced in the White Room, Momik discovers that he could never say ‘“I” without hearing a tinny echo of “we”’ (S 296). The move to The Complete Encyclopaedia of Kazik’s Life which ensues is his desperate attempt at pronouncing a closure, which would get him out of the White Room, if it cannot give him a fixed identity. The Encyclopaedia is an attempt to reaffirm the authority over the language after having entered the White Room, after letting it describe individual

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experience, outside the discourse of facts and figures and even in contradiction to it. This subordination of the narrative is to happen through silencing and covering up the story with the generalisations imminent in the structure of encyclopaedia. Momik withdraws from the position of the involved first person narrator and formally assumes the safe position of an editor of the encyclopaedia. In fact he fails. The story again takes over and the literary universe of The Children of the Heart and all the lives of those involved in it—Wasserman, Neigel, his family, Momik finally—keeps being reborn, persistently blasting out the constraints of the form, a form which this time is not the external reality, but the character’s self-defence. The paradigm of the performative aspect of literature exhausts here. So far I have tried to show, that in See Under: Love David Grossman explores the notion of the literature’s potential for creating new worlds and challenging those which seem unalterable. It seems useful to emphasize that such performative approach to literature, even in this specific double dimension of what literary speech act is in Grossman’s work, does open up the text to some kind of verification of felicitousness from the reader. An accepted, iterated literary convention is what justifies fiction—and in reference to that can the novel be innovative in its performativity. Now I shall look at See Under: Love as carrying out a different agenda too or stepping deeper into the experience of language. If the Shoah has become a part of the logosphere, if it is encountered primarily as a symbolically mediated cultural burden, then it can be seen as born from a certain kind of communicative reality, rather than another. In the next section I will be referring to the distinctions made by the orality-literacy theory in a metaphorical or exaggerated manner, which should be kept in mind. Nevertheless I will employ these categories as bringing out a specific relationship between linguistic shape, the logical or conceptual message and the mentality behind them. It is a relationship which goes beyond rhetoric, understood as the persuasive and expressive aspect of verbal communication, more or less consciously assumed by a particular speaker. 2

The Orality, the Literacy and the Utopia of Immediate Communication

When Shlomo reveals his idea to write a children’s encyclopaedia of the Holocaust for the first time, he thus explains his motivations: To spare our children having to guess or reconstruct it in their nightmares. I had a list of some two hundred main entries already: murderers

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and victims, the main extermination camps, literary works on the subject written during the period and later. I discovered that filing, writing and editing the material in this way was helpful. (S 155) It is in itself a project of incredible scope but also based on controversial intentions, the way Shlomo presents it. It reflects his desire to muster the reality which keeps both haunting and evading him. What he finally decides to do though, is to write a complete encyclopaedia not of the Shoah but of the life of one fictional character, Kazik. A task which might seem infinitely easier, but in the end it bears the unmistakable mark of fragmentation, blurriness of the categories used as entries, and lack of completeness. An Encyclopaedia as a concept is certainly a product of a literate mind. In his famous Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word Walter Ong discusses the example of lists and indexes as the literate forms which are particularly telling as to the essence of how writing, and especially print, restructure the human consciousness, making the words spatial and tangible and therefore ultimately more easily put to order.12 All this applies to the encyclopaedia, but it is also especially literate and seemingly anti-oral in its most fundamental quality of intended verbalisation of totality. The very objective of writing an encyclopaedia is to compile a compendium of fully systematized knowledge in a form of a visually organized list of entries, possibly abstract in formulation, so as to avoid the blurring contextualisation. It aims, if it may be put so, at taking the world in its totality and laying it down on paper, freezing it. If the visualisation of linguistic sign in writing makes distanced judgment of its meaning possible, then it seems that encyclopaedias are certainly among the ultimate forms of such textuality. And they represent the opposite of what orality-related qualities of language stand for. This is then what Shlomo wants to do with the story of baby Kazik, who goes through a full life cycle in only 24 hours. He wants to ‘butcher life into alphabetic order’, as David Grossman has himself put it.13 A very unliterary thing to do, too, but Shlomo is ready to give up the narrator’s pleasure in order to muster the story and his life at all. The concept deconstructs itself very soon though. First it seems that the very structure of an encyclopaedia turns out to be wonderfully post-structuralist in its basic quod vide or ‘see under’ mechanism. If each entry contains one or more references to other ones and cannot be conceived of without them, then the compendium can never be 12 Ong 2005: 123. 13 A quotation from a lecture delivered by David Grossman on January 12, 2010 at Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands.

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clear and exhaustive. Second, the encyclopaedia of one life is a contradiction in itself since the contextualisation has to be its major means of definition of the abstract entries—and from such abstract perspective, entries of the kind Momik provides cannot define anything generally. In almost each case the detached style of the first abstract definition is completely undermined in its authoritative voice by the episodes from Kazik’s life that follow. The ‘Reader’s Preface’ contains a point commenting on such dynamic, necessarily story-like fragments: 4. In an effort to preserve the authenticity of those characters who influence the life of the subject of our study (Kazik), the monologues and fragmentary conversations of said characters are cited herewith. Admittedly such a procedure impairs the academic objectivity of the project and ‘popularizes’ it to a certain extent, perhaps unavoidably so at the present time. We shall do our best to amend this in future editions of the encyclopaedia. (S 303–304) The style of this fragment and all the numerous intrusions of the ‘editor’ in the text resemble of course the rational and objectifying style of any other encyclopaedia, but it also strangely echoes some of the Nazi formulae Shlomo derided earlier in order to prove that a Nazi could never be a writer: 1. The Main guideline—party discipline. 2. Will is the overcoming of fears and weaknesses like compassion and sympathy. 3. Love for one’s neighbour should be reserved for the Germans of Adolf Hitler. (S 197) The points, the unspecified, distanced speaker and an equally distanced, disciplined and non-emphatic message—there are resemblances between the ‘Reader’s Preface’ and the Nazi commandments. The way these two forms are shown here they are the grotesque consequences of what text does with communication. Thus it seems that Shlomo does finally take up the Nazioriginated language. And yet he lets the story weave underneath. The way the entries unveil in this unique encyclopaedia can be perhaps best described by a following quotation from an article by Jack Goody and Ian Watt: There can be no reference to ‘dictionary definitions’, nor can words accumulate the successive layers of historically validated meanings which they acquire in a literate culture. Instead the meaning of each word is ratified in a succession of concrete situations, accompanied by vocal

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inflexions and physical gestures, all of which combine to particularize both its specific denotation and its accepted connotative usages.14 It is a fragment which in fact describes the way words and meanings are constituted in oral cultures. I venture to say that its applicability to Grossman’s encyclopaedia is not accidental though. See Under: Love juxtaposes these two alternative models of verbal communications, which may be, by virtue of a literary metaphor, termed as orality and literacy,15 and mentalities that go with them with reference to the problematic of the Shoah. It can be safely said that The Complete Encyclopaedia of Kazik’s Life brings out this opposition most vividly. However, it is elaborated upon elsewhere too, with orality and literacy serving as metaphors or embodiments of two worldviews realized through means of communication, two attitudes to language, two attitudes to the status of reality and to the other. This contrast is connected with what I earlier called the performative aspect of the language of the novel which seeks to undermine the fixedness of the language of the Shoah. It is translated into yet another contrast—that of alienation of writing and the immediacy of the living speech, as Goody calls it. The first one is the frame of mind which the narrative identifies with the Nazi formation and its consequences. The other functions as a refuge for individuality and as a sphere of interaction in which Grossman’s—and Shlomo’s—characters can try to heal each other from it by letting the story weave through them. In fact it is the living speech which seems to be the most vitalistic element in this novel, one that can outlive—in the double sense of living longer than something and overcoming—the Shoah. Of course one charge which can be immediately thrown at such an interpretation is that Grossman, as well his narrator-protagonist Shlomo, write. Just like Plato famously wrote a dialogue dismissing writing. The novel is paradoxical in this respect. Shlomo attempts to write his new identity, letting himself be carried away by the fluid stories, but then halts every one of them at some point, he is the literate mind, the ‘peninsular type’, who would rather stick to some stability. He is not free from ‘the LNIY’, the Little Nazi in You, a part of 14 Goody & Watt 1963: 306. 15 It needs to be emphasized that if I refer here to the concepts of orality and literacy established by the great divide theory, I remove them from their original contexts of use within the domain of cultural history of Communications and employ them within the literary analysis of a modern novel, which is in itself a purely literate genre. I do so, because I believe they describe the two models of communication built up by David Grossman in See Under: Love.

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which quality is to long for some fastening in language as in a security belt. Grossman, on his part, seems to manage the kind of intimacy in the literate alienation of the novel, which through living speech could only be achieved in a very deep one-to-one interaction. Perhaps it happens so exactly through the stylistic incoherence of the work—which keeps searching for the right way to perform or bring about a certain subjectivity. On the other hand, following the direction given by Ong, I want to treat orality and literacy as two poles of communication distinguishable also through certain qualities within textual forms. The relationship between orality and literacy would then constitute the internal dynamics of the novel actualized in the process of reading.16 In the case of See Under: Love orality and literacy are both the modes of communication, which determine the shape of relationships between characters, and the literary motifs or metaphors. The association of the Nazism and the factual aspect of the Shoah with written text is perhaps first evoked when Momik starts reading about it in the first part, very quickly going through the Holocaust shelf in the library. He accumulates facts: He read history books with tiny print about what the Nazis did, and stumbled over a lot of words and expressions that weren’t used anymore. He puzzled over some peculiar photographs, he couldn’t figure out what was going on and what went where [. . .]. (S 66–67) Interestingly enough photographs share the qualities that are important here. Print (of text and of photographs in this case) on one hand requires deciphering, divining the meaning which does not necessarily offer itself as selfevident, and on the other hand it is unquestionable and nonnegotiable. If we consider the Momik part from that perspective, we might notice that the other pole—that of orality—is not really present. There is very little dialogue, none really between Momik and his parents. When Momik finally manages to fire all his questions at Bella, all he can ask for are the most brutal facts he had read about. The only interaction through living speech within the plot seems to happen between him and the distorted old neighbours and Anshel—all of them rather mumbling about fragments of a reality which is completely foreign to the boy. They evoke the world he does not belong to and therefore what he can gather from it is mostly void, unnervingly bleak. Thus it is neither the traditional orality, which created bonds by reaffirming the reality commonly 16

Godlewski 2008: 314.

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known, nor the more modern, subversive and presumably healing orality from the later parts of the novel. When Shlomo first brings Anshel back to the camp, the latter says they should hurry because there is a story to tell. The narrator then describes his impression of this new encounter: His voice sounded like the voice I heard under water: like the faint crinkling of a thousand broken shells. Not like speech exactly, more like a steady flux of drab grey verbiage without the vigor of speech, yet closely resembling written language. Grandfather Wasserman spoke to me in the language he wrote [. . .]. (S 189) The weird entanglement of speech and writing surfaces here too, but Shlomo and Wasserman soon reinforce Anshel’s voice which will start weaving the story of the Children of the Heart to Neigel. A task the old Scheherazade takes up with a hidden agenda, which is resurrection of the dead, giving their life back to them, just like Neigel wants him to do with dead Paula. However, the plan is intricate—his strategy is to defeat their deaths through the vengeance of healing Commander Neigel or, more specifically, uprooting him from his safe, detached, ‘Nazi’ position of mind. The progress of the plan—the German’s growing emotional involvement with the story and with Wasserman—is carefully noted. He wants to give up his promise of trying to kill the Jew. At some point he actually calls him ‘Herr Wasserman’, which the old man notices with pain and pleasure (S 291). Wasserman takes up the role of Socrates too, in a way, as an oral speaker and interrogator trying to reawaken the spark he believes to be there. He adjusts his methods, negotiates meanings, asks for help even, giving his opponent-companion a sense of involvement, as when he needs smells for the story (Wasserman claims he is deprived of this sense). The dialogue with all its turns takes up the whole part entitled Wasserman and then sloshes, unstoppable almost, to the Encyclopaedia and forms a difficult meandering process. Wasserman calls it his ‘trap of humanity’ set on Neigel. At the beginning Neigel gives a little notepad to Wasserman, at which the old man ravishes, not having held paper for years perhaps. He would use it from that point on pretending he is reading his story from it, but in fact he only has one word written in it, a word that is never revealed. Apart from that Wasserman, who seems to trust in the ethically healing power of words, improvises the story or lets himself be led by it, accommodating it only to the ultimate goal of awakening the hidden spark of humanity in the German. By contrast Neigel believes the story is properly written, has a planned plot and an ending. Trusting the authority of this text he notes it down in his notebook. A notebook

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which becomes yet another figure of Nazi literacy—everything can be jotted down for future reference, from details of the story to the ‘requirements for extermination gas, as well as the number of bars of gold teeth extracted and the amounts of hair shorn’ (S 221), all on the same sheets, without any differentiation. More importantly still, Neigel resorts to writing when he commits the act of plagiarism of Wasserman’s story in order to save his marriage. He seems to succeed from a distance, in correspondence, but he fails miserably as soon as he meets up with his wife in person. He fails because the transformation Wasserman believed the German had gone through was superficial and in fact fragmentary. He failed to realize that to be redeemed by his wife he would have to change his very attitude to communication and language and the mentality which stands behind it. The Nazi literacy has perverted the language. When at some point Wasserman opposes using the word ‘live’ by Neigel before it is certain that he has retrieved his humanity, the old man calls Germans the ‘artists of merciful translation’, giving ample examples of German euphemisms such as ‘Abwanderung, which means “exodus and migration”, [and which] is the word used to describe mass deportations to the camps.’ (S 283–284). This type of linguistic manoeuvre so easily used in written announcements on walls or other forms of impersonal communication seems to evade and hurt Wasserman. For him words do not mean something in themselves, but they carry multilayered, negotiable meanings the speaker is responsible for in front of his listener. The essence of oral communication in this context is then the language rooted in the situation and in the people who use it. Wasserman hopes that through his story Neigel would see what is human in anyone using language, what is individual and priceless. Yet he fails, because the German misuses his story, he writes it down almost like a euphemism, assuming that the story itself would do the job of rebuilding the personal, intimate bond with his wife. It is of course painfully verified. The brand of Nazi literacy goes much deeper and in a way Wasserman’s attempt cannot have but a limited success. Neigel cannot be saved. Orality as an intensely intimate experience of communication which through the story creates a bond between the interlocutors is the essence of the use of language in the part entitled Bruno. Here Momik enters into dialogue with the Sea—while in fact wading in it—in order to tell the story of Bruno Schulz, who fled Drohobycz and fled the land of people by jumping into the sea. The narrative fluctuates between monologues of Shlomo addressed to the Sea and a sort of dialogue between the two. In fact very often, in moments of highest intensity of the story and of the relationship, their voices are almost undistinguishable, they fluently interchange. Sea is both a mother figure and a

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figure of a lover,17 she is the perfect one and only interlocutor to whom Momik opens up completely and allows himself to build intimacy with, which involves all kinds of emotions on both sides but is not limited by any convention. Their common love is Bruno. The Sea, with all her emotionality, fluctuation, her immediate psycho-physical reactions (as when one of her shivers causes a tsunami) allows for this perfect interpersonal communication, most intensely attuned to any signal from the speaker, not only to words. The attention of the Sea is fascinating and satisfying but it is not easy to retain: Are you with me? You shake your head at my awkward attempts to tell the story. I can just hear you muttering, If that’s how he writes, he’d better not write about me. He’d better not dry me out on his pages or plaster me all over his notebooks. Because with me, dearie, you’re going to have to write with wild abandon, in rarest ink made of pungent male and female secretions and the passions of life [. . .] (S 103) Such communication is capricious then and requires a good speaker. What is more, the Sea seems to think that the standard writing which freezes the upheavals of life, its constant fluctuation and indeterminacy into fixed categories (as in an encyclopaedia for example . . .) may be good for her, the land, but not here, where the unlimited sensitivity and openness to communication and change call for elasticity. No one subject can be exhausted once and for all. Sentences are very long and in fact lose the structure and logic of sentences (Wasserman says people and things lack logic, which is but the divider and connector between passions and fear: ‘Logic, for instance, is your wonderful program for transporting trains here from all over Europe’, S 294). Logic is what allows to put a full stop on a sentence and separate one thread of the infinite story from another, while in the Sea they seem inextricably tangled up. When the Sea tells the story of her sensations when Bruno first jumped off the pier, she cannot separate the sensations of his smell, of her labour-like pain, of her speeding around the Cape of Good Hope and the squirming and vomiting of all the bits and creatures she carried along with her. The cause-consequence logic seems barbarian in its imperative of simplification, in its quest for easily distinguishable relationships. For the same reasons Shlomo, when talking to the Sea, cannot help but reveal everything about himself to her, even if he claims to just want to learn as much as he can about Bruno from her. His story 17 Ronen 2007: 87.

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of Bruno is inherently linked with the story of Ayala, of his wife Ruth and his son Yariv, of Wasserman and Neigel, of Narvia. And especially with the process of writing itself and his own self-perception. In the telling of the story nothing is irrelevant. At the same time however, it is really only the telling itself that counts, together with the bond it created between Shlomo and the Sea, the deepest intimacy he has ever experienced. If, as I am trying to show here, one of many dimensions in which See Under: Love explores the issue of facing the Shoah is communication and its modes spread between the poles of orality and literacy, then the messianic vision which ends this part should not come as a surprise. The language derived from writing, impersonal, precise and decontextualized has been ultimately stained by the fact that it particularly suited the reality of the Shoah and in a way it perpetuates it in the form of an infinite number of undisputable horrid facts. While the personal living speech is explored between Wasserman and Neigel and, more intimately, between Momik and the Sea, Bruno is the character who can lead Momik’s way to an even further horizon of communication outside language. Having spent ‘eternity and half’ in the sea becoming a salmon, Bruno learns that the sheer life he sought, where the subtlest communication is subordinate to the shoal’s ning cannot remain individualized and creative, a situation Shlomo’s Bruno would not accept. As a result the vision of salvation he shall enact to Shlomo in Drohobycz is far from a salmons’ cycle of life. It is based exactly on these two principles: individuality and art, outside the violence and expressive impotence of language and any other elements of the social norm. Once the supposed Messiah, resembling Jesus Christ in Jerusalem, descends his donkey and disappears, no longer will anything be ruled by convention. With the disappearance of language and memory, people communicate the subtlest impulses, cease to be restrained by any divisions, opinions or judgments—but they can no longer lie either. Life and creativity become one. They’re human beings all, and therefore creators. They’re doomed to be. They’re compelled to be by virtue of their origins—to create their own life. [. . .] Ah, Shloma, compared to real art, natural art, literature and music are nothing but ephemeral copy work, a superficial interpretative craft, not to say poor plagiarism, lacking in imagination and talent . . . (S 180) Bruno’s utopia is radical. ‘Secondhand souls’, like Aunt Retitia, who live only through language, law and order, cannot have a place here. They disappear, they do not die, because, as Bruno says, they never had life at all. And, most importantly, murder is impossible in this new communicative reality.

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And now everyone will understand [he said] that whosoever kills another human being destroys a uniquely idiosyncratic work of art which can never be reconstructed . . . a whole mythology, an infinite Age of Genius . . . (S 180) Nevertheless, anyone can choose to die whenever he wants, erase himself simply, as Bruno does. ‘[. . .] and there will be no more mass death, Shloma, just as there will be no more mass life!’ (S 181). The radicalism of this messianic vision might seem very harsh, almost totalitarian.18 However my interpretation treats it as the extreme opposite pole to the broadly conceived communicative reality of the Shoah, with its eradication of individuality and sincerity of feeling for another, with its mass death covered up with the language of euphemisms. Not only does it embrace individuality, creativity and instinctive, pure, uncorrupted, sincere communication between individuals. What we cannot forget, I believe, is that it is in itself an act of extreme individuality, ‘a uniquely idiosyncratic work of art’. In other words, it has very little to do with any messianic visions of any universal religion which is by principle totalizing. This one is not and that is why Bruno disappears after showing it to Momik—because the only message he can give him is that of individual creativity. And this fantastic transformation of Drohobycz has to disappear together with Bruno—and his Messiah. The lost work cannot be found because it rejects language, it is not meant to be objective and, what is more, it is not to be introduced as reality. Therefore Bruno of Shlomo’s imagination could never really write it. Shlomo could though. Bruno’s vision is both frightening and seductive for Momik but he ultimately has to leave it—not denounce it—as the unachievable horizon of immediate communication. May I add here that the move to the next part, Wasserman, does not signify abandonment of everything Bruno represented, there is no such teleology in the narrative of Shlomo’s subjectivity. The first moment in the text, when he talks to the Sea, is actually chronologically the last of the novel—three years have gone since his stay at Narvia and he clearly says that after accomplishing Wasserman and the Encyclopaedia, he is only left with the ever unfinished story of Bruno. We may assume then that the three parts narrated in the first person are dimensions of his identity expressed through creation rather than form a sequence. They are, as acts

18

Shoshana Ronen treats it as such, as a grotesque ‘vision of an age in which contact between people is impossible, human beings turn into self-indulgent atoms which are trapped in their own feelings and instincts . . .’. Ronen 2007: 103.

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of communication and with reference to communication, tangled up and at times contradictory, also because, as Shlomo tells Wasserman, he doesn’t have ‘the strength for great aspirations’. And Wasserman explains: . . . that utopias are not for mortals. And that people are like flies, that the stories they are told must be like flypaper. Utopias are gold-covered paper, he said, and flypaper is covered with everything man secretes from his body and his life. Especially suffering. (S 225) Shlomo has it all then. The fascination with a dream of immediacy, the tenderness and subtlety of his dialogue with the Sea but also the brutal, impersonal language of the encyclopaedia, one that quite often sides with Neigel in face of Wasserman’s living, uncontrollable speech. See Under: Love tells the story of Momik Neuman’s life-long quest for salvation from the Shoah—one that can never be fully achieved, because to some extent it already comes with language, as we know it. However, in a way See Under: Love is also an attempt at salvation of writing and literature from the corruption of distance and authority somehow inherent to them. As I said before, orality and literacy seem to be used here as two poles on the axis of communication, both of which we find as metaphors here, but also as actual principles of Grossman’s writing, of his construction of meanings, characters, situations, relationships, etc. They are complemented with Bruno’s vision, unattainable and transcendent, but lurking on the horizon. Ultimately however, it is not language of literature that Grossman seeks to reinvent. Through language he opens literature to the otherness—or strangeness as the English translation has it—of human beings. 3

Approaching the Other in Literature

There seem to be two good reasons to juxtapose Grossman’s See Under: Love with Emmanuel Levinas’s philosophy of the Other. The first one is in my opinion the philosopher’s split, or fractured perhaps, notion of language, in which, while always inescapably leaning towards fixed meanings, the Said, is at the same time marked by traces of the Saying, a primeval impulse directed towards the Other; a dynamic, open, non-oppressive attempt at passively relating up to the Other. It seems to resemble the vision of language I have previously described in terms of orality, which was especially evident in Shlomo’s communication with the Sea, in Wasserman’s dialogue with Neigel, and, paradoxically most, perhaps, in Bruno’s utopia of communication which does not fail,

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which does not betray this impulse of the Saying.19 The association of Levinas’s notion of language with the model of oral communication as it can be found in the novel is especially valid if we remember to what extent the philosopher conceptualized his idea of the relationship to the Other within language in terms of a face-to-face encounter. It has the nature of speech, where the distance between the interlocutors is at once always present, impossible to bridge, and constantly marked by The Same’s attempts to relinquish the separation and substitute the other for himself.20 The aforementioned description of the mechanism of constituting meanings in oral cultures shows again a certain affinity with this dynamic vision of language which is more directed at the contact, at the attempts, rather than at the stabilisation of the relationship between the participants of such communication. The second strong resemblance comes as a consequence of this self-undermining, amphibological understanding of language and it is the ethical quality of language surfacing through its dialectic structure, which is common to both authors. The main statement behind Levinas’s philosophy is the precedence of ethics over ontology, ethics which is not conceived of as a set of norms, but as the root dynamics of the relationship of The Same with the Other. The unquestionable imperative which emerges from the encounter with the Face of the Other is ‘Thou shall not kill’, which in fact has the nature not of a norm but of utter inability, powerlessness in face of the Other. Ultimately the Others in See Under: Love say the same. Bruno’s words that there can be no murder, because everyone is a unique idiosyncratic work of art, incomparable and unreduceable to anything, are the explicit statement of the postulate. More generally the novel, just like the philosophical thought of Levinas, is a call for the ethics not only determined by but actually preconditioning an encounter with the Other. Ethics which would culminate in the inherent impossibility of murder between people. It is also a search for language which would bear traces of its own ethicality, in Levinas’s terms the traces of the Saying. Thus the Saying and the ethical obligation not to kill seem to link the two authors together. The comparison becomes less valid though, if we remember some of the more radical tropes in Levinas’s thought, specifically his expulsion of art from the domain of ethics. Separation of a work of art from the presence of the 19 Levinas describes a comparable vision of the Saying unspoiled by the Said, a state of perfect linguistic openness to the Other, where lies are impossible, in one of the final chapters of Otherwise than Being. . . . Such language of pure Saying seems to resemble Bruno’s utopia of pure expression outside language. Cf. Levinas 1991b: 142–144. 20 Cf. Levinas 1991a: 39–40.

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speaker and of the relationship with the Face, as well as its belonging merely to the Said makes it unethical. As such all that the language of art can do is appropriate the Other, incorporate and consequently reduce the Other to The Same. It cannot be the source of emergence of the ethical subject. In other words, laying aside strictly Levinasian diction, one would have to admit that the confrontation with otherness possible in literary fiction can only be illusionary as an ultimately selfish or even narcissistic act of self-constitution of the subject. The problem of the attitude of this philosophy to art and the consequences it could imply for the employment of it in literary theory was thoroughly discussed by Zuzanna Ladyga. The crucial argument in favour of a misreading of Levinas which allows for using his categories with reference to literature lies in his own core statement from later works that any language is inherently amphibological, torn between the Saying and the Said. As a result it has to be acknowledged that even any art aiming at stabilizing certain meanings in mimetic representation can never fully realize this goal without bearing the traces of ethicality, traces which can be deduced from particular literary tropes or moments of failed mimesis.21 Moreover, it would not be ungrounded to claim that Levinas’s attitude to art and literature might itself be regarded as totalizing, closing the phenomenon within a restrictive paradigm of mimesis and violently persuasive rhetoric.22 Considering the previous analysis it can also be said that the conditions for ethicality of literature resemble the possibilities of rendering orality as a comprehensive model of communication and mentality within a text of literature. The immediacy of an oral encounter just as the immediacy of the expression of the Face remains unachievable, but the more deeply rooted structure of language as well as the type of subjectivity and relationship to otherness implied by these philosophical and anthropological concepts, can be performed in literature. Paul Ricoeur grants the role of a lab to literature, assuming it is a space where the constitution of self in relationship to the other or to otherness can be performed.23 Emmanuel Levinas would most probably protest, not allowing such situation of reading (or, may I add, narrating) any ethical quality as he understood it. Nevertheless David Grossman’s concept of the possibility of approaching the Other in literature might get some support from Ricoeur’s view, while retaining its emphasis on ethicity. Literature can be a laboratory in a sense in which at the point of departure it does create its own conditions for the encounter with otherness, which for Levinas is necessarily unconditional. It does not follow, however, that such an encounter has a mock 21 Cf. Ladyga 2009: 29–37. 22 Robbins 1999: 53–54. 23 Ricoeur 1992: 329–330.

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quality, that it is a kind of rehearsal. For both Ricoeur and Grossman it makes an intensified experience achievable. David Grossman declares that the chance to strip the barriers which separate him from the Other in the normal course of social life is one of the main reasons for his involvement in writing. It might also be worth adding that he significantly matches it with the urge for storytelling, for weaving a narrative as the second driving force behind his work.24 Thus he might be simply confirming the very basic role of literature in our culture as a sphere of identification with fictional heroes. However on the other hand, through shifting the emphasis to the experiential level of the practice of creation and together with the unconventional, explicitly self-conscious language of his narratives, he places himself within the postmodern redefinition of literature, fearfully aware, one might say, of its own misleading and manipulative power. Belonging to this paradigm, Grossman is doubly entangled in the issues of ethicity already, both in his interest in the otherness and in his linguistic awareness of the problems of the ethics of reading and writing. In the case of See Under: Love another dimension is added, one that might put Grossman in a polemic with Levinas when it comes to the ethicity of literature. Most crudely put, the issue is that of the confrontation with the otherness of the Shoah and the Other(s) of those who perished. Or, indeed, of those who were to some extent silenced as Others within the discourse of the Holocaust—the perpetrators. See Under: Love can be interpreted as a project of such encounter which cannot happen in the immediate expression of the Face, which is not conditioned by presence. Yet it happens and, more importantly, is sought for in language. Moreover within the novel it is conceived of in terms which belong to the radical ethics of Emmanuel Levinas, as I shall now proceed to show. The new adventures of the Children of the Heart, the story Wasserman invents for Neigel is never actually continuously narrated. The biggest episodes of it find their way into the Encyclopaedia in the form of the entries. In them Shlomo the editor tries to convey the message of the stories told by his grandfather Anshel. He is trying to tame the indeed ethical, dynamic power of the narrative. The very idea behind it is, so to say, to open up the most diverse universe of humanity to Neigel, the universe of otherness, which transgresses all the rules of the Said, the strict, exclusive definition of what is and what is not human, introduced by the Nazis. Each of the entries is, as I have shown before, a paradoxical attempt to tame the Saying which drives Anshel’s encounter with the commander of the camp. The principle of the Encyclopaedia remains individuality and alterity of each of the characters, which is the source of 24

See David Grossman, ‘Desire to be Gisella’, in: Grossman 2008a.

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the subversion towards the reality of the war and the Shoah accomplished through their being in the novel. The panorama of the characters, the weird personalities to which Otto Brig from The Children of the Heart gives shelter in the Warsaw zoo in the midst of the war, is broad. The very entry entitled ‘Strangeness’, (the Hebrew word is ‘Zarut’, which could also be translated as ‘Otherness’) is devoted to Fried’s relationship to Kazik, his adopted son, whose whole life span happens within 24 hours. Fried observes his never grown up son with a conviction that he has no access to knowledge of the child, that the boy shall always remain a stranger to him, which is of course the fundamental statement of alterity. However, at the same time, just like in Levinas’s view of fatherhood, the son is never the entirely Other, since it is the Other, who is born from the I of the father, is a part of it. ‘It was like watching your own reflection in the mirror: even if you say ‘me’ the thousand and one times, you never really know what you mean’ (S 347). It is a strangeness that cannot be overcome—Grossman seems to describe this otherness as still even stronger than it is for Levinas who emphasizes that fatherhood is a sort of proliferation of I.25 Fried’s relationship to Kazik is described as serving, an obligation and an unsatisfied need to comprehend: Fried would always love him more than Kazik loved Fried. And even if he were wonderfully successful and Kazik lived a complete and happy life [see under: PRAYER], Fried would suffer the same hunger and grief at his inability simply to ‘be’ Kazik, to overcome the strangeness, the part of himself that was banished forever. (S 347) The concept of alterity in the two last two parts of See Under: Love is related to and defined through at least two other notions. The first one is that of humanity which is obviously denied within the Nazi regime, but which preconditions the encounter with the Other and in fact is the source of obligation to it. It is the basis for any ethicity and it is what makes it possible. Wasserman’s secret goal is, as was said earlier, to reawaken the spark of humanity in his opponent. Anshel asks the commander about his oath of humanity, as opposed to the strictly obliging officer’s oath Neigel has taken. The old Jew equals it with responsibility. Again, the conglomerate of notions seems Levinasian—on the ground of humanity is born the sense of otherness, the responsibility to the Other and an obligation or an oath towards the Other. Wasserman’s idea of humanity needs further recognition of nuances—the universal category retains its 25 Levinas 1991a: 267.

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individualized character. As it is stated in the entry on ‘Suffering’, ‘the measure of man’s humanity [. . .] is defined by the amount of suffering he succeeds in diminishing and preventing’ (S 389–390). It is then individualized partly by the consciousness of the Other’s potential emotions. Shlomo’s editorial comment to this entry has it as Wasserman’s passivity, readiness to sacrifice and accept his own suffering to prevent the suffering of someone else. The responsibility is another factor which makes the general quality of humanity an interpersonal phenomenon. Neigel defies being ‘personally responsible for what happened’ using the argument of ‘the Big Machine’ (S 306). In Wasserman’s view it is the personal sense of responsibility grounded in emotions which matters, responsibility which is not effective action as much as freedom—‘the choice is the fulfilment of the truly human in man’ (S 312), as another entry states. This dynamic between responsibility and freedom seems clearly Levinasian—the Other calls for responsibility and through responsibility justifies freedom and makes it possible (Levinas uses the French word ‘consacrer’ to describe this relationship).26 While humanity is a rather obvious correlate of alterity in the context of the Shoah perhaps, the other one is more specific to Grossman—it is art. Art and being an artist are key notions for the struggle with the memory and brand of the Holocaust in See Under: Love. Through this specific understanding of art the ethicity of this novel is also justified and accomplished. As I have quoted earlier, a human being in Bruno’s messianic vision is not only an idiosyncratic work of art. The ultimate vocation of anyone is actually to be an artist, a creator. The subject-object (artist-work of art) border is of course bleak here, but not simply in a sense in which it might have been bleak for a modernist artist (of the times of Schulz perhaps, although not necessarily for himself), where the self-creation could be the major work of art. The artistry in See Under: Love is completely democratic and it in fact serves to deconstruct the modern concept of art. Bruno says ‘compared to real art, natural art, literature and music are [. . .] plagiarism, lacking in imagination and talent’, let us remember. The conventional art, rejected by Levinas, is dismissed here too, and the actual sphere of creativity is moved beyond the codes of established domains of art, to the sphere of action and expression. The entries on art and artists in the Encyclopaedia begin with analogous general definitions.

26 Levinas 1991a: 209.

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ART The expression of human creativity in the pursuit of aesthetic and functional objectives, in accordance with rules and techniques requiring skill and practice [. . .] ARTISTS Persons who express the creativity of mankind, in the pursuit of aesthetic and functional objectives. (S 307) The solemn style of these sentences is in contrast with what follows in each of the entries. First of all however, they testify of the failure of language of generalization to account for the phenomenon of art. Each of these definitions could be formally criticized as ignotum per ignotum, with words such as ‘creativity’ or ‘aesthetic and functional objectives’ calling for explanation, they are also too broad to pinpoint the intuitive scope of art. Nevertheless, they do in a rather perverse and unexpected way encompass the concept of an artist which the Children of the Heart represent. The ‘bunch of loonies’ Otto gathers are artists united by the common readiness to fight the strangling rules and necessities of the reality of human relationships, emotions, actions towards other people. Paula becomes imaginarily pregnant and goes through labour in old age, Hannah Zeitrin keeps having sex and giving birth to ever more children, even though all of them are murdered in the streets, Ilya, who keeps asking the question ‘Who am I?’, even amidst the Gestapo tortures. Aaron Marcus the apothecary who tries to understand and expand the range of human feelings. Among them is also the character of Yedidya Munin, ‘the great Orgasman, advocate of human transcendence, seeker of happiness, lover of the immanence of God’ (S 307), who masturbates relentlessly, forever restraining the ejaculation. ‘Masturbation’ is also the entry to which ‘Art’ refers—described as an act of unfulfilled desire, longing, but also leading to wear and suffering, without effect. Munin says: ‘I have balls like ostrich eggs, Pan Doctor, all because of my ART [q.v.], [. . .] and it hurts, sir, but then of course it has to hurt! One must always suffer for art. [. . .]’ (S 365). The grotesque of this statement, symptomatic for the style of the entire story of the Children of the Heart, brings out the non-normative character of the alterity realised through Grossman’s concept of art. It is futile and absurd from the point of view of The Same, of any coherent and teleological universe of interpretation. It opposes understanding, in this case also through the partial effect of aversion, it builds the frontier of strangeness, as the English translation of the novel puts it. Indeed, the aesthetic and rhetoric category of grotesque seems to be an appropriately found means of translating otherness

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into literary language. Grotesque awakes abjection but evades routine judgements and violently undisturbed categorization, thus rendering the trace of otherness here. The last artist who needs discussing separately here is Malkiel Zeidman, the biographer, who gave up finishing the account of the life of Alexander the Great in order to write ‘a definitive biography of an ordinary human being’ (S 338–339). Accomplishing absolute passivity, completely substituting himself for the Other, he manages to overcome the frontier of strangeness up to a point when he attempts suicide exactly when the person he is writing about, commits it. Zeidman seems a figure of substitution and passivity, under complete obligation by the Other to guard him and save his being. The impossibility and grotesque of Zeidman surface again. The complete alterity is also the alterity of trusting in the possibility of ethicality, of a being defined as interest in the Other (‘esse is interesse’).27 The art of individuality evoked in Wasserman’s story is the factor causing the breach of totality, which in Levinas’s thought is effectuated by the I faced with the Other. History is the totalizing narrative of The Same, the result of domination and reduction of otherness.28 The arts of the Children of the Heart, which are this kind of acts of opposition to the necessities of history, account for such a breach of totality. They stand outside the logic of totalization of the relationships between people, which are explicable, liable to comprehensive narration. The q.v. structure keeps sending us over to other entries, forming a constellation of notions which refer us to Levinasian radical ethics: the Other and strangeness, passivity and substitution, oath or obligation of humanity. The editor of the Encyclopaedia explicitly formulates these issues as a manifesto or a fantasy, if we will, concluded with the entry entitled ‘Prayer’. The Children of the Heart are a project of fiction evoking alterity which transcends the totality of reality and history, alterity which in itself is defined as art, as futility and grotesque which block understanding and enforce passive acceptance. Unlike in Levinas’s thought the story Wasserman tells Neigel is the sphere of forced interest, passivity, ethical involvement of the recipient. The trope of the encounter with the Other is also structurally a part of the narrative or narratives of the novel in the form of the ruptures in the narrator’s domination over the words of the story.29 It is a recurrent theme in See Under: Love, in the parts narrated by Shlomo, the characters such as Wasserman and 27 Levinas 1991b: 4. 28 Levinas 1991a: 39–40. 29 Jill Robbins points out, citing Jean-Louis Lannoy, that the terms such as passivity, loss of initiative and agency which Levinas valorizes negatively in his early works with reference

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the Sea constantly challenge his rights and skills in telling the story. The relationships between Shlomo and two of his characters in particular have a quality of the radically ethical encounter with the Other—these are Herr Neigel and Bruno Schulz. The obligation they impose upon him within the narrative is an equivalent of the Levinasian ‘Thou shalt not kill’. It is a call for interest, the call which within the narration cannot be left unanswered. Literature is summoned to actualize the absent faces of those who perished, it is a commitment to evoke their Otherness without accommodating it to the rules of the commonly accepted reality, directives of judgment or logic of events. Malkiel Zeidman, the biographer, tells Fried that even though he is under the tyranny of his liability to substitution, the evil-hearted people, as he puts it, have no power over him. For instance I pass ‘their’ patrol a hundred times, you know who I’m talking about, and nothing happens inside me. Though I’ll tell you a secret, I ‘like’ to pass them, because then, if only for a second, I feel relieved of my tyrannical art, my calamity, and for a little while I am myself again, poor Malkiel Zeidman [. . .]. (S 343) The metaphors of harassment, of violence of the Other’s intrusion in the subjectivity of Zeidman are worth emphasizing here too, since they resemble the Levinasian idea of the persecution by the Other summoning ego in substitution. However, while the biographer cannot breach the barrier of strangeness between him and the Germans, within Shlomo’s narrative it becomes inescapable. Despite his and Wasseman’s reluctance, Neigel demands his own space of individuality. The narrator and Anshel (who also emancipates as the storytelling instance) have an ambivalent attitude to the camp commander’s presence in the story. In the third part of the novel they move from giving him a limited verisimilitude as a human outside the fixed identity defined by Nazi ruthlessness, to the moments when he claims the floor to further delineate his literary persona. The first moment the character of Neigel transgresses the model of Nazi persecutor is described as ‘the frail foetus of fiction’ (S 201), a lie the narrator is willing to believe. Through the synchronization in the permanently self-conscious narrative, the relationship between Wasserman and Neigel explicitly involves Shlomo as the instance by convention capable of mustering the story. When the commander demands the right to tell his story,

to the effect of art, become the most important categories with the development of the concept of utter substitution in the later period. Robbins 1999: 52.

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[Wasserman] understands immediately, as I do, what has been happening here in this ‘White Room’, under the reign of absolute physio-literary laws. Because both of us, Wasserman and myself, have waived the writer’s foremost obligation, that of delineating his characters, and because we prefer to dismiss or delay our involvement with Neigel for the time being, he has cleverly and subtly taken advantage of our distaste for him in order to expand the terrain of his personality, the Lebensraum of his limited, posterlike existence within us [. . .] (S 240) The writer’s obligation is to give voice and being to the Other of the character and Shlomo is finally forced to do so—by letting Neigel tell a story of himself based on the self-account given by Rudolf Höss in his memoirs. Again, the writer as the subject obliged to give face to his characters, operates solely within the realm of texts—what he picks as his source belongs to the realm of the Said, but it is an autobiographical text of the hanged commander of Auschwitz. He remains alien and unacceptable as the manager of mass murder and yet by the very fact of having a personal story, he demands taking some kind of ethical position. In this case of unwilling offering a space of individual alterity within the narrative to Neigel, the language becomes perhaps most explicitly a shell of the Said, of fixed words, which do however bear a trace of their primary ethicity, summoning through Saying to acknowledge the Otherness of the Nazi persecutor too. While the whole novel by David Grossman can be perceived as ruled by a variously realized principle of encounter of an I with alterity, in general it is born from an obligation put by Bruno Schulz on the narrator. Actually, if we are to treat the author’s recurrent declaration about the novel as a part of this novel in a way, an additional narrative—an assumption which is not necessarily misguided or methodologically impure, given Grossman’s essential proneness to storytelling, declared, among other places, in Writing in the Dark—he himself has been summoned by Schulz to write the story. On numerous occasions he has said or written that he had read The Street of Crocodiles, in the afterword to which he found an account of Schulz’s death, including the sentences pronounced by the murderer’s enemy , which come back in the novel: ‘You killed my Jew . . .’ Two quotations from articles by Grossman will account for the call, from which See Under: Love is described to have been born. I remember that I closed the book, left the house, and wandered for several hours as though in a fog. I was in a state in which I no longer wanted to live. I didn’t want to live in a world where such things are possible and such people exist, I didn’t want to live in a world where such a

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language can exist and allow such monstrous events to take place, like that sentence. I wrote See Under: Love, among other reasons, to avenge the murder of Bruno Schulz. I took action against his death, and also— of course—against the insulting description of his murder, this so-Nazi description: as if human beings were interchangeable one for another.30  Not always can a writer pinpoint the moment at which a book sprouted inside him. After all, feelings and thoughts accumulate over a period of years, until they ripen and burst out in the act of writing. And yet, although for many years I had wanted to write about the Shoah, it was those two sentences, this devastating sample of Nazi syntax and world view—‘You have killed my Jew, all right, now I will go and kill your Jew’— which were the final push, the electric shock that ignited the writing of my novel See Under: Love.31 Beyond the possibility of expression in the Face, after death has made the realization of the imperative ‘Thou shalt not kill’ impossible, it is Schulz’s literary text juxtaposed with the language of murder which express his otherness and which formulate the call to ‘avenge his death’. The act of writing was again, just like in the novel itself, an act of opposition to the linguistic reality—the death of Schulz came to Grossman as a text and the ethical act it ignited also happened through words. The writer from Drohobycz, ‘a Don Juan of language, conquering with a mad, almost immoral passion, audacious explorer of linguistic geography’ (S 165), remains the most important Other in the novel, the transcendence, defying description or grasping in language at all. The plot of the second part of See Under: Love which allows him to flee the death in Drohobycz, flee the domineering reality, forms a literary realization of the absolute independence of the transcendent Other from oppression, as Levinas puts it in Totality and Infinity: he remains unpredictable, outside the logic of violence, full of moral power defying the possibility of murder.32 His unattainable mastery of language, his artistry lying somewhere in the excess, ‘a plethora almost rotting with verbal juices’ (S 165), which, as was discussed before, is a correlate of alterity in Grossman’s novel, put him too in the Levinasian position of elevated transcendence. The transcendence of the Other, which is his eminence, his height, his lordship, in its concrete meaning includes his destitution, his exile [dépaysement], and his rights as a stranger.33 30 Grossman 2002. 31 Grossman 2009. 32 Levinas 1991a: 225. 33 Levinas 1991a: 225.

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Similarly, Bruno’s ultimate vulnerability of an artist and of a victim demands interest. The force which lies behind the act of writing See Under: Love and behind all the acts of writing and storytelling described in the novel seems not so much a commitment to remember, as an attempt to defy death through a literary fantasy, an ethical act of literature against murder. As I have shown at the beginning of this essay, the aim is not to create a fiction which would negate the Shoah, but to create a dynamic language of opposition to the burden of it, a highly individualized sphere for facing the history of the Holocaust. This sphere is encapsulated in the metaphor of the White Room. This space, where an individual can face the Shoah not in a form of alienated facts but where facts are a basis for a struggle with all that transgresses them in individual experience, is also a metaphor for various aspects of the thought of Emmanuel Levinas. In the White Room one stands in the empty space beyond everything that can be and was Said about the Holocaust, it is the place which induces the ethical Saying directed at all the actors of these events—the real subjects of this experience. The metaphor of blinding whiteness could also be treated as resembling the darkness of There Is, the basic and inextricable layer of the experience of there being something, of impossibility of absolute emptiness.34 The White Room is the space outside facts, figures and readymade representations, which retains however the most basic sense of the incessant presence of the Shoah. Finally the White Room also enforces substitution, the One-forthe-Other movement, where the person inside, the narrator, allows himself to be taken over by the Others he encounters there. At the same time however, this substitution is ambivalent of course, it is not Levinasian complete relinquishing of The Same for the Other, since, as Ayala says: ‘In the White Room everything comes out of your own self, out of your own guts, victim and murderer, compassion and cruelty’ (S 210). It is undoubtedly a movement towards the self, one which Levinas does not account for and would not allow in his concept of radical ethics. It does not lose its ethical quality though. This ambivalent, complex substitution through which the literary subjectivity emerges, remains a gesture of reindividualization of those, who have become accommodated into totality through the machine of the Shoah and the discourse of historical knowledge together with the mechanisms of social memory. I opened this essay with a passage from See Under: Love describing Momik as a constant translator. He translates the logosphere marked by the Shoah into 34 Levinas 1991a: 160. Levinas treats the darkness of night as the most valid metaphor of There Is, claiming that light does not eradicate the level of this ‘murmur of being’, but allows for a slow accommodation and bringing out meaningful objects through sight. Grossman however, continuously emphasizes that the White Room remains empty and blindingly bright, making orientation by visual points of reference impossible.

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his own self, into his own identity. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak writes in her essay ‘The Politics of Translation’, fundamentally referring to quite a different and yet related issue of translating Third World women’s texts: ‘Logic allows us to jump from word to word by means of clearly indicated connections’. How close is that to Wasserman’s notion of logic as the Nazi system of rail transportation! She continues: Rhetoric must work in the silence between and around words in order to see what works and how much. The jagged relationship between rhetoric and logic, condition and effect of knowing, is a relationship by which a world is made for the agent, so that the agent can act in an ethical way, a political way, a day-to-day way; so that the agent can be alive, in a human way, in the world. Unless one can at least construct a model of this for the other language, there is no real translation.35 Perhaps an accurate description of Shlomo’s endeavour is that he silences the logic of facts, leaves it somewhere outside his words, while surrendering to the oblique, emotional rhetoric behind them, marked with a multitude of irreducible individualities. He indeed undertakes what Spivak would have called a responsible translation—one that surrenders to the agency of rhetoric completely. However, at the same time the translation is always ambivalent in the way it ‘mimes the responsibility to the trace of the other in the self’.36 I emphasize this one phrase from Spivak’s essay because in her plea for responsible translation, it seems to mark exactly the relationship with the otherness accessible through art that Levinas seems to denounce so much. Grossman’s Shlomo does perhaps mime his service to the otherness of the victims. And yet there is so much he manages to retrieve from their silenced voices.

35 Spivak 1993: 181. 36 Ibid., 179.

chapter 3

Grossman’s White Room and Schulzian Empty Spaces Katarzyna Szurmiak The main theme, or at least the major narrative construction of See Under: Love is storytelling. Reality in Grossman’s book does not exist independently and neither is it taken for granted by main figures in the book. Characters from See Under: Love constantly negotiate reality. They do so through dialogues, which at some points turn into internal monologues. As a result, reality in the novel is reshaped within different stories—some more realistic, some utterly fantastic, letting the reader drift into regions of dream or illusion. The book contains a number of hidden themes. One of them is the problem of limitations of language and, more specifically, of art as a means of expressing the unspeakable. This issue reappears in all the chapters, but its presence is most profound in Part II: Bruno. It is also the chapter in which the reader is confronted with the central metaphor of the book: the White Room. The problem of artistic creativity is also a reappearing motif in the prose of Bruno Schulz, a Polish-Jewish writer who was the prototype of Bruno from the second Part of See Under: Love. His collection of stories, published under the title The Street of Crocodiles/Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass1 and Grossman’s novel also share the illusive, dreamlike atmosphere. While in the discussed chapter of See Under: Love the narrator tells the story of Bruno who avoided being shot by a German officer during the war and instead jumped into the sea and turned into a salmon, the dreamy little town of Drohobycz from The Street of Crocodiles/Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass together with trivial lives of its inhabitants spread into the dimensions of an unknown universe inhabited by prophets and torn by revolutions. The main characters of both novels seem to share the urge to enter new realities—in a more metaphorical sense of artistic creativity in Grossman’s book and in a more literal sense in the case of Bruno Schulz. In Grossman’s book the gate to the undiscovered universe of uninhibited literary activity (at least when it comes to the description of the Shoah and experiences related to it) is the mysterious White Room, a completely empty space situated somewhere in the heart of Yad Vashem. In Schulz’s books we find a somewhat similar concept 1 Schulz 1989. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���4 | doi ��.��63/9789004280946_��6

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of ‘empty spaces’. Some characters in his The Street of Crocodiles/Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass find it possible to explore parallel spaces or branches of time where pure matter is able to speak for itself. In the chapter Bruno the narrator seeks a completely new language in which genocide would be unspeakable (and thus impossible). Therefore, liberation from conventional language is presented as a way of preventing matters like the Shoah from happening again. Similarly, in Schulz’s stories the “empty spaces” and parallel branches of time are regions where pure matter deprived of form is finally able to germinate into unknown and unexpected shapes and therefore create a reality far different from the one we know. In See Under: Love the key to the new way of speaking about the Shoah lies in the White Room. Bearing this fact in mind and assuming that language and form belong to the same category of factors which impose conventional shape and order to reality, it is possible to ask whether the Schulzian concept of “empty spaces” might be the ultimate clue to understand the meaning of the metaphor of the White Room. 1

Welcome in the Dream Sea? Are you sleeping? Sea?! She’s sleeping. [. . .] Listen, sea. I don’t care if you are asleep. (S 120–121) I woke up in panic. It was 6:00 p.m. already. I had been sleeping on the beach for a whole hour. Later on I remembered my dream, which merely recapitulated what happened in reality. (S 136) When did it start? Bruno didn’t know. Maybe while he was asleep, or during the luscious gyoya to my north, near the Orkney Islands. (S 159)

Both in See Under: Love and in The Street of Crocodiles/Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass the plot is set in some semi-real, dreamlike scenery. Or in another, supplementary or alternative, unknown branch of time. While Grossman clearly and repeatedly refers to a dream in the chapter Bruno, Schulz himself can undoubtedly be called one of the forerunners of onirism in Polish literature.2 2 This convention influenced also Franz Kafka, whose prose made great impression on Schulz. In one of his letters Schulz wrote: ‘I am looking for a new author who would dazzle and

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The main difference between these books is that in Schulz’s book reality is created by young Joseph, the narrator who describes the world which surrounds him, his family and other people present in his life. The departure from principles of realistic description is therefore a result of the uninhibited imagination of a child. In See Under: Love, on the other hand, the adult writer Shlomo seems to be unable to cross the limits of his mind in search for new means of expression. The question which appears at once (a question familiar to Schulz as well)3 is whether entering the regions of unlimited creativity is possible at all for an adult? And if so, is it possible only through recuperating abilities lost with the end of the Age of Genius, with the end of childhood? Grossman’s book shows another way. Here reality is negotiated through numerous dialogues and, both real and fictional, interactions between various characters in the story. The result seems to be somehow similar—the reader is pulled into a time and a space located somewhere beyond the world we know. The final scene of the chapter Bruno represents an alternative reality, another branch of time: ‘And I was Shloma son of Tobias’—says Shlomo—‘Again.’ (S 170) And with these words he begins to rewrite reality as if he has entered the past events, he starts to create an alternative story which (in contrast to the original one from Schulz’s The Age of Genius) does not end with disappointment. Not only the narrator but Bruno as well seems to be captured in some alternative course of time: ‘[. . .] Bruno was galloping backward and forward in “time” as well: one moment he was a mature man burning with tremendous force, and the next moment, an alert and lively child [. . .]’ (S 172)4 In her analysis of Bruno Schulz’s stories Diana Kurpel relates to Trinity Square as one of the ‘empty times’ or ‘empty spaces’ which allow for what ‘exceeds the capacity of the factual world for representation’, such times and spaces are ‘the ground of latency out of which specific events are actualized’.5 There are more ‘empty’ times or spaces of this kind in Schulz’s prose. In The Age of Genius Joseph explains:

enrapture me. For quite some time, I haven’t found anything except Rilke, Kafka, and Mann’. Quoted in: Prokopczyk 1999: 26. 3 Schulz wrote in a letter: ‘The most beautiful and most intimate thing in a man are his memories from youth, from childhood. Yes, rather from childhood. People without childhoods to which they can return in memory are color-blind. How wonderful it is that layers of memories can be unfolded before our eyes . . . as when a flower in a movie, growing slowly, is speeded up. Memory is an element: at times we curse it, at times bless it.’ Quoted in: Taylor 1969: 459. 4 Needless to say that Bruno is already captured in the flow of alternative events—since he managed to escape from the ghetto in Drohobycz and start a new life as a salmon. 5 Kurpel 1996: 105.

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Ordinary facts are arranged within time, strung along its length as on a thread. [. . .] Yet what is to be done with events that have no place of their own in time; events that have occurred too late, after the whole of time has been distributed; [. . .] Yes, there are such branch lines of time, somewhat illegal and suspect, but when, like us, one is burdened with contraband of supernumerary events that cannot be registered, one cannot be too fussy.6 Or in The Night of the Great Season: Everyone knows that in a run of normal uneventful years that great eccentric, Time, begets sometimes other years, different, prodigal years which—like a sixth, smallest toe—grow a thirteenth freak month. [. . .] What is at fault is the senile intemperance of the summer, its lustful and belated spurt of vitality.7 These additional days are further described as ‘stunted, empty, useless days— white days’.8 Therefore it is possible to state that at least to some extent the White Room, the central and most profound metaphor in Grossman’s book also seems to be rooted in Schulz’s stories. It is the ‘empty space’ of See Under: Love. Let us recall how the White Room is described: And this White Room [. . .] was squeezed into being.9 It isn’t a room at all, in fact, but a kind of tribute, yes [. . .] a tribute from all the books, all the pictures and words and films and facts and numbers about the Holocaust at Yad Vashem to that which must remain forever unresolved, forever beyond our comprehension. (S 121) And in this room you find the essence of those days [. . .] but the wonderful thing is that there are no ready-made answers there. Nothing is explicit. It’s all merely possible. Merely suggested. Merely liable to materialize. Or likely to. (S 124) And now let us compare the description with a fragment of Schulz’s Tailor’s Dummies: 6 Schulz 1989: 131. 7 Schulz 1989: 84. 8 Schulz 1989: 84. 9 Originally this expression is phrased as: “powstał z nadmiaru” (Pol.)—arose from excess.

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“As you will no doubt know,” said my Father, “in old apartments there are rooms which are sometimes forgotten. Unvisited for months on end, they wilt neglected between the old walls and it happens that they close in on themselves, become overgrown with bricks and, lost once and for all to our memory, forfeit their only claim to existence.10 [. . .] “I could see the trembling of the air, the fermentation of too rich an atmosphere which provoked that precious blossoming, luxuriation and wilting of the fantastic oleanders which had filled the room with a rare, lazy snowstorm of large pink clusters of flowers. ‘Before nightfall,’ concluded my Father, ‘there was no trace left of that splendid flowering. The whole elusive sight was a Fata Morgana, an example of the strange make-believe of matter which had created a semblance of life.’11 In both cases the room is a space where things speak for themselves but the products of such activity of the pure matter are always mere possibilities, they never reach the phase of permanence or certainty. In both cases these places are forgotten by ordinary people and only some individuals obtain the chance to enter this mysterious space. 2

Demiurge (Who Can Enter the White Room?)

The burning desire for pure form (or rather pure matter?), of unrestricted creative process, the need of an entirely new language—all these problems are common to both writers. However, it is not so simple to identify them with a particular character in a novel. While in See Under: Love most of the artist’s dilemmas are articulated by Shlomo (but partly also by Ayala, Wasserman and the most unusual “artists” presented in the novel—the Children of the Heart), looking for a direct counterpart in Schulz’s stories proves complicated. It is possible to draw a parallel between the figures of Shlomo and Joseph, the narrator of Schulz’s stories, who appears in Grossman’s book under the name Bruno12 at the end of the chapter discussed. However, as for The Street of Crocodiles/Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass it seems equally valid

10 Schulz 1989: 37. 11 Schulz 1989: 38. 12 Bruno is actually a compilation of Joseph, Bruno the salmon and Bruno Schulz—the writer and historical character.

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to look for an archetype of an artist in the figure of Father. Let us analyse both possibilities. I felt different with her, and different things were evoked in me. I had never known I could turn a woman into an urn, etc., before. The amazing thing is, though, that with regard to us, I guessed what would happen even before she did, because I knew myself, I knew I had no hope whatsoever of fitting into her dreams. (S 123) In this description some aspects of Shlomo’s situation appear to be similar to the case of the Father from the prose of Bruno Schulz. First of all, he is presented as the Demiurge, as someone impudent enough to dare to repeat the sacred act of creation. In the story Visitation, Father is presented as a prophet and a creator. The narrator of the story, Joseph, picturing his Father as the biblical Jacob wrestling with God, recalls:13 [. . .] we heard him talk to God, as if begging for something or fighting against someone who made insisted claims and issued orders. Until one night that voice rose threateningly and irresistibly [. . .] and we heard the spirit enter into him as he rose from his bed, tall and growing in prophetic anger [. . .] We heard the din of battle and Father’s groans, the groans of a titan with a broken hip, but still capable of wrath.14 And soon he pushes the description further, making the reader believe that Father is somebody more than a prophet, that he is the creator: “Without looking, I saw him, the terrible Demiurge, as, resting on darkness as on Sinai, propping his powerful palms on the pelmet of the curtains, he pressed his enormous face against the upper panes of the window [. . .]”15 In Treatise on Tailor’s Dummies or the Second Book of Genesis, the treaty in which Father presents the full esthetic theory, we read: We have lived too long under the terror of the matchless perfection of the Demiurge. [. . .] For too long the perfection of his creation has paralysed our own creative instinct. We don’t wish to compete with him. We have no ambition to emulate him. We wish to be creators in our own, 13 The name of Father in Schulz’s stories is Jacob. 14 Schulz 1989: 15. 15 Schulz 1989: 15–16.

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lower sphere; we want to have the privilege of creation, we want creative delights, we want—in one word—Demiurgy.16 Similarities between Shlomo and Father are worth emphasizing not only because both are presented as creators, as heresiarchs, but also because their actions are ultimately doomed to failure. Failure is an inherent element of Father’s creative acts. Father’s tragedy of incomprehension is best described in the chapter Birds, where Father breeds flocks of the strangest oriental birds—pelicans, peacocks and cranes. Overwhelmed by his passion for creation of a new species, he himself begins to resemble a bird—he begins to forget himself and waves his arms and emits bird’s calls.17 As usual, the whole affair is soon cut short by Adela, who, during spring cleaning, opens the window and lets all the birds escape. However, one day the fruits of his genius creation come back to their master . . . in a truly distorted shape: There were among them two-headed birds and birds with many wings, there were cripples too, limping through the air in one-winged, awkward flight. [. . .] Nonsensically large, stupidly developed, the birds were empty and lifeless inside.18 And further: How moved my Father was by this unexpected return, how he marvelled at the instinct of these birds, at their attachment to the Master [. . .] But these blind birds made of paper could not recognise my Father, In vain

16 Schulz 1989: 31–32. 17 It is important to mention that Father’s gradual transformation into a bird is not in the least an outcome of the affair with tropical birds. Already in the previous chapter, Visitation, the following scene is described: “Occasionally he climbed on a pelmet and froze into immobility, a counterpart to the large stuffed vulture which hung on the wall opposite. In this crouching pose, with misty eyes and a sly smile on his lips, he remained for long periods without moving, except to flap his arms and crow like a cock whenever anybody entered the room.” (Schulz 1989: 18) Thus it seems reasonable to state that the seeds of future creation germinated not only in his mind but also in his body long before the actual act. 18 Schulz 1989: 93.

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did he call them with the old formulae, in the forgotten language of the birds—they did not hear him nor see him.19 Deformed animals, these caricatural remnants of Father’s heretic act of creation return as a bitter reminder of the imperfection of his work,20 just as vague remnants of Shlomik’s creativity remain visible in Ayala’s body: And a few weeks later I could see that Ayala was beginning to tire of me. Handles still curved out on her body, with the fine fluting, the pouting oval lips of the urn; sounds still issued from her body—I don’t know from where exactly—like little chirrups: ‘Drink me, drink me!’ but the undulations were definitely becoming awkward. And later, all was lost: I was rarely able to conjure the little green leaves around her neck anymore, or transform her skin into a shimmering strawberry-flavored surface of crunchy red grains. She would gaze at me with sorrow and pity in her eyes. Sorrow for us both, and the chance we’d missed. Around that time I had been making frantic attempts to write in a systematic way the story Grandfather Anshel told Herr Neigel, but, of course, the harder I tried, the worse I fared. (S 123) In See Under: Love the Father is mentioned only twice (S 93, S 116). In both cases the description is almost an exact quotation from Schulz’s The Street of Crocodiles/Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass. An important clue to understanding the character of the Father in the prose of Bruno Schulz is his relationship with women. The narrator emphasizes the importance of the fact that he ‘had not been rooted in any woman’s heart and therefore he could not merge with any reality and was therefore condemned to float eternally on the periphery of life, in half-real regions, on the margins of existence.’21 It does not imply the lack of women in Father’s life. On the

19 Schulz 1989: 94. 20 The whole story of Father’s creative attempts can be placed in the broad literary tradition of human creation as repeating God’s act. Within the Jewish tradition, numerous stories about the creation of a golem fired up writers’ imaginations—Chaim Bloch, H. Leivick, I.L. Perec, Kalman Segal or I.B Singer. However, Bruno Schulz’s voice in reinterpretation of this traditional story is highly untypical because Father, posing as the Demiurge, does not strive for perfection. From the beginning he praises the imperfection of form and postulates not to create a golem in the shape of a man, but exactly the opposite: ‘In one word’, he says, ‘we wish to create man a second time, in the shape and resemblance of a tailor’s dummy.’ (S 33) 21 Schulz 1989: 73.

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contrary, his existence was somehow suspended between two women—his wife Henrietta and the sensual young maid Adela. The case of Shlomo in Grossman’s book seems to be similar and different at the same time. Shlomo constantly seeks a fulfilling relationship and yet, torn between two powerful women, his wife Ruth and his mistress Ayala, he cannot find it. However, his situation differs profoundly from the drama of Father, the underestimated genius-creator whose fabulous undertakings are usually terminated with Adela’s one gesture. Shlomo does not lack the support of both women. The presence of Ayala is the factor which releases both his passion for life and his creative powers (it is she who makes him realise that he can turn a woman into an urn or make her blossom). Thanks to her, Shlomo himself turns into a powerful Demiurge, even if he fails (but is failure not the main feature of the creation of Father in Schulz’s stories?), even if it is just for a moment. Ruth, on the other hand, offers him stability and deep insight into the issues of art and life or rather the art of life (‘The things I know about you are very important to me. Just as the characters you write about are important to you. Our life, yours and mine—and now with Yariv—is the simple creation I work at every hour of every day. Nothing very big or daring. Nothing original either. [. . .] But his is mine, and I live it with all my might and main.’ (S 152–153)). For her art and life are of a similar nature. If there was no Ayala, Shlomo would not be able to write at all: I hated myself for the suffering I was causing her, yet I was afraid that if I left Ayala I would never be able to write again. And sometimes I think Ayala stayed with me out of some weird sense of duty toward Grandfather Anshel’s story, not because she especially cared for me. (S 123) Ayala symbolizes the essence, the very root of all forms of art: “Ayala does not write, but she does write her life.” (S 123) Father capitulates in the face of Adela’s pure physicality, while Shlomo capitulates in face of his lover’s wisdom: That childish performance was only a mask for her acute vision, a vision far more penetrating than my own, with her accurate and enlightened sense of bitterness of life. Once again I knew I was wrong. (S 125) So maybe the power of these two female figures was too overwhelming for Shlomo to allow him to write at all? Perhaps their deep understanding of matters which he could not solve, neither in life nor in his writing, their unmistaken intuition and perfection could not but make him see how miserable his attempts were?

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But their wisdom also allows Shlomo to finish his story: When Ruth and Ayala decide he should move out and rent a room on his own for some time, he capitulates again: ‘They were right, as usual. Women are always more perceptive.’ (S 157) Shlomo stays in a room without a telephone, without contact with his wife. Even though he hopes for further meetings with his mistress, she does not appear: ‘She never came, though. It was there that I wrote the sixth and final version of the story Anshel Wasserman told a German named Neigel’ (S 158) So despite his fear that without Ayala he will not be able to write again, Shlomo manages to overcome the crisis. Finally, it is not her presence but her absence that allows him to write. In some aspects Shlomo resembles the Father but in other he bears a likeness to Joseph or maybe to Bruno Schulz himself. After all, Schulz stated: ‘My ideal is “to mature” into childhood. That would be a true maturity’22 and indeed at some point in See Under: Love Bruno is portrayed as a person in a constant state of transgression between adult and child while Shlomo is absolutely unable to overcome the trauma of his childhood and to start an adult life without constantly relapsing to the past. Thus each of these characters—Shlomo, Bruno and even Schulz himself, seems to be either unable or unwilling to fully accept the definite end of some period of life. Indeed, in Schulz’s prose the Age of Genius, the time of creativity in its full bloom, is identified with childhood. Schulz believed that childhood sets the limits of imagination for an adult. Even an artist cannot cross the boundary set by visions produced in the early years of his life: I don’t know how we manage to acquire certain images in childhood that carry decisive meanings for us. They function like those threads in the solution around which the significance of the world crystallizes for us . . . Such images amount to an agenda, establish an iron capital of the spirit, proffered to us very early in the form of forebodings and halfconscious experiences. It seems to me that all the rest of one’s life is spent interpreting these insights, breaking them down to the last fragment of meaning we can master, testing them against the broadest intellectual spectrum we can manage. These early images mark out to artists the boundaries of their creative powers . . . They do not discover anything new after that, they only learn how to understand better and better the secret entrusted to them at the outset; their creative effort goes into an

22

Quoted in: Taylor 1969: 456.

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unending exegesis, a commentary on that one couplet of poetry assigned to them.23 In the prose of Bruno Schulz, the transition point, the boundary separating the Age of Genius, the childhood years of unrestricted creativity, from the jejune time which was to replace it, is marked by two events. Within the biography of the main character, the transition takes place together with the appearance of the mother in his life: This was a very long time ago. My mother had not appeared yet. I spent my days alone with my Father in our room, which at that time was as large as the world. [. . .] Then my mother materialized, and the early, bright idyll came to an end. Seduced by my mother’s caresses, I forgot my Father, and my life began to run along a new and different track with no holidays and no miracles.24 On a more general, historical level, the change occurs more or less when the traditional world of the 19th century is squeezed out by the flourishing industrialism of the 20th century. The Street of Crocodiles, the industrial district of the town and the quintessence of all degeneration, grows into forbidden but tempting territory. With prostitutes, American commodities and omnipresent signboards, the reality of this district contrasts sharply with the old-fashioned, orderly lifestyle of local merchants. We face a transition point in See Under: Love as well—it is the moment when Bruno decides to leave Drohobycz, the town of his childhood, his roots, his literature. However, Grossman decides to shift the moment in time and make the new degenerated epoch coincide with the war: And then the war came, and he began to think he’d make a mistake: people were turning treacherous, and the stalls of the sly merchants concealed ‘untrod markets, dark and deep, corrupt streets curbed with the debris of crumbling walls like rows of crocodile teeth . . .’ (S 92) Needless to mention that the description of the time of war refers to the description of the Street of Crocodiles. However, while the industrial revolution in Schulz’s prose is depicted as harmless and grotesque (‘The Street of Crocodiles 23 24

Quoted in Kurpel 1996: 103–104. Thus the time of unrestricted creativity in young Joseph’s life is also the time of his Father’s exclusive guidance. Schulz 1989: 118.

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was a concession of our city to modernity and metropolitan corruption. Obviously, we were unable to afford anything better than a paper imitation, a montage of illustrations cut out from last year’s mouldering newspapers’),25 the Second World War in Grossman’s book is the forming event and the primal cause of the whole evil which is associated with the degeneration of language. In See Under: Love we face a situation which requires completely new means of expression. Ayala tells Shlomo that he can deal with it only by entering the White Room. In Schulz’s novels the ‘empty spaces’ are accessible both for Joseph and for Father. In Grossman’s book Ayala is the one who can enter the White Room. The question remains, does Shlomo manage to enter it as well and if yes, with what result? 3

Culmination (What Happened in Trinity Square?)

The culmination scene of the chapter Bruno takes place in Trinity Square. The place itself is described in The Age of Genius as follows: Trinity Square was at that time empty and tidy . . . The thaw was followed by many days of quiet, discreet fine weather, with long spacious days stretching beyond measure into evenings when dusk seemed endless, empty, and fallow in its enormous expectations.26 Undoubtedly, empty and tidy, offering pure potentiality, Trinity Square is one of the Schulzian ‘empty spaces’ and it is used as such in Grossman’s novel. It appears that the scene in Trinity Square is the symbol of Shlomo’s final transformation and that events described at the end of the chapter Bruno are synonymous with the moment when he finally enters the White Room. In those few, remarkable days, little Bruno, with the help of his paintbrush, successfully broke out of the heavy metal bars imprisoning us, into a torrent of light, a ravishing first bloom. (S 169) As Colleen M. Taylor notices, the issue of ‘form’ understood as ‘limitations on man’s being imposed by “the other”’ was not new to Bruno Schulz’s contemporaries with whose works he was undoubtedly familiar—starting with Heidegger and the French existentialists, just to mention a figure much closer 25 Schulz 1989: 72. 26 Schulz 1989: 138.

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to Schulz—his friend and famous artist Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz who also developed complex theories on ‘Pure Form’.27 Schulz presented a radical view on this matter, saying ‘that form exists only insofar as essence continually recreates itself’.28 We are led to the conclusion that what Bruno did in the final scene of the chapter of Grossman’s book was liberating people from (or depriving them of) precisely what has been defined as ‘form’ in the above-mentioned quotation of Colleen Taylor. In a letter to Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz, Schulz explained his theory of ‘the migration of forms’: The substance of that reality exists in a state of constant fermentation, germination, hidden life. It contains no dead, hard, limited objects. Everything diffuses beyond its borders, remains in a given shape only momentarily, leaving its shape at the first opportunity.29 Thus, paradoxically, form is not something stable. On the contrary—it exists only in a state of constant transformation. Form does not penetrate matter. It limits the essence by shaping it but this state is not indefinite. The essence seems to have a capability of blowing up all the imposed limitations and transforming into unknown forms of matter. If this theory is applied to people, it should be assumed that under certain circumstances all conventions, social rules and relationships will disappear. This leads us to a situation described in See Under: Love. The radical utopia proposed in the book is a mixture of radical freedom and ultimate destruction. With the help of Bruno, by entering one of his stories, Shlomo finally enters the White Room. From the small scraps of reality he remembers from the past, he manages to create new stories, alternative sequences of events and most unusual biographies for people he knows from his childhood. Is it a successful undertaking? Definitely, he does not manage to write a comprehensive story which would convey the whole truth about the Shoah. Even the form of an encyclopedia proves insufficient. The narrative itself deceives its author through unexpected proliferation over which he seems to have no control. Each entry of the encyclopedia begins with an objective, non-emotional comment only to spread into a self-referential tale with unlimited branches. But is it a failure? In Schulzian terms this primal freedom achieved by letting things speak for themselves is the only accessible way to touch the essence of reality. 27 Taylor 1969: 470. On Witkiewicz and his theory see: Kiebuzinska 1993: 59–83. 28 Kurpel 1996: 111. 29 Quoted after Kurpel 1996: 111.

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As Dorota Głowacka notices in her essay, ‘Schulz insists that the artist’s task is to loosen the web of reality because this will allow the word to complete itself with Sense from which it has been divorced.’30 Bruno’s (or rather Shlomo’s) final vision is cruel, but so is the creativity of Joseph in the Age of Genius (‘The drawings were full of cruelty, pitfalls and aggression. [. . .] It was a murderous pursuit, a fight to the death.’)31 It is out of control but so is reality in The Street of Crocodiles/Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass. Shlomo’s art will never be perfect, just like all the results of human creativity, but imperfection is exactly what Father, the great heresiarch, expects. See Under: Love is another voice in the debate of the Shoah: the unspeakable can be represented. Shlomo himself refers to Adorno’s famous statement on this matter, saying: “Adorno says after Auschwitz, poetry is no longer possible” (S 106). However, he recalls this often repeated phrase not to express his genuine belief, but rather to admit that he is trying to avoid the problem again. “I was still sidestepping” (S 106), he says. This time through easy labels. Grossman’s book is a courageous objection against those who claim that writing about the Shoah in any form different than a testimony can only trivialize the truth, diminish the endless horror of what assumed the status of a dogma already years ago. Shlomo’s helplessness in dealing with the topic is not only related to his impotence as a writer. It refers to the general problem of paralysis in dealing with the canon. It refers to the dilemmas of people who feel that the Shoah is part of their own experience although they did not live through it. It is, however, inscribed in cultural texts they grew up with, coded in the experience of people who influenced their sensitivity, their perception of the world. Therefore, to some extent, it is their experience and yet they are not allowed to choose the language they want to use to describe it, because the decision concerning a proper form has already been taken. Shlomo decides to break the canon. As Yehuda Bauer puts it, he allies the Chronicler with Job.32 He tries to embrace the experience which is solely his and at the same time absolutely external. His ultimate goal was to find a new language. A language which would protect people, which would prevent genocide from happening again. Events in Trinity Square prove this aim to be both a success and a failure. On the one hand, they show that a complete reconstruction of social structures is possible. However, this process is not subject to any control. Choosing Bruno for a guide in the quest for a new language was a 30 Głowacka 1999: 115. 31 Schulz 1989: 134. 32 Bauer 1978: 49.

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risky decision—after all in Bruno Schulz’s prose tandeta (meaning something tacky; junk; of cheap, imperfect imitation) assumes the role of the paradigm of language.33 Thus opening the door of the White Room designed by Bruno is equivalent to entering the regions of great heresy—such an act may be a promise of uninhibited creativity but will never guarantee safety. 33

Schönle 1991: 127–144.

part 2 Dying Over There

⸪

chapter 4

The Laugh of a God Who Doesn’t Exist Marc De Kesel 1

‘Little Favors of Divine Will’

‘Every time I laugh . . . my deity, who doesn’t exist, of course, knows I cleave to Him, knows I have understood Him profoundly, if only for an instant.’ (S 330) A God who does not exist, but whom you believe in. A God you understand the best in moments of humor and laughing, including laughing at God Himself. I quote this strange faith in God from the lips of one of the characters in See Under: Love. We are in the years 1920, in one of the Jewish shtetls in central Europe, and the man speaking is Shimon Zalmanson, editor of a childeren’s magazine named Little Lights. Two decades later, in 1943, in one of the Nazi extermination-camp where the entire shtetl culture literally and ‘biologically’ was burned, Zalmanson’s memorable words are cited by Anshel Wasserman, another character of the novel. Twenty years ago, Wasserman was widely praised as the author of the successful story cycle ‘The Children of the Heart’, but unfortunately, his literary inspiration ran dry. Now, he is sitting in the camp office, facing the leading SS-commander, Otto Neigel. Actually, instead of sitting there, he should already have been gassed and cremated. After a failed gassing, they shot him several times through the head, but inexplicably, he felt nothing but a strange noise passing through his brain. This is why the camp commander had decided to give him a ‘camp-job’ in his own office, as gardener. The commander’s hidden reason, however, was that, as a child, he grew up with Wasserman’s stories, and that, now, he takes the opportunity for enjoying some literary entertainment at the end of his ‘working’ day. It is to him that Wasserman addresses the words of his editor Zalmanson, elevating laughter to the most eminent form of religious faith. But Wasserman does not only address him. Aside, invisible to Neigel, he also addresses Momik/ Shleimeleh/Shloma, a writer in crisis, and the main character of the novel. Momik supposes Wasserman—erraneously—to be his grandfather. When, in the course of Part 3, Wasserman constantly addresses his words to him, it is because he wants Momik to write his story—the story of his ‘grandpa’ who has lost his capacity to properly speak after the war.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���4 | doi ��.��63/9789004280946_��7

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The larger context is as follows. The son and grandson of Jewish Holocaust survivors is an Israeli writer in the eighties and goes through a deep existential crisis after having been confronted with the traumatic past of his parents and his people. By writing a novel about (among others) his ‘grandpa’, he tries to overcome his crisis. ‘Grandpa’, so Momik tries to make clear in the novel he wants to write, is not simply the lamb that is brought to the slaughter. It is true that this perception dominates the larger part of the Jewish Holocaust memory, just as it dominates Momik’s own memory of his ‘grandpa’, but the facts were different, so Momik wants to prove: his ‘grandpa’ was a writer and writing was his way to resist the Nazi-beast. This is why Momik/Shleimeleh/ Shloma’s resistance, too, will consist in writing—writing as resistance against his own depression and against the depressing world that has made and still makes things like the Shoah possible. And this is why Momik wants to do justice to the story of his ‘grandpa’ becoming speechless: to the stories he wrote, to the story of his life, both his life in the shtetl and his ‘non-life’ in the Shoah. Simultaneously, Momik wants to do justice to the life and force that his own story (and that literature as such) can give to the struggle against the lethal forces that Wasserman and other survivors barely escaped. One of the topics in Anshel Wasserman’s story (told by Momik) is the friendship that he once shared with his editor, Shimon Zalmanson, who professionally was a severe person but, apart from that, lived his life as a real ‘bon vivant’. A thing that the anxious bourgeois Wasserman was secretly jealous of. And that, while he is sitting in front of his Nazi executioner, he is involuntarily thinking of. If only because his former editor would have simply laughed away the thorny position he is in. And ‘thorny’ is after all a euphemism if one tries to describe Wasserman’s situation. It is not that he is eager to escape death. On the contrary, he hankers after death, but fate refuses to give him that and, instead, forces him, as a living dead, to fake his lost literary talent in order to please one of the main persons responsible for the extermination of his family and his people. So, only now he understands the holy message of Zalmanson’s reaction to such situations: laughing, feeling joyful, and laughing troubles away. For this is the way in which Zalmanson has entered the gas chamber. Together with Wasserman, be it that, there, the latter was confronted with his acute incapacity to die. This obliged him to listen to Zalmanson’s inexcusable laughing till the very end—longer, in a way, than Zalmanson himself was able to tolerate. Elsewhere, in a passage in which Wasserman adresses himself aside to (the always invisibly present) Momik/Shleimele, that moment in the gas chamber is strikingly described:

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Nu, they were writhing and groaning [. . .] and only I, Anshel Wassermann was left standing like a lulav, and Zalmanson started laughing then, would that I had never heard him, snorting and weeping, such a laugh, till suddenly he died. He was the first to die! And it is important you should know this, Shleimeleh: Shimon Zalmanson, the Jew, my only friend, editor of Little Lights, the children’s magazine, died laughing in the gas chamber, a fitting death for a man like him, who believed that God reveals Himself through humor. (S 190) Wasserman is not capable of following his murdered editor’s example. He takes things too seriously for that. Including the literary job his executioner has charged him with. Although the latter is forced to do him a favor in return: after every successful literary evening, he has to shoot ‘his Jew’ through the head. One never knows it once may work. But laughing the way Zalmanson does is certainly no option for him. Whether, however, Grossman’s reader will be able to repress a fit of laughter is less certain. Despite its subject—how children and grandchildren of Shoah victims can deal with that trauma—the novel is in fact one long chain of hilarious situations, scenes, and characters. A boy (Momik as kid) wants to catch the ‘Nazi-beast’ about whom he ‘heard’ his parents and others in his neighborhood keep silence, picks up that it can come out of every beast, therefore breeds animals at home in the basement; and as the Nazi-beast still refuses to come out, he gathers all traumatized lunatics (Shoah survivors) of his neighborhood, including ‘grandpa’ Wasserman, hoping this will tempt the beast to show up. It goes without saying that the entire plan runs into a hilarious fiasco. So far Part 1. Part 2, which is an ode to the Jewish-Polish writer Bruno Schulz, might be a tougher part to read, the subject is not less hilarious. A Jew, anno 1943 at an art gallery in Dantzig/Gdansk, kisses Edward Munch’s Scream (S 90) and escapes his pursuers choosing the open sea to become a salmon in a school of salmons. The conflict he has there with his rescuers, both the sea as such and the salmon school, brings about highly comic and funny scenes—certainly when the story is interlarded with another one about a writer in crisis supposing to have contact with ‘Bruno’ by speaking directly to the sea and, at times, by disappearing in it like once Bruno did. In Part 3, a Jew fails in the only test he is invited to in ‘Auschwitz’: dying. That this guarantees a set of unseen comic situations has already been illustrated above in the few things revealed from Wasserman’s story. The fourth and last part is, if possible, even more comical. It tells the story of a baby, Kazik, who in 22 hours lives the 72 years of a normal man. The baby is the central preoccupation of a group of aged madmen in the

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destroyed zoo of Warsaw in the same year 1943. The group is gathered by Otto Brig, a Christian Polish man who supposes his collective of ‘artists’ to be the true response to the dominating Nazi terror. One of them is a real ‘elephantiasis man’ who carefully counts the number of his ‘non-ejaculations’, convinced as he is that once his saved and accumulated sexual energy will catapult him out of the Nazi hell. When looked at closely, the entire book is one big hilarious joke. It is probably only due to Grossman’s unquestionable literary genius that the critics haven’t razed the novel to the ground, accusing it to be sheer blasphemy. When George Didi-Huberman once began an essay on the Shoah and visual culture saying ‘Il faut s’imaginer’ Auschwitz, he was reprimanded immediately.1 Grossman’s novel is one big ode addressed to that imperative, and constantly violates the ban on images that dominates a larger part of the Shoah memorial culture. The critics reproached Didi-Huberman of feeding the illusion that images can bring us into the heart of the Shoah, the gas chamber, and so help us overcome the non-representable nature of the Holocaust. With Grossman, we enter all the ventricles of the Shoah’s heart, both the ones of the executioners and the ones of the victims. He carries us along to the gas chamber’s very inside and lets us witness there how a Jew dies from laughing. A greater blasphemy is almost impossible. This is all the more true if one considers that the Jew’s laughter answers the blasphemous laughter of the Nazi. The passageway leading the naked Shimon Zalmanson and Anshel Wasserman to the gas chamber was decorated in a way that could not be misunderstood. A few lines above the quote that opened this chapter, Wasserman cites Zalmanson’s words uttered just before they were collectively killed: ‘No doubt you remember, Anshel, the sight that greeted us at the entrance of the Holy of Holies, the little gas chamber?’ Wasserman remembered very well: the Germans had brought the ark curtain from a synagogue in Warsaw and hung it at the entrance to the gas chambers. Embroidered on the curtain were the words ‘This is the gate of the Lord. The righteous shall enter’ and here Zalmanson began to laugh, and died laughing with the realization that even someone like fusty old Wasserman has his funny points. Laughter itself was the spontaneous ritual of his religion. ‘Every time I laugh’ he explained, ‘my deity, who doesn’t exist, of course, knows I cleave to Him, knows I have understood Him profoundly, if only for an instant. Because, my little Wasserman, the good Lord created the world 1 Didi-Huberman 2003: 11. For a critical reply, see Wajcman 2001; Pagnoux 2001: 84–108.

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out of nothingness, out of chaos, and He took His blueprint and building materials from that chaos . . .  nu, what do you say to that? (S 330) Zalmanson’s laughter responds in the first place to the sarcastic joke of the Nazis’ letting the Jews advance their certain death as if they were entering the space where, in a synagogue, the Torah scrolls are stored and which, since the second destruction of the Temple (70 AD) functions as the ‘Holy of Holies’. Nazi sarcasm cannot be more thorough, more grundlich, more blasphemous. And what does Shimon Zalmanson do? Instead of protecting himself against the humiliation, and, out of vicarious shame, looking away from such tasteless cynicism, he fully approves of it. He simply does what each joke expects one to do: he laughs. What is more, he does what each sarcastic joke expects one to do: he laughs without laughing away the cruel thing almost every joke is about. For this is the Nazis’ intention: the curtain hanging before what the Jews consider to be the Holy of Holies, hangs there for nothing, because it hangs hiding nothing. It hangs there hiding the nothing the Jews are as biological and cultural identity, hiding the nothing they are now and, thanks to the biopolitically ‘correct’ Nazi ideology, they will be in a few moments. It hangs there hiding their grave, telling that in that grave lies nothing and that their death doesn’t count, that the one dying there, never was really living, never was real life and that, therefore, just like that embroidered curtain, he was mere fiction and fantasy. In case of the Jew: a bad, biologically and racially wrong fantasy. Indeed, Shimon Zalmanson understood the joke of his killers perfectly. He didn’t miss the point and thus laughs—dies laughing, literally. So the ‘immortal’ Wasserman was able to witness. But his lethal laughing not only fully acknowledges that which the Nazis laugh with, Zalmanson acknowledges at the same time his own religion. This is why he does not simply laugh because the Nazis are right in his eyes. He also laughs with the Nazi joke because even in that he recognizes a sign of God. Because it is God himself who, in the most terrible moment of their history, has given the Jews that joke. When Zalmanson laughs, it is in gratitude for this divine present. The lines above the just cited passage cannot be misunderstood: Zalmanson (who was, incidentally, the errant son of a great rabbi) said humor was the sole means to understand God and His Creation in all its mystery, and to go on worshipping Him in gladness. Zalmanson’s God went around showering mankind with little favors of divine will. ‘No doubt you remember, Anshel, the sight that greeted us at the entrance of the Holy of Holies, the little gas chamber?’ (S 330)

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One of the ‘little favors of divine will’: thus Zalmanson qualifies the cynical, sadistic joke the Nazis play on the Jews just before killing them. Similarly, he has no fear to name the ‘little gas chamber’ ‘the Holy of Holies’. Against the use of the word ‘holocaust’ as the term to indicate the Nazi genocide of the European Jews, there is a widespread critical reserve. A cruelty and suffering of that proportion cannot be done justice with a religious, and more precisely sacrificial term. ‘Holocaust’ is the word for a sacrifice that ‘burns all’, i.e. a sacrifice that does not leave the participants anything to eat. One cannot appropriate the unimaginable cruelty of the Shoah, not even religiously. On Zalmanson, this kind of critical reserve is definitely wasted. According to him, even infernos such as Auschwitz are barrels full of ‘little favors of divine will’, and with full religious assent he takes them to heart—laughing, laughing to God, even in the most godforsaken instant of his dying. As a restlessly consumable sacrifice—i.e. as a ‘holocaust’—he offers himself while laughing to his God. An apotheosis of gratitude for the humor offered to him by God even in the most infernal of his Creation’s ‘mysteries’. 2

‘The Almighty’

Zalmanson’s laugh seems to be Grossman’s grotesque, literary blow-up of the kind of reactions that historically are ascribed to Hasidic Jewry. Hasidic Jews were largely represented among the Holocaust victims, if only because their kind of Judaism was dominant in the religious and cultural life of the EastEuropean shtetls. It was thanks to the Hasidic reformation movement that, during the 18th century, Ashkenazi Judaism conquered a proper place both within the Jewish world and in European culture in general.2 Referring to elements from the Cabbala (but without the sophisticated intellectualism in which it often was practiced), Hasidism believed in a far reaching interaction between the divine and the earthly reality, so that even the most ‘earthly’ and ‘evil’ things were considered to be signs referring to God. Among other prominent Hasidic rabbis, Grossman mentions a few times Nahman of Breslow (1772–1811),3 who learned that happiness and joy are the privileged signs of God’s blessing. This made him compel his disciples to be always happy and joyful.4 It is a fact that in the Nazi concentration and extermination camps,

2 Kriwaczek 2005. 3 Cohn-Sherlok 1997: 97–100. 4 Besançon 1986: 432–439.

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many Hasidic Jews did what they could to obey that commandment.5 In his way, also Shimon Zalmanson does so in Grossman’s novel. In the beginning, before Creation, there was only God. The infinite space was filled with Divine Light. Thus the Jewish myth inspired by Isaac Luria’s Cabbala-interpretation. In order to create heaven and earth, God decided to ‘shrink’, to ‘contract’ himself. In a gesture of ‘contraction’—in the Hebrew of the Cabbala called ‘tsimtsum’6—the Light-God shrank. This way, an immense space was set free. Deprived of Divine Light and Goodness, that space was dark and empty, and allowed evil to come into being. Even when the dark immediately was traversed by God’s Light again, evil and godforsakenness stuck to the Creation that was made in that space. But also sparks of the original Light remained present in every single corner of the created universe. Even in those corners dominated by evil. This is why evil, badness, calamity and disaster are to be conceived as possible bearers of redemption.7 The raison d’être of the Jewish people consists in gathering all over the universe, including its most evil corners, the sparks of light that could bring mankind back to the God of Light. Thus the Chosen People has to fulfil its task of bringing redemption to the entire creation. This kind of Hasidism based on the Lurian Cabbala constitutes the background of all ‘positive’ characters in Grossman’s novel. In what seems to be the worse, they are able to recognize the sparks of redemption, as the laughing Zalmanson recognized it in the corridor leading to the gas chamber as well as in the gas chamber itself. Just like all others acknowledge a messianic feature in the most abject of their inclinations and idiosyncrasies. Yedidya Munin, for instance, the manic ejaculative superman, already mentioned above, interprets his own sexual aberration in no other way. Which is the reason why Otto Brig received him in his circle of ‘artists’ intending to engage into combat against the Nazi terror. In a conversation with another member of that circle, Fried, the physician/veterinarian of the zoo, who takes heed of Munin’s obsession of constantly touching his genitals, the name of Nahman of Breslow is mentioned, together with a striking evocation of the Lurian-Cabbalistic doctrine of redemption: ‘. . . And the sperm, your honor surely knows that sperm, a drop of semen is more than a drop of semen . . .’ ‘Is it?’ ‘Absolutely so! It, too, contains a 5 Schindler 1990; Gabner 2005. 6 Scholem 1995: 260–265. 7 For the hasidic idea that one can experience God within the mundane (Avodah Begashmiut), see Schindler 1990: 12–13.

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divine spark! And the organ, the smitchick, all the more. And we find in the compilation of Rabbi Nahman that the whole world was created for the sake of Israel, and even for the lesser ones of Israel, such as I, for instance, and even for the least of organs, and all this so that Israel may be redeemed [. . .]’. (S 372) [Fried:] ‘But God—is holy! Transcendent, and all that, while you—foo! It is too revolting!’ Munin: ‘Only seemingly, your honor! Seemingly indeed it is revolting, but God’s glory is everywhere, as they say in the Zohar, Munin’s commentary—there is no place where God is not, He pervades even that which is called sin, and sparks that fell from on high are tarnished now and sullied in every kind of corruption, in the drop of semen, too, and we, the children of Israel, are commanded to worship the Holy One, blessed be He, with devotion, in order to bring those sparks back to their rightful place, and even the most terrible sinners will be His support, [. . .]’ (S 373–374) What semen and ejaculation mean for Yedidya Munin, blasphemy and sanctification mean for Shimon Zalmanson. The sinful ‘drop of semen’ contains an unspoiled spark of Light, and Munin’s obsession for ejaculation is his way to push the hidden sparks back to their origin. In the same way, the sardonic laughter of the Nazis hanging the synagogue curtain before the entree of the gas chamber is a spark of Light to be acknowledged. This makes Zalmanson’s laughter in the gas chamber a supreme act of Hasidic religiosity. The divine is what even the most abject and godless things can behold as seeds of redemption. Only in that sense, God is almighty. Not in the sense that he has realized all that is possible. Only as mere possibility He is almighty. He is inexhaustible, infinite potentiality—a capability incapable of realizing its capacity and of reaching its limits. Operating in the darkest corners of the universe, this God gives new possibilities to everything that, exhaustedly, seems to dash against its limits. Instead of a transcendent God whom human desire is longing for, He is radically immanent, again and again breaking open the potentialities of mortal humans. It is a God who delivers the human potentiality from its finitude, not by integrating it in a realized infinity, but by giving finitude as such again and again new possibilities. God as an infinitely creating God is the basic intuition of the cabbalisticly inspired Hasidism, which constitutes the background of a larger part of the Jewish characters in Grossman’s novel. The ‘delusion of creation’ into which another of Otto Brig’s ‘artists’, Hannah Zeitrin, has fallen, illustrates this strikingly. Hannah is a Polish/Jewish woman

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whose husband and children were killed by the Nazis in 1939, at the very beginning of the war. Now, 1943, she lives in the ghetto of Warsaw, together with her new husband (Yisrael Lev Barkov) and the child she got from him. One night, a Polish policeman capriciously shoots the child as well as her sister who was carrying the child to Hannah’s house. Since all this occurs a few minutes before the hour of the curfew, the two dead bodies stay lying outside on the street in the sight of Hannah and her husband. A delirious dream keeps the desperate mother between sleep and wake: incessantly she has sex with her man, incessantly she bears children, and, once outside the house, one after another each child is shot through the head. Hannah: ‘Barkov and I were like hungry animals that night. We gave birth to my son Dolek, and my Rochka, and then Nechemia, and Ben-Zion, and Abigail. And our last child. And Barkov lay with me again and again. And we scratched and bit each other till we bled. And we sweated buckets and drank buckets to have more en more moisture. And my womb was a giant funnel, a cornucopia. Seas and mountains and forests and land. And children flowed out of Barkov and me and filled the streets, and the ghetto, and all of Warsaw. And our passion knew no bounds. And our children were murdered outside. And we made new children. And then we heard shots outside again. So we made more children. And towards dawn we knew we could never stop. And then we felt everything move with us, the bed and the room and the house and the street. Everything rose and fell and writhed and sweated and groaned. And when dawn broke, all the world was with us, all the world was dancing our dance. People and trees and cats and stones. A dance. Even the sleepers did it in their dreams. Dreams. God was giving in. His terrible secret had been found out. That He can create only one thing. That He has doomed us to passion. To love this life. Love this life at any cost. Love without reason. And faith in life. And longing. [. . .]’ (S 411) Notice the same kind of reaction as in the case of Zalmanson’s lethal fit of laughter. Again, childless, again realizing that, in a Nazi-universe, raising children has no sense, Hannah Zeitrin does not stop bearing children, children for that very world. In the hell of the ghetto she deliberately is a funnel of voluptuousness and labour pains, incessantly, until she feels that the entire world—man, animal, and stone—enjoys limitlessly that kind of ‘procreative’ lechery. Here, the enigma of the novel’s title is revealed. In the realm of death, pogrom, mass murder, and crematoria, victims have only one motto, ‘See

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Under: Love’, ‘Love’ to be found ‘under: Sex’.8 The only remedy is love, love that is sex, sex that is creating life, giving birth. Exploiting life’s inexhaustible potentialities. This is God’s mystery, that He is life, an excessive source of life incapable of running dry. And Hannah’s and Barkov’s sexual orgy has forced God to abandon his usual reserve: ‘God was giving in’. At least in the delirium of Hannah’s dream during the night she was forced to stare at the dead body of her child lying next to that of her sister on the street in the Warsaw ghetto. The same night, Barkov could no longer stand it and committed suicide.9 But Hannah doesn’t give up. In other words, even awake, she sticks to her delirium. She begins to make herself up for her God and, in full make-up, wanders through the streets of the ghetto. And where others stick to the facts (a mad drifter who keeps on laughing even when by times she is raped both by Polish and by Jewish men), Otto Brig sees what Hannah really is doing: seducing God so that He keeps on revealing his secret. Otto admits her in his community at the zoo where now the ‘most beautiful woman in the world’ dances in order, once again, to seduce God. It is her way to shape her ‘war with God’, a war against a God who is at war with himself. Otto and Hanna hear ‘him bang His hoary head against the wall and moan with pain’ (S 412). 3 Crisis Does David Grossman belong to the kind of ‘artists’ recruited by Otto Brig? Is he a modern exponent of the cabbalistic and Hasidic culture able to turn the harshest Nazi sadism into divine light sparks? Is Grossman a pious Hasidic Jew? If not wrong, the question is at least pointless. As if the understanding of a novel depends on what we know about an author’s biography. Yet, within the boundaries of the novel, the question is not inappropriate. Does Momik/ Shleimele/Shlomo belong to Otto Brig’s ‘artistic’ collective? Is the way he deals with his existential crisis not imbued by Hasidic mythology and, even, Hasidic faith? Let us have a second look at Momik’s crisis. He is a thirty years old writer, married, father of a son, and ‘would-be’ grandchild of a Shoah-survivor. The crisis came on during the months he decided to have children with his wife. Initially, he didn’t want children. This seemed inappropriate to him in a world enabling things like the Shoah, a world that has not come to terms yet with 8 ‘SEX, See Under: Love’ (S 376); ‘LOVE, See Under: SEX’ (S 305). 9 ‘And Yisrael Lev tore himself from me. He dragged himself to the window and threw himself out.’ (S 500)

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the possibility that one shoots one’s colleague’s ‘house Jew’ because the other has shot his. This happened, so Momik discovered, to Bruno Schulz, a famous 20th-century Polish writer, in the ghetto of his home town Drohobycz—as the ‘house Jew’ of the Nazi officer Felix Landau (S 119; 209). This made a deep impression on Momik. To him, it felt as an attack on language itself. A language allowing sentences like ‘You killed my Jew, so I will kill yours’, loses all acceptability. Such language should be destroyed, so that, from its ashes, a new one could rise up again in which sentences like this have become impossible. This is why Momik is fascinated by Schulz’s literary work. Years before the Shoah occurred, this Polish writer already had that intention in mind. To destroy and to rebuild language is the basic motive behind Schulz’s literary writing. In a passage in the second part of Grossman’s novel, Momik (who is looking for Bruno) is told by the sea: . . . that Bruno, sensitive as he was, had guessed everything years before it actually happened. And for that reason, perhaps, he had begun to write, to train himself in the new language and the new grammar. He understood humanity and knew; he heard the rumbling long before anyone else heard it. He had always been the weak link. Yes. He knew that a language that will admit a sentence like ‘I killed your Jew . . . In that case, I will now kill . . .’ etc., a language where such verbal constructs do not turn to poison in the speaker’s mouth—is not the language of life, human and moral, but a language infiltrated many ages past by evil traitors, with one intention—to kill. (S 167–168) A new language, killing the one of death and giving birth to the one ‘of life’. This is the impossible task of a writer, so Momik thinks. This task names both Momik’s crisis and his way out of that crisis. Bruno Schulz strikingly expresses Momik’s crisis, for he lived in a world in which sentences like ‘I have killed your Jew . . .’ were commonly accepted and, yet, he kept on being an ‘artist’. How could he do that? How could he obey Nazi officer Landau, who liked to shoot children in the mouth while they were hankering for lollies and who at the same time admired both Schulz’s literary and graphic art? How could he obey this war criminal who has taken him as his ‘house Jew’ and charged him to paint frescos on the walls of his private house? How could he make art on Nazi command? This is the idea Momik cannot stand. How can one be an artist for the benefit of the Nazis? For Momik, it is a real question, if only because he assumes that Bruno is basically right to do so, and that it is up to him, Momik, to understand it. By traversing his crisis, by writing like Bruno wrote, Momik begins to understand.

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In the darkest night, one must recognize the spark of pure light. In the most lethal, one must let speak the living. That is what creation is about. That is the task of art and literature. And this is why Bruno could continue doing what he did in the time before Landau made him his ‘Hausjude’. He could do so even when it got clear to him that the Nazis’ New Order was ‘new’ because it was an order without people of his ‘race’, an order built on the death of the Jew. With his art, Bruno tried to break open the Nazis’ world and make them realize that the ones they considered to represent death (the evil virus among the world’s races) were in fact life’s creative force. Yet, Momik’s understanding of Bruno’s lesson is only possible by an intervention of his imagination that explicitly ‘changes’ the facts. Unlike in Schulz’s biography, in Momik’s writing Bruno does not die. He escapes. He disappears into the sea, into that fluid element where nothing is what it is, where each fish can choose to go or not to go his own single way in an ocean that allows each his own language. He is taken by an element in which even his decomposition is still a fertile gesture. That fertility is similar to the one of that other Bruno, ‘grandpa’ Wasserman. Wasserman does in fact what Bruno does. Obedient to the Nazi commandment, he produces art, in his case literary art. In the story he tells for (and with) him, he gathers a collective of ‘artists’ centred on a kind of strange apotheosis of fertility: a baby who, in hardly one day, lives the entire life of an adult man. It is Momik’s way to show that even in the centre of Warsaw 1943, a life not affected by the Nazi killing machinery is possible. It is Momik’s escape from his existential crisis as well. Of course it is foolish to beget children in a world that cannot deal with the normality that sentences as ‘I killed your Jew . . .’ once had. Or, what in the novel amounts to the same thing: in a world in which each Israeli is doomed to face his Palestinian neighbour/enemy in arms till the end of his day. A world in which his children will have to share their playground with tanks and armoured cars and where a pomegranate might always be simply a grenade. But life is to be lived, made and loved nonetheless. Yet, even when Momik overcomes his fear of having children and becomes a father, the crisis is not fully over. Remember, for instance, the passage when he visits the neighbourhood play area with his young son. I am always testing him. He’s taller and sturdier than most children of his age, and that is good, but he is afraid of them. He is afraid of everything. I have to climb the slide because he refuses to move without me. I climb down again and leave him there crying that he’s afraid he might fall. Some kindly soul walks over to inform me that he’s afraid. I smile, coldly beatific, and tell her that out in the forest children his age were used as sentinels and made to sit guard for hours high in the treetops.

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She recoils in horror. [. . .] He screams and carries on. I light a cigarette and watch him. [. . .] Come here, you little coward, I say out loud, feigning nonchalance stubbing my cigarette out on the heel of my shoe, and then I climb up to get him. But when his mouth sticks to my neck and trembles with a mournful sob, I feel the heavy pendulum of childish shame swing from his heart to mine with such force it almost knocks me off the ladder. Forgive me, my child, I say inwardly, forgive everything, be wiser and more patient than I am, because I don’t have the strength, they didn’t teach me how to love. Be strong enough to tolerate me, love me. And stop crying like a girl, I whisper out loud. (S 149) Not a real son will release Momik from his crisis, but a fictitious one. Not the strong shoulder of a child which the father can cry on, but a weak baby burning life in less than a day in order to keep itself saved from ubiquitous evil. Not his Holocaust research keeping him day after day in Yad Vashem, not a harsh confrontation with the facts, but imagination and fiction show him the way out from the impasse both his life and his writing is in. That imagination makes him one with Bruno and enables him to understand the story his ununderstandably mumbling grandpa ‘told’ him when he was a child, a story that he now understands/imagines as the one of a Nazi beast that repents— read: commits suicide—by getting absorbed by a story about a baby who, in Warschaw 1943, is the messianic torch of an artists’ collective. 4

‘The White Room’

One of the basic elements in the narrative of See Under: Love—a young writer traumatized by the memory of the Shoah—is Momik’s intention to write a ‘Youth Holocaust Encyclopaedia’. For months, he locks himself up in Yad Vashem, the Jerusalem memory and documentation centre of the Nazi genocide on the European Jews. Room after room he unravels the archives. Only this way, he argues, one can get access to the facts. And facts—correct, hard facts—are a conditio sine qua non to understand the Shoah. Yet, this very confrontation with the facts cuts him off and brings him in a deep existential and artistic crisis. Wandering through the rooms of Yad Vashem, he more and more feels deadlocked. If only you have the courage to look there for ‘the White Room’, Ayala replies. With Ayala, Momik had an affair in the period of his crisis. Already in their first meeting, she perfectly felt what his problem was about. One of the things she asked him was whether, at the end of ‘one of the subterranean corridors of Yad

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Vashem’, he had visited the ‘White Room’. At that time, Momik was so obsessionally keen on facts, that he did not mention that this ‘room’ isn’t a room at all, in fact, but a kind of tribute,10 yes [. . .] a tribute from all the books, all the pictures and words, and films and facts and numbers about the Holocaust at Yad Vashem to that which must remain forever unresolved, forever beyond our comprehension. And that’s the essence of it, Shlomik, isn’t it?’ (S 121) The ‘White Room’ is a ‘tribute’, a ‘gesture’ made by all the ‘words and films and facts and numbers’ in Yad Vashem. A ‘tribute’ making clear that even their assembled force is not able to give full voice to the facts they report. A ‘gesture’ hiding the suffocated cry concealed in all these books and files. In a house where each room is filled up with archives on the Holocaust, the ‘White Room’ names a central but elusive surplus, a vacuum that imperceptibly sticks to the abundance of documentation. That empty ‘room’ hides the ‘essence’ where the account of the facts keeps failing. Yet, this is the ‘essence’ this account at the same time acknowledges and cherishes. The ‘White Room’ is the unmemorable, ‘extimate’ kernel of the Shoah memory.11 You cannot deal with this kernel in the way you deal with the facts. Here, you have to rely on imagination. Operative in a house full to bursting with facts, imagination must run the risk of entering the ‘White Room’, the room emptied of all facts. Who refuses to enter that ‘extimate’ room will not be able to write about the Shoah in a proper, truthful way. This is what Momik learns from his mistress in the first night they meet, and it indicates one of the central theses in Grossman’s novel. She told me that first night that the White Room was the ‘real testing ground for anyone who wants to write about the Holocaust. Like the riddling Sphinx. And you go there to present yourself willingly before the Sphinx, understand?’ [. . .] ‘and if you want to be honest with yourself’, she said gravely, ‘you’ll have to try the White Room.’ (S 123–124)

10 11

A ‘gesture’, so the Dutch translation writes. ‘Extimate’ is a term borrowed from the Lacanian theory indicating the position of the central object of human desire. Since that object is by definition inaccessible, so this theory says, desire can only turn around that object. In that sense, desire’s most intimate object remains at the same time exterior to it—hence: ‘extimate’ (Lacan 1992: 131; De Kesel 2009a: 146–147, 180–181).

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Of course, you have to face the facts mercilessly. But should you not allow that the facts face you? For this is what they do. The hideous horror they throw into your face affects your capacity of seeing, of assuming and comprehending. In spite of their macabre clarity, the facts you deal with are enigmas coming from a dark ‘beyond’, enigmas without answers but which, once you have taken notice of them, need an answer, or you will not survive them. To understand the Holocaust, you have to find the ‘room’ where it reveals itself as an explicit enigma and where only the wager of your own life may give an adequate answer. Only in this ‘room’, you truly write about the Shoah. ‘And in this room you find the essence of those things’, she said [. . .], ‘but the wonderful thing is that there are no ready-made answers there. Nothing is explicit. It’s all merely possible. Merely suggested. Merely liable to materialize. Or likely to. And you have to go through everything all over again, by yourself. Without a double or stunt man to play the dangerous parts. And if you don’t answer the Sphinx correctly, you’ll be eaten up. Or you will leave without having understood. And in my eyes that almost amounts to the same thing.’ (S 124) In the ‘White Room’, the facts turn back to what they where before occurring: merely virtual, non-actualized potentiality. Facts in a shape before they were ‘explicit’—read: actualized, realized. Facts such as they were in the imagination they originate from: flights of fancy, unarticulated possibilities. If you want to penetrate into the ‘essence’ of the Shoah, you have to allow that the facts penetrate into what also for you lies beyond—or (what amounts to the same thing) before—the facts, into your own imagination, into your own capacity to live a mere, non-actualized possibility. In the ‘White Room’, Momik’s inquiry of the facts remains without ‘readymade answers’. Even without new questions enabling promising orientations. The room has only ‘white’ to offer, i.e. virgin, unlimited imagination. That is the basis the facts rely on. For facts as well have once been imagined. Once they have been dug up from the bottomless pit of virtual possibilities, before a ruthless logic turned them into concrete reality. If you want to make a stand against those facts and their ruthless logic (and this is Momik’s intention), if you want to remember them without cutting off your way to the future, you will have to imagine them. Yet, your imagination should not be of the kind which, in a totalizing vision, appropriates the facts, holds them in its grip and, thus, makes the unacceptable acceptable. Your imagination has to connect the facts’ unacceptability with the equally unacceptable imagination they originate from. If you want

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to enter into the heart of the Shoah memory, you have to reach that level: you have to jump into the imagination before or beyond the facts. Acknowledging the Shoah facts is necessary but not sufficient, so this passage states. You have to ‘go through’ them as well. In your imagination, of course. Though this too is not without taking its toll. For you have to imagine the facts as possibilities you have imagined. It is in that sense that the horrible, unimaginable facts have something to do with you, not because you have done them or should produce them, but because you can imagine them. In their quality of merely unarticulated possibilities, these facts are yours as well. If you do not take them like that, you will never ‘understand’. Or, which ‘almost amounts to the same thing’, you will be ‘beaten up’. Certainly as a writer ‘you will be beaten up’. Writing operates in the limitless domain of imagination, in the realm of non-actualized virtuality. There, the limitlessly cruel facts the writer fights against have their origin too. That is why he has to find the ‘White Room’. There, his imagination finds its equal, which in this case is at the same time its enemy. There, he finds the imagination that grounds the facts. Neglecting this, the writer misses the comprehension literature can give, and risks losing his dignity as writer. Yet, when he does not neglect this and deals with the imagination the cruel facts originate from, another risk then is that he loses his dignity as author and even as human being. For how can he avoid being affected by the evil hidden in this kind of virtual imagination? Against that risk, he can only use his risky imagination with a yet greater force. Entering the ‘White Room’ of imagination equals the courage to ‘embody the soul of the other’—which is an expression Grossman uses in an essay on literature and writing.12 You have to imagine the other as having virtual possibilities that are yours as well, he explains. This is what Momik does with his ‘grandpa’ Wasserman: ‘It was for Grandfather Anshel’s sake I went into the White Room’ (S 193)’, he realizes. He has put himself in the shoes of Wasserman. Writing becomes speaking through the confused murmuring of his ‘grandpa’ who, since his return from the Shoah, has lost the capacity of properly speaking. Writing in the White Room, Momik renders voice to the imagination hiding in that murmuring. That imagination has been broken down by the Nazis in the camp, and it made Wasserman irreparably ‘mad’. In the White Room, Momik reactivates so to say his grandpa’s suffocated imagination. He imagines himself an other Wasserman, a Wasserman who resists the killing machine of the Nazis and even subverts it. 12

See his essay ‘The Desire to Be Gisella’, in: Grossman 2008a: 38–42.

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Momik succeeds in entering Wasserman’s imagination, his ‘soul’, as well as the one of Bruno Schulz. But putting himself in the ‘soul’ of the Nazi perpetrator is a more difficult thing to do. It is not simply a matter of willing, but also of time. In a touching passage Wasserman resists Neigel’s attempt to intervene in his artistic imagination. There, Momik, who is always imperceptibly present in that kind of scenes, shows clearly he is not yet ready to ‘enter’ Neigel: ‘Don’t get so insulted, Scheissemeister’ [sic], says Neigel. ‘I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings [. . .] There is a name for that, isn’t there? ‘Poetic licence’ you artists call it, right?’ Wasserman studies him anxiously. I [Momik], too, I am anxious. ‘Poetic licence’ doesn’t seem to either of us [to Wasserman and Momik] to belong on the intellectual menu of a Nazi officer. He may have been quoting someone. I’ll probably know more about him when I get under his skin, as I did so easily with Wasserman. It’s my duty, after all. As Ayala said, In the White Room everything comes out of your own self, out of your own guts, victim and murderer, compassion and cruelty . . . soon, then. Meanwhile, I will just have to make do with Neigel reflected in Wasserman’s eyes. Very slowly. (S 209–210) Momik has to let the perpetrator ‘come out of his [Momik’s] own self, out of his own guts’. The range of cruel possibilities hidden in the morbid fantasy of the anti-Semitic Nazi has to be dug up from Momik’s own imagination. As if it were his—Momik’s—possibilities. No wonder it takes time to enter that ‘soul’. By appropriating the perpetrator’s imagination, you are able to intervene in it, to give it a different direction and, so, to nip evil in the bud. But therefore, you dare to dig it ‘out of yourself’. You must leave the mediation of the facts behind and directly take part in what made the Shoah possible: imagination. And against that imagination you have to place yours in position. You have to ‘cut’ the Shoah out of your imagination, because your imagination is the only thing you can put in position against the unimaginable Shoah. This is what Wasserman does when, in the midst of hell, he shares room with his perpetrator. He re-animates—so Momik wants—his perpetrator’s dried up imagination and makes it break the iron wall of what the officer calls ‘facts’, for instance the ‘fact’ that a Jew is not a real human being. This way, so Wasserman/Momik hopes, the Nazi may face again a field of virtual possibilities out of which he can freely choose. And indeed, Neigel will reach that free state, be it in order to commit suicide.

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A Room and a God ‘Non-Existent’

Only from the ‘White Room’, which in fact does not exist, one might be able to truly write about the Holocaust. How, then, should we imagine that ‘room’? Does it differ from the room Zalmanson goes in when, as he says, he enters the ‘Holy of Holies’? That ‘Holy of Holies’ does not exist either. What exists is the opposite, the gas chamber, and Zalmanson perfectly knows that, just like he knows he is going to die there. Without denying this for one second, that room nonetheless is at the same time the ‘Holy of Holies’. As befits a pious Hasid, he dances and laughs, and realizes that his ‘deity, who doesn’t exist, of course, knows I cleave to Him, knows I have understood Him profoundly, if only for an instant’ (S 330). No one can have faced the Shoah more directly, no one can ever have felt the macabre reality of that room more. Nonetheless, the room Zalmanson enters is another one, one that ‘does not exist’, a room where he laughs for a God who does not exist either, though this does not devaluate Zalmanson’s laughing and the validity of the truth worshiped by his uncanny prayer. Religion is fantasy. Zalmanson fantasizes that the darkest corner in God’s creation and history’s most hopeless deadlocks contain sparks of light and that only man’s positive affirmation can bring these sparks back to where they belong. Only such radical imagination may contribute to a possible salvation of the sinful universe. Even if these sparks of light do not exist, it is our task to acknowledge this non-existence in an affirmative sense. For in those sparks, whether they exist or not, lies hidden the exit from the negative force that drives the universe into death, into non-existence. Literature is imagination. Momik brings it face to face to the Shoah horror and recalls the duty to keep its memory alive. This literary imagination, however, is to be situated in a room ‘that does not exist’. It is literature’s task to assume this non-existence and to affirm it as an infinity of virtual possibilities, capable of turning the darkest impasse into a starting point for a new actualization, a new reality. Zalmanson’s affirmative laughing can be compared with Momik’s affirmitive attitude once he has started writing in the White Room ‘that does not exist’. And, similarly, Momik only joins in with what occurs in the gas chamber when he delivers himself to that empty, white and ‘factless’ imagination. What does this say about Zalmanson’s religion and about religion in general (1)? And what does this say about literary imagination (2)? Where does that

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kind of striking parallel come from and what does it mean? Let me, by way of conclusion, develop this parallel. (1) The Hasidic background of Zalmanson’s religion is already made clear. Though never prominently present, a lot of Lurian-Cabbalistic elements play a decisive role in that kind of religiosity. One of them is the immanent character of the worshiped deity. Here, God is not the transcendent deity of rabbinic Judaism, emphasizing the Law as the way to get in line with creation’s lost perfection. Here, the Creator has compromised himself from the very outset. The idea of ‘tsimtsum’ says that creation is a process occurring within God, and that thus God is not situated transcendently outside his creation. Inside Himself, God has withdrawn Himself out of Himself. He has deliberately chosen to be marked by lack and emptiness. Finitude, the hallmark of creation, is now part of the infinite God. Finitude is a characteristic of infinity. This provocative idea13 has a typically modern dimension. Here, man is no longer delivered to a perfect Law which, as imperfect human being, he obeys in order to be in line with the perfect God. Without denying these qualities of God and Law, the idea of tsimtsum puts forward that it is first of all up to man to lend a helping hand to Law and Grace, since they too are marked by lack and void. The relation between God and man is not the one of a perfect God meeting the realm of the human, full of shortcomings. On the contrary, since God Himself is shortcoming, since He Himself withdraws and establishes a void within Himself which escapes His omnipotence, man should not simply worship God’s perfection, but particularly remedy it, restore it. Here we meet the typically modern God. Not the God of fate or grace, who determines our life path with iron perfection, whatever we might do or not do. The God we meet here admits to be wounded ‘in the blossom of his sin’ and has to ask his son/man to heal that wound in order to avenge the crime that is done to him. This is, as I have called it elsewhere,14 the Hamletian God, the God who is no longer the alternative for human lack and finitude, but assumes that lack and, thus, gives man the chance—and the duty—to remedy that lack. Yet, the emphasis on lack is to be rectified. For that lack is in fact a surplus, a sign of abundance, which is still God’s real hallmark. It is the positive product of God’s infinite power. The lack involved here is the ‘finitude of the infinite’, the incapacity of the Almighty to enclose and exhaust Himself, i.e. His infinite capital of possibilities. This is what the immanent idea of the Hasidic God 13 Scholem 1995: 260: ‘[. . .] the doctrine of Tsimtsum, one of the most amazing and farreaching conceptions ever put forward in the whole history of Kabbalism’. 14 De Kesel 2010: 139–142.

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is about. It is a God allowing everything in himself, even what escapes him. Put in Leibnizian terms: the infinity of His virtual possibilities can never be actualized in the same infinite extent. God is the inexhaustible virtuality that grounds the totality of exhausted, actualized possibilities. He is the immanent and infinite virtuality on which actual reality rests. (2) In other words, He is the ontological base of the imagination that brings reality into being and re-creates it again and again in different shapes. This is the answer to the second question I put forward, asking what Zalmanson’s religion has to say about literary imagination, about the imagination that has produced See Under: Love and whose praise that novel sings. Just like Zalmanson’s religion, here, imagination is an infinite field of possibilities forming the base of each actualized reality, also to the extent that these possibilities have not been actualized. In that sense the novel recalls postmodern theories like the ones of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Building on Henri Bergson’s vitalistic thought and going back to the pre-Kantian ontologies of Spinoza and Leibniz, Deleuze considers imagination, not as a subjective faculty able to produce representations and, thus, unreal fantasies, but as a dimension in our thought that closely joins reality itself, even reality’s ontological foundation, i.e. the virtual field of possibilities of which the actual reality is only one of countless other ones. Reality is thoroughly productive and creative, but not as a result of a creatio ex nihilo performed by a transcendent God throning above being (and non-being). The productive creative reality is an immanent creatio, a dazzling field of possibilities that no actual reality can exhaust. Each reality rests in a ground that, in itself, has an infinity of other possibilities. In other words, current reality is only one ‘expression’ of the absolutely immanent, virtual possibilities constituting its ontological ground.15 This is the secret, non-existing ‘White Room’ Momik’s imagination has to draw from if he wants to write about the Shoah in a true, authentic way. Even the lethal certainty of the gas chamber is resting in a virtual possibility which no certainty can exhaust, however absolute it might be. This is why human imagination—in this case the one of Momik/Grossman—is able to let Zalmanson die from laughing in the gas chamber and to let Wasserman survive there in order to bear witness of it. For Giorgio Agamben, a ‘rest’ enables bearing witness of Auschwitz, as already the title of his book suggests: Quel che resta di Autschwitz (‘What

15 Deleuze uses the term ‘expression’ first of all in his analyses and evocations of Spinoza (Deleuze 1968; De Beistegui 2005: 91–92.

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remains from Auschwitz’, ‘Remnants of Auschwitz’).16 What ‘survives’ is first of all life itself, vegetative life that keeps even the ‘undead’ Muselmann ‘alive’, though all human life has left him, incapable as he has become to even recognize the injustice done to him as injustice—incapable as he has become to distinguish between the pain the SS man inflicts on him and the pain of the freezing cold.17 This kind of ‘surviving’ is the ultimate base of the Shoah witness, so Agamben argues. This, too, is the ‘surviving’ David Grossman arms Wasserman’s ‘Children of the Heart’ with, when, in the zoo of destroyed Warsaw, they organize their battle against the Nazis. More generally, this ‘surviving’ is responsible for the vitalistic purport of Grossman’s imagination, which during the novel’s course, becomes more and more explicit. At the end it finds its most grotesque expression in Hannah Zeitrin’s endless act of copulation and giving birth. Life, life as an non-exhaustible surplus of life, as a non-obstructable surviving: this is the remedy against the lethal violence of those who want to lock life up in fixed boundaries and controlled definitions. Whether a vitalistic vision on imagination is defendable or not, whether an ontological view on imagination is the most adequate one or rather a metaphor among others, is a question which cannot be dealt with here.18 But even as metaphor, it shows how indispensable imagination is within our typically modern way to lean our relation to reality on empiricism and empirical facts. What is more, it shows our reliance on empiricism in a way that obliges us to acknowledge the primacy of imagination.

16 Agamben 1999a. 17 Agamben refers to a passage in Robert Antelme’s L’espèce humaine, (Antelme 1947); see Agamben 1998: 185. 18 I do deal with this in De Kesel 2009b.

chapter 5

The Perpetrator Bettine Siertsema Most reviews of See Under: Love concentrate on the naturalist Momik-part, which is the first part (although according to Grossman the last one to have been written), and for the reader the point of departure for the other parts, and the easiest to recount. It is no accident that this part was separately made into a theater play. Unlike the second and fourth parts and despite fairytale-like elements and a strange narrational perspective, Part 3, ‘Wasserman’, resembles a traditional narrative: it has a chronological order, a well defined, historically plausible space and more or less credible human characters. In this chapter I want to focus on one of these characters, the figure of Herr Neigel, who also appears in Part 4. I will compare his portrait with the way victims of the concentration camps write about the perpetrators, and with historical findings regarding background and personality of SS-officers, as they come forth in documents and interviews. One could ask if such a comparison is called for at all. Doesn’t Part 3 begin as a fairytale, with the quite unrealistic element of Anshel Wasserman being unable to die, an old Jew who cannot be put to death, either in the gas chamber or by a gunshot through the head? Isn’t that a powerful clue for the undeniable and complete fictitiousness of the story? It is, of course, but within this clearly surrealistic setting I think the novelist does strive for the utmost psychological credibility. And the way the story is told, with Wasserman as the one through whose eyes we see everything, has a certain likeness to the autobiographical writings of victims of the Holocaust. Actually it is not Wasserman himself but his great-nephew Momik Neuman, who tells the story, but his point of view melts together with that of Wasserman. Wasserman tells Momik his thoughts and feelings in direct speech, addressing him as Shleimeleh, and Momik has no inside view in Neigel or other characters. In the last paragraph I’ll reflect on the role of literature in the novel as a whole, especially in Parts 3 and 4. 1

The Victim’s View of the Perpetrator

To begin with I’ll go into the perpetrator’s portrait in autobiographical writings. For my dissertation I researched the diaries and memoirs on the concentration © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���4 | doi ��.��63/9789004280946_�08

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camps, published in the Netherlands between 1945 and 2005, 114 books in total. It struck me that most writers are rather reticent about the SS-men they are confronted with. In many texts they are largely absent, or only vaguely present, not as humans but as a sort of threatening fate, looming as an abstract force in the background. The SS are relatively seldom depicted as individuals, but when they are, the overall image is of course negative. The vice that is mentioned the most, is—not surprisingly—cruelty, and furthermore stupidity, laziness, cowardice, drunkenness and lewdness (with a preference of vile pornography). The excessive German love for lists and numbers is observed with disdain, but not much fun is made of it, because the prisoners often suffered a great deal from this love, in the endlessly stretched roll calls. It is clear from this catalogue of vices, that the authors look upon the SS with a great inner superiority. Corresponding with this view irony is often used as a stylistic device in speaking about the SS. By irony the author elevates himself above the situation, he winks as it were at the reader and establishes a link with him or her at the cost of the ironically painted character. See for instance Albert van de Poel telling how a completely ignorant roommate of an escaped prisoner is severely beaten to make him tell the whereabouts of the fugitive: ‘It was above the calculated achievements of the whip of the SS to make an unconscious man talk, let alone to make him tell a truth he didn’t know.’ Irony can also be used as a means to show that the narrator rises above his pitiful situation, that he is not defeated mentally. In this way the same author declares, talking about the prevailing hunger in Neuengamme: ‘As far as slimming methodology is concerned the regime is perfect.’1 Some authors try to find a reason for the cruelty they observe. The word ‘sadism’ is often used, sometimes even in the original sense as a sexual aberration, as is suggested in this description by Bill Minco: ‘With the butt of his rifle the man was beaten up by an SS-man. The drivel ran from the brute’s mouth. He panted with lust. He had got his portion of today’s pleasure.’2 Yet others observe that the cruelty cannot be a matter of sadism, because the necessary relationship with the victim is non-existent, since in the eyes of the SS the victims were not human. Most authors seem to use the term in the plain sense of enjoying pain of others. Apart from this form of sadism the motives for the SS behaviour are sometimes sought in hidden feelings of social inferiority and jealousy of the socio-economic level of the prisoners, especially the Jewish ones. Mirjam Blits, for instance, writes about the female SS when the end of the war is drawing near:

1 Poel 1945: 40 and 7 (my translation, BS). 2 Minco 1997: 171 (my translation, BS).

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After the fall that would come, the important SS-uniforms with the tilting soldier’s caps, the beautifully polished boots and the whips that could so deliciously smack to the stiefel (the German word for boots, BS), these would all disappear, and only their sense of inferiority would remain, that surely would return soon, when an SS-woman was nothing more than a simple salesgirl or a cleaning woman with aristocratic Germans.3 Non-Jewish G.J. van Velthoven talks about ‘the wretched Hitler-plebeians’.4 Boud van Doorn lets an SS-volunteer ponder about the contempt he notices with the prisoners, some of them black marketers: ‘The black marketer, who, through his dishonestly earned money, doesn’t need to join the SS, despises him. (. . .) For him, who tries to get some money as well, there is no forgiveness (. . .)’ These ponderings turn out to be the prelude of an explosion of cruel violence.5 In Van Doorn’s book the socio-economic disadvantages are put forward, in a fictitious representation, as the explanation for the rise of Nazism as a whole. One of the characters in this third person narrative tells for instance how he saw the first S.A.-men march through the streets in Germany: (. . .) fellows, who didn’t want to live in poverty anymore, fellows who didn’t shrink back from anything to reach their goals. As the bearers of hatred they executed every order from their leaders without hesitation or compassion. Did anyone have compassion with them? Every day the banks in the park were full of hungry unemployed young fellows. Who counted with them? No one indeed.6 And in the same book, another inmate of Camp Vught tells, after the story of his own misfortune, how his son joined the Waffen SS as a volunteer: He had to become a soldier. Shooting, adventures, his whole, lonely youth, devoid of pleasures, longed for it. I couldn’t stop him. Didn’t want to. What right did I have? Through poverty the child had grown wise before his time. Had I offered him anything but misery?7

3 Blits 1961: 287. 4 Velthoven 1945: 5. 5 Doorn 1945: 71. 6 Doorn 1945: 71. 7 Doorn 1945: 70.

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Abel Herzberg presents a more complicated view on the roots of the cruelty he observes: on the surface it stems from complicance to the demands of the Nazi ideology and military culture. But deep down it is also a manifestation of his struggle to silence his conscience. In spite of appearances he does have a conscience, and its voice has to be silenced, because else he would loose everything, his courage and his country and his uniform that is so much nicer than the cheap reach-me-down suit that was his.8 It is striking how many memoirs pay attention to the individual positive exceptions they encounter, instances of unexpected kindness or help: a guard who permits the prisoners of an ‘Aussenkommando’ (labour squad working outside the camp) to pick berries in the wood where they have to work, an officer who is friendly to a prisoner working as a doctor, because he reminds him of his son, a guard who doesn’t object to a religious gathering or one who is touched by the songs female prisoners sing to each other. Because the SS in general is not a very prominent theme in these texts, the positive exceptions contribute substantially to the image of the perpetrators, although it is stressed that indeed they are exceptions. Moreover, instances of uncalled for cruelty and viciousness are sometimes told in an impersonal way, without a specific subject, for instance: ‘the beating went on’ or ‘the cane struck over and over’. Thus, linguistically the perpetrator is made invisible. This way (by means of the syntax and in the attention for the exceptions) the image of the perpetrator tends to be somewhat more positive than is in accordance with reality. But this applies only to the memoirs, and more so in the later ones than in the early texts. In the diaries the SS is barely taken notice of and stays mostly out of focus. And certainly no positive exceptions are ever mentioned in the diaries. Apparently a certain distance is needed before victims are able and willing to see and sketch the shades of grey, the differentiations in the dark colours of the perpetrator’s portrait. The phrases with which the individual SS-officers are referred to, especially in early texts, often are either in animal terms like beast, bloodhound, predator, or in metaphysical terms like devil, demon, or Satanic, diabolical—so in both ways as non-human beings. The Jewish psychiatrist E. de Wind, who wrote his Auschwitz memoirs as early as 1946, tells about the conversations on ethics he and his campmates sometimes had in the evenings. At one point he realizes with disgust that, biologically speaking, the SS and he himself belong to the same species, humans: ‘You are tired, ill and sick of yourself, because you are a man, and the SS-man is also a “man”.’ (Note the revealing quotation marks, 8 Herzberg 1987: 17.

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with which he simultaneously distances himself from the alleged similarity.)9 But in general the SS figures only as an amorphous group, seen from a distance, and not so much as individual men. This is especially the case where Kapos ran the daily proceedings in the camp. How do these findings relate to David Grossman’s portrait of Herr Neigel? Unlike his adjutant Staukeh he is not sadistic, only highly indifferent towards the prisoners in the camp. Nor is he lazy, given to drinking, or lewd. On the contrary: he is faithful to his wife, and his love for her motivates part of his actions. Still, Wasserman is (and feels) superior over him, both morally and intellectually. He is culturally much better educated, however disappointing his career as a writer may be. This intellectual superiority enables him to toy with Neigel, in fact even ridiculing him, by sending him on a journey to fetch background information for his story, and confusing him with the inconsistencies in the story, pleading creative freedom. Here the victim’s inner superiority has nothing to do with the perpetrator’s lower socio-economic standing, unlike the view in many autobiographical Dutch writings, only with his modest intellectual qualities. One could say there is irony in the situation, in the relationship between Neigel and Wasserman with its shifting dominance, yet irony as a stylistic device can not often be pinpointed. Wasserman aims to ‘infect Neigel with humanity’, by awakening his capacity for empathy, at first empathy with the characters in his story. Wasserman is successful in this respect, as is shown in the lemma ‘Torture’: When Neigel heard this description of the torture Kazik underwent, he muttered, “A little more compassion, Herr Wasserman.” (S 394) His polite form of address shows that in the process Wasserman himself has become a human being for him.10 And as a human being he is worthy of empathy. And so it comes about that the episode when Wasserman confronts him with the fact that it was Neigel himself who shot Wasserman’s little daughter, is one of the climaxes of Part 4: Neigel: “Get to the point, Wasserman, my driver’s waiting.” “That is the point, Herr Neigel. The only one. You were standing there with the 9 10

Wind 1946: 114. The second person phrasing is exceptional in this generally third person narrative. This time it seems to go unnoticed by Wasserman himself, but in the lemma ‘Catastrophe’, Neigel calls him ‘You . . . son of a bitch’, and Wasserman comments: ‘How this compliment made me blush, the first time a German swore at me like a human being (. . .) I was even prouder than I was the first time he called me Herr Wasserman!’ (S 432).

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s­ elfsame gun in your hand. My daughter ran to the buffet and reached for the chocolate. And the, nu well, it happened, you see . . . you shot her. That is all, Herr Neigel.” Neigel turned pale. His face gleamed unnaturally for a moment, as though a magnesium bulb had exploded inside him. He wobbled. He leaned against the cupboard. (Wasserman: “Only then did he begin to fear me. He understood what was in the balance.”) Neigel groaned: “And you never said a word?” “What could I say?” The German gripped his knees and pressed them as hard as he could. His lips contracted with pain. Then he looked up. His eyes were red and scared. “Believe me, Wasserman,” he said, “I love children.” (S 404) At one time Neigel refuses to honour their agreement and doesn’t shoot his gun to Wasserman’s head, not so much for his dependence from Wasserman’s storytelling, but because he has indeed come to see Wasserman as an individual human being: ‘ “You promised! You promised! Curse you, Neigel!” And Neigel, his face contorted: “No! Ach! For you it’s nothing! You feel nothing when I shoot you! No pain at all! But for me it’s different! I know you now! You are not just another Jew for me like the others out there!” He indicated the windows behind the closed curtain. “No, Wasserman. Forget it. I can’t do it any more.” And he fell silent, alarmed by what he had just blurted out.’ (S 386) So we can conlude that Anshel Wasserman was beginning to become successful in his efforts to infect Neigel with humanity, and maybe this, more than the immortality of Wasserman, is the true fairytale-element. It is no coincidence that this episode is told in the lemma ‘Miracle’ in Part 4.11 2

Parallels with Historical Perpetrator’s Portraits

There are perpetrator group portraits like the one by Christopher Browning of the ‘ordinary men’ of a battalion of reservist policemen becoming involved in the Einsatzgruppen and committing mass murder,12 and Robert Lifton’s

11

12

This same change in Neigel makes him hesitate a split second before shooting a rebellious young prisoner, which is the beginning of the end for him, the starting point of his downfall (in the lemma ‘Rebellion’, S 381). Browning 1993.

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study of the Nazi doctors.13 There are also some studies on individual perpetrators. The most widely written on is, I think, the ‘Schreibtischmörder’ Adolf Eichmann. But there is also Rudolf Höss, the commander of Auschwitz, who wrote his memoirs,14 which were fictionalized by Robert Merle in the novel La mort est mon métier (Death is my Trade).15 And there is the book by the journalist Gitta Sereny, Into that Darkness,16 in which she tells about her postwar interviews with the imprisoned Franz Stangl, the commander of Treblinka, and the people around him, his family and colleagues. Rudolf Höss and his memoirs are mentioned in Grossman’s novel, and openly compared with Neigel, for instance the exiting stories they are told in their childhood about military expeditions in Africa.17 Yet I think Herr Neigel is actually modelled just as much, or even more so, on Franz Stangl. The unnamed camp of Neigel and Wasserman to a great extend resembles Treblinka: it is an extermination camp and not, like Auschwitz, also a labour camp, the guards are Ukrainians, there is a ‘Himmelstrasse’ (heavenly way) to the gas chamber, which is situated in the lower camp, the camp itself is camouflaged by green shrubbery, there is a train station with fake destination boards and a fake restaurant, all meant to ease the prisoners’ minds and to conceal their real destiny. All this is very similar to what is known about Treblinka. For the sake of comparison, I first want to call to mind some details of the character of Herr Neigel, especially his family background. Kurt Neigel comes from Bavaria, from a village at the foot of the Zugspitze, he went to the catholic church every week, and read as a child only Bible stories, tales about missionaries in Africa, Karl May, and of course the serial of The Children of the Heart, written by Anshel Wasserman. He is married to Christina, an uneducated but very pious catholic woman. He adores their two children, a boy and a girl. He has no friends, neither in the camp nor at home. Christina has no NationalSocialist sympathy whatsoever. One day she pays a surprise visit to the camp and faints as she witnesses the naked prisoners being made to run to the gas

13 Lifton 1986. 14 Höss 1959. 15 Merle 1952. 16 Sereny 1974. 17 ‘And since Neigel does not descend to particulars, I quote similar disclosures by Rudolf Hoess, commandant of Auschwitz in his diary (The Commandant of Auschwitz Testifies), [. . .] And Rudolf Hoess continues to transfuse biographical data into Neigel’s transparent veins: [. . .]’. (S 281)

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chamber. Neigel succeeds in concealing his role in the camp. Yet, without fully knowing that he is in command, she abhors the fact that he works in that place. This causes an alienation between them, which Neigel tries to overcome with Wasserman’s story, presenting it as his own. At the same time he is very scared that her critical attitude towards the Nazi doings may well endanger her and therefore himself, and he lives in permanent fear. Now for Rudolf Höss. He came from a Roman Catholic family in the Black Forest, he was destined to become a priest, but after the death of his father he ran away from home and joined the army in the First World War. In the twenties he joined a ‘Freikorps’ and was sent to jail for a murder (that he himself considered an execution) committed by a comrade, for which he took the blame. After seven years he was released when Hitler came to power. He was a member of the Nazi party from the very beginning and its ideology totally was his own, including the required blind obedience to the leaders. He joined the SS because he craved for his former military life, although he now had a wife and children. Therefore he was rather disappointed that he got a post in the staff of the newly developed concentration camp of Dachau, a camp for protective custody of both political and criminal prisoners (protection that is, for society from the prisoners). He is very critical about the training of SS-guards of the camp, supervised by the infamous Theodor Eicke, who installed deep hatred in the guards towards the enemies of the Reich, so that they were not even looked upon as humans anymore, quite unnecessary so, according to Höss. (That is to say, according to his autobiography, written in prison, which cannot be taken at face value, of course, because it is meant to put him as much in a favourable light as is possible without renouncing his National-Socialist ideology.) Given the opportunity he was happy to move on to Sachsenhausen. When his former superior in Dachau came to Sachsenhausen as well, he grabbed the chance to become the commander of a newly planned camp ten times as large as the biggest camp known until then: Auschwitz. He went there with his family (his wife, who shared his nationalistic ideals and their four children), in 1940. In his autobiography Höss stresses that it was the inferiority of the staff he was given, mostly guards from other camps like Ravensbrück, who had received their training from Eicke or his followers, that was accountable for the many abuses in Auschwitz, whereas his superiors were deaf to his complaints and demanded better results (in the building and organization of the camp) without supplying him with adequate materials. In short, he is not to blame, he was of good will, but with these subordinates and with these superiors nothing could be expected! Because of the troubles of his untrustworthy staff Höss became a solitary, unsociable character.

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In 1941 the first experiments with gassing were done with Russian prisoners of war as the victims. Höss seems to consider the gassing a relatively humane way of killing, because in his observation it was quick, and the bodies ‘showed no signs of convulsion’.18 Nevertheless it was difficult for him to witness the gassing of the masses of women and children in Auschwitz-Birkenau. For present-day readers the pity with which he describes these scenes is sickening for its hypocrisy. Moreover he tries to mitigate his own responsibility and guilt by pointing out how unmoved the Special Detachments (Sonderkommandos) were in performing their ghastly jobs of pushing their fellow prisoners into the gas chamber and burning the corpses afterwards. On the one hand he feels his superiors failed him, on the other hand he prides himself in performing a difficult task, and proudly states that many of his superiors declared they wouldn’t want to be in his shoes. Finally, the story of Franz Stangl shows a somewhat different picture. He was born in Austria. After the Anschluss he felt insecure, because earlier, as a policeman he had got a medal for the discovery of a hidden Nazi arms depot. This fear drove him, according to himself, to accept all the tasks he was given, however repulsed he might have been by them. He was married—and this is the most striking similarity with Neigel—to the very catholic Theresa. They had a big row when he told her he joined the Nazi Party. Later on he therefore suspected that she did’t like his jobs in the SS at all. First he was involved in the ‘euthanasia’-program in Schloss Hartheim, then he became commander of Sobibor and later of Treblinka. He didn’t tell his wife about the exact nature of his duties, and she was well content not to probe any further into them. For me the most exciting passage in Gitta Sereny’s book is the sixth chapter of the sixth part, telling about her last conversation with Frau Stangl, when the question is put to her what would have happened, had she insisted that he told her what he did exactly, and had she presented him with the choice between her and his job: would her husband then have backed out from the SS? Finally she admits that she suspects this to be true and that she bears a certain amount of responsibility by looking away (and as if this weight is too heavy to bear she withdraws this conclusion in a letter written in the night after this conversation).19

18 Höss 1959: 123. 19 In the next chapter Gitta Sereny tells how Stangl himself eventually talked about ‘guilt’ as well, in the last interview she had with him. For the very first time he seemed to consider his actions condemnable. And within 24 hours after that he died of heart failure.

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It is my impression that Christina Neigel is some sort of a mirror image of Theresa Stangl, be it a more outspoken and straight backed image. It is as if David Grossman shows what could have happened, had Frau Stangl, and so many other SS-wives, protested more and played the card of marital love. Frau Stangl and the fictitious Frau Neigel share their reservations about Nazism and their abhorrence of the mass murder of innocent people, an attitude that is for both of them closely connected with their catholic faith. And they have in common that their husbands, both not very sociable characters, and not enjoying the comradeship other SS-officers tend to boast about, are sexually faithful, and highly value (to the point of dependence) the love and loyalty of their wives. This supposed influence of the SS-wives might be rather utopian, however. I don’t want to absolve the womenfolk of Germany; maybe they could have changed the course of history, if only a little, by not looking away and protesting more pointedly against atrocities. And indeed I came across an autobiographical Dutch story by a female prisoner who met in an ‘Aussenkommando’ the mother of a not unfriendly SS-guard, who was deeply ashamed for her son’s job; from then on the guard was even more friendly and unobtrusively tried to help the prisoners whenever he could.20 Yet when I look at the victims’ testimonies on the SS (the memoirs and diaries I examined) it seems that especially in the second rank, heavily drinking, corrupt and pornography loving officers were more common than the sober, dutiful, chaste and lonesome ones like Stangl and the fictitious Neigel.21 And the influence of critical wives and mothers on that real kind of men must be deemed a lot less decisive. 3

The Role of Literature

See Under: Love plays with the idea of literature as a redemptive power. The boy Momik tries to retrieve the story of ‘Over There’ that his parents and the other grown-ups refuse (or are unable) to tell. He has the vague and unarticulated notion that this story is necessary for him to understand his parents’ behaviour, to understand who he himself is. Momik shows a close resemblance to the author David Grossman, who says about his writing the novel: ‘I felt that 20 21

Keizer 1999: 294–295. This image of the SS is especially to be found in: Mortel 1990; Nicholls 1994; Bueno de Mesquita 1991, Marchand 1999, Folmer 2005.

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I could not understand my life as a Jew, as an Israeli, as a human being, as a father, as a man if I did not understand the life that was no longer there.’22 The situation of Momik’s social surroundings, with a past that is silenced but that nevertheless impregnates all existence, is representative of the young state of Israel, that had so much difficulty in dealing with the survivors in its midst, and the mostly untold tales of their past. Momik is eager to know those tales, while the state of Israel in its early years fervently wanted to disregard them. See Under: Love can be read as ‘a literary analysis of traumatic neurosis in Israeli society’, as is done by Johanna Baum. She shows that Freud’s theory of the effects of trauma in individuals and communities can be found in the first part of the novel. She even likens Momik’s enterprise to that of a psychoanalyst: ‘In a role akin to that of the Freudian psychoanalyst, Momik pieces together the fragmented stories he is able to retrieve from those around him, attempting to form a coherent and sensible narrative whole.’ She interprets the three remaining sections of the novel as constituting ‘various approaches to the process of working through the trauma. (. . .) The three remaining stories are phantasies which speak to the possibility of healing through artistic endeavor. (. . .) Through literature, Momik writes himself into the Holocaust narrative. Momik’s role as a writer forefronts the role of narrative in the working-through of traumatic experience.’23 In the third and fourth section of the novel this redemptive power of literature that is hoped for, shifts to a different perspective: in these sections literature is presented as a purifying and ennobling power. It is through his storytelling that Wasserman tries to make a human being again of Herr Neigel. In their very first encounter Neigel hints that he is conscious of the incompatibility of literature and Nazism: ‘Inside your small and cowardly heart you’re saying: A Nazi could never be a good writer. They don’t feel anything.’ Wasserman denies this, but the invisible Momik quite agrees, referring to a sign in the classroom of the SS-Führerschule at Dachau, that says that compassion and sympathy are weaknesses to be overcome by the will (S 197). This encounter echoes in the Part 4, where under the lemma ‘Fiction’ a conversation of Wasserman and Neigel is told, in which the Jew asks about the individual people that Neigel has killed, and Neigel after some time doesn’t want to play along any further. Wasserman explains his questions: ‘obliged, obliged, am I, Herr Neigel, to believe that even you have pangs of conscience and prickings of the heart!’ And Neigel: ‘Why? So I’ll be a little 22 23

Grossman 2002. Johanna Baum 2000: 7, 10.

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more interesting to your pathetic literary mind?’ [Wasserman denies it is for literary reasons. He reminds Neigel that he did not even ask the names of the Jews before he killed them.] ‘(. . .) and now, let me amuse myself and seek contrition in you, a single twinge or scruple, let me endow you with the idea of compassion, because I need this little fiction.’ (S 311) In Part 3 Wasserman confides in an aside to Momik the purpose of his storytelling (and it is no coincidence that this fragment is from the encyclopaedic entry ‘fiction’, explained as: ‘Falsehood. A fabricated story.’): ‘You can easily get rid of grief, of compassion, Herr Neigel, and the love of mankind, the wonderful capacity of fools to believe in mankind, in spite of everything. And the operation will be almost painless.’ ‘But can you bring them back again?’ asks Neigel, his eyes fixed on Wasserman. ‘I hope so,’ Wasserman replies, and to himself, or to me, he says these unintelligible words: ‘After all, this is my mission, Shleimeleh, for this I am staging my little comedy here.’ (S 239) This fragment is echoed in Part 4, where in the lemma ‘Creation’ Wasserman says to himself (or to Momik): (. . .) even a simple Jew like me has the dough to bake a bagel for Neigel to choke on, heaven forbid. Beware, Neigel, beware! I said to him in my heart. Beware, for I am a writer! (S 362) In the lemma ‘Trap’ Wasserman acknowledges that he had set ‘the trap of humanity’ for Neigel (S 379). In Part 4, ‘The Complete Encyclopaedia of Kazik’s Life’, the theme of the power of (art and) literature again appears now and then, but not always in a very hopeful sense. In the lemma ‘Art’ for instance, the artist is seen as deprived of comforting illusions and as one who acknowledges (or should acknowledge) the limitations of hope (S 307). On a certain level Neigel even shares this idea and this aim: by recounting Wasserman’s story to his wife as if it were his own, he hopes to become deserving of her love again.24 Neigel calls the writers of modern literature ‘out-andout misanthropes’ (S 235). 24

Sidra Dekoven Ezrahi calls ‘the humanization or de-demonization of the Nazi Other’ the central trope of the novel. (Ezrahi 2002).

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They enjoy confusing us, and what do they give us in return? Nothing! I’m telling you: only grief and disappointment! [. . .] That’s what they give us, these modern writers, unlike the good old stories I remember so fondly to this day, which must say something for them, no? (S 235–236) And later on: You used to write about American Indians and floods in India and Beethoven and Galileo—a different type of story! With different settings! You never used to write about real things! I already know about our lousy life here! That’s what I want to forget when I hear a story! What do you think we have stories for, anyway? (S 378)25 Though the sober and chaste Neigel is not an exemplary SS-man, his portrait is not unrealistic in the sense that his ideas, his ‘Weltanschauung’, are not reformed, as his wife discovers to her dismay, when she is about to make it up with him and sings him a naughty anti-Nazi song. He wanted to regain her love and her respect, but he can’t allow her to have different political views, that he sees as subversive. So politically speaking there is no reform in Neigel, and no remorse about his earlier actions either. There was in him only the beginning of a more humane way of looking at himself and the world. The seed that Wasserman tried to sow with his Children of the Heart story didn’t get the chance to develop into a determining factor. It is not remorse but his ambitious adjutant Staukeh who drives him to suicide, though it is Neigel’s slight hesitation in shooting a rebellious prisoner that gives Staukeh the occasion. And Neigel’s unhappiness about the lost love of his wife’s may also have helped. In his San Francisco lecture26 David Grossman tells how he got acquainted with the works and fate of Bruno Schulz, and how shocked he was by the insulting description of his murder, with the suggested interchangeability of victims, in the dialogue of the two Nazis: ‘I killed your Jew.’ ‘Fine, soon I’ll kill your Jew.’ His novel See Under: Love can be seen as the avenging of this murder and this way of thinking, not only by bringing Bruno Schulz back to life as a salmon, the fish that crosses seas and leaps over waterfalls to swim back to the source of his life, but also by bringing back the individuality of the victim, by making

25

26

Neigel’s simplistic ideas about literature remind me very much of a famous character in Dutch literature: Batavus Droogstoppel in the 19th century masterpiece Max Havelaar (Multatuli 1967). Grossman 2002.

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him a human being instead of a number in a statistic.27 And indeed Grossman succeeded beautifully; moreover, he made a human being out of the perpetrator as well. This is what literature, what the imagination can do with a reader. However, can literature have beneficial effects in real life? Does it have the capacity to open the eyes of perpetrators to the individuality of their victims, is it really an instrument to advance compassion and human solidarity? Read against the background of an atrocious historical reality, the fairytale-like and playful elements in the plot of Parts 3 and 4 pose the question how seriously this role of literature is meant. How much weight can one attach to the humanizing possibilities of imagination and literature? The odds are not too promising. A parallel with music is suggested, when in the end Wasserman, who then poses as a composer, becomes the ‘House Jew’ of the music loving Staukeh. After all, there are stories in abundance about the cruellest camp commanders who played Schubert on the piano and were moved to tears by music, not to speak about the harrowing role of the bands and orchestras in many camps. I think the answer to the question of the humanizing power of literature is a hope against hope, and for me this unfathomable same hope is the heart of See Under: Love.

27

Grossman writes: ‘I hoped that whoever would read this book would understand—and especially would feel—that everyone who was killed in the Shoah—man, woman, child, six million Jews and tens of millions of other human beings—that every one of them was a unique artistic creation of its own kind, that can never recur.’

Part 3 Memory and Identity

∵

chapter 6

Diasporic Remarks Dirk De Schutter God loves a joke

Isak Dinesen

∵ Lately some questions have become fashionable—questions such as ‘Where were you when John F. Kennedy was assassinated?’ or ‘Where were you when the planes crashed into the Twin Towers?’ or ‘Where were you when Saddam Hussein was found?’ Few people realize that these questions are but the faint echo of the first question that was ever put to man. After Adam and Eve ate from the forbidden tree, they were hiding in the garden of Eden; and God cried out for them and asked: ‘Where are you?’ Ever since, man, the earthling, is nothing but a question. The novel See Under: Love asks a question. As the novelist David Grossman puts it in the afterword to his book, the Shoah is not just an event in history. Rather, it is like the sphinx that confronts us with the question: ‘What would I have done, if I had been there?’ The novel itself assumes the role of the sphinx, and that is why See Under: Love, unlike most other novels, does not only confront us with the question ‘What are you reading?’ or ‘What is the meaning of what you are reading?’, but above all with the question ‘What does it mean for you to read this?’ With his novel See Under: Love David Grossman accedes to what is called the second generation of Holocaust-novelists. Unlike Primo Levi, Robert Antelme, Jorge Semprun and Imre Kertész, David Grossman did not spend time in a camp: so, he does not write about personal experience; what he writes about, he knows from hearsay. Whereas the first generation novelists are primarily concerned with telling the truth, with bearing witness to the gruesome facts that occurred and with giving testimony to what happened to them personally, David Grossman writes in a different context—a context in which the facts are known, so much so that Grossman takes the almost blasphemous liberty of denying a painful fact: Bruno Schulz does not get killed, but jumps into the sea and survives as a salmon. I used the expressions ‘bearing witness’ and ‘giving

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���4 | doi ��.��63/9789004280946_�09

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testimony’, and in doing so, I was referring to the theoretical work of Giorgio Agamben, more specifically to his book Remnants of Auschwitz.1 In this book Agamben formulates the claim that whoever engages in bearing witness to the camps is doomed to bear witness to the impossibility of witnessing. As is well known, Agamben bases his theory on the testimonial novels of Primo Levi, in which considerable attention is given to the so-called ‘mussulmani’, the denuded living corpses who populated the camps, named by Levi, ‘i sommersi’, the submerged ones, petrified by Gorgon. So, without any doubt, the context in which Grossman writes, has changed; the question is: has the nature of the problematic issue changed? There is a second important difference between the first generation and second generation authors. The latter are not only familiar with the facts, provided these words are not completely out of place here, but also with the theoretical comments. In his novel Grossman mentions the controversial statement by Adorno, questioning the possibility of writing poetry after Auschwitz, the phrase by Arendt about the banality of evil, and the notorious remarks by Hilberg and Arendt about the role of the Judenräte, the Jewish Councils. Once again, the context has changed; the question is: has the issue of writing and reading about ‘what occurred’ (‘das was geschah’, as Paul Celan used to call it) changed? As is well known, with his statement ‘To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric’ (‘Nach Auschwitz ein Gedicht zu schreiben ist barbarisch’) Adorno inaugurated an enormous discussion. His statement is of course related to the age-old ban on images, the iconoclastic prescription that tells us not to make an image or a picture of God. The law forbids us to turn God into an object. But the ban can be interpreted in a different way: what if the law does not only forbid us to turn God into an object, but also to position ourselves as a subject vis-à-vis God? Analogically, with regard to the Shoah, maybe the iconoclastic prescription does not so much prohibit us to make an imaginative representation of the Shoah, but rather to take on the position of conscious and autonomous subject that knows what it is talking about. Here the Greek story about the sphinx comes in. Let us first recall the story. The sphinx formulates the following riddle: who is it that in the morning walks on four feet, at noon on two and in the evening on three? Oedipus thought he knew the answer and said: that creature is man. Thereupon, the sphinx throws itself into the abyss. Oedipus returns to the city of Thebes, where he is welcomed as king, because he has delivered the city from the plague. The traditional interpretation, that has been put into words in an exemplary way by Hegel in his philosophy of history, states that with Oedipus man for the 1 Agamben 1999a.

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first time in history understands himself, i.e. man understands himself as consciousness and spirit, and expels everything that is non-human and nonspiritual, a monster like the sphinx that is partly woman, partly lion and partly snake. However, there is a more provocative interpretation that, above all, does more justice to the story about Oedipus, as put down in the tragedy by Sophocles. According to this interpretation, the sphinx hurls itself into the abyss, not because Oedipus has given the correct answer, but rather because Oedipus’ answer fails to appreciate the issue at stake. The sphinx’s riddle is not about man in general, but about each human being in particular; the correct answer would have been: that creature is I insofar as I am human. It is precisely his own entrapment in the riddle that Oedipus ignores and fails to understand. That happens to him a second time, when in the tragedy he starts looking for the person responsible for the new plague scourging the city of Thebes. He does not know what he is saying, when he utters the words in the first scene of the tragedy: ‘As for the criminal, I pray to God that that man’s life be consumed in evil and wretchedness . . .’ He does not realize that he starts from the wrong premise, when he proclaims: ‘Until now I was a stranger to this tale . . .’ (‘xenos tou logou’). This second interpretation comes, I believe, closest to what Grossman has in mind. The emphasis falls on the singularity of the respondent, or on the respondent as singular incarnation of a general principle. That is also the message of the White Room in Yad Vashem. The suggestion to enter the White Room is made by Ayala. This is the story as told by the I-narrator in the fourth chapter of the part entitled ‘Bruno’: The first time we met, Ayala told me about the White Room at the end of the subterranean corridors of Yad Vashem. ‘And this White Room,’ explained Ayala, ‘was squeezed into being. It isn’t a room at all, in fact, but a kind of tribute, yes—a tribute from all the books, all the pictures and words and films and facts and numbers about the Holocaust at Yad Vashem to that which must remain forever unresolved, forever beyond our comprehension. (S 121)2 2 An important remark is here to be made. It would take a study in itself, but there is a big difference between the English and the Dutch translation of this novel. Whole pages are missing in the English edition. I refer to the opening scene of chapter three of ‘Bruno’. The sea senses that someone has jumped into her, she wants to find out who it is, and at a certain moment she remembers that millions of years ago something similar happened, when she met a creature called ‘wonder’. The latter scene about the sea meeting wonder, takes up a full page in the Dutch translation, but is completely left out from the English. The so-called

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She / Ayala told me that first night that the White Room was the ‘real testing-ground for anyone who wants to write about the Holocaust. Like the riddling Sphinx. And you go there to present yourself willingly before the Sphinx, understand?’ I didn’t understand, of course. She sighed, rolled her eyes, and explained that for the past forty years people had been writing about the Holocaust and would continue to do so, only they were doomed to failure, because while other tragedies can be translated into the language of reality as we know it, the Holocaust cannot, despite that compulsion to try again and again, to experience, to sting the writer’s living flesh with it. (S 123–124) There is nothing in the White Room. It’s empty. But everything that exists beyond its walls, everything that flows out of the corridors of Yad Vashem is projected into it: By way of, call it inspiration. [. . .] The entire human, animal inventory, fear and cruelty and pity and despair, glory and wisdom, and all the pettiness and love of life, all that halting poetry, Shlomik, and you sit there as if you were inside a giant kaleidoscope, but this time the glass fragments are you, the different parts of you—And if you happen to think about something, like the victims who collaborated with the Germans, then right away—I mean right away!—all collaborators ever mentioned in books and monographs and documents, all the Quislings and Judenrats of the ghetto, all the miserable scum now frozen in the testimonies beyond the walls, are spliced by a single laser beam that dissects the collaborator that ‘you are’ inside, like this—whikkk!—the way Eve was cut out of Adam. (S 124–125) What does this mean? 1.

We have to enter Yad Vashem, the museum. When Aaron Marcus asks, Is it an art museum?, Hannah Zeitrin smiles crookedly and says, Oh sure it is, a museum of human art, that’s what kind of art. (p. 55) This sounds metaphor of the White Room saddles us with a similar problem. The English text says: ‘The White Room is squeezed into being.’ The Dutch: ‘Deze Witte Kamer is gevormd uit verstikking.’ (Literally: ‘The White Room consists of suffocation.’) The English text says: ‘It is a kind of tribute . . .’ The Dutch: ‘Het is een gebaar . . .’ (‘a gesture’). In the White Room things are projected—the English text says: ‘by way of inspiration’; the Dutch text uses the word ‘inductie’ (‘induction’). I could go on, but as I indicated, it would take a study in itself.

Diasporic Remarks

2.

3.

4.

5.

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like a variation on a phrase by Imre Kertész, in his book Valaki màs: ‘God created the world and man created Auschwitz.’ By entering Yad Vashem we acknowledge that the Holocaust is not a thing of the past. On the contrary, the Holocaust concerns us, it is about us. The reference to Kertész is not unfounded: a visit to Yad Vashem will prompt us to reconsider creation. We will discover that inside our dearly loved selves lurks (the banality of) evil: the miserable part of mankind, those we treat as scum, are ‘our equals and peers, our brothers’ (‘nos semblables, nos frères’). It takes a dissection to separate us, ‘the way Eve was cut out of Adam’. Once we recognize this, we will look at the events in a different way. We will understand that the so-called collaborators are also victims, that they are like us, flesh from our flesh. It is no coincidence that the painful subject of the Judenräte is brought up in a context free of persecution and condemnation. To state that the Judenräte betrayed their fellow men does not entail a condemnation, but demands the confession ‘I, too, am a traitor’. We can only sympathize with mankind, if we are in touch with what is most despicable in ourselves. I can only love my neighbor, as the Judeo-Christian religion commands, if I do not shrink away from what is most hideous in myself. God crying out for Adam and Eve turns man into nothing but a question. This question, i.e. ‘Who am I?’, is unbearable for a totalitarian regime like Nazism. Such a regime wants every question, and definitely that question, to be answered, and it purports to have solved that question. The final solution to that question is the elimination of all those asking it. That is the fate of Ilya Ginzburg, who is nicknamed ‘Diogenes’, but is also thought to be one of the ‘lamed vavnik’, one of the legendary thirty-six just men. To live with that question, to live that question, and to persist postponing every possible answer may be the ultimate form of justice. Just as the question ‘Who am I?’ does not get an answer, the entries ‘love’, ‘mercy’ (‘rachamim’), ‘justice’, ‘mercy’ (‘chemla’), remain empty. These principles, these laws are still valid, they rule like signifiers without signification. The tables may not have been smashed, but it is as if they have become illegible. The Holocaust remains incomprehensible, it cannot be translated into the language of everyday reality. This is a common theme in the Holocaustliterature. Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism offers what I consider to be the most baffling formulation of this insight: ‘The real horror of the concentration and extermination camps lies in the fact that the inmates, even if they happen to keep alive, are more effectively cut off from the

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world of the living than if they had died.’3 That makes the question as to why linger on the horrors even more poignant and compelling. And it raises the question: what is the proper attitude regarding the Holocaust? The latter question has also troubled the German painter and sculptor Anselm Kiefer. Kiefer is another second generation Holocaust artist: born in March 1945, a few weeks before the end of the war, he is puzzled by the question why we are so fascinated by the history of Nazism, by the horrors of the Holocaust and by Hitler. He produces a series of pictures, mostly photographs, under the title ‘Besetzungen’. He alludes of course to the multiple meanings of the German word ‘Besetzungen’, ‘occupations’: not only the military meaning of a country or a region that has been occupied, but also the psychological or psychoanalytical meaning of the human mind that is occupied or obsessed by a word or an image. Grossman seems to take sides with Kiefer. In the first part of his novel he describes Momik as fascinated and obsessed with the Nazi Beast. His fascination deludes him into the belief that he will be able not only to nurture but also to defeat the Nazi Beast and thus to redeem his parents. His fascination is not entirely free of identification and self-glorification. It resembles the fanatic adoration that the German masses had in store for their Führer. In fighting the Nazi Beast Momik hopes to become a hero: [. . .] he had to fight to the finish, though nobody cared whether he wanted to or not, and he knew only too well that if he ever tried to run away, the Beast would chase him to the ends of the earth (it has spies and supporters everywhere), and little by little, it would do to him what it did to all the others, only this time in an even slyer, more diabolical way, and who could say how many years it would torture him like that and what would happen in the end. (S 68) It does not suffice to point out that Momik argues like a child; we need to understand that this puerile way of reasoning mirrors and echoes the selfcongratulatory crap about the Third Reich, the thousand-year empire (which lasted approximately twelve years), that the Nazis were bragging about. Grossman and Kiefer try to make clear that the confrontation with Nazism needs a different attitude—an attitude that understands the irreducible and unsolvable paradox couched in the pious interjection: ‘the Nazis—may their name be blotted out’. How can one obliterate something that is mentioned all the time, in and out of season? Why would one bear in mind something that 3 Arendt 1979: 443.

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one wants to destroy? Why keep in memory something that needs to be gotten rid of? We want to overcome Nazism, we want to leave it behind, yet we bring it up all the time. The reason for this may be that it lurks inside us: we can’t get rid of it, because it belongs to us; it is part of our deepest self that like an uncanny ghost haunts our past and thus our future. We are repelled by it, yet we cannot exorcize it; we are repelled by it, yet we must admit that we are unable to extricate ourselves from it. The experience of intricacy with something repulsive is shame. Camp survivors agree: shame was unknown to the Nazis, it was the fundamental experience of the inmates every time they witnessed or suffered another infamous, ignominious deed, because they realized that from now on this evil was an irrevocable part of the world in which they lived. It is the fate of Grandpa Wasserman to live on in shame for not having died of shame. He confesses: ‘It was as though my entire being had shriveled up and disappeared from sight like paper catching fire, and I felt a sharp stinging, and drooped as if beheaded, heaven forbid. Ai, Shleimeleh, if I live and die seven times, if I tell this story to the unhearing world a thousand times, I will never forget the moment Neigel uttered the secret password of the Children of the Heart.’ [And the Dutch version continues:] ‘for there is nothing that could not exist.’ (S 199) That everything is possible, that the worst may come true, that we humans are capable of nothing less than diabolical evil, is the shameful experience of the camps. So far, Grossman seems to be perfectly aligned with the first generation Holocaust novelists. Yet, in his writing another dimension is opened. That events occur without any cause and that therefore anything is possible,4 is the typical subject of comedy. In See Under: Love it is affirmed with humor. The novel as a whole is permeated with humor, but the most conspicuous passage is the entry about humor in part four. It goes as follows: According to Shimon Zalmanson, humor is not just a disposition or mental faculty but the only true religion. ‘If you were God, nebuch, and you wanted to reveal the potential of creation to your believers, all the coincidences and paradoxes, all the joy and reason, the ambiguity and 4 Arendt opens ‘Totalitarianism’, part three of The Origins of Totalitarianism, with a quotation from David Rousset: ‘Normal men do not know that everything is possible.’

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deception your divine powers spilled out into the world every minute, and if, let us say, you wanted to be worshipped as befitting a deity, that is, without sentimentality and flattering hymns but with a clear and lucid mind instead, what method would you choose, eh?’ Zalmanson said humor was the sole means to understand God and His Creation in all its mystery, and to go on worshipping Him in gladness. Zalmanson’s God went around showering mankind with little favors of divine will. ‘No doubt you remember, Anshel, the sight that greeted us at the entrance to the Holy of Holies, the little gas chamber?’ Wasserman remembered very well: the Germans had brought the ark curtain from a synagogue in Warsaw and hung it at the entrance to the gas chambers. Embroidered on the curtain were the words ‘This is the gate of the Lord. The righteous shall enter’ and here Zalmanson began to laugh, and died laughing with the realization that even someone like fusty old Wasserman had his funny points. Laughter itself was the spontaneous ritual of his religion. ‘Every time I laugh,’ he explained, ‘my deity, who doesn’t exist, of course, knows I cleave to Him, knows I have understood Him profoundly, if only for an instant. Because, my little Wasserman, the good Lord created the world out of nothingness, out of chaos, and He took His blueprint and building materials from that chaos . . . nu, what do you say to that?’ (S 330)5 Right from the start it is stated that psychology will not suffice to explain the phenomenon of humor: humor is not a disposition or mental faculty of man. Humor goes much deeper, it engages man as a whole, it engages man in a profound existential relationship with the entire creation and therefore with the Creator-God Himself: humor is ‘the only true religion’, thus the emphatic claim made by Shimon Zalmanson. This statement is all the more surprising, as it is well known that religion and humor (or laughter) are difficult to reconcile: humor is predominantly seen as a threat to the supposedly sublime thoughts and actions that religion allegedly lives by. The most eloquent example is undoubtedly given by Christianity, that for centuries has been torn apart by the question whether Jesus, to whom Terence’s adage ‘homo sum: nil humani a me alienum puto’ was applied, had ever laughed. The fierce discussion, instigated by this question, could only overlook the gaiety that forms part and parcel of the glad tidings, Jesus’ fondness of children and the witticism pervading some of his sayings—what is the notorious ‘Give unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s’ but a ‘mot d’esprit’? 5 For an analysis of this passage, see also the essay of Marc De Kesel in this volume (chapter 4).

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No-one has been more sensitive to this problem than Nietzsche, who cursed Judaism and Christianity for their slave morale based on resentment and who in the figure of Zarathustra turns the tradition of seriousness and gravity upside down to convey a message of ‘gaya scienza’. ‘Let that wisdom be false to us that brought no laughter with it’, Zarathustra proclaims in his speech ‘Of Old and New Law-Tables’. And in ‘Of the Higher Man’ he resorts to the unmistakable words: This laugher’s crown, this rose-wreath crown: I myself have set this crown on my head, I myself have canonized my laughter. Zarathustra the prophet, Zarathustra the laughing prophet, I myself have set this crown on my head! For Zarathustra, indeed, laughter (and humor) is ‘the only true religion’. It is hard to determine whether Nietzsche has ever realized how familiar his thoughts are to a certain Jewish tradition. For Nietzsche, to laugh means to fully embrace the contingencies and whimsicalities of human history and existence, to leave behind all qualms and to say yes to the suffering that inherently belongs to the human condition. Very often, humor is misinterpreted and understood in terms of an ironical aloofness or a sovereign distance from man’s predicament. Nietzsche knew better: to laugh demands an unconditional affirmation, it equals a blessing of everything that happened in the past and will happen in the future. This humor recognizes the groundlessness of things; it presupposes that one is aware of the terrible truth that man has no reason to laugh. It searches and probes the abyss in the heart of what we call our existence, it does not articulate anything meaningful, yet it prevents the subject from subsiding into absolute dumbfoundedness. It is the pyrrhic victory of the human subject that cannot understand what has happened. It is a way of coming to terms with the nothingness that from the very beginning threatens creation, the tohu-bohu that even the Creator was unable to dissipate.6 The radical nature of this humor becomes manifest when one takes into account that Zalmanson dies laughing with the realization that the Nazis mockingly present the gas chamber as the Holy of Holies. Whereas most people are disgusted by the sick sarcasm of phrases like ‘Arbeit macht frei’ (at the entrance gate to Auschwitz) or ‘Sauberheit ist Gesundheit’ (in one of the barracks in Birkenau), Zalmanson accepts them as ‘little favors of divine will’. There is no denying that Zalmanson puts into words the point of view 6 Grossman 2008a: 13.

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of Grossman himself. Indeed, one can say that his novel is nothing but the humorous processing of the Shoah: the humor in the part about Momik seems obvious, but one should not miss the humor pervading the metamorphosis of Bruno into a salmon, nor the humor in Wasserman’s inability to die at the hands of his executioners, nor the humor in the encyclopedia that starts with an entry on masturbation. In his essay ‘Books That Have Read Me’ Grossman points out: The first part of See Under: Love tells of a boy named Momik who tries to understand the Diaspora in Israeli terms. Large parts of the book are an attempt to write about a Jewish existence in an Israeli idiom. But it also attempts the opposite: to describe Israel in a ‘diasporic’ language. That is the book’s internal music, its counterpoint. As I have indicated before, in the part about Momik, Grossman rejects or finishes with the Zionist ideology that refuses to consider Jews as suffering lambs and pictures them as warriors. Could it be that the ‘diasporic’ language he uses is the language of humor? What to make of the following passage in which we see Momik at work, in the days after he has discovered: ‘From utter darkness sprang the Nazi beast’? He read history books with tiny print about what the Nazis did, and stumbled over a lot of words and expressions that weren’t used anymore. He puzzled over some peculiar photographs, he couldn’t figure out what was going on and what went where, but deep down inside he began to sense that these photographs might reveal the first part of the secret everyone had tried to keep from him. There were pictures of a mother and a father forced to choose between two children, to choose which one would stay with them and which one would go away forever, and he tried to figure out how they would choose, according to what, and he saw a picture of a soldier forcing and old man to ride another old man like a horse, and he saw pictures of graves where a lot of dead people lay in the strangest position, on top of each other, with somebody’s foot stuck in somebody else’s face, and somebody’s head on so crooked Momik couldn’t twist his head around like that, and so little by little Momik started to understand new things, like how weak the human body is, for instance, and how it can break in so many shapes and directions if you want to break it, and how weak a thing a family is if you want to break it, just like that it happens and it’s all over. [. . .]

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He would start firing questions in a whisper that was more like a roar: what was the death train? Why did they kill little children? What do people feel when they have to dig their own graves? Did Hitler have a mother? Did they really use the soap they made out of human beings? What’s a Jude? What are experiments with human beings? What and how and why and why and how and what? (S 66–67) We, the readers, understand Momik’s dismay: we are familiar with the horrible pictures taken in the camps, with certain facts: the grave-digging and the parents forced to choose and the deportations, with intertextual references: to Sophie’s Choice and to verses by Paul Celan (‘wir schaufeln ein Grab in den Lüften da liegt man nicht eng’/’we shovel a grave in the air where you won’t lie too cramped’),7 with the nightmarish questions. But Grossman punctuates his description of Momik’s growing awareness with humorous questions like ‘Did Hitler have a mother?’ and the screamingly funny ‘What’s a Jude?’ At the same time, his humor nowhere ridicules the infinite commiseration with the little boy who is about to make the most dreadful discovery imaginable. Remarkably enough, humor has never been absent from the reflection on the terrors of totalitarianism. The archetypal scene is the opening scene of The Great Dictator, in which Charlie Chaplin enacts the Führer playing with a colorful ball. This ball represents the globe: the Führer is playing with it, throwing it up into the air, kicking it and having it bump on his behind—until it explodes, thus foreboding the utter devastation awaiting the world during the war. Both Chaplin’s and Grossman’s humor has the same effect: it unsettles, it knocks away the ground beneath one’s feet. So, the question posed by the novel, i.e. the question ‘Where are you?’, gets an answer: the reader is not given a definite place; on the contrary, he is unsettled, dis-placed. Just as the ban on images forbids anyone to position himself as subject vis-à-vis the Shoah, so humor tells the reader never to be sure where he is at while reading the novel. This displacement is the hallmark of the religion that honors God with laughter. This religion parts with propositions like ‘God exists’ or ‘I am who I am’, it renounces any understanding of God, because born in laughter it experiences that it does not understand itself, that it remains in the dark as to why one laughs, what laughter is caused by and where one stands while laughing. This religion, devoid of dogmas, affirms and blesses. It finds shelter in simple and funny sayings that seem senseless because they upset what is thought of as logic: Oy, may God help us till He helps us. 7 Celan 1986a: 41.

chapter 7

The Holocaust’s Muses—On Voices, Appropriation and Misappropriation in Grossman’s Novel and W.G. Sebald’s Prose Fiction Jan Ceuppens If narrative literature offers not designs for life, but demonstrations of how such de­signs can­not but fail, if failure is the paradigm proper to modern literature,1 then so-called Holocaust literature could be considered the limit case. The impos­si­bility of ever arriving at a closed representation, a determined meaning or a universally ap­pli­cable model within narrative fiction is not just a structural problem, but also a reoccurring theme in literary texts at least since the early twentieth century. The extermination of European Jewry, however, may well have pushed this impossibility to the limit of silence.2 It presents literature with an ethical conundrum which is simultaneously a crisis of represen­tation, a crisis of witnessing, and a crisis of narrating. A crisis of representation, since the ‘thing’ itself defies concretization: the anonymous and anonymizing nazi machinery of death as well as the inconceivable number of victims bereave the events of a face.3 A crisis of witnessing, because the witnesses of the ‘actual’ horror are no longer with us, and the survivors often seem unable to capture what happened, and a crisis of narrating, since there is no subject for it—in the double sense of the word: there is no subject to speak and master the events to be related, and there is no subject matter that could actually encompass the horrific truth.

1 Contributions on failure as the constitutive category for modern literature abound. Walter Benjamin’s reflections on Kafka and Werner Hamacher’s comment on this point (‘Die Geste im Namen’ and ‘Benjamin und Kafka’, in: Hamacher 1998) provide a concise outline of the topic. The German journal LiLi devoted a special issue to it under the title Vom Scheitern (Schnell 2000). 2 Of course, presenting Holocaust depiction as nothing but a variety of this failure could seem a profanation or a denial of the uniqueness of the event. This is also a problem of some psychoanalytical approaches of the Holo­caust and a central point of contention in trauma theory. A succinct discussion of what is at stake can be found in Zuckermann 2003. 3 Again, this can be considered a problem common to all modern literature, as analyzed by such thinkers as Benjamin or Adorno.

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The danger inherent to such claims of unrepresentability, how­­ever, lies in the mysti­fi­ca­tion of the ‘event’,4 its elevation to the order of a mys­te­rium tre­men­dum et fascinosum, a seduction some theorists have not been able to withstand when speaking of the unspeakable, or to the order of the aesthetic, overcoming heroic failure by making it just that—heroic—and tur­ning it into beautiful form.5 On the other hand, one could claim that the Shoah is ‘but’ a special case of a trauma inherent to the modern subject. The missed encounter with the real, which prevents the symbolic order we organize our lives by to close, would be at the heart of our modern condition, and any historical event would be a contingent instance of this structural lack. This, of course, would seem to be a denial of the absolute sin­gularity of the Shoah.6 In literature, these two incompatible interpretations could be said to gain a specific form in uncompromising docu­men­ta­ry realism on the one, and fantasmagoric distortion on the other hand. Yet neither of these modes of representation can ever hope to really do justice to the fact that the en­counter with the real is by necessity missed.7 In what follows, I shall attempt to compare two works in which this encounter is indeed sought through what presents itself as documentary realism on the one hand and something we might term, for lack of a better expression, magical realism on the other: W.G. Sebald’s prose fiction, especially The Emi­grants and Austerlitz and Da­vid Grossman’s See Under: Love.8 Such a comparison is .

4 The very name of this event has notoriously presented both theory and literature with problems: if the term ‘Holocaust’ may seem inappropriate for its religious implication of sacrifice, it has nevertheless wide use within literary studies. As Giorgio Agamben points out, refe­ring to Primo Levi, the term more common in Jewish communities, Shoah, is not entirely unproblematic itself (see Agamben 1999a: 28–31 for a discussion of both terms). 5 This can be observed in some instances of so-called trauma theory, celebrating trauma, as it were, as the road to a ‘higher’ knowledge—at least this seems the vicarious consequence of some of Shoshana Felman’s contributions (see Felman’s essay ‘Education and Crisis: The Vicissitudes of Teaching’, in: Felman & Laub 1992: 1–56). This kind of mystification of the trauma was criticized among others by Linda Belau and Tom Toremans. Zuckermann labels such approaches as ‘fetishism’ (Zuckermann 2003). 6 If Felman represents one extreme point of view, Dominick La Capra’s writings on the subject are at the other end of the scale, emphasizing concrete historical trauma; however, La Capra distinguishes between the structural absence at the origin of subjectification and the lack that is construed to reinterpret this absence into a narrative. 7 The notion of missed encounter with the real is obviously taken from Jacques Lacan (Lacan 1994), although the present contribution makes no claim to a ‘Lacanian’ reading of Sebald’s or Grossman’s works. 8 References are to the following editions: Sebald 1996 (The Emigrants); Sebald 2001 (Austerlitz).

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anything but obvious, for although these two authors are often mentioned in recent dis­cus­sions about the representation of collective trauma, there seem to be more points of di­ver­gen­ce than con­ver­gence be­tween them. Among the ‘family resem­blances’, one could mention a similar perspective: the point of view of the outsider be­longing to a second, post-war ge­ne­ra­tion. Although Sebald and Grossman do not exactly belong to the same generation (Sebald was born in 1944, Grossman in 1954), nei­­ther has experienced the horrors of the war and the exter­mination camps, nor have their fic­tional narrators, so that both have to resort to his­to­ri­cal document, first hand wit­ness accounts, and fic­tion as their starting point, begging the question of a testimony across generations.9 Because of their historical place, the ‘actual’ event is at the same time less and more ac­cessible for them than it is for its survivors and eye witnesses; the direct affective link to these events—the trau­ma—might be said to be missing in the authors’ as well as the narrator’s cases. And this, one could contend, is what makes them more fit to unveil the ‘truth’ than the original witnesses. On the other hand, the narrators themselves also disclose an involvement that goes far beyond historiographic curiosity. But where Gross­man’s (Jewish) narrator ap­proa­ches the subject from many dif­­fe­rent angles, using all kinds of litera­ry co­des and tech­niques, eventually going back in time to imagine the horror ‘as it hap­pened’ in the camp, the ‘Himmelstraße’ or the torture cham­ber—albeit in a partly phantastic mode, blurring temporal distance and diegetic levels—,10 Sebald’s (German) narrator clearly dis­tances himself from the events re­lated, reporting accounts of witnesses who them­selves steer clear of the actual event, going so far as to circumvent the one symbolic name for the horror: although the titular pro­ta­go­nist of his last prose book is called Austerlitz and we are told of a place called Bauschowitz and of the Auschowitzer Quel­len, the name Auschwitz itself is never named once in his books, nor is a word like holocaust.11 And although Sebald’s narrative strategy 9

10

11

As Gilead Morahg puts it: ‘On its most important level, See Under: Love is an attempt to confront the consequences of the Holocaust as they continue to affect the life of a man who had not yet been born at the time of the events.’ Morahg (1999). The same applies to Sebald, in whose work the possibility of secondary witness accounts is thematized; it has been connected to Marianne Hirsch’s concept of ‘postmemory’ (Hirsch 1997). In view of these stylistic devices, a more obvious literary parallel to Grossman would be Günter Grass. However, Grass belongs to the war generation and, although uncovering what German history in his view has covered up is certainly an important motif, has never explicitely thematized the Holocaust. Indeed, his depiction of Jewish characters is highly problematic, as Ulrich Baer has pointed out (see below). In their accounts of historical facts, Sebald’s narrators limit themselves to less horrifying sites—if such a quali­fi­cation can be applied here—or transit camps such as Breendonk, Terezin, and Litzmannstadt.

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implies a number of witnesses to contribute their part of the story, resulting in the often praised winding and ‘periscopic’ style remindful of Thomas Bern­ hard, paradoxically, only one voi­ce is actually heard: that of the first-level narrator. Grossman, on the other hand, would seem to favour dialogue (a narrative device Sebald has explicitely disavowed), his narrator being addressed (or held accountable) by muses such as the two women in his life, Ayala and Ruth, or the Sea in the Bruno chapter, but also ancestors and literary models such as Anshel Wasserman and Bruno Schulz. However, despite the seemingly polyphonic style of See Under: Love, there is, just as in Sebald’s texts, an instance trying to make sense of the events presented, narrated or avoided, a nar­ra­tor for whom telling this story is a necessity; pursuing it with great tho­rough­ness, possibly hoping to find some kind of closure—and answering to a crucial ethical appeal, as Grossman’s narrator Shlomo ‘Momik’ Neumann puts it: it’s also about me. It’s about my family and what the Beast did to us. [. . .] And about Grandfather, whom I can’t seem to bring back to life, not even in the story. And about being unable to understand my life until I learn about my unlived life Over There. (S 109) It’s also about becoming a narrator, an artist, since that is also at stake: being able to present a fitting picture, getting it right artistically. Thus, Grossman’s Momik as a child attempts to conjure up the Nazi beast in grotesque experiments involving a captured raven and a number of bewildered camp survivors—a childish reaction to the adults’ secretiveness about the past, but also a perverted form of artistic recreation, one might say, which he later continues in his writing attempts. Sebald’s narrator only discloses his motifs in passing, but he is clearly intrigued by the omissions in his own family history or German history in general—sensing, just like Grossman’s character, that the past so conveniently glossed over is also part of his identity. In the course of both narrators’ pursuits of artistic recovery of the past, the dangers of appropriation and mis­ap­pro­priation mentioned above loom large. What such an artistic misappropria­tion could look like, can be demonstrated in the ending of Sebald’s second prose book, The Emigrants. It is an often quoted and de­ba­ted paragraph, whose ethical implications remain unclear.12 The narrator, who has just finished his factual report on the painter Max Aurach (or Max Ferber, as he is called in the English translation, hiding

12

See Cynthia Ozick (1996): The Posthumous Sublime. The New Republic, December 16, 1996, pp. 33–35, as well as Bart Philipsen’s response: ‘Prosopopöie und Atropos: Blicke zwischen Text und Leser’, in: Horn, Menke & Menke 2005: 210–229.

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another appropriation),13 finds himself at the Midland hotel in Manchester, when via a number of flashbacks, he is sud­denly reminded of an exhibition he saw earlier that year in Frankfurt. There, some recently dis­co­ve­red pho­to­ graphs were being shown which were taken at the ghetto of Litz­mann­stadt/ Łodz; the photographer was actually the ghet­to’s Austrian bookkeeper, one Gene­wein. Curiously, the photographs are not inserted into the text as is so often the case in Se­bald’s books; the narrator, how­ever, does give an elaborate description, to conclude with one picture that particularly strikes him: Behind the perpendicular frame of a loom sit three young women, perhaps aged twenty. The irregular geometrical patterns of the carpet they are knotting, and even its colours, remind me of the settee in our living room at home. Who the young women are I do not know. The light falls on them from the window in the background, so I cannot make out their eyes clearly, but I sense that all three are looking across at me, since I am standing on the very spot where Genewein the accountant stood with his camera. The young woman in the middle is blonde and has the air of a bride about her. The weaver to her left has inclined her head a little to one side, whilst the woman on the right is looking at me with so steady and relentless a gaze that I cannot meet it for long. I wonder what the three women’s names were—Roza, Lusia and Lea, or Nona, Decuma and Morta, the daughters of night, with spindle, scissors and thread. (The Emigrants 237) This final description or ekphrasis, which concludes the book, presents us with a complex interaction of looks: the narrator, standing in the photographer’s place, looks at the girls, who in turn may or may not look at him, but even so, one of them forces him to look away. What he finds so unbearable about her look, is not clear: is it an injunction? An appeal? A reproach? The narrator immediately fends off what he considers a threat by first naming the Jewish girls, lifting them out of anonymity, and then turning their presence into a mythological scene: as the god­des­ses of fate, they may be the ones deci­ding not just on the end of this story, but in a more general way on the fate of the narrator. This in­terpretation may seem inappropriate: after all, the girls in the pho­ to­graph were more than likely deported to one of the nearby extermination 13

The character called Aurach in the German original was inspired by English-German painter Frank Auerbach, who had this reference to his name as well as a reproduction of one of his works and a detail photograph of his right eye removed from the English translation.

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camps, they could not make the kind of choice implied in the mythologization, as a matter of fact, choice is precisely what was denied to them. Maybe that is the very reason why the narrator has to look away, being confronted with a fate that touches his own humanity. Of course, they are in opposite camps: the place of the photographer seems like the right place for the onlooker that is Sebald’s narrator. After all, he comes from the community of per­pe­tra­tors or beneficiaries of the extermination industry, a position implied in the mention of the ‘settee in our living room at ho­me’. Indeed, many of the artifacts produced in camps and ghettos such as Litzmannstadt found their way into German living rooms. The position assumed here by the narrator, however, is exactly what he is constantly struggling with in all of Sebald’s nar­rative texts—just like the author Max Sebald, with whom they have so suspiciously many biographical elements in common, his narrators look for an external perspective that will enable them to see some kind of truth beyond simple victim-perpetrator oppositions. But there are other metonymical and metaphorical layers at work in this picture as well: since the activity of the girls depicted here, as all activities in Litzmannstadt, were seen as economically useful—indeed, the inhabitants of the ghetto were reduced to their economic value—, the leaders of the Jewish ghetto hoped it would buy them time and a chance of surviving. ‘Arbeit ist unser einziger Weg’ (Work is our only course) was the motto of the Jewish ghetto council. But as in this case, the car­pet being knotted, with its irregular patterns, acquires the meta­pho­ri­cal meaning of the book we just read, the whole passage could be read as the old motif of Sheherazade’s story. The two metaphorically implied frameworks—the editing function of the fates and the post­po­ning function of Sheherazade—could be considered two conflicting models of nar­ra­tion in Se­bald’s prose fiction. This is, admittedly, a somewhat coloured reading. To make the point a bit too crudely: the choreography of glances between the narrator and his objects could be said to bear similarities to the choreography of seduction between the author Anshel Wasserman and the camp com­man­der Neigel in the ‘plagiarism’ chapter of Part 4 of Grossman’s novel. Neigel had been copying Wasserman’s story in his letters to his wife as an attempt to reconcile her and himself with the horrors he is responsible for. Wasserman’s reaction is quite fierce: ‘that is plagiarism! The worst crime you could ever commit against me here! [. . .] Worse than death! You stole my story, Neigel, you stole my life!’ (S 396–97). This charge deserves closer attention, since forms of literary appropriation are thematized throughout Grossman’s narrative: its narrator, Shlomo Neuman, uses both his grandfather’s Children of the Heart stories and Bruno Schulz’ unfinished Messiah to redesign himself as an author. I shall return to this below.

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Sticking with Sebald’s novel, its final narrative ploy may be said to steal the Jewish girls’ story by encapsulating it in a classical myth in what could also be termed a reconciliatory move. If this were really Sebald’s strategy, it would be dishonest—as dishonest as the excuses offered by Neigel. However, such an interpretation would be malevolent in the light of what went before. A recent article by Ulrich Baer may shed some light on what is at stake here. Baer has levelled serious charges against a number of German literary texts written ‘after Auschwitz’.14 In his view, the posture of the ‘good German’ implied in much of this literature comes down to an attempt of extorted reconciliation. By staging Holocaust memory, German authors offer excuses or ask for forgiveness from an audience that is un­able to respond as equals: the victims have been deprived of all dignity, including that of an equal partner in com­ mu­nication. The plea for reconciliation, in Baer’s view, implies a power that confirms this un­equal relationship. He sees this kind of strategy at work in a lesser-known, recent novel by a representative of the postwar, 1968 generation—Peter Schneider’s Eduards Heimkehr15—, but one might add, for instance, much more popular novels such as Bernhard Schlink’s The Reader.16 But Bear makes a similar diagnosis for Günter Grass, who has repeatedly in­te­ gra­ted Jewish characters in his prose work, and who repeatedly refers to Paul Celan as a moral compass in his essays. For Baer, this all too often amounts to an almost caricaturizing gesture—even if he credits Grass with a much more authentic ‘failure’ then Schneider. For Sebald, however, such criticism seems inappropriate. If we discard the final scene from The Emigrants for now, we can find many other passages in Sebald’s work which show a much more tactful approach. An often quoted example can be found in the story of Paul Bereyter, the second story in The 14 Baer 2005. 15 Schneider 1999. 16 Schlink 1995. Although this immensely successful novel doesn’t really deal with reconciliation as Baer views it—Jewish camp victims are only briefly mentioned in Schlink’s novel—, it nevertheless attempts to conjure the ethical problematics of the ‘good German’, albeit in a rather dubious and definitely kitschy way—the hero of the story, as a young boy, is implicitely identified with the Jewish girls his ‘lover’ used to keep as readers; his coming down with ‘jaundice’ may well be a reference to the yellow David star Jews were obliged to wear. A novel closer to what Baer has in mind would be Dieter Forte’s Der junge mit den blutigen Schuhen (Frankfurt/M.: Fischer 1995), in which the Jewish character ‘Opa Winter’ bears resemblances to the Jews in Grass’ novels. Forte’s contention that this character is based on a real-life model doesn’t necessarily refute the criticism that it is a stereotype. In Germany, there was some controversy over such texts in the early 2000s, as documented (albeit in a partisan way) by Volker Hage (Hage 2002).

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Emigrants. The narrator hears the news of the death of his elementary school teacher Paul Bereyter and is puzzled by the brief mention of the fact that Bereyter had been ‘prevented from practising his chosen profession’ by the Third Reich. In the following years, the narrator takes it upon him to uncover the story behind this. Not trusting his own memories, he resorts to imagination: belatedly, I tried to get closer to him, to imagine what his life was like in the spacious apartment top floor of Ler­chenmüller’s old house, which had once stood whe­re the pre­sent block of flats is now, amidst an array of green ve­ge­table pat­ches and colourful flower beds, in the gardens whe­re Paul often helped out of an afternoon. I ima­­gi­ned him lying in the open air on the balcony whe­re he would often sleep in the sum­­mer, his face canopied by the hosts of the stars. I ima­gined him skating in winter, alone on the fish ponds at Moos­­­bach; and I ima­gi­ned him stretched out on the track. As I pic­tured him, he had taken off his spectacles and put them on the bal­last stones by his side. The gleaming bands of steel, the cross­ bars of the slee­pers, the spru­ce trees on the hill­side above the village of Alt­städten, the arc of the mountains he knew so well, were a blur be­fo­re his short-sighted eyes, smudged out in the gathering dusk. At the last, as the thun­derous sound ap­proa­ched, all he saw was a dar­ke­ning grey­ness and, in the midst of it, needle-sharp, the snow-white sil­hou­ettes of three mountains: the Krat­zer, the Tret­tach and the Him­mels­schrofen. Such en­­ dea­vours to imagine his life and death did not, as I had to admit, bring me any closer to Paul, except at best for brief emotional moments of the kind that seemed pre­sumptuous to me. It is in or­der to avoid this sort of wrongful trespass that I have writ­ten down what I know of Paul Be­reyter (The Emigrants 29). There we have the problem: not respecting a certain distance to the person under scru­tiny is pre­sump­tuous, even a wrongful trespass [Aus­ufe­run­gen des Gefühls, wie sie mir un­zu­läs­­sig er­schei­nen]. The central word in the description, which occasions the narrator’s scruples, is imagination or, rather, representation [Vergegenwärtigung]. It would seem that the realism evoked in this passage is all too lively to be morally acceptable; it is an in­tru­sion into the intimacy of a person who ultimately re­mains incomprehensible, or worse, an attempt to identify with an Other who is then turned into self. In short, a problem of misunderstood empathy. The solution suggested is one of careful re­search to be written down—indeed, the use of ‘writing’ in this and similar passages is often op­po­sed to ‘imagination’; a strange turn in a text interspersed with photographs.

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As already mentioned, the imaginative appropriation of another’s life is also thematized in See Under: Love, especially in Bruno, the second section of Grossman’s novel. Yet where Sebald tries to ‘reenact’ his subject’s life, Grossman (or, rather, Momik) dispenses with any kind of realism, imagining an alternative fate for real-life author Bruno Schulz instead. Not surprisingly, he learns about Schulz through one of the women in his life, Ayala. While reading The Street of Crocodiles, Momik gradually identifies with Schulz up to a point where he no longer knows the difference: ‘As Bruno once wrote. (Or did I write that?)’ (S 100). At first, the Sea serves as a kind of conduit between the two men, being an element of dissolution as well as another muse for Momik. Yet the Sea also needs him, since she has no voice. And voices are what it’s all about: lending a voice to the Sea, telling the story of Bruno Schulz who aspired to a voice completely his own (which is why, in the fairytale-like story of Bruno’s escape as a fish, he will eventually no longer stay within the school but make his own way). The paradoxical demand made by Bruno would be to emulate a voice that claimed uniqueness. This demand Momik could not possibly meet; moreover, he eventually finds that such a move would renounce the one thing he was looking for: love. Bruno, it turns out, was so engulfed in himself that he didn’t recognize real beauty—the beauty of the sea and of everyday, communal existence: [. . .] she deserves love. She really does. Perhaps even the love of someone with smaller claims than Bruno’s. A more modest and practical man, not lacking in a certain poetic sensibility, who would be able to distinguish her subtle nuances, a man who is, well, a mere nothing compared to our lofty, transcendental, uncompromising Bruno, but perhaps precisely because he is so involved in the petty details of daily existence because he’s such an obvious product of decadent society. (S 183) The attempted appropriation of another writer’s genius curiously ends in what seems like a much more modest bid, the inkling of a writership more involved in other’s lives, recognizing the need for community and tradition or memory. As a result of this, Momik renounces the simple first-person narration, first by staging a dialogue in Wasserman, then by using the impersonal form in The Complete Encyclopedia of Kazik’s Life. However, the idea of community remains dubious throughout Grossman’s novel.17

17

The Bruno section is not just on appropriating another artist’s voice in order to tell a story, it is also on voicing the memory of others and constituting a community in the act. This

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It should be clear that the kind of community sought by Momik must have a very different character in the work of Sebald, the German. In Austerlitz, the anonymous narrator makes an attempt to appropriate or identify with the ‘victims’, only to be thrown back to his own position—on the side of the ‘perpetrators’. This is, however, done in a very matter-of-fact way, not invoking any kind of excuse. When first visiting the Belgian camp of Breen­donk, which is now a museum, he is ap­pa­lled by the idea that the primitive wheelbarrows on display there had to be used by the prisoners: I could not imagine how the prisoners, very few of whom had probably ever done hard physical labour before their arrest and internment, could have pushed these barrows full of heavy detritus over the sun-baked clay of the ground, furrowed by ruts as hard as stone, or through the mire that was churned up after a day’s rain; it was impossible to picture them bracing themselves against the weight until their hearts nearly burst, or think of the overseer beating them about the head with the handle of a shovel when they could not move forward. However, if I could not envisage the drudgery performed day after day, year after year, at Breendonk and all the other main and branch camps, when I finally entered the fort itself and glanced through the glass panes of a door on the right into the so-called mess of the SS guards with its scrubbed tables and benches, its bulging stove and the various adages neatly painted on its wall in Gothic lettering, I could well imagine the sight of the good fathers and dutiful sons from Vilsbiburg and Fuhlsbüttel, from the Black Forest and the Bavarian Alps, sitting here when they came off duty to play cards or write letters to their loved ones at home. After all, I had lived among them until my twentieth year (Austerlitz 28–29).18 Setting aside for the moment a rhetorical ploy resembling praeteritio—‘I shall not talk about the wheelbarrows’—, one can only recognize that the narrator does not conceal what camp he be­longs to. The feeling of community presented here is, at best, one constituted by shame.

18

can obviously lead to a restrictive and exclusive idea of community, something Grossman appears to be struggling with in this novel. Despite the narrator’s belonging to the Germans community, the Germans in his story (or any other story by Sebald) never acquire a face, as if the author would agree with Wasserman when he describes Neigel as ‘a list of facts, common to thousands of SS officers like him, and that’s all’ (S 281). Of course, the Wasserman section eventually does ‘penetrate’ the Neigel character as well.

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The narratorial impotence admitted to here is made even more explicit in of the most quoted passages from The Emigrants: Often I could not get on for hours or days at a time, and not infrequently I unravel­led what I had done, conti­nuous­ly tormented by scruples that were taking tighter hold and stea­dily paralysing me. These scruples con­ cer­­ned not only the subject of my narrative, which I felt I could not do justice to, no matter what ap­proach I tried, but also the entire questionable bu­siness of writing. I had covered hundreds of pages with my scribble, in pencil and ballpoint. By far the grea­ter part had been crossed out, discarded, or ob­li­te­­rated by additions. Even what I ultimately salvaged as a ‘fi­nal’ version seemed to me a thing of shreds and pat­ches, utterly botched (The Emigrants 230–231). However, this passage only gains its real weight when juxtaposed to the earlier description of the paintings and drawings of Max Aurach, the representative of the ‘1.5 generation’ whom Sebald’s narrator is writing about.19 Both artists, the German-Jewish painter and the German writer, try to approach the loss caused by the Holocaust, and in both cases, it would seem that only a ‘botched’ version, a failure can truly do justice to the model depicted—the outcome being a ‘thing of shreds an patches’ for the narrator, a ‘steady production of dust’ for the painter. On the one hand, one could consider this another ‘triumph of failure’; the narrator finds the ‘ghostly presences’ of ‘ancestral faces’ in Aurach’s portraits. On the other, it is only in the dialogue between the two characters— the narrator and his model, the artist Aurach—that a sort of authentic image can arise. That is: if dialogue there is. When the narrator finally decides to stop working on Aurach’s life story and goes to present the result, however botched, to Aurach, the artist is in hospital and his voice is hardly audible, reminding the narrator of ‘the rustle of dry leaves in the wind’ (E 231)—a reference to Franz Kafka’s story The Cares of a Family Man, where Odradek, half-being, halfobject, becomes a matter of concern for the man of the house: as a curiously shaped, useless and elusive object, it cannot be recuperated. In a similar way, Aurach, close to death and voiceless, is no longer attainable for the narrator— even though similarities between the two are emphasized throughout the text

19

The term ‘1.5 generation’ is used for immigrants who have left their native country very early on in their lives. Usually applied to South-East Asian immigrants in the USA, the term was adopted by Susan Rubin Suleiman to designate child Holocaust survivors. See Rubin Suleiman 2002.

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and even though connecting to the artist seems a matter of utmost importance to the writer. Not surprisingly, the Israeli Grossman is confronted with very similar problems of representation; like The Emigrants, See Under: Love is also the story of a writer trying to find a genuine voice, and like The Emigrants’ narrator, Momik attempts to establish a dialogue with his ‘models’. Consider a passage from the Bruno section, where Momik Neuman ponders questions of identification and appropration: As I tried to write the story of Anshel Wasserman, my own life became more and more cir­cum­scribed. The Greek philosopher Zeno argued that motion is impossible because a moving object has to reach the halfway point before it can reach the end, and therefore a body that traverses a finite distance must traverse an infinite number of halves in finite time, i.e., the time it actually takes to traverse the finite distance in question. Which is exactly what happened to me: I wrote, but could not progress from one word to the next. From one idea to the next. My pen scored the page with a terrible stammer. I had a regular desk at the Yad Vashem Holocaust Library by this time, and the librarians all knew me [. . .] I would sit around listening to the employees talk about their children and their paychecks, and think to myself dejectedly, Somewhere inside this edifice is an empty white room with thin, membranous walls, if only I could find it. (S 103) The Jewish survivor Wasserman, like the Jew saved by a child transport— Austerlitz or Aurach—can be approached only asymptotically, in a movement of infinite approach, yet never fully identifiable. The problem here, however, may be not just an impossibility of empathy, but also the irritating influence of models and clichés. I would like to illustrate this with a motif that is never explicitly developed in either Grossman or Sebald, but that could nevertheless be considered central to both their works. It capitalizes on a cliché from western popular culture: the Wandering Jew, or, in German, ‘Der ewige Jude’. An interesting depiction of this legendary character can be found in a volume of popular literature published in 1867; the carving’s title is ‘Le vrai portrait du Juif-errant’, but the most interesting scene, Les Bourgeois de la Ville parlant au Juif-errant, is a detail on the bottom left: two townspeople—said in the accompanying poem to be from Brussels—meet with the Wandering Jew, who then tells them of his fate: he has wandered the earth and seen many calamities and wars, but walked away unharmed. Despite the caption and the conversation presented in the poem,

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however, the men shown in the picture do not really talk to the Jew, neither does he seem to address them; rather, the men talk to each other—which could be seen as an interesting analogy to our topic. Art historians have long since established that this very scene later became the main source of in­spi­ration for one of realism’s masterpieces: Gustave Courbet’s La rencontre or Bonjour, Monsieur Cour­bet.20 In this, the pain­ter affirms his importance as an artist, being greeted by his benefactor Al­phon­se Bruyas and his servant. Courbet puts the ancient motif to work in a picture that witnesses the artistic and social turmoil of the mid-19th century: not just artists, but also the working class identified with the figure of the Wandering Jew, and the mythical depiction was given a realistic turn—although one could also inverse this order: underneath the realist depiction of an artist meeting with his patron lies a model that is being appropriated for artistic purposes. Of course, in another time and place, the figure of the Wandering Jew gained a completely dif­fe­rent meaning: The Nazi propaganda film Der ewige Jude with its pseudo-scientific and statistical facts proved the utter vileness, but also the slyness of the Jewish race, which is not even deemed worthy of being called a race—one only needs to look behind the surface of the well groomed, civilized Jews of the West, who have succeeded in deceiving their surroundings, and one sees the real Jew, who is unhygienic, lives in dirty dwellings—if he had a dwelling at all—and in groups than can best be compared to rats: in a famous match-cut, this creaturely dimension is actually shown.21 And here is another possible description of the Wandering Jew: the oldest man in the world [. . .] he wore blue-striped pajamas and was all wrinkled like grandma before she died. His skin was yellowish-brown, like a turtle’s, sagging down around his skinny neck and arms, his head was bald, and his eyes were blank and blue (S 4). Or: [he] wears a gown of gorgeous silk, and a large watch on a chain that bounces against his chest as he runs. He is bowed and wisened, with a whispy beard and an incipient hump on the back of his neck (S 187).

20 21

See Nochlin 2007. A useful account of this ‘documentary’ and its implications can be found in HornshøyMøller 1998.

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This is how Anshel Wasserman is depicted in See Under: Love; first as the near corpse that is delivered to Momik’s family in the first section of the novel, then as the farcical rabbi before camp commandant Neigel in the Wasserman section. The Holocaust survivors sur­rounding him in Tel Aviv and then again figuring in the Children of the Heart-stories are given equal­ly caricaturesque, if not downright revolting appearances. Not only do they have unfavourable physiognomies, they also smell bad and pay no attention whatsoever to their bodies, in clear contrast to the Nazi characters, who are either described as good-looking, like SS interrogator Orf, or quite ordinary, like Neigel. The other side to this, however, is in a sense the reversal of what the propaganda film is bent on proving: while the dirty Jews keep a sense of right and wrong, inside the clean Nazis is a moral void. Or to put it in the words of Hitler, who is quoted by Grossman: ‘Conscience is the business of the Jew’ (S 197). But of course, the character of the Wandering Jew also figures in a much more meta­phori­cal way in the book’s second section, Bruno. Indeed, when Bruno takes to the waters, it may seem at first as if he joins the community of salmons who in a kind of reverse Diaspora return to their native land. However, when Bruno notices he has acquired a kind of force that could enable him to become the leader of the school, he decides against it and wanders off as a lone artist. It is not at all clear just what side Grossman is on then—Momik, at least, seems to disavow the Wande­ring Jew, the lone artist, and favour a happy ending. That is: if we don’t count the last section of the book, The Complete Encyclopedia of Kazik’s Life. The Encyclopedia could be considered Momik’s actual accomplishment, his answer to the impossible task imposed on him by the white room. In a convincing case for a Hegelian reading of the novel, Paul Eisenstein sees the first three sections caught in the ‘totalizing’ frame of a master-narrative (of sorts). The final section, however, abandons such aspirations: it gives up on a closed narrative frame and opts for a seemingly random approach of its topic instead. This can be considered, then, a way of confronting the Real.22 In Sebald’s work, the Wandering Jew is certainly never named, but it is clear that all of his pro­ta­gonists, including the anonymous narrators, are wanderers. The book title The Emigrants speaks for itself: the four protagonists have all been prompted or forced to leave their Heimat, now con­demned to living abroad—which, in this case, should be understood less in the geo­gra­phical 22 Eisenstein 1999. Eisenstein makes a case for a non-totalizing reading of Hegel, of which he sees Grossman’s novel as an example. In Gilead Morahg’s view, the Kazik section’s main merit is its bringing to full fruition the combination of the ‘realistic’ and the ‘fantastic’ (Morahg 1999).

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sen­se than as radical outsider status. They all feel uneasy in the places they live in: Doctor Henry Sel­wyn prefers living in a small folly in his garden rather than in his large villa; Paul Be­rey­ter only stays in the apartment in his home town a few times a year, becoming more and more aware that he doesn’t belong there anymore; Ambros Adelwarth travels extensively as the servant and sometime lover of Cosmo Solomon, the manic-depressive heir of a banker’s family, even­ tual­ly even visiting Jerusalem, which is no more than a shadow of the holy centre it once was; Max Aurach, who was sent to England by his parents to escape the camps, ends up under the chim­neys of Manchester, which is depicted like an unworldly, post-catastrophic ghost town; and fi­ nal­ ly, Austerlitz, although an architecture scholar, in whose opinion only buildings the size of man can truly be human, does not find a resting place, wandering between his grey and empty house in London, and the objects of his research in Antwerp, Brussels, Terezin and Paris. And here too, there is a metaphorical turn: Franz Kafka’s Wandering Jew, Gracchus the Hunter, who figures so prominently in Sebald’s first prose book, Schwindel. Gefühle. (Vertigo), is again quo­ted, albeit in a more covert way through intertextual allusions, in The Emigrants. This haunting character’s homelessnes and inability to arrive and die, a kind of anti-odyssey, offers the narrative plot underlying all of Sebald’s stories. But is this the last word? Or do Sebald and Grossman manage to turn the impossibility of representing their subjects, who cannot find redemption, into an aesthetic triumph? A fitting analogy for what I consider the artistic aporia in both Sebald’s and Grossman’s work can be found in the final section of The Emigrants. It is an aerial photograph of the former Jewish quarter of Manchester, which had just been demolished at the time this story is set, around 1966. The narrator mentions how ‘all that was left to recall the lives of thousands of people was the grid-like layout of the streets’. An obvious reaction of many readers is to parallel the picture to aerial views of concentration camps, the small working-class homes resembling the barracks. But it is not too hard to turn this unsharp black-and-white picture into text again: the rows of houses into lines, the waste lands in the middle into blank spaces where text is missing. This is, I would claim, a procedure of literalization typical of Sebald, but possibly at work in Grossman too, as Momik constantly copies other writers’ books and, as a child, writes down all the printing errors he can find. It may also be the sense of the White Room he first so desperately seeks and then desperately wants to leave. This place, to which he is introduced by his lover Ayala, may be a room at Yad Vashem, but is in fact a metaphor:

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She told me that first night that the White Room was the real testingground for anyone who wants to write about the Holocaust. Like the riddling sphinx. And you go there to present yourself willingly to the sphinx, understand? (S 123) The sphinx’s questions, however, will ultimately force the man before her to confront himself. Grossman’s Momik dodges this confrontation as long as he can, only to find that ‘the whole world is the white room’ (S 297) and come up with an abbreviation of life—the life story of Kazik, spanning only 24 hours— but in an encyclopedic way, thereby avoiding an all too subjective narratorrial voice. As a narrator, he only comes into being as he effaces himself. The sphinx—or Ayala, who seems to know the answer to the sphinx’s riddles— becomes a strange kind of muse for Momik, one that will only inspire him by constantly questioning him. Similarly, in Sebald’s case, the Jewish girls appearing somewhat inadvertently in the final lines of The Emigrants may well be his riddling muses, too.23 Standing in the position of the photographer—the perpetrator—, the narrator finds himself in another kind of White Room, questioned by the women in the picture that is not revealed in the book. His final interpretation amounts to an avoidance, a screen which keeps the truth at bay. And ultimately, the girls, like Aurach or any other Jewish victim, remain foreign to him, even as their fate is intimately tied to his own.

23

The role of women in Sebald’s prose is mostly limited to that of a conduit between men, akin to the Sea in Grossman’s novel. Another comparison between the two writers would be this ‘gendering’ of the Holocaust. For Sebald, such an analysis can be found in Barzilai 2004.

Part 4 See Under: Political

∵

chapter 8

The Novel Form and the Timing of the Nation Pieter Vermeulen The formative role of the novel genre in the emergence and the consolidation of modern nation states has become nearly axiomatic in the field of literary studies. In Imagined Communities, his classic study of the emergence of the nation, Benedict Anderson famously argued that “the historical appearance of the novel-as-popular-commodity and the rise of nation-ness were intimately related”.1 Anderson’s thesis about the close affinities between novel, nation, and culture applies both to the nineteenth-century European nation-state and to the later development of non-Western, postcolonial nations.2 Yet while the novel genre has amply demonstrated its capacity to consolidate a national imaginary, the history of the novel has also shown its power to criticize such an imaginary. Through its various modernist and postmodernist mutations, the genre has often intervened in the imagining of the nation in a way that destabilized rather than fortified national unity. Anderson himself conceded as much when in 1998, 15 years after the first publication of his thesis, he noted that while the link between novel and notion is “rather easy to make for the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries”, except for “some recently decolonized parts of Asia and Africa”, the affinities between the two have become “visibly strained” in the second half of the twentieth century.3 In the first section of this chapter, I return to Anderson’s seminal analysis in order to emphasize two crucial aspects that are often obliterated in the frequent invocations of his work. First, Anderson does not claim that the novel genre can inculcate a particular nationalist ideology, but rather that the novel is a technology that makes it possible to imagine “the kind of imagined community that is the nation”;4 second, this imagining consists in a particular “apprehension of time”5 that is particularly conducive to imagining a sense of national community. By retrieving these vital dimensions of Anderson’s analysis, it becomes possible to see that the novel genre’s capacity to critically 1 2 3 4 5

Anderson 1998: 334. Cheah 2003: 235–248. Anderson 1998: 334–335. Anderson 1991: 24–25. Anderson 1991: 22.

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intervene in a national imaginary is not only situated on a thematic or formal level, but also on the level of its temporal organization. The rest of this chapter applies this insight to the case of Israeli author David Grossman’s 1986 novel ‘Ayen ‘erekh: ahavah (translated as See Under: Love, the title I use in the rest of this article). Grossman’s novel is routinely recognized as a major intervention in Israel’s national imaginary. The first of the novel’s four sections, which is situated in 1959, chronicles the social pathologies that beset the nation’s exclusion of the Holocaust from the national imaginary at that time, an exclusion that was informed by a Zionist discourse that regarded the Holocaust as “the ultimate manifestation of a pathological diasporic mentality”, and that rejected the alleged passivity of the victims of the Holocaust in its celebration of the heroic resolve of the “New Jew”.6 By representing the horrors and the afterlife of the Holocaust in an unusually blunt and imaginative way, See Under: Love, according to much of the scholarship on the novel, helped the nation to finally “assimilate the legacy of the Holocaust into the communal narrative” and to own up to the untenability of Zionist visions of national identity.7 See Under: Love “was perceived as both a literary and societal event”;8 “it has revolutionized the conventional Israeli attitude to the major trauma of Jewish history”;9 it “has taken an important step toward subverting the exclusionary conceptions of Israel’s conventional view of the Holocaust”.10 On the strength of Anderson’s case for the importance of the apprehension of time for the novel genre’s ability to intervene in the national imaginary, I argue that See Under: Love’s critical intervention in a national tradition that downplayed the nation’s connection to the Holocaust not only operates on a thematic and a formal level, but is made possible by its reorganization of the temporal logic of the traditional novel. An analysis of the novel’s temporal organization explains why it not only constitutes a major event in Hebrew literary history, but also in the Israeli national imaginary; moreover, it makes it possible to address another major challenge in the scholarship in the book: the question of the relation between the novel’s four stylistically very diverse and seemingly discontinuous sections. There is a further reason why See Under: Love provides a good testing ground for the relation between novel and nation. While the link between the two is well-established in the cases of nineteenth-century Europe and of postcolonial 6 7 8 9 10

Morahg 1999: 459. Bernstein 2005: 78–79. Bernstein 2005: 65. Shaked 1989: 313. Morahg 1999: 475.

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nations, the state of Israel cannot simply be reduced to either of these cases. Even if it is clear that “Israel’s nation-state format derives from the nationalist movements that flourished in the nineteenth century”,11 it is impossible, or at the very least irresponsibly reductive, to consider Israel as either a straightforward colonial imposition or as the outcome of anti- or postcolonial practices. Indeed, much of the scholarship that is not excessively biased in either of these directions ends up with one version or other of the observation that “Zionism was historically and conceptually situated between colonial, anticolonial and postcolonial discourse and practice”.12 At the same time, the “intensity and stubbornness” of Israeli nationalism that See Under: Love confronts is profoundly out of sync with the decline of the idea of the nation-state in most of the Western world in the 1980s and 90s.13 While the role of cultural, memorial, and literary practices in Israeli nation-formation has been well established,14 this process cannot be coordinated with contemporaneous developments in the West nor with complex processes of nation-formation in the decolonizing world. In this way, See Under: Love confronts Anderson’s thesis, and the scholarship it has inspired, with a historical case they have not yet addressed.

The Novel and the Timing of the Nation

Anderson’s Imagined Communities puts forward a double thesis on the relation between the nation and media such as the novel: first, it holds that the very possibility of “thinking” a nation depends on a particular way of “apprehending the world”; and second, this apprehension is in its turn enhanced by the operations of particular technologies and media.15 In order for the nation to be imagined, citizens needs to apprehend that they belong to the same community as thousands or even millions of people whom they can never hope to meet in real life.16 This community can never be perceived in a concrete shape, and can therefore only ever be imagined. Yet what makes it possible to imagine the nation as “a bounded intrahistorical entity”, to imagine the reality of “large, cross-generation, sharply delimited communities”?17 For Anderson, 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

Susser and Don Yehiya 1994: 197. Penslar 2001: 85, emphasis mine. Susser and Don Yehiya 1994: 189. Zerubavel 1995; Zerubavel 2005. Anderson 1991: 22. Anderson 1991: 6. Anderson 1998: 334.

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this requires the ability to apprehend one’s simultaneity with the other members of one’s community—one’s simultaneous belonging to the same community as other people. Such a sense of simultaneity, he argues, is promoted by “two forms of imagining which first flowered in Europe in the eighteenth century: the novel and the newspaper”, which “provided the technical means for ‘representing’ the kind of imagined community that is the nation”.18 Anderson notes that the traditional realist novel projects a community of people who may not even be aware of each other’s existence; even if Charles Bovary does not suspect the existence of Rodolphe Boulanger, they yet belong to the same community that Flaubert’s novel writes into existence and thereby allows his readers to imagine and apprehend. Such an imagining of simultaneity is a condition of the nation: Anderson writes that “[t]he idea of a sociological organism moving calendrically through homogeneous, empty time is a precise analogue of the idea of the nation, which also is conceived as a solid community moving steadily down (or up) history”.19 Anderson borrows the phrase “homogeneous, empty time” from Walter Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History” in order to refer to a sense of time determined by clock and calendar, a time made up of identical and interchangeable moments, none of which is inherently more significant than the next. The novel trains citizens’ ability to imagine that this emptiness is filled with the idea of the (their) nation; it is, in Anderson’s words, “a complex gloss upon the word ‘meanwhile”’.20 Anderson’s thesis is counterintuitive in that it does not primarily connect the nation to a diachronic imagining of heroic roots and historical origins, as is commonly done, but instead underscores the vital importance of a synchronic imagining of togetherness, without which these roots and origins could not possibly be imagined as those of a particular collective. For Anderson, national history is not irrelevant, as it supplements synchronicity “with a diachronic form of narrative”, a teleological narrative of which the established nation is the consolidated last stage.21 Indeed, to the extent that the nation also relies on legitimizing historical narratives, these narratives are marked by the unshakeable continuity of the nation, not by its openness to chance and otherness. As Etienne Balibar writes, representations of the nation’s coming-into-being present the nation “as the fulfilment of a ‘project’ stretching over centuries”, in

18 19 20 21

Anderson 1991: 24–25. Anderson: 1991:26. Anderson: 1991: 25. Anderson 1998: 334.

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which successive generations “have handed down to each other an invariant substance”.22 So what does the nation’s reliance on both a myth of diachronic continuity and a sense of synchronic stability mean for the potentiality to critically intervene in the national imaginary? It suggests that there are at least two possible strategies, both of which have been exploited by novelists and others. As for the diachronic dimension, especially revisionary historiography—a project in which the novel form has been deeply involved—can lay bare the contingency and the constructedness of the national narrative, and point to elements that have been left out of that story. In the case of Israel, which concerns us in this article, the so-called New Historians have started this project in the 1980s when they began to challenge received accounts of Israeli history. Still, it is the nation’s dependence on synchronic stability that has offered a peculiarly fruitful avenue for novelistic critiques of the nation, in that it allows novels (such as See Under: Love) to address the national imaginary by reconfiguring the genre’s traditional consolidation of “homogeneous, empty time”. When Anderson reassesses his original thesis on the affirmative relation between novel and nation in 1998, and notes that their relation has become “visibly strained” in the second half of the twentieth century, he links this development to literature’s increasing attention to questions of temporality: “the attempt to transcend or disrupt ‘homogenous, empty time’,“ he writes”, was “a crucial aspect of the innovations of early modernism”.23 This modernist challenge is not restricted to one particular historical moment and locale, as the tendency to critique the nation by intervening in its temporal organization and its imagined homogeneity even today figures prominently on the agenda of critical projects that aim to open up the nation to global, postcolonial, or planetary dimensions. Perhaps the most famous instance of this tendency is Homi Bhabha’s classic essay “DissimiNation”, in which Bhabha notes that there is “always the distracting presence of another temporality that disturbs the contemporaneity of the national present”.24 For Bhabha, “the homogenous empty time of the nation’s ‘meanwhile’ is cut across by the ghostly simultaneity of a temporality of doubling”.25 In a recent book, Vilashini Cooppan reconceptualizes the nation as an entity harboring a crypt containing “the global world, the non-national them, the time before or after nation-time, the other languages that split the national ‘we,’ even the several 22 23 24 25

Balibar 1991:86. Anderson 1998: 334–335. Bhabha 2002: 143. Bhabha 2002: 160.

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genres of national narration that install other times than nation-time and ghost the plot of national becoming with national dissolution, decomposition, and displacement”.26 In a similar vein, Peter Hitchcock notes that the idea of the nation as a continuous subject is inevitably betrayed by the narration of its development. Narration always “destabilizes the logic of nation form, calling into question every manifestation of narrative appropriateness”; for Hitchcock, there is a “waywardness in narration itself that cannot guarantee the integrity of the nation form”.27 It is by looking at the strategies that novels use to interrupt the empty “meanwhile” of the nation, then, that it becomes possible to understand the way they can intervene in the national imaginary. While critical studies of See Under: Love simply assume its successful reorganization of the nation’s relation to its past and its future, this approach makes it possible to substantiate that claim.

See Under: Love and ‘the Synchronicity of the Non-Synchronous’

The first section of David Grossman’s 1986 novel See Under: Love recounts a few months in the life of a ten-year-old boy, Momik, who grows up as the only son of Holocaust survivors in Beit Mazmil, Jerusalem in the 1950s. The section is consistently focalized through the boy’s eyes, and it makes clear that his life is lived in the shadow of a past that he can neither escape nor understand, as the grown-ups around him are unwilling or incapable to address the traumatic past. One of these survivors is Momik’s great uncle Anshel Wasserman, a once famous writer of children’s adventure stories; linked to both the realm of the imagination and the world of the concentration and extermination camps, Wasserman comes to serve as the vehicle for the novel’s audacious imagining of life in the camps in its third part (out of a total of four), in which Wasserman entertains “Camp Commander Obersturmbannführer Neigel” by inventing stories featuring “The Children of the Heart”, the familiar cast of characters from his erstwhile bestsellers. The novel reformats these stories in its fourth and final section, in which it narrates the afterlife of the heroes of Wasserman’s adventure stories as the unlikely curators of the Warsaw zoo between 1939 and 1943 in the non-linear form of an encyclopaedia. The formal innovations of Grossman’s novel are routinely linked to postmodernism and to magic realism, developments that were at the forefront of the international novel production in the eighties, when the book was 26 27

Cooppan 2009: 28. Hitchcock 2010: 143.

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published. While See Under: Love is clearly in tune with contemporaneous international developments, the novel is also undeniably affected by a modernist impulse. For one thing, the book’s second section is dedicated to the life story and the work of the Jewish Polish modernist writer and artist Bruno Schulz; its formal decision, moreover, to bring four stylistically diverse and discontinuous sections together between the covers of the book is reminiscent of modernist innovations in the novel form. Anderson’s revision of his thesis on the novel and the nation suggests that the book’s non-traditional organization is a crucial aspect of its intervention in the national imaginary. While for Anderson the traditional novel, like the newspaper, connects events and individuals through nothing more than simple “calendrical coincidence”,28 See Under: Love signals that the genre leaves room for a more complicated temporality that is not made up of identical and interchangeable moments. In an essay written in 1998, Grossman remarks that books “are the place in the world where both the thing and the loss of it can coexist”.29 In Israel, this coexistence of the present and the past, of a European history of a Diaspora that failed to avoid the Holocaust and an emerging nation-state, was forcefully denied in the immediate postwar period up to the Eichmann trial in 1961. Instead of recognizing the continuity between the diasporic past and the challenges of the future, a robust Zionism developed a “national myth that predicated the formation of a new people upon its departure from the ways of the Diaspora”,30 a Diaspora it took to task for its alleged passivity in the face of the threat of the Nazis. The phrase “like sheep to the slaughter” recurs throughout See Under: Love as a constant reminder of its intent to confront this ideological legacy (S 357–358). This foreclosure of the diasporic past, moreover, went hand in hand with “a powerful new code of Holocaust sanctity”, which held that the experiences of the Holocaust victims were “deemed inaccessible and incomprehensible to those who did not actually live through them”.31 While Nava Semel’s short story collection Glass Hat (1985) had for the first time given voice to the generation of children of survivors, Grossman’s 1986 novel even more forcefully rewrote that code: born in Jerusalem in 1954, Grossman is the son of parents neither of whom are survivors. In this way, See Under: Love made an unprecedented claim for the recognition of the ongoing afterlife of the Holocaust in the present. The violent discontinuities between the novel’s four sections embody the recognition that a triumphant national myth 28 29 30 31

Anderson 1991: 33. Grossman 2008:13. Bernstein 2005: 66. Morahg 1999: 460.

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that remains deaf to the voices of the Holocaust needs to be replaced by an awareness that, as Jed Esty remarks on modernist form more generally, “both national and individual histories unfold as sequences of rupture and loss, of separate and disjunctive states”.32 See Under: Love interrupts the empty time of the nation by its retrieval of “repressed memories of coming from somewhere else”:33 first of all, of course, through its imaginative exploration of life in the camp (especially in the third section), but also through its self-conscious evocation of the literary example of Bruno Schulz, who died in 1942 at the hands of the Nazis, and through which the novel forges a European—and thus diasporic—genealogy for itself. In what follows, I argue that Grossman’s novel exploits the novel’s generic potential to allow the apprehension of simultaneity only to insert nonsynchronous elements within that simultaneity. It proposes such a ‘synchronicity of the non-synchronous’ (die Gleichzeitigkeit des Ungleichzeitigkeiten, the phrase was coined by Ernst Bloch) as a different way of apprehending a sense of community. At the same time, it dismisses two competing ways of apprehending time: the first section of the novel, focusing on the life of the young Momik, diagnoses the baleful consequences of a national imaginary that cashes in on the precarity of the nation’s existence by emphasizing the imminence of ever new disasters; the second part negotiates (only to ultimately dismiss) the terms of a messianism that wishes to transcend historical reality altogether. Against these two temporal logics, See Under: Love attempts to re-imagine the nation by occupying it with the memories of a diasporic past. The novel’s ambition to exploit its generic capacity to evoke a sense of simultaneity, even of seemingly incompatible elements, becomes clear when we note that, in spite of the impressive diversity of the formal tricks and devices it deploys, all four sections are clearly marked by a movement of synchronization, i.e., by an overarching strategy to draw discordant and incongruous historical elements and perspectives into the novel’s empty time. The novel’s first part, which is focalized through the young Momik, consists in a continuous free indirect speech. Through this device, we lack a distinctive first-person voice as well as a clearly recognizable narrator who is separated from Momik; instead, the use of free indirect speech blends narrator and focalisator and simulates their coexistence on the same narrative plane. The novel’s second section fuses the dialogue between Shlomik (the grown-up Momik from the first section) and a strangely anthropomorphized Sea with the same Shlomik’s 32 33

Esty 2007: 144. Boyarin and Boyarin 1993: 715–716.

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conversations with his wife and his mistress. These dialogues are further interwoven with the phantasmagoric story of a Bruno Schulz who has morphed into a salmon (about which more later), who magically manages to escape death by jumping into the sea, and who is thus forever contemporaneous with the Shlomik who is talking to the Sea in which Schulz survives. This movement of synchronization is made even more explicit near the end of the section, where the actualization of one of Bruno’s messianic fantasies—which is in its turn fantasized by Shlomi—finds Bruno and Shlomik together as members of the same imagined community.34 Here as elsewhere, the novel is indifferent to customary distinctions between narrative levels. This tendency is even more marked in the third section. While it initially seems like it is Shlomik who is telling the story of the relation between Neigel and Anshel Wasserman in the camp, Shlomik is impossibly situated on the same narrative plane as the story he is ostensibly telling. This is a device that narrative theory calls ‘metalepsis’: the present in which the story is told and the past in which Shlomik imagines Neigel and Wasserman are presented as contemporaneous with each other. The book’s fourth section, entitled “The Complete Encyclopedia of Kazik’s Life”, finally, is ordered like an encyclopedia. This “framework of arbitrary classification” (S 303) disables all sense of teleology or even linearity in the account of Kazik’s life, and it invites the reader to conceive of this life as a brief, instantaneous whole, as a monad in which the energies of past, present, and future are condensed. Kazik is a foundling adopted by the characters of Wasserman’s adventure stories, in a strange sequel to these stories that brings the Children of the Heart together again in old age in the Warsaw zoo; Kazik’s life is exceedingly brief, as he moves from infancy to old age in less than twenty-four hours; during this life, Kazik has the ability “to view simultaneously the processes of growth and decay in every object and person”, and to see “each plant and animal as the cruel battlefield of a never-ending struggle” (S 388). The figure of Kazik emblematizes the novel’s work of synchronizing incongruous moments, and thus its ambition to reconfigure the empty “meanwhile” of traditional novel space.35 By intervening in 34

35

I use the name ‘Bruno’ to refer to the novel’s imaginative reconstruction of Bruno Schulz rather than to the historical figure of that name. I am not making any claims about Schulz’s own positions here. See Brown (1990) and Sokoloff (1988) for Schulz’s literary afterlives. By looking at the novel’s synchronization of discordant elements, we can also recognize—rather than gloss over—the remarkable and seemingly irreconcilable diversity of the novel’s four parts. Several available accounts of the novel tend to avoid this problem

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the temporal organization of the novel, it recalls the national imaginary to a diasporic past that it had resisted in the immediate aftermath of World War II, and which it had still not fully integrated when the novel appeared in the early 1980s.36 As Grossman remarked in 1998, while in See Under: Love he attempted “to write about a Jewish existence in an Israeli idiom,” this effort is continuously counterpointed by the simultaneous attempt “to describe Israel in a ‘diasporic’ language”.37

The Critique of “The Sense of Calamity” and of the Messianic

See Under: Love not only promotes a less homogenizing timing of the nation through its formal construction; in the book’s first two sections, it also scrutinizes and ultimately dismisses two alternative ‘timings’ of the nation; both in the Momik-section and in the section devoted to Bruno Schulz, the novel diagnoses ways of imagining simultaneity that it sees as detrimental to social life. As I noted, the first part of the novel chronicles the social and psychological damages that follow from Israel’s failure to recognize the memories of the disasters of its diasporic past in the 1950s. As there are no cultural codes that can help Momik make sense of the silences and taboos that affect his life, he turns to the only cultural framework he has at his disposal to give shape to the rumors about life “over there” (the phrase the novel uses to refer to the world of the concentration and extermination camps): myths of action and adventure that he adopts from the children’s books he reads, but that also more invisibly permeated Israeli life in the 1950s through the prevalent Zionist ethos of heroic action.38 This emphasis on heroic action informs his conviction that “the Nazi Beast” is not a thing of the past, but rather a threat that is always about to break loose again. His self-appointed task to defeat the beast soon deteriorates into a paralyzing obsession with the imminent return of the disaster. By adopting this perspective, the boy’s life is henceforth overshadowed by a sense of terror and imminent doom, and his youthful innocence makes way for an overpowering sense of responsibility—the responsibility to save the lives of the people around him.

36 37 38

by focusing on only one of the sections (Bernstein 2005), or by reducing the different sections to stages in a Hegelian dialectic (Eistenstein 1999), despite the formidable resistance of formal features that warn against such a linear, teleological reading. Bernstein 2005: 65–67. Grossman 2008:13. Morahg 1999: 458.

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Grossman’s depiction of the plight of young Momik diagnoses the pathologies of Israeli society at large. In a 2004 lecture to the Levinas Circle in Paris, Grossman notes that “a significant element” in the Jewish people’s self-definition “is the sense of impending annihilation, of the calamity hovering over its head”.39 Elsewhere, he notes that his own encounter with the stories of Sholem Aleichem as a young boy already instilled the sense of “calamity, the calamity that always hovered over everyone’s head so that its imminence was never in doubt” (p. 10). See Under: Love diagnoses how what Grossman calls a “perpetual state of preparation” (p. 47) has historically served as a powerful catalyst of national consent, and has gone hand in hand with the promotion of an ethos of heroic action as well as with a downplaying of the resonances of Jewish suffering during the Holocaust. This position reduces the future to a threat of imminent destruction, while it at the same time disconnects the present from the disasters of the past. According to this ideology, the emergence of the Israeli nation is not essentially connected to the events of the Holocaust, but is first of all a form of defense against the always imminent repetition of doom and disaster.40 See Under: Love shows that the upshot of the cultural codes that silence the claims of the past and reduce the future to an apocalyptic specter of imminent doom is a drastic impoverishment of everyday life; they lead to a voiding of 39 40

1998: 90. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Foreign Policy Speech from June 2009 offers a compelling illustration of the persistence of this timing of the nation. Netanyahu’s speech was delivered only a couple of days after Barack Obama’s Cairo speech, which had underlined the connections between the Holocaust and the state of Israel, an association to which Netanyahu objects: “The right of the Jewish People to a state in the Land of Israel does not arise from the series of disasters that befell the Jewish People over 2,000 years— persecutions, expulsions, pogroms, blood libels, murders, which reached its climax in the Holocaust, an unprecedented tragedy in the history of nations. There are those who say that without the Holocaust the State would not have been established, but I say that if the State of Israel had been established in time, the Holocaust would not have taken place. (Applause) The tragedies that arose from the Jewish People’s helplessness show very sharply that we need a protective state.” Netanyahu’s downplaying of the passivity and “helplessness” of the victims of, especially, the Holocaust, is entirely in line with the Zionist cultivation of Jewish heroism. Remarkably, he argues for the legitimacy of an Israeli state by asking his audience to imagine what could have happened—or what could have been avoided—had it existed before 1948. For Netanyahu, this thought experiment confirms the present need to prevent a repetition of what the state’s earlier non-existence allowed to take place. Netanyahu’s speech sets free the specter of an imminent repetition of the disaster, which in its turn helps to mobilize national consent for a violent suppression of vulnerability and helplessness.

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the present, of what Grossman elsewhere calls “the whole spectrum of possibilities that a full, normal, peaceful life can offer a human being” (1998, p. 46). Momik sees himself as a prophet, and he always tries to be ahead of himself. At school, “he likes to be three chapters ahead”, because, “you have to be prepared, because the Beast can come from anywhere” (S 43). This life-denying attitude persists in the grown-up Momik who narrates the second section of the novel, and who also wants “to be ready next time it happens. Not just so I’ll be able to break away with a minimum of pain from others, but so I’ll be able to break away from myself” (S 154). His interlocutor notes that, with such an obsessive fear of imminent death, “you might as well have been dead to begin with” (S 154). See Under: Love indicates that an ethic of eternal vigilance and proleptic haste has, in effect, overwritten the realities of the Holocaust in Israel’s national imaginary; when we read that “[p]rophecy runs in the family, because it seems to have started with Grandfather Anshel and passed down to mama and now Momik. The way diseases pass down” (S 40–41), the novel codes such a panicked withdrawal from the present as Israel’s inadequate answer to Nazi discourses that infamously identified the blood as a site for the transmission of degeneracy rather than prophecy. This answer perversely ends up perpetuating the Nazi’s assault on Jewish everyday life, and continues to deny Israelis the possibility of “a full, normal, peaceful life”. The nation’s cult of heroic action and its fear of imminent destruction together lead to a collective disavowal of the realities of the Holocaust. The novel stages this diagnosis through Momik’s obsessive attempt to “find the [Nazi] Beast and tame it and make it good” (S 30, 68). This fateful combination of an emphasis on action and a fear of the future duly culminate in the dismissal of diasporic passivity: when the “stinky Jews” that Momik has gathered to bait the Nazi Beast start telling stories, young Momik expresses his disgust with their passivity, as according to him “you can’t kill the Nazikaput with a story, you have to beat him to death” (S 85). Disavowal of the past, reduction of the future, impoverishment of the present—this, the novel implies, is not the way the “homogeneous, empty time” of the nation is to be occupied. The book’s second section, dedicated to the imaginary afterlife of Bruno Schulz as a fish, dissects a very different timing of the nation that similarly ends up impoverishing the historical present. In this section, the grown-up Momik fantasizes an intimate connection to the Polish-Jewish modernist artist and writer Bruno Schulz, a victim of the Nazis, if not of the Holocaust, and an avowed influence on Grossman. Schulz, who was forced to live in the ghetto of Drohobycz, was gratuitously shot in 1942 by a German officer, a rival of Schulz’s protector. In the last year of his life, he was allegedly working on a

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novel entitled The Messiah, of which no traces remain. See Under: Love constantly refers to the known facts of Schulz’s life, but it adds the imaginative twist that instead of being shot, Schulz miraculously escapes by diving into the Baltic, after which he morphs into, of all things, a salmon. The account of Schulz’s phantasmagoric afterlife is interwoven with Shlomik’s dialogues with the Sea and with his wife and his lover. Shlomik suffers from the same disconnect from his own life that the first part of the novel diagnoses in the life of the young Momik, and it is this dissatisfaction that tempts him toward Bruno’s messianic beliefs: his conviction that truth and authenticity are not tо be achieved in human language, but rather through a radical release from human language and limitation. While this a-historical, messianic time is emphatically not the clock time in which the novel and the nation normally operate, the novel concludes that this messianic timing fails to offer a tenable alternative to it. See Under: Love dramatizes this inadequacy by staging Bruno Schulz primarily as the author of the unwritten novel entitled The Messiah—a work that, given Bruno’s messianic impatience with what the novel calls “a frozen secondhand world of exact science, classified language, and tame clock time” (S 138), could never really fit the pedestrian label of ‘a novel.’ In this sense, it is unsurprising that the novel remains unwritten. Bruno holds that “the Messiah could never come in writing, would never be invoked in a language suffering from elephantiasis”—which is a neat self-characterization of See Under: Love’s maximalism—instead, “[a] new grammar and a new calligraphy had first to be invented” (S 89). As Shlomik’s wife reminds him, such a radical release from the bounds of human language and time is not available in the novel form: unlike a poem, which “is like a love affair”, “a novel is more like marriage: you stay with your characters long after the initial passion has worn off” (S 150). Bruno’s poetics depends on a refusal of such formal containment, just as the political vision that it underwrites refuses to be contained by the borders of a particular historical community. His desire to escape from human language into a “singular, secret body language” corresponds to an attempt to escape from community: in the words of one of this section’s insistent refrains, it bespeaks a desire to “say ‘I’ without the tinny resonance of ‘we”’(S 162). Bruno’s impatience with the confines of the novel and the nation is figured through his imagined survival as a salmon. The salmon lives in a borderless sea and this, the novel implies, is the only kind of territory that is acceptable to Bruno’s ahistorical messianism. His “salmonization” is figured as an escape from human form to the status of “a non-human human” (S 130), and from the nation into the globe:

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Bruno had to become thoroughly salmonized in order to learn about life. The barest life of all, as the salmon drew their tangible geometric design over half the globe (S 131). Yet in spite of its outright refusal to be bound by man-made borders, Bruno’s messianism paradoxically holds on to a desire for a homeland—and this obviously strengthens the relevance of Grossman’s analysis for the state of the Israeli nation. For all its alleged disinterest in merely human affairs, Bruno’s messianism ends up underwriting claims for what Daniel and Jonathan Boyarin have referred to as “a sense of organic, ‘natural’ connectedness between this People and this Land”.41 For the Boyarins, such “myths of autochthony” are only one aspect of the Jewish tradition, which also hosts a totally opposite diasporic awareness “of always already coming from somewhere else”42—the awareness that, as we saw, See Under: Love tries to make part of the national imaginary. And even if Bruno’s survival as a fish gestures toward such an acknowledgement of the diasporic past, it in the last analysis ends up confirming the problematic idea of Israel as an exclusively Jewish homeland. While the vast expanse of the sea seems to deny the claims of land and soil, the ideological countercurrent that ties Bruno’s trajectory back to the fantasy of a unique and unnegotiable claim to Jewish land surfaces when Bruno morphs into, of all fish, a salmon—into precisely the kind of fish that, after all its wanderings and diasporic struggles, unfailingly returns to the spawning grounds where its life began. Being constitutively unable to break its identification with its native ground, the salmon is not just any fish, but rather what one commentator has aptly called “the ultimate late-Zionist fish”.43 The conceit of Bruno Schulz’s afterlife as a salmon allows the novel to explore the politics of an ahistorical messianism that, even as it registers its impatience with the empty time of the nation, still fails to achieve the integration of the diasporic past in the national present that See Under: Love as a whole attempts.

Grossman’s Secular Messianism

So what is the novel’s own alternative to such a messianic refusal of clock time (diagnosed in the Bruno-section) and to an obsession with the imminent repetition of the disaster (in the Momik-section)? How, that is, does it 41 42 43

Boyarin and Boyarin 1993: 715. Boyarin and Boyarin 1993: 715–716. Ortwin de Graef, chapter 9 in this volume.

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imagine the historical present without transcending or denying it? As I noted, recent tendencies in literary studies have begun to “question the homogeneous and horizontal view associated with the nation’s imagined community”, and have instead begun to apprehend “the ‘double and split’ time of national representation”.44 We need to look no further than the work of Benedict Anderson, in which the link between the timing of the nation and the novel genre was first established, to find one way in which literary form can intervene in the national imaginary. When Anderson describes national time as “homogeneous, empty time”, he contrasts this with a different notion of simultaneity, an idea of “simultaneity-along-time”, which he again describes by referring to Walter Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History”. This is the idea of “what Benjamin calls Messianic time, a simultaneity of past and future in an instantaneous present”.45 Such a ‘historical’ messianism— historical in that, unlike that of the novel’s Bruno Schulz, it intends to replenish rather than transcend historical time—aptly describes the way in which See Under: Love’s work of synchronization manages to recast the present as such an “instanteneous present”, as a densely historically layered Jetztzeit (to use another of Benjamin’s key terms). This also explains why the novel so insistently summons Bruno’s messianic desire, which it eventually channels into a revitalization of historical time, rather than a transcendence of it. See Under: Love retrieves Israel’s diasporic past, Bruno Schulz’s modernist poetics, as well as the realities of the Holocaust (especially in its third part, which is entitled “Wasserman” and is situated in the camp), and it mobilizes these elements in order to valorize the present as more than an indifferent and interchangeable moment in the progression of clock time. This idea of “redemption as a recaptured past” is not foreign to the Jewish tradition to which Grossman’s work belongs. Indeed, it is the crucial element in the tradition—with which See Under: Love has many affinities—of what Richard Wolin and others have analyzed as “Jewish secular messianism”.46 This secular form of messianism is the form in which “the messianic idea” managed to find a place in the twentieth century; it testifies to the “peculiar resilience” of the messianic impulse in the face of new threats and demands.47 In this secularized form, messianism does not aim at a transcendence of historical time, but rather at an active intervention in it; in the work of Walter Benjamin and

44 45 46 47

Bhabha 2002: 144. Anderson 1991: 24. Wolin 1996: 50. Wolin 1996: 45.

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others, messianism—what Benjamin called a “weak” messianic power48— became less a matter of faith than a historical practice aimed at reorganizing the relation between past and present. In a description that also captures the logic of Grossman’s imaginative work in See Under: Love, Wolin notes that the aim of this secular messianism is not to restore the past to “its pristine, original condition”; Instead, the very process of conjuring forth the past in a contemporary historical setting serves to activate and release dormant potentials that lie concealed in the past. The past is not merely recaptured; it is rendered dynamic—in the sense of a living tradition—as a result of this fructifying contact with the utopian potentials that are secretly at work in the historical present. (p. 50). The novel genre provides an ‘empty’ time that can be filled with the hidden affinities between the past and the present, and that in this way contributes to a re-imagining of the nation that eschews transcendent or demoralizing moves. The novel specifically confronts Bruno’s ahistorical messianism with its own secular messianism in a scene at the end of its second section—after which the novel, in the Wasserman-section, foregrounds the historical layering of the present by imagining the impossible simultaneity in the narrative “now” (S 187) of the Nazi Neigel and the Jewish storyteller Wasserman, of Wasserman and his grandson Shlomik, and, ultimately, of all of these and the reader, who is structurally implicated in the chapter’s different acts of storytelling. Just before this third section, Shlomik projects himself and Bruno into one of Schulz’s stories. The scene is presented as the impossible actualization of Bruno’s messianic longing for an escape from historical time; it consists in a social gathering of “all the townspeople, our acquaintances, all of Bruno’s family, his classmates and teachers from the Gymnasium . . . the neighbors with their children and their dogs”, and so on (S 171). This gathering is, moreover, marked by a “galloping backward and forward in time” (S 171), yet it is not for all that the result of a work of remembrance: instead, for Bruno, this gathering depends on a momentous forgetting of “[e]verything: the language they spoke, their loves, the passing moment” (S 172–173). In its failure to recognize the vital importance of memory for the imagining of the future, Bruno’s messianism is unwittingly complicit with the severing of the connection between the past and the nation that the novel’s first section exposes. 48

Benjamin 1969: 254.

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“There’s no longing for the past”, Bruno continued, only a passion for the future; there are no immortal works . . . look at them, Shloma—they don’t remember anything beyond this moment, only this moment in the world of the square is not a single chime of the church clock; it is, shall we say, a time crystal containing one experience only, which can last a year or an instant, yes . . . these are people without memory, firsthand souls, who in order to continue to exist must re-create language and love and each coming moment anew . . . (S 175). Bruno’s vision of redemption depends on a blatant indifference to the reality of the past. The novel voices its difference from this ahistorical messianism through Shlomik’s objections to Bruno’s hollowing out of historical time, which he calls “terribly cruel” (p. 175). See Under: Love’s momentous formal achievement mobilizes the resources of the novel in order to achieve the coincidence of the past and the present within history, within the present, within the time of the novel. This reconfiguration of the present paradoxically locates the hope in redemption in the past, and as such restores to the past an open-endedness that normally only pertains to the future. In its last section, See Under: Love presents “the Complete Encyclopedia of Kazik’s Life”, a life that in the end generates “new buds of hope” (p. 452). Crucially, this hope is fostered by an imaginative recreation of the past, by imagining the afterlife of the heroes of Wasserman’s adventure stories as the curators of the Warsaw zoo between 1939 and 1943. The Children of the Heart collectively take up the care of Kazik, a foundling, and even if they cannot save his life—he dies before his allotted twenty-four hours are over—the story persists as an index of the novel’s power to restore past possibilities. In a 2007 lecture, Grossman notes that “[t]he power of memory is indeed great and heavy. Nevertheless, the act of writing creates for me a ‘space’ of sorts, an emotional expanse that I have never known before, where death is more than the absolute, unambiguous opposite of life”.49 Grossman’s commitment to the force of writing is a secular reminder of the simultaneity of disaster and hope, of past and present that the novel proposes as a less disastrous timing of the nation.

49

Grossman 2008: 64.

chapter 9

Torag, Dolgan, Ning, Gyoya, Orga: Diaspora under the Sign of Salmon Ortwin de Graef September fattens on vines. Roses flake from the wall. The smoke of harmless fires drifts to my eyes. This is plenty. This is more than enough. The closing lines of Geoffrey Hill’s splintered sonnet ‘September Song’ twist an autumnal sense of sufficience into a suspicion of excess and transgression, specifically a transgression of the law forbidding the sacrificial-sacrilegious transcription of what must not be named the Holocaust into self-serving style.1 (I have made an elegy for myself it is true) The song sets out to commemorate an unnamed being ‘born 19.6.32–deported 24.9.42’ but sinks back into the undeparted self of the singer, born the day before and still surviving as Geoffrey Hill, twenty-six Septembers later. Not surviving: living, a life of untouchable insular satisfaction shamefully styling itself as touched into song by a threat it can barely imagine in English and strains to name as ‘Just so much Zyklon and leather, patented terror, so many routine cries.’ The shamelessly shiny pun in patented terror signs the sonnet off midway as the sham aestheticization it self-consciously seeks to recover from. It will always be more than enough. Too much. No voice on the Shoah shall ever be free of its site, of the distance that separates it from eretz sham, the land of there, Over There. For David Grossman, that site must always be eretz Yisrael, the land that goes not without saying. 1 Hill 1968: 19.

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Grossman’s mother was born in what was then still called Palestine, before the 1948 founding of the state of Israel. His father, born in a Galician shtetl, emigrated to Palestine in 1936. Grossman himself was born in Jerusalem in 1954, nine years after the end of the Shoah—not a survivor of the Holocaust, not even a so-called second generation survivor (‘not even’: imagine that difference), his engagement with its memory in his 1986 novel ‘Ayen ‘erekh: Ahavah shares a measure of transgressive unease with Hill’s sonnet. As one of the novel’s voices articulating the Holocaust also admits, ‘I am telling the story for no one but myself . . . [. . .] Yes, so it is: for no one but myself!’ (S 362) Yet the novel’s inscription in new Hebrew prose necessarily also addresses its stories to the State, in ways which are arguably not or no longer available to the lyric, ways which it arguably also wrenches from the powerful tradition of lamentational literature in Jewish culture.2 As Marc Bernstein has noted, Grossman’s novel not only engages with the sheer unspeakability of suffering mass-produced in the Nazi extermination routine, but also poses a landmark challenge to the Diaspora denial and silence on the Shoah sustaining Israeli state-formation from mid-century into the 1980s.3 For Bernstein, this challenge adumbrates a ‘therapeutic integration’ for the nation of Israel, helping it ‘to assimilate the legacy of the Holocaust into the communal narrative’ and to face the untenability of heroic Zionist models of national identity.4 Iris Milner has similarly argued that the ‘return of the voice’ of the Diaspora in Israeli literature—of which See Under: Love serves as an example—accompanies a ‘transition’ in Israeli society ‘from a single, monolithic and ideologically-bound cultural model to more flexible, heterogeneous and pluralistic ones, allowing the negated identity categories—marking antiheroic weakness—to re-emerge as legitimate self-definitions’.5 It is significant that both these acclamations of See Under: Love as a therapeutic taboo-breaking performance should focus in particular on the first part of the novel, in which Grossman’s as yet unnarrated narrator recounts about half a year, 1959, in the life of the ten-year-old Momik, only son of Holocaust survivors settled in Beit Mazmil, Jerusalem. The fact that ‘Momik’ was recently republished in Israel as a separate work and subsequently staged 2 For an early authoritative statement on See Under: Love as a literary fact disturbing its culture of inscription, see Shaked 1989. 3 Bernstein 2005: 66. 4 Bernstein 2005: 78–79. 5 Milner 2003: 195.

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as a theatre production in 2007, suggests that it still possesses a distinctive timeliness that does not require the counter-weight of the novel it opened some twenty-five years ago to do its socio-politico-cultural work: trying ‘to understand the Diaspora in Israeli terms,’ as Grossman himself puts it in the opening piece of his recent collection of essays Writing in the Dark.6 The boy Momik is a good little vehicle for this task, a voice helping us all to recall the haunting writing of Anne Frank while safeguarding the ability ‘to believe in the possibility of childhood in this world, and to hold it up against the sheer cynicism. To tell the whole story again through the eyes of a child.’7 Momik pays for his exposure to his parents’ repressed past and his great-uncle Anshel’s strange power of speech by being sent away to a boarding school, but he lives to be narrated into free indirect speech for as long as we read and reread his self-staged exposure to the Nazi Beast in the cellar, and vicariously recover, and recover from, the now shameful history of Diaspora dismissal in the name of the New Jew. Momik is the eye through which the whole story is told again—only ever that part of the story that Momik can see—hardly anything, more than enough. And if it works, it works because there is no I there—or hardly any, and then it’s not his but the I of another he overhears or eagerly solicits, as when the Sholem Aleichem story he is reading for school miraculously releases his father and mother from the Beast and tricks them into speaking their first personal past: ‘and with your own eyes you could see the Beast open its mouth a little, to let Papa tumble right out to Momik.’ (S 60) The erasure of the I-narrator lets Grossman off the hook: he records a boy’s joy at his father’s finally finishing a sentence; he registers the failure of the future inhabiting that finished sentence of the father in the silence of the son in the face of the Beast as it fails to rise to the bait of the great-uncle’s smell; he returns a voice that never was his and avoids accusations of misappropriation of suffering he has no right to, sharing out suffering to the entire nation as it begins to address its denials.

∵

But Momik survives and returns in part two, set some twenty-five years later, as Shlomo Neuman, narrating his own life of marital breakdown, thirty-something infidelity, and persistent frustration in the service of the Holocaust. Shlomo is 6 Grossman 2008a: 13. The independent afterlife of ‘Momik’ is noted in Ofer 2009: 33. Sokoloff 2005 comments on an alternative earlier stage adaptation of Grossman’s novel. 7 Grossman 2008a: 13.

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no longer the little boy we see desperately trying to name and tame the Beast from Over There that has reduced his parents, his great-uncle and so many others to pathological inarticulacy. He is now a dysfunctional one-time poet obsessively researching the Holocaust in pursuit of a language adequate to its extremity. Although the ‘Momik’ part can be said to have found a voice that approximates such language in the imaginary recreation of concentrationary conditions Over There in the cellar Down Here, the heir of that voice, who we now must surmise is also its narrator, has not been healed and raises the stakes, attempting to engage with Over There Over There, first in an uncanny encounter with the Polish author Bruno Schulz, and then finally entering the death camp where his great-uncle entertains the camp commander with the final installment of his adventures of the Children of the Heart, a multi-ethnic A-Team now running Warsaw Zoo under the shadow of Hitler. Sustained readings of the novel tend to read Shlomo’s struggle with Holocaust memory as a difficult but ultimately successful dialectical trajectory culminating in the past prayer concluding ‘Tefilla’ (‘Prayer’), the final entry in the ‘Complete Encyclopedia of Kazik’s Life’ that makes up the fourth part of the book: ‘We asked so little: for a man to live in this world from birth to death and know nothing of war.’ (S 452) Gilead Morahg, for instance, recapitulates Shlomo’s progress as an intense narrative effort to salvage his great-uncle Anshel’s identity and voice in order to finally understand his own life, conditioned as it is by experiences he didn’t experience—‘an act of recuperation that is concerned with the Holocaust not as the historical reality of the horrible events that took place in the past, but rather as the psychological reality that is very much a part of the present.’ (S 464) This requires imaginative transgressions against the constraints of Israeli culture which, Morahg argues, Shlomo can only effectively accomplish after having found an authentic voice in his obsessive struggle with Bruno Schulz in part two. Schulz’s summary execution in 1942 by Karl Günther, a rival of Felix Landau, the SS-officer who kept him as a ‘House Jew’ in occupied Drohobycz, comes to figure as a brutal bit of historical fact in response to which Shlomo can begin to flex his imagination. ‘I killed your Jew,’ Günther told Landau, who casually replied, ‘In that case, I will now kill your Jew.’ (S 100–01) Shlomo imagines an escape for Schulz from this lethal economy by fantasizing him away from Drohobycz to Gdansk, where he jumps into the Baltic and somehow turns into a salmon. The escape is simultaneously figured as a means to recover Schulz’s missing magnum opus, the novel The Messiah, representing the culmination of a radical drive inhabiting Schulz’s writing as its resistance to the language that had always already made his murder a routine matter. Shlomo imagines this

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recovery of the lost manuscript by projecting both himself and Schulz into one of Schulz’s stories and rewriting it as a dream of ‘the coming phase of human evolution’8 whose essence is the release from language. For Morahg, the point of this fantasy, no less than ‘the key to understanding [. . .] the novel as a whole,’9 is not so much what precisely it imagines—the post-linguistic condition—, but the performative paradox of its being produced as a collaborative effort integrating ‘fantastic imagination with dialogic narration,’10 thus opening up alternative and, more importantly, ‘authentic’ therapeutic passages into the concentrationary universe in the subsequent parts of the novel.11 Morahg’s concluding evidence in this regard is the encyclopedia entry on ‘Slaughter, Like Sheep To The’, which both names the New Jew’s disgust with the ‘abject passivity’ of camp inmates, and lends the victims a voice with which they can claim a measure of defiance in their silence, even in the face of Shlomo’s persistent incomprehension, which now, importantly, is reduced from its earlier obsessive monologism to editorial grumbling in passive constructions ‘for the sake of balance’ (S 358). In ‘Holocaust Memory and Hegel,’ Paul Eisenstein similarly argues that the novel achieves its truth in the form of its fourth part, whose random encyclopedic make-up and over-all generic instability triumphantly discards what he diagnoses as ‘the prescription for self-referentiality that stands today as an ethical maxim overseeing all historical inquiry’.12 For Eisenstein, this prescription is predicated on an ethically coherent but philosophically deficient aversion to ‘totalizing,’ ‘the whole,’ or ‘the universal’ on the part of ‘poststructuralists, new historians and pluralist humanists alike,’ particularly as they seek to engage ‘the fundamental trauma of the Holocaust.’13 Suspicious of such selfreferentiality as potentially a self-serving strategy ‘to maintain the self in its encounter with the object/other of history’ which effectively leads to ‘a deferral of an encounter with the real of history, that unsymbolizable dimension that cannot (yet) even be called other,’ Eisenstein proposes to recover ‘Hegel and the category of the absolute’ for ‘an ethics of historical memory’:

8 Morahg 1999: 179. 9 Morahg 1999: 469. 10 Morahg 1999: 470. 11 Morahg 1999: 474. Sokoloff makes a similar point about the novel’s dialogist technique (Sokoloff 1988: 188). 12 Eisenstein 1999: 14. 13 Eisenstein 1999: 13.

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Far from being a position of self-satisfaction or supreme mastery, Hegel’s totalizing position leads us toward the experience of difference not between something and something but rather between something and nothing. Hegel’s absolute is thus not to be regarded as a means by which we would ‘know all’ about the Holocaust and thus mitigate a traumatic encounter with it, but rather entails the experience of realizing the way in which all of our knowledge—and indeed our very way of knowing itself—only takes us to the point where we traumatically encounter the real of history.14 In a move reminiscent of Cathy Caruth’s fairly foundational generalization of trauma as a constitutive crisis accompanying experience itself,15 Eisenstein tries to recover true trauma from the pious touchy-feely fetishization of the unrepresentably particular infecting mainstream Holocaust memory. Rather than dutifully ‘dramatize the impossibility of ever arriving at or narrating from a totalizing position when it comes to bearing witness to the Holocaust’16— the standard recipe of common-and-garden postmodern anti-Hegelian selfreferentialist memorialism—, a genuinely ethical encounter with catastrophe requires us to summon the courage to assume the totalizing position as what it is: a full recognition of ‘the impossibility of total knowledge [which] experiences the abyss between all that we are able to conceptualize and the real itself,’17 and through that experience generates a form more radically and productively faithful to the particular in its ineluctable unavailability than any beautiful-soul-searching can ever articulate. See Under: Love ‘exemplif[ies] these Hegelian insights,’ Eisenstein contends, reading the novel as if it were a Phenomenology of Spirit deploying its consecutive parts as so many dialectical negotiations with the Holocaust on the way to ‘a form that has given up its belief in the essence of the alterity of the Other or of that kernel of non-sense to which we are subjected’.18 Parts One, Two and Three are each conceived as a quest for the recovery of some ‘something that is meaningful’19—the real life of the Nazi Beast and the deaths of its victims Over There; the lost life and missing Messiah of Bruno Schulz; the real story and the 14 Eisenstein 1999: 14. 15 For some cursory comments on this generalization, see Ortwin de Graef, Vivian Liska and Katrien Vloeberghs 2003. 16 Eisenstein 1999: 22. 17 Eisenstein 1999: 20. 18 Eisenstein 1999: 22, 27. 19 Eisenstein 1999: 25.

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last story of Anshel Wasserman—, and each quest fails to integrate this ‘real’ in the symbolic order whose phantasmatic completion it precludes; part four, by contrast, ‘fully assume[s] the symbolic order’s incompletion’ 20 by abandoning narrative commitment to purpose for the purposeless endlessness of the Encyclopedia, that form which in true Hegelian fashion arbitrarily organizes the imagined life of a victim of the Holocaust so as to suggest the stupidity of all our ordering efforts, the impossibility of achieving complete relations within language with history or with those we love. The Encyclopedia reveals its order while at the same time revealing the complete contingency of all order, its dependence on a tautological, idiotic, performative act of pure positing.21 It is this form that delivers what Eisenstein calls ‘our lesson’: the trauma of the Holocaust is not confined to it but pertains to the implicit trauma—the inexplicability of our lives and of our deaths—that it makes, and made, explicit. As the Event that attempted to eliminate this inexplicability, the nature and permanence of this trauma is perhaps its greatest, and most difficult, legacy.22 Kazik, the fictional ephemeral foundling raised by the Children of the Heart and whose brief life in occupied Warsaw the Encyclopedia transcribes into its constituent parts and scatters across its pages, comes to figure as an allegorical incarnation of the unrepresentability of life in its resistance to the Holocaust understood as a programme designed to deliver restless representation. Figuring this resistance also identifies disturbing traits of Holocaust logic in Holocaust memory: memorial engagement with the Holocaust piously reiterating its unrepresentability as a sacrosanct and radically unique exception to the making of meaning is in danger of negatively reinforcing delusions of purposive integrity predicated on a denial of history. ‘We asked so little: for a man to live in this world from birth to death and know nothing of war.’ (S 452) For Eisenstein, the truth of this prayer, ‘the larger, formal message of Grossman’s novel,’23 is the rejection of both ideological 20 Eisenstein 1999: 27. 21 Eisenstein 1999: 28. 22 Eisenstein 1999: 30–31. 23 Eisenstein 1999: 26.

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formations fantasizing fully integrated representation through the aggressive elimination of scapegoats representing the unrepresentable, and ideological reaction-formations enshrining fully integrated representation as what will forever remain unattainable in the wake of this catastrophe. Life without war is life lived in the trauma of its inexplicability and death died for no purpose. A fine sentiment, more than enough to finish on, but too much to ask for.

∵

See Under: Love does not end in this prayer closing the final entry in the ‘Encyclopedia’—in the English translation it begins again in a fifth section, called ‘Glossary: The Language of “Over There” ’, implicitly renaming the Here where its original Hebrew was rearticulated as the nation’s tongue and dissociating this tongue from its others for the benefit of readers Next Door to Over There, all too familiar with ‘Jewish’ as a mix of Yiddish, Polish, German, Russian, Dutch, European, whatever. The translation’s decision to add a glossary critically translates the force of the site of enunciation which the Hebrew prayer in the original voices in its own right, in contingent defiance of the noble sentiment of ‘complete contingency’.24 Israel in its modern mode as nation-state is the sole setting of Part One and remains substantially present in Part Two, but as Shlomo enters the Diaspora death camp in Part Three it begins to fade and in the ‘Encyclopedia’ it has all but disappeared—while surviving in the language itself. As does Shlomo, who recedes into editorial anonymity but not before having recommended, in the ‘Reader’s Preface’, ‘the king’s highway of the Hebrew alphabetical order’ as the best route through the ‘Encyclopedia.’ (S 304) At the end of that royal road, there is the prayer for a life without war, followed by a date line—‘July 1983– December 1984’ (S 452)—forever fixing its writing in the wake of all the wars feeding into the First Lebanon War, haunted by the whispering tongues of the Diaspora. The glossary consists primarily of Yiddish words, with a handful of Polish, German and Russian terms setting the region. But it does not include the strange terms coursing with the salmon through part two: torag, dolgan, ning, gyoya, orga. I cite these in the English transliteration supplied by Grossman’s translator Betsy Rosenberg, as arresting script strings newly coined in Shlomo’s 24 Eisenstein 1999: 28. The addition of a glossary to the English edition of the novel was approved by the author. I owe a debt of gratitude to Betsy Rosenberg for her prompt and instructive answers to my various queries about translation details. Leona Toker and Vivian Liska have also been helpful in clearing up some of my confusions over Hebrew.

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rewriting of Bruno Schulz as a salmon. The text offers more or less precise definitions of each of these terms at their first occurrence: torag is ‘war’ (S 98), struggle or conflict; dolgan is ‘the natural law of maintaining distance’ (S 118); gyoya is a time of resting and feeding (S 128); orga is the salmon shoal’s ‘fast escape strategy’ when attacked by predators (S 127). Ning, the most frequently used of these weird words, is also the most slippery signifier: at its first mention it is explained as ‘the string extending from the back of your neck to the bottom of your soul’ (S 118), it then becomes a binding force urging Bruno and the shoal of salmon ‘onward onward while death drops in their wake’ (S 120), a force gradually specified as issuing from one salmon in particular, the leader of the shoal (S 127), challenged at one point to a torag by the dissenting ning of another salmon who ‘sewed the shoal to him with a strong, taut string’ (S 142) and leads part of them to crash to bloody death ‘on the rocky reefs of the Shetland Islands’ (S 146), after which Bruno himself develops a contending ning leading to a torag between him and the lead salmon from which Bruno then suddenly retreats: ‘The power of his ning was good for a shoal of one only.’ (S 161–62) The salmon drift away, and Bruno swims into the next phase of the fantasy, which stages the arrival of the Messiah on Trinity Square in Schulz’s fictionalised Drohobycz, witnessed by Shlomo as a terrifying breakdown of language, tradition and community under the force of ‘a biological drive’ (S 175) ushering in ‘the coming phase of human evolution’ (S 179) in which ‘people without memory’ (S 175) just listen ‘with wonder and pleasure to their own ning’. (S 178) It is hard to do justice to this phantasmal salmon story composed in the quarrelsome intimacy between Shlomo and Sea, the Mediterranean and Baltic Sea in which he swims and who receives him as a femme fatale in possession of the one thing needful, interlaced with scenes of Shlomo’s failing marriage and ailing affair, haunted by fragments of Schulz’s eccentric prose. Its strange neologisms signal a claim to authorship summoning understanding, and Grossman has emphasised that for him it ‘is the core of the book, the reason I wrote it, the reason I write.’25 As Naomi Sokoloff notes, the reading public has mostly found it ‘rough going’26 and critics either avoid it altogether, or (like Morahg and, in more cursory fasion, Eisenstein) tend to recover it as a necessarily dark stage in the novel’s dialectic, generating insights on art and representation that are subsequently operationalized in the novel’s next movements. Sokoloff, too, reads the Schulz section as ‘a point of departure for [Grossman] himself even as it provides a kind of apprenticeship for his main 25 26

Grossman 2008a: 17. Sokoloff 1988: 196.

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character.’27 Hers is a particularly expansive treatment of the section, figuring as it does in an extended comparison between the use (and abuse) of Schulz in Cynthia Ozick’s The Messiah of Stockholm and in Grossman’s See Under: Love, and the comments she offers are generally acute and compelling, though the over-all ‘satisfying coherence’28 she ultimately finds in the text is more a matter of wishful surrender than of critical achievement. More specifically as regards the choice of Schulz in particular as a sparring partner in Shlomo’s training, or Bildung, Sokoloff is strangely and emphatically evasive, as when she justifies what she calls the ‘deemphasis on Jewishness’29 in Grossman’s construction of ‘Bruno’ by arguing that ‘the question of identity has already been dealt with extensively’ in the preceding section on ‘Momik.’30 Granted even that ‘Momik’ satisfactorily settles issues of identity (which it doesn’t when it’s really read), this hardly means that ‘[t]he adult Shlomo therefore can turn to philosophical discussion and generalities about art’31—given that Shlomo’s ruminations occur in an encounter with Diaspora and disaster in the face of an intensely uncanny body of writing translated into Hebrew but originally signed in Polish by a secular Galician Jew who, unlike Grossman’s father, did not get away—or at least didn’t return to the old ground. And that way, in some way, did get away. It is hard to do justice. But writing of this intensity is up to brutality. So let us say that Schulz’s salmonization which saves him from the bullet of his SS master’s rival is visited upon him as a lesson in life, and that what is at stake in ‘the torag,’ the ‘relentless war between [Shlomo] and Bruno the fish’ (S 98) is the smell of Jews, the smell of the same and the smell of the other. As Shlomo has Bruno think: for the first time since jumping into the sea, Bruno guessed why he’d chosen the salmon and their journey. For he was a salmon among men. [. . .] just as a man must learn to love a single flesh-and-blood woman in order to become, however imperfectly, acquainted with pure and abstract love, so Bruno had had to become thoroughly salmonized in order to learn about life. The barest life of all, as the salmon drew their tangible geometric design over half the globe. (S 131)

27 28 29 30 31

Sokoloff 1988: 195. Sokoloff 1988: 197. Sokoloff 1988: 196. Sokoloff 1988: 196. Sokoloff 1988: 196.

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Schulz’s choice is to become what he already is: a salmon among men. Why a salmon? Schulz’s fiction teems with theriomorphism, but no-one turns into a fish—the closest we get is Schulz’s narrator’s father’s transformation into a crab.32 Salmon: a fish of northern waters for which Hebrew has to borrow from the Diaspora, which supplies it with an ominous name it renders as a tetragrammaton indistinguishible from Solomon, builder of the First Temple. The grimly grotesque analogy nagging for attention here brands salmon as the ultimate late-Zionist fish, driven by whatever ning drives it to the spawning grounds it came from before it wandered the ocean for no reason other than return to ‘bloody battles over females and territory’ upon which the ‘survivors will fertilize the roe, and die.’ (S 162)33 Swimming with the salmon, Bruno come[s] to know that all the others floating about you have not a quibble or doubt that the thread of smell is sprayed by a river current far away whence they hatched into the world so long ago and whither they return to die never again to breathe the myriad smells of the sea every moment now they sense only the thread the flickering call of fate of a yearning come to me what counts is the way come to me and death will sever you from life (S 119) Salmon life is achieved in the coincidence of ning and smell: in between feeding and fleeing salmon move in a shoal regulated by a master ning issuing from 32 Schulz 2008: 308. Morahg points to this transformation into a crab or lobster as the direct inspiration for Schulz’s salmonization in Grossman’s novel without worrying about the difference between crustaceans and fish, let alone lobsters and salmon, and forgets about the fish in the course of his commentary (Morahg 1999: 466). Sokoloff similarly avoids the salmon by turning them into a generic case for philosophical rumination: ‘Joining Bruno up with a school of salmon, the writer can ruminate on relations between the weak and the strong, the loner and the crowd, the value of remaining true to oneself (pp. 129–135, for example).’ (Sokoloff 1988: 189) Neither comment on Grossman’s neologist salmon-speak. 33 Russell E. Brown, in an essay surveying Schulz’s afterlife in world literature, notes that ‘Any interpretation of this fantasy continuation of Bruno’s life must assume the salmon to stand for the Jewish people, to which both Schulz and Grossman belonged, and necessarily also to allegorize the fate of European Jews in the Holocaust, for Bruno enters the sea at Danzig in 1942.’ (Brown 1990: 241) He then goes on to dismantle the allegory by pointing up the differences between salmon migration and the persecution of the Jews but fails to even entertain the notion of return to the original ground as the grotesque ground of the trope.

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the shoal promising the smell of the origin in the end each ning echoes as its salmon fate. The trajectory is disrupted only by attacks from predators and by torags between alpha male rivals, but the final catastrophic homecoming in accordance with the continuous cycle of life is assured. Spawning Grounds, Like Salmon To The. But Bruno the salmon is summoned by smells pulling against the shoal’s ‘big ning [. . .] stretched inside [him] till it hurt’, such as perhaps, Shlomo wonders, the cheap perfume Adela the servant wore or the smell of the great rolls of cloth in your father’s magical store or [and here Shlomo recalls the opening page of Schulz’s The Street of Crocodiles]34 the smell of cherries shining and brimming with a dark liquor under their skins which Adela used to bring home in late August gleaming drunk with light and warmth or [and here he refantasizes the Book in the opening pages of Schulz’s Sanatorium Under the Sign of Hourglass35 as well as the missing Messiah] the smell so cloyingly sweet it made you dizzy of the longed-for book the wind was leafing through, its riddled pages rotting like an overblown rose? (S 120) Shlomo’s attempt to imagine Bruno’s smells abruptly turns to his own: ‘And I, too, am like that.’ (S 120) He recalls ‘that same smell I keep encountering in so many unexpected places’—‘Could it be that I still carry that smell inside me, that it spurts out of me at certain points? Does my own body produce it to compensate for some deep-seated need?’ (S 120) Rhetorical questions resisting the question Schulz’s narrator asks himself when, in one of the few Jewish scenes in his fiction, he visits his aunt Agatha, in the same story from which Shlomo picks the smell of Adela’s cherries: In the gloom of the hall, with its old lithographs, rotten with mildew and blind with age, we rediscovered a well-known smell. In that old familiar smell was contained a marvelously simple synthesis of the life of those people, the distillation of their race, the quality of their blood, and the secret of their fate, imperceptibly mixed day by day with the passage of their own, private time. [. . .] They were sitting as if in the shadow of their destiny and did not fight against it; with their first, clumsy gestures they

34 Schulz 1979: 3. 35 Schulz 1979: 116.

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revealed their secret to us. Besides, were we not related to them by blood and by fate?36 That is the question. What does it mean to be related by blood and by fate? For salmon it means to follow the smell of the same picked up in the ning as the ever-present non-sign of the assigned site where life meets death in accordance with trivially unreadable (for radically unwritten) laws of autochthony no agency or intent can contest—which is to say that for salmon it just means salmon, nothing that makes a difference, nothing. For humans it means that nothing ever just means humans, or nothing, for humans—that relations of blood feed into narratives of difference forever in danger of determination as fateful division. For Momik, this division is determined by the Beast as he brings Anshel Wasserman down to the cellar for a ritual confirmation of the racial fatalism undergirding the Nazi dehumanization drive. ‘Here, I brought you the kind you like, a real Jude that looks like a Jude and talks like a Jude and smells like a Jude, a Jude grandfather with a Jude grandson, so come on out . . .’ (S 80) Taunting the Nazi Beast with essence of Jew in a cellar in Israel all but decides Momik’s desperate investigation of Jewish identity in what is not yet the achieved aftermath of the Diaspora. Having failed to raise the Beast with the smell of his great-uncle alone, he marshalls the survivors he has been interrogating about ‘Over There’; as soon as they all have ‘the same smell,’ (S 82) he leads them ‘like sheep’ (S 82) to his makeshift Holocaust museum in the cellar, where they started to file past the walls, looking at the pictures as if they were at an exhibition, and the more they looked at the pictures like that, the more they gave off the sharp, old smell which nearly suffocated Momik, but he knew this smell was probably his last chance, and inwardly he screamed, Show it, show it, go on, be Jews and show it [. . .] be so Jewish it won’t know what to do with itself, and even if the Beast was never here before, now it’s got to come out, but nothing happened [. . .] (S 82–83) Something does happen. Momik’s frustration turns into intense contempt for ‘these stinking Jews,’ ‘the kind the goyim called Jude,’ (S 85) driving him to aggressive sabra-style sneering at them to 36 Schulz 1979: 8.

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[s]hut up already, enough already, we’re sick of your story, you can’t kill the Nazikaput with a story, you have to beat him to death, and for that you need a naval commando unit [. . .] they’ll bring the whole world down on their knees, pshakrev, and spit in their faces, and we’ll fly overhead in our jet planes, war is what we need (S 85) The survivors suffer his outburst ‘huddled together,’ and when his rage is spent and he walks over to ‘his Jews’ (S 85) they make way for him: it felt good when they closed in around him and he was standing in the ring, and he thought the Beast would never be able to get him in the ring, it would never try to get in, because it knows it wouldn’t stand a chance, but when he opened his eyes and saw them all around him, tall and ancient, gazing at him with pity, he knew with all his nine-and-a-halfyear-old alter kopf intelligence that it was too late now. (S 86) Momik releases the animals he kept in the cellar, ‘but their smell lingered on and the smell of the Jews did too.’ (S 86) It is too late now: the smell of the Jews lingers on as the claim of a race to a place and the Beast once more stands its chance to decide on what it means to be related by blood and by fate. For Schulz, that decision is confirmed in the disastrous exchange between his master and his murderer: ‘I killed your Jew.’—‘In that case, I will now kill your Jew.’ It matters little who said what, whether Günther first shot Landau’s Jew and Landau then shot Günther’s Jew, as Shlomo and Grossman have it (S 101);37 or Landau first shot Günther’s Jew, the dentist Löw, and Günther then shot Schulz, as Jerzy Ficowski, Schulz’s biographer, has it.38 Shlomo tells his wife Ruth that he wrote ‘Bruno’ to overcome his anger and horror at the way the Holocaust obliterated ‘every trace of individuality’: ‘A person’s uniqueness, his thoughts, his past, his characteristics, loves, defects, and secrets—all meant nothing. You were debased to the lowest level of existence. You were nothing but flesh and blood.’ (S 153) Schulz’s blood decides his fate, for Landau, for Günther—for Shlomo, who reinvents Bruno as living the ‘barest life of all’ (S 131): smelling the Holocaust in all the smells that bind him to the Jewishness he binds himself into, Shlomo seeks to smell his sameness with Schulz by exposing him to the smell of the same binding the shoal home. But Schulz’s writing resists the shul in radically diasporic inscriptions of eccentricity 37 Grossman 2008a: 16–17. 38 Ficowski 2003: 137–38.

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Shlomo construes as ‘slyly destroying the very language of humanity’ (S 166). And so Shlomo’s Bruno is spared one Jewish fate and writes up another in the arrival of the Messiah whose donkey swishes its tail and spells an end to the present phase of human evolution, ushering in a new dispensation of dispersal so universal that it fully achieves and thus ends the Diaspora. With all humans released from all that binds and ‘sen[t] flying weightless [. . .] like confetti to re-create [their] lives with every passing minute’ (S 177), relations of blood and fate come to an end in what Bruno, quoting Schulz’s writing, calls ‘an infinite Age of Genius’ (S 180). Yet in recalling Schulz’s writing in Bruno’s voice Shlomo inevitably recalls him to the death he sought to deliver him from and recalls himself, ‘a prisoner by nature’ who ‘love[s] [his] fetters’ (S 181), to the memory of the Holocaust and his ‘home in Israel’: “ ‘Home’—how strange and dull the word sounds to me now.” (S 184)

∵

‘Large parts of the book are an attempt to write about a Jewish existence in an Israeli idiom,’ Grossman wrote in 1998, adding that ‘it also attempts the opposite: to describe Israel in a “diasporic” language. That is the book’s internal music, its counterpoint.’39 After more than half a century of new nationhood under the unremitting pressure of what he calls the ‘disaster situation’,40 that music is in danger of becoming unbearable. It fades already at the close of his Levinas Circle Lecture in 2004, some twenty years after See Under: Love, where he remembers the closing lines of Part Four as ‘the very end of the book’, Behind them, the real world is going up in smoke, with blood and fire everywhere, and they say a prayer together. This is their prayer: ‘All of us prayed for one thing: that he might end his life knowing nothing of war . . . We asked so little: for a man to live in this world from birth to death and know nothing of war.’41 In the perpetual wars marking the site of Grossman’s writing as a ‘disaster zone’,42 so little is more and more too much. The prayer persists, but with home increasingly besieged into a terrible Heimat, where ‘race and space’ 39 40 41 42

Grossman 2008a: 13. Grossman 2008a: 59. Grossman 2008a: 119. Grossman 2008a: 44.

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interlace as ‘a deadly discourse’ disabling ‘diasporic consciousness’,43 Grossman here remembers these words as issuing from ‘a group of persecuted Jews in the Warsaw ghetto,’ ‘elderly Jews, broken and tortured,’ and seems to forget his having imagined one of these humans praying for justice as other than Jewish—as the Polish Catholic Otto, leader of the Children of the Heart, and brother of Paula, consummate sniffer of her Jewish husband’s socks and underwear and farts (S 250). Far from excluding the other from the wish for life without war, the bleak truth of this erasure is that war has now settled in Hebrew.44

43 Boyarin & Boyarin 1993: 714, 713. 44 Research for this article was facilitated by a Fellowship of the Flemish Academic Centre for Science and the Arts. I am grateful to my fellow Fellows Gert Buelens, Stef Craps, Samuel Durrant, Robert Eaglestone, Roger Luckhurst, and Michael Rothberg for their helpful comments and questions.

chapter 10

On Some Adornean Catchwords Erik Vogt Although David Grossman’s See Under: Love and Theodor W. Adorno’s writings are separated by what may seem an unbridgeable gulf, both in historicaltemporal and geographical terms—Grossman was born in Israel, 51 years after Adorno’s birth in Germany—they are nonetheless haunted by the same question: ‘whether one can live after Auschwitz’.1 Moreover, both Adorno’s texts from the fifties and sixties and Grossman’s novel, as well as his recent collection of essays Writing in the Dark, recognize that a mere conceptual approach towards Auschwitz will not suffice; that is to say, while Auschwitz is not a concept, exceeds conceptual language, it is also not simply a name invoking ‘some indivisible unity located in a site beyond the concept;’2 for as Alexander Garcia Düttmann shows brilliantly in his essay on Adorno, both concept and name call ‘forth an oblivion or a denial of constellation.’3 In relation to both concept and name, Auschwitz is the non-identical ‘thing’ or ‘object’ that, since it is not some non-linguistic external point of reference, is articulated in and by language; in other words, since the conceptual rendition of Auschwitz fails to secure both its identity ‘as well as the identity of what is to be grasped,’4 it has “to enter into constellation; this entrance is the emergence of language in its essence as ‘configurative language’.”5 Adorno writes: Constellations alone represent, from without, what the concept has cut away within. The concept has cut away the surplus it seeks to attain, a surplus it seeks to attain all the more the less it can actually attain it. Insofar as concepts gather around the object or thing which is to be recognized, they potentially determine the inner character of this object or

* This essay was first published as ‘Adornean Catchwords in David Grossman’s See Under: Love’ in: Cultural Perspectives (17), 2012, pp. 115–136. 1 Tiedeman 2003. 2 Düttmann 2002: 9. 3 Düttmann 2002: 93. 4 Düttmann 2002: 91. 5 Düttmann 2002: 91.

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thing, and thus in the process of thinking what thought has necessarily eradicated from itself.6 Concepts’ movement of entering into constellation, thereby letting emerge configurative language, is a movement marked by historical time: To become aware of the constellation in which the object or the thing stands, amounts to deciphering the constellation which a singularity bears within itself as something historically produced . . . The history in the object can only be released by a knowledge mindful of the historical value of the object in its relation to other objects. Such a focusing actualization of something we already know, transforms it.7 In such a manner, the historical genesis of the singular ‘thing’ or ‘object’ Auschwitz can be revealed—its constitutive historical processes that, moreover, are unfinished, even ongoing. Mindful of this proviso, I intend nonetheless to gather together in the manner of a tele-program five concepts or catchwords extracted from and corresponding between Adorno and Grossman, in the hope that, although somewhat arbitrary and without any claim to completion, they can be presented in such a way that the urgency for both authors to ‘comprehend the incomprehensible’ is rendered tangible.8 This urgency is moreover indicated by the fact that the writings of Adorno and Grossman have to be considered interventions into officially and nationally imposed contexts of silence. While Adorno’s Federal Republic of Germany hallucinated both a supposedly clean break from its immediate political past for the sake of a new Realpolitik and a deep continuity of a cultural tradition that, after the ‘short perversion’ during the thirties and forties, simply had to be re-actualized and re-cultivated after the end of the war, Grossman’s ‘young state of Israel’ believed ‘that its strength depended partly on its ability to 6 Adorno 2003: 162. 7 Adorno 2003: 163. 8 Interestingly, Adorno prefaces his volume Catchwords in the following manner: ‘The title “Catchwords” alludes to the encyclopedic form that, unsystematically, discontinuously, presents what the unity of experience crystallizes into a constellation. On the principle of a small volume with somewhat arbitrarily selected catchwords, it would thus be possible to imagine a new Dictionnaire philosophique’ (Adorno 2005b: 126). It, perhaps, announces a project that is not dissimilar to the Holocaust encyclopedia, also discontinuous and incomplete, that is elaborated in the fourth part of Grossman’s novel.

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forget so that it could cobble together a new identity for itself.’9 A new identity, furthermore, that was to be articulated via a doubly coded silence: on the one hand, the silence which the discourse of Zionism imposed upon Auschwitz by an enforced departure from anything associated with the Diaspora, and by inscribing the Shoah into the logic of ‘catastrophe and redemption’;10 on the other hand, the silence generated by a powerful ‘new code of Holocaust sanctity [. . .], according to which the lives of the Holocaust victims are sanctified and their experiences in the ghettos and the camps’ are deemed singularly absolute and therefore ‘inaccessible to those who did not actually live through them.’11 Moreover, ‘while witness accounts by those survivors who chose to provide them are permitted and even promoted, any attempt by a nonsurvivor to describe and explain these experiences becomes an intolerable violation of a sacred taboo.’12 Ultimately, these two discourses ‘reinforced each other and quickly merged into a national narrative that discouraged engagement with the experiences of the Holocaust and was a major cause of the long silence on the subject.’13 Before this very background, Grossman’s novel is an ‘attempt to write about a Jewish existence in an Israeli idiom. But it also attempts the opposite: to describe Israel in a ‘diasporic’ language. That is the book’s internal music, its counter-point.’14 1 Anti-Theodicy Both Adorno and Grossman maintain a secular distance to any account of Auschwitz in which the categories of the unique and the absolute coincide in such a way that Auschwitz as unique-absolute event can no longer be made accessible to critical thought; for this self-abdication of thought might harbor the danger identified, among others, by Alain Badiou: ‘to concede a strange victory to Hitler and his henchmen to declare outright that they had managed to introduce the unthinkable into thought [. . .]’;15 via this absolute uniqueness thesis, the atrocities of Auschwitz are moreover subjected to a ‘mise en 9 10

Grossman 2008a: 6. See Saul Friedländer, ‘Afterword: The Shoah between Memory and History’, in Sicher 1998: 345–357. 11 Morahg 1999: 459. 12 Morahg 1999: 459. 13 Morahg 1999: 459. 14 Grossman 2008a: 13. 15 Badiou: 31.

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transcendence’; they become the ‘measure without measure’,16 compatible with the religious theme of the Altogether-Other. This quasi-religious elevation of Auschwitz into ‘metaphysical diabolical Evil, irrational, apolitical, incomprehensible, approachable only through respectful silence’, that is, into a ‘mystery’ that ‘negates all (explanatory) answers in advance, defying knowledge and description, noncommunicable, lying outside historicization’ and cannot ‘be explained, visualized, transmitted, since it marks the Void, the black hole, the implosion, of the (narrative) universe’,17 reveals itself as a kind of knotting together of the impotence of thought and the might of the crimes of the Auschwitz in which thought occurs only as its own impotence and is enshrined in a new figure of the unthinkable. By contrast, Adorno and Grossman insist on the urgency that thinking expose itself to Auschwitz; it is necessary for them that one render Auschwitz within thought without the recourse to the trope of the unthinkable, of the apriori impossibility of each and every interpretation of Auschwitz as cipher for the very horror that cannot be presented by and in thought. That is to say, thought has to measure itself ‘by against the extremity that eludes the concept, it is from the outset in the nature of the musical accompaniment with which the SS liked to drown out the screams of its victims.’18 For if thought does not consider that which challenges its claim to undamaged (conceptual) authority, it becomes not only empty in the face of the worst, but also its accomplice. Adorno’s famous claim that one can no longer extort meaning from Auschwitz must thus not be confused with the claim that Auschwitz cannot be analyzed and comprehended. In other words, it cannot be brought in accord with this uniqueness thesis, that is, with its underlying assumption according to which that which resists its integration into a traditional philosophicalhistorical logic or into a theodicy, contains its incomprehensibility; for this assumption would sever Auschwitz from the very history of which it is a part.19 Both Adorno’s and Grossman’s respective constructions of Auschwitz as fulfillment of a certain logic of subsumption, classification, administration and 16 Badiou: 63. 17 Slavoj Žižek 2002: 66–67. 18 Adorno 2003: 365. 19 Moreover, invocations of the absolute uniqueness of Auschwitz also depend on national contexts so that the absolute uniqueness thesis can take on different and even opposite political-moral meanings. That is to say, the debate about the absolute uniqueness of Auschwitz can be instrumentalized for different interests. If exclusivity is demanded for Auschwitz, then analyses of Auschwitz cannot be opened towards different expressive forms, potentially leading to an ethical and epistemological hierarchical ranking, to a marginalization and even forgetting of the victims of other genocides.

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‘massification’ of human subjectivity represent their attempts to render legible that Auschwitz exhibits a certain intelligibility that is identifiable as destruction of individuality having been prepared by the instrumentalization of reason/language without Hingabe and by the indifference of its logic: ‘Logic’, Wasserman says at some point to Herr Neigel, is your wonderful program for transporting trains here from all over Europe. To the slaughter. Logic is the railroad tracks stretching over most of the world [. . .] Logic, Herr Neigel, is the invisible string that binds the hand of the dutiful functionary whose signature authorizes the engine’s oil supply for the day, and the engineer who drives it over the tracks [. . .] (S 294; see also S 179). A logic, furthermore, through which ‘every trace of individuality was obliterated. A person’s uniqueness, his thoughts, his past, his characteristics, loves, defects, and secrets—all meant nothing.’ (S 153) 2

Survival/Afterlife of Auschwitz

Without ever relativizing the singular status of Auschwitz, Adorno’s as well as Grossman’s thought opens up the possibility to illuminate the very phenomena in which aspects of Auschwitz are iterated (phenomena in which these aspects were either anticipated or are announcing themselves). They do not give in to the blackmail according to which each iterative analysis would reduce the singularity of Auschwitz. Thus, Adorno refers at one point to the Armenian genocide: Already in the First World War the Turks . . . murdered well over a million Armenians. . . . Genocide has its roots in this resurrection of aggressive nationalism that has developed in many countries since the end of the nineteenth century.20 In another passage, Adorno reminds again of the link between genocide and nationalism—now, however, under the sign of the possible displacement in the present of

20

See in Adorno ‘Education after Auschwitz’, in: Tiedeman 2003: 20.

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what broke out in Auschwitz. Tomorrow a group other than the Jews may come along, say, the elderly, who indeed were still spared in the Third Reich, or the intellectuals, or simply deviant groups.21 For Grossman as well, it is the faktum Auschwitz that shapes our situation in which the real experience of the ‘impossible’ haunts the present and future possible. It is a matter of the past that incessantly returns in our memory; but it is also a problem of the future; in short, Auschwitz is the hell of our memory and, as Derrida remarks somewhere, ‘each hour counts its Holocaust’, especially in light of our continuous indifference toward suffering and mass destruction: ‘[. . .] it seems that most of us manage to lead a life of almost total indifference to the suffering of entire nations, near and far, and to the distress of millions of human beings who are poor and hungry and weak and sick.’22 We remain indifferent to mass destruction. For it is the very same indifference that the vast majority of the world displays time after time, whether during the Armenian Auschwitz or the Jewish Auschwitz, in Rwanda or in Bosnia, in the Congo, in Darfur, and in many other places.23 Most significantly, both Adorno and Grossman perceive a Nach- and Überleben of National Socialism in the democratic societies of Germany and Israel. Adorno considers ‘the survival of National Socialism within democracy to be potentially more menacing than the survival of fascist tendencies against democracy.’24 To put it in even stronger terms: Precisely the very past which one wants to evade or which one has supposedly overcome, is still very much alive: National Socialism lives on, and even today we still do not know whether it is merely the ghost of what was so monstrous that it lingers on after its own death, or whether it has not yet died at all, whether the willingness to commit the unspeakable survives in people as well as in the conditions that enclose them.25

21 22 23 24 25

Tiedeman 2003: 32. Grossman 2008: 78. Grossman 2008a: 79. See in Adorno, ‘The Meaning of Working through the Past’, in: Tiedemann 2003: 4. Tiedemann 2003: 3–4.

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The ghost invoked by Adorno is encapsulated for Grossman in the ‘there’ (of ‘Over There’), suggesting ‘that somewhere out there, [. . .] the thing that happened is still occurring, constantly growing alongside our daily lives, and that it may re-erupt. It is not decisively over.’26 And in a passage curiously absent from the English translation of Writing in the Dark, Grossman elaborates further: ‘The world in which we live today is, perhaps, not [. . .] as brutal as the world created by the Nazis, but certain mechanisms are taking place in it whose regularities are similar [. . .]’27 In other words, it is impossible to draw a rigid line of demarcation between National Socialism and contemporary liberal democracies, since a continuity exists between the societal conditions which brought about National Socialism, and those of our present: ‘That fascism lives on [. . .] is due to the fact that the objective conditions of society that engendered fascism continue to exist’28 not least of all in the mass language of a culture industry inflated to the point of total enclosure. Hence the current ‘weakness of the democratic worldview, which does not seem to have been truly internalized by most citizens [. . .]’29 That is to say, people do not yet ‘truly experience it as their own and see themselves as subjects of the political process.’30 The potential for democratization must therefore rely on a democratic pedagogy whose educational ideal is that ‘Auschwitz not happen again’31—an ideal that ultimately is contingent upon successfully working through one’s past. This is Adorno’s definition: The past will have been worked through only when the causes of what happened then have been eliminated. Only because the causes continue to exist does the captivating spell of the past remain to this day unbroken.32 This, however, requires a critical interrogation of coldness as constituent of (bourgeois) subjectivity, derived from the principle of self-preservation for its own sake. Any attempt to break through the coercive mechanisms characterizing a ‘consciousness blinded to all historical past, all insight into one’s own conditionedness,’33 would have to begin with an examination of ‘the inability 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33

Grossman 2008a: 70. Grossman 2008b: 92. Tiedemann 2003: 13. Grossman 2008: 115. Tiedemann 2003: 7. Tiedemann 2003: 19. Tiedemann 2003: 18. Tiedemann 2003: 28.

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to identify with others’34—a claim subscribed to by Grossman as well, when he asks the following questions: ‘[. . .] what is the thing that I must suspend within myself, that I must dull, repress, so that I can ultimately collaborate with a mechanism of murder? What must I kill within me to be capable of killing another person or people, to desire the destruction of an entire people, or to silently accept it?’35 Put simplistically, what has to be suspended is both what is other in me and the others; this suspension is to be grasped as the historical experience of the destruction or dehumanization of the human, as the stripping away of the human, but not as a kind of transcendental marker, according to which the inhuman is something like the necessary condition for the possibility of the human that is simultaneously its impossibility. And does not Grossman’s portrait of Herr Neigel represent precisely the refusal to elevate the experience of the inhuman from a state attendant to a historically determined limiting condition into a general ontological condition that is no longer historically and indexically bound?36 In other words, the processes of dehumanization must be studied and mediated precisely in the face of and ‘after Auschwitz’; this the raison d’etre of Adorno’s ‘new categorical imperative’: ‘to arrange thoughts and actions so that Auschwitz will not repeat itself, so that nothing similar will happen.’37 The force of the denial motivating the formulation of this new categorical imperative on the basis of particularity and contingency is ultimately mediated by one’s practical abhorrence of intolerable bodily agony suffered by the victims of Auschwitz. Again, Kant’s categorical imperative has to be infused with the materialist motive found in the 34 35

Tiedemann 2003: 30. Grossman 2008a: 77. For both Adorno and Grossman, the destruction of individuality can, however, only be registered by means of (the remnants of) individual experience. What Adorno, in the ‘Dedication’ opening his Minima Moralia, writes, against Hegel’s verdict on individuality, about contemporary individual experience, holds for Grossman as well: ‘[. . .] social analysis can learn incomparably more from individual experience [. . .] while conversely the large historical categories . . . are no longer above suspicion of fraud [. . .] some of the force of protest has reverted to the individual [. . .] the individual has gained as much in richness, differentiation and vigour as, on the other hand, the socialization of society has enfeebled and undermined him. In the period of his decay, the individual’s experience of himself and what he encounters contributes once more to knowledge [. . .] In the face of the totalitarian unison with which the eradication of difference is proclaimed as a purpose in itself, even part of the social force of liberation may have temporarily withdrawn to the individual sphere. If critical theory lingers there, it is not only with bad conscience.’ (Adorno 2005a: 17). 36 Rather, Herr Neigel’s portrait seems to share several features of Adorno’s (study of the) ‘authoritarian character’ (S 281–282). 37 Adorno 2003: 365.

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‘somatic, unmeaningful stratum of life [. . .] suffering, of the suffering which in the camps, without any consolation, burned every soothing feature out of the mind, and out of culture’38—it has to be transformed into a new form refracted by those annihilated in the extermination camps so as to respond to the general context of destruction ‘after’ Auschwitz. 3 Human/Animal39 Both Adorno and Grossman critically probe the human/animal relation in light of civilizational-historical dialectic of human reason and nature that reveals itself as a domination of nature remaining under the spell of nature as reified historical forms of domination. Adorno remarks upon this structural relation of violence traversing the human/animal: The whole earth bears witness to the glory of man. In war and peace, arena and slaughterhouse, from the slow death of the elephant overpowered by primitive human hordes with the aid of the first planning to the perfected exploitation of the animal world today, the unreasoning creature has always suffered at the hands of reason. This visible course of events conceals from the executioners the invisible one: existence without the light of reason, the actual life of animals.40 This relation is, historically, a differential determination concealing hierarchical relations between humans and animals and justifying all possible forms of animal abuse. That is to say, the history of human reason endlessly subjecting animals becomes legible as a natural history of human violence extirpating everything that is creaturely because it might recall man’s own naturalness. It is nothing but this very ‘curse on Over There’, this ‘spell that was put on all the children and grownups and animals, and it made them freeze.’ (S 50) Moreover, both Adorno and Grossman point to the constitutive violence that is operative in both identification (of animals) and self-identification (as humans):

38 Adorno 2003: 365. Perhaps, one can claim that there is an affinity between Adorno’s transformed categorical imperative and the novel’s ‘White Room’; for both are the ‘real testing-ground for anyone who wants to write about the Holocaust’ (S 123). 39 For this section, see my ‘Animal Tracings in Adorno’s Reflections on Genocidal Machines’, in: Watson 2010: 233–252. 40 Horkheimer & Adorno 2002: 206.

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An unconscious knowledge whispers to the child what is repressed by civilized education: this is what matters, says the whispering voice. [. . .] A child, fond of an innkeeper named Adam, watched him club the rats pouring out of holes in the courtyard; it was in his image that the child made its own image of the first man.41 It is also this very image that Momik seems to embrace when he keeps animals in the cellar, tortures them and then justifies this torture by stating that the suffering of animals is the price that has to be paid both in the war against the ‘Nazi Beast’ and in scientific progress (S 56). But against this ‘anthropological machine’,42 one finds in both Adorno and Grossman attempts to draw animals and humans closer to each other so that they become tied to each other and cannot be easily separated into distinct stages of evolution. What is more, for humans to truly become humans, they must not move against or away from animals, but rather return to animality as that force which disrupts the continuity of time in order to generate a new beginning or at least remember the beginnings dormant in childhood’s affinity to animality. Humans and animals are rendered proximate to each other not only by Wasserman’s insistence that ‘the story should also take place in the midst of nature,’ (S 218) by relocating the story ‘in the Zoological Gardens, or zoo, of Warsaw,’ (S 271) but also by filling up the zoo not only with animals, but also with artists, children (above all, the child Kazik), Jews, and a ‘bunch of loonies.’ (S 365) Locking together animals and certain groups of humans in the zoo makes not only impossible performing a clean epistemological and ontological break between humans and animals, but the human/animal relations are also transformed into ethic-political sites and stakes. This becomes explicit in both Adorno’s and Grossman’s Engführung of human (idealist) thought (on animals) and fascist practice (of the annihilation of Jews), thereby rendering legible and denouncing this lethal and bloody machine by bringing into constellation the simultaneous destruction of animal and human lives. For Adorno, human insults on animals, on the animal in man, constitute not only the preparatory step for identifying as animal what is to be degraded, reviled and killed, but have to be taken further towards a coincidence of human contempt for animality with the ideological and physical annihilation of the Jews under National Socialism. Adorno writes: ‘Animals play for the idealist system virtually the same role as the Jews for fascism.’43 While animals in 41 Adorno 2003: 366. 42 See Agamben 2004. 43 Adorno 1998: 80.

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idealist thought are the objects of virtual annihilation and of a sacrificial logic, the Jews are victims of the real liquidation by the Nazis. The stigmatization and exclusion/confinement of animals as abjects, Adorno intimates, virtually anticipates the exclusion/confinement and annihilation of Jews. The human treatment of animals are trial runs of a model of dehumanization; cruelty practiced on animals is therefore one essential condition for the torture and annihilation of humans because it prepares humans for the real identification of humans with animals in which ‘Jews looked like hunted animals.’ (S 363) Thus, what reveals itself in the zoo is the camp. Not only did Wasserman’s characters move ‘constantly between the Warsaw zoo and the extermination camp’ (S 424), but once an opening is torn in the ‘cage bars [. . .] the opening revealed a view of Neigel’s camp.’ (S 428) This passage continues: [Editorial comment: No wonder. The camp had always been waiting there.] Kazik saw the high, gloomy watchtowers and the electrified barbed-wire fences, and the train station which leads nowhere but to death. And he smelled the smell of human flesh burned by human beings, heard the screaming and snorting of a prisoner hanged all night long by his feet [. . .] (S 428)44 However, there are also counter-images providing a temporary refuge from the anthropological machine—counter-images that, in Adorno and Grossman, are associated with the element of water. In a thought-image with the title Sur L’Eau Adorno, reflecting on the goal of an emancipated society no longer fettered to the fetishism of production and a blind fury of activity culminating in integrated totality, writes: Rien faire comme une bête, lying on water and looking peacefully at the sky, ‘being, nothing else, without any further definition and fulfillment’, might take the place of process, act, satisfaction, and so truly keep the promise of a dialectical logic that it would culminate in its origin. None of the abstract concepts comes closer to fulfilled utopia than that of eternal peace.45

44

S 428. See in this context of an affinity between animal slaughterhouses and extermination camps Charles Patterson’s provocative Eternal Treblinka: Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust (Patterson 2002). 45 Adorno 2005a: 157.

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The life of the animal is presented as an exemplary image of a (human) life without guilt; animals are no longer silenced because a mimetic relation is maintained between animality and (true) humanity. This mimetic relation shared between animals and humans is also present in those utopian passages contained in the section ‘Bruno’. Only after having become ‘thoroughly salmonized’, can Bruno ‘learn about life’ (S 131) only after having become an animal, having grown ‘two perfect little side fins,’ can Bruno experience happiness: ‘two fins fluttered in the water like sea butterflies, fanning my Bruno with a happiness he’d never known.’ (S 144–145) 4 Remembrance It is only from within the ‘interested’ perspective of this new categorical imperative—which posits against the destruction of memory the responsibility to remember destruction so that the murdered are not ‘cheated out of the single remaining thing that our powerlessness can offer them: remembrance’46—that the traces of Auschwitz in contemporary society can be revealed. Remembrance is, as Grossman shows so brilliantly in the first section of his novel, a complex and mediated endeavor; its power is ‘indeed great and heavy, and at times has a paralyzing effect.’47 Since the narrator’s attempt to remember and transmit the past of his family and other survivors—a past that remains fragmentary—is mediated and refracted by his own suffering,48 his remembrance is never simply a concentration of and on the past, but involves attentiveness to the present, as well as to the relation between the past and the present; that is to say, his attempt to expose his present to the memory of the death camps sheds an increasingly critical light on contemporary social phenomena. Thus, Auschwitz does not lie entirely ‘outside’ or ‘inside’ the present; for if it were a kind of ineffable exteriority, the present would always already represent, fully and completely remember, it (by forgetting it); if it were, on the other hand, strictly a matter of representation through one’s present, this would deny the extent to which it has been disrupted and altered by Auschwitz; therefore, Auschwitz only exceeds the present because its effects are internal to the present itself. Consequently, since both 46 47 48

Tiedemann 2003: 5. Grossman 2004: 64. But also by certain, ultimately untenable, interpretative frameworks such as the spy, detective, and adventure novel—see, for instance, S 18–19. What reverberates in these interpretative frameworks is, of course, the trope of heroism owed to the Zionist discourse.

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forgetting/denial and remembrance are within the purview of historical experience, any transcendental and/or ontological investigation into the conditions of the possibility of historical events, that purports to be conducted at a safe distance from the latter, proves to be problematic;49 moreover, since remembrance as an undoing of historically produced forgetting and denial remains implicated in Auschwitz, it can never pretend to somehow return to some undamaged form of life prior to Auschwitz in order to restore it ‘after’ Auschwitz; rather, what has been abjected through Auschwitz without having been worked through theoretically and practically within present historical experience, spectrally haunts present history in form of the very injustices and suffering that it perpetuates—injustices and suffering inflicted, above all, on the somatic strata, the so-called ‘lowest elements of life’, figuring so prominently in both Adorno and Grossman: sexuality, death, violence, disintegration (but also, as has been seen, the animal!). Remembrance enacts, in Adorno and Grossman, a materialist practice of thinking/writing embracing ‘psychosomatic functions, [. . .] desires, dreams [. . .] normally ‘resistant’ to analysis.’ (S 303) However, giving voice to suffering generated by always historically and socially determinable injustices requires the comprehension of one’s historically and socially determinate conditions; it is here that both Adorno’s and Grossman’s allegiance to enlightened thought (that, of course, simultaneously reflects on the shortcomings and failures of enlightenment itself) becomes tangible; for both insist on the continual necessity of rendering intelligible socio-historical processes in such a way that a space can be created for releasing specific possibilities from the structures that suppress them and therefore perpetuate domination. That is to say, Auschwitz is part of a historical process that both Adorno and Grossman identify as that of capitalist modernity and its attendant culture industry.50 It is for this very reason that Adorno and Grossman conceptualize the materialist practice of remembrance in terms that clearly mark the difference to mere Gedenkkultur, that is, to a discourse of passive witnessing that, in the 49

50

There is an agreement on this point in two more recent essays on the role of forgetting/remembrance in Adorno, written by Iain Macdonald and Mario Wenning; see: Iain Macdonald, ‘Returning to the “House of Oblivion”: Celan Between Adorno and Heidegger’, in Cunningham & Mapp 2006: 117–130; Mario Wenning, ‘Adorno, Heidegger, and the Problem of Remembrance’, in Macdonald & Ziarek: 155–166. I am indebted to arguments from both these essays. Although Grossman does not name culture industry as such, he nonetheless refers repeatedly to and affirms Herbert Marcuse’s critique of one-dimensional mass culture— see Grossman 2008a: 69–85.

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face of the unfathomable and unrepresentable that, supposedly, is Auschwitz, would be condemned to nothing but repeated invocations of silence; rather, since there is no ‘proper’ language of witnessing, the materialist practice of remembrance has to express the experience of dehumanization by taking up and taking in, by representing, not only the voices of the victims, of the survivors, but also of the bystanders and even of the perpetrators: one has to represent, Grossman remarks from the perspective of a work still in front of us, both victims and murderers, so as to no longer be ‘doomed to face this absolute, false, suffocating dichotomy;’51 that is to say, if one wants to reconstruct the materiality of the event of Auschwitz, one has to include all these voices. Thus, the practice of remembrance is not simply turned towards the catastrophe of the past lying behind us, but, at the same time, towards an end to be accomplished in the future: the end of non-violence and peace or, as Grossman puts it, the creation of conditions in which human beings can ‘live in this world from birth and death and know nothing of war.’ (S 452) This concern for the historical present does not reify Auschwitz into an immemorial break or caesura within history that already happened; rather, it grasps the historical present as containing the traces of failed emancipative possibilities that, if actualized in the future, could bring about a break, ‘at the same time as it illuminates the eternal return of the same in those places that have not yet worked through the Auschwitz model.’52 Although the materialist practice of remembrance ‘cannot alter history, . . . in citing and resignifying a discursive chain, it can keep the past present and the future open.’53 Therein consists its assertion of immanent freedom that, although conditioned by history, anticipates future emancipation. This emancipative dimension is, above all, articulated in literature—the last Stichwort—for literature as remembrance negatively enacts a ‘world in flux, elastic, full of possibilities—unfrozen.’54 5 Literature However, would one not have to say that Grossman’s novel is guilty of a gross violation of Adorno’s famous verdict, according to which ‘poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric’ (which, interestingly, is quoted in the novel, however in a manner which, perhaps typically, substitutes ‘no longer possible’ for 51 52 53 54

Grossman 2008a: 66. Rothberg 2000: 56. Rothberg 2000: 56. Grossman 2008a: 64.

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‘barbaric’)?55 Furthermore, does the ‘barbarism’ of Grossman’s novel not become even more blatant, if one considers the following quotations from Adorno: ‘In its disproportion to the horror that has transpired and threatens, it is condemned to cynicism; even where it directly faces the horror, it diverts attention from it.’56 And: ‘The so-called artistic rendering of the sheer physical pain of people beaten to the ground by rifle butts contains, however distantly, the possibility that pleasure can be squeezed from it.’57 Finally: ‘The aesthetic stylistic principle [. . .] make the unthinkable appear to have had some meaning; it becomes transfigured, something of its horror removed.’58 However, contrary to appearances, Adorno does not simply impose a ban on writing literature ‘after’ Auschwitz; he does not decree for literature a silence in which impossibility and interdiction would coincide;59 rather, he maintains that ‘not even silence gets us out of the circle; in silence we simply use the state of objective truth to rationalize our subjective incapacity, once more degrading truth into a lie.’60 Thus, although literature is proximate to silence, its proximity to silence is an expression of suffering;61 that is to say, the ‘rescuing of the past’ through literature is identical with the remembrance of suffering; for Wasserman too, suffering not only gives substance to literature as the memory of accumulated suffering, but it is the compass or lighthouse, the criterion for every human decision. Wasserman sees sensitivity to suffering and consciousness of it as the

55

S 106. It is in this context that the possibility of letting ‘the facts speak for themselves’ is briefly considered, only to be ultimately dismissed. That is to say, a ‘literal’ discourse devoid of all imagination and figurative language will not suffice; however, as will be seen shortly, a ‘romantic’ poetic discourse will also no longer do; what both these share, perhaps, is still a clinging to immediacy that, in See Under: Love, is always already broken and mediated at multiple levels; thus, the literary discourse of See Under: Love cannot be described in terms of these two modes of representation in that it ruins both traditional historiography and poetic discourses. 56 Adorno 1997: 234. 57 Adorno 1992: 88. 58 Adorno 1992: 88. 59 See Rancière 2009: 124. 60 Adorno 2003: 367. 61 This is why literature at the same time must resist Adorno’s verdict, ‘that is, be such that it does not surrender to cynicism merely by existing after Auschwitz’ (Adorno 1992: 88), and: ‘A perennial suffering has just as much right to expression as a tortured man has to scream.’ (Adorno 2003: 362).

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highest goal of mankind. Moreover, it is man’s protest, and the highest expression of his freedom. (S 389) True, literature can no longer authorize history in an essential sense; it cannot restore and recover itself, as if it had not been sundered by Auschwitz. Since Auschwitz was not kept at bay by literature, literature cannot continue with its tradition without having to acknowledge that its forms have been sustained by and have sustained the very tradition whose repetition Auschwitz has put into question to the point of refusing that tradition.62 Consequently, literature ‘must turn against itself, in opposition to its own concept, and thus become uncertain of itself right into its innermost fiber.’63 The conditions of literature’s self-certainty have disintegrated, and this disintegration enters literature. What has thus perhaps become impossible is the self-sufficient individuality of the poetic ‘I’,64 as well as the desire for a pure language, for ‘a pure art’ (S 130): in short, the very kind of desire embodied by Bruno Schulz’s literary project for which ‘even the dual is too plural, and the truly crucial things are apparently said only in first person, singular.’65 What has become impossible is what Grossman captures as Bruno Schulz’s ‘restless search, the longing for a different, primordial wholeness.’66 Literature can no longer recover or transmit the past by means of a simple immediate return to and invocation of literature’s ‘original stature’, its ‘originary dimension’;67 it can no longer be turned into a testimonial for its supposedly uninterrupted quasi-transcendental orientation, for its continuance as the authentic source for meaning.

62

‘Auschwitz demonstrated irrefutably that culture has failed. That this could happen in the midst of the traditions of philosophy, of art [. . .] says more than that these traditions and their spirit lacked the power to take hold of men and work a change in them. There is untruth in those fields themselves, in the autarky that is emphatically claimed for them. All post-Auschwitz culture, including its urgent critique, is garbage’(Adorno 2003: 366–67). 63 Adorno 1997: 2. For Adorno, there is in general ‘no content, no formal category of the literary work that does not, however transformed and however unawarely, derive from the empirical reality from which it has escaped’—see Adorno 1992: 89. 64 See Howard Caygill, ‘Lyric Poetry before Auschwitz’, in Cunningham 2006: 69–83. 65 S 165. This exclusion of duality and plurality is registered in the novel in terms of a certain cruelty, even of a ‘killing of the language of humanity’—see S 166. 66 Grossman 2008a: 15. 67 For Bruno, to build a ‘completely different language’, an ‘exclusive linguistic existence’ which, however, thanks to its principle of monologue does not allow for any ‘We’, however fragile—see S 167; S 165.

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Against this conception of literary transcendence, could one not recall, especially in light of what happens in the transition from ‘Bruno’ to ‘Wasserman’— the horrific recognition that there is a ‘death potion’ in (the German) language (S 284)—, Paul Celan’s ‘Bremen Speech’ from 1958, according to which language ‘had to go through its own lack of answers, through terrifying silence, through the thousand darknesses of murderous speech’?68 That is, ‘after’ Auschwitz, literature has to orient itself in murderous language; it is presented with the difficult task of keeping remembrance of ‘the thousand darknesses of murderous speech’—and it can do so only if it remains bound to history, to historical dates: ‘For the poem does not stand outside time. True, it claims the infinite and tries to reach across time—but across, not above.’69 Literature reaches across time toward its ‘outside’, and it does so in a double movement that separates it from and connects it with history. This means, however, that one can no longer pretend that literature would be safe from the disintegrating forces of Auschwitz; and this applies even to children’s literature, that is, to the stories about the Children of the Heart—is this not the every reason as to why, in the third section, they have become subject to the ravages of age, illness, torture, death? (S 209, 235, 330) Auschwitz insinuates a problematic in literature itself that exposes literature to a risk that is historically conditioned. A risk that literature is no longer possible always or everywhere because, as Adorno writes, ‘after Auschwitz there is no word tinged from on high, not even a theological one, that has any right unless it underwent transformation.’70 That is to say, Auschwitz can neither be bypassed nor recuperated by or for literature, especially since it is has been complicit with it and therefore not exempt from the ‘guilt context of the living’. This is not to deny that material element in literature that points toward a future that retains a moment of incompatibility with intransigent historical reality—but it does so only from a position within history that Adorno (and, it seems, Grossman as well) identifies as the historical position of autonomy of modernist literature, of modernist literature as semblance.71 That is to say, modernist autonomous literature occupies an imagined space of dissonance

68 Celan 1986b: 34. 69 Celan 1986b: 34. 70 Adorno 2003: 367. 71 See, for instance, the references to Kafka and Mann in S 91; more importantly, the stories about the ‘Children of the Heart’ can only be transmitted in a manner that re-tells them in a modernist manner—see S 235.

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and dissensus72—hence its structural discontinuity with progressive history, its ‘semblance of non-semblance’, takes on the form of a promise that both affirms dissensus and rejects all forms of reconciliation.73 Literature has to show the processes of dehumanization, it has to enact barbarity in order to present the barbarity of the age; but at the same time, literature’s enactment contains the ‘model of a possible praxis’74 pointing beyond what Adorno would call reified consciousness, and Grossman ‘states that had seemed frozen, eternal, monolithic.’75 Precisely by ‘comprehending all the facets of one human character: its internal contradictions[. . . ,]’76 does literature reveal its truth content that cannot be separated from the concept of humanity. Through every mediation, through all negativity, they are images of a transformed humanity and are unable to come to rest in themselves by any abstraction from this transformation.77 As if responding affirmatively to this passage from Adorno, Grossman maintains that his ‘literary approach’ is an ‘act of redefining ourselves as human beings in a situation whose essence and methodology consist entirely of dehumanization.’78 Moreover, this is Grossman remark about the ‘secret’ of literature ‘that it can repeatedly redeem for us the tragedy of the one from the statistics of the millions. The one about whom the story is written, and the one who reads the story.’79 This ‘one’ would, however, no longer be a societal monad, but one exposed to what Grossman calls ‘the principle of Otherness;’80 thus, by actualizing its mimetic capability to let the other resonate with or touch the self 81—‘just two people trying to connect in a faltering [. . .] way,’ (S 106)— 72

S 153, where Bruno/literature is accorded the ability to teach how to ‘fight the obliterators’ of individuality, however ‘in a hypothetical way, though Bruno doesn’t solve a thing for me in the day-to-day. Bruno is a nice dream. But he’s more than that, too.’ 73 Rancière 2009: 103. 74 Hammer 2006: 131. 75 Grossman 2008a: 14. 76 Grossman 2008a: 49. 77 Adorno 1997: 241. 78 Grossman 2008a: 57. 79 Grossman 2008a: 85. 80 Grossman 2008a: 52. 81 Adorno 1997: 331. This also marks the place of the sublime in Adorno’s thought; in contrast to Lyotard’s sublime, which has been emptied of all emancipative dimensions, Adorno’s sublime is to be understood as a mobilization not against emancipation and

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literature presents a relation between self and other in which ‘what protects me from the Other [. . .] the usually invisible barrier’82 has been stripped away. Ultimately, literature articulates this (demand for) reconciliation negatively, respecting the gap between the present and the redeemed world; in other words, it cannot itself bring about salvation (S 307), and this must not be concealed by creating ‘literary tension, [. . .] this extraneous illusion of a purpose;’ (S 304) therefore, literature’s articulation of the demand for reconciliation, for love, presents itself as a—presently—impossible demand, whose possibility consists paradoxically in its own impossibility: ‘Every person today, without exception, feels too little loved, because every person cannot love enough. [. . .] I do not want to preach love. [. . .] To preach love already presupposes in those to whom one appeals a character structure different from the one that needs to be changed.’83 And does the empty space, the void, under the Stichwort ‘love’ in Grossman’s ‘Complete Encyclopedia of Kazik’s Life’ (as well as the other voided Stichwörter such as ‘justice’, ‘meaning of life’, ‘mercy’, ‘compassion’) not testify to the impossibility of See Under: Love’ that, precisely in its impossibility to offer any narrative consolation,84 remains immune to the betrayal consisting, for Adorno, in providing images of reconciled life and of the positivity of love?

82 83 84

reconciliation as such, but rather against ‘direct invocations of reconciliation’—see Hammer 2006: 140. Adorno writes: ‘The ascendancy of the sublime is one with art’s compulsion that fundamental contradictions not be covered up but fought through in themselves; reconciliation for them is not the result of conflict but exclusively that the conflict becomes eloquent’ (Adorno 1997: 197). Moreover, Adorno is far from simply ignoring the triumphalism that has been characteristic of the aesthetic tradition; it is for this very reason that the sublime of the modernist artwork is coupled with natural beauty as semblance of alterity; on the crucial differences between Adorno’s sublime as transcendence in strict immanence and Lyotard’s sublime as the ‘ “sacrificial” pronouncement of ethical dependency with respect to the immemorial law of the Other’, see Rancière 2009: 105. Rancière summarizes these differences when he writes: ‘The modernist rigour of an Adorno, wanting to expurgate the emancipatory potential of art of any form of compromise with cultural commerce and aestheticized life, becomes [in Lyotard] the reduction of art to the ethical witnessing of unrepresentable catastrophe’ (Rancière 2009: 131). Grossman 2008a: 41. Tiedemann 2003: 30. Is this, finally, not also the reason why this novel additionally suspends these Stichwörter, puts them into quotation marks? See S 290.

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Index Adorno, Theodor vi, ix, 4, 6, 72, 116, 126 n. 3, 178–179, 179 nn. 6–8, 180–181, 181 n. 18, 182, 182 n. 20, 183, 183 n. 24, 184–185, 185 nn. 35–37, 186, 186 n. 38–40, 187, 187 nn. 41, 43, 188, 188 n. 45, 190, 190 n. 49, 191–192, 192 nn. 56–58, 60–61, 193 nn. 62–63, 194, 194 n. 70, 195, 195 nn. 77, 81, 196 n. 81 Agamben, Giorgio 96–97, 97 nn. 16–17, 116, 116 n. 1, 127 n. 4, 187 n. 42, 197, 199 Aleichem, Sholem 155, 164 Anderson, Benedict 4, 145–149, 151, 159, 197 Antelme, Robert 12, 97 n. 17, 115, 197 anti-theodicy 4, 180 Arendt, Hannah vii, 3, 116, 119, 120 n. 3, 121 n. 4, 197 Ashkenazi Judaism 82 Auschwitz 12, 106, 123, 197–198, 200, 202–204 Austerlitz 3, 127, 127 n. 8, 135, 203 Badiou, Alain 180, 180 n. 15, 181 n. 16, 197 Baer, Ulrich 5 n. 1, 128 n. 10, 132, 132 nn. 14, 16, 197 Bakhtin, Mikhail 26 Bauer, Yehuda 72, 72 n. 32, 198 Baum, Johanna 32 n. 11, 108, 108 n. 23, 198 Be My Knife 21, 200 Benjamin, Walter 126 nn. 1, 3, 148, 159–160, 198 Bergson, Henri 96 Bernhard, Thomas 129 Bernstein, Marc 20 n. 19, 146 nn. 7–8, 151 n. 30, 154 nn. 35–36, 163, 163 nn. 3–4, 198 Bhabha, Homi 149, 149 nn. 24–25, 159 n. 44, 198 Bible 6 Blits, Mirjam 99, 100 n. 3, 198 Book of Intimate Grammar, The 21, 199 Boyarin, Daniel and Jonathan 152 n. 33, 158, 158 nn. 41–42, 177 n. 43, 198 Breendonk 128 n. 11, 135 Browning, Christopher 103, 103 n. 12, 198

Cabbala 82–83, 95 Caruth, Cathy 167 Celan, Paul 116, 125, 125 n. 7, 132, 190 n. 49, 194, 194 n. 68–69, 198, 200 Chaplin, Charlie 125 Cheah, Pheng 145 n. 2, 198 cherem 11 Cooppan, Vilashini 149, 150 n. 26, 198 Courbet, Gustave 138, 202 Dachau 105, 108 Deleuze, Gilles 96, 96 n. 15, 198–199 Derrida, Jacques vii, ix, 183 Descartes 18 n. 13 Diaspora vi, 4, 124, 139, 151, 162–164, 169, 171–172, 174, 175–177, 180, 198 Didi-Huberman, George 80, 80 n. 1, 199 Dinesen, Isak 115 displacement of meaning 11, 22, 24 dolgan vi, 4, 15, 162, 169–170 Doorn, Boud van 100, 100 nn. 5–7, 199 Drohobycz 15, 31, 33, 42, 44–45, 56, 59, 61 n. 4, 69, 87, 156, 165, 170 Düttmann, Alexander Garcia 178, 178 nn. 2–5, 199 Eichmann, Adolf 104 Eicke, Theodor 105 Eisenstein, Paul 5 n. 1, 139, 139 n. 22, 154 n. 35, 166, 166 nn. 12–13, 167, 167 nn. 14, 16–19, 168, 168 nn. 20–23, 169 n. 24, 170, 199 Emigrants, The 3, 127, 127 n. 8, 129, 130, 132–133, 136–137, 139–141, 197, 203 ethics viii, 2, 31, 47, 49, 53, 57–58, 101, 132 n. 16, 166–167, 181 n. 19, 196 n. 81, 197, 198, 201 Ficowski, Jerzy 30 n. 5, 175, 175 n. 38, 199, 203 Freud, Sigmund viii, 108, 204 Głowacka, Dorota 72, 72 n. 30, 199 golem 66 n. 20

206

INDEX

Goody, Jack 38–39, 39 n. 14, 199 Gracchus the Hunter 4, 140 Grass, Günter 128, n. 10, 132, 132 n. 16, 197, 199 Guattari, Félix 96 Günther, Karl 6, 30 n. 5, 165, 175 gyoya vi, 4, 15, 60, 162, 169–170

53, 53 nn. 27–29, 54, 56, 56 nn. 32–33, 57, 57 n. 34, 58, 155, 176, 201–202 Lifton, Robert 103, 104 n. 13, 201 linguistic performativity 2, 32, 39 Littell, Jonathan 31 n. 8 Luria, Isaac 83, 95 luz 24

Hasidism 3, 82–84, 86, 95, 203 Hegel 18 n. 13, 23, 116, 139 n. 22, 154, 166–168, 185 n. 35, 199 Heidegger 70, 190 n. 49, 199, 201 Her Body Knows 25 n. 25, 200 Herzberg, Abel 101, 101 n. 8, 200 Hilberg, Raul 116 Hill, Geoffrey 162, 162 n. 1, 163, 200 Hitchcock, Peter 150, 150 n. 27, 200 Hitler, Adolf 7, 38, 100, 105, 120, 125, 139, 165, 180 Höss, Rudolf 3, 55, 104, 104 n. 14, 105–106, 106 n. 18, 200 humor 2, 3, 33, 77, 79, 81, 82, 121–125

magical realism 15 May, Karl 6, 104 Merle, Robert 104, 104 n. 15, 201 Messiah 15, 44–45, 157, 170, 176 Messiah, The 15, 45, 131, 157, 165, 167, 173 messianism 44–45, 51, 83, 89, 152–154, 157–160, 204 Milner, Iris 163, 163 n. 5, 202 Minco, Bill 99, 99 n. 2, 202 modernism 51, 145, 149, 151–152, 156, 159, 194, 194 n. 71, 196 n. 81 Morahg, Gilead 128 n. 9, 139 n. 22, 146 nn. 6, 10, 151 n. 31, 154 n. 38, 165–166, 166 nn. 8–11, 170, 172 n. 32, 180 nn. 11–13, 202 Munch, Edward 79

identity-formation 2, 163 irony 3, 7, 99, 102 Israel 1–2, 4, 12–13, 26, 84, 108, 124, 146–147, 149, 151, 154, 155 n. 40, 156, 158, 162–163, 169, 174, 176, 178–180, 183, 202, 204 Kafka, Franz 4, 60 n. 2, 126 n. 1, 136, 140, 194 n. 71 Kant, Immanuel 185, 198, 200, 204 Kertész, Imre 12, 115, 119 Kiefer, Anselm 3, 120 Kurpel, Diana 61, 61 n. 5, 69 n. 23, 71 nn. 28–29, 201 Lacan vii–viii, 2, 11, 11 n. 1–2, 13, 17, 17 n. 11, 18, 18 nn. 12–14, 16, 19, 19 nn. 15–17, 20, 20 nn. 18–19, 23, 90 n. 11, 127 n. 7, 198, 201 Ladyga, Zuzanna 48, 48 n. 21, 201 Landau, Felix 29, 30 n. 5, 32, 87–88, 165, 175 Lannoy, Jean-Louis 53 n. 29 Lanzmann, Claude 1, 1 n. 1, 12, 201 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 96 Levi, Primo 1, 12, 115–116, 127 n. 4 Levinas, Emmanuel viii, 2, 46–47, 47 nn. 19–20, 48–50, 50 n. 25, 51, 51 n. 26,

Nahman of Breslow 82–84 Netanyahu, Benjamin 155 n. 40, 202 Neuengamme 99, 202 New Historians 149, 166 Nietzsche, Friedrich 123 ning vi, 4, 15, 24, 44, 162, 169–170, 172–174 Obama, Barack 155 n. 40 Ohmann, Richard 30, 30 n. 6, 202 Ong, Walter 37, 37 n. 12, 40, 202 orga vi, 4, 162, 169–170 Ozick, Cynthia 129 n. 12, 171, 203 Plato 20, 39 Poel, Albert van de 99, 99 n. 1, 202 Poland viii, 2, 6, 13, 32, 198, 202 postmodernism viii, 49, 96, 145, 150, 167, 199, 201 psychoanalysis viii, 2, 11, 19–20, 20 n. 19, 32 n. 11, 108, 120, 126 n.2, 199, 201 Ricoeur, Paul 31, 31 n. 9, 35, 48, 48 n. 23, 49, 202 Rilke, Rainer Maria 61 n. 2 Robbins, Jill 48 n. 22, 53 n. 29, 202

207

INDEX Ronen, Shoshanna 43 n. 17, 45 n. 18, 202 Rosenberg, Betsy 15 n. 8, 169, 169 n. 24, 199, 200

stream of consciousness 15 Street of Crocodiles, The 24, 27, 55, 59–60, 63, 66, 72, 134, 173, 203

Sachsenhausen 105 Sanatorium 59, 60, 63, 66, 72, 173, 203 Schlink, Bernhard 132, 132 n. 16, 203 Schloss Hartheim 106 Schneider, Peter 5 n. 1, 132, 132 n. 15, 197, 199, 203 Scholem, Gerschom 83 n. 6, 95 n. 13, 203 Schulz, Bruno v, 2, 6, 15, 24, 27, 27 nn. 2–3, 28 n. 4, 29, 30 n. 5, 42, 51, 54–56, 59, 59 n. 1, 60, 60 n.2, 61, 61 n.3, 62, 62 nn. 6–8, 63, 63 nn. 10–12, 64, 64 nn. 13–15, 65 nn. 16–18, 66, 66 nn. 19–21, 67–69, 69 n. 24, 70, 70 nn. 25–26, 71–73, 72 n. 31, 79, 87–88, 93, 110, 115, 129, 131, 134, 151–154, 156–160, 165–167, 170–173, 172 nn. 32–33, 173 nn. 34–35, 174 n. 36, 175–176, 193, 193 n. 67, 198–199, 201–204 Sebald, W.G. vi–vii, 3, 126–127, 127 nn. 7–8, 128, 128 nn. 9, 11, 129, 130–132, 134–135, 135 n. 18, 136–137, 139–141, 141 n. 23, 197, 201, 203 Semprun, Jorge 115 Sereny, Gitta 104, 104 n. 16, 106, 106 n. 19, 203 Smile of the Lamb, The 20–21, 200 Sobibor 106 Sokoloff, Naomi 153 n. 34, 164 n. 6, 166 n. 11, 170, 170 n. 26, 171, 171 nn. 27–31, 172 n. 32, 203 Sophie’s Choice 125 Sophocles 117 Spinoza 11, 96, 96 n. 15, 199 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty 58, 58 n. 35, 204 Stangl, Franz 3, 104, 106, 106 n. 19, 107 Stichwörter (Adorno’s) 4, 191, 196, 196 n. 84

Tailor’s Dummies 62, 64, 66 n. 20 Taylor, Colleen M. 61 n. 3, 68 n. 22, 70, 71, 71 n. 27, 204 Terence 122 torag vi, 4, 15, 162, 169–171, 173 trauma theory 2, 108, 126 n. 2, 127 n. 5 Treblinka 104, 106, 188 n. 44, 202 tsimtsum 83, 95 Ukraine 2 Under the Sign of the Hourglass 21, 59–60, 63, 66, 72, 173, 203 Velthoven, G.J. van 100, 100 n. 4, 204 Wandering Jew 3, 137–140 Watt, Ian 38, 39 n. 14, 199 White, Edmund 14, 14 n. 7, 204 White Room iv–v, 2, 24, 29, 34–35, 55, 57, 57 n. 34, 59, 60, 62–63, 70–71, 73, 89–94, 96, 117–118, 118 n. 2, 137, 139–141, 186 n. 38 Wiesel, Elie 1, 12 Wilkomirski, Binjamin 12 n. 3, 201, 204 Wind, E. de 101, 102 n. 9, 204 Witkiewicz, Stanislaw Ignacy 71, 71 n. 27 Wolin, Richard 159, 159 nn. 46–47, 160, 204 Writing in the Dark 55, 164, 178, 184, 200 Yad Vashem 29, 59, 62, 89–90, 117–119, 137, 140 Zeno 24, 31, 137 Zionism 4, 28, 124, 146–147, 151, 154, 155 n. 40, 163, 172, 180, 189 n. 48, 202 Žižek, Slavoj ix, 25 n. 25, 181 n. 17, 204 Zohar 84