Cultural
criticism finds itself faced with the final stage of the dialectic of culture
and barbarism. To write poetry after Auschwitz
is barbaric. And this corrodes even the knowledge of why it has become
impossible to write poetry today.
- Theodor Adorno (CCS 34)
According
to Efraim Sicher, Adorno's claim that “to write poetry after Auschwitz is
barbaric” (CCS 34) is the conventional starting point for discussions about
writing after Auschwitz (Sicher, 299). This claim, however, is interpreted in a
variety of ways. Adrienne Rich claims that Adorno “may have forgotten the
ancient role of poetry in keeping memory and spiritual community alive. On the
other hand, his remark might be pondered by all poets who too fluently find
language for what they have not yet absorbed, who see human suffering as
'material'” (Rich 141). By claiming that Adorno has forgotten the “ancient role” of poetry, Rich suggests
that Adorno’s claim is about what poetry can do. In other words, assuming that Rich
is disagreeing with Adorno in this claim, she implies that Adorno’s claim is
that poetry does not fulfill its
role. This interpretation of Adorno’s claim assumes that Adorno’s claim is
about poetry’s inability to do something after Auschwitz
(that it could perhaps do beforehand). It assumes, in short, that Adorno’s
claim is about the function of
poetry. Joseph Brodsky argues in “Uncommon Visage” (a 1987 Nobel lecture) that
he and his contemporaries have comprehended and rejected the temptation of
discussing the obvious because these discussions too easily give people the
sensation that they are right and that this comprehension and rejection is one
of the sources of their literature (Brodsky 54-5). For this reason, he argues,
contemporary literature is a rejection of neither history nor memory, such that
the answer to Adorno's “inquiry” into whether one can write poetry after Auschwitz is affirmative. Indeed, “the generation to
which I belong has proven capable of writing that poetry” (55). Here, Brodsky's
disagreement with Adorno's claim (veiled as an answer to Adorno's inquiry) is
based on the assumption that Adorno means that poetry cannot take into account
the history and memory of Auschwitz. In other
words, for Brodsky, Adorno's claim is a literal one meaning that it is
impossible in contemporary Western society to write a particular kind of
poetry: poetry that can take into account the recent history of this society.
But, because Brodsky and his contemporaries have written poetry that does
take these things into account, Brodsky believes that Adorno's claim is
incorrect. Naomi Mandel's reading of Adorno's claim differs drastically from
these two. “It is this crucial complicity of contemporary culture after Auschwitz that lies behind Adorno's declaration of the
Holocaust as unspeakable” (Mandel 222), yet (if we take Adorno seriously)
“contemporary culture must 'speak the unspeakable'...: effacing the possibility
of guiltlessness and addressing the issue of contemporary culture's complicity
with its history” (223). For her, then, Adorno's claim has two equally
important parts: contemporary culture – along with the poetry that is part of
it – is complicit in the history that led to Auschwitz; and treating Auschwitz as ineffable (i.e. not speaking/writing about
it) allows contemporary culture to feign guiltlessness in its complicity. In
other words, poetry is both complicit with barbarism and at the same time
necessary if we are to acknowledge culture's complicity with barbarism.
Although
none of these interpretations are able to account for all of the evidence
around Adorno's claim about poetry and Auschwitz, each of them touches on an
important attribute of the quotation, and reconciling them all gives us a better
understanding of what is going on in the quotation. I will argue that Adorno's
claim is three things at once: 1) a worry that poetry's function is becoming
more impossible (similar to Rich's and Brodsky's reading of Adorno's claim as
one about purpose); 2) an example of what it means for art to be
self-contradictory (which leads to Mandel's claim that it is both ineffable and
necessary); and 3) an emphasis on the problematic binary of particularity and
totality (which is, according to writers like J. M. Bernstein, central to
Adorno's theory). An analysis of the style of the claim in turn emphasizes the
three interpretations and his overall argument throughout CCS.
