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

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