Given the above analyses, these texts' explorations of
the purpose of literature after Asuchwitz at first appear to fall into two
relatively simple categories. Whereas the themes that Adorno and Levi explore
are ultimately sociological, Pagis's is a literary exploration. Adorno's is the
most obviously sociological text, utilizing sociological (Marxist) language,
and appealing to other sociological texts, but its conclusions are, in the end,
similar to those of Levi's texts, which use literary language and appeal to
other literary texts. Both, as we have seen, are concerned with the issue of
whether Auschwitz will return and how
literature can prevent that return. For Levi, the critical issue is to
complicate people's simplistic interpretations of the Lager and its
implications. For Adorno, the issue is culture's implicit compliance with a
society that can lead to Auschwitz, while
culture also has the power to rebel against its society. Thus, both Levi and
Adorno are concerned with culture's ability to alter Western society so that it
does not allow something like Auschwitz to
recur. For Pagis, on the other hand, we do not find any such concern. His text
opens up questions about how best to approach the topic of the Shoah in thought
and literature. Thus, it is concerned with the Shoah as a textual artifact
(that opens up a host of issues regarding representation) not as a
sociological artifact (that opens up a host of issues regarding prevention).
Yet,
this binary is problematic, partly because the issues of representation and the
issues of prevention inform each other and partly because, beyond this broad
level of similarity/dissimilarity, each of these texts approaches the issues it
attempts to address in a unique way. Levi's ambivalent attitude towards memory
and language that we saw above (p. 54-5) – both are necessary yet problematic
because they are imperfect – is a bridge between representation and prevention.
Given our analysis of Levi, readers should realize that the representation of a
writer's experience of an atrocity is complicated because such a realization
will desimplify their assumptions that these atrocities can be comprehended
fully and thus dealt with and relegated to the past. One might further argue
that this issue appears in Adorno as well – that the ideological assumption
that culture is unaffected by material reality is similar to the assumption
that representation of the material world is straight-forward. Thus, instead of
understanding Levi, Adorno, and Pagis as approaching the topic of literature
after Auschwitz from entirely different
angles, we can see that Pagis is working on what for Levi and Adorno is a
necessary part of prevention: the desimplification of our approach to
representation. Pagis works on it in more depth than Levi or Adorno, and
thus questions even their own assumptions (i.e. that the best way to approach
the Shoah in literature is through direct autobiographical prose).
All
of the texts, therefore, are working on a larger communal project. The unique
ways in which they do so go beyond their different specific claims to the
different genres they employ and even the different terms they use for the Nazi
genocide. The genres they employ are a historically-grounded philosophical
treatise, a complicated combination of memoir/autobiography/essay, and a series
of poems. These three genres show the different frames through which these writers
view the problems in which they are interested. Adorno's style is most often
abstract but peppered with moments of particularity, suggesting that both the
particular and the general are important for understanding the overly-general
world after Auschwitz. Thus, his choice of
philosophical treatise in the style of German Idealism as his genre is
interesting because it mimics, through its abstract, general language, the
concentration on the abstract and the general in culture and society. By including
particular moments, and moments that arguably drive his texts (i.e. “to write
poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric” as the starting point for discussions of
literature after Auschwitz and as a starting
point for most discussions of Adorno), Adorno thus emphasizes the need to take
account of the particular in culture and society. But, by functioning in this
way, Adorno's point still remains mostly abstract and general; culture's and
society's “need to take account of the particular” is a general need, not of
any particular at all, but of the abstract, general concept of “the
particular.” Levi's genre, on the other hand, emphasizes the particular, as
opposed to Adorno’s genre’s emphasis on the total, because it is grounded in
Levi's personal (thus particular) memories. Even as his texts deal with similar
issues as Adorno's and even in similar ways, as a memoir and a set of essays
driven by memory, they emphasize the need for individuality without appealing
to general concepts like “the individual” or “the particular.” They exemplify a
particular-oriented, individualized approach to dealing with these issues.
Pagis's genre (poetry) is indirect, thus emphasizing his indirect approach to
the Shoah. Although Levi's approach to the topic of depersonalization is highly
personal, it still assumes that such depersonalization can be approached in
text and thus fits it into a (problematic) language. By looking at the topic
indirectly, Pagis's poems question whether “the particular” can be expressed
without always being a general concept and thus betraying itself. At the same
time, by approaching the topic in this way, Pagis limits himself to his
questioning. Approaching the Shoah through silence questions our assumption
that we should think about it directly but it can do little of what Levi's and
Adorno's texts do, i.e. expand upon our knowledge of the particulars of camp
life and examine what in Western society allowed, and has the potential to
again allow, Auschwitz to happen. In short, Adorno's genre allows him to spend
time working through issues like particularity and generality, but forces him
to work through them as general concepts, while Levi's genre allows him to
approach the same questions in less depth but as particular problems (problems
for him as an individual), and Pagis's genre allows him to question our ability
to ever do justice to the particular but this question disallows Pagis from
examining any other aspect of the issues of particularity and generality
(specifically in the Shoah) in any more detail.
We
see these three different ways of talking about the Nazi genocide in the terms
that each writer uses for the genocide as well. Adorno's “Auschwitz” is a
metonymic term that means both the whole of the Shoah and also Auschwitz particularly, thus itself revealing the
conflict between general and particular. At the same time, though, Adorno
conceptualizes the term by looking at the world “after Auschwitz.”
After all, it is not that the events in Auschwitz specifically have made
writing poetry barbaric, but the meaning behind Auschwitz,
the objectifying trend of which it is the horrific culmination. And, although
the events of Auschwitz elicit a physical response, thus pushing the particular
nature of Auschwitz, the physical response creates a categorical (thus
universal and conceptual) imperative, thus turning Auschwitz once more into a
concept: into “that which should never happen again.” Levi's “Lager”s and
“concetrationary world,” on the other hand, treat the genocide in its
particularity. To describe the “world” (DS 116) or “universe” (84) of
the camps emphasizes their isolation from everything else, thus suggesting that
even if the creation of the Lagers follows from societal trends (as Adorno
argues), there is still something unique to their existence that is not
apparent in the trends that preceded them. Furthermore, because the term
“Lager” is non-specific to any camp yet specific to the camps themselves (it is
the term used by those in the camps for where they were), it emphasizes the
importance of the point of view of the victim and thus of Levi's personal
memoir (which is necessarily looking at the issue from the standpoint of the
particular). In other words, it represents the problem of particular and
general, but does so from the standpoint of the particular rather than Adorno's
conceptual (and thus more general) “Auschwitz.”
Pagis's texts do not use any term to talk about the Shoah. When making any sort
of direct reference to the Shaoh, the speakers use concrete images (“tin
chimney” [“Draft of the Reparations Agreement,” l. 9]), but such references are
rare. This lack of a general term with which to talk about the Shoah shatters
the binary between particular and general, at least insofar as we can employ it
when talking about the Shoah. If we claim that Eve's writing on the marked car
is a specific instance, or that the smoke returning into the chimneys is a
general instance, Pagis's text asks us: a specific/general instance of what?
Both “general” and “particular” assume a larger whole that one can talk about
unproblematically (“the Holocaust,” “the Shoah,” “the Nazi genocide,” etc.),
where for Pagis, one's ability to talk about this larger whole is precisely the
problem.[1]
In other words, Adorno and Levi both assume that the Shoah can be discussed
(relatively) unproblematically with a single term, but for Pagis, the question
of whether and how one can represent the Shoah begins with the question of
whether and how one can talk about it, beyond its concrete events (the
chimneys, the railway cars), in the first place. In short, the terms
“Auschwitz” and “Lager” reveal a complication of the dichotomy of general and
particular, in which both become equally necessary aspects of the same whole,
while the lack of a term in Pagis questions how and whether any term can
encompass that whole.
We
therefore see the following overall points of comparison between the texts of
these three writers: Pagis is more interested in the representational issues
surrounding the Shoah, while Adorno and Levi are, on the surface, more
concerned with the prevention of future atrocities, but for Levi especially,
and to a more minor extent Adorno, the issue of representation is central to
the issue of prevention, such that Pagis's work can be viewed as a more
concentrated effort on one part of the larger project that concerns Levi and
Adorno. Adorno examines issues surrounding Auschwitz from the perspective of
the problematic society, as exemplified by his claim about the importance of
both the general and the particular, where “the general” and “the particular”
are both general concepts, while Levi works on similar issues from the
perspective of the victim forced into enlightenment, and Pagis complicates the
notion of any work on the issue at all, as exemplified by the lack of a term
for the Shoah, which suggests that a term for the images and moments that
constitute it is impossible.
[1] Although it is beyond the scope of this
paper, one might here find interesting parallels between the issue of an
unproblematic whole in Pagis and of the misrecognition of the self as whole
during the Mirror Stage in Lacan. Both are misunderstandings and both are
related to language – though for Lacan, the misrecognition in the Mirror Stage
leads to the Symbolic Stage of language
use, while it might be a stretch to claim that, for Pagis, the misrecognition
of the Shoah as unproblematic whole leads to (as opposed to being led
by) the use of singular terms about it, like “Shoah” and “Holocaust.”
