The Conflagration of Community: Fiction before and after Auschwitz
331
The Conflagration of Community: Fiction before and after Auschwitz
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Overview
“After Auschwitz to write even a single poem is barbaric.” The Conflagration of Community challenges Theodor Adorno’s famous statement about aesthetic production after the Holocaust, arguing for the possibility of literature to bear witness to extreme collective and personal experiences. J. Hillis Miller masterfully considers how novels about the Holocaust relate to fictions written before and after it, and uses theories of community from Jean-Luc Nancy and Derrida to explore the dissolution of community bonds in its wake.
Miller juxtaposes readings of books about the Holocaust—Keneally’s Schindler’s List, McEwan’s Black Dogs, Spiegelman’s Maus, and Kertész’s Fatelessness—with Kafka’s novels and Morrison’s Beloved, asking what it means to think of texts as acts of testimony. Throughout, Miller questions the resonance between the difficulty of imagining, understanding, or remembering Auschwitz—a difficulty so often a theme in records of the Holocaust—and the exasperating resistance to clear, conclusive interpretation of these novels. The Conflagration of Community is an eloquent study of literature’s value to fathoming the unfathomable.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780226527239 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Chicago Press |
| Publication date: | 08/01/2011 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 331 |
| File size: | 415 KB |
About the Author
J. Hillis Miller is Distinguished Research Professor of Comparative Literature and English at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author of many books and articles on literature and literary theory, most recently of For Derrida.
Read an Excerpt
The Conflagration of Community
Fiction before and after AuschwitzBy J. Hillis Miller
The University of Chicago Press
Copyright © 2011 The University of ChicagoAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-52722-2
Chapter One
Nancy contra StevensLe témoignage le plus important et le plus pénible du monde moderne, celui qui rassemble peut-être tous les autres témoignages que cette époque se trouve chargée d'assumer, en vertu d'on ne sait quel décret ou de quelle nécessité (car nous témoignons aussi de l'épuisement de la pensée de l'Histoire), est le témoignage de la dissolution, de la dislocation ou de la conflagration de la communauté. Jean-Luc Nancy, La communauté désoeuvrée
(The gravest and most painful testimony of the modern world, the one that possibly gathers together all other testimonies which this epoch finds itself charged with assuming, by virtue of who knows what decree or necessity [for we bear witness also to the exhaustion of thinking by way of History], is the testimony of the dissolution, the dislocation, or the conflagration of community.) Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community
We were as Danes in Denmark all day long And knew each other well, hale-hearted landsmen, For whom the outlandish was another day
Of the week, queerer than Sunday. We thought alike And that made brothers of us in a home In which we fed on being brothers, fed
And fattened as on a decorous honeycomb. This drama that we live—We lay sticky with sleep. Wallace Stevens, "The Auroras of Autumn"
This chapter builds on recent theoretical investigations of community to establish a set of tentative hypotheses for my investigations of community's conflagration in fiction before and after Auschwitz. The chapter juxtaposes, or causes to "compear," two quite different models of community. "Compear" is "a legal term that is used to designate appearing before a judge together with another person." The word will come up again later in this chapter as part of a translation of Jean-Luc Nancy's word comparution. My setting side by side, as if haled before a tribunal, of two concepts of community will provide a somewhat uneasy foundation for my investigation of community or the lack of it in some novels written before and after the Holocaust.
My initial citation is the first sentence from one of many recent philosophical or theoretical works that have reflected on what is meant by the word "community" and on what has happened to community in modern times. What Nancy says is peculiar in several ways. For one thing, he starkly opposes giving testimony and clear knowledge, such as historians are supposed to supply. Witnessing is a speech act, a performative enunciation, while "la pensée de l'Histoire" (thinking by way of History) leads to constative statements. These are statements of facts that are verifiable as true or false. We can bear witness to what has happened to community in modern times—its dissolution, dislocation, or conflagration. We cannot know it or understand it. We have to accept the burden of testifying to the conflagration of community, but we must do that by virtue of some unknown decree or necessity. Someone or something has decreed our painful obligation to bear witness to the end of community, but who or what has done that is unknown. Even the decree itself is unknown, though it obliges us implacably. We are obligated by a decree whose exact formulation and whose source of authority we cannot know.
That is exceedingly strange, if you think of it. What does it mean to be coerced by a decree or law whose wording we cannot know? Ignorance of the law is no excuse, but, still, it is unpleasant, to say the least, to be subject to a decree of which we must remain ignorant. It is a little like Joseph K.'s experience, in Kafka's The Trial, of being arrested one fine day even though he has not done anything wrong. Playing a little on the word "trial," one could even translate Nancy's assertion that we are "chargée d'assumer" (charged with assuming) this painful testimony by saying such bearing witness is a trial we must endure, even though we are not aware of having done anything wrong. This bearing witness, Nancy assures us, is so important and so painful (penible) that it seems as if it possibly involves all the other responsibilities of witnessing to which we in the modern world are subject.
A further peculiarity of Nancy's sentence is that it contradicts itself. It exemplifies the thinking by way of history that, at the same moment, it says is exhausted. The passage implies that once community existed, but now, in the modern world, community has been dissolved, dislocated, or conflagrated. Something had to be there initially to suffer those transformations. That is a historical proposition if there ever was one. It is a statement capable of being true or false. Nancy's book as a whole, moreover, contradicts this historical proposition. It does so by expressing, as is characteristic of Western philosophical thinking, its definition of an "inoperative community" as a universal human condition. Nancy's propositions, his way of stating his assertions implies, are true in all places, in all cultures, and at all times.
La communauté désoeuvrée as a whole deconstructs, if I may dare to use that word, its strikingly apodictic first sentence. A thesis/antithesis with no possible sublation, a suspended or hovering self-canceling, bears witness to the way any thought of the dissolution of community depends on the traditional idea of community it would put in question. In a reciprocal way, the traditional concept of community, as expressed, for example, in Stevens's poem, contains already its apparent opposite. You cannot have one concept of community without the other, as both Nancy and Stevens show, almost in spite of themselves.
A final peculiarity of Nancy's sentence, in its relation to the title of his book, might be expressed in two ways. (1) The terms Nancy so carefully chooses to name what has happened to community in the modern world by no means say the same thing. Each is a little strange. (2) Nancy seems to have gone out of his way to avoid using the word given worldwide currency by his friend Jacques Derrida: "deconstruction." The English translation gives La communauté désoeuvrée as The Inoperative Community, presumably because "unworked," the literal meaning of désoeuvrée, is not an ordinary English word. But "unworked," neologism or not, would much better catch the force of what Nancy wants to say in the title and in the book itself. "Inoperative" suggests a passive condition. Modern communities just do not work. They are like an inoperative piece of machinery, in need of repair. Désoeuvrée, "unworked," on the other hand, though it is used in French to describe an apparatus that is out of order, puts the stress on the process by means of which some forces or other have actively worked to dismantle community. It has not just passively happened.
"The Deconstruction of Community," in its double antithetical meaning as a simultaneous doing and undoing, constructing and taking apart, would be a good English translation of Nancy's title. Even that translation, however, would not catch the resonances of "work" in désoeuvrée, with its allusions to the Marxist or Sartrean notions of collective, communal work that has constructed communities. Marx and Sartre are important explicit references for Nancy's thinking in this book. These references embed the book in the time and place when and where it was written.
Désoeuvrée suggests that any human community has been constructed by collective human work. That work has put together roads, buildings, houses, machines of all kinds (including communication machines), institutions, laws, and conventions of family life to make a whole that we call a "community." Counterwork has been required in modern times to dismantle or deconstruct those material and immaterial elements of community. Having first been "worked," they now have had to be "unworked," as George W. Bush and his colleagues went far toward "unworking" or "deconstructing" the United States Constitution and the other laws and institutions that have held our national community together for over two hundred years as a fragile democracy—government of the people, by the people, and for the people.
Nancy's words, "dissolution," "dislocation," and "conflagration," are three not quite compatible terms for the unworking of community. Each implies a different model for what has happened.
"Dissolution" implies a disintegration of something once whole, as a dictator will "dissolve parliament" when he does not like the laws elected representatives are promulgating.
"Dislocation" implies that modern communities have been set outside or beside themselves, displaced. It is hard to grasp what Nancy may have had in mind when he used this word. Perhaps he meant a breaking of the ligatures that have held communities together as living, quasi-organic wholes, as when we say: "He dislocated his shoulder." The dislocation of community is the disarticulation of the bonds, the joints, which have held its members together.
"Conflagration" is the most striking word in the series. It suggests that the whole community has not only been dissolved, its parts disarticulated from one another. It has also been consumed, burned up. The more or less explicit allusion is to the Holocaust, which means of course "sacrificial burning," and to those crematoria at Auschwitz and Buchenwald. The Nazis did not simply work to make inoperative the Jewish communities within their Reich by dislocating through deportation millions of Jews, or by dissolving the family and community bonds that held together the inhabitants of the ghettos. They destroyed those communities altogether by murdering more than six million Jews in the gas chambers and then cremating their bodies, in an unspeakable conflagration.
Stevens's Model of Community
My second citation is from a poem by Wallace Stevens written in 1947. This was just the time when the Holocaust, as a turning point in Western history, was being assimilated into the American consciousness, insofar as that happened at all. "The Auroras of Autumn," as its title suggests, is a poem in which an autumnal conflagration of community is signaled by an uncanny display of northern lights.
The passage by Stevens I have cited movingly chants what it is like to live in a sequestered indigenous community. Stevens is an American poet who has expressed as well as any of our great writers a sense of homeland places, whether it is Hartford, Connecticut, where Stevens lived, or Pennsylvania Dutch country, where Stevens was born, or Florida, where he vacationed, or even Tennessee, as in "Anecdote of the Jar": "I placed a jar in Tennessee" (CP, 76). One thinks of all the American place-names in Stevens's poetry, for example, the magical line "The wood-doves are singing along the Perkiomen" ("Thinking of a Relation Between the Images of Metaphors," in CP, 356), or of "The Idea of Order at Key West" (CP, 128-30), or of a mention of "the thin men of Haddam," in "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" (CP, 93), or of the line "Damariscotta da da doo" ("Variations on a Summer Day," in CP, 235). "Perkiomen" is the name of a small river in Stevens's native Pennsylvania. Haddam is the name of a small town in Connecticut. Damariscotta is the name of a coastal village in Maine. It is a Native American name meaning "river of little fish." The list could be extended. Stevens's early poem "Sunday Morning" (CP, 66-70) celebrates the particularities of the United States landscape as determining the life that is lived there. Many others of Stevens' poems do the same, as in the line "The natives of the rain are rainy men" ("The Comedian as the Letter C," in CP, 37).
Just what are the salient features of an indigenous community, according to Stevens? I say "indigenous community" because Stevens stresses that it is an experience shared by a "we": "We were as Danes in Denmark all day long." This assumption that the indigene lives in a community of other indigenes like himself or herself is one main feature of Stevens's indigene ideology. To be an indigene is to be part of a collectivity and to have collective experience. An indigenous community, moreover, is located in a place, a milieu, an environment, an ecosystem. This milieu is cut off from the outside world, the "outlandish," the "queer," one might almost say the uncanny, in the sense implied by the German word unheimlich, literally "unhomelike," "unhomey." Indigenes are "hale-hearted landsmen." They belong to the land, to its rocks, rivers, trees, soil, birds, fish, animals, and to ways of living on the land. They would feel uprooted if they moved elsewhere. The indigene feels at home in his place, as Danes feel at home in Denmark, or as bees are at home in their honeycomb.
To be an indigene is to be innocent, childlike, almost as if asleep while awake. This innocence is like that of Adam and Eve before the Fall. The indigenes know not good and evil. They do not suffer the "enigma of the guilty dream" that persecutes fallen men and women, for example, the terrifying (but perhaps secretly attractive) Oedipal male dream of having killed one's father and slept with one's mother. "Enigma" refers perhaps to the Sphynx's riddle that Oedipus solved, but also to the Delphic oracle's prediction to Oedipus that he is destined to slay his father and sleep with his mother. Indigenes lack self-consciousness, as though they were sleepwalkers. They are "sticky with sleep." "Sticky" here is associated with the decorous honeycomb on which the indigenes feed. Their at-home-ness makes their milieu a kind of sleep-inducing narcotic, as eating the honey they have made puts bees to sleep.
Not only are the indigenes not aware of themselves, with the painful self-awareness and habit of guilty introspection that is supposed to characterize Western peoples. The indigenes are also not aware of their environment, in the sense of holding it at arm's length and analyzing it. They take their milieu for granted as something that has always been there and always will be, eternally, as Denmark is for the Danes, according to Stevens. The resistance to the evidence of global warming may be generated in part by this mythical assumption that our environment is unchangeable, endlessly renewable. Why does Stevens choose Danes as exemplary of an indigenous community? I suppose because they live in a small country, have a relatively homogenous culture, and speak a "minority" language that cuts them off from others. That fits most people's idea of an indigenous community.
To mention language leads me to note that language plays a crucial role in Stevens's description. An indigenous community is created not just through shared ways of living, building, and farming on a particular homeland soil. It is also created out of language, by way of language, a particular language that belongs to that place. One radical effect of the global hegemony of Western cultural capital is to endanger, if not extinguish, so-called minority languages everywhere. The indigenous peoples who inhabited the state of Maine, where I live in the United States, had dwelled here for as much as twelve thousand years before the white man came. By "here" I mean right here, within a mile of where I am writing this. On a nearby shore there is a large shell midden going back at least seven thousand years. We eradicated most of the indigenes and their cultures in a couple of centuries. Only a few still speak the "native languages" of the Penobscots or the Micmacs. Their goal is often to run gambling casinos, hardly consonant with maintaining their "native culture." To shift to the other coast, a dozen indigenous languages often disappear forever in California in a single year, as the last "native speaker" of each one of them dies. Apparently languages cannot be resuscitated when no one is left who has learned the language as a baby. Learning a language from a recording or from a grammar book does not bring a dead language back to life.
(Continues...)
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Table of Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
Part One: Theories of Community
1 Nancy contra Stevens
Part Two: Franz Kafka: Premonitions of Auschwitz
2 Foreshadowings of Auschwitz in Kafka’s Writings
3 The Breakdown of Community and the Disabling of Speech Acts in Kafka’s The Trial
4 The Castle: No Mitsein, No Verifiable Interpretation
Part Three: Holocaust Novels
Prologue: Community in Fiction after Auschwitz
5 Three Novels about the Shoah
6 Imre Kertész’s Fatelessness: Fiction as Testimony
Part Four: Fiction after Auschwitz
7 Morrison’s Beloved
Coda
Notes
Index