Jay Ladin, Princeton University
"At first the details horrify, but finally they're a bore," Israeli poet Dan Pagis wrote in "Autobiography," one of the first poems in which he addressed his concentration camp adolescence. These days, we are barraged with stories of atrocity--poetic, fictional, journalistic and >autobiographical accounts of the entire spectrum of human savagery, from date rape to genocide. But as films such as "Schindler's List" prove, however graphic the "details," the act of narration domesticates horror, transforming unthinkable acts of violence and unspeakable torment into orderly arrangements of villains and victims, subjects and predicates, presenting us with temporal, causal, psychological and moral frameworks that naturalize the most extreme anguish, turning horror to boredom as the details pile up.Indeed, according to Daniel Dennett's Consciousness Explained our "fundamental tactic of self-protection ... and self-definition... [is] telling stories..." (418). At first, explicit representations of atrocity may challenge these "fundamental" narratives. But ultimately, as Pagis knew, our narrative immune systems respond, subsuming the "horrifying details" into the very psychological, cultural and ontological categories-- self and other, good and evil, past and present--they threaten to undermine. Typical first-person, past-tense narrations, for instance, distinguish between the self telling the story and the self within the story. As a result, no matter what atrocities are being narrated, the act of storytelling offers us an implicit narrative of survival to cling to, a post-trauma perspective with which to identify, and an absolute distinction between "now" and "then" which cordons off the narrated suffering. And as we construe the relation between the narrator's past and present selves, we differentiate the storyteller's frame of reference from ours: as a result, however strongly we empathize or sympathize with the storyteller, the narrator's "I" represents a clear boundary between the narrated atrocities and our own lives.
The self-protecting and self-defining powers of narrative are so great that it is, paradoxically, a commonplace of Holocaust literature to affirm that the Holocaust is "unspeakable," i.e., that it cannot be represented in language. Pagis and Paul Celan responded to this problem by developing modes of narration which short-circuit the processes by which storytelling assimilates horror to normative existential schemata. For example, the speaker of Pagis' "Autobiography" is not Pagis, but the Biblical Abel, the first murder victim, who begins the story of his life "I died with the first blow," immediately confounding the reassuring temporal syntax autobiographies normally offer. The rest of "Autobiography" extends this effect to other fundamental conceptual categories: "Afterward the well-known events took place./Our inventions were perfected. One thing led to another,/orders were given. There were those who murdered in their own way,/grieved in their own way." By erasing the "details" that enable us to distinguish the speaker's life from the rest of human history, murderers from mourners, living from dead, the poem prevents us from cognitively detaching ourselves from this "autobiography" of atrocity; as we construe his story, it bleeds into our own.
The emotional intensity and semantic difficulties of Celan's later poems tend to obscure the central, albeit spectral, role narrative plays in them. For example, in "With wine and being lost," Celan writes, "I rode through the snow, do you read me,/I rode God far--I rode God/near, he sang,/it was/our last ride over/the hurdled humans." The statement "I rode through the snow" evokes the commonplace schemata by which we construe the relation between the world of the story and the world in which we are reading it. These schemata - and the ontological and narrative airplane-radio-style interrogative "do you read me." Suddenly, the one-way mirror which separated us from the world of the story has vanished; we are being addressed, questioned, doubted. "I rode through the snow" identifies us with the speaker's perspective: we are, as it were, regarding his past self with him. As a result, when the speaker asks, "do you read me," for an instant we perceive ourselves from his perspective, as a blank and perhaps uncomprehending silence. Our ability to construe this as a narrative - and thus to enjoy the "self-protecting and self-defining" benefits of narration - is further undermined by the notation "he sang," which retroactively transforms the preceding lines from a first-person narrative to a third-person account of a ballad. At this point, when we cannot distinguish story or speaker, the poem delivers a metonymic, guilt-ridden glimpse of the way slaughter looks to the unslaughtered: "it was/our last ride over/the hurdled humans." As we struggle to construe this unconstruable story, the pronoun "our" becomes a viscous, quicksand-like pit that sucks us toward the horror whose "details" the poem so assiduously omits.
Most cognitive approaches to narrative have focused on delineating the processes by which readers construe normative fictional and non-fictional narratives. Combining close reading, language processing theory, and Constructivist accounts of cognition, this paper will show how two very different poets subvert those normative processes, so that, rather than containing and naturalizing the Holocaust, narration enmeshes us in it. [J.L.]