Читать книгу Reading (in) the Holocaust - Malgorzata Wójcik-Dudek - Страница 12

As postmemory, the notion coined by Hirsch, simultaneously refers to the present and to the future, it is invaluable in exploring the history of Holocaust representations, supporting in this way the construction of a history of historiography which encompasses the narratives of several generations of historians and artists. Ironically speaking, the Shoah has a future, as it were, which Norman Finkelstein showed quite uncompromisingly in his controversial The Holocaust Industry, where the Holocaust – or, more precisely, the memory of the Holocaust – was envisioned as an effectively working, profit-generating mechanism. Things being the way they are, Finkelstein appealed to his (our) contemporaries to perform “the noblest gesture” for the six million Holocaust victims, that is, “to preserve their memory, learn from their suffering and let them finally rest in peace.”⁷

This is quite a radical suggestion and it stands a rather slim chance of being followed,⁸ although researchers agree that while the powerful appeal which the Holocaust testimonies initially had has not subsided perhaps, the ways in which this potency is hoarded and used have profoundly changed. Berel Lang, who sharply criticises the subjectivity and figurativeness of literary discourse, which is after all a testimony to the second generation’s altered attitude to the memory of the Holocaust, insists that “the most valuable […] writings about the Nazi genocide appear in the form of historical discourse,”⁹ and though this discourse will continue to develop, “admittedly, a second and third generation of memories ←13 | 14→[…] have since added their identities to the event itself […] an incentive to art and reflection.”¹⁰

The strict position adopted by Lang, who basically denied all those who have not experienced the Holocaust personally any right to narrative, could not but invite incisive criticism. Hayden White, one of Lang’s most vehement polemicists, insisted that there were no objective facts and historiography was always an interpretation. His famous dictum that “[t];here is an inexpungable relativity in every representation of historical phenomena”¹¹ initiated explorations of historical prose, or rather of a postmodernist genre of the (neo)historical novel which produces historiographic metafiction that typically shows the historical embedment of fiction and the discursive structuring of history.¹² According to White, the chief (if not the only) purpose of the narrative form is to facilitate the absorption of information.¹³ Consequently, if historiography is inescapably figurative, there is no avoiding metaphorisation in any accounts of the Holocaust experience.¹⁴

The concept of the narrativity of history proved revolutionary vis-à-vis Holocaust representations; it also invaluably contributed to the idea of the ethical shift which was taking place in historiography and was embodied first and foremost in a heightened alertness to the positioning of the knowing subject and his/her attitude to the object of knowing.¹⁵ Specifically, White’s theory undermined the belief in the objectivity of depictions of the past and in the transparency of language as a medium, instead offering reflection on the narrative structures underpinned by metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche and irony.

←14 | 15→

Frank Ankersmit, a practitioner of late narrativism, has gone a step further. The Dutch philosopher has developed a concept of historical experience which originates in contact with an object that offers direct access to the past. Thereby, Ankersmit proposes going beyond narrative and becoming receptive to a specific revelation of the past. This means that post-postmodernist history should focus on experience comprehended as a sublime relation with the past. Such a concept of history demands that accounts of the past use aesthetic categories rather than epistemological ones, a notion that triggered immediate criticism from historians.¹⁶

Undoubtedly, postmemorial practices can also easily be accused of appropriating the past because, as Hirsch explains, the link between postmemory and the past is established through imagination, projection and creation, rather than through recollection.¹⁷ It is precisely the concept of recall that will exert a considerable, differential influence on the shape, or rather shapes, of memory, because “in the model Hirsch proposes, it is essential to register the temporal and qualitative difference between the memories of the first and second generations of the Holocaust. Postmemory is memory which is in a sense belated, even vicarious, as Hirsch puts it, in relation to the memory of the Survivors, for one of its goals is to work through the parents’ trauma anew, something they have failed to do themselves.”¹⁸

According to Joanna Tokarska-Bakir, the definition of postmemory should be extended to include displacement as its vital factor, because memory is concretised in a symbolic space and time, which turn out to be, as it were, a replacement of the past. Tokarska-Bakir claims that this displacement is caused by the fact that the actual Holocaust survivors,¹⁹ who have instilled certain models of Holocaust representations in the second generation, are inevitably passing away. Consequently, the depositaries of such interpretations of the past are understandably challenged to remember the Shoah otherwise than it ←15 | 16→was transmitted to them.²⁰ Multiple synonyms of postmemory are invented in repeated attempts to capture this transfer of narrative from parents to children; notable examples include absent memory, belated memory, inherited memory, prosthetic memory, memory of ashes and the like.²¹

In the course of time, principles channelling intergenerational communication were established and endorsed in the space of postmemory; consequently, the necessary conditions of mutual understanding were met, such as the development of the same system of meanings for communication participants; attentive listening to the sender of the message; and the negotiation of an agreement among the communication participants. Of course, in the context of the second generation’s postmemory, these principles of Luhmann’s communication model could not be expected to be accurately implemented, because the survivors, as a rule, tended either to be silent or to rely on severely restrictive narrative practices. What was needed was a new model of writing that was compatible with the experiences of the second generation and, at the same time, addressed to the subsequent one. Aesthetically shocking tales of the children of survivors were primarily supposed to fulfil a therapeutic function.

This process is perfectly encapsulated in David Grossman’s novel See Under: Love. One of its parts, entitled “Momik,” is a profound analysis of relationships between a child who has been raised in complete ignorance of the Holocaust, which directly affected his grandfather, and the adults entangled in the conspiracy of silence. Momik endeavours to release the “Nazi Beast” all by himself in order to deal with it once and for all. For this purpose, he hurts the animals he keeps shut in the basement of his house, yet as cruelty does not bring him any closer to the truth about the Holocaust, Momik attempts to grasp it by reading. However, even though he reads avidly and assiduously, he still cannot comprehend the passivity of his grandfather and other victims of Nazi oppression. He grows alienated from his loved ones and eventually goes away to school, losing contact with them, which ultimately precludes the discovery of truth.

According to Shoshana Ronen, Grossman’s novel includes an array of topoi which were later mandatory in the literature of the second generation: a child protagonist who grows up in a traumatised family, the silence of adults which forces him/her to construct a biography of his/her own, being named after a murdered family member, the feeling of estrangement and a sense of the loss of ←16 | 17→childhood.²² These thematic concerns seem universal and can also be found outside of Israeli literature, which Ronen examines.

In Poland, books by authors who survived the Holocaust as children have also been published, particularly after 1989, side by side with the texts produced by such writers as Henryk Grynberg, for whom the Holocaust has always been the axis of literary narrative. Among them are Michał Głowiński and Wilhelm Dichter, members of so-called generation 1.5.²³ Still, crucial to investigations of postmemory are rather the voices of the second generation: Magdalena Tulli, Ewa Kuryluk, Agata Tuszyńska and Bożena Keff. It was actually in the new trends of representing the Holocaust that Przemysław Czapliński noticed an opportunity for forging a new language,²⁴ even if it were to involve a risk of profanation, for profanation actually makes inquiry into the sacrum of the Holocaust possible.²⁵ Therefore, the writings of the second generation can be considered to have broken the parental monopoly on the Holocaust narrative. Today, we are ←17 | 18→rather faced with the representations fashioned by the third generation – people of both Jewish and non-Jewish descent (e.g. the work of Piotr Paziński, Mariusz Sieniewicz or Igor Ostachowicz).

Pondering the changes in writing about the Holocaust, Michał Głowiński distinguishes three stages, which were dominated, respectively, by documentary writing, narratives akin to the literature of a personal document, and counterfactual, highly conceptual, post-Holocaust literature.²⁶ This trajectory of aesthetic transformation has been compellingly captured by Czapliński: “We live on […] the sublimity we remember from literature. And as we produce history modelled on the books we have read, the past we have matches the library we hold in our minds.”²⁷

Thus, if Czapliński announces the end of grand narratives, his proclamation would seem to herald the waning of the communal historical narrative which has engendered a sense of group identity.²⁸ Yet Czapliński states that small narratives, published with increasing frequency and read with increasing eagerness, as they are, can gain in significance only if society is permeated by an urge for expiation, that is, for articulating one’s own individual truth.

It is thus no coincidence that the beginning of the new millennium abounded in literary writings about the Holocaust, many of which were to prove extremely important. This discourse was joined by survivors and members of the second and third generations, as well as historians, which certainly boosted the popularity of this theme and enhanced the diversity of its literary representations. This tendency was especially vividly manifested in shortlists for Poland’s prestigious literary prizes. In 2000, as many as three out of the eight books shortlisted for the NIKE Literary Award, one of the most coveted distinctions in Poland, addressed ←18 | 19→the vicissitudes of Polish-Jewish history: Osmaleni (Scorched)²⁹ by Irit Amiel, Tworki (Tworki) by Marek Bieńczyk and Szkoła bezbożników (The Atheists’ School) by Wilhelm Dichter. The following year’s shortlist was similar: out of its twenty titles, no fewer than five concerned the Shoah or other Jewish themes: Sąsiedzi (Neighbors) by Jan Tomasz Gross, Memorbuch by Henryk Grynberg, Z Auszwicu do Belsen [From Auschwitz to Belsen] by Marian Pankowski, U progu Zagłady (On the Threshold of the Holocaust) by Tomasz Szarota and Zmierzchy i poranki [Dusk and Dawn] by Piotr Szewc. In 2002, a year when biographies and autobiographies proliferated unprecedentedly, the NIKE shortlist included Wspomnienia wojenne (Those Who Trespass against Us: One Woman’s War against the Nazis) by Karolina Lanckorońska, Postać z cieniem [The Figure with a Shadow] by Bożena Umińska, Nożyk profesora [The Professor’s Penknife] – Tadeusz Różewicz’s volume of poetry and W ogrodzie pamięci (In the Garden of Memory) by Joanna Olczak-Ronikier.³⁰ This seems to be a well-entrenched tendency as, year in and year out, books exploring Jewish themes abundantly make their way to the shortlist of the NIKE Literary Prize, with recent nominees including Rejwach [Uproar] by Mikołaj Grynberg, Sendlerowa. W ukryciu [Irena Sendler: In Hiding] by Anna Bikont and Duchy Jeremiego [Jeremy’s Ghosts] by Robert Rient.

In all probability, the novels listed above represent “memory regained”³¹ (as distinguished and thoroughly discussed by Michael C. Steinlauf), which is capable of engendering cultural memory.³² For literature about the Holocaust ←19 | 20→is on the one hand an original product of the new generation and, on the other, an outcome of the experiences of the parents’ generation. In these knotted circumstances, references to the past warrant cultural continuity, although the modifications ushered in by the new generation attest to their exceptional input into the structures of memory. In this sense, cultural memory is a variety of collective memory,³³ which primarily performs identity-related functions and, as such, calls for modes of preservation³⁴ which make it transmittable to the following generation.

The topography of Jerusalem’s Mount of Remembrance (Har Hazikaron), as its very name suggests, seems to be perfectly in tune with the dialogicity of cultural memory. Founded in 1953, Yad Vashem together with the Holocaust History Museum established in 2005 occupy only a part of its area. The rest of the terrain is to be handed over to the next generation in order to construct a new narrative about the Holocaust. This venture perfectly exemplifies the transposition of cultural memory onto space.

What seems evident in this context is that the smoothness of transmission within cultural memory is immensely affected not only by art,³⁵ but also by education.