Textual Silence

Jessica Lang

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780813589923
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria judía

There are thousands of books that represent the Holocaust, but can, and should, the act of reading these works convey the events of genocide to those who did not experience it? In Textual Silence, literary scholar Jessica Lang asserts that language itself is a barrier between the author and the reader in Holocaust texts—and that this barrier is not a lack of substance, but a defining characteristic of the genre.  
 
Holocaust texts, which encompass works as diverse as memoirs, novels, poems, and diaries, are traditionally characterized by silences the authors place throughout the text, both deliberately and unconsciously. While a reader may have the desire and will to comprehend the Holocaust, the presence of “textual silence” is a force that removes the experience of genocide from the reader’s analysis and imaginative recourse. Lang defines silences as omissions that take many forms, including the use of italics and quotation marks, ellipses and blank pages in poetry, and the presence of unreliable narrators in fiction. While this limits the reader’s ability to read in any conventional sense, these silences are not flaws. They are instead a critical presence that forces readers to acknowledge how words and meaning can diverge in the face of events as unimaginable as those of the Holocaust.  
 

1 • Readability and Unreadability

A Fractured Dialogue

The Holocaust belongs to the type of enormous experience which reduces one to silence. Any utterance, any statement, any “answer” is tiny, meaningless, and occasionally ridiculous.

—Aharon Appelfeld, Beyond Despair

The two opening images of Primo Levi’s La Tregua—The Truce (published in the United States as The Reawakening), which describes his liberation from Auschwitz and his long journey home, shift between his own act of reading and ours.1 I use these images here as a means to introduce the concept of readability and unreadability—in contrast to postwar and ongoing discussions around the process of reading itself, including theories that investigate how meaning and interpretation emerge from reading. After Auschwitz was liberated by the Russians, Levi is ill and weak and is hoisted into a cart along with other sick and dying men and taken to the infirmary in the main part of Auschwitz: “While the slow steps of Yankel’s horses drew me towards remote liberty, for the last time there filed before my eyes the huts where I had suffered and matured, the roll-call square where the gallows and the gigantic Christmas tree still towered side by side, and the gate to slavery, on which one could still read the three, now hollow, words of derision: ‘Arbeit Macht Frei,’ ‘Work Gives Freedom.’ ”2 These are the words that Levi first encounters upon entering the camp. He records this moment in Survival in Auschwitz: the gate is “brightly illuminated (its memory still strikes me in my dreams).”3 The shift Levi notes in his own reading of the words that demarcate the boundary of Auschwitz are telling: from “brightly illuminated” as he enters the camp, to hollow and derisive on his departure, to continuing to “strike” him in his dreams decades after the war, all these effects reflect the “proverbial work” the sign purportedly advances.4 The sign itself identifies Auschwitz as a place of work “where the nonproper, the nonworking—and, it is thus insinuated, the already dead—are once more put to death, in order that the proper, the society of work, can emerge as the product of its own labor. It defines murder as the work of life on itself.”5 The bitter hollowness with which Levi reads the sign on his departure underscores the mockery found in each word—“work”; “making”; “freedom”—each of which is rendered void of its original meaning in Auschwitz, the place that ultimately concentrates on the unmaking of its Häftlinge (Levi’s preferred word for prisoners like himself).

Levi’s second initiation of reading anticipates his reader. As he recovers in the infirmary in the days following liberation, he finds in a neighboring bed a child about three years old who is paralyzed, cannot speak, and has no name but who others around him have taken to calling Hurbinek. A Hungarian teenager in another bunk devotes himself to Hurbinek’s care and declares after a week of tending to the child “that Hurbinek ‘could say a word.’ What word? He did not know, a difficult word, not Hungarian: something like ‘mass-klo,’ ‘mastiklo.’ . . . In the following days everybody listened to him in silence, anxious to understand, and among us there were speakers of all the languages of Europe; but Hurbinek’s word remained secret.” Levi’s tone shifts in the next sentence, addressing his readers as much as those who are with him, puzzling out Hurbinek’s syllables: “No, it was certainly not a message, it was not a revelation; perhaps it was his name, if it had ever fallen to his lot to be given a name; perhaps (according to one of our hypotheses) it meant ‘to eat,’ ‘bread’; or perhaps ‘meat’ in Bohemian, as one of us who knew that language maintained.” And then Levi concludes magisterially: “Hurbinek, who was three years old and perhaps had been born in Auschwitz and had never seen a tree; Hurbinek, who had fought like a man, to the last breath, to gain his entry into the world of men, from which a bestial power had excluded him; Hurbinek, the nameless, whose tiny forearm—even his bore the tattoo of Auschwitz; Hurbinek died in the first days of March 1945, free but not redeemed. Nothing remains of him: he bears witness through these words of mine.”6

By concentrating on language and more specifically on reading, or (as I believe it is better described) on unreading, as marking his way into and out of Auschwitz, Levi invites those who are reading about his reading—namely, us—to reflect on our own actions, positions, and interpretations. In the first instance, Levi bears witness through the act of reading; in the second, he narrates and records, navigating between the non-witness reader (again, us) and the voiceless non-survivor. What is most significant here is the sense that Levi recognizes not only our limits of comprehension but also, and quite willingly, his own. The “secret” word that Hurbinek repeats bears import through the act of repetition—originating with the child, reproduced by Levi, read by us. Repetition and not (necessarily) comprehension is, Levi both illustrates and advises, a legitimate form of bearing witness. In recording Hurbinek’s testimony, in declaring its incomprehensibility and also its value as testimony Levi not only makes room for the unreadable but becomes a protector or preserver of it, recognizing how easy it would be to modify—and so reduce—its unknown meaning to something more manageable and more accessible, more identifiable, such as a name or a plea for food. In many ways the foreignness of Hurbinek’s language and testimony resonates with the discomfort with which readers encounter the unreadable. Levi recognizes this tension and not so much resolves it as makes room for it, using the legibility of his language to imbed the illegibility of the murdered witness.

Taking together these two moments in Levi’s The Reawakening illustrates the need and function behind reconsidering our relationship to the act of reading, both the language that is readable and accessible and the language that subverts our understanding, language that falls into textual silence. In some way, my understanding of the unreadable can be aligned with Giorgio Agamben’s understanding of bearing witness. “What is borne witness to cannot already be language or writing. It can only be something to which no one has borne witness. And this is the sound that arises from the lacuna, the non-language that one speaks when one is alone, the non-language to which language answers, in which language is born. It is necessary to reflect on the nature of that to which no one has borne witness, on this non-language.”7 Hurbinek’s initial silence is transposed into a language that is inaccessible to all those around him. But, Levi reminds us, meaning derived from the absence of meaning is an essential component of witnessing.

Indeed, I would go so far as to say that Levi not only articulates an important difference between reading as a survivor and reading otherwise but in doing so gestures toward a tension between memory and experience that is transfigured for post-Holocaust readers. Our memory is a memory of that fragmented textual experience made available to us by the survivor-writer. The memory is for the most part intact—we have the book right in front of us! The experience it captures and the experience it is itself as a text that has been read are both well within our reach to describe, discuss, process, read, and re-read. In effect, our ability to read distracts us from what is arguably the most delicate, essential, and hard to access element of the text, namely, the silence that accompanies the language, imagery, and style of the original text—an overture, in other words, to read the unreadable. Here language and narrative both do and do not allow for the presence of the unreadable with the intention of illuminating its importance and value. An alternate formulation of this turn appears in Kalí Tal’s Worlds of Hurt (1996) with the suggestion that one strategy of coping culturally with traumatic narrative is to mythologize it, “turning it from a frightening and uncontrollable event into a contained and predictable narrative. . . . Traumatic events are written and rewritten until they become codified and narrative form gradually replaces content as the focus of attention.”8 One might add here that mythologizing is a product of reading as well as writing. The reductive nature of a text or texts that have gone through the process of mythologizing gestures toward the necessity of defining and preserving the quality of the unreadable that was part of the text’s original creation.

The process of reading is typically understood as a moment or series of moments of illumination, from which readers derive certain meanings through a complex processing of words or images and placing them in a continuum of individual and textual memory of contexts and usages. Mikhail Bakhtin understands reading as a dialogic enterprise, one intrinsically open to outside influences in which no word is limited to a single meaning. The main thrust behind Bakhtin’s understanding of reading is that readers cannot and do not converge around a single meaning with a given text. Rather, language and thus also reading are fundamentally relational. Readers and texts, and the cultural influences that form them, come together to produce the multiple meanings that inform reading. Bakhtin claims that

no living word relates to its object in a singular way: between the word and its object, between the word and the speaking subject, there exists an elastic environment of other, alien words about the same object, the same theme, and this is an environment that it is often difficult to penetrate. . . . The way in which the word conceives its object is complicated by a dialogic interaction within the object between various aspects of its socio-verbal intelligibility. And an artistic representation, an “image” of the object, may be penetrated by this dialogic play of verbal intentions that meet and are interwoven in it.9

Bakhtin’s thesis here is clear: meaning and thus reading always exceed the singular definition found within a text’s individual words.

Bakhtin’s definition is significant both in its understanding of the process of reading and in its gesture toward what cannot be read: if language opens on a multiplicity of meaning, not only will the value attached to any one reading vary among readers but the possibility of meaning existing outside of or eluding any one reading is a constant presence. This does not mean that all acts of reading are equal. Nor does it mean that the limits of reading and what lies beyond them—namely, the unreadable or the silent—play a prominent role in every text. Rather, this points to an underlying anxiety that often accompanies the act of reading and acknowledging or identifying our limitations as readers. Claiming that we cannot or do not read (even as we all seem to) appears to fly in the face of our understanding of ourselves even as individuals. Yet, in keeping with Bakhtin’s notion of the elasticity of language, the meaning that emerges from reading is so various and divergent that also unattainable meaning becomes a possibility. Holocaust texts, and in particular survivor testimonies, challenge the normative practices behind reading. What this means in connection to Bakhtin’s understanding of dialogism is that, while many meanings behind reading Holocaust literature certainly exist, one of them is and must be the presence of textual silence or unreadability.

One central cause behind the “unreadability” of Holocaust texts lies in the tension between memory and experience. Survivor-novelist Aharon Appelfeld best situates these two distinct but overlapping concepts when he notes that anyone “who underwent the Holocaust will be as wary of memory as of fire. . . . It was impossible to live after the Holocaust except by silencing memory. Memory became your enemy.” Appelfeld documents the moment for him when “memory burst forth from the prison where it had been sent.” As an author, the challenge then was corralling memory in such a way that it would give “a new order to facts” and touch upon the “heart of the experience.”10 Memory can never be conveyed in its wholeness; rather, the tools of the writer—Appelfeld lists them as “the sense of alternatives, of proportion, the choice of words”—lend themselves to a more fragmented description of experience. The unreadable, then, is a recognition of the gap between the memory and the experience that Appelfeld and so many other Holocaust eyewitnesses who write about their memories regularly note; the sense that their documentation is necessarily limited and incomplete and yet, at the same time, necessary. “The question facing me was no longer what happened, but what had to have happened,” Appelfeld notes as he reflects on the shift between not writing and writing about the Holocaust. Memory serves to represent the past even as it stands for what cannot be represented.

To return to Bakhtin’s conception of reading, in many ways he and postwar writing about reading by the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre and literary theorists Roland Barthes and Wolfgang Iser all combine to express renewed interest in defining the relationship between writing and reading, essentially investigating a cross-section of phenomenology and epistemology. These thinkers largely recognized that the process of writing involves a special sort of partnership, with a “dialectic correlative” (in Sartre’s words), which links the process of writing to the process of reading: “these two interdependent acts require two differently active people [whose] combined efforts . . . bring into being the concrete and imaginary object which is the work of the mind.”11 Iser moves one step further, describing the reading process as a “dynamic interaction between text and reader.”12 Iser, in part, is responding to Barthes’s claims in his 1968 essay “The Death of the Author” that the existence of a text “lies not in its origin but in its destination.” Yet this destination cannot any longer be personal. The reader “is without history, biography, psychology; he is simply that someone who holds together in a single field all the traces by which the written text is constituted.”13 This move requires the author to be “removed.”14

The Role of the Reader

Barthes’s provocatively titled essay and extreme position required theorists to consider more seriously the role of the reader in relation to the author. What these several views share is the principle that the act of reading is comprised of a series of constructive moments for the reader, a process of production where symbols become characters, characters become sentences, sentences become stories, stories become worlds. Whereas previously the notion of creation and creativity was attributed solely to the act of authorship, with a reader dutifully reading for a proscribed meaning, increasingly in the twentieth century the reader is considered part of the creative process that, when successful, results in a more extended or even open meaning.

Among the many theorists who build on Bakhtin’s understanding of language, reading, and writing, the general consensus emerges in which the author is in fact quite removed from the relationship and interaction between the reader and the text. The reader and the text essentially meet in an arena that is open to cultural influences, mediation, and experience.15 In effect, these are causal constructions of reading: readers are able to read and understand narrative because they devise a system of comprehension that contextualizes current reading in a continuum of past reading and personal experience.16 In his book Understanding Reading (1971), the psycholinguist Frank Smith makes the point that reading works on a predictive model. That is, the uncertainty with which any reader faces a text “is limited to a few probable alternatives” that are predicted before the actual reading of a given sentence. The act of reading a sentence “indicate[s] which predicted alternative is appropriate” and thus “comprehension occurs.”17 Smith’s understanding of reading, in keeping with other postwar theorists, positions readers as participants in bringing meaning to text, which they do through a limited set of predictions and expectations about the text before and as they read.

In a similar vein, Paul Ricoeur extends the “dialectical structure of reading” by thinking of it in unequal terms: “With writing, the verbal meaning of the text no longer coincides with the mental meaning or intention of the text. This intention is both fulfilled and abolished by the text, which is no longer the voice of someone present. The text is mute. An asymmetric relation obtains between text and reader, in which only one of the partners speaks for the two. . . . Consequently, to understand is not merely to repeat the speech event in a similar event, it is to generate a new event beginning from the text in which the initial event has been objectified.”18 Ricoeur understands meaningful reading as taking place through “emplotment,” that is, reading is situated not only in relation to prior texts but also in anticipation of future texts. Another way of thinking about emplotment is as a sequence of events “ ‘configured’ (‘grasped together’) in such a way as to represent ‘symbolically’ what would otherwise be unutterable in language.”19 For Ricoeur, reading narrative is the opposite of passively imbibing t...