The Literary Imagination (Langer)

1937, Guernica by Picasso on display at MOMO

The Holocaust and the Literary Imagination (1975)
Lawrence L. Langer

"The very dilemma which has inspired so much critical controversy -- a univers concentrationnaire which refuses to be subjugated by the rules of traditional rhetoric, but which asserts the essential realities of its hell in spite of the dry husks of verbal formulae which contain or express them" (63).

Langer's contribution to literary criticism is his genre of "literature of atrocity"; he asks his readers to consider what it has achieved,  and he wants to call this body of literature to the attention of readers. He is interested in how a writer has devised an idiom and a style for the unspeakable. This book attempts to impose some critical order on a selected imaginative works around the themes of

•  the aesthetic problem of reconciling normalcy with horror;
• the displacement of the consciousness if life by the immanence and pervasiveness if death;
•  the violation of childhood; 
• the assault on physical reality; 
• the distinction of rational intelligence; and 
• the disruption of chronological time.

He begins with an examination of Art saying that it is not its "transfiguration of empirical reality but its disfiguration, the conscious and deliberate alienation of the reader's sensibilities from the world of the usual and familiar, with an accompanying infiltration into the work if the grotesque, the senseless, and the unimaginable,to  such a degree that the possibility of aesthetic pleasure ...is intrinsically eliminated" (3).  The uncertain nature of the experience recorded, combined with the reader's feeling of puzzled involvement in it, prohibits Adorno's well cited fear that there should be no poetry after Auschwitz in that the reader may discern in the inconceivable fate of the victims. The principle of aesthetic stylization such as the sequence and structure is one way that art forces us to search for more adequate basis for apprehending the human suffering because it leaves us with mystery and silence. Art performs the paradox of incomprehension despite the logic of language and structure. If we consider the forces of historical fact and imaginative truth, Langer offers that we will see that literature is never wholly invented and never wholly factual --the task of the artist, then, is making such reality possible for the imagination.

Langer quotes Gilman: "If anything, literature, like all art, is the account of what history has failed to produce on its own, so that men had to step in to make good the deficiency" (9). The deficiency is, I think, what Langer calls the "unity of impression." Cleary, the Holocaust experience cannot evoke it; "art of atrocity is unsettling art indifferent to the peace that passeth understanding and intent only on reclaiming for the present, not the experience of the horror itself...but a framework for responding to it, for making if imaginatively (if not literally) accessible... wrestling from silence the language that had survived its fearful events but lacked the eloquence and precision of vocabulary to describe it" (13). The language that was wrestling from the silence, however, comes with a distrust for sufficiency of language.Langer quotes Steiner who actually thinks that the art of literature can do something that testimony cannot. Steiner suggests that perhaps it is only those who had no part in the events who can focus in them rationally and imaginatively; to those who experienced the thing, it has lost the hard edges if possibility, it has stepped outside the real (20). However, Langer reminds us that some survivors became writers because they arrived at a different conclusion (Levi).

Normalcy and Horror: Langer then moves to examining the difference between violence and atrocity. What event occurs for "no apparent reason"? An explicable event :in the sense that a cause and effect exist the connection between agent and victims is clear and suffering seems to be a direct consequence of the impetus behind it. Atrocity, on the other hand, has its consequences in excess of the situations that  inspired them; but because its literary expression is rooted in a historical reality  that haunts the reader we cannot dismiss it as we might some other literature from Dickens or Poe. This conclusion goes against that of Clendinnen who can easily dismiss fiction and does not feel obligated to attend to it as she does testimony or "purely" historical texts. Therefore, Langer says that the task of artist is to find a form and style to present the atmosphere or landscape of atrocity to make it compelling, to coax the reader into credulity- and ultimately, complicity. The task of the critic, then, is not to ask whether it should be done since it had been but to ask how it had been done, to judge its effectiveness and analyze its implications for literature and society (22).

Pervasiveness of Death: Literature of atrocity "reverses the customary growth toward insight that fiction has trained the imagination to expect by transforming death into a vital image and reducing life to an aborted journey" (65). The narrator of the fiction is forced by the discovery of death what it means to die and "the state of insane desolation to which we are reduced when life is done." The melancholy conclusion of the literature of atrocity offers death as a collective tragedy altering the meaning of life. Langer examines Pierre Gascar's The Season of the Dead  to explore the narrator confrontation between the pre-Holocaust reality and the l'univers concentrationnarire. Gascar uses language to "lure the imagination" but we see the experience of the narrator alientates him from himself and his values, so Langer asks "what effect must it have on his audience?" Langer writes, ""Gascar chooses his metaphors and similes as weapons to assault the sensibilities and break down any remaining reluctance on the part of the reader to accept the 'abnormal' world of his fiction as an accurate reflection of modern reality" (68).

• Can art indeed conjure a reality that itself must remain forever unredeemable? It has made an attempt groping toward a possibility that tests its resourcefulness and perhaps defines its limitations.
• Aesthetic distance or indifference: indifference is a failure of the artists imagination ti seduce the spectator into a feeling of complicity with the material of his drama
• Complicity what does Langer mean!
• Using historical evidence: piling atrocity on atrocity without imaginative orientation for the development of the  human faculty to be disoriented ; the artist can make the testimony accessible  yet leave the inhabitants of the literary edifice incredulous and dismayed --- talking about the failure of The Investigation
• Literature of innuendo : author were conspiring with his readers to recapture an atmosphere of insane misery which they somehow shared, without wishing to name or describe it in detail
• Imagery of insulation: insulation separating two worlds and the effect of one upon the other and the reverse... The colors, the time, the temperature , the textures, the clarity or veiling... Shades and tones of sketching visions of the unspeakable  43
• Verisimilitude is insufficient: some quality of the fantastic stylistic or descriptive become essential; precise details may overlook the existence in a middle realm between life and death with its ambiguous and inconsistent appeals ti survival and extinction which continuously undermined the logic if experience without offering any satisfactory alternative--- distortions wrought by their veils if fantasy only illuminate the terrors of the reality with an unholier flow 43
• Dreams as an answer to problems of characterization  and style which novelists exploiting this material will have to confront-- the creation of  characters with divided and often uncomplimentary sensibilities, passive, or with exaggerated impulses like capacity for cruelty-- dream exposé something about the mental states and motives--but the have to be surrealistic and fragmentary where rational details are brought into fantastic juxtapositions and made more rather than less coherent   --- it is unlike other fiction compelled to employ the implications of fact to create its unique aesthetic appeal46
• Irrrealism: impact of holocaust on dreams of survivors and then use dreams or surreal to capture the disorientation
• Death in this genre is not concerned with whether one must die it that one must die- the question of other fictions and the growth focused readers-- but how it would happen, so the artist is faced within fusing literature with a sense of dying unimaginable in pre- holocaust

• The reader will experience what Clendinnen calls the Gorgon effect. The discomfort engendered by the uncertainties that will account for the psychological and emotional rejection provoked by the content of the literature of atrocity, and I would argue that the content of literature is quite different than that of ' history."  The reader, if he persists and does not reject as in the Gorgon effect, becomes a temporary inhabitant of uc recreating in collaboration with the artist the features of reality that history had declared extinct but which continue to haunt the memory and imagination with echoes of unquenchable despair 73.   I don't think you can go this far as to say the reader inhabits

• Eric Kahler--"true art create a new reality as a new sphere of conscious life; true art has an exploratory quality; true art  lifts into the  light of our consciousness a state of affairs,a layer of existence, that was dormant in the depth of our unconscious that was buried under obsolete forms, conventions, habits of thought and experience."

• Anne Frank does not pretend to concern itself with the uniqueness of the reality transforming  life outside the attic walls that insulated her vision confirming the sentimentality of an audience that pursues Anne's reality that us unable or unwilling to peer beyond the end of her tale to the new reality symbolized by her wretched death 77
• Night challenges her (Anne's) epitaph about believing people are good; the difficult struggle between language and truth that every author must engage in and the important distinctions it draws between the holocaust itself and it's tale; what really happened and what we tell about what happened... The power of the imagination to evoke an atmosphere does far more than the historian's fidelity to fact to involve the uninitiated reader in the atmosphere of the holocaust 79; Wiesel the writer has transcended history and autobiography and used the imagery if atrocity and his own experience to involve the non participant in the essence of its world
• With historical info - numbers, places, names- cease to affect the mind or imagination not because they lack significance but  because the mind and imagination lack a suitable context for the information; thus Wiesel focuses on the implications and selects scenes and feelings creating an indispensable vestibule for anyone wishing to venture farther into it 83

• Schizophrenic art the art of atrocity 88

• Fiction: scenic organization, characterization through dialogue, periodic. Lunacies, elimination of superfluous or repetitive episodes, ability to arouse empathy of his readers, which elusive to writers bound by fidelity to fact...and I would argue that fact is just as elusive and does not access the  imagination that I'd capable of empathy; to evoke rather than describe the  two world- pre and during holocaust

• Inadequacy of this supposed  common consciousness: authors had to fight a reader reluctance based nit on an inability to understand but on the alleged assumption of the reader that he understood it too well, that there is little need to burden the human imagination with further morbid explorations of horrible reality which anyone with s long memory is ready aquainted 91

• Problem of tension: actuality events that literally occurred and reality the attempts of the mind to absorb such events into literary harmony or to compose a new dissonance that make endurable and meaningful to the imaginative ear 92
• The theoretical dilemma of the suffering of children: have characters bear literary witness to a portion of reality which eluded classification among conceivable and endurable human experience;iterate technique is contrived descriptive realism designed to offend the reader's sense of justice 131

• Dostoevsky and Camus dramatize child suffering from the point of view of adult visions; neither had attempted to recreate the universe of their suffering from the pov of the children's confused and tormented eyes; the resulting concentration and intensity of outlook ANd action would have imposed limitations too restrictive to the artistic designs if their works 133--the child not capable of mature insight but this world would result in the new imaginative world which Camus anticipated when he called in the artists of his time  to create dangerously:' an equilibrium between reality and man's rejection of that reality... Different from the everyday world and yet the same, particular yet universal, full of innocent insecurity' 134

• Fiction will leave confusions in a void of uncertainty-- the same void characters inhabit and in turn reproduces the atmosphere if baffled apprehension  139; the behavior of children as children is consistently framed by fear as their inner desire to retain the securities of their youth impinges on the oppression that disrupts the normalcy of their lives; let's pretend only intensifies fright

• The moment one speaks of the reality of the holocaust, one is compelled to include its unreality find the two coexist as a fundamental principle of creation; the style of the modern novel does not seek to inform  as dues the chronicle, the testimony offered in evidence, or the scientific report, it constitutes reality. It never knows what it is seeking, it is ignorant if what it had to say; it is invention, invention of the world and if man, constant invention and perpetual interrogation Alain Robert-grilley- for a new novel, essays on fiction 1965

• Bewitching paradox if the art of atrocity: like music it depends on sound  not stillness for its aesthetic effect  , starts with a harmony. Includes familiar associations  then adds dissonance( as should teaching) that abruptly undercuts the continuity and produces an intellectual  shock ... Lacking verbal equivalent that resounds fr the silence through its absence; two worlds collide in unspoken dialogue

• Endings-- lit if atrocity dies not have to be specific not could it be since the very nature of the reality it seeks to apprehend repudiates the mind's attempt to organize its insights into s comprehensive pattern or to suggest an interpretation of the events if the fiction consistent with the expectations of reason or tradition 163

• Ending and reader: speechless with a giant silence of the brain and a paralysis of the emotions rather than empathy is with the literature of atrocity substitutes for Aristotle's idea of predation not the green leaf of having shared the tragic destiny of the heroic a fallible human character but I kind of stupefied uncertainty as to whether or not the events we have encountered have actually occurred and so as fantasy or reflection of authentic experience 164

• Suffering of victims:  the specific forces behind he suffering of the victims are as anonymous as they themselves are destined to become and the choice of children as victims compounds the anonymity and intensifies the atmosphere of intimidation

• Metaphor and Extreme youth -- an opportunity to trace the evolution of a still unformed human creature's response to atrocity with immediacy because of the imaginative universe using metaphor as a device for evoking the atmosphere of terror; rather than diminishing. The evil and horror if the real atrocities they make them feel less strange less unique and less alien... So more terrible and  more tolerable

• The author may have nothing to do with the literary experience but reflects the philosophy of the reader who sees himself as a potential victim and flees from the consequence if this possibility -- clendinnen's gorgon effect 175

• the question of deciphering motive-- fiction can help us humanity's dilemma in trying to account for the unaccountable and the lengths we will go rather than accept the possibility of the pure will to torture and destruction as a valid expression of human instinct under certain historical and psychological circumstances 179

• Discard implied action through dialogue and draw the reader into the physical substance of reality; words are illusory veils that disintegrate upon touch penetrating the intellectual facade of the reader as spectator and reaches the organs and nerve ends of his being  dissipating aesthetic distance and creating a reader engage a direct emotional participant in the experience if atrocity 182

• parody of Bildungsroman: parody this that educates a youthful protagonist in the ways of society so that he may enter into some kind of productive or creative alliance with it.... A bleak, hostile, Solitary future 189

• Temporality: The tragedy of a crime always remains with the living 190

Chronological : exploring precedents in time

Antichronological-- inner world- a sundering of each generation from the other; the unique quality of the evil rife during this period entrenched it in the private mind disqualifying it from the possibility of shared experience of communal suffering; time not as an indefinite continuous concept but as separate units which; must not be related and become history 273( missing link that joins cause to effect and reason to result ; external rituals that displaced the active inner moral life 282

Nonchronological - one event while the narrator reaches backward on time and forward establishing s fictional pattern that deliberately violates normal sequence without substituting any definable, alternative temporal scheme yo guide the floundering reader  285; Reader must learn to recognize the unannounced time shifts by the allusions that mark it a technique to suggest the voyage to Buchenwald and the camp experience have severed past from future-- the reality of a nightmare; once inside this experience one never entirely regains the feeling of being outside