Issues of Representation (Clendinnen)

Reading the Holocaust (1999)
Inga Clendinnen

 "The doing of history, our ongoing conversation with the dead, rests in the critical evaluation of all the voices coming from the past, in our reconstruction of the circumstances of their speaking, and on our critical evaluation of our own 'natural' unexamined responses to those voices" (21).

Richard Rorty says that we need to be educated in the imaginative ability to see strange people as fellow sufferers and that with such imaginative ability we'd be readier to count the cost of our own gratifications and to  temper our quests for autonomy and abundance (163).  Clendinnen examines issues of representation in her book Reading the Holocaust where she examines the texts of various actors in the Holocaust including survivors, those in the Resistance, and, controversially, the "perpetrators" from Himmler to SS officers to Sodderkomandos. Of interests to my work is her examination of representation, specifically her concerns with fiction.

The novel has the task of reaching the moral imagination, and according to Rorty, the novel can be the prime educator of the popular imagination. Is the novel, however, seeking to extend our knowledge or assume it? Clandennen suggests there are innate difficulties in the successful literary representation of the process of genocide, specifically the Holocaust.  Such problems are with representation: any representation may appear a falsification or sentinentalisation of the general condition. In these fictions, ones that she cites as perhaps more effective than others,  it is "the reader struggling for a foothold, finding none, who is the protagonist feeling the moral vertigo investing that cursed place" (169). But  does this author of fiction have to have been there in order to write effective fiction, to reach the moral imagination? That the authors are "selecting, shaping , and inventing" out of direct participation and observation more valid than author who is inventing without having been a firsthand witness? Why is it insufficient for the author to have been a listener as Felman in Testimony might argue? And, if the author is a first hand witness, can the author create fiction and thus separate from the genre of "survival testimony"? Is fiction, in fact, a place where subjective experience can be represented with high art by a witness-artist? And if so, what happens to the testimony of witnesses who are not artists? Can't the artist be the listener in that case?

Clendinnen talks about the "been there" quality that supplies an under text of intimate moral implication never present in pure fiction. When comparing History and Fiction, she says that each establishes quite different relationships between writer and subject and writer and reader. Fiction, for example, provide access to inner thoughts and secret actions of closed others  that can teach about life; however, the fiction world contains a "curious absence" in that the only responsibility of the reader is to respond to what the text says. Clendinnen, as the reader, feelsno human responsibility towards these people saying because the characters are fiction that the compassion is fiction; you know the people are fiction. In nonfiction, however, there is no creator to strip away the characters'  veils, so the protagonist will be opaque to the reader who will engage with them differently because of the moral relationship --as a fellow human being whose blood is real and death is final (170).  Thus, Clendinnen argues, the reader assumes a different contract with the writer depending on whether the writer is "offering me fiction or claiming to report on this mundane world." Indeed, the rich accounts of physical circumstance and interior states that fiction provides are the freedoms and riches  of  the privilege of fiction not to be simulated in historical writings as it would violate the historian's unstated but binding contract both with their reader -- to stay in close contact with evidence -- and with their characters, the once real people they have chosen to represent (171).

So, Clendinnen is concerned with the costs of fiction's freedoms  claiming she has not forgiven Nabokov "for installing those images in my mind, because they are gratuitous, things of his own invention"  and that she stapled together the pages of Bend Sinister dealing with the death of David Krug (172). She is not compelled to heed the text as it is "only" fiction and that she is under no "obligation to attend" saying she could close the book (as she could do of nonfiction, too). Her point is that "we" listen differently to stories we know are "real" versus stories that are invented. While she says that we marvel at the imagination of a fiction writer and are brought to wonder at ourselves when faced with "real thought and actions," I find that she is truly dismissive of the artist endeavor of a writer who truly does intend to render real thought and action and truly does expect the reader to attend. Real thought and action coming from a survivor or a a perpetrator is a rendering of a lived experience; what of an artist who listens and then renders -- only with the skill to reach the moral imagination and create that moral vertigo in that reader?

Clendinnen does say that writing is our best bet at understanding history, but also says that the historian is best suited for this task of "speaking for the dead: because they "take this libery under the rule of the discipline, and the rule is strict"; she goes on to say that "historians must retrieve  and represent the actualities of past experience in accordance with our rule, with patience, skepticism and curiosity, and with whatever art we can muster -- provided always that the art remains subject to our rule" (182). (However, she ends her book with a poem saying the poem says "much of what I have been trying to say over these pages in as many words. ") Nevertheless, we can agree on this point: "writers must destroy silence in order to represent it" (177).  The writer -- and I think it has to be an artist - has the task of mediating an experience --in fact, all access to experience must be mediated -- but Clendinnen believes that the very words are solid representations of that which is quite obscure because memory can be unstable; nevertheless, the written word brings an "awareness of a truth that the daily work of living,  like the daily work of doing history,  tempts us to forget."

In the shadow of the Holocaust none of us is at home in the world because now we know the fragility if our content. If we are to see the Gorgon sufficiently steadily to destroy it, we cannot afford to be blinded  by reverence or abashed into silence or deflected into a search for reassuring myths. We must do more than register guilt, or grief, or anger, or disgust, because neither reverence for those who suffer nor revulsion from those who inflict this suffering will help us overcome its power to paralyze, or to see if clearly. (182)

Milan Kundera : The struggle of men against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting (183).

• We need to know both ourselves and the worlds we are capable of making if we can hope to change any pat if either. 16
• The  gorgon effect -- do not look away at the reality that it is within our human content that such atrocities happen; we are the agents -- look
• The problem of transcendence 20
• Wiesel says only survivors may speak because no one who has not experienced this event will ever be able up understand it
• Historians have to think  hard about how the documents before them relate to the actuality they are trying to retrieve and understand
• The eloquent episode: the apparently trivial moment which illuminates a world 43
• Survivor of camp- Levi; Resistance - Charlotte delbo;Sonderkommando- the prominents--mullet; Fried lander -- look at all of history's actors to understand
• To get all povs we need multiple stories why not a novel? The artist will bear witness to the testimony and render the truth
• Why should we look?  How dare we look at such degradation? What are we meant to learn from this viewing if a fellow human in extremist? 54 Such things are done because men and women willed them and were able to implement their will; we would be fools not to try to understand as precisely as we are able how that situation came about 54
• Moral imperative to be attentive
• Wood:  the unusual but not impossible demand the dead make upon the living
• Problem of asking identification: Do no ask for it. Our understanding will be as imperfect as our grasp  of all subjectivities-- we do not need identification but a long route of meandering observation, inference. And experiment 89 not attempting to identify with hitler if we are trying to understand the structure of ideology
• To understand us not to justify or excuse
• Analysts gave to attune their ears to what is in effect a new language masquerading as a familiar one: a language where a term like anti- semitism dies not mean spite or malice but the active conviction that every Jewish adult, child and infant is a dangerous enemy 93
• Banality of evil: incapable of self scrutiny, blandness of the surface presented for our inspection on the first person narrative; we need help making it accessible to our understanding in wars their -- hoess himmler- could not 107
• Cognitive imbalance-to create balance either your attitude to one or the other has to change
• Grossman - the history if warfare is the history if conditioning men to overcome their innate resistance to killing their fellow human beings
• Social plasticity if emotions alerts us to the possibilities too easily masked from us by our casual assumptions as to what constitutes the normal 126
• Habituation
• To not invoke evil or extra- human capitalisation accepts killers as human as Brownings work argues...explaining is not excusing and understanding is not forgiving... Could I have been moved to do the same? Asking this question forces us into the serious , imaginative reconstruction of a particular circumstance, temperament and personal history, and of the uncertainties haunting the whole enterprise of retrieval, which together constitute historical understanding 132
• Participatory rituals: texts in performance or acted texts are invaluable because they are public and viewable the heart made creation of whatever group it is we are trying to understand 141... Theatrical  reanimating the sense of purpose and invincibility authenticating the realism of an absurd ideology  
• Fiction offer access to the mute and silences beyond actions; we retreat to pathological psychology ... If such creatures live among us -- creatures acting beyond the theatrical  expectations-- we  must be careful to deny them the conditions and opportunities for their self realization 155