For Adorno, culture has at
least three properties: it is a form of cultural criticism, such that it both
serves society and always has the potential to rebel against it; it is the product
of both mental and material work and only conceives of itself as guiltless in
the face of the ever-objectifying society by ignoring its material component;
and its ideology (and that supported by cultural criticism) is that cultural
artifacts are nothing but goods with more or less value in the commercial
world. Given
these attributes of culture, culture has a unique purpose when faced with a
society that allows atrocities like Auschwitz to occur and the categorical
imperative that we must do what we can to prevent future occurrences of
Auschwitz: because it is a form of cultural criticism, it has the power to, and
therefore should, rebel against contemporary society, partly by
admitting its guilt within its system and partly by abandoning its ideology. Yet,
at the same time, insofar as culture is self-contradictory (and moreover,
because it is enmeshed in the material world that brings it into existence), it
necessarily fails at its purpose. It should have as a goal subverting
contemporary society and yet its other goal is always to perpetuate it. Thus,
its purpose is self-contradictory.
Levi
identifies (at least) five functions for his literature. It should
function as a memoir (providing an account of his experiences); it should
examine the state of mind that led to and existed at all levels within the
Lager; it should desimplify common assumptions that allow the general
population to treat the Lager as an atrocity that is easily understood or
entirely in the past; it should put Levi's memory into language (provide
testimony); and it should examine two specific questions about the Lager – will
it return, and what can we do to prevent that return? These five functions can
be turned into four goals for literature in general. Literature should: consist
of narratives that help us understand how the Lager came to be and what
happened there; work to desimplify any unjustly and untruthfully simple
conceptions of the world; create a collective history of the Lager, of as many
of the stories that took place there as possible; and attempt to prevent any
atrocity like the Lager from recurring by doing all of the above. Yet such a
generalization into “literature should”s is unfair to Levi, whose project is
highly personal and a response to the depersonalization that took place in the
Lager. Thus, although his texts suggest changes in society that all literature
after the Lager can help create, the purposes he identifies are at the same
time personal purposes for Levi's texts specifically, not for literature in
general.
We
found two themes related to the Shoah in Pagis's poems: silence and biblical
allusion as ways of approaching the Shoah that make interesting points about
it; and the Shoah as embodying a broader conflict between earth and heaven, but
one that is grounded in the specific conflict between victim and perpetrator of
the Shoah. The overarching function in Pagis's literature in which both of
these themes fall is the questioning of assumptions and specifically
assumptions about how one can and should go about representing the Shoah. We
then find two general functions for literature. It should explore a topic
indirectly and by doing so question assumptions about that topic. Specifically
when dealing with the topic of the Shoah, literature should make indirect reference
to it and thereby bring into question even the assumption that the events that
took place can be narrated.
