We see this lack of
conclusiveness further in the genre that Pagis employs in “Marked Car” (a
series of chronologically progressing yet non-linear poems not directly about
the Shoah). By allowing Pagis to explore the topic of the Shoah indirectly,
this genre helps him avoid running into the contradictions that defined Levi's
approach to it. As Levi himself notes (DS 24, see above) and Gubar claims
(Gubar 8), traditional narrative, because (if nothing else) of its assumption
that a narrative can be told that represents what happened in the concentration
camps and the people who died in them, necessarily fails to live up to
its expectation. By depicting moments that readers do not expect will directly
represent the Shoah, a poetics of silence can sidestep the issues we found in
Levi regarding the imperfection of language and memory in the act of
representation.[1]
Moreover, this genre forces readers to be conscious of what Derrida calls the
“limit” between testimony and proof, the crossing of which is “both forbidden
and constantly practiced” (Derrida 191). In other words, for Derrida, a
testimony never constitutes proof because it always involves a level of trust on
the part of the audience (that the person providing testimony did in fact
witness what she claims and is telling the truth about what she witnessed), yet
the audience always provides that trust and therefore assumes that the
testimony involves proof. Pagis's poetry, because it incorporates poetic
language, such that we expect it to approach its themes indirectly, and because
it deals with biblical subjects, yet is still both informed by the Shoah and
treats it as an indirect theme, forces readers to rethink exactly to what
extent to provide trust. It opens up the question, in other words: what is true
about a depiction of the Shoah if not the facts?
[1] Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi expresses a similar
idea in her conclusion to “Conversation in the Cemetery: Dan Pagis and the
Prosaics of Memory,” in which she claims that her response as a reader to the
later Pagis (who switches to prose and a much clearer discussion of memory) was
a sense that something was missing: “the absences – all the circumlocutions and
mysteries” (Ezrahi 133). The poetry, she claims, is “a poetry of unfathomable
depths poised at the borders of language” (133). Although we are more concerned
with the function of this literature in response to the Shoah, the enigmatic
writing that does not depict the real world directly that Ezrahi misses is
exactly what, given the above reading, is necessary for representing the Shoah
in a way that circumvents the pitfalls of memory and language.
