The Ethics of Survival in Contemporary Literature and Culture 3030834212, 9783030834210

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The Ethics of Survival in Contemporary Literature and Culture Edited by Rudolf Freiburg Gerd Bayer

The Ethics of Survival in Contemporary Literature and Culture

Rudolf Freiburg  •  Gerd Bayer Editors

The Ethics of Survival in Contemporary Literature and Culture

Editors Rudolf Freiburg University of Erlangen-Nuremberg Erlangen, Germany

Gerd Bayer University of Erlangen-Nuremberg Erlangen, Germany

ISBN 978-3-030-83421-0    ISBN 978-3-030-83422-7 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83422-7 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the ­publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and ­institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Contents

1 Survival: An Introductory Essay  1 Rudolf Freiburg and Gerd Bayer Part I Survival and the Group  47 2 The Visibility of Survival: Even the Dogs and Jon McGregor’s Ethics of Attention 49 Jean-Michel Ganteau 3 “Survivors all”: Affirmative Connections in Novels by Julian Barnes and Caryl Phillips 69 Vanessa Guignery 4 Feats of Survival: Refugee Writing and the Ethics of Representation 89 Janet M. Wilson 5 Surviving Trauma in the Female Neo-slave Narrative: Sara Collins’s Neo-gothic The Confessions of Frannie Langton111 Susanne Gruss

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Contents

Part II Survival and the Individual 131 6 “That was what all men became: techniques for survival”: The Paradoxical Notion of Survival in Julian Barnes’s The Noise of Time133 Rudolf Freiburg 7 Vulnerability, Empathy, and the Ethics of Survival in Graham Swift’s Wish You Were Here167 Susana Onega 8 Stories of Dis-ease: Ethics and Survival in Dementia Narratives187 Sibylle Baumbach 9 Surviving: Jenny Diski, Illness, and Gratitude203 Gerd Bayer 10 Environmental Ethics of Survival: Case Study Analysis of I am Legend and The Revenant221 Pat Brereton Part III Survival and the Holocaust 245 11 Close Reading of a Title: On Survival in Auschwitz247 Maria Anna Mariani 12 Narrative Closure and the “Whew” Effect: The Ethics of Reading Narratives of Survival of the Holocaust265 Erin McGlothlin 13 With All the Force of Literalness: Ruth Klüger’s Survivor Testimonies in Erwin Leiser’s We Were Ten Brothers and Thomas Mitscherlich’s Journeys into Life291 Brad Prager

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14 “The Four Brothers”: Claude Lanzmann’s War Refugee Board Interviews311 Sue Vice Index333

Notes on Contributors

Sibylle Baumbach  is Professor of English Literature and Culture at the University of Stuttgart, Germany. Her research areas include early modern literature and cognitive literary studies with a focus on the aesthetics of fascination and literary attention. She is the author of Literature and Fascination (2015) and Shakespeare and the Art of Physiognomy (2008) and (co-)editor of several volumes, including New Approaches to the Twenty-First-Century Anglophone Novel (2019) and Victorian Surfaces in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture (2021). Gerd Bayer  is Professor of English Literature and Culture at the FriedrichAlexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany. He has written on contemporary and early modern literature, including Novel Horizons: The Genre Making of Restoration Fiction (2015) and on Holocaust literature and film, most recently as guest editor of a special issue for Holocaust Studies (UK). Pat Brereton  is a professor in the School of Communications at Dublin City University, Ireland. His books include Hollywood Utopia: Ecology in Contemporary American Cinema (2005), Continuum Guide to Media Education (2001), Historical Dictionary of Irish Cinema (2007) with Roddy Flynn, Smart Cinema: DVD Add-Ons and New Audience Pleasures (2012), Environmental Ethics and Film (2016) and Environmental Literacy and New Digital Audiences (2019); and he has co-edited a reader titled Ireland and the Climate Crisis (2020). He is completing ‘Essential Concepts for Climate Communication’.

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Notes on Contributors

Rudolf  Freiburg is Professor of English Literature at the Friedrich-­ Alexander-­Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany. He is the co-editor and editor of several books, including Swift: The Enigmatic Dean (1998), “But Vindicate the Ways of God to Man”: Literature and Theodicy (2004), Kultbücher (2004), Literatur und Holocaust (2009), Träume (2015), Unendlichkeit (2016), D@tenflut (2017), Sprachwelten (2018) and Täuschungen (2019). He has written many articles on eighteenth-­century literature (Joseph Addison, Jonathan Swift, Samuel Johnson) and contemporary literature (John Fowles, Julian Barnes, Ian McEwan, Sebastian Barry). Jean-Michel Ganteau  is Professor of Contemporary British Literature at the Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3 University, France, and a member of the Academia Europaea. He is the editor of Études britanniques contemporaines. He is the author of three monographs and has (co-)edited many volumes devoted to contemporary British literature. He has written extensively on the ethics of affects, trauma criticism and theory, the ethics of vulnerability and the ethics of attention. Susanne Gruss  is Visiting Professor of English Literature and Culture at the University of Passau, Germany. Her publications include a monograph on contemporary feminist writing, a collection of essays and a special issue on neo-Victorianism, and articles on contemporary literature, canonisation, early modern piracy, and law and literature. After finishing her second book project The Laws of Excess: Law, Literature, and the Laws of Genre in Early Modern Drama, she is working on narratives of piracy in the early modern period and the culture of collaboration in early modern English theatre. Vanessa  Guignery is Professor of Contemporary British Literature and Postcolonial Literature at the École Normale Supérieure de Lyon, France. Her research focuses, among other topics, on the poetics of voice and silence, and on the transformation of literary genres in contemporary literature. She has written books and essays on the work of Julian Barnes, B.S. Johnson, Ben Okri and Jonathan Coe. Her latest monograph is Julian Barnes from the Margins: Exploring the Writer’s Archives (2020). Maria  Anna  Mariani  is Assistant Professor of Italian Literature at the University of Chicago, USA.  She is the author of the scholarly books Primo Levi e Anna Frank (Carocci 2018) and Sull’autobiografia ­contemporanea (Carocci 2012). She also wrote the fictionalized reportages Voci da Uber (Mucchi 2019) and Dalla Corea del Sud (Exòrma 2017).

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Erin  McGlothlin is Professor of German and Jewish Studies and Vice Dean of Undergraduate Affairs at Washington University in St. Louis, USA. Her research interests include Holocaust literature and film, GermanJewish literature, narrative theory, autobiography and the graphic novel. She is the author of Second-Generation Holocaust Literature: Legacies of Survival and Perpetration (2006) and The Mind of the Holocaust Perpetrator in Fiction and Nonfiction (2021). Susana Onega  is Emeritus Professor of English Literature and a member of the Research Institute on Employment, Digital Society and Sustainability (IEDIS) at the University of Zaragoza, Spain. She is also a co-opted member of the Academia Europaea. She has been leader of numerous competitive research projects and teams and written extensively on contemporary English fiction, narrative theory, ethics and trauma and the transition from postmodernity to transmodernity. Brad Prager  is the Catherine Paine Middlebush Chair of Humanities at the University of Missouri, USA. He teaches in the Programs in Film Studies and German. He is the author of several books including After the Fact: The Holocaust in Twenty-First Century Documentary Film (2015). He is also the co-editor of several edited volumes including a recent collection of essays dedicated to Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah titled The Construction of Testimony: Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah and Its Outtakes (2020). Sue Vice  is Professor of English Literature at the University of Sheffield, UK, where she teaches contemporary literature, film and Holocaust studies. Her publications include Holocaust Fiction (2000); the BFI Modern Film Classics volume on Shoah (2011); the co-edited book Representing Perpetrators in Holocaust Literature and Film, with Jenni Adams (2013); Textual Deceptions: False Memoirs and Literary Hoaxes in the Contemporary Era (2014) and Barry Hines: ‘Kes’, ‘Threads’ and Beyond, with David Forrest (2017). Her latest book is Claude Lanzmann’s ‘Shoah’ Outtakes: Holocaust Rescue and Resistance (2021). Janet M. Wilson  is Emerita Professor of English and Postcolonial Studies at the University of Northampton and a visiting professor at Birmingham City University, UK. She has written widely on the p ­ ostcolonial/diaspora writing of Australia and New Zealand, refugee writing, globalisation and literature and transnationalism; her work has appeared in Postcolonial Text, Anglica, Literary Research, Law and Literature. She is the co-editor of the Ibidem series, Studies in World Literature, and the Journal of Postcolonial Writing.

CHAPTER 1

Survival: An Introductory Essay Rudolf Freiburg and Gerd Bayer

Survival as an Omnipresent Issue in Life and Literature “They are in you and in me; they created us, body and mind, and their preservation is the ultimate rationale for our existence. […] they go by the name of genes, and we are their survival machines.”1 From the materialistic perspective of biology, survival seems to be an automatic genetic device deeply installed into the dynamic programme of life by evolution leading to a kind of “biologicized” ethics.2 As a feature of the élan vital or the vis vitalis, the genetic drive to survive seems to be consistent with Charles Darwin’s and Herbert Spencer’s insights into the dynamics of evolution, namely that those who survive have functions which “happen to be most nearly in equilibrium with the modified aggregate of external forces”.3 Biology defines survival as a life-long struggle and a permanent process, an everyday affair, a perpetuum mobile of existential provenience, a ‘mechanical operation of the spirit’ of nature which reduces all ‘animals’, including those called ‘humans’, to well-oiled machines trained to survive deadly

R. Freiburg • G. Bayer (*) University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Erlangen, Germany e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 R. Freiburg, G. Bayer (eds.), The Ethics of Survival in Contemporary Literature and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83422-7_1

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perils without a will of their own, uncannily reminiscent of the Cartesian concept of ‘beast machines’.4 However convincing and elegant this biological explanation of survival may appear, it does not pay enough attention to the multidimensionality of survival as an issue in ‘conscious lives’ of human beings.5 With regard to human nature, survival is more than a merely mechanistic, biological process easily to be defined in the sterile language of scientists. In the human world, survival is closely affiliated with complex questions concerning such different areas as history, politics, psychology, theology and religion, society, culture and of course ethics, to name but a few. The omnipresence of the issue of survival cannot be ignored: as long as we live—in a certain sense—we all are survivors; individual survivors of an extremely troublesome day or night, of a disease or an accident, but—and here the topic reveals its infinite potential—also especially after we (maybe as a group or society) have survived natural cataclysms such as pandemics (the actual Covid-19 pandemic included), earthquakes, tsunamis or man-made catastrophes such as wars or genocides, or probably the worst of all, the Holocaust. And the human desire to survive is in fact so strong that it even transcends worldly life and aims at an imagined existence ‘beyond the grave’, manifesting itself as the wish to be resurrected after death.6 The omnipresence and the significance of the issue of survival in life are impressively covered in literary texts. Sensitized for the relevance of the topos of survival, readers will detect it almost everywhere. The renowned ‘masterworks’ of world literature are populated by ‘survivors’: Homer’s Odyssey (eighth–seventh centuries BC), Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote (1605/1615), Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719), Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1857), Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov (1879–1880), Leo Tolstoy’s Resurrection (1899), Thomas Mann’s Joseph and his Brothers (1926–1943), Ian McEwan’s Enduring Love (1997), Jon McGregor’s Even the Dogs (2010) and Julian Barnes’s The Noise of Time (2016); the list could go on endlessly. The literary representation of survival comprises purely imaginary stories and fictions based on authentic experiences, biographies, autobiographies, memoirs, parables, allegories and testimonies. Even the most fictional stories like, for instance, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006) or Kevin Brooks’s The Bunker Diaries (2013) reveal valuable insights into the conditions, processes, ethical issues and consequences of actual survival, since they represent an exemplary situation which mirrors the universality of the general survival context, defined as the ‘microeconomic mode’ by Jane Elliott, a

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paradigm with an intense exemplary nature “so that the world writ small enables us to understand the world writ large”.7 Literature of this kind allows the vicarious experience of approaching the field of liminality, of humans existing in a danger zone, but they exude the aura of “faux-­ laboratory settings”,8 under which “protagonists must make agonized binary choices between horrific options, each of which involves intense physical and potentially deadly consequences. In its fullest manifestations, the aesthetic effect of this mode is brutal in every sense of the word: crude, harsh, ruthless, unrelenting, and unpleasantly precise.”9 Fictions based on authentic experience, which may encompass biographies, autobiographies and memoirs, claim a higher degree of seriousness, frequently accompanied by either explicit or implicit warnings, moral exhortations, political agendas, suggestions for social reformation or the necessity to revise obsolete value systems. The borderline between the first and the second category of these ‘survival stories’, however, is far from being clear: when the claim to authenticity is revealed as being not as strong as the reader thought it to be, or when it can even be unmasked as a mere ‘fake’, the reader’s reaction will definitively be changed. Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year (1722), an instance of the first case, the ‘realistic’ description of the struggle to survive the plague in London in the seventeenth century, remains completely convincing and instructive for quite a while until one recognizes that the  author could not have witnessed the events with his own eyes.10 Readers will probably react with indignation and disdain when they find out that a survival story, especially one referring to the Holocaust, was forged, as was the case with Binjamin Wilkomirski’s allegedly authentic autobiography Fragments: Memoirs of a Wartime Childhood (1995).11 Judged from an ethical point of view, such forgeries are both dangerous and contestable, since they may be misused and become grist to the mill of right-wing deniers of the Holocaust. Parables and allegories of survival are legion in world literature: the mythical story of Prometheus, punished by Zeus for bringing fire to men, Tantalus and his legendary torments, the myth of Sisyphus, who must forever heave a boulder up a hill only to see it roll down again after he has reached the top, the story of Philomela, whose tongue is cut out so that she cannot speak about having been raped. Myths like these exemplify essential aspects of survival to such a degree that throughout the ages they were accepted as paradigmatic stories suitable to all situations, since as myths they allow a huge potentiality of adaptability to different existential crises where life is at stake. The Bible offers a rich gallery of parables and

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allegories, describing such diverse survivors as Noah, Job and Joseph in the Old Testament, or telling the stories of Lazarus, the Good Samaritan or Christ’s crucifixion and ensuing resurrection in the New Testament. The many survival stories in legends, sagas and folklore prove that memories of ‘survivors’ are deeply engraved into the collective memory of mankind, to such a degree even that the topos can claim the status of an archetype. Even in contemporary trauma contexts, these allegorical texts with their more or less mythical auras are reanimated, they are widely used as ‘prefabricated’ narrative stereotypical illustrations of suffering, grief, endeavour, endurance and resilience, and they often replace an individual’s testimony, when the sufferer—due to a severe traumatic experience— has completely lost his or her capacity to speak. As ‘microeconomic modes’, the parables and allegories condense a complex experience to a minimal narrative form which offers various interpretations. In her book Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered (2001), Ruth Kluger, for instance, refers to the Viennese legend of ‘Drunken August’, who in the dark fell into a ditch filled with corpses only to step out of it on the next day as if nothing had happened, and comments on this parable of survival with the memorable words “We are different. We don’t get off so cheaply; the ghosts cling to us”.12 And a legendary story also serves her as an illustration of her own precarious feelings after survival; pointing out the psychological accessory symptoms of survival, she remembers the story of the “Rider of Constance”: In New York the fear of death which had haunted me in Auschwitz gradually turned into its opposite, into depression, the temptation of death. There is an apt German legend about a winter so cold that Lake Constance was frozen solid, which never happens in reality, since the lake is much too large. One night, according to the story, a horseman unwittingly crossed it. When he got to the other shore and had firm ground under his feet he looked back and realized where he had been, what he had done, and how unnatural his survival was. Tradition says he died of shock on the spot. I sympathized with that horseman.13

The most significant genre for the literary representation of survival is the ‘testimony’, which has been intensely analysed by the relatively young discipline of trauma studies.14 The testimony has an oscillating character; it intends to give insight into the ‘reality’ of a traumatic experience, signalling at the same time that it will never be capable to do so precisely, because

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the impact of the trauma has violated the capability of ‘witnessing’.15 “Trauma brings about a dissociation of affect and representation: one disorientingly feels what one cannot represent; one numbingly represents what one cannot feel.”16 The testimony  is a product of the ‘traumatic memory’ of an individual “possessed by an image or an event”,17 varying from all other forms of literary endeavours by a specific dialectics of approaching the moment of crisis and simultaneously distancing itself from it by using techniques of postmodern writing, symbolism and cryptophoria or by including gothic elements and ghost stories.18 Testimonies indicate both a ‘failure of the mind’ of the survivor and a general ‘failure of language’,19 since survivors may not be able to really understand and describe with words what happened to them. They feel impelled to return to the traumatic event again and again, in order to find some ‘meaning’ in it.20 In testimonies, the ‘witnesses’ in a certain sense ‘create themselves’, by leaving the space of silence behind and by establishing an “internal ‘thou’”, a ‘listener’, to whom they can tell their stories.21 The testimony does not vie with the ‘factuality’ of historiography, it may even contradict some of the historiographer’s truths.22 In testimonies, “issues of biography and history are neither simply represented nor simply reflected, but are reinscribed, translated, radically rethought and fundamentally worked over by the text”.23 In its own particular aesthetics of dynamic vagueness, however, it remains paradoxically close to the ‘subjective truth’ of what the individual had to suffer, however distorted some details may appear: Writing trauma is a metaphor in that writing indicates some distance from trauma (even when the experience of writing is itself intimately bound up with trauma), and there is no such thing as writing trauma itself if only because trauma, while at times related to particular events, cannot be localized in terms of a discrete, dated experience. Trauma indicates a shattering break or cesura in experience which has belated effects. Writing trauma would be one of those telling after-effects in what I termed traumatic and post-traumatic writing (or signifying practice in general).24

The function of literature does not limit itself to a mere mimetic process of imitating survival in textual form. For many survivors, literature offers a kind of solace, reminiscent of Boethius’s Consolatio Philosophiae (sixth century); the deep feeling of complete isolation and separation from the ‘normal’ world, which often accompanies survival, can at least slightly be mitigated if the survivor  is able to  think of antecedent instances of

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suffering in literature. Primo Levi’s memories of Auschwitz are enriched with references to Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy (1321); placed in the ‘l’univers concentrationnaire’,25 in a ‘limbo’ that defies description in ‘his own words’, he falls back to a beautiful and terrific poetic collocation of the “dance of dead men” in order to portray the dismal scene before his eyes and he compares the prisoner’s torments with those of Tantalus.26 The imaginary homeland of literature and culture could be a psychological support and solace in the camps, but it was by far no guarantee for survival; on the contrary, life in the camps was especially hard for those prisoners who possessed an intellectual background. It was probably the group of intellectuals, professors, teachers, lawyers and doctors who suffered most. Intensely humiliated in their personalities, a profound alienation from their familiar world of cultural education set in. The relationship between literature and survival  is Janus-faced: for a small group of the inmates, the remembrance of literary texts offered a momentary chance of escapism from the harsh reality of the camps, the majority, however, preferred not to think and remember at all, to concentrate on the process of survival exclusively, finding no consolation in the rich cultural heritage they had brought with them. No one has given a more succinct and haunting analysis of the intellectual’s life in the camps than Jean Améry, who testifies to the complete breakdown of his former personality and identity. During his time in the camp, he is on the verge of losing confidence in everything he has believed in so far; the sages of philosophy, to whom he as an agnostic (before and after the experiences in the camp) might have turned in different situations of distress, now appear to him as ridiculous “failing household gods”,27 as helpless as himself, and he openly admires those believers who resort on their religious or political certainties.28 For him, the attempt to transcend the reality of the camps and escape into an intellectual sphere is completely impossible: “In no other place did the attempt to transcend it prove so hopeless and so shoddy”.29 The intellectual capacity to understand the brutal actuality of reality intensified the high degree of tortures all prisoners were exposed to.

The Definition of ‘Survival’ ‘Survival’ has a wide scope of meaning.30 Most speakers use the term in order to express the “continuing to live after some event […]; remaining alive, living on”31—the act of surviving something dangerous, often

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life-­threatening like accidents, calamities, wars or earthquakes. The meaning of the term also includes the following definition: “Continuance after the end or cessation of something else, or after some event; spec. continuance of a custom, observance, etc. after the circumstances or conditions in which it originated or which gave significance to it have passed away”.32 In the German language, there is an interesting use of the term, especially in its reflexive form and as an adjective (‘sich überleben’, ‘überlebt’), which expresses the notion of ‘obsoleteness’, the idea that something or someone does not fit into the present time any more, circumscribing a deep, frequently existential, dynamic process of intense alienation. Survival is a complex process, for which a general definition can hardly be given. At all events, however, survival requires an ‘object’ (or event) that has to be got rid of or left behind, and these objects such as disease, injury, trauma, war or catastrophe are defined by a high potential of explicit or implicit harm which can be inflicted on human beings. A definitive feature of survival is ‘agency’, a rather paradoxical notion in a context which—due to the prevalence of suffering—is usually associated with passivity. The term ‘suffering agency’, used in contemporary analyses of survival, aptly illustrates this paradox,33 since the ‘passive’ sufferer has to remain extremely ‘active’ in order to survive.34 This ‘passive activity’ consists of mourning (‘Trauerarbeit’, facing the loss of the former life culture and social recognition), but it also implies endurance, alertness, resilience, ‘involuntary willingness’ to stand blows and injuries, the energy to consolidate or reform value systems, and the capacity to adjust dreams and hopes to the unavoidable factuality of the ‘here and now’ (the harsh, insurmountable ‘reality’ described by Améry). The definition of survival should also heed the fact that survival does not ‘cease’ after an existential crisis has been ‘left behind’. The stereotypical phrases which define the ending of fairy tales, “And they lived on happily ever after (and died together on the same day)”, assume a cynical undertone in this context and have to be replaced by the recognition of—what I choose to call—‘the dialectics of survival’.35 The specific temporality of survival also causes Jacques Derrida to ponder the semantic nuances of ‘surviving’ and ‘survival’, when he differentiates between the process of survivance and the supposedly completed pastness of la survie. Writing under the impression of his own fatality following his falling ill with cancer, Derrida in his last interview reflects on the way in which survival can, in some cases, outlast the individual. He even suggests that the notion of survival provides an underlying rationale

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to most of this writing and thinking: “I have always been interested in this theme of survival, the meaning of which is not to be added on to living and dying. It is originary: life is living on, life is survival”.36 For Derrida, surviving is the element that intrinsically links life and death: “We are all survivors who have been granted a temporary reprieve”.37 The consequences of this insight, in particular for an intellectual whose work is based on writing, affect the attitude in which writing and publishing simultaneously connect finality and continuity, paradoxically linking life and death: “Each time I let something go, each time some trace leaves me, ‘proceeds’ from me, unable to be reappropriated, I live my death in writing”.38 Indeed, for Derrida, survival implicates both existential modes in that it extends beyond the merely physical limitations of human life: “I would not want to encourage an interpretation that situates surviving on the side of death and the past rather than life and the future”.39 Since such a view on surviving (survivance) reflects back on any premortal stage, it also affects an understanding of how to live, it creates an acute urgency in experiencing the quality of existence: “survival is not simply that which remains but the most intense life possible”.40 To be a survivor, then, is to live life intensely and mindfully.

The Survival of Individuals The significance of survival is an implicit commentary on the value of life:41 life in general, social life and individual life. Traditionally, the ethics of survival discuss the dynamic interferences of individuals, groups and an adversarial environment. From an individual perspective, the survival theme is intensely affiliated with discourses of ‘natural law’ and ‘natural right’.42 As an individual, a human being is separated from the outer world, in both physical, psychic and intellectual ways. The skin of the body is the borderline between ‘me’ and the ‘other’ person, the bones of the skull metaphorically ‘de-fine’ the area of a person’s psychic and intellectual ‘autonomy’. Transgressions of the first borderline, as the horrible ‘first blow’, described by Améry, a violation of the skin, or an eye injury, prove the essential vulnerability of human beings,43 symbolize the invasion of ‘otherness’, into one’s most intimate universe, an event Hans Blumenberg described as an encounter with ‘the absolute’.44 As a biological response to this confrontation, the genetic automatism of releasing unconscious survival instincts is triggered. But these instincts are also accompanied by an intellectual justification of any form of activity appropriate to reach this

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first and foremost goal. This impulse to defend one’s integrity, triggered by the ‘selfish genes’ and frequently sublimed into acts of secret protest, resistance and resilience,45 finds its philosophical explanation and legitimization in the writings of natural law philosophers,46 whose influence can be traced back to Aristotelian and Platonic doctrines.47 Believing in the factuality of intrinsic values all human beings share, the ius naturale establishes an alternative system of rules and principles that may overwrite the regulations of the ‘positive law’, the product of political power, no matter where and when this positive law was established. From the perspective of such seminal representatives of the ius naturale such as Samuel von Pufendorf, Hugo Grotius and Thomas Hobbes, the natural law may abrogate any positive law, if an individual’s existence is in danger of death: And because the condition of man […] is a condition of Warre of every one against every one; in which case every one is governed by his own Reason; and there is nothing he can make use of, that may not be a help unto him in preserving his life against his enemyes; It followeth, that in such a condition every man has a Right to every thing; even to one anothers body. And therefore, as long as this naturall Right of every man to every thing endureth, there can be no security to any man, (how strong or wise soever he be), of living out the time, which Nature ordinarily alloweth men to live. And consequently it is a precept, or generall rule of Reason, That every man, ought to endeavour Peace, as farre as he has hope of obtaining it; and when he cannot obtain it, that he may seek, and use, all helps and advantages of Warre. The first branch of which Rule, containeth the first and Fundamentall Law of Nature; which is: to seek Peace, and follow it. The Second, the summe of the Right of Nature, which is, By all means we can to defend our selves.48

Natural law with its inherent ‘categorial imperative’ of self-defence is based on the concept of man as an autonomous being, and in this respect, it precedes the mentality of the Enlightenment movement of the eighteenth century. The decision to survive a crisis and to defend one’s own ‘inviolacy’ with all means is both, an ‘instinctive’ and a ‘rational’ decision, a distinctive feature of human beings by which the automatic biological and genetic reactions to danger of death are ethically seconded. In the context of human survival, Enlightenment philosophy appears as a sustained effort to secure mankind’s survival, shaping reason into a tool which—according to Sir Francis Bacon’s famous definition—serves for the “use and benefit of man”,49 by improving the conditions under which human beings are doomed to live. The Enlighteners’ fight against prejudices, superstitions

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and wrong notions—against the idols of the ‘tribe, the cave, the theatre and the market-place’, in Bacon’s words50—is a rationalistic stratagem of survival, leading to the foundation of the Royal Society in England and bringing about a plethora of discoveries (among them that of the solution of the problem of the ‘Longitude’), detections and inventions which have indubitably contributed to improve survival in the modern world. However, it must be counted among the darkest chapters in the intellectual history of mankind that rationality, this strong tool, invented for the benefit and survival of men, was tragically perverted and ended up in a desolate state, commonly referred to as the ‘dialectics of rationality’.51 The tight and complex nexus between surviving, individuality, identity and rationality permeates most survival stories and shapes the tradition of the ethics of survival clearly based on a staunch belief in the ‘autonomy of man’. But this autonomy is often limited by the forces of mythology and religion. Especially until the period of the Enlightenment, but even in the following centuries the topic of survival had strong mythological and religious connotations. Before the impact of rationalistic philosophy transformed the general view of the world into a scientific observation of reality, both mythology and religion were looked upon as legitimate explanations for the enigmatic character of life; birth, death, happiness, danger, but also accidents, misfortunes, calamities and diseases were regarded as the material manifestations of an abstract metaphysical intention either by pagan mythological divinity, by the Christian God or the Gods of other religions. In the Western world, the concept of the nemesis divina, the divine lust for revenge and punishment, played a vital part in attempts to find reasons for all kinds of disaster. Fate or predestination are likely to cancel the belief in the close affiliation between survival and free will. The nature of the biblical God defined by his omniscience, omnipotence and omnipresence rules out the possibility that catastrophes and calamities human beings experience could be interpreted as ‘accidents’; they reveal a higher purpose as lessons or warnings,52 being meaningful in themselves, because they implement a divine secret plan concealed from the eyes of the mortals. In the ‘book of nature’, calamities are the ‘moral fables’ with clear messages revealed.53 The classical explanatory system of disaster is of course the doctrine of ‘theodicy’, the attempt to justify the ways of God to Men.54 In mythological contexts, it is not in the power of man to secure his survival; a human being is the cue ball of the  whimsical goddesses of fate, who mystically spin the threads of man’s life. An insurgency against God’s will or predestined fate cannot but end in tragedy.

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Two paradigmatic texts are briefly described to explain the difference between religious contexts of survival and their counterparts, stories which follow a rather agnostic philosophy. In Defoe’s Journal of the Plague year, belief is an essential precondition for survival. The narrator clearly believes in God, he bases his decision to stay in town, when the plague causes so many people to die, on the interpretation of subtle ‘signs’, which he seems to have received from Heaven. The story is interspersed with prayers to God, who is asked for solace, support and strength. Survival depends on God, and the sinner is doomed to die. Defoe’s narrator leaves no doubt about this simple recognition. In a drastic scene, he describes how a group of drunkards and licentious people make fun of one of the plague’s victims, who lost his family during the epidemic, and the rabble even dares to utter blasphemous words. It is with no small degree of satisfaction that the narrator describes how the blasphemers ‘were punished by God’ only days later, when they, too, died of the plague.55 Whereas in Defoe’s survival story catastrophes display an inherent teleology of divine provenience, the principle of radical contingency prevails in Voltaire’s famous satire Candide (1759). Candide and his mentor Pangloss live in a world of violence, rape and war, and although all their experiences can be summarized as an unbearable sequence of injuries, tortures, loss and disasters of all kinds, Pangloss recommends Candide to still believe in the ‘best of all possible worlds’; Voltaire, who luxuriously quotes Leibniz’s formula of theodicy, presents a grim story of survival where the survivors have kept their life but lost all their happiness. The implication is clear: if survival is in God’s hand, it must be a rather inhuman God who sends his creatures on such a journey of loss and pain. Voltaire’s story suggests atheism as a counterweight to theodicy.56 For Voltaire, survival is not a matter of divine providence, survival is defined by the accidental processes of radical contingency.

The Survival of Groups The survival of groups does not differ in a substantial way from the survival of individuals, but the general conditions are changed. The sudden encounter of a group with the ‘absolute’, the experience of an unexpected disaster may be as horrible as the traumatic experience of an individual, but nevertheless it is a ‘shared experience’, and this awareness of a ‘community’ may offer a kind of solace and support.57 The survival of groups is a complex issue, fusing elements of emotion and rationality together,

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using psychological stratagems of encouraging each other in the common attempt to survive. This feeling of an intense solidarity is probably the cornerstone of a well-functioning group; its identity rests on complex processes of social practices to intensify the feeling of ‘belonging together’, cherishing common notions and pursuing the same goals. These social practices, which may be accompanied by attitudes of xenophobia and violent acts of excluding others from the community, can be so strong that they turn a group into a hysterical ‘mass’ of individuals who have sacrificed their own individuality in favour of the group, as frequently happened in those periods of history when the group spirit was infected by fascistic ideology. But apart from this disdainful mode of group dynamics, a community following unitary principles, sharing the same value systems and acting according to a plan based on common decisions has a fairly good chance to survive many crises. Now single tasks can be distributed to individual members of the group, a successful ‘team spirit’ may end in the choice of an apt ‘leader’ who shoulders the duty of coordinating, controlling and adjusting the single acts necessary for overcoming an existential crisis.58 The achievements of such a ‘survival group’ depend on solidarity, honesty, resilience, loyalty to the common goals, the willingness to suspend one’s own personal wishes in favour of group interests and the persistent readiness to become a ‘cog in a wheel’ for a machine programmed to survive. Communication between the members of a group plays a significant role.59 The more homogenous, or better ‘uniform’, the group appears, the greater chances it has to survive catastrophes or pandemics. But this success comes at a high price. The group may still claim autonomy, but the individual members of the group have to face a gradual loss of liberty and privacy.60 As Michel Foucault has analysed with his habitual laserlike precision, ‘control’, ‘surveillance’, ‘discipline’ and ‘self-discipline’ are the usual companions of establishing stratagems of survival in a group.61 Under extreme conditions, a society may thus gradually be transformed into a kind of prisonhouse, with the citizens as prisoners who find ‘shelter’ in this building but simultaneously lose their freedom. To put it more succinctly, the prisonhouse is rather a ‘panopticum’, a vitreous monument of surveillance, where single inhabitants feel surveilled so intensely that they ‘voluntarily’ give up any activity which does not conform with common principles or common ‘ethics’.62

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The Individual and the ‘Group’: The Ethics of Survival Although groups show astounding similarities, they differ in various aspects: solidarity, communication, team spirit, the feeling of unity so that in some cases one can hardly define the arbitrary constellation of individuals; sometimes they even seem to be yoked together by chance or fate. In his novel Enduring Love (1997), Ian McEwan presents the famous ‘balloon scene’: several individuals thrown together by chance set out to help an unfortunate pilot, who eagerly tries to keep a helium balloon on the ground; the danger is high because the balloon has landed near an escarpment with a young boy remaining inside the basket. Several helpers arrive at the scene, each of them grasping a rope to keep the balloon down. But then a vicious gust of wind makes the balloon rise again, suddenly the men ‘tread air’.63 And each of them has to decide within seconds to let loose or to continue to hold on; if no one lets loose, the balloon will come to the ground again, but if only one of them gives up, the balloon will continue to rise. With the exception of a doctor all men decide to save their own lives. The balloon rises quickly, the doctor holds on for some minutes, then falls down to the ground and is killed. When the narrator later analyses this scene he diagnoses the ‘lack of team spirit’ and the absence of a ‘leader’ and summarizes the experience in the words “there was no team”.64 McEwan’s scene presents a clearly dysfunctional group. But there are worse groups than dysfunctional groups. A group without a leader, no team spirit and no feeling of solidarity is easily transformed into a hostile group.65 The individual, who normally finds shelter in the community of like-minded people, suddenly faces his ‘fellow beings’ as strangers, not to say enemies. The balloon scene exemplifies the antagonism between selfishness and altruism, illustrating the term well known in ethics: ‘the trolley dilemma’. Fascistic societies interested in the creation of a uniform nation where all mavericks and ‘underdogs’ are systematically ostracized are extremely likely to produce such paradoxical ‘groups’ in their prisonhouses, concentration camps or Gulags. The testimonies of the Holocaust are teeming with reports of ‘group life’ in the camps, which is frequently compared to the forced co-existence of poor souls in Hell.66 It is the combination of two archetypes, that of ‘Robinson Crusoe’ and that of a ‘living Hell’ that Philip Roth addresses when he interviews Primo Levi and asks him about his fate in the camps:

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What’s recounted there reads to me like the story of Robinson Crusoe in Hell, with you, Primo Levi, as Crusoe, wrenching what you need to live from the chaotic residue of a ruthlessly evil island. What struck me there, as throughout the book, was the extent to which thinking contributed to your survival, the thinking of a practical, humane scientific mind. Yours doesn’t seem to me a survival that was determined by either brute biological strength or incredible luck. It was rooted, rather, in your professional character: the man of precision, the controller of experiments who seeks the principle of order; confronted with the evil inversion of everything he values. Granted you were a numbered part in an infernal machine, but a numbered part with a systematic mind that has always to understand. At Auschwitz you tell yourself, ‘I think too much’ to resist: ‘I am too civilized’. But to me the civilized man who thinks too much is inseparable from the survivor. The scientist and the survivor are one.67

Levi agrees that he felt like Robinson but insists that he not only fought for his own survival but for that of his sick comrades too.68 This correction of Roth’s suggestion is remarkable because Levi here defends the notion that there were traces of humaneness, empathy and charity even in the camps. Although similar observations can be verified in the testimonies of other Holocaust survivors, the prevailing notion one gets from reading their reports is the gradual and universal loss of the feeling of group solidarity. Survival in such a group comes close to the idea of ‘survival against the interest of the other members of the group’. The bitter maxim ‘Every man for himself’ is one of the most essential lessons Elie Wiesel has to learn when he enters the concentration camp,69 and—due to similar experiences—Alexander Donat calls the camp a world in which “the doomed devoured each other”.70 This harsh observation, which circumscribes the Hobbesian notion of the lupine nature of man (homo homini lupus est), could have been meant metaphorically, but some witnesses seem to remember actual instances of cannibalism.71 In a certain way, the camps could be looked upon as a sinister microcosm of human life and human survival under extreme conditions. Levi compares them to ‘laboratories’ where human behaviour can be studied minutely, and he emphasizes the camps were a frame for a “gigantic social and biological experiment”,72 where the fight for survival can be observed in its most primeval shape.73 Some descriptions go even further and cynically call the camp a “perfect Skinner Box”, where human behaviour can be predicted with the precision derived from behaviouristic studies.74

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Under the fiendish conditions of the life in the camps, the age-old antagonism between instinct and reason, between biological and genetic drives and morality and ethics, selfishness and altruism is extremely exacerbated. The strategic reduction of human beings to their biological essence, sadly described as ‘bare life’ by Levi, transforms a man into a figure Giorgio Agamben has called ‘homo sacer’.75 The notions of hunger, thirst, coldness, sickness, pain, fatigue and fear, which people develop under ‘normal’ civilized conditions in a society based on principles of empathy and mutual support, assume an unimaginable, extremely dark undertone in the testimonies of Holocaust survivors. Even if most survivors eagerly attempted not to allow such a personal deterioration that would transform them into ‘Muselmänner’, it was extremely difficult to reserve a rudiment of human dignity under these circumstances. The fascistic politics of depersonalization found its extremity in the camps, and the never-ending sequence of bodily ordeals, biological needs, pain and fear led to a re-evaluation or even utter destruction of ethical systems. Of course, Emmanuel Levinas’s ethics, based on the responsibility for the other and his face,76 never loses its validity, not even under such harsh conditions, but probably nobody could live up to this or any other ethical system, neither that of Kantian deontology nor that of utilitarianism, because he or she simply did not have the strength or the courage to do so. One simple precondition for Levinas’s ethics is the implication of his moral maxim that a human face has to be recognized as a ‘human face’, but in the camps everything was systematically planned in order to deprive inmates of their human shape. Pain, hunger, disease, fear and constant ordeal turned personalities into living corpses; only very few were successful in keeping a dignified appearance, some gave up washing themselves any more; their faces were covered by dirt and dust. An extremely execrable stratagem to reduce human dignity to nil was the affront by breaking taboos, what Des Pres calls the “Excremental Assault”:77 the unbearable hygienic conditions, the spare water available in the camps, the scarcity of toilets, the absence of toilet paper, the omnipresence of excrements transformed human beings into walking cadavers, exuding a terrible stench. This strategic alienation, which often caused an ensuing self-­alienation for the victim, was planned to create an ontological distance between the guardians and the prisoners, and it facilitated the tormenting and killing of the cynically ‘dehumanised humans’ in an appalling way. The Nazis used a cynical form of scatology as an instrument to prevent survival.

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This does not mean that exceptions to this ‘normalcy’ of the harsh ethics of survival did not occur,78 but they were comparably rare, as everyone can comprehend. The ethics of survival are based on a re-evaluation and ‘reformation’ of coherent ethical systems, coming close to the doctrines of ‘natural law’. As Levi has described it, the values of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ are consistently under attack and have to be redefined.79 People can ask themselves to what extent it would be possible to stand pain before they would give in to the terrible mechanisms of betraying their personality, their moral and most cherished ethical notions under torture. One can probably not exclude the possibility that ‘one would do anything’ after the infliction of pain exceeds certain limits.80 Stealing is certainly regarded as a transgression in most civilized societies, but for the survivor of extreme calamities stealing bread becomes the moral imperative of natural law, for instance redefined as a harmless ‘Mundraub’ in the German language. But stealing bread from another starving prisoner reveals its dubious ethical quality and may lead to a feeling of guilt, when the ‘deed’ is remembered later. The ethical dilemmas of prisoners become even more drastic when the other person’s life is at stake, for example, if one may only get the necessary ration of food or to see the next day when one is willing to betray a comrade to the guardians or the ‘kapos’. About the gas chambers, camp survivors reported that— when the doors of the deadly room were opened again—the strongest persons could be seen lying on the top of the heaps of corpses because they trampled on the weaker prisoners in their agony of suffocating, creating one of the most ghastly icons of the fight for survival in the face of death.81 Nobody can evaluate this situation from a moral or ethical point of view, it is beyond human imagination and human value systems, probably singular in its sheer atrocity. Biologists would certainly refer to the survival automatism of the body, and neuroscience would highlight the fact that the brain—falling back on primeval evolutionary algorithms—in such a moment of distress would incapacitate any residuals of rationality, morality or ethics. The survival of the fittest revealed itself in various bizarre manifestations sometimes blurring the line between ‘perpetrators’ and ‘victims’; Harry Haft, for instance, a Jewish boxer from Poland admired for his athletic body, his strength and his skills in the ring, was ordered to fight against other inmates of the camp; if he won, he could count on extra rations of food which secured his survival.82 Some of his opponents in the boxing ring did not survive the cruel fight; if they were injured, they were

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sent to the gas chambers.83 Even if it was against his ‘will’, the ‘victim’ Haft was transformed into a tragic ‘perpetrator’. Levi describes some representatives of the category of ‘survivalists’ in the camp, but the term ‘survivalist’, which exudes a special charm in the equivalent German ‘Überlebenskünstler’ (with a stress on the ‘art of survival’), has lost any glory in the context of the camps. Levi’s ‘Schepsel’, ‘the engineer Elias Lindzin’, ‘Henry’ and also the ‘strong dwarfish person’ he tells of are representatives of what he calls the ‘primitive state’ of existence, cultivating techniques of deception, primeval self-discipline, simulation of power, Darwinian assimilation and a reckless selfishness bordering on amorality.84 Personalities whom, as Levi says, he would not like to see again in his lifetime. The question of survival and heroism is often discussed, and Des Press reminds his readers that the Holocaust survivors were no heroes: If by heroism we mean the dramatic defiance of superior individuals, then the age of heroism is gone. If we have in mind glory and grand gesture, the survivor is not a hero. He or she is anyone who manages to stay alive in body and in spirit, enduring dread and hopelessness without the loss of will to carry on in human ways. That is all.85

Des Pres’s observation may be right, but—at least when inmates were willing to care for each other, to share their little food with each other, or to support and help someone who was even more needy than themselves— these deeds of benevolence and empathy definitively come close to a kind of moral and ethical heroism under these hellish conditions.

The Dialectics of Survival The ritual repeats itself in various shapes: the survivors of mining disasters are acclaimed by  journalists  and congratulated on their ‘luck’; in interviews, the survivor of the attack on the Twin Towers comments on the unimaginable bliss he feels after being rescued and thanks the fire fighters; the survivor of a Tsunami publicly prays to God that his life has been saved; a group of Holocaust survivors is saluted on occasion of a memorial ceremony. On first glance, survival seems to be closely associated with ‘happiness’, ‘luck’, ‘bliss’ and ‘felicity’: the terrible past has been overcome, the future promises happy prospects. But the notion of the ‘happy survivor’, the person relishing in his ‘success’, is deceptive at best. Survival

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reveals a darker side, a dialectics which renders all idyllic imaginations of a comfortable ‘afterlife’ absurd. It is true, someone who has survived a car accident may have the feeling to be ‘born again’ and his life may prove to be as valuable as it had been before. But especially the survivors of extremely traumatic experiences caused by ‘fellow-men’ often witness a dubious ‘resurrection’ from death, feeling “tarred and feathered for life”, to borrow a memorable expression from Julian Barnes.86 In the camps there was an uncanny feeling of being ‘alive and dead’ at the same time; the intense perception of pain, hunger, thirst and coldness was accompanied by the weird experience of time standing still. The a-temporality of the extreme condition inspired the notion of merely being walking corpses, moving carcasses. And it is the fiendish aftermath of extreme trauma that clocks never resume their former trustworthiness after severe injuries; traumatic experiences cannot be overcome without difficulties, they remain an integral part of one’s whole personality, “like a bullet lodged in the soul where no surgery can reach it”.87 In traumatic memory the event somehow registers and may actually be relived in the present, at times in a compulsively repetitive manner. It may not be subject to controlled, conscious recall. But it returns in nightmares, flashbacks, anxiety attacks, and other forms of intrusively repetitive behaviour characteristic of an all-compelling frame. Traumatic memory (at least in Freud’s account) may involve belated temporality and a period of latency between a real or fantasized early event and a later one that somehow recalls it and triggers renewed repression or foreclosure and intrusive behaviour. But when the past is controllably relived, it is as if there were no difference between it and the present. Whether or not the past is reenacted or repeated in its precise literality, one feels as if one were back where reliving the event, and distance between here and there, then and now, collapses.88

Time sequence is cancelled by traumatic experiences, the past threatens to become an everlasting past, turning the present ‘book of life’ into a palimpsest where the subtext of the past is so strong that it permanently overwrites the actual life story. Flashbacks illuminate the present ‘here’ and ‘now’ with dark colours and transform it into an ephemeral moment behind which the contours of the terrible past emerge with unmitigated intensity. The loss of trust prevails in the ‘new life’: We emerged from the camp stripped, robbed, emptied out, disoriented— and it was a long time before we were able even to learn the ordinary

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l­anguage of freedom. Still today, incidentally, we speak it with discomfort and without real trust in its validity.89

The loss of personal autonomy that followed upon the humiliations in the camps is never remedied. The vulnerability and precariousness of human life,90 felt in its extremity in the concentration camps, conquer the rest of the survivor’s existence, inspiring the notion that the life he leads is no longer really ‘his own’. He has to share it with those whom he cannot forget, the ghosts of the past, the spectres of the common experience of suffering. The voices muted in the gas chambers or stifled by the terrible executions are still to be heard, the figures can still be seen wandering forever in their absurd suffering. It would be premature to define this new form of suffering as “concentration camp syndrome”;91 it is not so much a symptom of disease but a sign of the will to survive. On the one hand, it may be ‘resentment’ which “nails” every survivor “onto the cross of his ruined past”,92 but there is also a strong element of mourning and (unnecessary) ‘guilt’. Elegy accompanies survival with a sad undertone; sometimes as persistent as an unbearable tinnitus, melancholy brings about darker colours of life distorting the clear contours of what other people might regard as ‘reality’. The traumatized survivor sees the real world as a blend of empiric factuality with strong elements of both surrealism and unreality, finding their literary expressions in gothic elements.93 The loss of coherence, the tendency towards fragmentarization, disrupture, absence of orientation, disintegration of value systems and logic, represented impressively by postmodern techniques of writing,94 frequently become an integral part of the survivor’s new ‘life’. The title of the German edition of Kluger’s book weiter leben alludes to this dialectics of survival, suggesting interpretations such as ‘I am allowed to live on’ as well as ‘Do I have to live on?’ They manifest the dubious quality of life after a catastrophe. Kluger vividly describes her life-long nervousness and restlessness, the obsession of the drive to leave any place behind in an effort of permanent flight.95 In his essayistic reflection on suicide, Améry aphoristically states that the ‘world of a happy person is different from that of an unhappy person’;96 any  state  of ‘happiness’ is infiltrated by traumatic memory and the loss of trust in its persistence. Melancholy and a sense of guilt (even if it only exists in the eyes of the person concerned) form a toxic mixture leading to deep depression, utter despair and sometimes even the wish to commit suicide. The topos of the ‘suicidal Holocaust survivor’, paradoxical at first glance only, reveals its

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deepest meaning when one reads the life stories of Jean Améry, Bruno Bettelheim, Paul Celan and Primo Levi,97 stories of survival abruptly ended by ‘voluntary’ death. The alienation forced on the prisoners of the camps was so intense that—together with the ensuing self-alienation— reality, even the reality after the catastrophe, has become ‘un-heimlich’, to use a Freudian term; it refers to the idea of an existential homelessness, which finds a literary expression in Albert Camus’s books,98 the feeling of not ‘belonging’ to any place, situation, time or environment any more. The awareness that despite being ‘alive’ one has fallen through the safety nets of the basic sense of trust creates challenges for the rest of one’s life. There may be instances of genuine guilt (who would dare to judge?) but often the feeling of guilt remains vague though persistent; Kluger dedicates a whole paragraph to the topos of the survivor’s guilt: Survivor guilt does not mean that you think you have no right to live. Speaking for myself, I never believed I should have died because others were killed. I hadn’t done anything bad to anyone. Why should I pay? It’s a question of debt rather than guilt, though these ideas are closely bound together, as in the Lord’s Prayer (“Forgive us our debts”) or in the word debit, and in German the words are related, the one Schuld, guilt, the other Schulden, debt. One remains a debtor and yet doesn’t quite know to whom one owes the debts. One would like to take from the victimizers to give to the victims, but one doesn’t know how. For you owe me—I am a victim—but I owe them—for they are dead, more victim than I. One is debtor and creditor at the same time and is doomed to perform surrogate actions, alternating between giving and demanding: senseless actions in the flickering light or reason.99

Kluger finds appropriate words to fend off any suspicion of guilt, but, nevertheless, her further meditations upon survival betray a clear unwellness; the survivor cannot but compare his ‘fate’ with that of his fellow sufferers, and even from them he is separated: Now comes the problem of this survivor story, as of all such stories: we start writing because we want to tell about the great catastrophe. But since by definition the survivor is alive, the reader inevitably tends to separate, or deduct, this one life, which she has come to know, from the millions who remain anonymous. […] We who escaped do not belong to the community of those victims, my brother among them, whose ghosts are unforgiving. By virtue of survival,

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we belong with you, who weren’t exposed to the genocidal danger, and we know that there is a black river between us and the true victims. Therefore this is not the story of a Holocaust victim and becomes less and less so as it nears the end. I was with them when they were alive, but now we are separated.100

Améry, Levi, Kluger, Bettelheim and Celan were able to express the many agonies of survival by using a more or less literary medium: the essay, testimony, narration, psycholanalysis or poetry, but many survivors did not have access to this form of ‘sublimation’ and transformation of experience into other forms such as words, music, architecture or dance. Trauma is closely connected to silence, often causing an inability to process suffering in form of a ‘text’. Survival is often accompanied by an uncanny situation of silence, lack of words, impossibility to speak, circumscriptions of what usually is addressed as the ‘Unsagbarkeitstopos’ (the topos of inexpressiveness).101 The dialectic of survival also includes religious dilemmas. For agnostics and atheists it will probably be absurd to talk about God with regard to what happened during the Holocaust, but from a theological point of view, especially that of a theologian interested in the question of theodicy, the Holocaust will be of the highest concern. For a staunch believer, no matter if he is a Christian, a Jew or a representative of any other religion, evilness is a provocation of the notion of God, because “it cannot be that God stepped out, whether for an hour or an eternity, from world history, for this is the very world that He created and with whose life and destiny He is connected”.102 The Holocaust, taking place on what Yehiel Feiner under his pen-name ‘Ka-Tsetnik 135633’ called ‘another planet’,103 is the utmost emblem of evilness; in Jewish texts, Adolf Hitler is compared with Haman, the incarnation of evilness in Jewish history, the suffering of men exemplified by the story of Job. Wiesel suffered immensely, when he experienced those “moments that murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams into ashes”;104 the concentration camp caused despair in him (desperatio): Blessed be God’s name? Why, but why would I bless Him? Every fiber in me rebelled. Because He caused thousands of children to burn in His mass graves? Because He kept six crematoria working night and day, including Sabbath and the Holy Days? Because in His great might, He had created Auschwitz, Birkenau, Buna, and

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so many other factories of death? How could I say to Him: Blessed be Thou, Almighty, Master of the Universe, who chose us among all nations to be tortured day and night, to watch as our fathers, our mothers, our brothers end up in the furnaces? Praised be Thy Holy Name, for having chosen us to be slaughtered on Thine altar?105

Wiesel, who later adopted a more differentiated attitude towards religion, was not alone in questioning his God, who was ‘hanging from the gallows’ in the concentration camp.106 The textual documents written by Jewish theologians in reaction to the Holocaust belong to the most moving testimonies of human beings who reflect the meaningfulness of believing in God after the events of the Holocaust. The scope of reactions ranges from deep piety prepared to believe in God despite everything to the blank confession of atheism; the discussion is extremely complex, but two exemplary texts for the two antagonistic positions of ‘theodicy in the face of the radical evilness of the Holocaust’ shall be included here; the first is by Kalman Shapira, the second by Alexander Donat: In all honesty, what room is there, God forbid, for doubts or questions? Admittedly, Jews endure suffering or the sort with which we are currently afflicted only every few hundred years. Still, how can we expect or hope to understand these, God’s actions, and then allow our faith to be damaged, God forbid, upon finding that we cannot understand them? If one blade of grass created by God is beyond our understanding, how much more unfathomable is the soul; and if we do not understand a soul, how much less do we understand an angel, and how much less even than this can we understand the mind of God? How could we possibly expect to grasp with our mind what God knows and understands?107 I cannot understand how it is possible to believe in a God who allowed 1.5 million children to die in gas chambers and mass graves. No sophistry, rhetoric, or casuistry, no flood of description or poetry, no mysterious or flowery prose can answer this question. The answer is unique and as simple and final as an order to the right or left. There is no other option. Either this is the God of Treblinka—or else there is nothing. My choice is clear: There is nothing. Rabbi Eliezer Berkovits can brush aside ‘Auschwitz theology’ and call it naïve radicalism, but I do not believe in a paranoid, Stalin-like God of Israel or in His ‘chosen people.’ To believe in God after Auschwitz is an insult to our intelligence, true blasphemy, a blow to the deepest f­ eelings of morality. Anarchy rules. […] Precisely because I am a Jew, I deny God.108

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The Reception of Survival Stories The survivors almost unanimously state that ‘nothing’ came out of Auschwitz;109 it was neither a ‘laboratory’, in which survival could be studied under extreme conditions, nor a ‘lesson’ to be learnt for life, nor an inducement to start believing in God or to change the course of one’s own life after survival. The main judgement is that the experience in the camps was extremely and exclusively grotesque, completely absurd judged from a philosophical vantage point. Perhaps the only way to fill survival with essential meaning, as many survivors claim, is to confront the public as witnesses, to make huge audiences aware of the ghastliness of the catastrophe caused by fanatical human ‘fellow beings’. Many testimonies prove that survivors felt it as their duties to tell their stories so that the suffering of the ‘unlucky victims’ who could not escape the gas chambers could be heard around the world and that it would become impossible for world history to repeat itself. But even in its reception, survival manifests a dialectic character. On the one hand, audiences are interested and eager to know what happened to the survivors, and on the other hand, the witnesses feel that they will never be able to make themselves understood: So trauma has both centripetal and centrifugal tendencies. It draws one away from the center of group space while at the same time drawing one back. The human chemistry at work here is an odd one, but it has been noted many times before: estrangement becomes the basis for communality, as if persons without homes or citizenship or any other niche in the larger order of things were invited to gather in a quarter set aside for the disenfranchised, a ghetto for the unattached.110

The initial interest of the audience is genuine and probably caused by the old tribal impulse to be informed about accidents and catastrophes of any kind; it is a manifestation of curiosity with its inherent principle to transgress any borderline. In a psychological sense, it is more ‘satisfying’ and gives a feeling of security to fellow human beings if they ‘know the worst’ and cannot be surprised by horrible events. Telling stories about survival is also a warning and a mode of giving advice.111 In this respect, the narration of the process of other people’s survival can be a vicarious experience, a kind of ‘live model’ characterized by exemplarity, intensification and abstractness,112 where individuals and groups give valuable insight into the sociology, psychology, ethics and problems of survival. Furthermore, the

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representation of catastrophes in any kind of media such as literature, film, footage, art or testimony is always addressed to other ‘survivors’, those who are still living, even if they did not share the past of suffering which is represented in the media. Representations of catastrophes are even responsible for a feeling of ‘pleasure’, which should at no events be confounded with what is defined as ‘Schadenfreude’ in German; the audience does not experience pleasure in watching the suffering of others; it owes the pleasant feeling to the awareness of ‘still being alive’, the pleasure of having survived. The complexity of the aesthetic representation of suffering has been illustrated by Blumenberg’s famous scene of the ‘shipwreck with spectator’.113 The ship with its crew going down in a stormy sea and observed by a lonely stranger standing on a rock on shore is the illustration of survival and its observation. The observer, of course, represents not only the witness (here the picture would not fit) but the spectator who watches films or the listener who hears what a survivor has to say. For the survivors of extreme ordeals this topos and its graphic nature have to be changed; quite frequently the onshore observers look in the wrong direction, or they turn their backs on what they see in the distance; sometimes the storm is too loud so that the noises are drowned with the crew; sometimes spectators lose their capability to listen at all, or they no longer understand the meaning of a language whose codes remain enigmatic to them. This is exactly what happened to many survivors of the Holocaust: an encounter with unwilling recipients. Indifference, lack of interest, consternation or even the feeling of being threatened or attacked by survival stories are part of the reception history. Kluger summarizes this experience: We survivors reminded the population through our mere existence of what had happened, and what they and their people had done. Perhaps they were afraid of our revenge, or they thought we  were like dogs that have been regularly beaten and can only snarl and bite. If you hadn’t been there yourself, you could make believe that only criminals had survived the camps or those who had been brutalized while they were incarcerated. Never mind that this view was in direct contradiction to the equally widespread opinion that the camps couldn’t have been all that bad: witness how many survivors we (poor Germans) now have.114

Like Kluger, who to no avail tried to inform her aunt about her experiences in the camp, Haft felt completely misunderstood by his new American neighbours and friends. Language had lost its function to serve

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as a bridge between the individual and its new group. With deeply melancholic cynicism, Améry remarked: “What dehumanized me has become a commodity, which I offer for sale”.115 He feels extremely violated by the recommendation of the French Jewish scholar André Neher, who recommended “emotional ascetisms” to the survivors.116

Survival After the End of the Anthropocene The plethora of testimonies written in the wake of the Holocaust offer the opportunity of studying the calamities of individual survival, the survival of groups and the survival of individuals in the group or against and despite of a ‘group’ as under a concave mirror. The recurrent theme of the reports about the survivors’ experiences is the gradual loss of autonomy, which—even after liberation—could never be completely restored. The loss of the possibility to control one’s own life, to decide what to do, where to go and what to believe in were central aspects of the strategic dehumanization and humiliation of prisoners in the camps. The issue of survival does not lose its significance after the end of the Holocaust, the abolishment of the Gulags or the destruction of detention centres.117 Even in a modern society of the Western world, where citizens can ‘live’ in a comparably safe environment, survival will always remain an important subject; the vulnerability of life in general, and human life in particular, will probably never render the issue obsolete. Contemporary critics, however, do not tire to draw attention to the fact that the relative safety of modern life comes at a high price. It is precisely the doctrine of neoliberalism that criticizes a principle,118 vital for survival under the harsh conditions of fascism: resilience. From the neoliberalistic point of view, resilience is not really “the bedrock of positive mental health”,119 which is the main reason for a survivor to lead a happy life; it rather reveals its dark potential: it gradually and perfidiously undermines and then completely destroys autonomy.120 If the optimistic belief in the autonomous control of one’s own life and one’s environment was an essential concomitant of Enlightenment philosophy, neoliberalism describes the gradual loss of this philosophical achievement. Summarized, the argument reads like this: due to the prospects of economic growth and gain, the state gives a comparably high degree of (economic) ‘liberty’ to its subjects but simultaneously shifts the responsibility for any calamities to the individual who is coerced to shoulder the responsibility for his own survival; the failure of survival is blamed on the individual because it has miscalculated a specific

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situation.121 By following this stratagem, the state ‘produces’ well-adapted political subjects, drilled to put up with any adversities and too inert to fight against politics: The making of resilient subjects and societies fit for neoliberalism by agencies of sustainable development is based upon a degradation of the political capacities of human beings far more subtle than that achieved in Auschwitz and Buchenwald. But the enthusiasm with which ideologies of sustainable development are turning resilience into an ‘imperative’ is nevertheless comparable with that of the SS guards who also aimed ‘to speed up the processes of adaptive learning’ among those Jews and other populations in their charge by convincing them of the futility of resistance.122

Although after a discussion of the ordeal brought about by the Holocaust every critic would be well advised not to use that catastrophe as an object of comparison, the implication of the argument above is clear. It is the notion that neoliberalism, in the long run, will be inimical to survival. A further implication of the criticism of neoliberalism is the satirical view of the central economical interest in contemporary life, an interest that is exclusively focused on the ‘interest’ of human beings. Usually discussions about survival are based on the tacit assumption that the theme of survival pivots around one centre: the human being. As obvious as this seems to be, it is far from self-evident. The last decades have witnessed a paradigm shift of looking at the world: vulnerability has become much more visible and a growing preparedness to a turn to affect emerges in academic theory;123 furthermore, the paradigm of the anthropocene, which supports all kinds of anthropocentric ideologies, is about to end, and a new awareness of life and survival are to be seen. Survival no longer concerns human beings alone; a new sensitivity for the ‘rights’ of animals are to be felt everywhere. The theme of survival is widened now, taking into consideration the survival of animal species, but also the criticism of the consummation of meat causing the death of cattle and poultry. Due to the climate crisis and the public protest it has provoked, the movement ‘Fridays for Future’, initiated by Greta Thunberg, it is also ‘nature’ and the ‘earth’ whose survival has now been put on a global agenda.124 These new conditions and redefinitions of survival would present enough objects of research for future conferences and symposia, but this brief essayistic survey of the survival theme should not come to an end without at least mentioning a new category of survival: the survival of human

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beings in a century deeply characterized by the ‘digital revolution’. For the first time in history, humanity, the animal rationale, has to share its prominent position with other ‘creatures’ who may claim to be as intelligent, better, much more intelligent than itself. The future may well show that the new mode of human survival will rest on a balanced power relationship between human beings and intelligent robots, androids, who will render human work, human learning, human planning and human thinking more and more obsolete. In a humorous, but nevertheless, dystopian novel, Ian McEwan has given a foretaste of the battle of the ‘survival of the fittest’ between humanity and androids in his novel Machines like Me (2019). The survival of natural catastrophes is difficult but possible; the new challenge for survivors could be a group of antagonists, created by humans but more intelligent, more powerful and more dangerous than they themselves could ever become. ‘Survival’ might assume a new meaning, because—due to the future successes of science in general and medicine in particular—it might be possible to conquer death.125 The need to develop survival strategies of mankind in the ‘digital age’ will become more and more urgent in the future.

Chapter Summaries The chapters in this book are divided into three units. The first part centres on the notion of survival and the group. It opens with a chapter by Jean-Michel Ganteau, who addresses the complex affiliations between suffering, survival, testimony, elegy and the emerging culture of the ‘ethics of care’. Although he admits that the issue of survival is closely connected with the Shoah, his main focus lies on the analysis of survival in our contemporary world, exemplarily illustrated in Jon McGregor’s novel Even the Dogs. Building on research by—among others—Dori Laub, Judith Butler, Jean François Lyotard and Didi-Huberman, he confirms their notions that traumatic events are beyond the understanding of the survivor himself. In a certain way, fiction offers the chance to fill this hole; in fiction, it is permissible to include surrealistic elements, for instance the description of ghosts and spectrality, themselves emblems of traumatic obsession. Ganteau next discusses the prevalence of the elegiac in contemporary survival stories and accentuates the fact that contemporary elegies still consist of descriptions and lamentations, but that they have lost their third distinctive characteristic feature: consolation. In Even the Dogs, this ‘modern’ mode of ‘melancholic elegy without consolation’ is clearly to be

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seen. McGregor’s protagonists are outsiders, ‘losers’, underprivileged people, marginalized by society. Describing the sad death of the central figure, Robert, a deeply traumatized war veteran, the novel analyses survival in a hostile contemporary world. Ganteau shows that McGregor’s decision to employ a ‘spectral chorus’ as a narrative device allows him to describe traumatic experiences that could not be represented by more traditional forms of narration; the chorus becomes the superstes of the victim. Bodies and voices are separated in this story; the surreal collective narrator is present and yet absent, close and distanced, dead and alive simultaneously; narration becomes a kind of new mode of ‘meta-physical’ representation of suffering and trauma. This experimental novel, as Ganteau shows, is an analysis of the suffering of invisible people in modern society. For Ganteau, McGregor’s novel is a typical example of the emerging culture of care and of the ethics of alterity, since McGregor intends to train his readers to develop an intensified awareness of the suffering of invisible human beings. Like Ganteau, Vanessa Guignery accentuates the close affiliations between the theme of ‘survival’ and the context of the Shoah, and like him, she also shifts the focus from the ‘singularity’ of suffering during the Holocaust to a broader analysis of survival as a universal characteristic feature of mankind. Harking back on survival testimonies written by Primo Levi, Giorgio Agamben, Elie Wiesel and Ella Ligen, she confirms the tragic interrelation between survival, guilt and shame, and she shares the deeply pessimistic insight that survival is frequently based on a radical enforcement of ruthless egotism which abandons any ethical principles, but her in-depth analyses of selected novels by Julian Barnes and Caryl Phillips eventually reveal a more optimistic view of survival. Both Barnes and Phillips present a series of stories in which the suffering of individuals is described, but where they simultaneously manifest the inherent interconnectedness of all these single stories by integrating recurring echoes, patterns, motifs, themes, images and especially metaphors. Using ‘shipwreck’ as a universal existential metaphor in A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters, Barnes analyses the implications of suffering and survival in various historical periods from Noah’s Arc to the Titanic disaster, from the events on the Achille Lauro to the MS St Louis. In three novels, Higher Ground, The Nature of Blood and Crossing the River, Phillips links the fates of the sufferers together by a system of ‘parallel periodization’, which transcends history and time and establishes a strong net of time-transcending solidarity and resilience. Phillips’s novels can be interpreted as

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iconographic illustrations of Michael Rothberg’s concept of the rhizomatic ‘knots of a collective and cultural memory’, highly dependant on acts of story telling. Narration itself, it becomes clear, is a way of survival, and a chance to inspire the feeling of a trans-historical, cross-cultural, cross-­ difference solidarity between all human beings thus contributing to the emerging culture of a new visibility of vulnerability and a new awareness of resilience, empathy and the ethics of care in our time. In the optimistic conclusion of her chapter, Guignery suggests the possibility of a trans-­ traumatic society based on the principle of universal solidarity. Janet Wilson’s contribution to this volume, Chap. 4, verifies the topicality of the issue of ‘survival’ in the twenty-first century. She shows to what degree the contemporary phenomena of flight, migration and asylum seeking forced by poverty, oppression or war can be interpreted as manifestations of survival. Focusing on refugee writing, on the stories told by the ‘most marginalised of all diaspora populations’, she draws attention to the problems inherent in the ‘ethics of representation’. Refugees are either invisible, or they become ‘objects’ of overexposure, especially in media reports. Wilson shows the importance of giving refugees their own voice and of listening to them, but even the act of ‘giving a voice’ can be interpreted as a kind of neo-colonial mode of exerting inappropriate power. Using three literary examples, Wilson explores both the nature and potential impact of refugee writing. The first example, Abu Bakr Khaal’s poetic novel African Titanics, illustrates Judith Butler’s ideas of the precariousness of life and of the universal validity of co-vulnerability and of co-responsibility. As an Eritrean migrant, Khaal enriches his testimony of the exodus with fictional elements, poetry and especially songs, stories and legends from his cultural heritage. Migration to him appears like a pandemic, like a huge wave, even like sorcery putting a black spell on many Africans, some of them doomed to die during the attempt to survive. Refugee Tales I, II and III, an anthology of refugee texts, offer a kind of literary ventriloquism by which the experiences of others are presented. Using Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales as a frame, they collect the stories of anonymous narrators known only by their roles. The choice of Chaucer’s anthology as a kind of ‘imaginary homeland’ proves the pro-­ active stance of this literary project, intentionally giving a ‘national space’ to rootless immigrants. Refugee Tales, however, also reveals the ‘crisis of representation’, since the co-producers, ghostwriters and translators may be responsible for overwriting and thus distorting the original stories. The third example, the memoir No Friend but the Mountains: Writing from

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Manus Prison by the Kurdish author Behrouz Boochani, fuses testimony and fiction and combines the realistic description of the inhuman practices in the detention camps established for refugees by the Australian government with literary texts reminiscent of Franz Kafka, Samuel Beckett and Albert Camus. Boochani’s impressive memoir exposes the violence and humiliations witnessed in the Australian detention camps as a mixture of racism, sexism and colonialism. Boochani’s poetic depictions of nature and the natural life which he seeks out in rare moments of self-chosen isolation and loneliness prove the energy nature has: in this natural space he can grow his Kurdish roots again, reanimate the richness of his culture and, by finding his identity again, develop strong strategies of survival, especially resilience. All three examples analysed by Wilson reveal the strong impact refugee writing may have on official government policies of immigration and asylum law since all of them are powerful critiques of exclusion. The first section closes with a chapter by Susanne Gruss, whose article brings together questions of cultural and personal trauma with matters of neo-slave narratives. Taking as her case study Sara Collin’s The Confessions of Frannie Langton (2019), a novel that both builds on the historical eighteenth-century tradition of slave narratives and projects that form into the contemporary conventions of neo-historical writing, Gruss concentrates on questions of gendered and racial identities. Well connected to contemporary discussions in Britain about how the country did and maybe should deal with its colonial past and the legacy of racist ideologies, the novel actively toys with its literary precursors, inviting its readers to engage, intertextually, with both the history of race politics and the contemporary discussions about intersectional forms of aesthetic representation. The trauma resulting from colonial forms of oppression is placed in contrast with feminist forms of writing back, creating in the novel a kaleidoscope of voices that, far from providing a singular and finite account of the life and times of Frannie Langton, invites readers to participate in the tribulations that the protagonist had to go through, making of her own personal story of survival simultaneously a form of record that testifies to the relationship between literature and cultural politics. Employing various forms of narrative unreliability, as Gruss demonstrates, the text challenges readers to remain doubtful about any form of historiography, revealing that memories of survival routinely suffer from the intensity of emotional duress. Fragmentation, consequently, becomes a major form of

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representation, yet remains, at least implicitly, directed at particular contemporary readers. The chapters in the second part share an interest in survival and the individual. Rudolf Freiburg analyses physical, psychological and aesthetic aspects of survival under the harsh conditions of a totalitarian regime. Julian Barnes, who in almost all his works tells highly complex stories of survival enriched with ethical implications, presents a partly documentary, partly fictional description of Dmitri Dmitrijewitsch Shostakovich’s suffering under Stalin. Freiburg interprets Barnes’s novel as a veritable allegory of survival. Barnes is a master of condensing highly complex situations into unforgettable images reminiscent of modernist epiphanies. The introductory scene presenting an amputated warrior who desperately moves around on the platform on a shabby trolley is such an epiphany, an appropriate ‘emblem of survival’, in general, and of Shostakovich’s survival, in particular. Survival comes at a price, and Freiburg analyses how in a terrible process of vivisection, Shostakovich is more or less amputated before the reader’s eye. The minimalistic style Barnes uses for this novel creates a distance between Shostakovich’s world and that of the recipient, but it also represents the utter greyness of life under Stalin, when physical survival is a daily challenge, a constant fight against poverty, hunger, coldness, lack of gas and electricity, unemployment and disease. On the one hand, Shostakovich’s survival is a heroic act, but his survival is also overshadowed by cowardice, turning him, as Barnes accentuates himself, into a ‘heroic coward’ or a ‘cowardly hero’. The clash between art and power, allegorically described by Barnes, causes the gradual disintegration of Shostakovich’s personality. After Stalin publicly condemned Shostakovich’s opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, Shostakovich was officially transformed into an ‘enemy of the people’. The incessant psychological stress turned Shostakovich into a traumatized person living in constant fear. Barnes presents a second unforgettable image of Shostakovich’s mental state: the composer is described as a man waiting in front of an elevator with his suitcase packed. Freiburg interprets the dynamics of Shostakovich’s survival as a sequence of increasing humiliations and the collapse of ethical values: Shostakovich’s is compelled to betray his friends and, even worse, his aesthetic ideal, the music of Igor Stravinsky. The exploration of Barnes’s novel illustrates the paradoxical notion of the ‘unhappy survivor’, the oxymoron of a person still ‘alive’ but ‘dead’ at the same time. With the portrait of Shostakovich as a survivor who wishes his life away, and even more tragic, who never wants to be born again, Barnes sheds some rather

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pessimistic light on the theme of survival. But, and this is the positive final outcome of the novel, Barnes also suggests that the clash between art and power does not really result in the survival of power and the extinction of art. On the contrary, in the end, it is rather art that survives, as Shostakovich has proven with his immortal music. Susana Onega addresses both the politics and dynamics of survival in the story of the Luxtons, who deteriorated from a proud rural family into a group of traumatized individuals haunted by the past. Swift’s story illustrates the concept of the contemporary ‘wound culture’ described by Mark Seltzer. By interrelating world-wide traumatic incidences, as the attack on the World Trade Center in 2001 and the mad cow disease in England in the 1980s and 1990s, with the history of one English family, Swift shows how political events may trigger a concatenation of tragedies in the private world. Onega interprets Jack Luxton’s journey from Lookout to Oxfordshire, where he intends to attend the ‘Repatriation Ceremony’ for his younger brother Tom, who had been ‘killed on active duty’ in Iraq, as a mental journey into his past. His family history reveals itself as a sad narrative of vulnerability and as a sequence of losses. Referring to research by Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, Onega explores the various reasons that turn these traumatic experiences into even worse ‘objective correlates’ deeply ‘buried alive’ in the souls of each victim, from where they resurrect as ‘ghosts’. Due to the psychological laws of ‘belatedness’, they develop a kind of dark energy and cause the ‘survivors’ to suffer from life-long mourning and vitriolic qualms concerning the meaning of existence in general. Among the many causes which exacerbate the suffering of the victims are staunch concepts of manhood, which keep Jack and Tom from expressing their emotions, but also misinterpretations of episodes and misunderstanding of words, a general lack of communication and a continuous absence of empathy. Onega shows that by using a complex narrative structure reminiscent of a mental palimpsest, by composing a polyphony of diverse voices and by merging past, present and future together, Swift adumbrates the a-temporality and ubiquity of traumatic experiences, which may invade the present moment at any time and render survival almost impossible. Suicide seems to be the only solution to overcome Jack’s existential crisis. Although the novel clearly represents what Jean-­ Michel Ganteau has identified as ‘the prevailing elegiac mode of contemporary culture’, where lamentation frequently lacks any consolation, Wish You Were Here at least offers a perhaps more optimistic solution: survival is possible; it can be attained once the toxic feelings of guilt, neglect,

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despair and (narcissistic) melancholy are transformed into resilience, social empathy and the ethics of care. A different sense of resilience appears in Sibylle Baumbach’s chapter on dementia narratives. Starting with an ethical framing of how readers position themselves vis-à-vis narratives of illness and suffering, the chapter critically questions to what extent any reading of a narrative of illness and suffering can claim an ethical platform. This challenge also surfaces in narratives that deal with people whose lives are increasingly enmeshed in forms of oblivion and forgetting. Baumbach carefully addresses how a diagnosis affects both the patients and also those closest to them, requiring both groups to relate to forms of surviving in a way that accepts the finality of the diagnosis and the inevitability that results from the fact that, in this particular case, any survival that believes in a sense of continuity of existence is impossible. As she shows in her discussion of works by authors like Thomas DeBaggio and Michael Ignatieff, survival becomes a commitment to others: the patient diagnosed with dementia henceforth lives for others and in their memory. The forms of writing confront readers directly with the fragmentary nature both of memory and of the narratives that result from this state of mind. Making of survival what Baumbach calls ‘a social act’ that actively triggers the attention of readers, surviving becomes a task projected on to family members and, in the case of literary forms of representation, on the readers trying to piece together a life from the disintegration of its protagonist, struggling with remembering and challenged by social conventions of selfhood and identity that ill fit the requirements and reality of people who suffer from dementia. In Chap. 9, Gerd Bayer addresses the question of survival as it features in the memoir of British writer Jenny Diski. Her last book, In Gratitude, serves both as a cancer memoir, written while the author was undergoing treatment for a terminal illness, and as a reckoning with an earlier moment in the writer’s life, when she moved as a teenager into Doris Lessing’s household, following an extensive period of serious mental health issues. As Diski reflects on both these life-defining moments in her life, she discusses both the implications of living with a highly successful author when she was nurturing her own ambitions of becoming a writer and the challenges anybody faces when confronted in a non-negotiable manner with one’s own mortality. Drawing on Derrida’s reflections about the intellectual legacies that sometimes live on beyond the demise of the author and on Paul Ricoeur’s differentiations between the biographical versions of identity that allow him to ruminate about an experience of ‘oneself as

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another’, Bayer presents Diski as torn between a sense of gratitude that goes back to her early survival as a highly troubled teenager and the resulting guilt that grew from the relationship she developed with her foster family. In both situations, Diski apparently felt drawn to the force of literature as an art-form and thus as a tool for survival, or nachleben, that can provide comfort and a form of atonement in moments of retroactive regret. Turning from literary survival and printed sources to cinematic works, Pat Brereton’s chapter closes this section by providing a further shift in that it turns the attention to the interaction between humans and the rest of the planet. Drawing on discussions that stem from the environmental humanities, from ecocriticism and from ethical approaches to nature, Brereton frames his discussion of two recent films, I am Legend and The Ravenant, with a contextualization of cinema as a major source of how audiences learn about nature and the environment, contributing to their development of an ethical sense of responsibility for ecological issues. The setting of a post-apocalyptic New  York provides I am Legend with the backdrop for its tale of survival that, so Brereton contends, pits personal perseverance against a pandemic scenario of zombies attacking the sole survivor of a medical experiment run bad. Both a trained soldier and scientist, the film’s protagonist is framed as a hero defending family narratives and an American work ethic built around duty. With the non-human environment created as the ultimate threat, the film celebrates human strength of character while, at the same time, exacerbating the schism between humanity and the natural world. Brereton demonstrates how The Ravenant, while celebrating the cinematic qualities of highly picturesque and nevertheless wildly threatening natural landscapes alongside animal foes, focuses on the trials and tribulations that Leonardo DiCaprio, the lead actor, undergoes. Nature becomes a mere backdrop, yet both films contribute significantly to a public discourse about nature and the environment and as such, Brereton concludes, exist as elements in the development of an ecological consciousness as part of a general sense of mankind’s attitude towards nature. The final section of this chapter collection is built around one of the central themes of the ethics of survival, the legacy of the Holocaust. One of the early literary publications in this context was Primo Levi’s famous book Se questo é un uomo. In the American translation, the title was changed into Survival in Auschwitz; this problematic ‘emendation’ caused by the translator is the vantage point of Maria Anna Mariani’s chapter. Whereas the original Italian title suggests a deep philosophical reflection

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on the ‘nature of man’ and the problematic ethics of survival that may collide with the dignity of a person, the American version rather focuses on survival as a special technique human beings can be proud of. As the publishers confessed, the new title was chosen for commercial reasons, transforming and probably perverting the theme of Holocaust survival into a commodity, a veritable ‘disgrace’, as Hayden White judged in a review. Referring to Terrence Des Pres and Christopher Lasch, Mariani describes the semantics of the word ‘survival’ in the 1980s, when it was popular to describe even trivial problems as ‘matters of life and death’, and everyday life as a ‘domestic concentration camp’ thus contributing to the ‘deification of survival’: one can ‘learn’ how to survive even by listening to extreme stories told by Holocaust survivors. The ensuing close reading of Levi’s testimony explains why the American publisher took it for a kind of ‘survival guide’. Levi’s testimony shows the significance of the ‘here and now’ for the act of survival, the actual task of living yet another hour, even if the price for survival is extremely high. In the camps, Levi may have been able to preserve some ‘personal virtues’ such as empathy and solidarity, but yet the price for survival comes close to the total collapse of human dignity, authenticity and autonomy, thus turning an individual into the mere incarnation of a ‘faceless need’ to eat, drink and sleep. Mariani illustrates this process by accentuating the replacement of the first personal pronoun I by we in Levi’s text. The individual voice is lost, it gets dissolved and fuses with a choir, not unlike that described by Ganteau in his chapter on Jon McGregor’s novel Even the Dogs. Only the doomed man whose public hanging by the Nazis is described by Levi, and his desperate yet autonomous final cry, reclaims human autonomy. Levi’s book is a description of life ‘beyond individuality’, of existence as an ‘impersonal neutral need’ to live on. Levi invites the reader to understand a singular world of evilness simultaneously warning him against judging this world, and his strongest weapon is the device of ‘imagination’. He makes the reader aware that he himself could have been the one to face the ethical dilemmas of having to make toxic decisions concerning life and death, using the logic of the traditional fable, the message is clear: de te fabula. At the end of her chapter, Mariani mitigates her criticism of the title chosen by the American editors of Levi’s book, conceding that it is more appropriate than one thought, ending her chapter nevertheless by suggesting yet another title. Erin McGlothlin also takes an interest in the reception of Holocaust literature, albeit with a shift of interest to the classroom. Her chapter

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concentrates on the readerly moment of reception during which the protagonist in a Holocaust narrative is finally rescued from the mortal danger of the extermination camps. Developing her argument from her own experience in the classroom, teaching such texts, McGlothlin discusses this moment as a “whew” effect, when readers noticeably communicate a sense of relief. Differentiating her approach from classical notions of catharsis, she shows how generic and paratextual features contribute significantly, albeit usually quite unconsciously, to how readers approach a survivor memoir in terms of the ethical investment that sees them build empathy and attachment around a protagonist who, precisely by surviving the Holocaust, can hardly serve as a representative figure of this particular historical event. Authors who work in this genre are well aware of how readers participate emotionally in the positive outcome of these narratives and the concomitant reversal of historical facts, and McGlothlin even discusses an example in Ruth Kluger’s writing that appears to address directly an American audience prone to engage in such a redemptive reading of Holocaust biographies. While for survivors the moment of survival may only rarely have felt like a personal triumph, the “whew” effect as found amongst non-scholarly readers seems to suggest that, in particular with narratives of narrowly surviving, there is a readerly need for closure that provides a positive sense of an ending. Brad Prager’s chapter brings together literary and cinematic forms of Holocaust commemoration, focussing on two filmic representations that feature German writer Ruth Kluger. The complex relationship between verbal representations of the Holocaust has been variously discussed in the context of a general inability to speak about the horrors of the camp but also in light of the importance that forms of testimony have taken on, increasingly also in the shape of video testimonies that, as Prager shows, are being put together in various libraries and archives. With the lack of stability that attaches to all forms of testimony, the recorded voices of survivors that appear in filmed testimonies are prone to the same limitations that attach to other forms of representation and as such are not fully capable of recreating the horrors and violence of the Holocaust. The two films by Erwin Leiser and Thomas Mitscherlich frame the interview settings that feature Kluger with edited and contextualized footage from historical sources, including filmed footage of atrocities. The two films thus create representations that supplement their presented stories with material that brings onto the screen those who did not live to tell about their ordeals. The films speak for those who did not live to tell. While films can thus

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present forms of truth via testimony, the question remains whether reality ever speaks through visual footage. While Leiser, in Prager’s analysis, sets out to counter Holocaust deniers, Mitscherlich takes a different approach in that he aims to address feelings of responsibility in German viewers. With survival discussed as a ‘desire to write’, the two films as well as Kluger’s writing are presented as highly invested in matters of figuration, where the force of literalness remains limited, yet where through her choice of language Kluger aspired to affect her readers as forcefully as some atrocity images do. Closing this volume, Sue Vice in her chapter relates matters of survival to the principle of rescue. By looking at outtakes from Claude Lanzmann’s filmed material for his Shoah, Vice has identified four interviews with witnesses who all were related to various efforts to organize and implement forms of rescue and intervention on behalf of the concentration camp inmates. In trying to bring about the survival of the interned Jewish populations, the four individuals whose testimonies are under scrutiny in this chapter were all involved with the War Refugee Board, a US agency. By juxtaposing the footage with four people whose involvement and investment in the rescue effort appears to have worked not always in full accord with each other, Vice reveals the complexity involved in the political discussions during World War II when it came to create a political will to intervene in the mass killings in Nazi Germany. The footage makes clear that with respect to the matter of survival, each individual had to make difficult choices, and each individual will be more or less willing to discuss these decisions with historical hindsight. The chapter reveals how a communal sense of testimony can develop from collating individual video interviews, how individual perspectives provide a glimpse into the complexities of a particular historical scenario. Financial considerations, bureaucracy and red tape are frequently shown to have created obstacles to a clear and forceful intervention, but so was a lack of political will to intervene that betrays anti-Semitic overtones. By demonstrating how diverse the four witnesses acted and are willing to remember their involvement during this rescue effort, Vice reveals how ‘Realpolitik’ intervenes even when the survival of scores of people is at stake. Her chapter thus contributes a significant element to the communal way of how the trauma of the Holocaust is and will be remembered.

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Notes 1. Dawkins (1989, 20). 2. Wilson (1976, 562). 3. Spencer (1884, 444). This èlan vital, however, should be imagined as a force devoid of any teleological meaning; see Des Pres (1976, 193–194). 4. See Rosenfield (1968). 5. In this book the focus of most analyses will lie on the survival of ‘human’ individuals and partly on that of ‘mankind’. 6. Of course, this does not concern atheists; see Julian Barnes’s humorous remark in Nothing to be Frightened of on the “fury of the resurrected atheist” (2008, 64). 7. Elliott (2018, 16). 8. Elliott (2018, 3). 9. Elliott (2018, 1). 10. See Burgess (1986, 6). 11. See Maechler (2001). 12. Kluger (2001, 64). 13. Kluger (2001, 184–185). 14. See Kilby (2002). 15. Seen in this context, it is precisely the Holocaust which rendered witnessing almost impossible; see Laub (1995, 65). 16. LaCapra (2001, 42). 17. Caruth (1995, 4–5). 18. See Ganteau and Onega (2017, 5). 19. These two ‘failures’ are discussed by Caruth (2003, 60) and by Gilmore (2001, 6). 20. See, for example, Wiesel (2006, viii), who in his “Preface” to Night (vii– xv), asks himself why he tells the story of his suffering and comes to the conclusion: “However, having survived, I needed to give some meaning to my survival.” 21. See Laub (1992a, 85). 22. See also White (2016). 23. Felman and Laub (1992, xiv–xv). 24. LaCapra (2001, 186). 25. The term was coined by David Rousset; see Horowitz (1997, 33–46). Laub compares the traumatic experience with the qualities of a ‘black hole’; see Laub (1992b, 64). 26. See Levi (1996, 51 and 62). 27. Améry (1986, 12). 28. Améry (1986, 13–15). 29. Améry (1986, 19).

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30. Astonishingly, there is no entry on ‘survival’ in most handbooks of philosophy, including the prestigious Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, a standard work of reference in Germany. 31. See the online entry on “Survival” on oed.com. 32. See the online entry on “Survival” on oed.com. 33. See Elliott (2018, 1 and 4). 34. This is a vital distinction between suffering prisoners and the ‘Muselmann’ described by various Holocaust survivors; having given up any forms of active life, the Muselmann was doomed to die, with no chance to survive the Nazi camps; see Chap. 2 in Agamben (1999). 35. See the chapter by Freiburg in the present volume. 36. Derrida (2007, 26). 37. Derrida (2007, 24). 38. Derrida (2007, 32–33). 39. Derrida (2007, 51). 40. Derrida (2007, 52). 41. See Butler (2009, 1–32). 42. For this distinction, see Hobbes (1986, 189). 43. For the new awareness of vulnerability in contemporary society, see Ganteau and Onega (2017). 44. Blumenberg (1985). 45. For the power of resilience, see Neenan (2009). 46. For a discussion of natural law, see also the chapter “Life Interest” in Elliott (2018, 63–82). 47. See the entry on “Naturrecht” in Ritter, Gründer and Gabriel (1984, 560–623). 48. Hobbes (1986, 189–190). 49. See Bacon (1974, 36). 50. See Krohn (1987, 93–107). 51. For the pessimistic redefinition of human reason as ‘instrumental rationality’, see Horkheimer and Adorno (2017). 52. In most of Defoe’s novels, especially in Robinson Crusoe, the protagonists interpret accidents and misfortunes as divine warnings and signs. 53. For a philosophical interpretation of the topos ‘the book of nature’, see Blumenberg (1986). 54. See Freiburg and Gruss (2004). 55. Defoe (1986, 84–88). 56. See the satirical attack on the syllogism presented to defend the notion of the ‘best of all worlds’ at the end of the novel; Voltaire (1947, 144). 57. This aspect is also addressed by Vanessa Guignery in her contribution to the present volume. 58. See the first chapter of McEwan (2006, 1–16).

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59. See Wilson (1976, 547–575). 60. The actual Corona crisis exemplifies what prices societies all over the world have to pay for security. 61. See Foucault (1994, 1995). 62. Examples for societies who have given up individual autonomy and changed into a ‘panopticum’ are to be found in dystopias such as Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four (1949) or, more recently, Dave Eggers’s The Circle (2013). 63. See McEwan (2006, 14). 64. McEwan (2006, 14). 65. For the complex dynamics between groups and ‘masses’, see Canetti (2006). 66. Des Pres (1976, 111). 67. Philip Roth, “A Conversation with Primo Levi”, in Levi (1996, 179–180). 68. See Levi (1996, 180). 69. See Wiesel (2006, 110): “In this place, it is every man for himself, and you cannot think of others, not even your father. […] Each of us lives and dies alone.” 70. See Des Pres (1976, 97). 71. According to Johannes Ibel, Director of the Historical Department of Flossenbürg Memorial, there are no historical documents which could prove Haft’s report concerning cannibalism in the concentration camp in Flossenbürg. 72. Levi (1996, 87). 73. Levi (1996, 88–89). 74. See Des Pres (1976, 162–163), who passionately refutes this comparison. 75. See Agamben (1998). 76. See Levinas (1998). 77. See Des Pres (1976, 51–71). 78. See Des Pres (1976, 98; 135–136). 79. See the chapter “This Side of Good and Evil”, in Levi (1996, 77–86). 80. For an authentic report of this breakdown of morality, see Des Pres (1976, 78–79); see also the horrible torture scene, Chap. 2, of Orwell (1989, 275–298). 81. Kluger choses the ‘elbow’ as an emblem for this fight for survival and imagined her father, who died on his way to one of the camps, as a man without elbows; see Kluger (2001, 26). 82. See Freiburg (2017). 83. See Haft (2006, 61–62). 84. See Levi (1996, 89–95). 85. Des Pres (1976, 6).

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86. Barnes felt just like this after the traumatic loss of his wife; see Barnes (2013, 114–115). 87. Kluger (2001, 112). 88. LaCapra (2001, 89). See also the similar description of trauma in Van der Kolk and Van der Hart (1995, 173). 89. Améry (1986, 20). 90. See also Butler (2009, 14): “Precariousness implies living socially, that is, the fact that one’s life is always in one sense in the hands of the other.” Ganteau (2015, 8) emphasizes the interferences between the ‘ethics of care’, ‘the theory of alterity’ and ‘feminism’; see also his contribution to the present volume. 91. Améry (1986, 68). 92. Améry (1986, 68). 93. For the role of ghosts and gothic elements, see the chapter “Ghost Texts” in Ganteau (2015, 100–131). 94. For the interpretation of postmodernism as an intentional reaction to the Holocaust, see Eaglestone (2004). 95. See Kluger (2001, 15–16). 96. Améry (1999, 109–110). 97. See also Judith Butler’s highly speculative reflexion on Levi’s ‘suicide’ in Butler (2016). 98. See also Des Pres (1976, 10–14). 99. Kluger (2001, 146). 100. Kluger (2001, 137–138). 101. On Adorno’s dictum on art and the Holocaust, see Freiburg and Bayer (2009, 4–6). 102. See Peli (2007, 249). 103. See also Schweid (2007, 227). 104. Wiesel (2006, 34); see also Freiburg (2009). 105. Wiesel (2006, 67). 106. See Wiesel (2006, 65). 107. Shapira (2007, 45). 108. Donat (2007). 109. Kluger (2001, 65). 110. Erikson (1995, 186). 111. See the comments above about Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year, that is, Defoe (1986, 29–30). 112. See Elliott (2018, 32). 113. See Blumenberg (1997). 114. Kluger (2001, 151). 115. Améry (1986, 80). 116. Améry (1986, 69).

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117. On literary writing on detention centres and the lasting effects on their (former) inmates, see Janet Wilson’s contribution to the present volume. 118. For a brief history of neoliberalism, which can be defined as a ‘mode of government’, a ‘policy package’ or an ‘ideology’, see Steger and Roy (2010, 11). 119. Neenan (2009, 3). 120. See Chandler and Reid (2016, 53; 57; 71; 100). 121. See Chandler and Reid (2016, 122). 122. Chandler and Reid (2016, 69). 123. See Ganteau and Onega (2017, 1–18). 124. For a discussion of related aspects of the relationship between humanity and the natural environment, see the chapter by Pat Brereton in the present volume. 125. See “The Last Days of Death” in Harari (2017, 24–34).

References Agamben, Giorgio. 1998. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ———. 1999. Remnants of Auschwitz. Trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen. New York: Zone. Améry, Jean. 1986 [1980]. At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and its Realities. Trans. Sindey Rosenfeld and Stella P.  Rosenfeld. New York: Schocken Books. ———. 1999 [1976]. On Suicide: A Discourse on Voluntary Death. Trans. John D. Barlow. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Bacon, Francis. 1974. The Advancement of Learning and New Atlantis. Ed. Arthur Johnston. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Barnes, Julian. 2008. Nothing to be Frightened of. London: Jonathan Cape. ———. 2013. Levels of Life. London: Jonathan Cape. Blumenberg, Hans. 1985. Work on Myth. Cambridge: MIT Press. ———. 1986. Die Lesbarkeit der Welt. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. ———. 1997. Shipwreck with Spectator: Paradigm of a Metaphor for Existence. Trans. Steven Rendall. Cambridge: MIT Press. Burgess, Anthony. 1986. Introduction. In A Journal of the Plague Year, Daniel Defoe, ed. Anthony Burgess, and Christopher Bristow, 6–19. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Butler, Judith. 2009. Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? London and New York: Verso. ———. 2016. Fiction and Solicitude: Ethics and the Conditions for Survival. In Probing the Ethics of Holocaust Culture, ed. Wulf Kansteiner, Todd Presner, and Claudio Fogu, 373–388. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

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Canetti, Elias. 2006. Masse und Macht. Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer. Caruth, Cathy. 1995. Introduction. In Trauma: Explorations in Memory, ed. Cathy Caruth, 3–11. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. ———. 2003. Parting Words: Trauma, Silence, and Survival. In Acts of Narrative, ed. Carol Jacobs and Henry Sussman, 47–61. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Chandler, David, and Julian Reid. 2016. The Neoliberal Subject: Resilience, Adaptation and Vulnerability. London: Rowman & Littlefield. Dawkins, Richard. 1989. The Selfish Gene. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Defoe, Daniel. 1986. A Journal of the Plague Year. Ed. Anthony Burgess and Christopher Bristow. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Derrida, Jacques. 2007. Learning to Live Finally: The Last Interview. Houndmills: Palgrave. Des Pres, Terrence. 1976. The Survivor: An Anatomy of Life in the Death Camps. New York: Oxford University Press. Donat, Alexander. 2007. Voice from the Ashes: Wanderings in Search of God. In Wrestling with God: Jewish Theological Responses during and after the Holocaust, ed. Steven T.  Katz, Shlomo Biderman, and Gershon Greenberg, 275–286. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Eaglestone, Robert. 2004. The Holocaust and the Postmodern. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Elliott, Jane. 2018. The Microeconomic Mode: Political Subjectivity in Contemporary Popular Aesthetics. New York: Columbia University Press. Erikson, Kai. 1995. Notes on Trauma and Community. In Trauma: Explorations in Memory, ed. Cathy Caruth, 183–199. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Felman, Shoshana, and Dori Laub. 1992. Foreword. In Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History, ed. Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, xiv–xv. New York: Routledge. Foucault, Michel. 1994. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Vintage. ———. 1995. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage. Freiburg, Rudolf. 2009. ‘Moments that murdered my God and my Soul’: Der Theodizee-Diskurs im Spiegel ausgewählter Holocaust-Literatur. In Literatur und Holocaust, ed. Gerd Bayer and Rudolf Freiburg, 111–139. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann. ———. 2017. ‘Fighting Trauma’: Silencing the Past in Alan Scott Haft’s Harry Haft: Survivor of Auschwitz, Challenger of Rocky Marciano. In Traumatic Memory and the Ethical, Political and Transhistorical Functions of Literature, ed. Susana Onega, Constanza del Río, and Maite Escudero-Alías, 137–151. London: Palgrave.

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Freiburg, Rudolf, and Gerd Bayer. 2009. Einleitung: Literatur und Holocaust. In Literatur und Holocaust, ed. Gerd Bayer and Rudolf Freiburg, 1–38. Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann. Freiburg, Rudolf, and Susanne Gruss, eds. 2004. “But Vindicate the Ways of God to Man”: Literature and Theodicy. Tübingen: Stauffenburg. Ganteau, Jean-Michel. 2015. The Ethics and Aesthetics of Vulnerability in Contemporary British Fiction. New York: Routledge. Ganteau, Jean-Michel, and Susana Onega. 2017. Introduction. In Victimhood and Vulnerability in 21st Century Fiction, ed. Jean-Michel Ganteau and Susana Onega, 1–18. New York: Routledge. Gilmore, Leigh. 2001. The Limits of Autobiography: Trauma and Testimony. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Haft, Alan Scott. 2006. Harry Haft: Auschwitz Survivor, Challenger of Rocky Marciano. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press. Harari, Yuval Noah. 2017. Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow. London: Vintage. Hobbes, Thomas. 1986. Leviathan. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno. 2017. Dialektik der Aufklärung, ed. Gunnar Hindrichs. Berlin: de Gruyter. Horowitz, Sara R. 1997. Voicing the Void: Muteness and Memory in Holocaust Fiction. Albany: State University of New York Press. Kilby, Jane. 2002. The Writing of Trauma: Trauma Theory and the Liberty of Reading. New Formations: A Journal of Culture / Theory / Politics 47: 217–230. Kluger, Ruth. 2001. Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered. New  York: The Feminist Press at The City University of New York. Krohn, Wolfgang. 1987. Francis Bacon. München: Beck. LaCapra, Dominick. 2001. Writing History, Writing Trauma. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Laub, Dori. 1992a. An Event without a Witness: Truth, Testimony, and Survival. In Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History, ed. Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, 75–92. New York: Routledge. ———. 1992b. Bearing Witness of the Vicissitudes of Listening. In Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History, ed. Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, 57–74. New York: Routledge. ———. 1995. Truth and Testimony: The Process and the Struggle. In Trauma: Explorations in Memory, ed. Cathy Caruth, 61–75. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Levi, Primo. 1996 [1958]. Survival in Auschwitz: The Nazi Assault on Humanity. New York: Simon & Schuster. Levinas, Emmanuel. 1998. Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press.

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Maechler, Stefan. 2001. The Wilkomirski Affair: A Study in Biographical Truth. New York: Schocken Books. McEwan, Ian. 2006. Enduring Love. London: Vintage Books. Neenan, Michael. 2009. Developing Resilience: A Cognitive-Behavioural Approach. New York: Routledge. Orwell, George. 1989 [1949]. Nineteen Eighty-Four. London: Penguin. Peli, Pinchas. 2007. Borderline: Searching for a Religious Language of the Shoah. In Wrestling with God: Jewish Theological Responses during and after the Holocaust, ed. Steven T.  Katz, Shlomo Biderman, and Gershon Greenberg, 245–262. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ritter, Joachim, Karlfried Gründer, and Gottfried Gabriel, eds. 1984. Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie. Vol. 6. Darmstadt: WBG. Rosenfield, Leonora Cohen. 1968. From Beast Machine to Man Machine: Animal Soul in French Letters from Descartes to La Mettrie. New York: Octagon Books. Schweid, Eliezer. 2007. Is the Shoah a Unique Event? In Wrestling with God: Jewish Theological Responses during and after the Holocaust, ed. Steven T. Katz, Shlomo Biderman, and Gershon Greenberg, 219–229. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Shapira, Kalonymous Kalman. 2007. Holy Fire. In Wrestling with God: Jewish Theological Responses during and after the Holocaust, ed. Steven T. Katz, Shlomo Biderman, and Gershon Greenberg, 40–50. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Spencer, Herbert. 1884. The Principles of Biology. New York: Appleton. Steger, Manfred B., and Ravi K.  Roy. 2010. Neoliberalism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Van der Kolk, Bessel A., and Onno Van der Hart. 1995. The Intrusive Past: The Flexibility of Memory and the Engraving of Trauma. In Trauma: Explorations in Memory, ed. Cathy Caruth, 158–182. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Voltaire. 1947. Candide or Optimism. Trans. John Butt. London: Penguin. White, Hayden. 2016. Historical Truth, Estrangement, and Disbelief. In Probing the Ethics of Holocaust Culture, ed. Claudio Fogu, Wulf Kansteiner, and Todd Presner, 53–71. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Wiesel, Elie. 2006 [1985]. Night. Trans. Marion Wiesel. London: Penguin. Wilson, Edward O. 1976. Sociobiology: The New Synthesis. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

PART I

Survival and the Group

CHAPTER 2

The Visibility of Survival: Even the Dogs and Jon McGregor’s Ethics of Attention Jean-Michel Ganteau

In many ways, the definition of survival is intricately enmeshed with the memory of the Shoah. Over the last 70 years, it has repeatedly been considered in the light of the extreme experience of the death camp, at least since the publication of Primo Levi’s If This Is a Man (1947, translated into English in 1959). The raft of testimonies relating the experience of the Lager, like those written by Jean Améry in Austria or Robert Antelme in France, contributed to an increased attention to survival and stabilised the association with the death camp. From narrative accounts written by survivors the notion then spread towards philosophy and, more generally, theory, with very influential texts like Giorgio Agamben’s Remnants of Auschwitz (1999, translated 2002), which directly addresses the issue of surviving the camp experience; George Didi-Huberman’s Images in Spite of All (2003, translated 2008); or else Jean-François Lyotard’s The Differend (1983, translated 1988), some of those texts sparking off virulent controversies, as was the case with Didi-Huberman’s. Such works are

J.-M. Ganteau (*) Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3, Montpellier, France e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 R. Freiburg, G. Bayer (eds.), The Ethics of Survival in Contemporary Literature and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83422-7_2

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characterised, above all, by the centrality granted to the figure of the witness and, correlatively, to the form of testimony. Following in Levi’s wake, Agamben argues that the real witness is no longer alive, having gone through the extermination process; hence, that the survivor is to be distinguished from the true witness.1 He pinpoints a central paradox in the terms of which even if testimony is the condition of survival,2 such an account is by definition flawed or incomplete in that its value resides precisely “in what it lacks”: to him, testimony allows for “bearing witness to a missing testimony.”3 The idea of the lack or failure, powerfully expressed through the figure of the lacuna, is also prevalent in Lyotard’s work on the differend: “I would like to call a differend [différend] the case where the plaintiff is divested of the means to argue and becomes for that reason a victim. If the addressor, addressee, and the sense of the testimony are neutralized, everything takes place as if there were no damages.”4 The hole is at the heart of any testimony, as elaborated in a Shoah context, a form characterised by incompleteness, incapacity, limitation, and other types of losses that turn it into a paragon of vulnerable form. This is perhaps the reason why the idea of survival and the narrative forms attached to it were granted such prominence in trauma theory and criticism, an emblematic aspect of the memory turn that came to dominate academic and other concerns over the past few decades. One of the founding references as regards the double issue of survival and testimony is certainly Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub’s Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History (1992), where Felman describes the form in terms of a “crisis of truth” while addressing the shift from the legal to the cultural field of application of the notion: “What, however, are the stakes of the larger, more profound, less definable crisis of truth which, in proceeding from contemporary trauma, has brought the discourse of the testimony to the fore of the contemporary cultural narrative […]?”5—she asks, at the beginning of the first chapter. And such a crisis Laub attributes to the Shoah as “An Event without a Witness”: [W]hat precisely made a Holocaust out of the event is the unique way in which, during its historical occurrence, the event produced no witnesses. Not only, in effect, did the Nazis try to eliminate the physical witnesses of their crime; but the inherently incomprehensible and deceptive psychological structure of the event precluded its own witnessing, even by its very victims.6

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Survival, then, is evidently germane to the main tenets of trauma theory, based as it is on the founding unassimilability of a violent event, either provoked through a single breakthrough or by enduring exposure to abuse. From this point of view, it is certainly not fortuitous that the notion should be given such eminence in Cathy Caruth’s ground-breaking and influential Unclaimed Experience (1996), in which she records the “peculiar and perplexing experience of survival”7 and formulates what to her mind is a crucial issue: “The problem of survival, in trauma, thus emerges specifically as the question: what does it mean for consciousness to survive?”8 More precisely, she insists that the lateness inherent in the elaboration of trauma and the victim’s realisation that s/he is still alive after an extreme encounter with violence jeopardises any understanding of survival: “the trauma consists not only in having confronted death but in having survived, precisely, without knowing it. What one returns to in the flashback [as a modality of traumatic repetition] is not the incomprehensibility of one’s near death, but the incomprehensibility of one’s survival.”9 Trauma studies were therefore extremely influential in broadcasting the issue of survival in general and of survivor’s trauma in particular. Thanks to the collaboration between psychoanalysis and literature, one of the figures towards which the issue of survival has migrated is that of the spectre. The compulsion to repeat and the traumatic re-enactment of unassimilated episodes was naturally envisaged through the prism of revenance, at times linked with the Shoah. This is evidenced, for instance, in Gabrielle Schwab’s Haunting Legacies: Violent Legacies and Transgenerational Trauma (2010). It should be added that a notion akin to ‘survival’, survivance, has also been fairly influential over the last few decades, perhaps thanks to Didi-Huberman’s work on Aby Warburg, The Surviving Image: Phantoms of Time and Times of Phantoms: Aby Warburg’s History of Art (2002). In this study, Didi-Huberman considers Warburg’s model of history as spectral, characterised by haunting and survivance replacing the chronological model of academic transmission.10 Such an idea is encapsulated in the term Nachleben—or after-living—referring to a being of the past that goes on existing or, more precisely, surviving.11 From the violent denotations of ‘survival’ to the more resilient connotations of ‘survivance’—defined by Didi-Huberman as some humble, muted permanence which, though latent, remains indestructible—the notion seems to have evolved over the last two decades, or at least to have developed in two directions at the same time, while retaining a common core of meaning. In any case, it does loom large over the fields of theory and

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literary studies, carrying in its wake a string of associations like violence, extremity, trauma, temporal disjointing, spectrality, testimony, lacuna, incomprehensibility, and impossibility, a whole array of negative, privative connotations that clearly emanate from the historical context in which its theorisation emerged before being applied to sundry other fields. Survival has become ubiquitous. Fiction—and perhaps more especially experimental fiction—has taken the responsibility to address the issue of surviving. To take one obvious, though contentious example, this is the case with Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow, or, The Nature of the Offence (1992 [1991]), which mobilises the powers of fiction to transcend the limits of non-fictional testimony and precisely go beyond the ontological and epistemological limitations of the lacuna put forward by Agamben and relentlessly delve into the eponymous nature of the offence. This it does by concentrating on the controversial theme of perpetrator trauma and survival, as its protagonist is a doctor working in Birkenau during WWII, whose task it was to contribute to various types of experimentations on human beings and to take part in the extermination of the inmates. The notorious fact that the narrative is written in reverse, starting with the return to life of the old doctor and ending up with his regressus ad uterum, and the fact that it is recounted through the means of an estranged, split narrative voice possibly attributed to the eloquence of the narrator’s spectral soul, answers the need to expose the whole truth—or at least an impression of it—hence to go beyond the limits of non-fictional testimony, thereby fuelling fiction’s ethical capacity to state it all. Still, for this chapter I have chosen to concentrate on another, more recent novel, which does not take its inspiration from the Shoah context and makes the reader plunge into the margins of contemporary cities, among an invisible, submerged population of vagrants, drug-addicts, and tramps—without, of course, in any way wanting to efface the singularity and incomparable character of an event like the Shoah. Jon McGregor’s Even the Dogs (2010) opens with the discovery of a corpse, that of Robert, an unemployed ex-soldier turned alcoholic, who died over the Christmas break as he was left on his own, with all the fellow addicts and dossers that used to stay with him and to bring him food and drink in exchange for shelter having evaporated on various errands over the festive season. The novel also resorts to the powers of experimentation with an innovative choral narration, as the narrator uses the first-person plural and speaks from somewhere else, as if from beyond the grave. Such a narrative choice

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seems to be efficient in bypassing the limitations traditionally associated with testimony. In fact, the spectral chorus seem to have gone through the experience of extreme suffering and death. Even if these choral voices were absent when the central character, Robert, died, by surviving him as narrators they activate the ethical pole of fictional testimony and bear witness to similar experiences of exposure and deprivation. The spectral survivors, both present and not all there, both invisible and incarnated, renew the figure of the survivor as they reach beyond the limitations of the lacuna, doing away with unsayability and impossibility so as to plunge, once more, into the nature of the offence and to make testimony come to fruition. My point is that Even the Dogs throws the mechanics of survival into an unblinking light through its experimental vein. It casts a new spell on what surviving may mean, and on the possibilities of witnessing, against the grain of contemporary definitions. This is what I shall attempt to demonstrate in the first part of this chapter by exploring surviving in its transitive meaning, as one survives someone, which will lead me to attend to the elegiac dimension of the novel. The second part will be devoted to the figure of the witness as superstes and to survival as experience. I shall conclude on the text as an ethical means to train attention to survivors, reclaiming them from invisibility.

Survival and the Figure of Elegy As suggested above, I find it relevant to recall that ‘to survive’ is also a transitive verb, as one always survives someone or something. Hence survival is generally conceived of in terms of loss, as it implies attachment to those who did not make it. I would thus argue that, along with the form of testimony that has consistently been associated with it, survival is indissolubly connected to the elegiac. What I mean here is not so much funeral elegy as a genre (generally associated with poetry) as with elegy conceived of as a ‘mood’ that bleeds into and informs various types of texts,12 among which are also found novels. On that account, it may be said that Even the Dogs owes much to this mode. In fact, it hinges on the death of a central character and each of its five chapters is devoted to an action performed around the corpse, from its initial discovery to its final cremation, through the long autopsy executed in Chapter Four. The collective narrator may be considered as a chorus representing the voices of the citizens—in the tradition of classical tragedy coryphaeus—reversing the reader’s expectations and insinuating that the representatives of the submerged, marginalised

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population have come to assume the part of the original ordinary citizens, cast in the role of self-proclaimed, invisible, and hardly audible mourners.13 The choral narrators are, indeed, invisible, as they rub shoulders with the other characters (the policemen who discover the corpse in Chapter One, the ambulance drivers in Chapter Two, etc.), observing them while remaining unnoticed or unseen by them; and inaudible as they speak to themselves and, implicitly, the reader, without ever being heard by the rest of the cast. This clearly testifies to their spectral status and puts centre stage the theme of invisibility. Above all, this allows them to discreetly observe all marks of attention lavished on Robert’s corpse, a care that he distinctly missed when he was alive.14 The spectral status thereby allows for the omnipresence of witnesses and an even more acute ability to observe and testify. In many ways, the reader is confronted with the choral narrator’s relentless wish to tell everything and to testify fully, bearing witness to what is happening to Robert’s remains in the present and to his former life, allowing the past to invade and repeat itself in the present as in the first chapter, where anachronism allows for constant shifts between the happy, healthy past of the couple who used to inhabit the newly redecorated flat (Robert and his former partner, Yvonne) and the present dominated by loneliness and dereliction, time accelerating in cinematic fashion: The steam from the bath curls out into the hallway, easing the wallpaper away from the wall. Peppered spores of mould thicken and spread towards the ceiling. Rainwater seeps through the worn pointing on the front of the building and pushes through the plaster, the damp spreading outwards like an old bruise.15

Knowledge of the past, of the sort that makes its vivid repetition possible, allows for the creation of an almost fully fledged testimony. Of course, the witnesses were not around when Robert died, but the autopsy and inquest will provide a post-mortem reconstitution, and access to the past offers both an overall and a precise view of Robert’s own excruciating experience of survival (of the war, of the breaking down of his couple, of his forfeiting all hope of recovery). Surviving the former survivor seems to be their main task and takes the form of a permanent, endless monologue. It seems as if a complementary yet essential function of the chorus of survivors was not only to tell so as to prolong the life or at least cultivate the memory of the departed but also to keep telling so as to go on bearing witness, that is,

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recounting so as to survive. Such a reality is integral to the survival process, according to Laub among others, even if Laub concentrates on an altogether different historical context. In his terms, “testimony is […] the process by which the narrator (the survivor) reclaims his position as a witness.”16 Taking one step further, Laub reminds us that “testimony is inherently a process of facing loss.”17 Still, I would argue that where traditional elegy has a performative function— that is, that of helping the poet/narrator/survivor go to the end of the work of mourning, thereby coming to terms with loss and accepting a return to normal life beyond pathological attachment to the departed, in conformity with the dynamics of mourning as notoriously analysed by Freud18—Even the Dogs presents the reader with an interminable vigil or wake that fails to come to an end and seems to achieve some immanent status. In fact, the departed protagonist, Robert, used to spend his days waiting for his friends to bring him food and cider, and for his former partner and daughter to come back, as made clear in the first chapter and regularly recalled in the rest of the book. And what the spectral chorus do—reduced as they are to their narrative, testimonial function—is just that: wait for the police to do their jobs in Chapter One, wait for the ambulance to cross the city in Chapter Two, keep a vigil on Robert’s corpse in the mortuary in Chapter Three, attend the whole autopsy in Chapter Four and stay around while the coroner interviews the other, living witnesses and gives his conclusions as to what brought about Robert’s death throughout Chapter Five. Tellingly, the novel winds up on an official injunction to rise, followed by the chorus’s final words: “We rise. What else can we do, we fucking rise.”19 Reduced to a painstaking passivity, assigned the task of indefinitely waiting, the spectral survivors cum witnesses turn the novel into a never-ending wake. For in fact it seems as if their vigil were eternal, taking place in an endless present that is not so much that of hell (the epigraph to the novel is borrowed from Dante’s Inferno) but from some latter-day evocation of limbo, very much in the line of Coleridge’s famous poetic version of this heterotopia: Tis a strange place, this Limbo!—not a Place, Yet name it so;—where Time and weary Space Fettered from flight, with night-mare sense of fleeing, Strive for their last crepuscular half-being;—20

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Caught in the suspended, eternal present of limbo—possibly a figure of the traumatic presence of the past—the narrators/survivors stretch time and the unending vigil, all their agency concentrated on the dedicated, incandescent expression of a sense of loss. In so doing, they become figures of exposure to dependence on the departed whose main function is to express some belated solidarity and post-mortem interdependence with the deceased. What distinguishes the novel from the more traditional forms of elegy, though, is that—its temporality being that of an endless, traumatic present—mourning has been replaced by melancholia or melancholic mourning, as expressed in the freezing of chronology, hence the impossibility of consolation. Such a trait has been identified as a characteristic of contemporary elegy by Jahan Ramazani, who underlines “the absurdity of elegiac expectation” and casts doubts on the consolatory powers of the modern form.21 Now, melancholia assumes an essential ethical function in the narrative by acting as the warrant for a continuing testimony to the departed— hence as a condition for an ongoing engagement with witnessing. Thanks to survivors’ melancholia, the traditional idea at the heart of the literature of testimony and survival expressed in Michael G. Levine’s idea that survival is caught in intrinsic limitations is gainsaid. Against Levine’s vision of the “effort to listen to stories carried by the survivor that exceed his or her capacity to access and relate,”22 Even the Dogs proposes a conception of the belated, spectral witness as a contemporary witness whose perceptual and attentional powers fuel his/her gift of the gab. The novel thereby flaunts the relentless survivor’s responsibility to tell everything. The elegiac form lends itself to the expression of a “fantasy of care” for the departed that seems to be devoid of the revisionary wish at the heart of elegy.23 Instead of revision, it prefers melancholic faithfulness to the lost—an ethics of melancholy that warrants a literary and ethical experience of surviving through witnessing. From this point of view, the experience of survival appears as determined by exposure to the lost other and positions the survivor/narrator as the repository of adamant relationality, hence vulnerability to the other.

Experiencing Survival The cast of characters in Even the Dogs gathers together a sample of typical cases: people who lost their jobs and families (Robert), children who were abandoned and raised by surrogate parents (Danny), or former soldiers.

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This is the case with Robert, who fought for his country, and with Steve, who went to the Falklands, Northern Ireland, and found himself in other war zones like Bosnia. In Chapter Three, the chorus allow him to speak and evoke a situation when Steve, trying to go through rehab, reluctantly attended a speaking group led by a “facilitator” and never managed to testify: Is there something you’d like to share with the rest of the group. Well, no there isn’t as a matter of fact. If I told you half this stuff you’d have nightmares for a month, or you’d think I was lying and kick me out. Was about all he ever said in that group. My country lied to me and I’d rather not go into it all. I’d rather not share all that with the group, if you don’t mind, he said.24

Here, the traditional arguments explaining the impossibility of testimonies are summoned: the extremity of the experience, the concomitant fear of contamination, and the dread of disbelief or denial that condemn the survivor to dumbness. Still, I would argue that such passages are emblematic of what precisely the novel stands against, in its will to muster the powers of experimental fiction—through its innovative use of spectral, first-person plural narrative form, its idiosyncratic presentation of character discourse, and its densely poetic form—so as to whittle away the limitations imposed on witnessing. As suggested above, the narrative apparatus obeys the rules of maximum sayability and experience by disconnecting physical presence from voice through spectral narration, thereby giving access to all aspects of the deceased man’s life and to that of the rest of the cast of characters. The spectral chorus, both invisible and incarnated, are omnipresent through their common voice and the permanence of a ‘we’ that awkwardly echoes throughout. Even if they never directly address the reader, the resounding omnipresence of the first-person plural creates a defamiliarising effect that draws attention to the origins of the voice and to its enunciative parameters. More precisely, the impression, throughout, is that the ‘we’ solicits the reader’s consideration and that, even though indirectly inscribed— there is no explicit presence of a ‘you’—a distinct sense of address dominates the narrative. Now, address is at the heart of the witnessing process, and it is in many ways what constitutes the survivor, who survives, precisely, by addressing someone. This is what Laub reminds us of when describing the witness as a survivor who “reconstitutes the internal ‘thou’”

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so as to stay alive and project him-/herself beyond the unbearable present.25 Levine has also emphasised the survivor’s need to “look […] for a you” as there cannot be a witness,26 hence a survivor, without an addressee, and as each witness needs a witness to perform his/her testimony. And this is perhaps what Judith Butler has in mind in Giving an Account of Oneself (2005) when she states that “the ‘you’ comes before the we, before the plural you and before the they.”27 In other terms, each witness and survivor is intrinsically relational and exposed to the other and, one step further, in radical need of the other, albeit an internal other, as indicated by Laub. Such a situation has led Peter Arnds to evoke the situation of the survivor as witness in terms of translation of the experience of surviving. He reminds us that “[t]ranslation implies survival. The surviving witness tries to bring to the other side a reality that eludes the witness himself, but even more so those who have not experienced it.”28 Once again, translation implies the presence of an addressee, which makes the survivor the emblem of dependence on the other; and the reader, the figure of reliance on the survivor. Through its ostentatious, at times unpalatable use of the first-­ person plural, the novel stages the demise of autonomy as the prerogative of the sovereign subject that was supposed to characterise modernity.29 Conversely, it provides an experience of interdependence and relationality, giving pride of place to dispossession and exposure as central to the process of surviving, which is encapsulated in Alasdair McIntyre’s insistence on our dependence on others for survival.30

Attention to Invisibilities That the incessant resort to address should be at the heart of the practice of witnessing and survival is also a way of reminding us that the etymology of ‘witness’ is varied and that it also originally refers to the superstes or the one who has lived through the stated experience.31 Such a notion goes against the grain of contemporary visions of testimony as compounded of silence and impossibility. The superstes is more specifically associated with the capacity of total exposure to the event, and I would argue that this is what Even the Dogs, by resorting to a beautiful, densely poetic prose,32 precisely purports to do. This is made possible by the spectral device allowing for a considerable enlargement of perception that still falls short of omniscience the better to provide the conditions for a more complete recording and witnessing. The fact that the spectral chorus should be patiently waiting in the mortuary, before and throughout the autopsy,

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clearly provides the conditions for total vision, as indicated in this unblinkingly sensational episode: They come through and they stand around his body, still safely bagged and sealed, and they talk, telling each other what they know about the case, reading the policeman’s report, studying the notes. They shift him on to a large steel table with a sink built in to one end, and taps, and hoses, and extraction fans which begin to whistle softly as they talk. They weigh him and measure him and take pictures of his shrouded body. They switch on the overhead lights, searchlight-bright and stark and shocking.33

Under the glaring light of the operating theatre the various parts of Robert’s corpse are cut into pieces, sampled, and processed, and the doctors reveal deep layers of the dead man’s body, thereby literally plunging into his vibrant intimacy: We move in close around his body again, our hands resting on the table, and peer in at the strange swollen gleam of his insides, the flabby organs crammed wetly in upon each other. The doctor scrapes away more layers of creamy yellow fat, slices through a series of arteries and veins, and then lifts the organs out as a single block, easing them on to a plastic tray.34

Throughout the autopsy, the possibility of total access is performed by the narrative, the spectral survivors being obscenely granted access to the whole of the experience, which transforms them into emblems of the witness as superstes. While cringing at the spectacle, eyes wide open, they indulge in belated fantasies of care, voicing what they would have liked to do to offer Robert a decent burial, thereby expressing an indomitable sense of survivor’s guilt while simultaneously channelling the reader’s. Such passages seem to me to testify to fiction’s capacity to bear witness to the most extreme situations and to produce effects on the reader’s reality. This is explained by French philosopher Myriam Revault d’Allonnes, who, while working on what she considers the alleged crisis of representation from Ancient times to the present, underlines fiction’s “ability to have a reality effect and an effect on reality,” which leads her to conclude that “representation […] is neither a reflection nor a transfer: it makes what did not exist before happen.”35 And in fact, what Even the Dogs brings into existence, by providing an experiential reading based on narrative experimentation, is a confrontation with and exposure to something that

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approximates to the violent totality of the event and to the experience of surviving in front of such knowledge. More specifically perhaps, experimental fiction of the type favoured by McGregor reminds us that the attention to experience solicited by literature, by getting us to attend to singularities instead of generalities, contributes to a definition of the ethical, as underlined by Sandra Laugier, following in Martha Nussbaum’s wake.36 The fictional presentation of survivors provides some form of incarnation, all the more so when the process of address and solicitation is given pride of place, and when appealing to the reader’s sensations and affective response is as strongly determined as in a novel like McGregor’s. This is a powerful reminder that, in Corine Pelluchon’s terms, ethical reflection always “finds its roots in the body,”37 and that ethics “is not based on science or on philosophy; it primarily relies on the subject’s experience of the world and of him-/herself, on his/her intellectual representations, on his/her values and emotions.”38 The novel provides as full as possible an experience of what surviving implies, eschewing silences and blurred images, unblinkingly staring in the face of the event. This it does by practising singularisation and incarnation, “situating representation at the point when zoe ̄ and bios meet, this point where bare life is always already a biopolitics […] and where, reciprocally, biopolitics is overtaken by a bare life.”39 In Even the Dogs, the account of survival is also the incarnated presentation of experience as an ethical gesture. That the ethical and political dimensions of fictional testimony are at the heart of McGregor’s project brooks little ambiguity. As underlined by the critics who have so far engaged with the novel, Even the Dogs is very much concerned with politics and intervenes in the collective debate by performing a politics of literature. This is suggested by Barbara Korte and Georg Zipp, who stress the affinity between John Berger’s King, A Street Story (2000 [1999]) and McGregor’s third novel,40 and I have also studied the text as an example of the contemporary state-of-Britain novel.41 Obviously, one of the novel’s main points is to tackle the issue of social invisibility and to do so by throwing centre stage the lives of submerged populations who seem to be excluded from society and yet keep living— surviving—in its wings, being both outside and inside, or more precisely living in “an outside that is inside,” as analysed by French philosopher Guillaume Le Blanc.42 Such an invisibility he also describes in terms of latency, when he speaks of the existence of the excluded as “lives waiting for confirmation but that must remain underground, hidden.”43 Now, it

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seems to me that such words apply neatly to Even the Dogs, with its supernumerary army of spectres whose lives go on thanks to their “survival skills,”44 who remain hidden from the view of ordinary citizens, most of the latter turning a blind eye on them. Still, neither Le Blanc nor McGregor is happy with this situation, and both are very much willing to harness the powers of vulnerable, submerged populations to help shift the perceptual goal posts. This is what Le Blanc has in mind when he avers that “invisibility is not subtracted from politics: it reformulates it [, as] the conception of politics cannot be reduced to activities declared as political and must extend to infra-political activities.”45 I would argue that, among the activities that are not officially declared as political, surviving is given pride of place in a novel that retrieves the survivors from invisibility. By making the choral narrator omnipresent, by granting them the function of the precarious yet full witness, by giving them access to Robert’s family past, to Ant’s military action in the poppy fields on Afghanistan where he lost his leg, by allowing them to track Danny on his final course towards the next and last injection (as he is dying in a telephone box), by letting them and the reader be privy to Laura’s failed attempt to get ‘clean,’ the narrative makes us rub shoulders with both the invisible characters and the spectres, figures that we would be tempted to ignore when passing them in the streets. In this way, we are reminded that vulnerability—bodily, but also psychological, economic, and social—is a common condition or possibility: “But all Robert’s bruises don’t count for much. Everyone’s got them, after all. All of us. Bruises and the rest of it: cuts and grazes and sprains and breaks, abscesses and open infected sores.”46 We are also reminded that vulnerability, in its extreme version as survival, is kept hidden in contemporary cities and metropolises for the comfort of ordinary citizens. By concentrating on such figures of vulnerability and of power mobilised towards surviving, the novel promotes a definition of ethics as “attention that it lavishes on the figures of vulnerability” and, I would add, of survival.47 In so doing, it makes the reader realise that what is at stake in any ethical engagement is perception, as attention to the other—the submerged, relegated, and excluded other, here. One step further, it specifies that invisibility is not a given but a social construct.48 Similarly, the novel teaches us that “perception is no natural quality and that it is much more a social activity that makes relevant elements, worthy to be perceived, emerge in the subject’s environment.”49 By considering what generally escapes perception, McGregor trains the reader to be attentive to a “negative phenomenology”50 that he translates into a poetics of

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obscenity, in so far as the novel shows what is generally kept in the wings or underground. In other words, Even the Dogs promotes attention to survival practices and to the proximity of survival as practice, and it even trains the reader’s attention to such realities. McGregor’s ethical work consists in soliciting the reader’s ‘right to look’ against what Nicholas Mirzoeff has defined as visuality, that is, “both a medium for the transmission and dissemination of authority, and the means for the mediation of those subjects to that authority.”51 More specifically, the novel opposes the official visuality of video cameras and CCTV systems52 to “countervisuality” devices53 that are associated with the spectral survivors’ patient and acute gaze, granting the other members of the cast “the right to be seen,”54 even while securing it for themselves. As an apparatus designed to favour the possibilities of countervisuality, the novel aims at both ethical and political efficiency. It reminds us that ethics is based on “perceptive exploration”55 and that attention to the humble and the submerged is always already entrammelled in social relationships. One of the novel’s priorities is to make surviving visible and, one step further, to train the reader’s consideration to the reality of survival. In so doing, it contributes to empower the submerged by displacing received ideas and images and by helping “invisibility to reformulate the political.”56 Seen from such a perspective, this melancholy elegy should not be considered as a conservative, nostalgic piece but, quite on the contrary, as the expression of an ethical faithfulness to the departed, to the witnesses and to the survivors. Such faithfulness becomes in turn the lever for a resistance to modes of visuality, in Mirzoeff’s acceptation of the term, and a means to re-consider the invisibility of surviving. By whetting the reader’s perception and training his/her consideration, the novel favours what Laugier has called “a democratic economy of attention,”57 meaning that all subjects, even the humblest and most violently relegated, are worthy of attention—the latter being an activity for everybody to practise. I would argue that by re-writing the elegiac script and privileging the melancholic option, by performing the experience of survival and by rescuing survivors from invisibility, Even the Dogs respects its self-imposed ethical and political agenda and contributes its (angry) mite to narrative democracy. By focussing on the figures of the downtrodden and the excluded (those who are kept outside, even if such an outside lies within the pale), it trains our consideration, in Pelluchon’s sense of the term, that is, our capacity to remain on a level with the survivors instead of looming over them, adopting a humble attitude to connect with their humility

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(meant as their closeness to the ground).58 This is made possible by privileging a type of experimental narrative that favours the experiential over the merely rational, in so far as the novel never allows the reader to veer away from vibrant reminders of incarnation, suggesting that dependence, responsibility, and the capacity for survival begin in the body. From this point of view, Even the Dogs may be situated within a context of production that gives prominence to what has been called “new materialism,” a new mode of being that underlines “the material dimension of social life,”59 hence the subject’s inherently relational dimension. Among the objects whose vibrant materiality it chooses to put forward are the weeds and flowers that keep growing in the urban wasteland that the narrative takes as its background. This is what McGregor has indicated in an interview: [T]hat’s why I was so pleased with the image they chose for the British cover of the book, because on a metaphorical level and on an actual literal level, I was quite interested in the imagery of the flowers which survive against the odds. [… H]opefully it comes through naturally that that’s what these people are doing—surviving constantly in a very creative and inventive way.60

Through the image of the striving, surviving weeds and flowers, a strong sense of creativity is built into the novel, whose ethics is also a politics of healing or redressing, and which proclaims the clinical, caring purpose of literature. Some might analyse this in terms of resilience, but I would rather refer to a term hailing from the altogether different context of art theory: survivance. In one of his very influential essays, Survival of the Fireflies (La survivance des lucioles), French art historian Georges Didi-­ Huberman takes the image of the “minor light” (emphasis in the original) cast by the fireflies to insist on the humble ways in which resistance and indestructibility manifest themselves in the face of adversity. I would say that, like the fireflies that are exposed to disappearance in the contemporary context of multi-dimensional pollution, the survivors in Even the Dogs are shown in their dispossession and vulnerability the better to be apprehended through their resistance. It is ultimately such a positive image of survivance that emerges from McGregor’s engagement with survival and its ghostly and incarnated figures.

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Notes 1. Agamben (2002, 33). 2. Agamben (2002, 15). 3. Agamben (2002, 34). 4. Lyotard (2008, 9). 5. Felman and Laub (1992, 6). 6. Felman and Laub (1992, 80; emphasis in the original). 7. Caruth (1996, 60). 8. Caruth (1996, 61; emphasis in the original). 9. Caruth (1996, 64; emphasis in the original). 10. Didi-Huberman (2008, 26–27). 11. Didi-Huberman (2008, 33). 12. See Kennedy (2007, 2). 13. In an interview, McGregor has confirmed, if need be, that he feels “the novel is very much concerned with mourning” and that the mourners are the key image of the novel; see McGregor (2010b, 241). 14. See McGregor (2010a, 189, 2010b, 242). 15. McGregor (2010a, 11). 16. Felman and Laub (1992, 85). I am aware of the fact that Laub’s words are applied to non-fictional accounts, and that I am applying them to the field of fiction or what I have called above “fictional testimony.” Still, I am also conscious of the fact that all narratives, whether directly referential or fictional, are based on emplotment and figurative language, which produces a form of continuum between an ideal pole of total non-fictional transparency and another one associated with fictional opaqueness. My position is that the figurative and the fictional cannot be barred access from the responsibility of bearing witness. One of the ways of doing this ethically is by refusing to use older, all-purpose forms that fail to respect the singularity of the presented situation. This is where experimental fiction comes in, when it is devised, as is the case with Even the Dogs—and as was the case with Time’s Arrow, for instance—to provide an innovative, adapted formal solution to respect the singularity of the situation that it addresses. 17. Felman and Laub (1992, 89). 18. Kennedy (2007, 20 and 28). 19. McGregor (2010a, 195). 20. McGregor (2010a, 214). 21. Ramazani (1994, 37). 22. Levine (2006, 1). 23. Clifton (2004, 24). 24. McGregor (2010a, 102). 25. Felman and Laub (1992, 84).

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26. Levine (2006, 4). 27. Butler (2005, 32; emphasis in the original). 28. Arnds (2012, 163). 29. Latour (1993, 47). 30. McIntyre (2002, 1). 31. Agamben (2002, 17). 32. On McGregor’s use of an opaque poetic prose, see, for instance, Alexander (2013, 748–749). 33. McGregor (2010a, 122). 34. McGregor (2010a, 142–143). 35. Revault d’Allonnes (2016, np; my translation). 36. Laugier (2014, 264). 37. Pelluchon (2018, 61; my translation). 38. Pelluchon (2018, 89; my translation). 39. Bernard (2018, 68; my translation). 40. Korte and Zipp (2014, 69–73). 41. Ganteau (2015, 135–148). 42. Le Blanc (2011, 41; my translation). 43. Le Blanc (2011, 18; my translation). 44. McGregor (2010a, 91). 45. Le Blanc (2010, 176; my translation). 46. McGregor (2010a, 134). 47. Le Blanc (2009, 76; my translation). 48. Le Blanc (2009, 13). 49. Le Blanc (2009, 13; my translation). 50. Le Blanc (2009, 91; my translation). 51. Mirzoeff (2011, xv). 52. McGregor (2010a, 158). 53. Mirzoeff (2011, 24). 54. Mirzoeff (2011, 4). 55. Laugier (2014, 252). 56. Le Blanc (2010, 176; my translation). 57. Laugier (2014, 265). 58. Pelluchon (2018, 31–33). 59. Coole and Fox (2010, 16). 60. McGregor (2010b, 221).

Works Cited Agamben, Giorgio. 2002 [1999]. Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive. New York: Zone Books.

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Alexander, Neal. 2013. Profoundly Ordinary: Jon McGregor and Everyday Life. Contemporary Literature 54 (4): 720–751. Amis, Martin. 1992 [1991]. Time’s Arrow, or The Nature of the Offence. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Arnds, Peter. 2012. Translating Survival, Translation as Survival in Primo Levi’s Se questo è un uomo. Translation and Literature 21 (2): 162–174. Berger, John. 2000 [1999]. King: A Street Story. London: Vintage. Bernard, Catherine. 2018. Matière à réflexion: Du corps politique dans la littérature et les arts britanniques contemporains. Paris: PUPS. Butler, Judith. 2005. Giving an Account of Oneself. New  York: Fordham University Press. Caruth, Cathy. 1996. Unclaimed Experience. Trauma, Narrative and History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Clifton, R.  Spargo. 2004. The Ethics of Mourning: Grief and Responsibility in Elegiac Literature. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Coole, Diana, and Samantha Fox. 2010. Introducing the New Materialism. In New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency and Politics, ed. Diana Coole and Samantha Fox, 1–35. Durham: Duke University Press. Didi-Huberman, Georges. 2008 [2003]. Images in Spite of All: Four Photographs from Auschwitz. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Felman, Shoshana, and Dori Laub. 1992. Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History. London: Routledge. Ganteau, Jean-Michel. 2015. The Ethics and Aesthetics of Vulnerability in Contemporary British Fiction. London: Routledge. Kennedy, David. 2007. Elegy. London: Routledge. Korte, Barbara, and Georg Zipp. 2014. Poverty in Contemporary Literature: Themes and Figurations on the British Book Market. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Macmillan. Latour, Bruno. 1993 [1991]. We Have Never Been Modern. London: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Laugier, Sandra. 2014. L’éthique comme attention à ce qui compte. In L’économie de l’attention, ed. Yves Citton, 252–266. Paris: La Découverte. Le Blanc, Guillaume. 2009. L’invisibilité sociale. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. ———. 2010. Dedans, dehors: La condition d’étranger. Paris: Seuil. ———. 2011. Que faire de notre vulnérabilité. Paris: Bayard. Levine, Michael G. 2006. The Belated Witness: Literature, Testimony, and the Question of Holocaust Survival. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Lyotard, Jean-François. 2008 [1983]. The Differend: Phrases in Dispute. Manchester: Manchester University Press. McGregor, Jon. 2010a. Even the Dogs. London: Bloomsbury.

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———. 2010b. An Interview with Jon McGregor. Conducted by Caroline Edwards. Contemporary Literature 51 (2): 217–245. McIntyre, Alasdair. 2002 [1999]. Dependent, Rational Animals: Why Human Beings Need the Virtues. Peru: Carus Publishing. Mirzoeff, Nicholas. 2011. The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality. Durham: Duke University Press. Pelluchon, Corine. 2018. Éthique de la considération. Paris: Seuil. Ramazani, Jahan. 1994. Poetry of Mourning: The Modern Elegy from Hardy to Heaney. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Revault d’Allonnes, Myriam. 2016. Le miroir et la scène: Ce que peut la représentation politique. Paris: Seuil. Ebook. Schwab, Gabrielle. 2010. Haunting Legacies: Violent Legacies and Transgenerational Trauma. New York: Columbia University Press.

CHAPTER 3

“Survivors all”: Affirmative Connections in Novels by Julian Barnes and Caryl Phillips Vanessa Guignery

The ethical questions relating to survival and the act of living after a traumatic event have been addressed by many Holocaust survivors and trauma victims. In the chapter entitled “Shame” in The Drowned and the Saved, Primo Levi asks, “Are you ashamed because you are alive in place of another? And in particular, of a man more generous, more sensitive, wise, more useful, more worthy of living than you?”1 Primo Levi’s anguish of being alive “at the expense of another”, of having “usurped his neighbor’s place and lived in his stead”2 is well known and has been shared by such Holocaust survivors as Bruno Bettelheim, Elie Wiesel or Ella Ligens as reported by Giorgio Agamben in the chapter entitled “Shame, or on the Subject” in Remnants of Auschwitz.3 While pointing to the difference between the concepts of shame and guilt,4 Agamben argues that “[t]he survivor’s feeling of guilt is a locus classicus of literature on the camps”,5 and in Negative Dialectics, Theodor Adorno also mentions the “drastic guilt” of the survivor who was spared,6 a feeling which makes it difficult to V. Guignery (*) École Normale Supérieure de Lyon, Lyon, France e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 R. Freiburg, G. Bayer (eds.), The Ethics of Survival in Contemporary Literature and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83422-7_3

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live even after the initial ordeal is over. Adorno remarks, “it is not wrong to raise the less cultural question whether after Auschwitz you can go on living—whether one who escaped by accident, one who by rights should have been killed, may go on living”.7 Referring to the “culpable self-­ preservation urge”, Adorno argues that “this guilt is irreconcilable with living”.8 My aim in this chapter is mostly, though not entirely, to steer away from the complex ethical issue of survivor guilt based on negativity and singularity, and to focus instead on the affirmative connections between survivors of genocides, conflicts and disasters at different times and places of history as depicted in Julian Barnes’s A History of the World in 10½ Chapters (1989) and in several novels by Caryl Phillips, notably Higher Ground (1989), Crossing the River (1993) and The Nature of Blood (1997). My purpose is to examine the ways in which these novels connect fictional characters from different times and places who survived thanks to unexpected resources of resilience, solidarity and interdependence in the face of vulnerability and precariousness, and to reflect on the reasons why Barnes and Phillips highlight these connections. To do so, I will draw, among other sources, from Michael Rothberg’s concepts of “knots of memory” and “multidirectional memory”, whose aim is to relate histories and memories of slavery, genocide, colonialism and the Holocaust across different periods and generations instead of considering each history in isolation.

Transhistorical Novels The selected novels by Barnes and Phillips share a generic hybridity, a fragmented structure and a concern with victims and survivors of historical and personal tragedies ranging over several centuries and continents. Although each individual life is portrayed separately, they indirectly connect and interact, transcending time, place, race and gender. Thus, the novels do not merely juxtapose but subtly intertwine different traumas as a brief presentation of each novel will now show. Julian Barnes’s A History of the World in 10½ Chapters features various characters, plots and time frames in each chapter, starting with a rewriting of the biblical Flood and the episode of Noah’s Ark from the point of view of an unusual stowaway and survivor—a woodworm. The book also draws inspiration from historical events which killed many victims and left few survivors, such as the shipwreck of the Medusa in 1816, that of the Titanic in 1912, the earthquake in Arghuri in 1840, the tragedy of the 937 Jewish passengers on

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board the Saint Louis in 1939, the hijacking in October 1985 of the cruise ship Achille Lauro and the nuclear catastrophe in Chernobyl on 25 April 1986. The patterning of themes, motifs, verbal repetitions and echoes creates links between chapters without, however, unifying the whole into a metanarrative that would homogenize history. Caryl Phillips’s novels are well known for what Françoise Kral has called their “aesthetics of parallel periodizations”9 and “poetics of mnemonic relation”,10 as they run “different narratives in parallel, all set in different historical contexts” but linked through “echoing motifs and recurring patterns”.11 Thus, Higher Ground comprises three seemingly disconnected stories which all focus on displaced individuals in Africa, America and Europe. The first one is a first-person narration by an African who took a shameful part in the slave trade in the late eighteenth century by being an interpreter between the white masters and the slaves, thereby escaping the condition of Africans who were sold and shipped across the sea. Aware of his treachery of his own people, he declares “I am a survivor”12 and thus attempts to justify his situation: “I merely survive, and if survival is a crime then I am guilty”.13 However, at the end of the section, because the interpreter disobeyed his white masters, he is added to the cargo of slaves, thus sharing their fate of an uncertain survival. The second section of the novel consists of letters sent from prison by a Black American in 1967–1968 and is related to the first through the way the prisoner presents himself in one of his letters: “Name: Homo Africanus / Occupation: Survivor / Age: 200–300 years / Parents: Africans captured and made slaves”.14 Finally, the third story focuses on a Polish-Jewish refugee who escaped from the Nazi persecution and ended up in England, but twenty years later was placed in a psychiatric hospital after a suicide attempt. She tells her employer in England: “I’m shipwrecked but alive”.15 She meets a West Indian man about to return to the Caribbean, disillusioned by his failed attempt to lead a decent life in England, and, for a brief moment, these survivors from distinct backgrounds find comfort in each other. The same hybrid and transhistorical quality is to be found in Crossing the River, which is composed of a prologue and an epilogue voiced by a father who sold his children into slavery and reflects on his guilt and on the fate of his children over two hundred and fifty years. Within these framing monologues, the novel weaves together four narratives of forced displacement and throws light on the slave trade in Africa in the eighteenth century, the journey from America to Africa of emancipated slaves in the nineteenth century, the ordeal of a former slave turned

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frontierswoman and defeated pioneer in the American Wild West and finally, the thwarted love relationship between a white Englishwoman and a black American soldier in England during the Second World War. Spanning three centuries and criss-crossing three continents, the novel resonates with the voices of the victims of slavery, racism and exploitation. Finally, The Nature of Blood intertwines the stories of persecuted people in different times and places: Jews tyrannized by Christians in Italy in 1480, the Moorish general Othello confronted by the forces of nationalism and racism in Venice in the sixteenth century, a German Jewish doctor who survived the Holocaust and travelled to Palestine to help found Israel, his niece who ends up mentally deranged after her liberation from a concentration camp where she was a member of the Sonderkommando and eventually commits suicide, and a black Ethiopian Jew enduring racism from her white fellow Jews in Israel in the 1980s. The novel starts with a conversation between the German Jew and a Romanian boy, one of the “orphaned and unattached”,16 in a camp in Cyprus, a place of transit or in-between space where over thirty thousand refugees are waiting to go to Palestine. Both man and boy have had to leave their country and family behind, and the German doctor announces, “‘The old world is dead. The survivors are here. […] The new world is just beginning’”17—a distant echo of Antonio Gramsci’s sentence in his Prison Notebooks about the “interregnum” of 1930: “the old is dying and the new cannot be born”.18 Gramsci was referring to a transitional period during which fascism and capitalist hegemony were weakening and the Communist movement expanding, but conditions were not yet met for a Communist revolution. In The Nature of Blood, in 1945, the doctor shows more optimism by declaring the old fascist world already dead and placing faith in the survivors’ ability to create a new order in the form of a promised land. In all these novels, despite the clear separation into chapters or sections for the first three, the narrative strands are not disconnected but subtly related through echoes, repetitions, recurrent motifs and common themes, most of which relate to oppression, persecution and trauma, although one of them is also that of survival. In Higher Ground, the American prisoner declares: “To survive with the will to begin again and go on, this is the highest morality”,19 and this seems to be the desperate resolution shared by the characters of different times, places, races and genders in the four novels currently examined but also in other contemporary texts such as, for instance, Burnt Shadows (2009) by Kamila Shamsie. Like Barnes’s and Phillips’s novels, Shamsie’s book weaves together several historical

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tragedies, but unlike them, it provides an explicit continuous link between them by focusing on the same character, Hiroko Tanaka. A survivor (hibakusha in Japanese) of the Nagasaki bombing in which her fiancé died, Hiroko insists that she is not “haunted by the past”: “I’m told most hibakusha have survivor’s guilt. Believe me, I don’t”.20 She finds refuge in India, but she and her Muslim husband become the victims of Partition in 1947 and are forced to settle in Pakistan; their son gets involved in conflicts in Afghanistan (and ends up in a prison cell in Guantánamo), and by the time of the 2001 terrorist attacks Hiroko has moved to New York to escape the nuclear conflicts between India and Pakistan. As noted by her husband, Hiroko “was a woman who had learnt that she could leave everything behind, and survive”21—a statement that could also be applied to several characters in Phillips’s novels. The inexorable will to survive and begin again is also mentioned in Salman Rushdie’s Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights (2015), when a character marvels at the resilience of some individuals amidst chaos: “It was the resilience in human beings that represented their best chance of survival, their ability to look the unimaginable, the unconscionable, the unprecedented in the eye”.22 Although dealing with painful experiences, all these transhistorical novels foreground the characters’ determination to survive, be it corporeally or through narrative means.

Narrative as “A Kind of Survival” In an interview about Crossing the River, Caryl Phillips declared: “I wanted to make an affirmative connection, not a connection based upon exploitation or suffering or misery, but a connection based upon a kind of survival”.23 In the novel, physical survival is not granted to the emancipated slave who is sent to Liberia and dies in the interior, nor to the former slave who is separated from her husband and daughter, and later abandoned to die alone by black pioneers on their way to California, nor to the many slaves who die in the hold of the slave ship before even having started their journey westward, nor to the black American soldier who has suffered from racism and is killed during the Second World War. However, these fictional victims of a history which finds its roots in the slave trade before developing along further lines of exploitation, greed and racism survive narratively through the writing down of their stories for future generations. What is performed in this “kind of survival” may correspond to what Michael G. Levine (drawing from the observation of the clinicians Bessel

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van der Kolk and Onno van der Hart) refers to as the transformation of monologic, solitary and isolating “traumatic memories” into “narrative memories addressed to others”.24 The stories preserved in a book and read by others outlive the characters and guarantee what Jacques Derrida calls “survivance”, “a survival that is not, in spite of the apparent grammar of the formation of the word (überleben or fortleben, living on or to survive, survival) […] above life”. This “survivance” does not rely on an opposition between life and death but is “a survivance whose ‘sur-’ is without superiority, without height, altitude or highness, and thus without supremacy or sovereignty”.25 Phillips’s characters survive as spectres and live beyond their deaths through the act of narration. This points to an essential and ethical function of writing as providing “a kind of survival” and can be related to Judith Butler’s question of “whether, in writing, in bringing language to the task of communicating memory visually and truthfully, there is some living on, some permission to live, some mode of survival that is achieved”.26 The reader also plays a part in this process of survivance through the attention they pay to these narratives, either through the distanced act of interpretation and intellectual understanding of the situations in their specific contexts or through the ethical task of being empathic witnesses to the traumas of others.27 In the epilogue of Crossing the River, Phillips offers what Gail Low has called “a redemptive and affirmative history of survival”.28 Indeed, the father who sold his children into slavery celebrates the survivors of the slave trade and the experiences of uprooting, those who carried within their bodies “the seeds of new trees” and sunk “hopeful roots into difficult soil”.29 He confidently declares: “my Joyce, and my other children, their voices hurt but determined, they will survive the hardships of the far bank”.30 Beyond his own children who survived only through narrative means, the father listens to people and voices from all over the world, the “many-tongued chorus of the common memory”,31 the diasporic and transnational “haunting voices”32 from Spain, Harlem, Paris, Georgia, Trinidad, Rio and New Orleans, who have suffered from such hardships as racism after inter-racial marriages, dire poverty, drug-addiction or prostitution, but have survived, even if barely so. This paean to survivors may be compared to what Agamben calls “the exaltation of simple survival as such”,33 drawing from Terrence Des Pres’s analysis in The Survivor: An Anatomy of Life in the Death Camps. Agamben explains that for Des Pres, “the true ethical paradigm of our time is […] the survivor, who, without searching for ideal justifications ‘chooses life’ and fights simply to

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survive”.34 In Des Pres’s own words, survivors “embrace life without reserve” and “preserve their dignity in order ‘not to begin to die’”.35 In the epilogue of Crossing the River, the father proudly names them “Survivors all”:36 “Survivors. In their diasporan souls a dream like steel”.37 The alliteration in the plosive [d] (“diasporan”, “dream”) and the assonance in the shrill vowel sound [i:] (“dream like steel”) seem to mirror the steely determination of the diasporic survivors to follow the “reggae rhythms of rebellion and revolution” in the Caribbean, be among the “voices hoping for: Freedom. Democracy”38 and share Martin Luther King’s dream that “one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave-owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood”.39 What emerges from these traumatic and transgenerational stories and memories which the father listens to and transmits, are what Michael Rothberg would call “intersecting solidarities” or “solidarity across difference” between survivors.40 This resonates with Cathy Caruth’s contention that “history, like trauma, is never simply one’s own, […] history is precisely the way we are implicated in each other’s traumas”,41 or, in the words of a concentration camp inmate in The Nature of Blood, “everybody is part of somebody else’s game”.42 According to Stef Craps, what Caruth and other trauma theorists suggest is that trauma can form “a bridge between disparate historical experiences” so that “listening to the trauma of another can contribute to cross-cultural solidarity and to the creation of new forms of community”.43 Barnes’s and Phillips’s novels precisely weave together the stories of survivors from various times and places so as to bring to the fore connections which create a narrative web of solidarity between characters and enhance the reader’s understanding of the tragedies and injustices in the history of the world.

Connecting Tales of Survival By celebrating survivors from a variety of places, times and ordeals without forgetting their sufferings nor ignoring their differences, the narrator of the epilogue of Crossing the River establishes connections beyond the limits of these people’s communities and languages. Such affirmative connections in Phillips’s novels may be compared to the “strange links, impertinent connections” in Barnes’s A History of the World in 10½ Chapters.44 In a chapter entitled “The Survivor”, Kath, a character who believes she survived a nuclear war (but who, according to the doctors, is merely suffering

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from fabulation), explains the history of the world by insisting that “Everything is connected”,45 reminding us of Edward Said’s assertion in Culture and Imperialism that “No one today is purely one thing” and that “Survival […] is about the connections between things”.46 As noted by Brian Finney, the formal, thematic and structural connections in A History of the World in 10½ Chapters “assert in narrative form that certain patterns of human interaction reappear over the expanse of history”.47 The novel exposes ruthless patterns of discrimination and exploitation, but it also weaves a thread between stories of survival, some of them focusing on improbable vulnerable survivors (like the woodworm which survived the Flood in Noah’s Ark in the first chapter or a sailor who had been swallowed by a sperm whale in 1891 as recorded in one of the “Three Simple Stories”), others involving survival not of the fittest but of “the most cunning”, “the cowards, the panickers, the deceivers”,48 as in the case of Lawrence Beesley, an authentic survivor from the Titanic who supposedly escaped the sinking of the ship by dressing in women’s clothes. In the chapter entitled “The Survivor”, the female character dismisses the phrase “the survival of the fittest” as her husband was “the fitter to survive […] bigger, stronger, more practical […], more conservative, more easy-going” but is probably dead while she, a worrier, is alive. She therefore proposes a new model: “The Survival of the Worriers” and adds: “Only those who can see what’s happening will survive, that must be the rule”.49 According to her, only those who can see “the old connections”50 within nature will survive—in this case, those who see the connections between the cloud of radioactivity after the Chernobyl nuclear accident and the poisoning affecting the rain, the lichen, the animals eating the lichen and the human beings eating the radioactive animals. Her mode of survival from the looming nuclear war consists of abandoning land and getting on a boat with two cats, a reminder of Noah’s own method of survival but also an echo of the harrowing fate of the Jewish refugees in 1939 who boarded the Saint Louis to escape extermination from the Nazi state—all of them seemingly answering the human instinct evoked by the nuke survivor: “When threatened, scatter. Not just running away from the danger, but raising our chances of survival as a species”.51 It is by adopting a similar method of survival—which, in the case of the Jewish refugees, tragically failed—that individuals from various times, places or conflicts become connected in Barnes’s novel. What Barnes and Phillips seem to suggest through the very structure of their respective novels is that the weaving together of stories of survival

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creates cross-cultural connections between victims of trauma who share an experience of vulnerability and precariousness, but also of resilience. Historical tragedies are therefore not to be considered separately, as isolated cases, but in their connections and interrelations, and this sharing of experiences of vulnerability has ethical implications. This is what Michael Rothberg had in mind when he coined the concept of “knots of memory”, which conceptualizes “collective or cultural memory beyond the framework of the imagined community of the nation-state” and examines “rhizomatic networks of temporality and cultural reference that exceed attempts at territorialization (whether at the local or national level) and identitarian reduction”.52 Rothberg suggests connecting traumatic histories in a “multidirectional memory” (instead of a competitive memory) so that the victims of various conflicts worldwide are connected in their vulnerability and resilience. Rothberg identifies Paul Gilroy’s seminal 1993 study The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness as one of several sources of inspiration for the concept of “knots of memory” because of the way Gilroy staged “an extended dialogue about the overlapping traumatic legacies of Atlantic slavery and the Nazi genocide of European Jews” and explored “the mutual imbrication of black and Jewish counter-cultures of remembrance”.53 According to Rothberg, “the memory of the Holocaust has always been in a mutually constituting dialogue with histories and memories of racism, slavery, and colonialism that both preceded and followed the events of the Shoah”.54 In their novels, Barnes and Phillips (but also Shamsie in Burnt Shadows) point to “the knotted intersection of histories” mentioned by Gilroy,55 as they implicitly initiate dialogues between several human-made tragedies and encourage the reader to be active in seeing the connections. Phillips performs this task when he links the Holocaust with the legacies of slavery and colonialism in the West Indies, thus pleading for an interactive approach which could yield “some ethical insight into human suffering”.56 In Higher Ground, the Black American prisoner “constantly filters his own situation through the prisms of both the Holocaust and African American slavery”:57 using Holocaust terminology, he calls his wardens “the Gestapo police”,58 refers to the prison where he is kept as “Belsen”59 and compares the twenty-four-hour light in his cell to torture methods in “Nazi Germany”;60 in memory of slavery, he uses such terms as “slave”,61 “plantation”62 and “emancipation”.63 In A History of the World in 10½ Chapters, connections between tragedies are suggested through the repetition of specific phrases. Thus, the woodworm in the

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first chapter explains that the concept of discrimination finds its origins in the Bible: “Noah—or Noah’s God—had decreed that there were two classes of beast: the clean and the unclean”.64 The same words recur in later chapters to refer to the grouping of passengers according to their nationalities by Arab terrorists on the Achille Lauro (“Separating the clean from the unclean”65), the sacrifice of sick people on the raft of the Medusa (“The healthy were separated from the unhealthy like the clean from the unclean”66) or the selection of Jews to be allowed to disembark from the St Louis in Havana (“Who would separate the clean from the unclean?”67). Such echoes and repetitions bind seemingly separate tragedies together. In her analysis of Phillips’s work, Françoise Kral considers the aesthetics of parallel periodizations in his novels through Gilles Deleuze’s concept of “fold” (“le pli”). She compares Phillips’s polyptychs set in different times and places to the folding of a piece of paper or of fabric which “results in bringing into contact with each other motifs which otherwise would never have done”, and by doing so connects them “without altering their respective integrity”.68 In Barnes’s and Phillips’s novels, the connections or folds between stories of survival create a link between victims who, by the means of narration, seem to share their experience of suffering even if their stories are separated in distinct chapters or sections. According to Rothberg, “[s]olidarity […] is a frequent—if not guaranteed—outcome of the remembrance of suffering”,69 and the victims of Barnes’s and Phillips’s novels seem united (if only virtually) in their memories of survival in the midst of trauma. This ethical connectedness through solidarity could be considered through the prism of the paradigm shift which occurred from the mid-2000s in the status of victims and vulnerable people in contemporary societies. In his introduction to The Ethics and Aesthetics of Vulnerability in Contemporary British Fiction, Jean-Michel Ganteau refers to this “move from an era of suspicion to one of attention and solicitude for victims of trauma, both in military and civilian contexts”.70 As noted by Ganteau, the contemporary model is no longer one of autonomy but one of solidarity, interconnection, interdependence, an ethical relational model based on an attention to the other, a responsiveness to the other, solicitude and practical help for the other. In Ganteau’s words, “[t]he ethics of care develops a model that puts forward what may be called a loop of vulnerability, in that it is premised on vulnerability to the vulnerable other, vulnerability being both the condition and expression of interdependence”.71 Vulnerability is therefore viewed in terms of connections, as being part of an ethics of relationship and alterity in the wake of Levinasian ethics.

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Solidarity Through Vulnerability We may consider this loop of vulnerability in relation to some of the animals on board Noah’s Ark as recorded in the first chapter of A History of the World in 10½ Chapters, in particular the seven woodworms that stowed away aboard Noah’s Ark and survived the Flood. The woodworm can be considered to be the epitome of precariousness and vulnerability, not only because of its small size and its status as a parasite or pest but also because, like many other discriminated groups, it was not chosen by God or Noah, “the favoured survivor”,72 to be saved. At the beginning of that chapter, the narrator makes assertive and exalted proclamations in the first-person pronoun: “I was never chosen. […] I was a stowaway; I too survived; I escaped […]; and I have flourished”.73 At the end of the chapter, he repeats the same verbs but is now using the plural pronoun (which has prevailed throughout the chapter): “We had survived. We had stowed away, survived and escaped […]. We had done it by ourselves”.74 When the woodworms survive, they survive as a group and not as separate individuals like the Titanic passenger Lawrence Beesley, “false corpse turned mystery survivor”,75 or, in another chapter, Franklin Hughes, the guest lecturer on a cruise ship highjacked by Arab terrorists, who, being Irish, is not on the list of passengers to be executed and remains in his cabin while a pair of passengers is shot every hour.76 The attitudes of Beesley and Hughes remind us that in extreme conditions when survival is at stake, the self often prevails over any ethical sense of responsibility or solidarity towards the other. On the raft of the Medusa, as recorded in the fifth chapter of A History of the World in 10½ Chapters, the fifteen healthy passengers decide to cast into the sea their sick comrades so they themselves have a better chance to survive.77 In Auschwitz, as noted by Levi, the principal rule “made it mandatory that you take care of yourself first of all”,78 and he quotes Ella Lingens-Reiner in her book Prisoners of Fears: “How was I able to survive in Auschwitz? My principle is: I come first, second and third. Then nothing, then again I; and then the others”.79 On the other hand, in the first chapter of Barnes’s book, the repeated use of the plural pronoun “we” by the woodworm seems to point to the solidarity between the individual members of the group but also beyond their own community as the woodworm empathizes with the crossbreeds that were exterminated by Noah and his family on the Ark (the basilisk, the griffon, the sphinx, the hippogriff and others). Although Barnes’s chapter is marked by an essentially comic and subversive tone, the choice

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of the pronoun “we” may be compared to Judith Butler’s analysis of the use of that pronoun in Charlotte Delbo’s book Auschwitz and After. As noted by Butler, Delbo’s book is marked by “the absence of a strong and centering ‘I’”.80 This can be interpreted as the sign of a dismantling of the self as noted, for instance, by Maurice Blanchot about the powerless man in the concentration camp who has lost “existence in the first person, individual sovereignty, and the speech that says I”.81 However, Butler offers another interpretation for Delbo’s use of the plural “we”, “as if all the women undergo everything together”. When one is separated from the group, it is the sign that death is coming, so Delbo “finds solace and survival in that ‘we.’ […] survival seems to require separating from her own experience; the plural ‘we’ allows her to maintain a kind of solidarity at the textual level”.82 According to Butler, Primo Levi, by insisting on the shame of the survivor who lives at the expense of another, “heightens the individual accountability of the prisoner”; Delbo, on the other hand, “seeks to establish solidarity under extreme conditions of precarity”.83 In Phillips’s The Nature of Blood, although the female Jew keeps to herself and refuses to identify with the other women in the concentration camp (“I am not like them. I am not”84), she still tries to join in their singing upon the liberation85 and notes: “I understand the passion that they must feel. I, too, have survived the storm”.86 A movement from singularity to solidarity is also what befalls the various slaves in Phillips’s Crossing the River. In the first section, the emancipated slave Nash writes to his former master from Liberia and in his first letters uses the first-person pronoun to distinguish himself from the heathen “natives” who speak a “crude dialect”,87 “a much-maligned people in this dark and benighted country”.88 However, after some time spent in Africa and after his letters and pleas to his American “Father” have remained unanswered, Nash becomes more vocal in his denunciation of slavery and exploitation. He writes: “We, the colored man, have been oppressed long enough. We need to contend for our rights, stand our ground”.89 He is here assuming the voice of a political activist and spokesman for a community through the use of the first-person plural, thus vindicating their rights as survivors from the despoliation, slavery and “repatriation”90 to Africa imposed by Western masters. In the third section of Crossing the River, composed of the slave ship master’s journal and letters, we only know about the slaves through the trader’s use of numbers, for instance: “2 girl slaves, who have long been ill of a flux, died. Nos 117 and 127”.91 The slaves’ voices are reduced to a silent, written number, and

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their individual stories die with them. However, in the last entry of the journal, as the boat loses sight of Africa, the slave master refers to the slaves in the hold who gather strength from each other despite their condition of vulnerability: “They huddle together, and sing their melancholy lamentations”.92 In the same way in Higher Ground, the slaves in the cargo hold who are shackled to men of “a different tribe and language or dialect” to prevent any communication and rebellion, suddenly and “without organization” “swell into a choir” as they leave Africa, a “baffling rebellious music”93 that “makes a common sense for we are all saying the same thing: we are all promising to one day return”.94 The repetition of “we are all” and the polysemic use of the adjective “common” followed by the use of “same” point to the sense of communality which brings the slaves together despite of (or because of) their distress. Even the interpreter who had betrayed his fellow men but now shares their fate joins in the chorus and calls the group “We survivors”.95 To quote Butler again, the slaves “establish solidarity under extreme conditions of precarity”96 and thus articulate an ethical bond even when they do not share the same language or belong to the same community. For Butler, what makes survival possible “seems to reside in forms of unexpected cohabitation, across languages, with and beyond the communities we already know, in acts of solicitude that gesture towards solidarity”.97 The vulnerable characters in Barnes’s and Phillips’s novels, subjected to various forms of domination and subjugation, unite under the pronoun “we” and survive together. Interestingly, at the end of “The Survivor” in A History of the World in 10½ Chapters, Barnes uses the same verb “huddle” as in Crossing the River to refer this time to the kittens born to the cats which, together with Kath, supposedly survived the nuclear war: “Five tortoiseshell kittens, all huddling together, helpless and blind”.98 The seven cats, like the seven woodworms in the first chapter and the countless slaves in the cargo holds of Crossing the River and Higher Ground, are helpless and vulnerable, but they survive—if only for the time being—by “huddling together”, and it is this togetherness which, though fragile, places an affirmative trust in survival. While the individual prisoner in the second section of Higher Ground alienates his relatives by being incapable of “opening doors not closing them, reaching not holding back”,99 in the last section, the suicidal Polish-Jewish refugee and the disillusioned West Indian man go their separate ways but only after drawing warmth from each other, “allow[ing] the scars time to heal”100 and looking repeatedly at each other’s face.101 As noted by Levinas, the face is the most exposed and vulnerable aspect of the

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other’s presence, but it is also what “invites me to a relation”,102 an ethical encounter between two vulnerable selves or survivors from different backgrounds. In The Nature of Blood, the German Jew recognizes a fellow sufferer in the Romanian boy who, after being liberated from a camp by the Russians, returned to his village to discover that his parents had disappeared and that he himself was either to leave or be killed. The older man who left his family behind takes the orphan’s hand and holds it between his own, encouraging him to “think only of the future”: “Now there will be a homeland. Yes. We can share”.103 What Phillips and Barnes seem to suggest in their novels is that the sharing of vulnerability between survivors (or the “loop of vulnerability” as Ganteau calls it) forms the groundwork for the establishment of a “truly inclusive post-traumatic community marked by openness to and respect for otherness”,104 one which does not substitute one suffering for another or conflate distinct experiences but preserves the distance between them and therefore does not violate the integrity of each. In Barnes’s and Phillips’s novels, this sense of a post-traumatic community remains fragile and cannot annihilate the survivors’ singular pain and suffering, but it may be seen to participate in an ethical movement of solicitude and care for the vulnerable other from a different culture. Solidarity and community thus help vulnerable people develop resilience and resistance, and can enable them to survive individually and as a group, and later, to communicate about their survival, thereby creating affirmative connections between survivors of similar or different tragedies as well as sharing their narratives and experiences with a larger community.

Notes 1. Levi (1988, 62). 2. Levi (1988, 62). 3. Agamben (1999, 89) quotes Bettelheim: “One cannot survive the concentration camp without feeling guilty that one was so incredibly lucky when millions perished”, Wiesel: “I live, therefore I am guilty […]. I am here because a friend, an acquaintance, an unknown person died in my place”, and Lingens: “I live, because others died in my place”. 4. Agamben (1999, 88) finds Levi’s chapter “Shame” “ultimately unsatisfying” partly because of its confusion of shame and guilt, for example, when Levi writes: “many (including me) experienced ‘shame,’ that is, a feeling of guilt” (Levi 1988, 73). The difference between the two concepts is

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addressed by Ruth Leys in From Guilt to Shame: Auschwitz and After, in which she also refers to Levi’s use of the terms (2007, 20). 5. Agamben (1999, 89). 6. Adorno (1973, 363). 7. Adorno (1973, 362). 8. Adorno (1973, 364). 9. Kral (2017, 12). 10. Kral (2017, 78). 11. Kral (2017, 12). 12. Phillips (1995, 57). 13. Phillips (1995, 24). 14. Phillips (1995, 91). 15. Phillips (1995, 182). 16. Phillips (1998, 5). 17. Phillips (1998, 9). 18. Gramsci (1971, 276). 19. Phillips (1995, 97). 20. Shamsie (2009, 183). 21. Shamsie (2009, 137). 22. Rushdie (2015, 75). 23. Phillips in Davison (2009, 21, my emphasis). 24. Levine (2006, 7). 25. Derrida (2010, 131). 26. Butler (2016, 382). Trauma theorists refer to the survivors’ need to tell their story in order to survive and not only to survive so they can tell their story (Laub 1992, 78; Levine 2006, 1). Laurie Vickroy borrows Suzette Henke’s concept of “scriptotherapy” (Henke 2000, xii) to argue that protagonists of fictional narratives also “attempt to survive by creating enabling stories and self-concepts” (Vickroy 2002, 9). 27. As noted by Dominick LaCapra (1999, 722), the reader should avoid over-identification with the victim but feel what he calls “empathic unsettlement” which “involves a kind of virtual experience through which one puts oneself in the other’s position while recognizing the difference of that position and hence not taking the other’s place”. 28. Low (1998, 132). 29. Phillips (2006, 2). 30. Phillips (2006, 235). 31. Phillips (2006, 235). 32. Phillips (2006, 236). 33. Agamben (1999, 92). 34. Agamben (1999, 92).

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35. Des Pres (1976, 245 and 72). As noted by Agamben (1999, 93), “Bettelheim reacted to Des Pres’s book with indignation”, reaffirming instead “the decisive importance of the survivor’s feeling of guilt”. 36. Phillips (2006, 235). 37. Phillips (2006, 236). 38. Phillips (2006, 236). 39. Phillips (2006, 237). 40. Rothberg (2016, 366). 41. Caruth (1996, 24). 42. Phillips (1998, 170). 43. Craps (2012, 156). 44. Barnes (1990, 242). 45. Barnes (1990, 84; emphasis in the original). Kath repeats this expression as well as the noun “connections” five times in this chapter. 46. Said (1994, 407 and 408). 47. Finney (2003, 62). 48. Barnes (1990, 174). 49. Barnes (1990, 97). 50. Barnes (1990, 97). 51. Barnes (1990, 94). 52. Rothberg (2010, 7). 53. Rothberg (2010, 8). In a different context, one could relate this dialogue to Wilson Harris’s (1983) view of cross-culturality and Édouard Glissant’s (1990) poetics of relation. 54. Rothberg (2016, 359). 55. Gilroy (2000, 78). 56. Ledent (2002, 70). 57. Craps (2012, 160). 58. Phillips (1995, 127). 59. Phillips (1995, 69, 84, 145). 60. Phillips (1995, 72). 61. Phillips (1995, 89, 90). 62. Phillips (1995, 67, 90). 63. Phillips (1995, 147). 64. Barnes (1990, 10). 65. Barnes (1990, 44). 66. Barnes (1990, 121). 67. Barnes (1990, 184). 68. Kral (2017, 21). 69. Rothberg (2010, 11).

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70. Ganteau (2015, 3) 71. Ganteau (2015, 11). 72. Barnes (1990, 21). 73. Barnes (1990, 4). 74. Barnes (1990, 28). 75. Barnes (1990, 173). 76. Barnes (1990, 57–58). 77. Barnes (1990, 121). 78. Levi (1988, 79). 79. Levi (1988, 59). 80. Butler (2016, 383). 81. Blanchot (1993, 132). I would like to thank Maria Anna Mariani for drawing my attention to the reasons why the “I” vanishes in the camps. 82. Butler (2016, 383). 83. Butler (2016, 386). 84. Phillips (1998, 48). 85. Phillips (1998, 47). 86. Phillips (1998, 45). 87. Phillips (2006, 23). 88. Phillips (2006, 31). 89. Phillips (2006, 61). 90. The American Colonization Society supported the “repatriation” of former slaves to Africa (even if most of them were born in the United States) as a way to remove free blacks and avoid slave rebellions. 91. Phillips (2006, 116). 92. Phillips (2006, 124). 93. Phillips (1995, 59). 94. Phillips (1995, 60). 95. Phillips (1995, 60). 96. Butler (2016, 386). 97. Butler (2016, 388). 98. Barnes (1990, 111). 99. Phillips (1995, 169). 100. Phillips (1995, 215). 101. Phillips (1995, 216). 102. Levinas (1969, 198). 103. Phillips (1998, 11). 104. Craps (2012, 158).

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References Adorno, Theodor W. 1973. Negative Dialectics. Translated by E.B.  Ashton. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Agamben, Giorgio. 1999. Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive. Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen. New York: Zone Books. Barnes, Julian. 1990 [1989]. A History of the World in 10½ Chapters. London: Picador. Blanchot, Maurice. 1993 [1969]. The Infinite Conversation. Translated by Susan Hanson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Butler, Judith. 2016. Fiction and Solicitude. Ethics and the Condition for Survival. In Probing the Ethics of Holocaust Studies, ed. Claudio Fogu et al., 373–388. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Caruth, Cathy. 1996. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Craps, Stef. 2012. Linking Legacies of Loss—Trauma Histories and Cross-Cultural Empathy in Caryl Phillips’s Higher Ground and The Nature of Blood. In Caryl Phillips: Writing in the Key of Life, ed. Bénédicte Ledent and Daria Tunca, 155–173. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Davison, Carol Margaret. 2009. Crisscrossing the River: An Interview with Caryl Phillips. In Conversations with Caryl Phillips, ed. Renee T. Schatteman, 19–26. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Derrida, Jacques. 2010. The Beast and the Sovereign: Volume II. Translated by Geoffrey Bennington. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Des Pres, Terrence. 1976. The Survivor: An Anatomy of Life in the Death Camps. New York: Washington Square Press. Finney, Brian. 2003. A Worm’s Eye View of History: Julian Barnes’s A History of the World in 10½ Chapters. Papers on Language and Literature 39 (1): 49–70. Ganteau, Jean-Michel. 2015. The Ethics and Aesthetics of Vulnerability in Contemporary British Fiction. New York: Routledge. Gilroy, Paul. 1993. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. ———. 2000. Against Race: Imagining Political Culture beyond the Color Line. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Glissant, Édouard. 1990. Poétique de la Relation. Paris: Gallimard. Gramsci, Antonio. 1971. Selections from the Prison Notebooks. Edited and translated by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith. London: Lawrence and Wishart. Harris, Wilson. 1983. The Womb of Space: The Cross-Cultural Imagination. Westport: Greenwood. Henke, Suzanne. 2000. Shattered Subjects: Trauma and Testimony in Women’s Life-Writing. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Kral, Françoise. 2017. Sounding out History: Caryl Phillips’s Crossing the River. Nanterre: Presses Universitaires de Nanterre. LaCapra, Dominick. 1999. Trauma, Absence, Loss. Critical Inquiry 25 (4): 696–727. Laub, Dori. 1992. An Event Without a Witness: Truth, Testimony, and Survival. In Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History, by Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, 75–92. New York: Routledge. Ledent, Bénédicte. 2002. Caryl Phillips. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Levi, Primo. 1988 [1986]. The Drowned and the Saved. Translated by Raymond Rosenthal. London: Joseph. Levinas, Emmanuel. 1969. Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. Levine, Michael G. 2006. The Belated Witness: Literature, Testimony, and the Question of Holocaust Survival. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Leys, Ruth. 2007. From Guilt to Shame: Auschwitz and After. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Low, Gail. 1998. ‘A Chorus of Common Memory’: Slavery and Redemption in Caryl Phillips’s Cambridge and Crossing the River. Research in African Literatures 29 (4): 122–140. Phillips, Caryl. 1995 [1989]. Higher Ground. New York: Vintage International. ———. 1998 [1997]. The Nature of Blood. New York: Vintage International. ———. 2006 [1993]. Crossing the River. London: Vintage Books. Rothberg, Michael. 2010. Introduction: Between Memory and Memory: From Lieux de mémoire to Noeuds de mémoire. Yale French Studies 118/119: 3–12. ———. 2016. The Witness as ‘World’ Traveler: Multidirectional Memory and Holocaust Internationalism before Human Rights. In Probing the Ethics of Holocaust Studies, ed. Claudio Fogu et  al., 355–372. Harvard: Harvard University Press. Rushdie, Salman. 2015. Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights. New York: Random House. Said, Edward W. 1994 [1993]. Culture and Imperialism. London: Vintage Books. Shamsie, Kamila. 2009. Burnt Shadows. London: Bloomsbury. Vickroy, Laurie. 2002. Trauma and Survival in Contemporary Fiction. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press.

CHAPTER 4

Feats of Survival: Refugee Writing and the Ethics of Representation Janet M. Wilson

Refugees and their desperate circumstances are often seen as the zeitgeist of our time, haunting the western ethical value system and requiring new bureaucratic procedures of access and adjudication.1 Pouring into Europe from Africa across the Black Mediterranean and fleeing from Syria and other parts of the Middle East, refugees represent the most marginalised of all diaspora populations, subject to exclusion and discrimination as stateless subjects. Hostile or reactionary responses have dominated the political landscape with detention camps, new borders or the consolidation of existing ones and the assigning of allocations and quotas in “Fortress Europe”.2 As migratory influxes increase, nation states have struggled to meet the challenge that the so-called refugee crisis poses to processes for adjudicating entry and citizenship, with a progressive hardening into an artificial binary of those asylum seekers deemed worthy of refugee status and those not.3

J. M. Wilson (*) University of Northampton, Northampton, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 R. Freiburg, G. Bayer (eds.), The Ethics of Survival in Contemporary Literature and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83422-7_4

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Along with the heightened media exposure and political debate that either sensationalises or trivialises stateless people, there has been a plethora of refugee stories all contributing to a “crisis of representation”, as Agnes Woolley notes of asylum narratives published in Britain: [O]scillating between invisibility and overexposure in the public sphere, forced migrants have an ambivalent relationship to the aesthetic forms that seek to represent them, one which touches on questions of communicability, visibility and ethics.4

Misrepresentation and distortion in accounts by, of and about refugees have come to dominate public perceptions, usually reflecting the extremities under which these narratives are produced. The refugees’ own accounts of their journeys presented for adjudication in cases for asylum are given within narrowly prescriptive legal conditions and cannot hope to do justice to the personal elements of their experiences, which remain buried and invisible,5 while some accounts of refugee traumas by outsiders, western readers or sympathisers that emphasise their suffering and tragic loss tend to stereotype or scapegoat refugees as agentless victims or demonise them as criminals or parasites, vermin or insects, contaminating the pure body of the nation state. The crude simplifications and sensationalising that mark mass media reports also appear on right-wing websites or in documentary films and scripts where ways of nuancing the relationship between author, subject and viewer /reader are limited. When refugees are suddenly in full public view, as with the images of the drowned Kurdish three-year-old boy Alan Kurdi in 2015, an outpouring of public sentiment occurs, but all too many others go unnoticed. The politics of representation raises questions such as who has the right to tell these stories, and whose voices do we hear? How are audience expectations of authenticity and truth being manipulated? How can politically engaged readers make a difference to conditions of mass displacement that create extreme precarity and uncertainty? This chapter examines three texts that may loosely be categorised as forms of refugee writing, recently identified by Chandani Lokuge as that of non-citizens, that is, those who fail to gain asylum in host nations and so belong to no country.6 All texts reveal the extreme vulnerability and precarity of asylum seekers who lack any access to legal advice, medical, information and translation services, media support or citizen advocacy. Referring to a short novel, an anthology of tales that are retellings of

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refugee stories and a political memoir, I focus on the ethics of reading and reception of texts that use affective and critical discourses to raise awareness of the systemic inequalities underlining their plight. As forms of testimonial writing—often horrific stories of endurance and survival—these texts can be read as interventions into contemporary debates, and this chapter analyses the communities of readers and audiences, both within the text and outside it, who respond to and engage with the refugee content. Actors include readers or recipients of stories or fragments told by other refugees in the text; other collaborators with refugees or asylum seekers are activist citizens involved in the textual production from a mix of political and humanitarian motives. Both imagined audiences in the world of the text and socially committed readers outside provide responses ranging from empathy to critique, acting as touchstones for real-life readers. The response of collectivities such as activist refugee support groups can be read in relation to new understandings of citizenship as a participatory politics, based on “human rights and the duties of personhood” instead of the rights and duties of the nation state.7 Inclusivity is embraced by such groups as the norm, and citizenship recast as a series of practices linked across translocal spaces and national borders.8 Motivated by the wish for social justice and the claim to rights, citizen activists and pressure groups aim to overturn negative responses to refugees held by governments and circulated by the mass media, and to challenge official immigration and detention policies by invoking Human Rights, and international humanitarian organisations like the United Nations High Commission on Refugees (UNHCR) and PEN. In these three texts, the heightened consciousness of survivor refugees and collaborations between citizens and refuges produce a humanist response to tragic loss and a powerful critique of exclusions of the sans papiers, the non-citizen, from national structures of belonging. Informing this study are Judith Butler’s theories of precarious lives and frames of perception. Butler argues that “In the politics of immigration some lives are perceived as lives while others […] fail to assume perceptual form as such”.9 She asks whether displaced, precarious lives are disposable, and inauthentic, and whether the lives of disenfranchised subjects matter as “grievable, worthy of protection as belonging to subjects with rights that ought to be honoured”.10 Butler’s political agenda in responding to death and loss is marked by co-vulnerability and co-responsibility and defines a new humanism based on grief, relationality and bodily forms of susceptibility.11 Butler widens the debate about survival by theorising

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precarious lives in relation to the question of political representation, in an ethical discussion of choices about life, death and survival. She has reservations about the emphasis on empathy and compassion in personal responses and many media outlets, because it forecloses more informed debate. In Frames of War she writes, “we are against interpretation when we read the moral horror in tales of violence”12 and “affective response seems to be primary and in no need of explanations, and is prior to the work of understanding and interpretation”.13 This caveat (seemingly undermining her own thesis) is shared by others, who see the affective response as sheltering western viewers and readers from the intransigent facts of systemic inequality, injustice and persecution. Carolyn Pedwell, for example, writes that although the empathetic dimension seems to frame a solution by being linked to aims of building cross-cultural and transnational justice, it can also close down discussion, turning the encounter with trauma back onto readers’ own subject positions rather than trying to establish refugees as subjects with agency.14 In the divisive climate resulting from the precarity of refugees, images that might arouse compassion are seen as encouraging public assimilation of suffering rather than striving to effect wider socio-­ political change. In defining “the limits of empathy”, Sukhmani Khorana says, for example, The evocation of empathy in refugee-themed narratives is sometimes accompanied by a depoliticisation of systemic issues. This occurs by shifting responsibility onto the feelings of the ethical citizen rather than the imperative international obligations and/or power imbalance in regional relations.15

Yet debates over the relative merits of empathy and political activism cannot ignore the affective dimension that can catalyse readers and citizens to psychological, emotional or political forms of engagement and so contribute indirectly to current debates on national policies. In examining how reader expectation and understanding of survival is managed through different types of representation, it is worth considering how opinion in the discourse on refugees and non-citizens polarises around the question of national borders. On the one hand, Homi Bhabha advocates the need for belonging as crucial to understanding citizenship: We need to conceive citizenship in a more open, more liberal, more diverse, more empathetic way […] to change the very value-based time scale to create and think of the refugee, in that short moment, as the one who does not

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belong and who maybe provides the representative time frame for re-­ thinking this problem. The refugee thus becomes the model and the basis on which we should think about belonging.16

On the other hand, valuing survival at the expense of citizenship lends moral respectability to exclusionary agendas such as the deterrence policy of the Australian border force for processing illegal maritime arrivals, Operation Sovereign Borders, which claims a humanitarian policy of saving lives at sea while introducing a tow-back policy to Indonesia of boats en route to Australia, ostensibly to combat people smugglers, but in reality to prevent refugees, written reaching sovereign territory. The narratives of refugees with the mediating voices of citizen groups that contest these deterrence and detention practices, can be read as interventions in these debates, conscious of the written word’s power to shape opinion and hence indirectly influence government policy on illegal immigration.

The Poetics of Testimony: Abu Bakr Khaal, African Titanics Written in Arabic by Abu Bakr Khaal, an Eritrean migrant who fled to Tripoli in about 1990 and then after a short period in a detention camp in Tunisia moved to Denmark, this novel brings readers close to the irreducible humanity of the refugee whose life is in constant peril. A tale of the attempted exodus to the Mediterranean of an entire generation from Eritrea, Liberia, Somalia, Ghana and the Sudan, on clandestine asylum-­ seeking journeys—a doomed desert trip, a fraught crossing in a “titanic” (i.e. a leaky boat) and periods in a smuggler’s cell in Tripoli awaiting transport—the narrative acquires an affective dimension through the subjectivity of its narrator, Abdar. As witness to the death, starvation or debilitation of his fellow migrants, who call themselves “travellers”, Abdar creates a testimonial narrative that is also a “poetic homage” to them.17 His account of the exodus of boat people from North and East Africa, interspersed with stories, songs and legends from their Eritrean cultural heritage and the blend of written narrative with oral testimony, appears as a blend of autobiographical fiction and lament. In what can be read as the “inauthentic” framework of the novel’s opening, the narrator laughs at the travellers for being deluded in their rush to the west with its promise of sudden wealth, introducing this mirage with metaphors of sorcery, witchcraft and the plague, before himself

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succumbing to the “migration bug”. But he does so in order to test this mysterious force with his own powers of art and rhetoric that hubristically he sees as another form of magic. Migration came flooding through Africa, a turbulent swell sweeping everything along in its wake. […] I, and many others beside me, attributed it all to the works of a dark sorcerer, emerging from the mists of the unknown and sounding a magnificent bell […]. It was a pandemic. A plague. […] Dong, dong, dong pealed the bell, calling one and all to its promised paradise.18

The relative odds of survival inevitably weigh heavily on those who decide to take flight. Poverty, as Korte and Zipp point out, “is […] a ‘collateral’ motif in much literature dealing with migration”19 and a major justification for migration along with war, civil conflict and limited social capability in the homelands of Africa. Indeed, this might explain the willingness of an entire generation to put their lives at risk in African Titanics, for the people are seduced by the prospect of western consumerism—the flashy car and beautiful woman. But there is no suggestion that their mobilisation can be traced to historical problems such as Eritrea’s war with Ethiopia from 1998 to 1990 or long-term mismanagement, and hence little opportunity for developing any critique that might challenge Abdar’s point of view, which implies a reading position based on empathy. It is only when Abdar hears—and begins recording—stories and songs lamenting the non-survival of friends and fellow countrymen relatable to their wish to draw themselves out of poverty, that his ethical purpose in writing about his journeys of migration takes shape. The narrator’s engagement with Malouk, a singer whose lyrical powers of song and music make him legendary, especially after he drowns in one of the capsized boats, compels Abdar to give greater representation to all those others who have been lost. Responding to Malouk’s reputation, the narrator determines his role is to show that “bare life” is grievable, especially that of the artist, as he writes down Malouk’s songs and stories on behalf of the collective; this enables him to sing of this widespread tragedy that he has witnessed, climaxing in an “anthem to doomed youth”, a concluding poem that gestures to art as a form of liberation: To all the pounding hearts In feverish boats

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I will cut Through these paths With my own liberated heart And tell my soul To shout of your silenced deaths And fill palms of dust with morning dew And song20

The valuing of testimony and the act of memorialising are also built into the narrative when Abdar and Terhas, one of the women he travels with, bear witness to the voices of other travellers whose destinies are unknown, by reading out their inscriptions on the walls of the smugglers’ den: “If this letter reaches you, I beg you will not feel sad or fearful for me. Please do not shed any of your precious tears on my account”; “‘Where will you take me, oh fleeting hours?” read one beautifully written message in Tigre […] signed “Anonymous”; “How can the journey from shore to shore be so very difficult? It seems so simple on the maps,” a French hand had written […]; “Forgive me, my dear Hamouddi,” came another message in Arabic. When I translated it to Terhas tears welled in her eyes […]: “maybe it was her son?”21

As relics of past journeys and attempted crossings, the written fragments testify to lost lives or unknown fates of others who have gone before, and the tears of Abdar and Terhas, their affective responses, are a stalking horse for the reader. Abdar’s narrative begins with the implication that the impulse to migrate is delusional and ill-judged as his fellow travellers ignore the risk of death in their desire to reach a western El Dorado. This emotive dimension and change of mood, by contrast, acknowledge the demands of testimony in responding to whole-scale loss of life: the novel enacts recuperation of the travellers’ presence, now valued as worthy of memorialising—even though many names or voices cannot be recalled— by recording the singer’s response to this tragedy.22

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Politics and Representation: Refugee Tales I, II and III The three volumes of Refugee Tales (2016, 2017 and 2019) represent a genre of refugee writing consisting of advocacy-based story collections whose authors, editors or ghost writers mediate the voices of asylum seekers and refugees that might otherwise be inaccessible, by either retelling or reshaping their stories, drawing public attention to them, their feats of survival or injustices suffered.23 This aim to recover voice and agency, which implies some appropriation of subaltern voice, as Gayatri Spivak’s influential question about whether the subaltern can speak implies, can be countered with the argument, common to subaltern studies, that there is a need “to rely on the language of elite discourse” in critiquing the hierarchy between the west and its othered subalterns.24 In this popular anthology format, western sympathisers aim to show solidarity with refugees and detainees, and to demand greater social justice and humanity in official treatment of them. They may be compared to other types of refugee narrative whose success depends on the commodification of precarity and strategic command of empathy: for example, the boy refugee narrative is a fashionable form of semi-fictional autobiography and its self-fashioning strategy gains visibility and public, financial support for the first-person narrator (who may have collaborated with a ghost writer), who has relocated to the west or in his flight to search for a new life.25 Refugee Tales I, II and III stand out as a political intervention into national immigration policy in the UK as seen in the editors’ call in the “Afterword” for an end to the contemporary law of indefinite detention. This demand unites these collections of heterogeneous narrative accounts of detainees and asylum seekers who, in the titles that identify the writer who tells their story, are known only by their roles: for example, in Refugee Tales I, “The Refugee’s Tale as told to Patience Agbabi”, “The Unaccompanied Minor’s Tale as told to Inua Ellams” or “The Deportee’s Tale as told to Avaes Mohammad”. The writers, interpreters and lawyers under whose names the stories are presented represent a community of sympathetic listeners and narrators acting as witnesses or testifiers and so mediating the readers’ responses, sometimes appropriating, quoting or summarising the migrant tale, sometimes conversing or speaking in their own voice. By contrast to African Titanics, where the act of memorialising those who have disappeared takes over the narrator’s initial intention to write a

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story to prove the superiority of his rhetorical powers, in Refugee Tales the ethics of representation, of the western subject’s speaking for the “other”, might be seen as problematic because not necessarily faithful to their own experience. Spivak’s question about who should speak is relevant to the ethical issue of a committed writer imposing their voice over that a migrant whose story is being told at the risk of seemingly denying such subjects agency. Ali Smith’s manipulation of narrative conventions in order to foreground her own feelings in visiting a detainee in “The Detainee’s Story” by identifying with his situation and so overriding his voice was criticised by one reviewer, for it suggests that “skilful writing in the service of good intentions can still, without meaning to, contribute to the voicelessness of the voiceless”.26 Yet this issue is anticipated in the collaborative efforts of life writing, according to the editors, for when consulted about the problems of telling stories of personal trauma, often in an unfamiliar language, the migrants confirmed a wish for anonymity out of fear of official reprisal and so implied that their story could be shared with a teller: “it was a relief that the tale was being told though […] they could not be the person who told it […] they were relieved that the account was being passed on”.27 Their collective voice—that they would prefer the stories to be told in this way in order to gain visibility although not being individualised—underpins their willingness to collaborate in co-producing their narratives. Such ethical issues of representation can be seen in relation to the strategic construction of refugee texts, memoirs and anthologies in ways that elevate them above the limits of such writing due to language, social and educational factors. The welfare project underpinning Refugee Tales I, II and III challenges the human rights injustices perpetrated by the UK system of indefinite detention, as the acknowledgement of refugee support groups and citizens activists confirms:28 The Gatwick Detainees Welfare Group, Kent Refugee Help and a host of volunteers, speakers, patrons, walkers and other participants, representing many local and national community circles. The political aims are also realised in the central structural principle of the anthologies: an intertextual relationship to Geoffrey Chaucer’s fourteenth-century The Canterbury Tales, the nation’s earliest and most famous tale-telling collection. This appears in the conceptual dimension, the structure of the text and numerous verbal echoes and parallels. The collective enterprise of tale-telling on which Refugee Tales I is based took place in 2015 as a walking project (of tellers and narrators) across the wealds of Kent, retracing the route taken by Chaucer’s Canterbury Pilgrims along the North Downs Way to Canterbury. Not

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only does this walking trip locate the refugees and asylum seekers in “a deeply national space” from which such illegal migrants are usually excluded,29 it also aligns their words and experiences with the most seminal tale-telling collection in the literary canon: Chaucer’s text confers dignity by association. Furthermore, identifying the speakers responsible for each tale according to their role or vocation (e.g. “The Visitor’s Tale”, “The Chaplain’s Tale” and “The Lorry Driver’s Tale”) draws on the model used in Chaucer’s literary text (e.g. “The Man of Law’s Tale”, “The Parson’s Tale” and “The Shipman’s Tale”). The intertextual relationship with this famous precursor is most overt in editor David Herd’s “Prologue”, which partly rewrites Chaucer’s “General Prologue” and his seminal invocation to spring that stresses how nature quickens the spirit and inspires people to go on pilgrimages.30 Herd invokes the political energies that aim to reject official stories of asylum seekers (the version they have to tell in order to make a case for asylum) in favour of personal stories that have been rendered invisible and unknown: “So priketh hem nature / Not believing the stories/ Our officials tell./ Because we know too much /About what is left unsaid”.31 Collectively the welfare group of asylum seekers, detainees and refugees and the artistic community are motivated by a shared awareness of human life as grievable, and the collaboration between individual tellers and the asylum seeker and their tale is metonymic of the aims of the real-life walking project, to establish what Butler calls the “interdependency of persons, involving reproducible and sustaining social relations, and relations to the environment”.32 The telling of stories provides a dynamic of co-­ responsibility as the detainees’ and asylum seekers’ situation is addressed in the appeal for a change in policy. The editors’ polemic reflects this pro-­ active stance in engaging with refugees and detainees to protest against the practice of indefinite detention, while the intertextual engagement with Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales by including audiences with tellers elevates the text above the status of the familiar refugee narrative format. Furthermore, the dialogue/commentary format enables the refugee/asylum seekers to speak with their empathetic collaborator about the personal cost of their survival, and the retellings stress the different losses: of family left in the homeland and of those who did not survive the journey, while the cost to mental health and well being—the trauma and suffering on the journey and in the present circumstances—is conveyed both verbally and through body language.

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Beyond Pity: Behrouz Boochani, No Friend but the Mountains: Writing from Manus Prison No Friend but the Mountains: Writing from Manus Prison, a refugee memoir by Kurdish-Iranian writer Behrouz Boochani, is a powerful political critique of the Australian mandatory policy on asylum seekers that introduced offshore Regional Processing Centres for entry visas in 2001, and from 2013 decreed that those who attempted illegal entry would not be granted access to Australia but instead would be encouraged to seek deportation to their homelands. This repatriation process called refoulement is expressly forbidden in the UNHCR Refugee Convention (1951, 1967), but by undertaking refugee processing in territories beyond its national borders like Manus (situated in Papua New Guinea) and Nauru islands, that have either not signed up to the Convention or with limited sovereignty are able to ignore it, Australia has managed to meet its non-­ refoulement obligations.33 A resurgence of xenophobia and fear of illegal migrants and refugees, undoubtedly associated with the White Australia policy that prevailed until 1972, has meant that successive governments— at both ends of the political spectrum—found implementing harsh detention and deterrence policies a successful election ploy. But the hard-line policies of the Pacific Solution (2001–2008) and Operation Sovereign Borders (2013–) have been hotly contested by community activist Refugee Action organisations and Human Rights groups; leaks from whistleblowers among official personnel and reports by journalists who penetrated the secrecy of the camps contributed to the closure of the Immigration Detention Centres (IDC)34—Nauru after reports of physical and sexual abuse in 2007 and again in 2018, and Manus in October 2017, after the Papua New Guinean Supreme Court ruled that the camp was unlawful.35 A well-known writer-journalist-filmmaker who fled persecution in Iran, Behrouz Boochani was detained upon arrival on Christmas Island and sent to Manus IDC in late 2013, just after it was decreed that no refugee could enter Australia or be granted Australian citizenship; after the camp’s closure he remained in Port Moresby with other occupants who were subsequently evicted to New Zealand, USA, Cambodia, Nauru or detention centres in Australia. No Friend but the Mountains is his autobiographical memoir about life in the Manus IDC he calls “the prison”; published in 2018 it immediately gained a following, has gone into at least four reprints and is currently being adapted for a film. In February 2019, it won the prestigious Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards, the Victoria Prize for

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Literature and simultaneously the Victoria Prize for Non-Fiction; the book’s celebrity status has meant that Boochani, already known for his Guardian articles written while on Manus, has become a popular speaker at cultural venues and refugee circles, speaking from Manus by WhatsApp or Skype.36 An invitation to attend a literary festival in Christchurch in November 2019 became his passport out: he overstayed his tourist visa and was granted refugee status in New Zealand in July 2020 (Moses 2020).37 No Friend but the Mountains both mirrors in expressive performative images and indicts in evocative prose the inhumane practices perpetrated in the IDC on Manus Island, by which the refugee community, under constant surveillance of the Australian and Papua New Guinean guards, was reduced to borderline survival—many becoming psychological spectres. Boochani’s story of his death-defying ocean voyage from Indonesia to Christmas Island resembles other refugee accounts, but his politically angled representations of the malpractices and systematic degradation in the camp through what he labels the “Kyriarchal System” have evoked comparison with the canonical prison narratives of Oscar Wilde, Antonio Gramsci and Martin Luther King.38 Kyriarchy, a term adapted from feminist theory, refers to “a web of intersecting oppressions—racism, sexism colonialism”39 which on Manus defines a subjugating, punishing regime that uses “systematic torture”40 and aims to set the men against each other. The political aims and resistant ideology of the memoir are explicated in the introduction by Boochani’s Iranian translator, Omid Tofighian (attached to the Department of Philosophy at the University of Sydney), who, noting the historical links between forced migration and colonialism, identifies it as a “decolonial text” that aims to deconstruct the neocolonial practices of Australia’s zero tolerance immigration policy.41 Boochani also draws on Foucault’s critiques of the prison for what he and Tofighian call “Manus Prison Theory”,42 such as the “heterotopia of deviance”, one in which the absolute finite space of internment dissolves into multiple, disparate spaces, juxtaposed so as to fragment the experience of incarceration,43 and his surreal descriptions and states of mind point to Foucault’s “monstrous heterotopia”: that is, disordered spaces that “bring paradoxical arrangements into being in ways that seem unreal”.44 No Friend but the Mountains is also a text of mental resilience and survival, as Boochani punctuates his account of prison horrors such as self-­ harming, violent beatings and group hysteria, with subjective explorations of alternative spaces that offer refuge, as in imaginatively distancing

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himself and returning in memory to his childhood in the mountains of Iran and recalling folk tales and stories from his Iranian Persian heritage. Like in African Titanics, passages of exclamatory, rhythmic poetry punctuate the prose made visible by italics. In Boochani’s reconstruction of the prison logic of the Kyriarchal System denunciation and declamation blend with dreams of escape. Metaphorically the camp is a war zone: “The prison is in the middle of a clenched fist/ Now loosening now tightening/ on the verge of exploding”,45 but always at a distance, he realises that anger and rebellion inevitably fail and the men create “A smaller emotional jail within themselves out of hopelessness and disempowerment”.46 Boochani uses an anonymising naming strategy that resembles that of Refugee Tales: different personalities assume new roles in response to detention and are given appropriate monikers—for example, the Fat Man, the Prime Minister (the honourable man who asked to be repatriated), Maysam the Whore (entertainer), the Hero/Leader, the Prophet, the Cow (always first in the food queue). As the notes explain, only those who did not survive are named, as a mark of respect and to memorialise them (the Gentle Giant is Reza Barati, killed in the four-day riot of February 2014; the Smiling Youth is Hamid Khazaei, who also died). Realistic representation is otherwise avoided in order to protect the refugees from public exposure: the disguise that renaming offers to agentless, fragmented detainees is a tactical survival technique. Boochani’s strategy of resilience in dealing with the disorientation and distress he experiences through recurring nightmares of drowning, or as surreal or absurd states and impressions, is to distance himself and gain access to his creative powers. He seeks isolation and at night finds unoccupied spaces (on the roof of the solitary confinement hut or vaulting the fence to the beach); he revels in proximity to nature—the sights of flowers, insects and trees—and the sounds that fill the darkness, “the chanting of crickets, the whirling of moths and the voice of the cat”, and the fragrance of “flowers resembling chamomile” away from “the smell of other people”. From such moments comes a “Sense of calm and the grand feeling of a new self” due to an interaction, “internal and profound in my unconsciousness and the totality of the landscape”.47 These synergies are presented in an expressive mode that draws on the linguistic and stylistic heritage of Iranian Kurdish imagery and oral culture of folktales, as like many diaspora writers, he consciously “others” himself in order to reconstruct a more integrated identity. Becoming a stranger to the closely monitored, hysterical and explosive community, he images himself organically

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in ways analogous to the chestnut trees he remembers from the village of his war-torn childhood and his dream of freedom: “like a coconut tree with roots deep in the ground and my hair taken by the wind”.48 As a narrative of resilience and survival, as well as political critique, No Friend but the Mountains reaches beyond empathy and pity usually invoked in refugee stories, to demand a critical response to Australia’s harsh detention policies. Numerous paratexts implement its political aim to image and denounce the Pacific Solution and the Manus management system, while also testifying to the story’s extraordinary transmission from social media messages into the medium of print: a Preface by Australian Booker prize-­ winning novelist Richard Flanagan, a lengthy introduction comprising the voices of Boochani’s Australian supporters that includes a discussion of the book’s politics by Tofighian in “Translator’s Tale: A Window to the Mountains”, substantial explanatory footnotes and an Afterword, “Translator’s Reflections”. The story was smuggled out in fragments on Boochani’s cell phone through text-messaging;49 the original Farsi was translated into English by a team including the Iranian-Australian translator, Moones Mansoubi, and Tofighian, and the text was organised and revised through conversations on WhatsApp. The introduction acknowledges all others who contributed to the editing and publication process and their role in preparing the text in ways that would guide readers: Janet Galbraith, and her Refugee Writing Group, other writers and artists, Iranian friends, Picador publishers and PEN international. As a first-hand insider account of the dehumanisation that occurs in detention camps, No Friend but the Mountains complements and amplifies the media reports that over the years testified to the dire psychological and physical consequences of the maltreatment of illegal, stateless subjects, such as evidence of children self-harming and killing themselves, a potent source of public anger and outrage. The first readers of Boochani’s tale of incarceration—that is, the human rights and refugee support groups, translators and activists—collaborated with him on its political message and challenge to the Australian immigration system of deterrence and detention. The violation of life that occurred in the Pacific hell holes of Manus and Nauru is pointed to; at least 13 men died in detention on Manus and Nauru islands and Flanagan in his Preface demands: “Someone must answer for these crimes”.50 As with Refugee Tales I, II and III, and the story-telling walking tours across Kent, these enactments of solidarity reflect the aims of this supportive community, in this case to determine Boochani’s text’s cultural importance to Australia. In a gesture of

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inclusiveness, Flanagan acclaims Boochani’s place in the national narrative as a “great Australian writer” and demands that “our history must henceforth account for his story”.51 The text’s hybridised literary and historic genealogy is stressed: Boochani constructs his “zoo of cruelty”52 by blending western literary traditions and the legacies of Kurdish and Iranian cultures; modernist influences like Kafka’s The Trial, Camus’s The Stranger and Beckett’s prose works are seen in his defamiliarising stylistic tropes of the Gothic, grotesque and the surreal: citing these allusions in the introduction helps elevate the narrative above the level of a refugee story as it exposes a hidden episode in Australia’s shameful history of immigration.

Conclusion: The Impact of Non-citizen Refugee Narratives The acts of solidarity by characters in the text of African Titanics and the collaborative efforts of western sympathisers and activists in their advocacy against the practices of indefinite detention and deterrence in the other two texts are determining features of non-citizen refugee writing. In both Refugee Tales and No Friend but the Mountains the oppositional positioning of editors, translators, writers and refugee support groups can be inferred from paratexts which provide a rationale for the text and shape responses to it as a political document, as well as invoking empathic identification with the refugee or asylum seeker. In promoting these aims, the co-producers of the texts turn to the intersectional approach offered by writing in order to challenge the exclusionary norms of citizenship that are articulated along a single axis.53 These new forms of literary citizenship advocacy can be aligned to other recent types, such as the transgressive citizenship activism identified by Kim Rygiel, in which non-citizen migrants and citizens working with them engage in confrontations with official authorities at national and territorial borders;54 they may help in hardening opposition to refugee detention, and creating a demand for reconsideration of official policies. Such acts are informed by the belief that a change in the law is needed, requiring renegotiation of the division between the state and the “others” at its borders which policies of indefinite detention have sharpened. The reception of these texts confirms their wider impact on public opinion. Some reviews of Refugee Tales raised the issue of indefinite detention.55 In October 2019 the UK Parliament agreed to the

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recommendation of the Joint Committee on Human Rights (JCHR) that detention only be used “as a last resort” and that “the maximum cumulative period for detention should be 28 days”.56 These decisions may be read in relation to the demands made in Refugee Tales and reiterated in subsequent articles and reviews. The national importance of No Friend but the Mountains was remarked on by reviewers. Robert Manne notably recommended that “every Australian beginning with the Prime Minister should read Behrouz Boochani’s intense, lyrical, and psychologically perceptive prose-poetry masterpiece”,57 and Boochani’s double prize confirmed Flanagan’s claim that the book represented a “profound victory” in that words can overcome the system.58 Upon winning another prize, the National Biography Award in August 2019, Boochani acknowledged supporters like Flanagan, saying: “the literature community as a part of civil society of Australia are part of our resistance in front of this system”.59 Judith Butler’s observation in Frames of War, therefore, that although literature never got anyone out of prison or reversed the course of a war it can “provide the conditions for breaking out of the quotidian acceptance of war and for a more generalized horror and outrage that will support and impel calls for justice and an end to violence”,60 is relevant to the ways in which literary success and strategic cultural production help mobilise public resistance to injustice, and inhumane treatment, and help create a consensus that policies leading to such practices be revised or revoked.61 This determination to revalue human life by turning to the powers of song and the written word emerges in Abu Bakr Khaal’s African Titanics in the narrator’s “conversion” to testimonial writing, after witnessing precarity of life and death during the travellers’ flight, and it appears as well in the solidarity and solicitude among the refugees as they become increasingly enfeebled. It is explicit in the voices of Boochani’s supporters in his account, which confirm that refugee writing can be multi-generic, in that tales of individual resilience and survival can be framed with a political and reforming purpose. Likewise, in Refugee Tales, the intertexts of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales as well as tale-teller relationships that represent dialogues between narrators and refugees complicate any assumption that refugee writing is just a form of self-writing, memoir or autobiography. These strategies encourage readers who might otherwise feel reduced to the marginality of the narrative’s subjects to distance themselves from the traumatic dimension of the narrative and move beyond empathy to question official systems of deterrence and detention. Although personal trauma and suffering in many stories of Refugee Tales are manifest, and the

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core account of No Friend but the Mountains can be read as “horrific realism”,62 with affinities to the nightmare realism of other contemporary stories about migration and refugees such as those of the Iraqi writer Hassan Blasim,63 the affective reaction they incur can also encourage some appraisal of these real-life circumstances in terms of political resistance. Depictions of acts of affective solidarity and caring in all three encourage a rebalancing of the affective with the activist’s determination for social change. All of them, and especially Boochani’s No Friend but the Mountains, are more than expanded versions of the testimonial genre of autobiographical writing associated with the refugee narrative: recognition of the literary scale and merit of these stories of resistance and survival argues for their emphatic political impact in the public sphere as they open up new horizons of expectation for readers.

Notes 1. See Nail (2015) and Maley (2016). 2. The UNHCR reports that by June 2019 there were 79.5 million forcibly displaced people including 26  million refugees (half of whom are under 18) and 4.2 million stateless people; see UNHCR, “Figures at a Glance”; http://www.unhcr.org/en-­us/figures-­at-­a-­glance.html. Accessed 6 March 2021. 3. The term “crisis” refers to the threat refugees pose to border security; it is used to stop them from reaching sovereign territory and so justify their detention; see Fleay (2019, 519–520, 531). 4. Woolley (2014, 13). 5. Woolley (2014, 209). 6. Lokuge (2021, 6). 7. Ní Mhurchú (2014, 170). 8. Mann (2017, 3). 9. Butler (2016, 24). 10. Butler (2016, 41). 11. Critics argue that Butler’s new humanism occludes other positions with “a veil of ignorance” or “white amnesia” (Danewid 2017, 1676, 1681); that she universalises the human subject, predicated as a “wounded and injured, but essentially innocent western subject” (Thobani 2010, 135) as interchangeable with the victimised subject who is mourned; and that her mandate for empathetic engagement and ethical responsibility marginalises the systemic nature of precarity and its roots in colonialism. In summary, Butler’s western orientation is critiqued for ignoring the postcolonial

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­ roject of responding to historical situations of oppression, inequity and p injustice as likely causes of today’s migrant exodus. 12. Butler (2016, 41). 13. Butler (2016, 49). 14. Pedwell (2014, x). 15. Khorana (2018, 305). 16. Bhabha (2015, 20). 17. Anon (n.d.), the anonymous, undated review in Nahla Ink Online Journal. 18. Khaal (2014, 3). 19. Korte and Zipp (2014, 3). 20. Khaal (2014, 122). 21. Khaal (2014, 122). 22. See also Butler (2016, 25). 23. See also the anthologies edited by Rosie Scott and Thomas Keneally (2013), Lucy Popescu (2016), Olumide Popoola and Annie Holmes (2016). 24. See Nandi (2013/14, 153–154) and Spivak (1988). 25. See, for example, the Australian memoirs by Do (2010) and Deng (2016); the latter was co-written with Ben McKelvey and proceeds go to the John Mac Foundation “to further education and justice in Australia and South Sudan”. 26. Braun (2016). 27. Herd and Pincus (2016, 142). 28. Herd and Pincus (2016, 150). 29. Herd and Pincus (2016, 138). 30. The Middle English reads: “And smale foweles maken melodye,/ That slepen al the nyght with open ye /(So priketh hem Natúre in hir corages), /Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages” (Chaucer 1988, 23). 31. Herd and Pincus (2016, vi). 32. Butler (2016, 19). 33. Fitzgerald (2019, 231). 34. An Australian Border Force Act passed in July 2015 imposed a two-year imprisonment for release of unauthorised information about the IDCs; see Fleay (2019, 86). 35. Refugee Status Determination on Manus Island Regional Processing Centre was determined by Papua New Guinean Government in a Regional Resettlement Arrangement whereby Australia ceded management responsibility; see Wallis and Dalsgaard (2016, 3). Complaints by Australian guards and the Papua New Guinean workers that they could no longer tolerate working in the camp were also influential (Fitzgerald 2019, 238). 36. See Wahlquist (2019). The Victoria Premiere’s Literary Awards waived the criterion that applicants be Australian citizens.

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37. In 2021 Boochani is Ursula Bethell Writer in Residence at the University of Canterbury; https://www.canterbury.ac.nz/news/2020/uc-­writers-­ in-­residence-­2021-­vana-­manasiadis-­and-­behrouz-­boochani.html. 38. Boochani (2018, 124 (fn 6)). 39. Elliott (2019). 40. Boochani (2018, xxviii, 362). 41. Boochani (2018, xxv). 42. Boochani (2018, xv). 43. Foucault (1984, 3). 44. McWatters (2013, 204, emphasis in original). 45. Boochani (2018, 175). 46. The crisis came as a four-day riot in February 2014, in which one man was killed, after the Manus IDC refugees learnt that there was no hope of entry into Australia, when the Australian Immigration Minister warned: “either you go back to your countries or you will remain on Manus Island forever” Boochani (2018, 125, 313). 47. Boochani (2018, 294–295, 255, 257). 48. Boochani (2018, 263). Boochani was brought up during the Iran-Iraq war of 1980–88. His reflections on the Kurds’ long-term struggle against oppression focus on the chestnut oak forest that surrounds his village, a symbol of salvation and sacrifice. Kurdish civilians caught between the opposing forces of Iraqui Ba’athists (Arab nationalists), Iranian zealots and Peshmerga (Kurdish militia) found asylum in a chestnut grove; with the deaths of many “chestnuts became the solace for buried dreams”; Boochani (2018, 259). 49. Boochani (2018, xxxxiii). 50. Boochani (2018, ix). 51. Boochani (2018, ix). 52. Boochani (2018, vii). 53. Fleras (2017, 25). 54. An activism that engages with the “politics of death”; Rygiel (2014, 62). 55. Muir (2017) and Herd (2016). This period was recommended by a crossparty parliamentary enquiry in 2015. 56. Parliament. JCHR. Government Response to the Committee’s Sixteenth Report of Session 2017–19 (2019, 10, 14). 57. Manne (2018). 58. Boochani (2018, ix). 59. “Anon Behrouz Boochani Wins National Biography Award” (19 August 2019). 60. Butler (2016, 9–11). 61. Ian Rintoul from the Refugee Action Coalition, Sydney, reported in early March 2021 that refugees held on Manus and Nauru are currently being

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released in an ad hoc manner from Detention Centres and hotels into Australian society, indicating a tacit recognition that detention is no longer tenable. See http://www.refugeeaction.org.au/?p=15834; http:// www.refugeeaction.org.au/?p=15848; http://www.refugeeaction.org. au/?p=15850. 62. Boochani (2018, xxix). 63. See Sakr (2018).

References Anon. n.d. African Titanics. Book Review. Nahla Ink Online Journal. Accessed March 31, 2019. https://nahlaink.com/african-­titanics-­abu-­bakr-­khaal/. ———. 2019. Behrouz Boochani Wins National Biography Award. August 19. Accessed March 2021. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/ aug/12/behrouz-­b oochani-­w ins-­2 5000-­n ational-­b iography-­a ward-­a nd-­ accepts-­via-­whatsapp-­from-­manus. Bhabha, Homi K. 2015. Diaspora and Home: An Interview with Homi. K. Bhabha [with Klaus Stierstorfer]. In Diasporic Constructions of Home and Belonging, ed. Klaus Stierstorfer and Florian Kläger, 11–20. Berlin: De Gruyter. https:// blog.degruyter.com/diaspora-­and-­home-­interview-­homi-­k-­bhabha/. Boochani, Behrouz. 2018. No Friend but the Mountains: Writing from Manus Prison. Translated by Omid Tofighian. Sydney: Picador. Braun, William. 2016. Review: ‘Refugee Tales’ ed. by David Herd and Anna Pincus. Structo, November 7. structomagazine.co.uk/ review-­refugee-­tales-­ed-­by-­david-­herd-­anna-­pincus. Butler, Judith. 2016 [2009]. Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? London: Verso. Chaucer, Geoffrey. 1988. The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry O. Benson. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Danewid, Ida. 2017. White Innocence in the Black Mediterranean: Hospitality and the Erasure of History. Third World Quarterly 38 (7): 1674–1689. Deng, Thiak Adut. 2016. Songs of a War Boy: My Story. Sydney: Hachette Australia. Do, Anh. 2010. The Happiest Refugee: A Memoir. Sydney: Allen & Unwin. Elliott, Tim. 2019. A Long Distance Lunch with Detained Refugee Writer Behrouz Boochani. Sydney Morning Herald, May 2. https://www.smh.com. au/national/a-­long-­distance-­lunch-­with-­detained-­r efugee-­writer-­behrouz-­ boochani-­20190501-­p51ixj.html. FitzGerald, David Scott. 2019. Refuge Beyond Reach: How Rich Democracies Repel Asylum Seekers. New York: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/ oso/9780190874155.001.0001. Fleay, Caroline. 2019. Australia and People Seeking Asylum Who Arrive by Boat. In The Oxford Handbook of Migration Crises, ed. Cecilia Menjivas, Marie Ruiz, and Emmanuel Ness, 515–535. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Fleras, Augie. 2017. Rethinking Citizenship through Transnational Lenses: Canada, New Zealand and Australia. In Citizenship in Transnational Perspective: Australia, Canada and New Zealand, ed. Jatinder Mann, 15–47. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Foucault, Michel. 1984. Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias. Architecture/ Mouvement/Continuité (“Des Espace Autres,” March 1967). Translated by Jay Miskowiec, 1–9. October. https://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/foucault1.pdf. Herd, David. 2016. Outside the Skin of Language. Times Literary Supplement, June 24. Accessed March 6, 2021. https://www.the-­tls.co.uk/articles/ outside-­the-­skin-­of-­language/. Herd, David, and Anna Pincus, eds. 2016, 2017, 2019. Refugee Tales. Vol. I– III. London: Comma. Khaal, Abu Bakr. 2014 [2008]. African Titanics. Translated by Charis Bredin. London: Darf. Khorana, Sukhmani. 2018. Balancing the Quotidian and the Political: Beyond Empathy in Australian Multi-platform Refugee Narratives. In The Social Work of Narrative: Human Rights and the Cultural Imaginary, ed. Gareth Griffiths and Philip Mead, 301–317. Stuttgart: Ibidem. Korte, Barbara, and Georg Zipp. 2014. Poverty in Contemporary Literature: Themes and Figurations on the British Book Market. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Lokuge, Chandani. 2021. Resistance and Activism: The Literature of the Non-­ Citizen. In Citizenship, Law and Literature, ed. Caroline Koegler, Jesper Reddig, and Klaus Stierstorfer, 15–28. Berlin: de Gruyter. Maley, William. 2016. What is a Refugee? Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mann, Jatinder. 2017. Introduction. In Citizenship in Transnational Perspective: Australia, Canada and New Zealand, ed. Jatinder Mann, 1–11. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Manne, Robert. 2018. No Friend but the Mountains Review: Behrouz Boochani’s Poetic and Vital Memoir. Sydney Morning Herald, August 10. Accessed March 6, 2021. https://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/books/no-­friend-­but-­the-­ mountains-­review-­behrouz-­boochanis-­poetic-­and-­vital memoir-­20180801-­ h13fuu.html. McWatters, Mason. 2013. Poetic Testimonies of Incarceration: Towards a Vision of Prison as Manifold Space. In Carceral Spaces: Mobility and Agency in Imprisonment and Migration Detention, ed. Dominique Moran, Deirdre Conon, and Nick Gill, 199–218. London: Routledge. Moses, Jeremy. 2020. The Conversation, August 4. http://theconversation.com/ claims-­t hat-­b enrouz-­b oochani-­j umped-­t he-­q ueue-­a re-­a -­r eminder-­o f-­t he-­ dangers-­of-­anti-­refugee-­politics-­143743. Muir, Hugh. 2017. The Indefinite Detention of Refugees is Dehumanising. The Guardian, July 19. Accessed March 6, 2021.

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h t t p s : / / w w w. t h e g u a r d i a n . c o m / c o m m e n t i s f r e e / 2 0 1 7 / j u l / 1 9 / indefinite-­detention-­detention-­refugees-­journeys-­refugee-­tales. Nail, Thomas. 2015. The Figure of the Migrant. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Nandi, Miriam. 2013/14. Beyond Authenticity of Voice: A Response to Barbara Korte. Connotations 23 (1): 153–171. Ní Mhurchú, Aoileann. 2014. Citizenship Beyond State Sovereignty. In Routledge Handbook of Global Citizenship Studies, ed. Engin Isin and Peter Nyers, 119–127. Abingdon: Routledge. Parliament UK. 2019. Joint Committee on Human Rights. Government Response to the Committee’s Sixteenth Report of Session 2017–19: Second Special Report of Session 2019–20. October 25. https://publications.parliament.uk/ pa/jt201919/jtselect/jtrights/216/216.pdf. Pedwell, Carolyn. 2014. Affective Relations: The Transnational Politics of Empathy. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Popescu, Lucy, ed. 2016. A Country of Refuge: An Anthology of Writing on Asylum Seekers. London: Unbound. Popoola, Olumide, and Annie Holmes, eds. 2016. Breach. London: Peirene Press. Rygiel, Kim. 2014. In Life through Death: Transgressive Citizenship at the Border. In Routledge Handbook of Global Citizenship Studies, ed. Engin F. Isin and Peter Nyers, 63–72. Abingdon: Routledge. Sakr, Rita. 2018. The More-Than-Human Refugee Journey: Hassan Blasim’s Short Stories. Special issue “Refugee Writing”, ed. Claire Gallien. Journal of Postcolonial Writing 54 (6): 766–781. Scott, Rosie, and Thomas Keneally, eds. 2013. A Country Too Far: Writings on Asylum Seekers. Sydney: Viking. Spivak, Gayatri. 1988. Can the Subaltern Speak? In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Larry Grossberg, 24–28. London: Macmillan. Thobani, Sunera. 2010. White Innocence, Western Supremacy: The Role of Western Feminism in the ‘War on Terror’. In States of Race: Critical Race Feminism for the 21st Century, ed. Sherene Razack, Malinda Smith, and Sunera Thobani, 127–146. Toronto: Between the Lines. UNHCR. Figures at a Glance. Accessed March 6, 2021. http://www.unhcr.org/ en-­us/figures-­at-­a-­glance.html. Wahlquist, Calla. 2019. Behrouz Boochani: Detained Asylum Seeker Wins Australia’s Richest Literary Prize. The Guardian, January 31. Accessed September 10, 2020. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jan/31/ behrouz-­b oochani-­a sylum-­s eeker-­m anus-­i sland-­d etained-­w ins-­v ictorian-­ literary-­prize-­australias-­richest. Wallis, Joanne, and Steffen Dalsgaard. 2016. Money, Manipulation and Misunderstanding on Manus Island. The Journal of Pacific History 51 (3): 301–329. Woolley, Agnes. 2014. Contemporary Asylum Narratives: Representing Refugees in the Twenty-First Century. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

CHAPTER 5

Surviving Trauma in the Female Neo-slave Narrative: Sara Collins’s Neo-gothic The Confessions of Frannie Langton Susanne Gruss

Neo-slave narratives have been a visible element of black British writing since the 1990s, with novels like Caryl Phillips’s Cambridge (1991) and Crossing the River (1993), Fred D’Aguiar’s The Longest Memory (1994) and Feeding the Ghosts (1997) and David Dabydeen’s A Harlot’s Progress (1999) adding a distinctively British element to the largely US-American neo-slave narrative.1 In the early 2000s, writers such as Jackie Kay (The Lamplighter, 2007, republished in 2020), Bernardine Evaristo (Blonde Roots, 2008) and Andrea Levy (The Long Song, 2010) have added female voices to the mostly male perspectives of the first wave of black British neo-slave narratives. The majority of these texts is inspired by the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century slave narratives written in the service of abolitionism and of giving a voice to the lived experience of abduction and enslavement; Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano (1789) and Mary Prince’s The History of Mary S. Gruss (*) Chair of English Literature and Culture, University of Passau, Passau, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 R. Freiburg, G. Bayer (eds.), The Ethics of Survival in Contemporary Literature and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83422-7_5

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Prince (1831) are two prominent examples. Neo-slave narratives also take issue with the fact that the British history of enslavement and colonisation and the ensuing histories of trauma have neither been acknowledged fully nor worked through adequately.2 This charge has gained renewed public visibility not only with the Windrush scandal (2018–) or the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 but also with best-selling accounts of race, racism and blackness in the United Kingdom such as historian David Olusoga’s Black and British: A Forgotten History (2016),3 journalist, writer and former barrister Afua Hirsch’s Brit(ish): On Race, Identity and Belonging (2017) and journalist Reni Eddo-Lodge’s Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race (2017). The political activism of these writers is complemented by recent historical accounts that expose the British profits from enslavement long after the abolition of the slave trade and of slavery (the Slave Trade Act was passed in 1807 and the Slavery Abolition Act in 1833) and explore the presence of Africans in Europe.4 Sara Collins’s The Confessions of Frannie Langton (2019a), the main focus of this chapter, thus joins an already established canon of black British neo-slave narratives and was published at a time when interest in Britain’s colonial past and its traumatic legacies had regained visibility and urgency. Her novel delineates, as I will demonstrate, both the (im)possibility of surviving the trauma of enslavement and the potential of the re-­ visionary narrative. As a text with a multi-faceted heroine—former slave Frances ‘Frannie’ Langton is black, female and queer—Frannie Langton also complicates existing narratives of female identity and negotiations of trauma through its decidedly intersectional approach. Collins’s novel joins postcolonial rewritings of black female experience such as Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) or the female neo-slave narrative most prominently canonised in Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987); it complements (white) feminist historiographic metafictions like Angela Carter’s “The Fall River Axe Murders” (in Black Venus, 1981) or Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace (1996), both of which reconfigure cultural depictions of the female murderer;5 and it adds an intersectional perspective to the recently popular queer neo-Victorian novels (Sarah Waters’s ‘trio’ Tipping the Velvet, 1998; Affinity, 1999; and Fingersmith, 2002, are usually named as the most prominent examples). At the same time, Collins positions her main protagonist and focaliser, the eponymous Frannie Langton, as an unreliable narrator who is keenly aware of the literary traditions she partakes of and thus subverts the political (if not the emotional) impact of the (neo-)slave narrative in particular: “No doubt you think this will be one of

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those slave histories, all sugared over with misery and despair”,6 Frannie confronts readers at the beginning of her story, marking the slave narrative as a politically ambivalent genre that puts experiences of enslavement and trauma to work for the political aims of (white, Eurocentric) abolitionism. The survival of the traumatic experiences of enslavement consequently serves as a mere prerequisite to stories told in the service of another white enterprise, an ethical conundrum Collins’s novel criticises and undermines, as I will argue in this chapter. At the same time, the urge to narrate and to add her (black, female, queer) voice to the literary canon is one of the main motivations for the narrator (“I’ve always wanted to tell my story, even though one person’s story is only a raindrop in the ocean.”7)— and perhaps her only chance of surviving the traumatic experiences that have shaped her.

The Black British Neo-slave Narrative and Postcolonial Trauma Collins positions her novel in an already existing canon of black British neo-slave narratives negotiating postcolonial trauma and the possibility of surviving trauma or life with traumatisation. Many of the examples mentioned above are polyphonic novels strongly influenced by postmodernism’s refutation of grand narratives. They use their focus on the intersections of race, gender and (national) identity to complement or recalibrate authentic slave narratives by facing the “challenges of representing trauma and traumatic memories”.8 The slave narrative as such is an ideologically instable genre: Equiano used his partly fictional memoir to forge a name (and a living) for himself as an English gentleman by stressing his conversion to Christianity, for example;9 and the involvement of white abolitionist editor Thomas Pringle, who prefaced and supplemented Mary Prince’s History (a text not authored but dictated by the illiterate Prince), complicates the text’s ideological position.10 So if Elisabeth Bekers acknowledges the role of “editors and amanuenses active in the abolitionist movement” but goes on to argue that in “a context in which writing one’s life history is a white androcentric privilege, the life writing of slaves is nothing short of an act of resistance”,11 this is only half the story, as it does not address the ideological entanglement of black authors like Equiano or Prince with the system their texts criticise.12 The potential of neo-slave narratives and their imaginative re-visioning of lives in captivity lies exactly in addressing

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the complex ideological entanglements of colonialism, captivity and narration in the context of abolitionism, and of filling gaps such as that of the voice (and body) of the female slave.13 As Joan Anim-Addo and Maria Helena Lima succinctly put it, the “neo-slave narrative genre is particularly relevant to Black British writing since most received historical accounts have downplayed, or completely ignored, Britain’s role as a slaving nation”.14 Critical accounts of the traumatic repercussions of the experiences of enslaved people and the narrativisation of their stories of survival are complicated by comparatively recent developments in trauma studies. The intervention of postcolonial critics such as Stef Craps or Michael Rothberg, who have argued that existing models of trauma (literature) are predominantly white and Eurocentric (and more often than not based on the Holocaust as a model), highlights the need to reframe these models if they are also meant to account for the experience of postcolonial trauma.15 A “narrowly Western canon of trauma literature”—including the foundational work by Cathy Caruth, Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub— “privileges the suffering of white Europeans, and neglects the specificity of non-Western and minority cultural traumas”.16 In Postcolonial Witnessing, Craps urges academics to view racism as a particular form of trauma that is “rooted in the global systems of slavery and colonialism” and therefore does not fit existing models of trauma. He demands that critics “make visible the creative and political” aspects of trauma narrative rather than pathologising those traumatised by the conditions of living in a (post) colonial world,17 focusing, in Beker’s rephrasing of his argument, on “resilience and growth” in postcolonial trauma narratives rather than on the “traumatic wounding” as such.18 The Confessions of Frannie Langton is told in retrospect via alternating plot strands that non-chronologically reveal both Frannie’s childhood and young adulthood on the Jamaican plantation ‘Paradise’ and the events leading up to her presumed double murder of natural scientist George Benham and his French wife Marguerite (‘Meg’, ‘Madame’), who employ her as a housemaid in London. As the prime suspect, Frannie is awaiting her trial at the Old Bailey, where she writes down her ‘confessions’ for her lawyer John Pettigrew. Frannie’s fragmented memoir is supplemented by various interspersed narratives: the testimonies of the Benhams’s servants, newspaper coverage, excerpts from Benham’s journals and the accounts of expert witnesses at the trial. Almost all these accounts serve to underline systemic racism and misogyny in late Georgian Britain. Growing up as a

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house slave in the colonial mansion of Langton, Frannie is taught to read and write by Langton’s estranged wife Miss-bella. Langton, who is Frannie’s biological father (her mother Phibbah is an enslaved African presumably raped by him), not only sexually abuses his daughter but also trains her to assist him in his racist experiments on the assumed correlation between skin tone and (the lack of) intelligence. When Miss-bella’s brother evicts Langton from the plantation after a fire (started by Frannie in an act of defiance) has destroyed the sugar crop, he takes his unfinished manuscript Crania—an account of his phrenological experiments—and his daughter to London. Langton gifts Frannie to Benham in the hope of gaining his support in the scientific community and dies from a stroke later in the novel. Frannie, whose position as an unpaid maid remains one of captivity, becomes Marguerite Benham’s secretary, her co-addict (Meg ingests increasing amounts of laudanum) and, eventually, her lover. Thrown out after spying on Meg for her husband, Frannie prostitutes herself at the spanking parlour ‘School-house’, where she capitalises on the value of her skin tone as a fetish for the London upper class (“Everybody wanted Ebony Fran. The African Savage.”19). She returns to the Benhams when Marguerite—pregnant with a mixed-race child, the result of a fleeting affair with abolitionist activist Olaudah Cambridge—asks for her. Benham intends to use Frannie to cover up a pregnancy that would destroy his own social reputation and pressures her to claim the child as her own.20 When Meg loses the child and kills herself, the suicide is covered up by Benham’s family and falsely interpreted as a murder during the investigations leading up to the trial. Benham tries to cut Frannie loose; when her attempt to blackmail him leads to an altercation, she kills Benham, takes a substantial dose of laudanum (explaining her later memory lapses) and falls asleep next to Meg, who is dying from an overdose of the drug. While a medical expert eventually uncovers the suicide, Frannie is found guilty of the murder of Benham and hanged by the end of the novel.

“A patchwork monster”: Intertextuality and Unreliability The Confessions of Frannie Langton is, as I have already indicated, self-­ consciously intertextual, a characteristic that is emphasised via Frannie’s biography as a voracious reader. Her knowledge of John Milton’s early modern epic Paradise Lost (1667) serves as an early narrative foil of the

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Jamaican plantation’s name ‘Paradise’21 but also implies a protagonist who is about to ‘fall’ (and who cunningly manipulates her readers’ expectations regarding her fall in literary and religious terms). Frannie learns to read and, one has to assume, to write, via Daniel Defoe’s novels: “Dee. Ee … Eff. This spells Defoe”,22 Miss-bella tells her, and Frannie later criticises Moll Flanders (1722) as “smug nonsense” written by a man about a woman.23 Many texts that are mentioned by title are gothic novels— Frannie reads Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto (1764), William Beckford’s Vathek, an Arabian Tale (1786) and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus (1818)—or philosophical texts connected to Enlightenment philosophy. Frannie names Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s autobiographical Confessions (1782) and Voltaire’s satirical Candide (1759) explicitly, but also knows the writings of the Marquis de Sade.24 As the examples of Milton and Defoe indicate, none of these texts is an innocent reference. Frannie’s career as a reader doubles up as a mould for her writing, and the novels she chooses to mention by name more often than not serve as ironic, self-conscious counterpoints to her own life. Several novels are quite literally ‘doubled’ in the novel in appearing more than once: a copy of Moll Flanders is given to Frannie in prison by the end of the novel; the text she criticised as ‘smug nonsense’ earlier has now become a source of solace—this ‘true’ account of a (white) criminal woman does, after all, have the happy ending Frannie already knows she will be denied. With Candide—Voltaire’s literary debate of Leibnizian optimism and the mantra of the ‘best of all worlds’—Frannie not only makes use of white, male, Western philosophy, she also demonstrates the connection of the pleasure of reading to punishment in her own tale. When Langton finds young Frannie with a copy of Candide she has secretly taken from his library, he makes her swallow pages of the book until she is sick, and she steals pages of the same text from Benham’s library and sews them into the hem of her dress, metaphorically anticipating, perhaps, the punishment she will receive for falling in love with Marguerite.25 Collins’s protagonist devours and regurgitates the literary canon; in doing so, she makes it her own, a starting point for her own re-­ visions of literature and, by extension, her own Confessions. Like Frannie’s preferred genre, the most important texts for her literary autobiography are gothic texts. When she characterises her relation to Langton, she ventriloquises Shelley by turning herself into Frankenstein’s creature (“I was Langton’s creature” and a “thing sewn from Langton’s parts”).26 Depicting herself as a monstrosity is one of several ‘confessions’

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of the title and foreshadows the core of Frannie’s trauma: her complicity with Langton in his inhumane experiments.27 The ‘thing sewn’ from various parts is, simultaneously, an apt description of Collins’s novel itself, which is composed of various fragments, conjoining the slave narrative, the gothic novel, the (queer) romance and the crime novel into a new whole representing the fragmented mind of its protagonist. Frannie’s story is one of survival in bits and pieces that need to be sewn together in order to make sense. The second gothic classic that reverberates throughout Frannie Langton but is not part of the protagonist’s reading biography because it postdates the setting of the novel is Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847). Collins has repeatedly positioned her novel as an appropriation of the Victorian classic. In a Penguin feature accompanying its publication, for example, she stresses that she “wanted to write a novel driven by emotion of the kind I’d encountered in novels like Jane Eyre”,28 and while it is indeed anger that connects Frannie and Jane, the novel makes Frannie both a version of Jane—the women share a deeply unhappy childhood as well as a fierce love for reading and education—and of the ‘madwoman in the attic’, Bertha Mason. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s famous second-wave analysis of female authorship in the Victorian period, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (1979), characterises Bertha as Jane’s ‘dark’ twin (a reading complicated by Bertha’s colonial origins in later analyses or in Rhys’s fictional prequel Wide Sargasso Sea), a personification of the anger Victorian society forces Jane to repress.29 Like Jane in the early parts of the novel—and particularly in the famous ‘red room’ chapter—Frannie’s anger and aggressions cannot be suppressed on the one hand, but also help her survive under traumatising circumstances on the other.30 Rage against the racist and misogynist frameworks which control her life is a constant companion throughout Frannie’s biography, from her childhood on the plantation to her occupation as an unpaid servant for the Benhams. When Langton visits the Benhams, for instance, Frannie attacks him for abandoning her, “all anger. Anger a drum-beat. Anger, steady as rain on glass. Anger, like a hot spurt of blood from a wound.”31 While Brontë’s Jane merely loses consciousness when anger and panic overcome her in the red room (“[…] I suppose I had a species of fit: unconsciousness closed the scene.”32), Frannie’s anger literally overwrites her conscious memories. The quotation above shows anger as an integral element of her life, the subconscious, constant ‘rhythm’ (a ‘drum-beat’, a ‘steady’ companion) which not only mirrors the violence she experiences and witnesses

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on the plantation but also anticipates her frantic murder of Benham, the ‘hot spurts of blood’ from the multiple stab wounds Frannie inflicts with a pair of scissors. During her short ‘career’ at the School-house she can even instrumentalise her anger, as her brutal spanking of a client (“That time when my head had gone dark and filled with blood.”33) becomes a ‘signature’ that attracts lucrative clients even while Frannie experiences it as a traumatic lapse. By the end of the novel, Frannie has accepted her anger—the “old darkness […] slipping into [her] head”34—as a part of her identity that defies her attempts to repress and ‘civilise’ it just like Frannie defies the attempts of white Western androcentrism to press her into a particular mould of black femininity, an aspect I will explore later. Her inability to repress her anger thus makes Frannie both Jane and Bertha Mason, and while the servants’ quarters were always located under the roof in London’s Georgian townhouses, it is certainly no coincidence that her chamber is in the attic of the Benham’s house, turning Frannie into a spectral Bertha Mason who haunts the rest of the house: “After Charles left me in the attic”, she notes close to the end of the novel, “I crept back down to her [Meg’s] room. […] It was so like a room in a novel, for hiding treasure, or lunatics. Yet it was the place where I’d had my own romance, my own measure of happiness, fleeting as it was.”35 In Collins’s novel, Jane and Bertha, intelligence and blind rage, the trauma hidden in the attic and the potential for romantic relief and survival, are always already combined in the figure of her protagonist Frannie.

“A wave of memory breaks”: Trauma and the Fragmentation of Memory While the madwoman haunting Brontë’s gothic romance signifies both Jane’s repressed anger and the British repression of their colonial crimes, Frannie is haunted by and tries to repress what she understands as her own guilt, a traumatising feeling of complicity with the colonial system of repression which mirrors Irene Visser’s point that postcolonial narrativisations of trauma need to address “the sensitive issue of complicity”.36 One of Frannie’s first traumatising experiences is the death of Phibbah (her biological mother, as she belatedly finds out), who is executed for attempting to ‘poison’ Miss-bella, who is in fact suffering from the side effects of self-administered doses of mercury. Frannie admits to Langton that Phibbah has secretly added herbs to his wife’s food (in an attempt to cure

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her), and Phibbah is hanged for attempted murder, a “dark cloth wiped across my [Frannie’s] entire existence”.37 It is, however, Frannie’s complicity with and active collaboration in Langton’s cruel experiments as his amanuensis and his surgical assistant which fractures her memory and compromises her reliability as a narrator. Frannie is initially a subject in Langton’s phrenological measuring of the skulls of black men and women but is soon forced into assisting him in the dissection of corpses and his experiments on live subjects to support her master/father/rapist in his racist pseudo-scientific assumptions. As she finds out later, she is his collaborator but remains his subject: mixed-race Frannie’s education is the by-product of a wager between Langton and Benham about whether the former’s ‘mulatta’ daughter might prove more intelligent than a black child. In contrast to much of her biography (her stint as a sadistic domme or her queer relationship with Meg), which is clearly intended to shock the novel’s Georgian readership (if not the twenty-first-century readers), the most transgressive aspects of Langton’s unhinged experiments are only alluded to. Frannie admits that she operated on live subjects when Langton’s surgeon dies; she notes that Langton experiments with the eugenic ‘breeding’ of enslaved people on his plantation and plans to add an orangutan to these endeavours; and she writes about Langton’s eventual success in procuring an albino baby and the child’s black mother, who serves as ‘proof’ of the infant’s inherent blackness.38 It is the helpless child whom Langton plans to keep for prolonged experiments that eventually pushes Frannie into setting fire to Langton’s coach-house (another parallel to Bertha Mason, perhaps, who burns down Thornfield Hall in a delusional attempt to kill Rochester). And yet, the trauma of both witnessing and taking active part in these experiments is never articulated fully in Frannie’s Confessions, which remain radically fragmented.39 Even though she admits to her part in these events during her trial and at the end of her narrative, they defy narration. Benham, who tries to find out about the extent of Langton’s experiments in interviews with his maid, quite pointedly notes her detachment from her past on the plantation: Frannie depicts herself “as if she’d been but an instrument, calibrated like a set of scales, then put to use”.40 Importantly, this seeming dissociation from her collaboration is at least partly a conscious decision on Frannie’s side rather than an unconscious reaction to a traumatising event as classic trauma theory would have it. It is depicted as a coping mechanism which underscores the remarks of critics stressing the need to find ways of narrativising trauma in a (post)colonial context.

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“[Y]ou can find ways to shut things out after they’ve happened”,41 Frannie remarks, indicating that the conscious forgetting/repression that structures her narrative is one of her survival strategies: she quite clearly remembers, but she chooses not to put the “things” she has “shut out” into words. Her laudanum addiction, which “softens everything to the same grey shapes as English fog”, is another survival strategy, which allows her to keep forgetting.42 Frannie’s attempts to repress what she cannot or will not put into words are only partially successful, however, bleeding into the narrative by way of her body’s memory (a “wave of memory” she cannot control) and the ‘blackness’ of her anger, which becomes a pervasive metaphor for her repression of events at Paradise.43 While the outcome of the trial Frannie faces in London seems predetermined—the systemic racism does not allow for an innocent “Mulatta Murderess”44—she does hallucinate a reckoning with her traumatic past. During her hearing, the spectral presences of the men and women whose deaths she witnessed on the plantation appear, prompting Frannie to speak up about Langton’s experiments and her own part in them in a public confession: “I was his scribe, but I was worse. I did worse. I opened bodies. Many of them. I confess it! I confess.”45 The confession of her shame—perhaps the main reason for her instable narrative and her unreliability46—allows her to make at least partial peace with her past. It is here that coping mechanisms turn into true survival. In line with my earlier analysis of the gothic ‘doublings’ in the novel intertextual makeup, this scene is another double: while Frannie is on trial for the murder of the Benhams, she imagines a reckoning with her past. The real-life context forces her to speak out and thus to work through at least one aspect of her traumatic past that is eventually put to peace (the spectres are gone once Frannie has admitted to her crimes). At the same time, Frannie’s fragmented memory and the drug-induced amnesia about the supposed double murder of the Benhams serves as her only line of defence—her survival quite literally depends on her forgetting. Her lawyer and a medical examiner he consults argue that her consumption of opium led to a state of “non-insane automatism”, and Frannie herself characterises her narrative strategy, “somewhere between remembering and forgetting”, as her “only refuge”.47 Collins suggests that Frannie is conscious of the manipulative power of narrative and uses it to create a version of events that enables her to live with her past (i.e. to survive with the constant burden of traumatisation). When writing about the impending death of Langton, Frannie notes that “[d]ying men don’t just dwell on the past: they invent it”—a remark that might easily be applied to

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the narrator herself, who knows her chances of acquittal are slim.48 Frannie admits to lying to Benham in his interviews and knows about the appetites of the readers her narrative caters to, readers who want “novels and romances” and “death and vengeance” in equal parts.49 Her Confessions deliver both: they are structured parallel to her reading biography of the (white, male, British) canon but also offer death and revenge on the two men who have made her the subject of an unethical wager. Whether her story is a calculated invention rather than an ‘authentic’ (neo-)slave narrative or a narrativisation of trauma remains up to the reader to decide. As readers, we are therefore implicated in the narrative: as an intended audience whose voyeuristic greed for “death and vengeance” shapes the narrative and makes us part of the legacies of colonialism and enslavement.

Re-vision as Survival? Frannie’s Black Female Voice Versus White Male Abolitionism The Confessions of Frannie Langton is consciously positioned as a black female (feminist) re-vision of white male narratives (and, by extension, of white historiographies of empire, colonialism and enslavement) as well as of the slave narratives written in the service of abolitionism. The black woman, the former slave, the sex worker of colour is a liminal figure in Georgian England, where slavery might no longer exist officially but the status of an unpaid black maid is not substantially freer than that of the Jamaican plantation slave.50 The novel oscillates between the limited ascriptions available to Frannie and, in doing so, makes readers aware of the racist and sexualised stereotypes that pervade society in the twenty-­ first century: she is the “Mulatta Murderess”, “Ebony Fran or Dusky Fran”, “a slow Creole, his [Langton’s] mulatta whore”.51 Each of these ascriptions emphasises the black woman’s skin tone and sexuality, none of them makes space for her intelligence (she later notes that “there are many who find an educated black more threatening than a savage one”52). Frannie explicitly calls out the misogyny and the racism of ‘Enlightened’ British society by stressing that “[i]t is impossible to be both black and a woman”.53 At the same time, she knows that her status as an educated, self-confident black woman who is able to verbalise her emotions eloquently makes her “a puzzle”: “They [the jury] expected a sly African. Or a bent-double maid. A mulatta whore. The Black Murderess.”54 While black men can make use of the fact that supporting abolitionism had

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become a fashionable cause in late Georgian England by monetising their history of enslavement in abolitionist lectures (the novel namedrops Ignatius Sancho and Olaudah Equiano, and Collins’s fictional Olaudah Cambride follows a similar career path), this option is not open to black women like Frannie, even though her experiences equal those of black men. The novel therefore not only highlights the ideological complexities of the slave narrative, it also forces readers to confront their own reading expectations and the ways these might be burdened with colonial baggage. The novel consistently exposes the more uncomfortable aspects of abolitionism in early nineteenth-century Britain, with Frannie insisting persuasively that not all stories of enslavement are equally viable. “Blacks will write only about suffering, and only for white people”, she writes, “as if our purpose here is to change their minds.”55 Collins’s narrator rephrases the stance of twenty-first-century black activists, who argue that it is not their duty to educate white people about their experiences of systemic racism (a point perhaps most forcefully put forward in Eddo-Lodge’s Why I’m No Longer Talking). In Frannie Langton, the majority of abolitionists are depicted as vultures with an unsavoury desire for sensationalism who seek to profit from Frannie’s fate and supposed notoriety—a conundrum Collins herself circumvents by not having her protagonist recount the events that have traumatised her in detail. Awaiting trial in the Old Bailey, Frannie receives visits by anti-slavery campaigners who want to find out “what stories they can harvest out of me for their pamphlets”,56 an appetite for voyeuristic sensationalism Frannie compares to the plantation owners’ taste for misery and brutality.57 While Collins’s protagonist repeatedly criticises abolitionism for effacing black subjectivity and writing (especially that of women), Olaudah Cambridge (who originates from the Benhams’s Antiguan Estate) is able to use it for a career as a public-facing speaker and prize boxer. In a letter, he tells Meg that what he does is “[t]aking whites for sport. From the podium, and in the ring”, and Frannie notes his code-switching depending on his audience—Olaudah uses “old slave talk” when speaking to her and talks “white” when addressing Meg or other white people.58 The novel consequently exposes British abolitionism as at least partly based on tokenism, as a fashionable lifestyle which remains financed, ironically, by the spoils of British sugar plantations in the Caribbean. By extension, it exposes the voyeurism and sensationalism of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century slave narratives as a retraumatising narrative strategy that the neo-slave narrative subverts by explicitly exposing the ideological pitfalls of the genre.

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Frannie finds momentary release and happiness in her lesbian affair with Marguerite Benham, in whose constrained social mobility as an upperclass woman controlled by a husband mainly driven by a desire to protect the family’s reputation she finds surprising parallels to her own life of confinement. Like Frannie, who is both intelligent and murderous, loving and angry, Meg is described as “two women. One confident, the other nervous. One bright, the other dark.”59 Her unhappiness in a marriage of convenience, with a controlling husband who does not accept her literary aspirations for fear that she might outshine him, is pathologised as melancholia and treated pointlessly with blood-letting and laudanum. The upper-class woman becomes, in the words of her black lover, the “marionette” of “[t]he drug. Her husband’s demands. Her own confusion”,60 and tries to escape her imprisonment in the upper-class ‘private sphere’ by cross-dressing,61 her at times fetishist interest in young ‘Laddie’ Equiano, her obsessive affair with Frances and her eventual affair with Equiano. The women’s relationship—described by Frannie as “another beginning”62— momentarily enables Frannie to dream about her own happy ending, but it remains steeped in inequality. That Frannie calls her lover ‘Madame’ for most of the narrative attests to their differences in status, and the women’s relationship is one of co-dependence and (opium) addiction. Broken as she is by her uprootedness and her past experiences of trauma, Frannie is not able to see that Meg is as dependent on her as she is on her white lover while Meg remains entrenched in the demands of genteel society and her husband’s attempts to control the couple’s reputation. However, while Meg sees no possibility but to keep up appearances and allows her husband to suppress her voice as the author of a memoir that will remain unwritten, Frannie learns how to harness her anger and, as I will point out in my conclusion, her narrative voice in order to survive in a racist and misogynist society. Frannie’s attempts to rewrite her story in her own Confessions, in the choice of a female lover, in the attempt to subvert white accounts of slavery and the black accounts complicit with them in the goal of abolition become part and parcel of her survival strategy. These acts of defiance might not add up to a story of survival (the novel ends with Frannie’s execution), but Collins’s narrative still is a tale of resilience and the power of narration.

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Conclusion: “These pages are for you” While Frannie constantly criticises the limited possibilities of women to tell their own tales on their own terms, she does imagine herself as a writer from the outset of the novel.63 Contrary to the general gist of this volume, Frannie is not able to find a sustainable way to survive the traumatising experience of British enslavement, racism and patriarchy, even though she confronts parts of her past in the trial. Her story consequently encapsulates “the processes by which Britain’s White historiographic discourse fragments Black memory”,64 a fragmentation that is mirrored in Frannie’s memory lapses and the achronological narrative (another doubling, here between the narrator and the narrative structure). At the same time, Frannie’s unreliability and her conscious attempts at repressing what she does not want to remember/narrate undercut the structure of the traditional trauma narrative a (white) readership might want to impose on the novel. Nevertheless, the novel narrates the development of a black female narrator steeped in literary history and generic knowledge, a black survivor who tells her version of the past according to her own set of narrative conventions and defies the slave narrative as a predominantly male genre that does not make its own implications in and profits from enslavement transparent. Frannie imagines herself as an author telling her own story in her own words and on her own terms from the early pages of the novel, where she notes that she has been “moved to a cell of my own” so that she can compose her confession,65 a paradoxically freeing experience in a proto-feminist ‘room of one’s own’ in the Woolfian sense, where she is given space, paper and ink and can rekindle her dreams of becoming a writer.66 Rather than retelling the traumatic experiences on Paradise explicitly, she re-visions a biography refracted through literary history and the racist and misogynist stereotypes of her time, but remains stubbornly convinced of the almost utopian potential of fiction (and her own text is a hybrid between memoir, confession and fiction) to survive trauma: “Because life boils down to nothing, in spite of all the fuss, yet novels make it possible to believe it is something, after all.”67 This “something” of life encapsulated in fiction in general, and the neo-slave narrative in particular is decisively female, complementing and subverting the male abolitionist accounts of enslavement and supplementing a female tradition of trauma and resilience. The victims who are explicitly put forward towards the end of her confessions are female,68 making them visible as individual casualties

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of colonialism and enslavement. It is through Frannie’s voice that at least the stories of these victims (and her own) survive. Perhaps more importantly, Frannie also conjures up a black female readership who can take courage and consolation from her text in order to make sense of the past— and to survive its traumatic implications. Her last words—“These pages are for you.”69—address an imagined black girl who will be able to find parts of her own history of trauma, resilience and survival in the pages of Frannie Langton’s narrative. The addressee in these last pages is also, quite clearly, the (black, female) readership of the novel. Collins’s neo-slave narrative adds a complex story of complicity, survival and death to the black British neo-slave narrative, but it is also a story of hope. While it is not possible to resurrect the historical voices of black women like Frannie, whose stories are irretrievably lost, they can at least be re-visioned and used to augment both the literary canon and our notions of what it means to be black and British in the twenty-first century.

Notes 1. With an initial focus on contemporary US-American novels about the history of slavery, the term was first coined by Bernard Bell in The Afro-­ American Novel and Its Tradition (1987) and further developed by Ashraf H. A. Rushdy in The Neo-Slave Narrative: Studies in the Social Logic of a Literary Form (1999). Rushdy defines the neo-slave narrative as “a particular kind of slavery fiction, those that recreate the first-person narrator of the original texts written (or dictated) by the former slaves themselves” (Muñoz-­Valdivieso, 2012, 43). 2. Muñoz-Valdivieso (2012, 44) credits the 2007 bicentennial commemorations of the abolition of the British slave trade as triggering a new wave of interest in this particular aspect of British history. 3. Olusoga’s monograph was accompanied by a BBC documentary (2016) and has recently been published as an abbreviated and simplified version addressing (school) children. 4. See Taylor (2020) and Otele (2020). 5. Both texts are based on real crimes: Carter’s short story depicts the unsolved murders of Andrew Borden and his second wife Abby in 1892; although Borden’s daughter Lizzie was (and remains) the prime suspect, she was acquitted during the trial. Atwood’s novel fictionalises the murders of Thomas Kinnear and his housekeeper Nancy Mongomery. Like Frannie, who composes her Confessions before and during her trial for murder, Atwood’s Grace Marks pens the narrative from prison.

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6. Collins (2019a, 8). 7. Collins (2019a, 11). 8. Smith (2007, 168). See also Bekers (2018, 26): “British writers, especially authors of African descent, are adding to the genre’s formal diversification by experimenting with such literary strategies as polyphony, literary ­montage, narrative reversal, metafiction, and general hybridity, to name but some.” 9. Anthony Carrigan makes the important point that “Equiano’s portrayals of his early life could be placed anywhere within a potentially irresolvable matrix of fact, partial reconstruction and total fabrication” (2000, 42); Vincent Caretta emphasises that Equiano consciously worked on “establishing himself as a public figure participating in the debate over abolition, and honing an African identity” (2007, 48). 10. Barbara Baumgartner cautions that in his “obsessive concern with Prince’s sexualized body, Pringle undermines Prince’s interpretation of her own body as a site of resistance” (2001, 262). Sara Salih describes Prince’s autobiography as a “composite, multi-authored” text with “at least half of it […] not written by a black woman” (2004, 134). 11. Bekers (2018, 24). 12. Equiano is a case in point: after he bought his freedom in 1766, he helped to purchase and supervise slaves on a plantation in Central America (see Vol. II, Chapter XI in Equiano 2001, 150–166). 13. See also Olusoga 2017, 9 for the more general statement that the “history of Britain’s long, complex and traumatic relationship with Africa and her peoples has been and remains largely obscured. The most difficult chapters in that history, those that record the age of slavery, were largely expunged after the 1830s.” 14. Anim-Addo and Lima (2018, 2). 15. Rothberg asks whether traditional trauma theory as developed in the 1990s “provides the best framework for thinking about the legacies of violence in the colonized/postcolonial world” (2008, 226). See also Yusin (2018, 239): “The analytic strategies of the postcolonial critique of the poststructuralist methods employed by trauma theory concentrate on subjective experiences of pain and suffering in the effort to disclose the ways in which the very concept of trauma is a Western artifact.” 16. Andermahr (2015, 500). 17. Craps (2013, 2, 127) 18. Visser (2015, 258). See also Visser (2011, 279): “Possible directions in which to reconstruct this framework to respond to postcolonial ways of understanding history, memory and trauma will involve reorientation towards narratives that are forward looking, striving for subversion of the traumatic experience rather than its containment in melancholia.”

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19. Collins (2019a, 257). 20. See Collins (2019a, 278–282). 21. See Collins (2019a, 6). 22. Collins (2019a, 24). 23. Collins (2019a, 43). 24. See Collins (2019a, 361). 25. See Collins (2019a, 31, 87). 26. Collins (2019a, 11, 141). See also Mondal (2020, 295–296). 27. In his journals, Benham uses a comparable literary ascription when he describes Frannie as “Caliban to his [Langton’s] Prospero!” (Collins, 2019a, 91). William Shakespeare’s late play The Tempest (1611) thus serves as another literary intertext that is now predominantly read in the context of colonisation and the ideology of empire. 28. Collins (2019b, n.p.). 29. See chapter 10, “A Dialogue of Self and Soul: Plan Jane’s Progress”, Gilbert and Gubar 1984 [1979], 336–371. 30. See Brontë (2000, 12–18). 31. Collins (2019a, 135). 32. Brontë (2000, 18). 33. Collins (2019a, 258). 34. Collins (2019a, 361). 35. Collins (2019a, 360). 36. Visser (2015, 258). See also Bewes (2006, 39), who describes shame as “an index of the inadequacy or the impossibility of writing” in postcolonial writing addressing trauma. 37. Collins (2019a, 40). 38. See Collins (2019a, 333). 39. See also Espinoza Garrido et al. (2021), who pinpoint the contradictions which “arise from the novel’s layering of Langton’s fragmented memory […].” (2) 40. Collins (2019a, 111). 41. Collins (2019a, 50). 42. Collins (2019a, 210). 43. See Collins (2019a, 6, 129, 258). 44. Collins (2019a, 3). Pettigrew highlights that he has only defended one other black person in court before taking on Frannie’s case, but “the judge decided the prisoner didn’t have the intellect required to understand the nature of the oath. Though he spoke three languages!” (302). 45. Collins (2019a, 322; emphasis in original). 46. See also Bewes (2006, 47). 47. Collins (2019a, 316, 303). 48. Collins (2019a, 66).

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49. See Collins (2019a, 117, 43). 50. Collins (2019a, 116). On their journey to London, Langton makes explicit that she will remain unfree: “You will be under my jurisdiction. There [in London], as anywhere” (2019a, 61). 51. Collins (2019a, 3, 4, 66; emphasis in original). 52. Collins (2019a, 83). 53. Collins (2019a, 205). 54. Collins (2019a, 319). 55. Collins (2019a, 205). 56. Collins (2019a, 42). 57. Collins (2019a, 153). 58. Collins (2019a, 238, 203; emphasis in original). 59. Collins (2019a, 216). 60. Collins (2019a, 282). 61. See Collins (2019a, 123). 62. Collins (2019a, 129). 63. See also reviews such as that by Hannah Beckerman, writing for the Guardian, who describes Frannie’s narrative voice as “assured, defiant and articulate” (2019, n.p.). 64. Espinoza Garrido et al. (2021, 2) 65. Collins (2019a, 43). 66. See Collins (2019a, 68). 67. Collins (2019a, 369). 68. See Collins (2019a, 368). 69. Collins (2019a, 370).

References Andermahr, Sonya. 2015. Decolonizing Trauma Studies: Trauma and Postcolonialism—Introduction. Humanities 4 (4): 500–505. Accessed 20 February 2021. https://doi.org/10.3390/h4040500. Anim-Addo, Joan, and Maria Helena Lima. 2018. The Power of the Neo-Slave Narrative Genre. Callaloo 41 (1): 1–8. Baumgartner, Barbara. 2001. The Body as Evidence: Resistance, Collaboration, and Appropriation in The History of Mary Prince. Callaloo 24 (1): 253–275. Beckerman, Hannah. 2019. The Confessions of Frannie Langton by Sara Collins Review—Bold and Timely. The Guardian, 21 April. Accessed 27 October 2020. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/apr/21/ the-­confessions-­of-­frannie-­langton-­by-­sara-­collins-­review. Bekers, Elisabeth. 2018. Creative Challenges to Captivity: Slave Authorship in Black British Neo-Slave Narratives. Life Writing 15 (1): 23–42.

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Bewes, Timothy. 2006. Shame, Ventriloquy, and the Problem of the Cliché in Caryl Phillips. Cultural Critique 62 (1): 33–60. Brontë, Charlotte. 2000 [1847]. Jane Eyre. Edited by Margaret Smith, introduction by Sally Shuttleworth. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Carretta, Vincent. 2007. Olaudah Equiano: African British Abolitionist and Founder of the African American Slave Narrative. In The Cambridge Companion to the African American Slave Narrative, ed. Audrey A.  Fisch, 44–60. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Carrigan, Anthony. 2000. Negotiating Personal Identity and Cultural Memory in Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative. Wasafiri 48: 42–47. Carter, Angela. 1995. The Fall River Axe Murders. In Burning Your Boats: Collected Short Stories, 300–317. London: Chatto and Windus. Collins, Sara. 2019a. The Confessions of Frannie Langton. London: Viking/ Penguin. Kindle file. ———. 2019b. Sara Collins Sets Out to Rewrite the Characters Who Have Traditionally Been Invisible in Gothic Fiction. Penguin.co.uk. Accessed 1 March 2021. https://www.penguin.co.uk/articles/2018/oct/sara-­collins-­ on-­frannie-­langton.html. Craps, Stef. 2013. Postcolonial Witnessing: Trauma Out of Bounds. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Eddo-Lodge, Reni. 2017. Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race. London: Bloomsbury. Equiano, Olaudah. 2001 [1789]. The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, Written by Himself. Edited by Werner Sollors. New York and London: Norton. Espinoza Garrido, Felipe, Marlena Tronicke, and Julian Wacker. 2021. Blackness and Neo-Victorian Studies: Re-routing Imaginations of the Nineteenth Century. In Black Neo-Victoriana: Interrogating Presence, Challenging Absence, ed. Felipe Espinoza Garrido, Marlena Tronicke, and Julian Wacker, 1-30. Leiden and Boston: Brill. Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. 1984 [1979]. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Hirsch, Afua. 2017. Brit(ish): On Race, Identity and Belonging. London: Vintage. Mondal, Lewi. 2020. ‘No doubt you think this will be one of those slave histories’: Review of Sara Collins’s The Confessions of Frannie Langton (2019). Neo-­ Victorian Studies 13 (1): 292–300. Muñoz-Valdivieso, Sofía. 2012. Neo-Slave Narratives in Contemporary Black British Fiction. ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature 42 (3–4): 43–59. Olusoga, David. 2017 [2016]. Black and British: A Forgotten History. London: Pan.

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———. 2020. Black and British: A Short, Essential History. London: Macmillan Children’s Books. Otele, Olivette. 2020. African Europeans: An Untold History. London: Hurst & Co. Prince, Mary. 2004 [1831]. The History of Mary Prince: A West Indian Slave. Edited by Sara Salih. London: Penguin. Rothberg, Michael. 2008. Decolonizing Trauma Studies: A Response. Studies in the Novel 40: 224–234. Salih, Sara. 2004. The History of Mary Prince, the Black Subject, and the Black Canon. In Discourses of Slavery and Abolition: Britain and Its Colonies, 1760–1838, ed. Brycchan Carey, Markman Ellis, and Sara Salih, 123–138. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Smith, Valerie. 2007. Neo-Slave Narratives. In The Cambridge Companion to the African American Slave Narrative, ed. Audrey Fisch, 168–186. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Taylor, Michael. 2020. The Interest: How the British Establishment Resisted the Abolition of Slavery. London: Bodley Head. Visser, Irene. 2011. Trauma Theory and Postcolonial Literary Studies. Journal of Postcolonial Writing 47 (3): 270–282. ———. 2015. Decolonizing Trauma Theory: Retrospect and Prospects. Humanities 4 (4): 250–265. Accessed 20 February 2021. https://doi. org/10.3390/h4020250. Yusin, Jennifer. 2018. Postcolonial Trauma. In Trauma and Literature, ed. J. Roger Kurtz, 239–254. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

PART II

Survival and the Individual

CHAPTER 6

“That was what all men became: techniques for survival”: The Paradoxical Notion of Survival in Julian Barnes’s The Noise of Time Rudolf Freiburg

Introduction: Epiphany and Survival in Barnes’s Novels Julian Barnes’s literary works are rightly acclaimed for their narrative brilliance, their subtle diagnosis of human life and their philosophical wisdom. Although all his novels clearly differ from each other, since Barnes—by some critics called the “chameleon of British letters”1—successfully endeavours not to “write the same sort of book” again and again,2 they clearly reveal common themes and notions such as “the elusiveness of truth”, “the subjectivity of memory” and “the relativity of all knowledge”.3 Barnes’s interest in problems of epistemology and ontology is indisputable, but one should definitively add the theme of ‘survival’ to this

R. Freiburg (*) University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Erlangen, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 R. Freiburg, G. Bayer (eds.), The Ethics of Survival in Contemporary Literature and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83422-7_6

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list of his major interests. His ‘novels of survival’ are never turned into dry intellectual lessons of academic philosophy, since Barnes manages to keep his writing close to life.4 He describes complex moral and ethical problems and dilemmas by focusing on exemplary events and situations reminiscent of James Joyce’s concept of the ‘epiphany’,5 focusing on a moment in time which transcends the temporal borders of an event by defining it as ‘particular’ and ‘universal’ at the same time. In this respect, a moment that seems so ordinary, so common, occasionally trivial at first sight, suddenly discloses implications of a veritable existential dimension. These special events leave “a distinct impression on you, when a whole vision, an entire conception, seemed contained in that moment”,6 as Virginia Woolf defined her epiphanic concept of the ‘moment of vision’. Epiphanies and the theme of ‘survival’ are closely connected in Barnes’s novels, to such a degree even that one may define all his major works as ‘epiphanic stories of survival’.7 Some examples may suffice: Before She Met Me (1982) is—among many other things—a story about a man who has to ‘survive’ the bitter pangs of jealousy once he has learnt that his girlfriend used to perform in pornographic videos. A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters (1989) concentrates on the motif of the ‘shipwreck’ as the epitome of an existential crisis and meditates survival in historical contexts which range from Noah’s Arc to the age of space travels;8 it even presents a story called “The Survivor”.9 Barnes’s most famous novel, Flaubert’s Parrot (1984), studies the character of a ‘20th-Century-Monsieur-­ Bovary’, who has survived his wife’s suicide and seeks consolation in finding out the ‘truth’ about Flaubert’s writing. In The Porcupine (1992), Barnes presents the pessimistic story of Stoyo Petkanov,10 the dictator of an Eastern European totalitarian state (based on the historical events in Bulgaria) who has survived the breakdown of his corrupt regime and now faces trial. The more recent works, too, follow suit: The Sense of an Ending (2011) defines the narrator as a tragic and guilty ‘survivor’ who is forced to revalue his existence after remembering a fatal letter he had written decades before. His collection of brief tales in The Lemon Table (2004) is a gallery of partly humorous,11 partly grim survival stories which describe surviving a visit at the hairdresser’s, the attempt to outlive one’s peers and ironic recommendations how to stay alive in marriage, under the doom of dementia and under the distressing conditions of an old people’s home. Nothing to Be Frightened Of (2008), Barnes’s essayistic approach towards questions of death and the afterlife, clearly discusses survival, not only the survival of human beings forced to live under the shadow of death but also

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the survival of a work of art, more precisely the survival of the book the reader is actually reading;12 it even describes the idea of spiritual survival and the paradoxical notion of an ‘atheist’ surprised by his resurrection.13 Barnes’s Levels of Life (2013), this most impressive and moving literary meditation about the death of his wife Pat Kavanagh, defined as an “(auto)thanatography” by critics,14 adumbrates the dark aspects of ­survival often accompanied by anguish, feelings of senselessness and absurdity, and emotions ranging from wrath to moments of utter despair when suicide becomes an alluring alternative to a dull existence defined by loss and deep mourning: So grief in turn becomes unimaginable: not just its length and depth, but its tone and texture, its deceptions and false dawns, its recidivism. Also, its initial shock: you have suddenly come down in the freezing German Ocean, equipped only with an absurd cork overjacket that is supposed to keep you alive.15

Surviving a beloved partner is a highly complex procedure, unexpected in its grim intensity and absurdity; the survival contains more than a grain of melancholy, it is a test, the paradox of a static process with time standing still while it passes gradually producing a ‘blemished survivor’: When she dies, you are not at first surprised. Part of love is preparing for death. You feel confirmed in your love when she dies. You got it right. This is part of it all. Afterwards comes the madness. And then the loneliness: not the spectacular solitude you had anticipated, not the interesting martyrdom of widowhood, but just loneliness. You expect something almost geological—vertigo in a shelving canyon—but it’s not like that; it’s just misery as regular as a job … [People say] you’ll come out of it…And you do come out of it, that’s true. But you don’t come out of it like a train coming out of a tunnel, bursting through the Downs into sunshine and that swift, rattling descent to the Channel; you come out of it as a gull comes out of an oil slick; you are tarred and feathered for life.16

His latest novel so far, The Only Story (2018), describes the survival of Paul Roberts, a young man, who has to cope with his elder girlfriend’s alcoholism and dementia.

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The Noise of Time: An Allegory of Tragic Survival The Noise of Time (2016), too, is a survival story. When he was still a young man of 18, Barnes developed a strong interest in Dmitri Dmitrijewitsch Shostakovich; in 1965 he visited Russia. He read Solomon Volkov’s Testimony (1979) a bit later, and from this time on, he became even more interested in the composer’s life who exemplifies the “clash between art and Power”.17 In The Noise of Time, Barnes does not intend to present an historical ‘documentary’ of Shostakovich’s curriculum vitae; he is more interested in the exemplary character of the composer’s life, because his biography can be interpreted as an allegory of human suffering, in general, and of the artist’s suffering, in particular. Barnes feels one should give Shostakovich “his due for his survival”.18 Barnes makes use of his literary licence as a novelist; he does not feel obliged to compete with the historian or the biographer; on the contrary, where they stop, “the novelist picks up”.19 Nevertheless, he admits that he feels the responsibility to “be as true as to what I believe the truth to be”;20 more precisely, he is interested in what he calls the “psychological truth”.21 He closely follows his historical and biographical sources, which are not always too reliable, as he remarks in the “Author’s Note” at the end of his book; in his researches, he even worked together with Shostakovich’s biographer Elizabeth Wilson.22 The Noise of Time can be regarded as a ‘novel’; more precisely, a ‘dramatic novel’, since it displays a tripartite structure revealing the author’s skill of clearly arranging his wealth of information. He uses a multi-generic approach combining ‘protocols and stories with reports and documents’, and he frequently juxtaposes the different time levels of his narration.23 One German reviewer of the text calls the book a “biography sui generis in minor”, and indeed, it is the mixture of factography with reflections and aphoristic insights, a mélange of documentation and essayistic elements.24 The narrator keeps his distance to Shostakovich and the events in the composer’s life, but through this distance, achieved by both techniques of irony and sarcasm, a deep empathy remains cognizable. Barnes develops a special style for his book,25 “grey to the point of drabness” and a “lean grey realism”, by which he may intend to conjure up the ‘ghost of social realism’.26 Its style is “minimalistic” in a sense, as if Barnes were writing with one hand “tied behind his back”.27 Furthermore, the text does not appear as a continuous  narration symbolizing unity and coherence; it

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rather mirrors the fragmentary nature of Shostakovich’s life, presenting a sequence of brief paragraphs following each other. In The Sense of an Ending, in a kind of fragmentary prolepsis, Barnes collects ‘moments and objects of significance’, which bewilder the reader because their precise context is not yet known to him. Barnes uses a variation of this technique of reconfiguration of fragments again in The Noise of Time, where he presents epiphanic slices of life selected from the biography of the Russian composer Shostakovich, and remembered by the musician  himself.28 All these details, smithereens of Shostakovich’s memory, foreshadow existential moments in Shostakovich’s life and anticipate the extreme suffering the unhappy composer had to go through. The Noise of Time is a case study of survival, a succinct description of the physical, psychological and aesthetic aspects of survival; in this fictional biography, Barnes delves deep into the ‘ethics of survival’, and by “telling the story of the collision of art and Power, and who wins and who loses; who wins in the short term, how the artist fights back and […] who wins in the long term”,29 he also discusses the question of the survival of art after the artist’s death. The introductory emblematic scene of The Noise of Time epitomizes the central theme of the novel: the tragic art of surviving. When Shostakovich accompanied by “the one whose name is lost to history” and “the one who remembers” looks out of the window of his train stopping at a lonely station in Russia, he observes an invalid, who lost both his legs in war (see NT, 2–3). The invalid—himself the son of another unhappy survivor, who was severely injured in World War I (see NT, 1)—sings bawdy military songs to the passengers in order to scrounge some money. This crippled and lonesome soldier, doomed to move around on the platform on a shabby trolley, becomes the symbol of Shostakovich’s life. This veteran is the incarnation of both the idea of suffering and of the instinct of survival. The parable of the amputated warrior denies the primitive association of survival with happiness; it rather illustrates the notion that survival may imply mutilation and it discloses those dimensions of absurdity, grotesqueness and grim humour, which often go hand in hand with survival. The mutilated loner, whose only interest is to stay alive and who bellows obscene songs to passengers briefly stopping to listen, is an appropriate image for Shostakovich’s career, who—just as the veteran—is turned into a mere ‘technique for survival’ in the course of the following story:

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But nothing else had changed: young men were still blown to bits by guns, then roughly sliced by surgeons. His own legs had been removed in a field hospital among broken trees. It was all in a great cause, as it had been the time before. He did not give a fuck. Let others argue about that; his only concern was to get to the end of each day. He had become a technique for survival. Below a certain point, that was what all men became: techniques for survival. (NT, 1; emphasis in original)

The brutal power of World War I and now World War II turn healthy young men into helpless disabled persons. The violent political power of Joseph Stalin’s regime threatens to mutilate anyone regardless of his profession, character or achievements. Like the veteran, who lost his legs, Shostakovich, too, fears being mutilated: “Even if they cut off both my hands, I shall continue to write music with a pen in my mouth” (see NT, 48), is what he says in The Noise of Time. And he has good reason to dread Stalin, who out of a mere whim took offence at his music. Stalin’s stricture of Shostakovich led to a painful ostracism of the hitherto successful composer, who from this time on was doomed to live in constant fear of being imprisoned or even executed; he was turned into a “crippled artist”.30 Barnes uses an impressive image in order to illustrate the inhuman conditions under which Shostakovich is forced to live: for many nights on end, in the building where he lives, the poor composer stands in front of the elevator, his suitcase packed, so that—in case of being arrested—his chance to survive (and the chance for his sleeping small family to be spared) seems higher. With his mixture of heterodiegetic and homodiegetic narrative techniques, Barnes allows the reader to participate in Shostakovich’s ordeal directly by giving him insight into “the gulag” of Shostakovich’s mind.31 Barnes describes a situation characterized by futile waiting reminiscent of Franz Kafka’s “Before the Law” (1915) and Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (1952), by fear and anxiety mixed with absurdity, grotesqueness and despair: He did not want to make himself into a dramatic character. But sometimes, as his mind skittered in the small hours, he thought: so this is what history has come to. All that striving and idealism and hope and progress and science and art and conscience, and it all ends like this, with a man standing by a lift, at his feet a small case containing cigarettes, underwear and tooth powder; standing there and waiting to be taken away. (NT, 41)

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Physical Survival in The Noise of Time The emblematic image of Shostakovich standing by a lift, nervous, anxious, tortured by premonitions and expectations alike can be interpreted as a microscopic miniature of life in Russia under Stalin’s regime. During this time, political enemies were scrupulously incriminated and condemned in the notorious show trials. Masses of the opponents of the regime were annihilated, executed without much ado or sent to one of the many camps in Siberia and elsewhere. Stalin even gave out quotas fixing the number of individuals who were to be arrested or put to death in a certain period of time.32 Even the ‘inner circle’ of the Central Committee was not immune to these purges.33 The oppressive regime established a dense system of surveillance and used its power to turn ordinary citizens into informers and spies for the dictator. Just like Adolf Hitler’s terror regime in Germany during the ‘Third Reich’, the system registered any forms of deviation pursuing and punishing detractors without any mercy. A ‘wrong word’ spoken at the wrong time or place could destroy a career forever; a derisive remark ridiculing Stalin and his disciples could lead to a long imprisonment in the camps, or it might end in death. And even the families of political apostates did not remain untroubled: children of Stalin’s political antagonists were separated from their fathers and mothers and sent to children’s homes where staunch communists inculcated them with Stalinistic truths and Communist ideologies until they became both dedicated followers of totalitarian Socialism and total strangers to their parents. When Shostakovich’s art allegedly collided with the dictator’s political interests, the consequences for the composer were extremely painful. Stalin took offence at the performance of Shostakovich’s opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk (1934) in 1936; what followed was a long series of denunciations against Shostakovich. An avalanche of abuses was triggered by a Pravda article, which Stalin himself was believed to have written.34 In this article, entitled “Muddle instead of Music”, Shostakovich’s opera was vilified as an intellectual work of pure ‘formalism’, as the epitome of an ‘unpopular’ work of art. An artist who produced such music, so the relentless critic argued, could no longer be considered a friend of the Russian people; hence, his work should be banned forever. When Shostakovich first read this article, he was so paralysed that his companions thought he was already drunken early in the morning.35 From this moment on, Shostakovich was in dire straits:

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He also noted which musicians now made public statements against his work, and which friends and acquaintances chose to distance themselves from him. With equal apparent calm he read the letters which came in from ordinary members of the public, most of whom just happened to know his private address. Many of them advised him that his ass’s ears should be chopped off, along with his head. And then the phrase from which there was no recovery began to appear in the newspapers, inserted into the most ­normal sentence. For instance: ‘Today there is to be held a concert of works by the enemy of the people Shostakovich’. Such words were never used by accident, or without approval from the highest level. (NT, 39)

The threats of mutilation and execution illustrate the more drastic aspects of physical survival in the face of “carnivorous Power” (see NT, 133). The anxiety of being arrested and tortured followed Shostakovich like a shadow. Even as a young man, he suffered from the fear that his body was not safe from physical encroachments; he was afraid of hands which “would grab him” (see NT, 147) and of “the claws of cats” (see NT, 69; 97), the cats being a metaphor for the cruelty of the despotic state. Stalin’s terror regime was notorious for its brutal violence and the systematic application of merciless torture methods.36 To keep his physical integrity, Shostakovich fell back on superstition; he tried to protect himself from infections by wearing an amulet of garlic around his neck (see NT, 69). Like Alexander Pope, Shostakovich could have described his existence as “this long disease, my life”,37 since from childhood on, he suffered from delicate health. As a prolific composer and busy pianist, he had to endure pain in his wrist frequently;38 later on in life, he and his family were repeatedly troubled by various diseases so that in one of his letters he defined his home as “one big sickbed”.39 Even after Stalin’s death, Shostakovich could never enjoy his considerably ‘new freedom’, because his health problems kept on troubling him: in his older age, his right hand showed symptoms of paralysis, and he had to recover from a broken leg,40 and apart from afflictions which would nowadays be designated as ‘burn-out-symptoms’, he was tormented by pains caused by a kidney stone (see NT, 167) and by a host of further ailments. Towards the end of his life, he was doomed to live under the shadow of poliomyelitis.41 Further obstacles rendered his physical survival difficult. For many periods in his life, Shostakovich was short of money. In order to support his family he was obliged to play the piano in cheap cinemas, where the audience did not appreciate the art of his performance (see NT, 55–56).

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Shostakovich was as prolific composer, but since he did not receive any royalties for musical pieces played on the radio,42 he remained relatively indigent. Being on Stalin’s black list of artists, he could not find proper jobs. It is true, he owned a car, but he could rarely afford the petrol to run it. The flats where he lived with his family often remained cold due to the general shortage of coals.43 He was oftentimes forced to compose and write in the dark, because the electricity broke down, and from time to time there was even no water.44 When a friend, Flora Litvinova, returned from a visit to Shostakovich’s family, she was shocked by the dire conditions under which Shostakovich was forced to live, and with great empathy she entered the following remark into her diary on 11 February 1948: “How terrible. Poor Dmitri Dmitriyevich! How many times can they smash him? How much must a man bear? Why is he continually prevented from working, composing the music generated by his genius? What will happen to him?”45 As a person decried as a ‘public enemy’ he was not entitled to buy manuscript paper so that the sheer work of copying music became an awkward and time-consuming task. In later interviews, Shostakovich’s children report that workers from a nearby factory, staunch believers in the principles of Socialism, used to throw garbage on the family property; loudspeakers kept on blurting out socialistic ideologies with an incredible loudness in order to prevent Shostakovich from composing.46

Psychological Survival in The Noise of Time Physical survival was tough, but the psychological aspects of surviving were even harder to endure. Many of the physical ailments he suffered from later in life were probably caused by the manifold disturbances of his nervous system irritated by the incessant stimuli of fears.47 And nerves, as Barnes makes Shostakovich observe in The Noise of Time, are not to be replaced as simply as the “broken string of a violin” (see NT, 155). Stanislaw Jerzy Lec’s aphorism “The one who survives a tragedy cannot have been its hero” adumbrates the complexity of the issue of survival.48 Survival can be associated with heroism, but it may also reveal clear links to cowardice, as Barnes confirms in interviews on The Noise of Time. Barnes, who freely confesses that he “would have been the coward” if he had been forced to live under the conditions of Stalinism,49 also reveals the paradoxical nature of Shostakovich’s cowardice redefining it as ‘individual heroism’. Whereas deeds of heroism often require a moment of firm

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decision, cowardice—in Barnes’s reading—demands a ‘lifelong commitment’ not to give up in the face of calamities, injustices, abuses and deadly threats.50 Stalin’s leadership, usually denominated as ‘The Great Terror’, was an incomparable climax in the history of human suffering; it was a nightmare for Russia. The time from 1937 on was a period characterized by political madness; it was teeming with grotesque events, combining the horror of a tragedy with the absurdity of a farce.51 In a few years, Stalin and his original disciples had established a system of suspicion, mutual spying and ruthless denunciation that turned Russia into a political lunatic asylum. Stalin, who considered himself as the ‘Himalaya’, entitled to look down on others,52 and who gradually became the idol of afficionadoes who adored him as “the greatest genius of mankind”,53 gave free rein to his bloodthirstiness; in one day alone he and Vyacheslav Mikhailovich Molotov are said to have confirmed 3167 death penalties.54 At the end of Stalin’s regime, as historians confirm, more than one million ‘enemies of the people’ had been arrested, more than 700,000 executed.55 What Shostakovich experiences in Barnes’s The Noise of Time was common best practice under Stalin: Shostakovich has his first encounter with ‘Power’ and is summoned to the ‘Big House’, the centre of the Committee for State Security, where he is to be interrogated by Zakrevsky, who wants to know whether Shostakovich has any information concerning Marshal Michail Nikolajewitsch Tukhachevsky. Indeed, Tukhachevsky, as the reader knows already, was not only one of the most powerful leaders of the Red Army, called ‘The Red Napoleon’ by his admirers, but also one of the few friends of Shostakovich; he had even tried to help him get back into Stalin’s favour by writing a letter to the dictator on behalf of the discriminated composer. The fictional scene of the Marshal’s writing the letter, included into The Noise of Time, illustrates the extent of anxiety Stalin used to instil in the most powerful men, who—as it is reported of Tikhon Nikolayevich Khrennikov later in the text—often defecated out of sheer fear in Stalin’s presence; compared to Khrennikov, Tukhachevsky’s reaction may be less drastic, but the Marshal’s ordeal is clearly observable: But as soon as the man in uniform gripped his pen and started writing, a change came over him. Sweat began to pour from his hair, from his widow’s peak down to his forehead, and from the back of his head down into his collar. One hand made flurrying darts with a handkerchief, the other halting

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movements with a pen. Such unsoldierly apprehension was not encouraging. (NT, 29)

In the novel, it remains open if the letter was indeed written and finally sent; it is proved, however, that Tukhachevsky tried to “intercede on Shostakovich’s behalf with Stalin”.56 Shostakovich cannot avoid going to the ‘Big House’. In compliance with Stalin’s order to detect the germs of rebellion in Tukhachevsky’s private circle, the interrogator Zakrevsky presses Shostakovich to give away all the names of visitors who together with himself frequented the Marshal’s salon. When Shostakovich pretends not to remember, Zakrevsky fixes a time limit of 48 hours during which Shostakovich is supposed to think harder and to improve his memory.57 When the time limit is over and Shostakovich returns to the ‘Big House’ with the worst of fears, he is surprised to learn that his interrogator Zakrevsky has meanwhile been arrested himself. The scene displays the capriciousness of ‘Power’ and its arbitrary decisions; on the spur of a moment a hero could be turned a rascal and vice versa: People who had belonged to the group of plaguers yesterday, now quite often found themselves deep down in the torture chambers on the same pallets with those in whom they had instilled deadly terror just a day before.58

Although Shostakovich was relatively ‘lucky’ in this situation because he did not have to give any friends and relations away, the affair proved deadly for Marshal Tukhachevsky; when Shostakovich heard that the Marshal had been shot and that Stalin himself had also ordered to execute Tukhachevsky’s wife together with her sister and two of her brothers, and even mandated to send Tukhachevsky’s 17-year-old daughter to the camps,59 he was on the verge of a nervous breakdown, since survival under these circumstances now seemed completely improbable. For Shostakovich it was the second blow after the Pravda articles, but after some time he learnt to accept this new stroke again and tried to reinterpret it as ‘ordinary life’.60 The Pravda article “Muddle instead of Music” had already smattered Shostakovich, destroyed his reputation and changed his life completely which—from now on—became an incessant struggle for survival. Although Shostakovich was wrong in believing that the article had been written by Stalin himself, its impact was strong enough to decide about the composer’s life or death: “This was enough to take away his life” (see NT, 28). Being summoned to the ‘Big House’ seemed to be the next step in a

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dangerous escalation which might end in the total extinction of the musician’s life: Power had talked to him through newspapers, publicly, and had whispered in his ear, privately. Recently, Power had humiliated him, taken away his livelihood, ordered him to repent. Power had told him how it wanted him to work, how it wanted him to live. Now it was hinting that perhaps, on consideration, it might not want him to live any more. Power had decided to have a face-to-face with him. Power’s name was Zakrevsky; and Power, as it expressed itself to people like him in Leningrad, resided in the Big House. Many who went into the Big House on Liteiny Prospekt never emerged again. (NT, 43)

Survival is not a static form of existence, as sentences such as Barnes’s own description of Shostakovich “He was lucky to survive” may misleadingly suggest.61 The survival of a person can seldom be separated from his identity; on the one hand, survival becomes an important part of a person’s ‘new’ identity, since he is ‘the survivor’ now; on the other hand, it may gradually or radically revise the very identity he had before he had to face the existential crisis. Surviving the death of his wife, for instance, Barnes compared himself with “a gull [which] comes out of an oil slick”; he felt “tarred and feathered for life”.62 Shostakovich witnessed a similar experience; he, too, was ‘tarred and feathered’ again and again, and—to a certain degree—for him survival was tantamount to the ordeal of having to observe his own personal erosion. The psychological aspect of Shostakovich’s survival under Stalin could be defined as a cruel vivisection of his personality, with attacks on him as a musician first, then threats to his physical integrity, and finally with the utter destruction of the vital functions of his very soul. As an extraordinarily gifted musician and an extremely talented composer,63 Shostakovich developed a highly individual character from his early childhood on. He had perfect pitch, was a ‘whizz kid’ at the piano, who learnt the most difficult pieces of classical music in no time,64 and his intellect enabled him to internalize the theory of harmonies together with the long history of the musical lore. With Sergei Sergeyevich Prokofiev and Igor Stravinsky, he belonged to the elite group of modernist composers who tried to overcome the patterns of traditional compositions following the examples of Johann Sebastian Bach, Amadeus Mozart, Ludwig van Beethoven, Pyotr Tchaikovsky, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov or Modest Mussorgsky. Just as elsewhere in

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Europe, where musical innovators such as Arnold Schönberg and Alban Berg introduced their audiences to the provocative sounds of the newly developed ‘twelve-tone-technique’, Shostakovich in Russia looked out for experiments in music, by which he could leave the beaten paths of classical compositions behind. Although he could write popular melodies cherished by a wide audience, he also set out to choose a polystilistic, polyphonic and even polyharmonic approach to music which included ambivalent tonality and even atonality. Stalin’s fascistic regime tolerated no elite, let alone any form of individuality; the dictator’s consolidation of institutional powers comprised all branches of life. In exaggerated notions of applied ‘Communism’ and ‘Socialism’, where everyone should have the same rights and duties, any form of deviationist individualism was declared to be a form of opposition to the State. Stalin’s absurd notion that any member of the Soviet State should be able to shoulder any task led to fatal consequences: when due to the purges under ‘The Great Terror’ thousands of engineers and specialist workers had been killed, they were replaced by farmers—with the result that the goods the new labourers produced often fell to pieces several days after they had been manufactured.65 Stalinistic visions of the synergy between workers and artists were even more preposterous: any worker should be able to write great music, and every musician should be able and willing to work as a miner (see NT, 25–26). As so many dictators, Stalin had no formal education in arts, not to mention music; nevertheless, he regarded himself as an expert in all matters concerning aesthetics; a conversation with him on questions of harmonies or melodies might end up deadly for the musician who was not willing to play the sycophant. Dictators are commonly suspicious of intellectuals and artists,66 and Stalin felt personally insulted when Shostakovich was called a musical genius in the early reviews of his compositions.67 If a musician happened to be associated with the group of the abhorred ‘formalists’, his death warrant was as good as signed. Formalism defined the aesthetic programme of the ‘enemies of the people’, because if the ordinary worker did not like or could not understand this kind of abstract music it was condemned as harmful to the great Communist concern. It was exactly this accusation of being a ‘formalist’ Shostakovich met with in the Pravda article and in the ensuing meetings of various committees established to expurgate music and art from any disturbing elements:

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Zhdanov reminded the nation’s composers yet again that the criticism embodied in the 1936 Pravda editorial were still valid: Music—harmonious, graceful music—was required, not Muddle. The chief culprits were named as Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Khachaturian, Myaskovsky and Shebalin. Their music was compared to a piercing road drill, and to the sound made by a ‘musical gas chamber’. The word Zhdanov used was dushegubka, the name for the truck the Fascists used to drive around while inside their victims were being asphyxiated by its exhaust fumes. (NT, 77)

Great achievements in art are usually based on authenticity and honesty,68 on the passion of an artist who deeply believes in what he creates. Shostakovich was a passionate musician, the individuality of his musical style had already revealed itself in Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk (1934) but also in his numerous other compositions. He was preparing an œuvre of his own, an inimitable manifestation of modernist music, which might have paved (and despite all disturbances it indeed has paved) the way for future musical experiments. Survival for Shostakovich meant that—once the Pravda editorial had been published—he was doomed to ride on the horns of a dilemma: either he adhered to his own aesthetic notions and risked being thrown into prison to be finally executed, or he conformed himself to the new aesthetic principles of musical dilettantes accepting the fact that in this way his own achievements as a musician would be undone. Survival for Shostakovich under these harsh conditions meant that he was coerced to give up an essential part of his aesthetic and personal honesty, integrity and authenticity. Survival became a kind of permanent self-denial, a vivisection, a mutilation, a splitting up of the person into insignificant fragments; as usual, Barnes finds the appropriate, impressive words for this cruel erosion of personality: “He could not live with himself.” It was just a phrase, but an exact one. Under the pressure of Power, the self cracks and splits. The public coward lives with the private hero. Or vice versa. Or, more usually, the public coward lives with the private coward. But that was too simple: the idea of a man split into two by a dividing axe. Better: a man crushed into a hundred pieces of rubble, vainly trying to remember how they—he—had once fitted together. (NT, 155)69

The fragmentation of the self is a decisive step towards death, and first after the Pravda article and then again after the interrogation, Shostakovich feels like a dead man (see NT, 46–47). He experiences the fragmentation

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as a veritable vivisection; in a way mutilated, he has to live on to protect his family and to secure their survival.70 He knows that genius and evilness are incompatible (see NT, 41), and by having to sell his aesthetic honesty to Stalin’s functionaries, he prepares his own artistic burial. In a certain way, survival is deadly for the artist and musician Shostakovich, and he recognizes this high prize he has to pay for his chance to ‘live’ on. Almost as severe as the fragmentation and the vivisection of one’s existence is the loss of freedom which marks the psychology of Shostakovich’s survival. Stalinism comes close to the erasure of human nature, in general, and that of the artist in particular. Men are transformed into cogs of a merciless ‘machine’, and artists become ideological henchmen, puppets with no will of their own, with an everlasting preparedness to follow orders and to serve the dark purposes of dictatorship. It looks as if Stalin instinctively subscribed to Julien Offray de La Mettrie’s notion of man in his provocative book L’homme machine (1748) and that he tried to realize the book’s dark potential by his own politics. Stalin’s intention to “engineer human souls”, rightly characterized as a “chilly, mechanistic phrase” in The Noise of Time (NT, 40), was liable to reach its sinister ends. Stalin, who admired Hitler together with ‘Ivan the Terrible’,71 revealed in notes he left on the margins of Vladimir Lenin’s Materialism and Empiriocriticism (1909) that he counted ‘strength’, ‘activity’ and ‘intelligence’ (‘capability’) among the virtues of human beings; in his view, the catalogue of human vices comprised ‘weakness’, ‘laziness’ and ‘stupidity’.72 Barnes’s paradoxical characterization of Shostakovich as a ‘cowardly hero’ or vice versa a ‘heroic coward’ reveals the ‘weakness’ the composer showed in his behaviour towards Stalin and his acolytes; the composer never dared to contradict Stalin or to resist his orders, and what else could he have done in a climate of fear, where survival might be dependent on the fact that a piece of music ended in “pianissimo and in the minor” instead of in fortissimo and in the major (see NT, 58)? The Noise of Time is teeming with scenes in which Shostakovich is portrayed as a marionette of the great dictator, who found a kind of sadistic pleasure in playing with his helpless victims before killing them.73 As an ‘enemy of the people’, Shostakovich became the appropriate object for ideological re-education; he was invited to attend concerts with ‘real music’, no muddle, and in Barnes’s book, the invitations revealed themselves as urgent demands: “Come to this free open-air concert, comrade. Oh, we really think you should attend. Yes, of course it is voluntary, but it might be a mistake if you didn’t show your face …” (NT, 41). Later on, Shostakovich receives

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intense ideological lessons in Marxism-Leninism by Comrade Troshin, who laments the absence of Stalin’s photograph in the composer’s study (NT, 120–121). Stalinism prevented Shostakovich from being the person he was and forced him into a habit of permanent self-denial and of lying. The cost of survival was betrayal: first of one’s friends and relations, next of oneself. Even after the first encounter with Power, Shostakovich knows that he would give names away in order to survive: They might want to torture him, and he would agree to everything they said immediately, as he had no capacity for bearing pain. Names would be put in front of him, and he would implicate all of them. No, he would say briefly, which would quickly change to Yes, Yes, Yes and Yes, Yes, I was there at the time in the Marshal’s apartment; Yes, I heard him say whatever you suggest he might have said; Yes this general and that politician were involved in the plot, I saw and heard it for myself. (NT, 48)

This is an impressive lesson in the ‘ethics of survival’.74 Fear and anxiety endanger any system of ethical thinking; ethics and morality are devalued in the face of sheer Power. Lying and self-denial have to become an instinctive habit if one wants to survive under the conditions of Stalinism. The cult of impersonality, which transformed Stalin into a ‘Pharaoh’,75 ‘the greatest genius of mankind’ or even ‘God’,76 simultaneously isolated the dictator. A similar isolation, though not achieved by excessive praise but permanent blame, can be observed in Shostakovich’s life: from a full-blooded artist he was turned into a pale and anaemic biological product of soulless ideology, separated from friends and colleagues. For Stalin, Ludwig Feuerbach’s observation “homo homini deus est” seems to be appropriate,77 and Shostakovich has no choice but to join in admiring this ‘human idol’. Shostakovich had to shoulder the unbearable task of becoming a walking contradiction: he is an apostate of his own beliefs, simultaneously a disciple of a quasi-religious Stalin-cult he detests from his heart. Self-betrayal, which is probably incompatible with any forms of aesthetic achievements in music, is the sine qua non of survival under Stalin. It brings about a harsh cognitive dissonance, painful and tragic in its essence. At first, Shostakovich still believes that he can bridge the antagonism between his authentic beliefs and the statements one expects of him by a clever use of irony.78 The Noise of Time analyses the achievements of irony in the context of totalitarianism and dictatorship:

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When truth-speaking became impossible—because it led to immediate death—it had to be disguised. In Jewish folk music, despair is disguised as the dance. And so, truth’s disguise was irony. Because the tyrant’s ear is rarely tuned to hear it. (NT, 85)

But the composer also knows that irony is a negative sign of the time, because it shows that something is deeply corrupt in the state of Denmark. Under Stalin irony overnight grows like a “mushroom” and develops the dangerous character of an insatiable “cancer” which destroys all healthy organs in the body politic (see NT, 86). As a person forced into the position of a maverick, an outsider, an ‘enemy of the people’, irony, as a verbal tool of survival, for a moment, heals the pains of isolation by establishing a small coterie of like-minded persons, who clandestinely lavish abuse on the great leader while openly praising his great gifts. Volkov compared Shostakovich’s relation to Stalin with the yurodivy’s relation with the tsar.79 For Shostakovich, irony is a safety buoy he can cling to if he is in danger of drowning in the incessant streams of contradictions the Party produces from one day to the other.80 Irony allows despair to be expressed in a witty, humorous way; it is a place of refuge for the remnants of a personality under constant attack: All his life he had relied on irony. He imagined that the trait had been born in the usual place: in the gap between how we imagine, or suppose, or hope life will turn out, and the way it actually does. So irony becomes a defence of the self and the soul; it lets you breathe on a day-to-day basis. You write a letter that someone is ‘a marvelous person’ and the recipient knows to conclude the opposite. Irony allows you to parrot the jargon of Power, to read out meaningless speeches written in your name, to gravely lament the absence of Stalin’s portrait in your study while behind a half-open door your wife is holding herself in against forbidden laughter. (NT, 173)

For Shostakovich, irony is one of his basic tools to survive; it is his safety-­ valve if the pent-up anger and the frustrations get too strong to be repressed any longer: “And part of you believed that as long as you could rely on irony, you would be able to survive” (NT, 174). But even irony is not immune against the eroding forces of Stalinism;81 it has to be cultivated and requires at least a minor degree of liberty in order to remain effective. Occasional uses of irony may achieve their intended goals, but a lifelong ironical attitude towards one’s own existence can deteriorate into the state of utter self-alienation: “If you turned your back on irony, it

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curdled into sarcasm. And what good was it then? Sarcasm was irony which had lost its soul” (NT, 175). It is true, irony certainly helped Shostakovich to survive Stalin, but the composer also recognizes that his survival is eventually devalued by a deep note of irony: And this, perhaps, was their final triumph over him. Instead of killing him, they had allowed him to live, and by allowing him to live, they had killed him. This was the final, unanswerable irony to his life: that by allowing him to live, they had killed him. (NT, 176)

The ‘dead survivor’ is an oxymoron describing the pitiable existence Shostakovich was compelled to endure.82 His biography exemplifies the traditional topos of ‘death in life’, of being alive and dead simultaneously.83 Shostakovich had the smile of a ‘condemned’, of ‘a dead man’.84 And he was not alone; in his memoirs, the composer’s friend Solomon Volkov spoke of many men who could no longer be regarded as human beings, but as cadavers instead, because they dared not remember their lives.85 The price for survival under Stalin was high. Self-denial, alienation, self-­ estrangement, betrayal of one’s acquaintance and constant fear accompanied the attempt to live on. The ‘engineering of souls’ went hand in hand with acts of extreme humiliation. As Barnes remarked in one of his interviews, Shostakovich probably ‘suffered more than any other composer in Western art’,86 and a grave cause for his extreme suffering was humiliation. Although he could at first still avoid the mortification of a public apology for having allegedly violated the norms of socialistic music, he was later on humiliated by having to publically support notions which he simply did not cherish. When a group of opportunistic musicologists, handpicked by Stalin’s functionaries, expressed their caustic criticism on his compositions, Shostakovich could not help applauding their wisdom and musical expertise (see NT, 78). Even during ‘the Thaw’, when the ‘Great Terror’ was over and Power had lost its carnivorous appetite and turned “vegetarian” instead (see NT, 117; 133) and when Stalin awarded prestigious prizes onto Shostakovich until the composer “swam in honours like a shrimp in shrimp-cocktail sauce” (NT, 118), he was obligated to sign articles which he had not written himself and in which some anonymous scribbler passed verdicts on the state of musical art and on colleagues Shostakovich would never have shared had he been a free man. But Stalin’s

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regime had two further humiliations in store for him which would finally give the death blow to Shostakovich’s self-esteem. As a modernist composer eager to open up a new chapter in the history of music,87 Shostakovich had always revered the achievements of Stravinsky (see NT, 64–65). For Shostakovich, Stravinsky was probably the most talented musician of the twentieth century, and in masterworks such as Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du Printemps (1913), he found inspiration and encouragement for his own œuvre. As Barnes correctly describes it in The Noise of Time, Shostakovich, out of the blue, received a phone call by Stalin:88 it was the tragic ouverture of the greatest drama of humiliation in Shostakovich’s life. Stalin invited, urged, then pressed him to attend the ‘Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace’ in New York; Shostakovich hesitated, acted coyly and made subterfuges, but in the end he had to accept the ‘invitation’ and flew to New York. In endless meetings he again read out in Russian ideological papers written by others, which were then translated into English. He felt so bored and numbed by this task that he paid no attention to what was printed on the paper, and after the first page, sat down in order to leave the rest of the work to the American translator. With shock and shame, he then suddenly realized that he, Shostakovich, was eagerly condemning the work of Stravinsky in this speech; that he now betrayed even the person he admired more than anyone else in this world. And his humiliation did not end there. Another Russian, Nikolas Nabokov, interrogated him after the speech and insisted on learning if the composer ‘personally subscribed’ to the opinions he had just delivered in his official speech. In a scene reminding the reader of ‘Peter’s Denial’ in the Gospel, Shostakovich affirms not three but five times that these are his personal opinions. It is the darkest hour in the composer’s existence: “It had been a betrayal. He had betrayed Stravinsky, and in doing so, he had betrayed music. Later, he told Mravinsky that it had been the worst moment of his life” (NT, 110). Not to betray music had been the last anchor in Shostakovich’s life; to listen to, to play and to compose music had given him the opportunity of escaping from an existence unbearable in its dreariness and claustrophobia. Not allowed to live like other, ordinary people, “he had buried himself in his music, which took his entire attention and therefore consoled him” (see NT, 140). The title of Barnes’s book The Noise of Time, which Barnes borrowed from Osip Mandelstam’s memoirs,89 refers to the cacophony which accompanies the period of the ‘Great Terror’ and World War II:

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with the shriek noise of falling bombs, the sound of exploding grenades, the inhuman rhythm of machine guns deafening musicians in particular (see NT, 164) and the staccato syncopation of the pistol shots by which the frequent executions betrayed themselves. It alludes to the “bigger barking dogs” Shostakovich had provoked with his art (see NT, 41). For Shostakovich, music was the antidote to the noise of time; what his enemies had denounced as the musical equivalent to ‘gas chambers’, was a therapy for his injured mind, his abused personality and his cracked identity, allowing him to feel still as a human being, when his normal life proved to him every day that he was nothing but a walking corpse and belonged to the group of the ‘living dead’. Music for Shostakovich was the “whisper of history, heard above the noise of time” (see NT, 92). Music was Shostakovich’s refuge; by betraying Stravinsky, he ran the risk of losing it: What could be put up against the noise of time? Only that music which is inside ourselves—the music of our being—which transformed by some into real music. Which, over the decades, if it is strong and pure and pure enough to drown out the noise of time, is transformed into the whisper of history. That was what he held to. (NT, 125)

For Shostakovich, music is the only way to leave Stalin behind, to transcend the ‘Great Terror’ and to enter a proto-mythological sphere called the aevum by some critics,90 immune against any earthly, political or ideological interferences.91 The betrayal of music was probably Shostakovich’s ‘genuine sin’ and the most significant humiliation; as a person, he regretted this betrayal most intensely, “inside he felt awash with shame and self-­ contempt” (see NT, 101), and from now on, his life became a sinister mélange of fear and shame: One fear drives out another, as one nail drives out another. So, as the climbing plane seemed to hit solid ledges of air, he concentrated on the local, immediate fear: of immolation, disintegration, instant oblivion. Fear normally drives out all other emotion as well; but not shame. Fear and shame swilled happily together in his stomach. (NT, 61)

Up to this moment, however, Shostakovich’s humiliation paradoxically still remained a ‘personal’ one, widely concealed from the eyes of the public sphere. With the exception of his most intimate friends, probably

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nobody could reckon the high esteem in which Shostakovich held Stravinsky. He himself knew of the tremendous break of honesty he had been forced to commit, but the public might still assume that, for Shostakovich, Stravinsky might just be one of the many composers whose work did not really count as ‘ideologically correct’. Still it was possible to appear as a victim, as someone who only had to wait to reveal his true opinions and to correct the aesthetic judgement he had been obliged to pass publicly. But there was still a further humiliation waiting for Shostakovich. The relentless pursuit of Stalin and his functionaries had been terrible, but the new acknowledgement of his music, the awards he received, the positions he now was summoned to take over, the new ‘authority’ he might have enjoyed under different conditions in a certain way looked like an official gravestone the state gave to the person it had killed. Shostakovich’s son Maxim reports to have seen his father weep only twice in his life, once when he mourned the death of his wife and a second time, when he was forced to join the Party.92 His forced assimilation was now complete: He felt suddenly, as if all the breath had been taken out of his body. How, why had he not seen this coming? All through the years of terror, he had been able to say that at least he had never tried to make things easier for himself by becoming a Party member. And now, finally, after the great fear was over, they had come for his soul. (NT, 152)

He tried to excuse himself for not being able to attend the committee meeting where his membership is to be officially proclaimed, but he is not even spared this last humiliation.

The Survival of Music In one of his stories in the collection Blick vom Turm: Fabeln (1968), the German writer Günther Anders once remarked that a person is finally dead when nobody thinks and talks of him or her anymore.93 What—in the long run—will concern anyone, because humankind will probably cease to exist in the future, is of particular concern for someone opposed by a dictatorial political regime. Stalin did not only try to engineer the human soul, he was also keen on engineering ‘truth’ and ‘history’. Barnes’s central themes—“the elusiveness of truth”, “the subjectivity of memory” and

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“the relativity of all knowledge”,94 always discussed as unavoidable byproducts of human perception and history—assume a darker colour when applied to Stalinism, since Stalin actively contributed to distorting facts and fogging the truth. Stalinistic propaganda was busy manipulating photographs, deleting persons who had lost the dictator’s favour. The regime did not shy from rewriting history books, and the fear, Shostakovich expresses in The Noise of Time, is thus not ungrounded: “There is no escaping one’s destiny.” And so, he would be dead at thirty. Older than Pergolesi, true, but younger even than Schubert. And Pushkin himself, for that matter. His name and his music would be obliterated. Not only would he not exist, he would never have existed. He had been a mistake, swiftly corrected; a face in a photograph that went missing the next time that photograph was printed. […] He would be remembered by what? […] Perhaps his First Symphony would make the cheerful prelude to concerts of mature works by composers lucky enough to outlive him. (see NT, 47)

The radical annihilation of an existence thus seems possible. But, and this is the optimistic message Barnes insists on in his book, art has a special magic, a distinctive aura, not to be destroyed easily by earthly powers. In The Noise of Time, Barnes exemplifies what he told the interviewer in one of his own analyses of the book, namely, that he is interested in the question who finally survives ‘the collision between art and Power’, the artist or the dictator.95 The particularity of an artist’s life defines itself as the liminality between transitoriness and immortality; the artist as a human being is mortal of course, but if he is lucky, his works of art may live on long after their creator has died. Art, if it is ‘successful’ in the long term, survives in a realm of a quasi-timeless, mythological state, called the aevum by Thomas Aquinas. This is a place immune against earthly forces, an atemporal locus amoenus, no dictator could ever enter; here the artist triumphs over Power; here the final victory is obvious to everyone. The aevum is the place where—in the words of Walter Benjamin—a kind of ‘poetic immortality’ seems at least possible.96 Art, seen in this context, assumes a new power; for the artist, especially the one who has to live in a hostile social and political environment, art can give consolation; it may promise a way of existence real life never offered and never will. But even if art does not reveal this utopian

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character, it allows a kind of vicarious existence. In art, repressed essential aspects of the existence tormented by a totalitarian regime may resurrect in a new, aesthetic and sublime form. Shostakovich’s music with its atonal ambiguity was the continuation of his ironical attitude towards life; his works show subtle forms of criticism against Stalin and his functionaries.97 The composer’s music uses sophisticated techniques to camouflage his most intimate beliefs. The artist, it is true, may be made “tongue-tied” as Shakespeare described his oppression with his own poetical words (see NT, 87). Music, it is true, may be drowned in the ‘noise of time’, but then again, the noise of time may be dispelled by music. And art in general, and music in particular, based on the intense emotions of lifelong suffering, testifies to the truth that great works of art frequently mirror the history of human ordeal.98 The time-honoured metaphor of ‘the oyster and the pearl’ illustrates this complex relationship: only an injured oyster produces a pearl.99 Even if Shostakovich himself may have had the feeling to have betrayed his art, posterity proves him wrong. By using art as a refugium for his unlived life, by transferring his most personal, most intimate emotions and beliefs into the region of the aevum, Shostakovich managed to survive Stalin and his bloodhounds. In other words, despite the lifelong shipwreck he suffered on the sea of life, he has left traces.100 When Isaak Glikman saw Shostakovich on his deathbed, he thought that the composer looked “as though he had escaped”.101 Although Shostakovich could neither defend his family, his acquaintance, his friends, nor himself, he— despite his own beliefs—was able to defend his music. He did not allow the regime to take possession of all his compositions. There are some propagandistic pieces he intentionally contributed to the false cult of Stalin celebrations, but in his more substantial works, such as the Symphonies and the String Quartets, he remained true to himself by insisting on the autonomy of art, simultaneously denying the demands of a pure aestheticism: Art belongs to everybody and nobody. Art belongs to all time and no time. Art belongs to those who create it and those who savour it. Art no more belongs to the People and the Party than it once belonged to the aristocracy and the patron. Art is the whisper of history, heard above the noise of time. Art does not exist for art’s sake: it exists for people’s sake. But which people, and who defines them? He always thought of his own art as anti-aristocratic. Did he write, as his detractors maintained, for a bourgeois cosmopolitan elite? No. Did he write, as his detractors wanted him to, for the Donbass

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miner weary from his shift and in need of a soothing pick-me-up? No. He wrote music for everyone and no one. He wrote music for those who best appreciated the music he wrote, regardless of social origin. He wrote music for the ears that could hear. And he knew, therefore, that all true definitions of art are circular, and all untrue definitions of art ascribe to it a specific function. (see NT, 92)

Conclusion: Survival—Worse than Death Barnes’s creative adaptation of Shostakovich’s biography is a substantial contribution to the composer’s ‘survival’, but it is also a moving document about the relationship between Power and art. The Noise of Time shows the limits of ethical thinking; to put it more succinctly, the book demonstrates that academic reflections on the nature and function of ethical thinking are doomed to be revised when they collide with real life, especially the forces of a totalitarian state. Is it possible to remain honest if your ideological oppressors threaten you with death? Will a person remain loyal to his family and friends if torture awaits him? Is the difference between utilitaristic systems of ethical thinking and deontic notions of any relevance if you may be killed just for having told a joke to the wrong person?102 Those who would answer these questions in the affirmative may count themselves among the number of the few heroes. If answered honestly, most persons would confess at least a certain degree of cowardice or ignorance, knowing that they would probably be too weak to face the imminent dangers. Shostakovich knew that he was no hero. His ‘heroic cowardice’ as described by Barnes reveals the contours of a lifelong deep humiliation, a vivisection of his former self, when he was merely permitted to survive in fragments. Feeling like a walking cadaver Shostakovich started to despise himself, experiencing his own personality as a form of radical estrangement. A dark note of elegy permeates Barnes’s description of Shostakovich’s life just as the ‘requiem’ plays a central role in Shostakovich’s music;103 for the composer, it is terribly impossible to return to his former state of honesty, innocence and purity. The Stalinistic ideology has successfully poisoned his being, the toxic surrounding has turned him into a person alive and dead at the same time. When he recognizes that his life is in no danger any longer, he deeply feels this as a further deterioration of his existence:

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He was no longer afraid of being killed—that was true, and should have been an advantage. He knew he would be allowed to live, and receive the best medical attention. But, in a way, that was worse. Because it is always possible to bring the living to a lower point. You cannot say that of the dead. (NT, 135)

For a person torn to pieces by antagonistic forces, as a human being consisting of fragments and smithereens, split up into innumerable atoms, it is impossible to regain identity; memory could perhaps fuse the torn pieces together again, but in Shostakovich’s case, his memory had been perverted by being transformed into a storehouse of guilt. Earthly survival for him had become a synonym of punishment; survival inseparable from feelings of guilt, shame and frustration, certainly worse than death, if one believes the composer himself. Looking back, Shostakovich described his life as “gray and dull” without any “particular happy moments”, and he confesses that it makes him “sad to think about it”.104 In one of his most moving letters Shostakovich wrote at the age of 62, he made up the balance of his existence; it reads like a total relinquishment of survival: Tomorrow is my sixty-second birthday. At such an age, people are apt to reply coquettishly to questions such as ‘If you could be born over again, would you live your sixty-two years in the same way?’ ‘Yes’, they say, ‘not everything was perfect of course, there were some disappointments, but on the whole I would do much the same again’. If I were ever to be asked this question, my reply would be: ‘No! A thousand times no!’105

Nevertheless, everyone who loves music is glad to see: Shostakovich survived.

Notes 1. See Groes and Childs (2011, 1–10); the epithet was originally used by Mira Stout, see Groes and Childs (2011, 2). 2. See Julian Barnes Interview on Charlie Rose (28 June 2016); https:// www.youtube.com/wat. 3. See Barnes Interview on Charlie Rose. 4. See Freiburg (2009, 31–52). 5. For the concept of Joyce’s ‘epiphany’, see Butler (1990, 67–86). 6. Here quoted from Lee (1992, xi).

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7. I prefer the term ‘epiphanic story’ to Elliotts concept of the ‘microeconomic mode’, which, however, is closely connected to it; see Elliott (2018, 16). 8. ‘Shipwreck’ and ‘survival’ are closely associated configurations harking back to the time-honoured topos in Lucrece’s famous poem De rerum natura (first century BC); see Blumenberg (1997). 9. See Barnes (1990 [1989], 81–111); see also the chapter by Vanessa Guignery in the present volume. 10. See also Freiburg (1998, 431–458). 11. See also Childs (2011, 103–116). 12. See the serene abuse Barnes lavishes on his ‘last reader’; Barnes (2008, 225–227). 13. See Barnes (2008, 64): “The fury of the resurrected atheist: that would be something worth seeing”. 14. See Kusek (2015, 150). 15. Barnes (2013, 69). 16. Barnes (2013, 114–115). 17. For this biographical information, see “Julian Barnes, The Full Interview—BBC Newsnight” (07 February 2016). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gBAgKTtZMMQ. 18. Julian Barnes, “Interview”, The Bookseller (Internet). https://www.thebookseller.com/news/julian-­barnes-­interview-­320358. 19. See Julian Barnes Interview on Charlie Rose. 20. “Julian Barnes, The Full Interview—BBC Newsnight”. 21. David (2017). 22. This mélange consisting of detailed research and fictional adaptation of the historical material is typical of Barnes’s way of working; for his books The Porcupine (1992) and Arthur & George (2005) he also followed his sources very closely; see also Kondeva (2011, 81–91) and Lycett (2011, 130). 23. Anonymous (2017). 24. Tischer (2017). 25. For a criticism of this style, see Denk (2016), who doubts that a man suffering from mortal fear would ‘think’ in this way. 26. See Craven (2016). 27. Craven (2016). 28. Barnes (2016, 7–11). All further references to this novel will be put in brackets in the running text (NT). 29. See Julian Barnes Interview on Charlie Rose (28th June 2016); https:// www.youtube.com/wat. 30. See also Chivers (2016, 880). 31. Craven, “One Hand Behind his Back: The Noise of Time by Julian Barnes”.

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32. See Chlewnjuk (2015, 245). 33. See the chapter “Angst im inneren Zirkel” in Chlewnjuk (2015, 233–244). 34. The article was written by David Zaslavski; see Wilson (1995, 109). 35. See the report in Wolkow (2006, 165–166). 36. Stalin had ordered Nikolai Yezhov to organize tortures and executions; Yezhov was feared as the ‘bloodthirsty dwarf’; see Kellmann (2005, 130–131); see also the chapter “The Great Terrorist” in: Service (2004, 346–356). 37. See Pope (1975, 252–264; 257 [l.132]). 38. Anonymous (2001, 9). 39. Anonymous (2001, 38). (Shostakovich’s letter from 21 December 1949). 40. See Anonymous (2001, 67, 76 and 93–94). (Shostakovich’s letters from 06 September 1958 and 03 November 1960). 41. See Anonymous (2001, 169). (Shostakovich’s letter from 23 November 1969). 42. See “Julian Barnes, The Full Interview—BBC Newsnight”. 43. Only members of Stalin’s entourage had free access to victuals and petrol; Chlewnjuk (2015, 241). 44. See Anonymous (2001, 27). (Shostakovich’s letter from 02 January 1945). 45. Here quoted from Wilson (1995, 203). 46. See Ardov (2004, 68–69). 47. Relentless stress and anxiety were responsible for the chronic illnesses of many members of the Central Committee, too; see Chlewnjuk (2015, 240). 48. Lec (1982, 84). 49. See “Julian Barnes, The Full Interview—BBC Newsnight”. 50. See “Julian Barnes Interview on Charlie Rose”. 51. See Kellmann (2005, 115–153). See also Barnes’s aphorism “History repeats itself the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce”; quoted from Guignery (2009, 57). 52. See Kellmann (2005, 89). 53. See Kellmann (2005, 135). 54. See Kellmann (2005, 124). 55. See Chlewnjuk (2015, 246). 56. Fay (2000, 92). 57. Barnes’s account of the interrogation follows its historical document very closely; see Wilson (1995, 124–125). 58. Kellmann (2005, 131; my translation). 59. Kellmann (2005, 129). 60. See also Shostakovich’s own report in Volkov (1981, 116): “Because after the articles came the ‘Tukhachevsky affair’. It was a terrible blow for me

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when Tukhachevsky was shot. When I read about it in the papers, I blacked out. I felt they were killing me, that’s how bad I felt. But I wouldn’t like to lay it on too thick at this point. It’s only in fine literature that a person stops eating and sleeping because he’s so overwrought. In reality, life is much simpler, and as Zoshchenko noted, life gives little material to fiction writers”. 61. Julian Barnes Interview on Charlie Rose (28 June 2016); https://www. youtube.com/wat. For the paradoxical notion of the ‘happy survivor’, see the introduction to the present volume. 62. See Barnes (2013, 114–115). 63. When Shostakovich worked as a professor of music at the Leningrad Conservatory his students admired his musical expertise: “They were all awed by their teacher’s phenomenal musical memory, laser-like insight into compositional flaws, outstanding sight-reading ability, and encyclopedic command of the literature” (Fay 2000, 108). 64. See Meyer (1984, 24–24 and 27–29). 65. See Kellmann (2005, 91). 66. For the analysis of the relationship between intellectuals and the brutal force of totalitarianism, see Jean Améry’s impressive essay “At the Mind’s Limits”, in Améry (1986, 1–20). 67. See Wolkow (2006, 176–177). 68. For the reflection on ‘honesty’, see also NT, 33 and 79. 69. This is an ironic parallel to Stalin’s personality who also ended up not being able to ‘live with himself’; the reasons which caused this impossibility, however, were completely different: Stalin had developed a ruthless system of suspiciousness which in the end collapsed in absurdity when he said: “I am at my end. I do not trust anyone anymore, not even myself”; see Kellmann (2005, 249). 70. Nevertheless, Shostakovich’s family felt the consequences of Stalin’s purges; see Fay (2000, 97–98). 71. See Service (2004, 340). 72. See Service (2004, 341–342). 73. For a description of Stalin’s mindset, see the chapter “Mind of Terror” in Service (2004, 336–345); see also Volkov (1981, 147): “Stalin liked to put a man face to face with death and then make him dance to his own tune”. 74. The claim that ‘ethics’ and the belief in the possibility of a ‘good life’ are annihilated under torture is not only a central idea in Barnes’s novel but a fact of real life experience; for the analysis of the significance of torture, see Jean Améry’s impressive essay “Torture”, in Améry (1986, 21–40); see also the well-informed analysis of Améry’s essay in Poetini (2014, 43–80).

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75. See the chapter “Emperor Warship”, in Service (2004, 541–550); Shostakovich, too, felt like a “resurrected pharaoh” and a “walking mummy”; see Volkov (1981, 237). 76. See Volkov (1981, 146). 77. See Feuerbach (1973, 444). 78. For the nature of ‘irony’, see Knox (1961). 79. See Volkov (1981, xxix); see also Volkov (1981, xxv): “The yurodivy has the gift to see and hear what others know nothing about. But he tells the world about his insight in an intentionally paradoxical way, in code. He plays the fool, while actually being a persistent exposer of evil and injustice. The yurodivy is an anarchist and individualist, who in his public role breaks the commonly held ‘moral’ laws of behavior and flouts conventions. But he sets strict limitations, rules, and taboos for himself”. 80. See NT, 89: “Further, he had the vanity, or foolishness, to notice and remember that what the Party had said yesterday was often in direct contradiction to what the Party was saying today”. Barnes concedes that some readers might interpret sentences like these as allusions to the ‘regime’ of Donald Trump in contemporary America; see David (2017). 81. It is also a tragic irony that Shostakovich, who was tormented all his life by Stalin, is not even mentioned in the index of the German biography of the dictator; see Kellmann (2005, 349–351). 82. Frank Kermode, who—like Barnes—wrote about survival so often, called this paradoxical figure of the ‘dead survivor’, who feels like a stranger in this world, ‘métèque’; see Rose (2012, 19). Améry described a similar experience using the metaphor of ‘Lazarus’ doomed to ‘survive’ in the ‘limbus’ between life and death; see Poetini (2014, 27 and 81). 83. For the history of this topos, see Blaicher (1998). 84. Volkov (1981, 198). 85. See Vokov (1981, xiv): “A man without a memory is a corpse. So many had passed before me, these living corpses, who remembered only officially sanctioned events—and only in the officially sanctioned way”. 86. See Julian Barnes Interview on Charlie Rose (28 June 2016); https:// www.youtube.com/wat. 87. For a description of the musical development of Shostakovich in his symphonies, see also Roseberry (2008, 9–37). The experimental aspect of Shostakovich’s compositions showed itself very early, for example, in his “Aphorisms for the Piano”; see Meyer (1984, 108–109). 88. The phone call is documented in several testimonies; see, for example, Volkov (1981, 148). 89. See Preston (2017). 90. See Rose (2012, 18).

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91. In his review of the book Michael Maar rightly complains that Barnes— unlike Thomas Mann in his Doktor Faustus (1947)—does not pay enough attention to the nature of Shostakovich’s music and wishes that at least the composer’s string quartets should have been characterized by the author (Maar 2017). 92. See Ardov (2004, 159–160); Volkov reports that Shostakovich was extremely hysterical, drank vodka, shed tears and looked like a character from Dostoevski’s novel who was likely to commit suicide; see Wolkow (2006, 403). 93. See Anders (1984, 78). 94. See the beginning of this chapter. 95. See Julian Barnes Interview on Charlie Rose (28 June 2016); https:// www.youtube.com/wat. 96. See Weidner (2011, 170). 97. For the use of ironical references in Shostakovich’s music, comparable to the principle of intertextuality in literary texts, see Ulicka (2007). 98. Shostakovich’s friend Volkov praised the music as an expression of the primal fear (Urangst); see Wolkow (2006, 10). 99. For the complex cultural background of the metaphor, see Ohly (1977, 284). 100. The metaphor of the ‘shipwreck with spectator’ implies that the disasters leave no trace behind and that the sea—after the noise of the storm—will become as calm as it had been before; see also Blumenberg (1997). 101. Volkov (1981, xix). 102. See also Quante (2011, 126–142). 103. Volkov (1981, xxxiv). 104. Volkov (1981, 275). 105. Anonymous (2001, 154–155).

References Améry, Jean. 1986 [1980]. At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and its Realities. Trans. Sindey Rosenfeld and Stella P.  Rosenfeld. New York: Schocken Books. Anders, Günther. 1984. Wie lange? In Der Blick vom Turm: Fabeln. München: Beck. Anonymous. 2001. Story of a Friendship: The Letters of Dmitry Shostakovich to Isaak Glikman 1941–1975. Trans. Anthony Phillips. London: Faber and Faber. ———. 2017. Der Lärm der Zeit von Julian Barnes. Buchrezensionen.org. https:// www.buecherrezensionen.org/buecher/rezension/julian-­barnes-­der-­laerm-­ der-­zeit.htm. Ardov, Michael. 2004. Memories of Shostakovich: Interviews with the Composer’s Children. Trans. Rosanna Kelly and Michael Meylac. London: Short Books.

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Barnes, Julian. 1990 [1989]. A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters. London: Picador. ———. 2008. Nothing to be Frightened Of. London: Jonathan Cape. ———. 2013. Levels of Life. London: Jonathan Cape. ———. 2016. The Noise of Time. London: Jonathan Cape. Blaicher, Günther, ed. 1998. Death-in-Life: Studien zur historischen Entfaltung der Paradoxie der Entfremdung in der englischen Literatur. Trier: WVT. Blumenberg, Hans. 1997. Shipwreck with Spectator: Paradigm of a Metaphor for Existence. Trans. Steven Rendall. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Butler, Christopher. 1990. Joyce the Modernist. In The Cambridge Companion to James Joyce, ed. Derek Attridge, 67–86. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Childs, Peter. 2011. Matters of Life and Death: The Short Stories of Julian Barnes. In Julian Barnes: Contemporary Critical Perspectives, ed. Sebastian Groes and Peter Childs, 103–116. London: Continuum. Chivers, Sally. 2016. Survival of the Fittest: CanLit and Disability. In The Oxford Handbook of Canadian Literature, ed. Cynthia Sugars, 877–891. New York: Oxford University Press. Chlewnjuk, Oleg. 2015. Stalin: Eine Biographie. Trans. Helmut Dierlamm. München: Siedler. Craven, Peter. 2016. One Hand Behind his Back: The Noise of Time by Julian Barnes. Sydney Review of Books. https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/ the-­noise-­of-­time-­julian-­barnes/. David, Thomas. 2017. ‘Sadomaso-Beziehung zwischen Theresa May und Trump’: Sechs Jahre nach dem Booker-Preis hat Julian Barnes wieder einen Roman geschrieben. Ein Gespräch über “alternative Fakten” unter Stalin und die Sadomaso-Beziehung von Theresa May und Donald Trump. Die Welt. https:// www.welt.de/kultur/literarischewelt/ar ticle162174395/Sadomaso-­ Beziehung-­zwischen-­Theresa-­May-­und-­Trump.html. Denk, Jeremy. 2016. The Noise of Time by Julian Barnes. The New  York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/15/books/review/the-­noise-­of-­time-­ by-­julian-­barnes.html. Elliott, Jane. 2018. The Microeconomic Mode: Political Subjectivity in Contemporary Popular Aesthetics. New York: Columbia University Press. Fay, Laurel E. 2000. Shostakovich: A Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Feuerbach, Ludwig. 1973. Das Wesen des Christentums. In Gesammelte Werke, ed. Werner Schuffenhauer, vol. 5. Berlin: Akademie Verlag. Freiburg, Rudolf. 1998. ‘Just Voices Echoing in the Dark’: Geschichte als literarisches Genre im Romanwerk Julian Barnes’. In Fiktion und Geschichte in der anglo-amerikanischen Literatur: Festschrift für Heinz Joachim Müllenbrock, ed. Rüdiger Ahrens and Fritz-Wilhelm Neumann, 431–458. Heidelberg: Winter.

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———. 2009. ‘Novels Come out of Life, Not out of Theories’: An Interview with Julian Barnes. In Conversations with Julian Barnes, ed. Vanessa Guignery and Ryan Roberts, 31–52. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Groes, Sebastian, and Peter Childs. 2011. Julian Barnes and the Wisdom of Uncertainty. In Julian Barnes: Contemporary Critical Perspectives, ed. Sebastian Groes and Peter Childs, 1–10. London: Continuum. Guignery, Vanessa. 2009. History in Question: An Interview with Julian Barnes. In Conversations with Julian Barnes, ed. Vanessa Guignery and Ryan Roberts, 53–64. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Kellmann, Klaus. 2005. Stalin: Eine Biographie. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgemeinschaft. Knox, Norbert. 1961. The Word Irony and its Context: 1500–1750. Durham: Duke University Press. Kondeva, Dimitrina. 2011. The Story of Julian Barnes’s The Porcupine: An Epistolary ½ Chapter. In Julian Barnes: Contemporary Critical Perspectives, ed. Sebastian Groes and Peter Childs, 81–91. London: Continuum. Kusek, Robert. 2015. Challenging Generic Conventions: Levels of Life by Julian Barnes and the Genre of (Auto)thanatography. Anglistik 26 (2): 149–160. Lec, Stanislaw Jerzy. 1982. In Alle unfrisierten Gedanken, ed. Karl Dedecius. München: Hanser. Lee, Hermione. 1992. Introduction. In Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse, ed. Stella McNichol, ix–xliii. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Lycett, Andrew. 2011. Afterword: Seeing and Knowing with the Eyes of Faith. In Julian Barnes: Contemporary Critical Perspectives, ed. Sebastian Groes and Peter Childs, 129–133. London: Continuum. Maar, Michael. 2017. Julian Barnes: Bloß die Musik fehlt. Zeit.de. https://www.zeit. de/2017/08/julian-­barnes-­laerm-­zeit-­komponist-­dmitri-­schostakowitsch. Meyer, Krzysztof. 1984. Schostakowitsch: Sein Leben, sein Werk, seine Zeit. Bergisch Gladbach: Gustav Lübbe. Ohly, Friedrich. 1977. Schriften zur mittelalterlichen Bedeutungsforschung. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. Poetini, Christian. 2014. Weiterüberleben: Jean Améry und Imre Kertèsz. Bielefeld: Aisthesis. Pope, Alexander. 1975 [1924]. An Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot. In Alexander Pope, Collected Poems, ed. Bonamy Dobrée, 252–264. London: Everyman’s Library. Preston, Alex. 2017. The Noise of Time Review—Julian Barnes’s Masterpiece: Shostakovich’s Battle with His Conscience is Explored in a Magnificent Fictionalised Retelling of the Composer’s Life Under Stalin. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/jan/17/ the-­noise-­of-­time-­julian-­barnes-­review-­dmitri-­shostakovich. Quante, Michael. 2011. Einführung in die Allgemeine Ethik. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft.

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Rose, Jaqueline. 2012. The Art of Survival. Critical Quarterly 54 (1): 16–19. Roseberry, Eric. 2008. Personal Integrity and Public Service: The Voice of the Symphonist. In The Cambridge Companion to Shostakovich, ed. Pauline Fairclough and David Fanning, 9–37. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Service, Robert. 2004. Stalin: A Biography. London: Macmillan. Tischer, Wolfgang. 2017. Julian Barnes: Der Lärm der Zeit—Glauben Sie nicht, was Sie da hören. Literaturcafé.de https://www.literaturcafe.de/ julian-­barnes-­der-­laerm-­der-­zeit-­glauben-­sie-­nicht-­was-­sie-­da-­hoeren. Ulicka, Danuta. 2007. The Enemy of the People, The Formalist Number 2, The Collaborator Shostakovich. Interpretations: European Research Project for Poetics & Hermeneutics 1: 99–114. Volkov, Solomon. 1981 [1979]. Testimony: The Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich. Trans. Antonina W. Bouis. London: Faber and Faber. Weidner, Daniel. 2011. ‘Fort-, Über-, Nachleben’: Zu einer Denkfigur bei Benjamin. In Benjamin Studien 2, ed. Daniel Weidner and Sigrid Weigel, 161–178. München: Fink. Wilson, Elizabeth. 1995 [1988]. Shostakovich: A Life Remembered. London: Faber and Faber. Wolkow, Solomon. 2006 [2004]. Stalin und Shostakovich: Der Diktator und der Künstler. Trans. Klaus-Dieter Schmidt. Berlin: List.

Onlinequellen (YouTube, etc.) Julian Barnes Interview on Charlie Rose (28 June 2016). https://www.youtube. com/wat. Julian Barnes, The Full Interview—BBC Newsnight” (07 February 2016). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gBAgKTtZMMQ.

CHAPTER 7

Vulnerability, Empathy, and the Ethics of Survival in Graham Swift’s Wish You Were Here Susana Onega

In an article wittily entitled “Graham Swift and the Mourning After”, Adrian Poole argues that the great majority of Swift’s main characters are ageing males engaged in recollecting their younger selves and embodying “guilty, damaged, vulnerable, diffident figures of manhood”.1 Although these words were written twelve years before the publication of Wish You Were Here, they are perfectly applicable to Swift’s ninth novel, as it develops around the process of mourning of Jack Luxton, a guilty, damaged, vulnerable, diffident middle-aged man engaged in a painful process of

The author would like to acknowledge the support of the Spanish Ministry of Economy, Industry and Competitiveness (MINECO) and the European Regional Development Fund (DGI/ERDF) (code FFI2017-84258-P); the University of Zaragoza and Ibercaja (JIUZ-2017-HUM-02); and the Government of Aragón and the European Social Fund (ESF) (code H03_20R), for the writing of this chapter. S. Onega (*) University of Zaragoza, Zaragoza, Spain e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 R. Freiburg, G. Bayer (eds.), The Ethics of Survival in Contemporary Literature and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83422-7_7

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recollection of his younger self, triggered by the death of Tom, his beloved younger brother, who, following his mother’s death and the appearance of the mad cow disease on their farm, had run off from home to join the army, leaving Jack to fend with the farm and with the rages and ominous silences of Michael Luxton, their traumatised father. Trauma critics with a Freudian allegiance agree that the defining characteristic of psychic trauma is its structural belatedness, the fact that a “traumatic event is not assimilated or experienced fully at the time of its occurrence”,2 but lies dormant, sometimes for many years, until a second traumatic event activates the symptoms of the first. Thus, Greg Forter defines trauma as “less a matter of punctual events intruding upon an unprepared psyche than an effect of the interplay between two moments, the second of which retrospectively determines the meaning of the first”.3 This relational definition of trauma would be perfectly applicable to Jack Luxton’s condition in the narrative present. His reception of a letter from the Ministry of Defence,4 informing him that his brother, “Corporal Thomas Luxton, along with two others of his unit, had been killed ‘on active duty’ in Iraq in the Basra region of operations, on 4th November 2006”,5 is the traumatic shock that activates the symptoms of an earlier trauma of loss: the lingering and painful death of their mother, Vera, “when Jack was twenty-one and Tom was thirteen, of ovarian cancer”,6 that is, eighteen years earlier, in 1988, as Jack is now thirty nine. Before Vera’s death, the Luxtons—Jack, his parents, Michael and Vera, and Tom, eight years his junior—were a tight-knit, inward-looking family sustained by a proud heritage of service to the nation symbolised by the medal for “Distinguished Conduct in the Field”,7 shared, according to Vera, by George and Fred, the Luxton great uncles who had served and died on the Somme in the First World War,8 and whose names were recorded in the Marleston War Memorial and honoured every year on Remembrance Day.9 The other element of cohesion was the family’s attachment to Jebb, the large farm in north Devon that had belonged to the Luxtons since 1614.10 Jack associates the end of this idealised rural family life, in harmony with nature, the land and the nation, with the death of his mother. As he reflects: The cow disease, which came later, was one thing and it was a killer in every sense, but the rot really set in […] when Vera died. Michael had run the farm, but Vera had overseen it, had made it revolve in some way round herself.11

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Beneath Jack’s personal trauma of loss lies then a wider trauma of deracination motivated by two subsequent epidemics: Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE), commonly known as mad cow disease, after Vera’s death and, ten years later, when the farms were starting to recover from its devastating effects, the mouth-and-foot disease,12 which once again covered the Devon countryside with Dantean smoke and fire stemming from the huge pyres of burning cows, “thousands more rotting on the fields”.13 The effect of these plagues was determinant in the ruin not only of Jebb farm and Westcott farm, the neighbouring farm owned by Jimmy Merrick and her daughter Ellie (Jack’s girl-friend and later wife) but also of many other farms all over England. The impotence Michael Luxton felt during the painful and lingering death of his wife, together with the obligation to sacrifice his healthy cows preventively, transformed him from proud member of the farming community into an aloof and angry man in a state of shock, incapable of expressing his feelings or empathise with those of Jack and Tom. Thus, after the killing of their sixty-five head of cattle, when they expected their father to put his arms around them, “[h]e’d done what he’d begun to do occasionally, after his wife’s death. He’d looked hard at his feet, at the ground he was standing on, and spat hard”.14 Tom’s decision to enrol in the army on the very day of his eighteenth birthday had been harboured two years earlier. As the narrator explains, “Michael had pulled Tom out of school when he turned sixteen to be a prisoner with his brother at Jebb Farm”.15 But the trigger in his decision to go away had been his father’s killing of Luke, the very ill and half blind family dog Tom considered his own. Jack points to the traumatic nature of this event when he reflects: “Sixteen to eighteen. In between, there’d been an on-going cattle disease, but also there’d been Luke”.16 At this stage, Michael’s treatment of Tom had become atrocious, even though or perhaps precisely because, after Vera’s death, Tom had assumed the “feminine” tasks of cooking, washing and looking-after the family, while “[Jack] and Dad simply watched him do it”.17 Tom enrolled in the army in December 1993, and Michael shot himself under the centenary oak tree at Barton Field with the DCM medal in his breast pocket, nearly one year later, on the first Sunday of November 1994,18 after fulfilling his duty of participating in the homage to the Luxton brothers on Remembrance Day. While the massive slaughter of cows may be seen as the collective catastrophe that brought about the end of an ancestral English life form, the fact that Tom’s escape from the farm involved his transformation from hunter to sniper, serving in such hot areas of conflict as the Iraq war, the

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Afghanistan war and the Bosnia war, against the background of the on-­ going “war on terror”,19 points to what Jack’s clients at the Lookout Caravan Park used to describe as the hopeless and “dire state of the world”.20 From this worldwide perspective, the story of the Luxtons becomes representative of the general malaise affecting an age dominated by the trauma paradigm.21 Jack’s painful recollection of the past prompted by Tom’s death may be seen, then, as a healing attempt to transform his traumatic memories into narrative memories as a way not only to gather a true sense of self in the light of Tom’s death but also to puzzle out the traumas22 behind the odd behaviour of his father, brother and wife, in the context of the cultural trauma provoked by the mad cow and foot-and-­ mouth epidemics,23 and the wider historical traumas of the on-going wars, the terrorist attacks and the war on terror.24 As I will attempt to show, central to Jack’s healing process of remembrance is the importance he gives to emotions, empathy and affection for the other as the basis for his ethics of survival.

The Function of Narrative Technique in the Representation of Trauma One of the most salient features of Swift’s novel is the complexity of its narrative structure. Reported by an omniscient narrator with variable focalisation, it reflects not only the interplay between Jack’s first and last traumatic moments of loss but also the traumatic effect on him of Tom’s, Michael’s and Ellie’s attempts to overcome their own traumas. Most of the chapters are focalised from Jack’s perspective and alternate the narration of the physical forward journey he undertakes to retrieve Tom’s corpse, with the mental journey backwards he initiates simultaneously through his association of Tom’s death, first with the death of his mother, then with that of Luke, and, finally, with the most repressed death of all, the suicide of his father. Jack undertakes the physical journey alone and in a state of shock, as his wife Ellie had refused to accompany him. The journey begins nine days after the reception of the letter and takes place along three days. It starts at Lookout, the cottage in the Caravan Park on the Isle of Wright25 that Jack and Ellie had been managing for “over ten years now”;26 it culminates with Jack’s strained participation in the “Ceremony of Repatriation”27 of Tom’s body organised by the army in an airfield in Oxfordshire, followed by his funeral and burial in Marleston,28 the town in

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North Devon near Jebb farm where their parents already lay buried; it ends with Jack returning from Marleston to Lookout Cottage, via the road that leads to Jebb farm, prompted by a sudden desire to visit it. The cottage and Barton Field at his point belonged to the Robinsons, an affluent family from London that had transformed it into a posh second residence protected by a high wall and a sophisticated security system evincing the anxiety about safety they “have brought with them from London”.29 Frustrated by his incapacity to enter, Jack drove madly on to the Lookout, where Ellie was waiting for him. At this stage, the distracted Jack was determined not only to repeat his father’s suicide but to “improve” it by killing Ellie first, so that she did not have to pick up the pieces of his brain, as he had to do with Michael’s.30 On his arrival at the cottage, Jack and Ellie engaged in a terrible quarrel, in which they accused each other of having killed their respective fathers.31 This is a strange accusation on both parts, as Ellie and Jack had postponed their wedding and stayed at their respective farms due to their sense of filial duty. Enraged by the accusation, Ellie slammed the door and drove away before Jack could load the gun and shoot her.32 She started driving “blindly, hither and thither at first, sometimes literally blindly, given the assaults of the rain” (34). The novel ends with the merging of narrative and story time in a “now”33 pregnant with suspense, as Jack, holding his father’s loaded gun, waits in the cottage bedroom for Ellie to return.34 Jack’s mental journey to the past covers eighteen years, from Tom’s death in the narrative present, situated in 2006, to Vera’s death, in 1988, while the process of remembering itself takes place along the three days of the physical journey. The narrative structure of the novel conveys this simultaneity of the inner and the outer journeys by adopting the technique of time-montage characteristic of stream-of-consciousness fiction.35 The narration of Jack’s actions is constantly undercut by sections or even whole chapters in indirect interior monologue containing Jack’s meandering and circuitous remembrances in which past, present and future occurrences merge or are repeated obsessively according to what may be described as a combination of the logics of free associations and repetition compulsion. Given the temporal freedom of the associations and the traumatic contents of the remembrances, the unveiling of Jack’s inner vulnerability behind his impassive face and huge body caused by the sustained process of victimisation he has been submitted to by his father and, to a lesser extent, also by Ellie and Tom, are only revealed fragmentarily, through the accumulation of passing remarks or thoughts whose true

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significance does not become apparent until the end of the novel. One of the most piercing doubts that torments Jack and enhances his sense of solitude and despondency is the impossibility of guessing the reasons for Ellie’s lack of empathy, her refusal to accompany him in the journey of repatriation and burial of Tom, or to participate in the process of mourning. In Tom’s case, what baffles Jack is his mutism, his refusal to answer his letters, as he had promised to do when he left the farm thirteen years before. He did not even ask for compassionate leave to attend their father’s funeral. The absolute lack of communication between Jack, Ellie and Tom is a central aspect of the three characters’ traumatised state and the reason why Jack embarks on a process of remembrance triggered by the need to grant retrospective meaning to his life in the light of Tom’s death. In this sense, the novel may be said to belong with the type of retrospective fiction, characteristic of trauma narratives, in which “the act of looking back and telling the story in some way transforms the person doing the telling”.36 While Jack is completely in the dark about the other characters’ thoughts and vice versa, readers have access to them, as the omniscient narrator alternates the chapters focalised through Jack with various chapters focalised through Ellie,37 one chapter focalised through Tom,38 and another one through Claire and Toby Robinson;39 and there are also various sections within some chapters focalised through secondary characters, such as the local constable Bob Ireton,40 the organiser of Tom’s repatriation, Major Richards, and Derek Page and Dave Springer, the undertakers hired by Jack,41 whose thoughts cast complementary light on the main characters’ thoughts and behaviour. The chapters or sections in indirect interior monologue are narrated in the form of space-montage, also known as camera eye or multiple view,42 a technique that allows for the space to change while the time remains static, thus giving the impression of simultaneity of the actions and thoughts of the various characters whose thoughts are reported. This simultaneity facilitates the readers’ perception of the discrepancies and misunderstandings in each character’s interpretation of the same events, while the characters themselves remain isolated in their own mental worlds. In the last chapter, the resolution of suspense, with Jack and Ellie embracing each other, is neatly echoed formally by the alternation of Ellie’s and Jack’s perspectives and the merging of narrative and story time.43

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Loss, Melancholia, Vulnerability and the Ethics of Survival At the beginning of the novel, Jack recognises that he has many traits in common with his father, and he is attentive enough to perceive his suffering behind his manly façade of imperturbability: Behind that wall his dad could present to the world, he knew, his father was stumbling. There were some things Jack could see through—or that he simply duplicated. He had a face like a wall too, he was stumbling too. It was his fall-back position, to take what he got and stumble on, to look strong or just dumb on the outside and stumble inside. He was just like his father. But on the other hand (and his father knew it), he’d always been closer to his mum.44

As this reflection suggests, the greatest difference between Jack and Tom with respect to their father was Jack’s capacity to perceive and share an inner vulnerability that, in agreement with his patriarchal conception of manhood, the proud old Michael Luxton so strenuously tried to conceal and repress in his sons. This was the main source of conflict not only with Tom but also with Jack, since, for all his similarity to his father, Jack also had a strong affinity with his mother, as is suggested in the last sentence of the quotation. Unlike Jack, Tom hated the life he led at the farm and was obsessed with the desire to escape, motivated by his father’s growing hostility towards him after the death of Vera and the mad cow disease. Their animosity climaxed the day Michael shot Luke, after offering him the gun,45 the episode that Jack signals as the moment when “the madness had really set in”.46 Characteristically, Michael’s real motive for killing Luke was misinterpreted by Jack, as Michael meant to put a quick end to Luke’s lingering death—what Tom would call a “clean killing”47 when he became a sniper—as he had not been able to do for his wife. In other words, Michael’s shooting of Luke was an act of pity and self-atonement evincing a deeply repressed emotional vulnerability and capacity for empathic unsettlement. Michael himself had suggested as much when, after placing a single bullet between Luke’s eyes, he told Tom: “I hope one day, when it’s needed, someone will have the decency to do the same for me”.48 Jack did not understand the full meaning of this remark until much later, during his process of remembrance, when, in a clear ethical move of Levinasian

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excendance,49 he tried to make sense of the killing of Luke by “put[ting] himself in his father’s shoes”.50 Only then was Jack invaded by the feeling that the way his Dad had brought about Luke’s death must have had to do with the death of his wife. As if the sudden swift killing of an animal that was only getting sicker and sicker might have cured Michael of all the grief, anger and abandonment gnawing away inside him. But it hadn’t worked. It hadn’t worked for any of them. It just caused more sickness. On top of the cow disease.51

Michael’s shooting of Luke was, then, an act of survival that, however, required the ethical attentiveness of excendance to be perceived by his sons. Jack had always believed that Tom had decided to enrol in the army because Michael had humiliated him by showing him that he was not manly enough to shoot Luke. In fact, however, Tom’s real reason for refusing to hold the gun his father had held out to him was that “he’d known that he’d have used it on Dad first, then on Luke. Or on Luke first, then on Dad”, and “he’d also known, from the look in his eyes, that Dad was half expecting it, even wanting it”.52 What had enraged Tom, then, was not Michael’s supposed attempt to humiliate him, but his shocked realisation that he had “the killer instinct in him. And he’d have to put a lid on it”.53 This shows a chilling lack of empathy that contrasts with Jack’s idealised perception of his younger brother as vulnerable and in need of protection. Jack also wrongly believed that Tom’s decision to enrol in the army had to do with his romantic desire to emulate his great uncles in the First World War.54 In fact, however, his motives were much more narcissistic and simple: the army offered him a form of venting his anger: “The army welcomed anger. Was happy to channel and redirect it, even, maybe cure it”.55 As he reflects a few moments before meeting his “dirty” death by fire while he is trapped under the mangled metal of his armoured vehicle, [to Tom, the war on terror] sounded like a perfect opportunity for firing off lots of cool, disciplined, single rounds of anger. The first time he’d fired for real and seen his man drop, he’d felt anger fly out of him, he’d felt a big whoosh of sanity and calmness.56

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This reflection shows Tom opting for the army as a form of survival based on the assumption that redirecting his anger towards an unknown enemy would have a healing effect. However, his transformation from naturally gifted hunter to trained sniper did not bring Tom the sanity and calmness he expected, as “[s]niping was a solo business”,57 and killing required the dehumanisation of his victims by mentally “replac[ing] them with cattle”.58 In other words, being an efficient sniper required a total repression of positive affects for the other and the denial of his own vulnerability. The fact that in order to dehumanise his victims, Tom had recourse to the traumatic memories of the cows being slaughtered shows that he was still in the phase of acting out of the trauma caused by the plague and immersed in the process of repetition compulsion. Although the seven soldiers under his command were “hard-nut townie boys” who liked to think of Tom as “a softie country boy, a bumpkin”, they knew that he was “hard underneath”.59 This inner hardness, a disease he had inherited from his father, did not, however, help Tom overcome his individual, cultural and historical traumas. Rather, it worked paradoxically to transform him from reluctant victim of a rural life-style that demanded extraordinary sacrifices to willing perpetrator of atrocities sanctioned by history. As he himself acknowledges, the ultimate reason for his refusal to answer Jack’s letters or attend Michael’s funeral was “the weight of guilt”60 he felt for leaving Jack behind, together with a desire to get lost in “this world of strangely unresented punishment […] he’d chosen”.61 His terrible death puts a fitting end to the dreadful life of self-inflicted punishment he had chosen. While he serenely accepts his terrible death as an act of atonement, readers cannot but see a potentially fulfilling and talented young man caught by the forces of history in a “wound culture” hinging on what Mark Seltzer has described as the “switch point between individual and collective, private and public orders of things”.62 Still, the facts that, in his last thoughts, Tom sees himself lying in Barton Field near the centenary oak tree, “more or less where Luke had been shot and had known it all along it was coming”,63 and manages to transform the dreadful noises of the approaching fire into the soothing sound of browsing cattle, show Tom reconciling himself at last with his cultural and family background.64 When Tom and Michael returned from Barton Field after killing and burying Luke, Jack perceived the “thickness” of the air between them, “heavy with the strange hollow weight of there being three of them now where once there’d been four. Just as once there’d been four of them where once there’d been five”.65 This reflection neatly summarises the

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concatenation of traumatic losses that had transformed Jack from affectionate son and brother into the traumatised last Luxton in the family. To these traumas of loss should be added the selling of Jebb farm following Ellie’s entreaties, as Jack associates the existence of the Luxtons to their having lived in the farm for centuries, in striking contrast to Ellie’s and also Tom’s obsessive desire to go away. This would explain the striking difference between Tom’s self-centred, action-taking survival strategies and Jack’s melancholic passivity as a form of resilience, what Jack himself described as his being “a sticker, a settler […]. Whereas Tom, clearly was a mover on”.66 This distinction points to the territoriality as a central element in Jack’s—and also Michael’s—construction of identity. As Simone Aurora explains, A territory is a space delimited by stable borders […] which distinguish an inside from an outside and, in this way, set up at least two separated areas of reality: one inside the borders and one outside, this latter probably belonging to another territory. It is therefore a conceptual device which produces order […]. It is in this sense that a territory can be said to produce identity: every different territory marks a particular identity-set, labelling a well-­ defined group of elements.67

Jack’s frustration and rage at being unable to cross the electrified wall surrounding Jebb farm and enter the territory that had belonged to the Luxtons for centuries points to this territorial aspect of his identity. Ellie’s failure to take this into consideration is a major source of friction between them. After the deaths of their fathers, Ellie had sold Westcott farm and convinced Jack to do the same with Jebb, so they could embark on what she pictured as an exciting new life as managers of the Lookout Caravan Park on the Isle of Wright, with holidays in the Caribbean during the off season.68 Ellie did not even imagine then that the option that would have made Jack really happy, but that he never dared to tell her, was that she move in with him: “Then they might become Mr and Mrs Luxton and share the Big Bedroom for the rest of their lives, as was only right and proper. Luxtons at Jebb”.69 The result of Jack’s enforced deterritorialisation was that he did not see the point of having any children, as Ellie wished: “If he was going to be the last Luxton to farm there, then there shouldn’t be any Luxtons at all”.70 In a characteristic example of misunderstanding, Ellie attributed this decision to the fact that “Jack once had

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his damn baby. And that’s why she had said that thing about Tom. ‘Forget him, Jack’”.71 Conversely, Jack did not give enough weight to the fact that, by escaping from Westcott farm and settling on the Lookout Caravan Park, Ellie was repeating her mother’s survival strategy. Alice Merrick had eloped with a lover in 1983, when Ellie was sixteen, and had never attempted to communicate with her or with her husband again.72 She had lived in the Lookout Caravan Park with her third partner, Anthony Boyd, until her death. Then, “Uncle Tony” had left the business to Ellie after his own death.73 In the first chapter focalised through her, Ellie, who, after the terrible quarrel with Jack, had left the cottage in a fit of rage and had started driving aimlessly, remembered an earlier occasion when she had done the same. Three days after her mother’s departure, while her father was drunk, she had taken his Land Rover and “driven it, for the first time in her life, right up the Westcott track to the gate and the road and beyond. With no real intention of returning”.74 During her unplanned, “frantic bid for freedom”,75 Ellie had seen herself going to Jeff farm and taking Jack with her. However, instead of him, what she saw in her mind’s eye was his family turning out to confront her amazing arrival. Michael. Vera. There is a difficulty there, she knows it—to tear Jack from his mum. And standing beside Vera is little Tom, aged seven. A difficulty there too—and there will always be. There is a difficulty now. But it’s only Jack she cares about. My Jack.76

As this imagined moment of frustrated freedom makes clear, Ellie had always seen Jack’s mother and younger brother as the competitors she must get rid of if she was to possess Jack fully and exclusively. What lies behind her command that Jack forget Tom and her incapacity to feel for his untimely and cruel death is, then, Ellie’s own trauma of loss for having been abandoned by her mother, expressed in a narcissistic jealousy that makes it impossible for her to make the move towards the other demanded by the ethics of alterity. What makes Ellie’s possessiveness a symptom of traumatic repetition compulsion is that in striking contrast to her own experience, Jack had always shared “a special space with his mother” that not even Michael dared to enter.77 In The Shell and the Kernel, a path-breaking essay written as a response to Freud’s work on mourning and melancholia, Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok argue that the child’s process of introjection, or successful transition from the maternal to the social realm, cannot take place without

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the constant assistance of a mother endowed with language.78 When this process is rendered impossible by some sort of traumatic relationship to the mother, the child suffers a reversion to the stage of food-craving prior to the acquisition of language.79 Consequently, the failure to round off this process results in the impossibility of speaking to someone else about our grief: The words that cannot be uttered, the scenes that cannot be recalled, the tears that cannot be shed — everything will be swallowed along with the trauma that led to the loss. Swallowed and preserved. Inexpressible mourning erects a secret tomb inside the subject. Reconstituted from the memories of words, scenes, and affects, the objectal correlative of the loss is buried alive in the crypt as a full-fledged person, complete with its own topography. […] A world of unconscious fantasy is created, one that leads its own separate and concealed existence.80

As Abraham and Torok further explain, when the traumatic affliction of the subject stems from the involuntary separation from the loved object, for example, when the mother dies, the subject falls into the self-directed fantasy of aggression called melancholia. This is clearly the case of Jack, as Vera was a loving mother with a perfect command of language that she employed, for instance, to tell an embroidered version of the tale of bravery of the Luxton great uncles that enhanced family cohesion and filial harmony, as it ended with the two brothers splitting the DCF medal one of them had won.81 Tom repeated this ethical act of sharing whenever he went hunting with Jack, as he always gave him some of the rabbits he had shot without telling anyone. Paradoxically, this well-meaning act made Jack think that Tom was better than him at everything, thus adding to his sense of inadequacy. Still, Jack’s childhood was unproblematic as he enjoyed a privileged relationship with his mother, including her allowing him to share with her a “special space” devoted to having “grown up” conversations: Jack would mysteriously understand—even when he was only nine or ten that he was having a grown up conversation, something you were supposed to have in life, a sort of always-to-be-resumed conversation, which went on, in fact, right up until the time when his mother fell ill and died.82

This special relation with Vera ensured that when Tom was born, eight-­ year-­old Jack would not harbour feelings of jealousy towards him. On the

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contrary, he assumed a protective role, carried him around, rocked him in the ancient cradle where numberless Luxtons had been rocked before, including Jack himself, and even sometimes kissed him “on his funny little head [until] his dad had begun to frown on […] such things”.83 This is a telling example of Michael’s sense of manliness as he is repressing his sons’ expression of affection as inadequate for males. The best memories Jack has of his childhood were the two successive one-week holidays he spent with Tom and their mother in a caravan park in Brigwell Bay when he was thirteen and fourteen. It was from their caravan, called Marilyn, that Jack had sent Ellie a postcard with the message “Wish you were here”.84 Although she had been terribly pleased, Ellie, who had never had holidays or seen the sea, had felt so jealous that she had avoided mentioning the card to Jack on his return.85 This episode points to Ellie’s jealousy as stemming from the traumatic loss of her mother. As Abraham and Torok explain, when the incapacity to round off the process of introjection is due to the mother’s unnatural behaviour, “schizophrenia would set in, implying the destruction of both the object and the subject”.86 What lies behind Ellie’s jealousy and affective numbness is, then, a split personality, torn between her love for Jack—expressed in her compulsion to possess him wholly and uniquely—and her narcissistic disappointment with her mother, a phantasmic presence encrypted in Ellie’s unconscious that keeps urging her to escape, even at the cost of losing Jack: She could hear her mother’s forgotten voice […], like I did. Cut loose. While you’ve got the car and while you can. […] Now or never. Cut lose.87

This is the encrypted voice that had been feeding Ellie’s fantasies of escape all her life and had prevented her from making the transition from the narcissistic to the social realm. Her dilemma is solved, however, at the end of the novel, when, sitting in the car at the edge of Holn Cliffs and thinking of leaving Jack, she is suddenly struck by “a great blast of terror”, as she realises, through “a strange seeming telepathy”,88 that Jack may be on the point of repeating his father’s fatal action. The tangible fear of truly losing Jack makes Ellie move from self-absorption to caring for the other. She repents from having left Jack alone, and this thought makes her realise for the first time in her life that “she wishes Tom not dead. Truly”.89 This is the healing revelation that allows Ellie to overcome her traumatic jealousy and move from the narcissistic to the social realm. As a result, Tom’s

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ghost is released from the crypt where she had buried him and, with it, her feelings of affection for him: Never, in any case, since the news of Tom’s death, has Ellie felt such a tangible sense of his living presence […], and even as she comes to a lurching halt outside the cottage, her eyes and throat thicken and she splutters out as if she might even have been the poor dead man’s wife, lover, mother, sister: ‘Oh Tom! Oh poor, poor Tom!’90

Like Ellie, Jack was unable to express his emotions, but in his case, as we have seen, because his father had taught him to repress his expressions of affection. He did not even recall the last time he had left “[t]ears on the pillow. But never in front of anyone. Certainly not in front of Ellie”.91 And although he was deeply shattered when he found his father’s corpse with the brains blown off leaning on the oak tree on Barton Field, he had never allowed these feelings to show. However, during Major Richards’s visit to the Lookout in order to arrange for Tom’s repatriation, Jack barely managed to repress what he described as something “deep and contained” going on inside him that “might need its outburst at some time”.92 As soon as the Major left, he gave way to “hot tears gushing out of him”.93 Still, instead of feeling relieved by this normal expression of sorrow for the death of his brother, Jack felt deeply ashamed. He wondered whether “it was okay for a grown man to cry?”,94 and when Ellie put her arms around him he imagined her thinking: “I’m not your mother, Jack. Don’t cry like a baby”.95 What is more, in a characteristic association of ideas, Jack also felt guilty for not being as manly as Tom: “Tom had gone off to be a soldier—and he wanted to sit here and cry?”96 For all this, Jack realised at this point that “there was a lot more crying left inside him”, while Ellie’s eyes “hadn’t even gone dewy”.97 Her striking lack of empathy, what he describes as her “failure to reach out and comfort him”,98 followed by her refusal to accompany him to the Ceremony of Repatriation or at least to the funeral and burial of Tom, are perceived by Jack as the incomprehensible acts that had erected an “invisible wall”99 between them and taken everything “off its hinges”.100 As Jack reflects, He’d gone to bury Tom, but now all the things that had once been dead and buried had come back again. […] Even Tom himself hadn’t been really buried. He was with him now […]. If Ellie had come with him […], then perhaps between the two of them they might have buried Tom properly.101

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Throughout the Ceremony of Repatriation, Jack had managed to keep the manly composure he thought would be expected of a big man like him, but he had felt awfully lonely, shattered and depressed. Already during the car drive back from the airfield to Marleston, he had started having visions of Tom’s ghost,102 and he had also realised that “[n]ow all the other ghosts were waiting for him too”.103 Just as Ellie had a strong perception of Tom’s presence when she gave vent to her repressed emotions, so the words that Jack had not uttered for eighteen years, the tears that he had not shed, everything he had swallowed along with the traumas that had led to his overwhelming sense of loss, had been preserved in a secret crypt inside him, until Tom’s death had forced him to open it. Since his father’s suicide, Jack had been having a terrible recurrent dream in which he saw himself opening and closing the gate of the farm to let his father drive in. Although he had gone through this nightmarish dream repeatedly, he had never been able to make sense of it. It was only on the night before Tom’s funeral, after drinking himself into sleep at the hotel in Oakhampton, that its shattering meaning suddenly became clear to him: Michael had killed himself on the night of Commemoration Sunday 1994, nearly one year after Tom’s enrolment in the army. Breaking the rule they always observed after the ceremony, Michael had decided to return to the farm directly, without stopping at the pub for a beer and visiting Vera’s tomb. The dream expressed Jack’s guilt for having said nothing about this change of routine: “For God’s sake, if he’d just bought his father a bloody pint—how different the consequences might have been”.104 In the recurrent dream, the night before and the night after his father’s suicide had seemed to merge together,105 always provoking “a particular confusion […]. He had heard the shot, yet the shot had woken him—as if in fact he was already awake to hear it, had known somehow beforehand that some dreadful thing was going to happen”.106 Here lies the real source of Jack’s most deeply repressed trauma, the shattering possibility that he might have been able to prevent his father’s suicide, because he was awake when he took the gun and went out to Barton Field,107 but had refused to act, just as he had refused to stop Tom from enrolling in the army. This is the unsupportable guilt behind what he describes as his “shaming […] policy of evasion” in the Ceremony of Repatriation, the reason why he is recurrently assaulted by the feeling “of being liable to arrest”,108 and also what eventually leads him to wish to repeat his father’s fatal suicide act. What the nightmare reveals is an

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animosity towards his father that contradicts his own description of himself as being “better at stopping a fight perhaps, than at picking them, better at quelling anger than venting it”.109 Jack provides an indirect explanation for his unconscious desire to kill his father during the funeral, when, bearing Tom’s coffin on his shoulder, he “had felt the overwhelming urge to be not just Tom’s brother, but the second, secret, cradling father he’d sometimes felt himself to be […]—he’d even wanted to be Tom’s real father, their father”.110 Behind Jack’s trauma of loss lies then an unresolved Oedipus complex, sublimated as a protective, brotherly attachment to Tom. This would explain why, placed in the dilemma of having to choose between Ellie and Tom, Jack had opted for the latter, and also why, in the last scene of the novel, it is Tom’s ghost that stops Jack from killing Ellie. Needless to say, after putting an end to Jack’s Oedipal fantasy of self-punishment and Ellie’s narcissistic jealousy, Tom’s ghost is at last allowed to rest.111 As the analysis has shown, Jack differs from the other characters in the novel in that he belongs to the type of “forlorn” men created by Graham Swift, whose central concern is to “mourn an idea of their own manhood as sons and husbands and fathers, and want to be forgiven for failing it, or failing to find something better”.112 This difference makes Jack more vulnerable and prone to melancholia than Tom and Ellie but also more capable than them of making the ethical move towards the other that is the first step in the overcoming of narcissism and melancholia, what Adrian Poole describes as “the benign progression, through phases of numbness, denial and anger, gradual acceptance, to final closure”.113 The precarious happy ending with which the novel ends, with Jack and Ellie embraced under a seaside umbrella with “the wind trying to wrest it from Jack’s battling grip”,114 shows the couple ready to undertake the process of mourning for Tom that would allow them to heal their wounds and learn to live with their scars. This ending points to Wish You Were Here as a contemporary elegy in Jean-Michel Ganteau’s acceptation of the term. As he argues in The Ethics and Aesthetics of Vulnerability in Contemporary British Fiction, in contrast to the traditional consolatory function of the elegiac, “no consolation or transcendence is to be expected from the contemporary versions of the mode” so that “mourning has been superseded if not by melancholia, at least by what [Jahan] Ramazani calls ‘melancholic mourning’”.115

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Notes 1. Poole (2006, 151). 2. Caruth (1995, 4–5). 3. Forter (2007, 264). 4. Swift (2012, 52–53). 5. Swift (2012, 78). 6. Swift (2012, 20). 7. Swift (2012, 250). 8. Swift (2012, 9–10). 9. Swift (2012, 11–12). 10. Swift (2012, 29). 11. Swift (2012, 20). 12. Swift (2012, 3). 13. Swift (2012, 3). 14. Swift (2012, 2). 15. Swift (2012, 137). 16. Swift (2012, 137). 17. Swift (2012, 43). 18. Swift (2012, 229–230). 19. Swift (2012, 61). 20. Swift (2012, 61). 21. There is widespread consensus among trauma critics that “Auschwitz [is] the determining catastrophe that inaugurates the trauma paradigm, for after 1945 all culture must address this question”; see Luckhurst (2008, 5). See also Onega (2014). 22. Kai Erikson (1995, 187) defines collective trauma as “a blow to the basic tissues of social life that damages the bonds attaching people together and impairs the prevailing sense of communality”. 23. According to Jeffrey C.  Alexander (2004, 1), “cultural trauma occurs when members of a collectivity feel that they have been subjected to a horrendous event that leaves indelible marks upon their group consciousness, marking their memories forever and changing their future identity in fundamental and irrevocable ways”. 24. Dominik LaCapra (2001, 16) distinguishes between structural trauma, which he defines as transhistorical and connected to an “absence [that] applies to ultimate foundations in general, notably to metaphysical grounds”, and historical trauma, which concerns an experience of loss that is “situated on a historical level and is the consequence of particular events”. 25. Swift (2012, 312). 26. Swift (2012, 7). 27. Swift (2012, 158).

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28. Swift (2012, 121, 195). 29. Swift (2012, 73). 30. Swift (2012, 342). 31. Swift (2012, 297, 301, 302). 32. Swift (2012, 305). 33. Swift (2012, 388). 34. Swift (2012, 233). 35. Humphrey, 50; see also Klecker, 221. 36. Higdon (1991, 183). 37. Swift (2012); see Chaps. 5, 13, 24, 30 and 34. 38. Swift (2012, Chap. 23). 39. Swift (2012, Chap. 32). 40. Swift (2012, 314–317). 41. Swift (2012, Chap. 22). 42. See Humphrey (1954, 50) and Klecker (2011, 221). 43. Swift (2012, Chap. 36). 44. Swift (2012, 20–21). 45. Swift (2012, 141). 46. Swift (2012, 152). 47. Swift (2012, 206). 48. Swift (2012, 143). 49. Levinas (1981, 73–74). 50. Swift (2012, 152). 51. Swift (2012, 152–53). 52. Swift (2012, 208). 53. Swift (2012, 203). 54. Swift (2012, 208). 55. Swift (2012, 206). 56. Swift (2012, 206). 57. Swift (2012, 206). 58. Swift (2012, 204). 59. Swift (2012, 205). 60. Swift (2012, 200). 61. Swift (2012, 201). 62. Seltzer (1997, 5). 63. Swift (2012, 209). 64. Swift (2012, 209). 65. Swift (2012, 144). 66. Swift (2012, 102). 67. Aurora (2014, 2). 68. Swift (2012, 27). 69. Swift (2012, 286). 70. Swift (2012, 115). 71. Swift (2012, 106; emphasis in original).

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72. Swift (2012, 16, 32). 73. Swift (2012, 70). 74. Swift (2012, 37). 75. Swift (2012, 37). 76. Swift (2012, 39). 77. Swift (2012, 22). 78. Abraham and Torok (1994, 127–128). 79. Abraham and Torok (1994, 128). 80. Abraham and Torok (1994, 132). 81. Swift (2012, 12). 82. Swift (2012, 22). 83. Swift (2012, 22). 84. Swift (2012, 22). 85. Swift (2012, 63). 86. Abraham and Torok (1994, 136). 87. Swift (2012, 35). 88. Swift (2012, 335). 89. Swift (2012, 348). 90. Swift (2012, 349). 91. Swift (2012, 82). 92. Swift (2012, 98). 93. Swift (2012, 81). 94. Swift (2012, 81). 95. Swift (2012, 83). 96. Swift (2012, 83). 97. Swift (2012, 83). 98. Swift (2012, 123). 99. Swift (2012, 119, 123). 100. Swift (2012, 300). 101. Swift (2012, 300). 102. Swift (2012, 216, 218, 221, 223–224, 226–227, 346, 350). 103. Swift (2012, 217). 104. Swift (2012, 232). 105. Swift (2012, 234). 106. Swift (2012, 234–235). 107. Swift (2012, 303–304). 108. Swift (2012, 265). 109. Swift (2012, 225). 110. Swift (2012, 328). 111. Swift (2012, 352). 112. Poole (2006, 151). 113. Poole (2006, 151). 114. Swift (2012, 353). 115. Ganteau (2015, 71).

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References Abraham, Nicolas, and Maria Torok. 1994. The Shell and the Kernel. Vol. I. Ed., Trans., and Intro. Nicholas T. Rand. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Alexander, Jeffrey C., et  al. 2004. Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity. Berkeley: University of California Press. Aurora, Simone. 2014. Territory and Subjectivity: the Philosophical Nomadism of Deleuze and Guattari. Minerva—An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 18: 1–26. Caruth, Cathy, ed. 1995. Trauma: Explorations in Memory. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Erikson, Kai. 1995. Notes on Trauma and Community. In Trauma: Explorations in Memory, ed. Cathy Caruth, 183–199. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Forter, Greg. 2007. Freud, Faulkner, Caruth: Trauma and the Politics of Literary Form. Narrative 15 (3): 259–285. Ganteau, Jean-Michel. 2015. The Ethics and Aesthetics of Vulnerability in Contemporary British Fiction. New York: Routledge. Higdon, David Leon. 1991. ‘Unconfessed Confessions’: The Narrators of Graham Swift and Julian Barnes. In The British and Irish Novel Since 1960, ed. James Acheson, 174–191. New York: St. Martin’s. Humphrey, Robert. 1954. Stream of Consciousness in the Modern Novel: A Study of James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Dorothy Richardson, William Faulkner, and Others. Berkeley: University of California Press. Klecker, Cornelia. 2011. Time- and Space-Montage in Mrs. Dalloway and The Hours. The Visual Culture of Modernism, SPELL Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature 26: 209–223. LaCapra, Dominik. 2001. Writing History, Writing Trauma. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Levinas, Emmanuel. 1981 [1974]. Otherwise than Being: Or, Beyond Essence. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Luckhurst, Roger. 2008. The Trauma Question. London: Routledge. Onega, Susana. 2014. The Notion of Paradigm Shift and the Roles of Science and Literature in the Interpretation of Reality. The European Review 22 (2): 491–503. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1062798714000295. Poole, Adrian. 2006. Graham Swift and the Mourning After. In An Introduction to Contemporary Fiction, ed. Rod Mengham, 150–167. Malden: Polity Press. Seltzer, Mark. 1997. Wound Culture: Trauma in the Pathological Public Sphere. October 80: 3–26. Swift, Graham. 2012 [2011]. Wish You Were Here. Basingstoke: Picador.

CHAPTER 8

Stories of Dis-ease: Ethics and Survival in Dementia Narratives Sibylle Baumbach

“I am dying as I write this. It is reality as well as mental conceit. You are reading the thoughts of a dying man”.1 This passage from Thomas DeBaggio’s memoir Losing My Mind (2003) offers a taste of the painstakingly honest account of living with Alzheimer’s disease and the attempt of writing against death. In this autobiographical narrative, DeBaggio takes us right into the heart of the neurocognitive disease and straight into the mind of a person suffering from dementia, making us witnesses to the death-in-life often associated with this disease. What is more, addressing readers directly, DeBaggio’s statement raises questions regarding the possibility of an ethical reading by pointing to our responsibilities as readers while hinting at the eerie fascination with stories of disease—a fascination which might be experienced by readers who live in a different ‘reality’ than those of the terminally ill to whose stories they respond with a

S. Baumbach (*) Department of English Literatures and Cultures, University of Stuttgart, Stuttgart, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 R. Freiburg, G. Bayer (eds.), The Ethics of Survival in Contemporary Literature and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83422-7_8

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combination of compassion, pity, and possibly even an ethically highly problematic notion of silent relief that it is not them for whom the bell tolls.

Mediated Dis-ease Especially with the digital turn, the fascination with ‘the pain of others’2 has been fuelled by new forms of life writing and self-exposure enabled through social media platforms, which are increasingly used to communicate personal stories of disease. Before I turn to dementia narratives and notions of survival and ethics connected with this emerging literary genre, I would like to briefly consider an example which illustrates the problem of responsibility ingrained in the ‘ethics of survival’ in connection with the mediation of another disease, namely the project “Big C.  Little Me  – Putting the ‘can’ in Cancer”, founded in 2018, which has received broad media coverage. The project was devised by Rachael Bland, who was diagnosed with aggressive breast cancer at the age of 38. In addition to launching a podcast programme on BBC Radio 5, she started writing about her treatments and her life with the disease on a blog and also on Twitter— with over 46,000 followers. Her key objective was to reduce the stigma around cancer; her medium of choice one that defies forgetting and secures the survival of her accounts—the net. Social media platforms, such as Facebook or Twitter, offer a new arena for a number of accounts which call for closer attention to the ethical framework behind the act of ‘regarding the pain [and suffering] of others’ on social media.3 On 3 September 2018, Rachael Bland announced her imminent death on Twitter. Her post read, In the words of the legendary Frank S—I’m afraid the time has come my friends. And suddenly. I’m told I’ve only got days. It’s very surreal. Thank you for all the support I’ve received. […] Au revoir my friends.4

This tweet was ‘liked’ by more than 52,000 people. The fact that Twitter offers a ‘heart’ as the only option to react to a tweet is an unsettling curiosity, which points to the core of the ethics of survival in our mediated “society of the spectacle”.5 To like or love a death tweet not only indicates that, in an increasingly digitised world, death, though apparently brought closer to home as it can be communicated instantaneously on our tablets and smartphones, seems more remote than ever: it also suggests the need

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to rethink the scope of our responsibility. While digital communication tools enable instantaneous responses, they might obstruct the ability to respond in an ethically responsible manner. Paradoxically, however, this ethical dilemma seems to tie in with Bland’s agenda to transgress norms of dealing with a terminal disease by countering it with humour and laughter, including death jokes that subvert the fear of dying, challenge our inherent desire for survival, and confront us with our own un-ease as survivors. Bland’s final entry achieves an effect that is also inherent in dementia narratives and stories of disease in general. These stories confirm our being-in-the-world by assigning to us the roles of survivors while creating a peculiar fascination, a dis-ease, in readers— insofar as they break a taboo, by naming the unnameable, by allowing us to witness the proximity of death, and also by partly legitimising us in our disturbing desire to regard the pain of others. At the same time, they prompt a critical reflection upon the scope of responsibility, upon the ability to respond to the other. In this sense, “‘responsibility’ is not about right response, but rather a matter of inviting, welcoming, and enabling the response of the Other”.6 It refers to “an ethical obligation to intra-act responsibly in the world’s becoming”7 or, to follow Donna Haraway’s understanding of ‘response-ability’, to an obligation to “staying with the trouble [which] requires learning to be truly present”.8 This form of ‘true presence’ demands a heightened attentiveness to our surroundings—an attentiveness which narratives of disease often demand by returning the survivors’ gaze onto themselves to expose the challenges and shortcomings of a response-ability that is at the core of an ethics of survival.

Survival and Dementia Though it can be, and often turns out to be, terminal, cancer has survivors. But there is no survival in dementia.9 As there are no workable therapies, dementia is a diagnosis which leaves no doubt about who survives and who dies. DeBaggio describes the disease as a “wander[ing] in a world without certainty and names” or, more drastically, as “dying in slow motion”: “Although subtle in attack, Alzheimer’s is the closest thing to being eaten alive slowly”.10 Dementia memoirs describe the experience of the struggle for survival—a struggle, however, that is futile. The narrators witness their own decay, but have no chance of emerging from this journey alive.

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Dementia is a death sentence even though the immediate cause of death in patients with dementia is not their cognitive decline, but the failure of key bodily functions resulting from this decline. The neurocognitive decay consumes first the mind, then the body. The median survival after the onset of symptoms of dementia ranges from 5 to 9.3 years,11 which are marked by a continuous regression into a childlike state, often described as the final stage of human life, which, as William Shakespeare’s Jacques in As You Like It (1603) suggests, “[i]s second childishness and mere oblivion,/Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything”.12 While dementia has multiple different faces, common symptoms include memory loss, apathy, withdrawal, loss of the ability to perform everyday tasks, loss of orientation, and difficulties in verbal communication. These are some of the first indications of a disease that, in its final stages, causes tremor, inhibition of physical movement, and the loss of the ability to communicate. The most commonly associated  symptom  of dementia, though especially connected with Alzheimer’s, is the inability to recognise your loved ones, and ultimately also yourself. Ironically, though lacking survivors, dementia is the disease of survival. As Jonathan Franzen remarks in a personal essay about his father who suffered from Alzheimer’s: “As fewer and fewer people drop dead of heart attacks or die of infections, more and more survive to become demented”13—a state of being that is often regarded as too dreadful to be endured. Remembering his father’s urge for independence throughout his lifetime, Franzen concedes: “I wish he’d had a heart attack instead”.14 It has long been acknowledged that “[d]ementia throws up a number of […] ethical […] problems”.15 These reach from questions of care and treatment (when to begin treatment and when to stop it) to more general but no less pressing questions of ‘what makes us human’, ‘what is a life worth living’, or ‘what constitutes our notion of person- and selfhood?’, as well as to problems of responsibility that arise from the secret impatience, often experienced by carers or the next of kin, for the sufferer to be released from his agony. As Jonathan Franzen recalls: “I don’t like to remember how impatient I was for my father’s breathing to stop, how ready to be free of him I was”.16 The ethics of survival in dementia has to be discussed in relation to those who are engaged in the process of survivance (i.e. the process of endurance of and also resistance to the disease) as much as with regard to those who are afflicted with the disease, who knowingly enter “the world

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without certainty and names”,17 and might question the value of survival, following their diagnosis: The day after I was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, my first thought when I awoke was of suicide. It appeared to be a logical thing to contemplate. I was facing a difficult, slow decline, leading to eventual loss of nearly everything human beings value, ending finally as a near-vegetable rotting in the sun. More important, my early demise saves thousands of dollars spent on my care as I deteriorate. I didn’t want Joyce to end a pauper or have Francesco lose the farm. I talked to Joyce about my thoughts carefully. It is to her I defer because she carries the burden of my care. I saw tears tease her eyes but her voice was clear and emphatic. She wanted me around as long as possible in any condition but dead. I deferred to her wishes. It is for her I live now; there is nothing else for me.18

As DeBaggio states in his memoir, the only survival dementia allows is a temporary survival of the self, which is sustained, however, by and for others. For him, the decision to continue living with dementia meant to be lived by and for others—a decision that will ultimately become incompatible with common notions of autonomy, freedom of will, and storytelling, and that leads to dependency and disability. One of the key symptoms of dementia is the gradual loss of memory as well as the loss of the capacities of speech. It is the survivors, therefore, who tell the story of forgetting. The ethics of survival in dementia narratives is tied to the survival of the voice and the story of those who have been suffering from dementia. This is suggested by the opening of Michael Ignatieff’s Scar Tissue (1993), where the narrator is struggling with this very task to do justice to his mother, who died of dementia: “How do I tell her story? When does it actually begin?”19 He chooses to start her story with her mother, his great-­ grandmother, claiming that “I want to commemorate the attention she paid to me”. “Memory is the only afterlife I have ever believed in”, he concedes, “[b]ut the forgetting inside us cannot be stopped. We are programmed to betray”.20 The anxieties attached to the inevitability of forgetting are shared by both, the ones suffering from dementia and the ones responsible for retrieving their stories. Juxtaposing the inability to remember (of those dying) and the inability to forget (of those who survive), dementia narratives often highlight the paradox of forgetting—and the inability to control our memory. As the narrator in Scar Tissue remarks, “Why can’t you forget what you want to forget?”21

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While the next of kin are quite naturally caught up in a vicious cycle of guilt (why have they been spared? Why have they survived?), they also often experience anxieties that they might have inherited the genes that cause dementia and therefore face a fate similar to their loved ones. It is this anxiety that might prompt reactions that are unethical and egotistic insofar as we tend to shun the presence of looming death that dementia patients embody. The desire to survive and also to forget the possibility of being afflicted with cognitive impairment often goes hand in hand with emotional and physical distance to those suffering from this disease, whose number increases by almost 10 million every year.22 Dementia narratives counter this urge to forget a disease that is essentially about forgetting. These narratives not only draw attention to dementia, which despite of its vast presence—according to the World Health Organization, around 50 million people worldwide suffer from dementia23—is often marginalised, made invisible in our society, and to the complex questions of the ethics of survival or survivance it raises. They also create and reflect upon a profound dis-ease that we—as relatives and readers—experience when being confronted with dementia by engaging readers in exercises of ‘moral attention’,24 which is crucial to questions regarding the ethics of reading and the ethics of survival. According to Martha Nussbaum, “[t]he artist’s task is a moral task” and narratives, especially “the novel[,] can be a paradigm of moral activity”.25 Through combining different viewpoints and modes of consciousness, they can illustrate “the extent to which fine attention to another can make two separate people inhabit the same created world—until, at the end, they even share descriptive language”.26 It is by this means that dementia narratives can convey the dis-ease that they aim to illustrate and challenge our ability to respond, that is “to intra-act responsibly in the [story]world’s becoming”.27 Even though dementia narratives skyrocketed in the past decade, driven by population ageing, the popularity of life-writing in “an age—if not the age of memoir”,28 and a growing awareness for an ethics of care, they are still under-researched. Some of these narratives tie in with discourses on forgetting and remembering connected to war experiences and the Shoah, blending aspects of cultural and individual memory, including Tilman Jens’s much-discussed novel Demenz: Abschied von meinem Vater (2008), Arno Geiger’s Es geht uns gut (2005) and Cécile Wajsbrot’s Aus der Nacht (2008).29 In English literature, attention to this emerging genre was drawn especially through the publications of Lisa Genova’s best-selling

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novel Still Alice (2007), Emma Healey’s debut novel Elizabeth is Missing (2014) and short  stories by Nobel-prize winner Alice Munro, many of which, including “The Bear Came Over the Mountain” (2001) and “In Sight of the Lake” (2012), feature narratives of ageing and personal memory. These narratives not only respond to changing demographics: they reflect upon the responsibilities of remembering, the (in-)ability as well as the need to respond, both cognitively and emotionally, to people afflicted with dementia, and the ensuing responsibilities of ‘survivors’ to recover the fragmented selves that emerge from this disease. They provide an arena for negotiating current challenges as well as solutions of how to come to terms with dementia by challenging popular forms of life-writing and creating a dis-ease in us as readers through a sense of disorientation that is afforded by contradictions within the texts and creates emotional and cognitive unsettlement as part of the reading process.

The Poetics of Dis-ease Some of these narrative strategies of dis-ease can be identified by going back to DeBaggio’s Losing My Mind. The memoir is a hybrid text that focuses on DeBaggio’s recollections (long- and short-term memories) but is interspersed with self-reflective remarks on the process of “dying in slow motion”,30 excerpts from dictionaries, and reports on latest treatments, survival rates, and clinical studies taken from the National Institute of Ageing and further institutions concerned with Alzheimer’s research. These scientific accounts rationalise the different stages of cognitive deterioration and create some moments of distance in an otherwise highly emotional account of a fading mind. The fragmentary design of the narrative is emphasised by the ‘Author’s Note’, which opens as follows: “THI I   BOOK B NCED BETWEEN     the wonder of childhood and the tottering age of memory”.31 The first line already points to the gaps, to the information that has been lost and needs to be retrieved and filled in by readers. It thus alludes to the porous brain tissue that is a clear indication of dementia while engaging the reader in recovering the writer’s voice. Fragmented words or sentences and staccato paragraphs which suggest a ‘broken’ language as well as nonchronological narratives are characteristic not only of this memoir but of dementia narratives at large. The survival of these narratives hence becomes a joint endeavour, shared by

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narrators and readers, who collaborate in piecing together the fragments that have survived the neurological decay. As DeBaggio reminds his readers, “The only way I have to preserve my memory now is to write. This book becomes my memory, the only record I have of these empty, dead days”.32 Survival in dementia, therefore, is possible, but it becomes a social act, a shared responsibility, which is based on our abilities and willingness to respond and react to the needs of those afflicted with dementia. As suggested earlier, this responsibility is often avoided or denied, partly based on the misleading conviction that dementia afflicts the senses to the extent that human needs, emotions, aims, and desires have faded in people suffering from this neurodegenerative disease. This aspect is addressed in Ignatieff’s Scar Tissue (1993) when the narrator enters into a conversation with his brother, a neuroscientist, about the fine “dividing line between compassion and pity”33 and more profound questions of selfhood. The narrator declares that his short (seven-­ to-­ten-minute long), daily visits to his mother in a nursing home have become central to his own life, to his own survival: he visits her, as he concedes, “[n]ot because I have to … Because I need to”, whereupon his brother remarks, “What’s the point? […] Is there anything left?”34 Enraged, the narrator sketches the foundations for person- and selfhood: Let’s review the evidence. What you’re asking is ‘is this a person or is this a vegetable?’ […] She has personhood. She has the habits a person has. […] Does she have a self? […] Does she have thoughts about her thoughts? Does she have second order desires? […] A couple of months ago, I was lying beside her on the bed in her room and I asked her, ‘Are you ever sad?’ And right away, staring up at the ceiling, she said, ‘Oh yes.’ That’s a second order thought. You look around the yellow room and the walls and the ceiling and the linoleum and you think to yourself, ‘What kind of life is this?’35

What is at stake here is “our very notion of what comprises the ‘self’”.36 In Western societies, personhood has frequently been reduced to autonomy and rationality, “categories in which people with Alzheimer certainly fail to rank very high—in which they even risk failing to register personhood at all”.37 While dementia is frequently associated with the “loss of […] self before the body dies”,38 dementia narratives work against this denial of personhood.

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In Lisa Genova’s novel Still Alice (2007), for instance, which tells the story of Alice, a psycholinguist who suffers from early-onset Alzheimer’s in her fifties, Alice contemplates on whether she can sustain the love for her daughter when her mind has faded: But will I always love her? Does my love for her reside in my head or in my heart? The scientist in her believed that emotion resulted from complex limbic brain circuitry, circuitry that was for her, at this very moment, trapped in the trenches of a battle in which there would be no survivors. The mother in her believed that the love she had for her daughter was safe from the mayhem in her mind, because it lived in her heart.39

These two examples refer to the ‘personhood movement’ in dementia studies, which first emphasised the ethical implication of referring to dementia as a disease of the brain which destroys the ‘self’. As part of this movement, two concepts were introduced to counter this notion: the concept of embodied selfhood and the concept of relational selfhood. The concept of embodied selfhood connects to both Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s idea of basic intentionality, which proposes that “the body possesses a co-­ ordinating capacity in relation to itself, through […] the ‘primary perceptual’ level”,40 and Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of habitus,  relating to the notion that many of our activities are grounded in embodied memory rather than relying on our cognitive capabilities.41 The model of relational selfhood derives from the assumption that our personhood is essentially social—“a status that is bestowed upon one human being, by others, in the context of relationship and social being”,42 and that “is provided or guaranteed by the presence of others”.43 Dementia narratives, such as Genova’s Still Alice, advocate the recognition of “an on-going sense of selfhood” in dementia, which is based on both the recognition of “an ontological continuity between consciousness, body, and world”44 and “a relational understanding of selfhood”.45 Paradoxically, however, the personhood of survivors is also threatened, jeopardised by the failing recognition of their identities on the part of the demented. This has been suggested by Jonathan Franzen, who recalls the fading of his mother’s self, brought about by her husband’s inability to recognise her as his wife:46

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She, paradoxically, was the one who slowly and surely lost her self, living with a man who mistook her for her mother, forgot every fact he’d ever known about her, and finally ceased to speak her name.47

Unlike his mother, Franzen manages to reaffirm his personhood by establishing himself as narrator of his father’s story and thereby creates a narrative that, like all dementia narratives, “challenge[s] the idea that loss of narrative ability necessarily signals loss of human selfhood”.48 Narrative is an important element in sustaining relational selfhood. It is in the act of reading that characters or the voices of memoirs respectively are actualised and sustained. It is the responsibility of the survivors, therefore, to maintain what Tom Kitwood refers to as the “interpersonal milieu”49 of the demented by recovering or telling their stories through actualising or narrativising them, which, while raising questions concerning the ownership of one’s story, one’s life-writing, is the only way they can survive. What dementia narratives emphasise is that it is not so much the “recognition [of the self and others] [which] becomes extinguished; rather, it may be that the expression of recognition is what becomes impaired with advancing dementia”.50 This is emphasised, for instance, in Elizabeth Healey’s novel Elizabeth is Missing (2014)—a narrative focalised through Maud, who suffers from dementia but has lost neither her ability of observation or critical self-assessment nor her theory of mind: Helen sighs again. She’s doing a lot of that lately. She won’t listen, won’t take me seriously […]. I know what she’s thinking, that I’ve lost my marbles, that Elizabeth is perfectly well at home and I just don’t remember having seen her recently. But it’s not true. I forget things—I know that— but I’m not mad. Not yet. And I’m sick of being treated as if I am. I’m tired of the sympathetic smiles and the little pats people give you when you get things confused. […] I have a terrible urge to kick Helen under the table. I kick the table leg instead.51

Healey’s narrative introduces humour to dementia, which makes Maud’s story much more enjoyable, but simultaneously also increases our un-ease, as we are placed into an even more pronounced superior role even though, as it will be revealed towards the end of the novel, we misapprehend Maud’s cognitive abilities.

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Though deeply forgetful (especially regarding her short-term memory), Maud solves a mystery—the mystery surrounding the ‘disappearance’ of Elizabeth, which turns out to be connected with another (lost) story of a missing person which Maud retrieves. The dynamics of memorising and forgetting play out on several different levels in the narrative while the demented, as we only gradually become aware, has the deepest insight into what happened around her. The novel is an excellent example of ‘moral attention’ in that it engages readers into sharing Maud’s worldviews and gradually frees her from the stigma of dementia (even though, of course, there is no cure). What is particularly interesting with regard to narrative form is that Healey uses a genre that can be deemed a key genre for attention narratives. Elizabeth is Missing is written in the tradition of detective fiction—a genre that emerged in the nineteenth century, prompted partly by growing psychological awareness of the nature of ‘perception’ and ‘attention’ (promoted by publications such as William James’s The Psychology of Perception [1891]).52 With the figure of the demented detective, Healey adapts the genre to respond to attention anxieties that characterise contemporary culture and have been fuelled by technological advancements in the digital era.

Literary Dis-ease in the Attention Economy In today’s attention economy, where success is defined by “getting as many people as possible to spend as much time and attention as possible with one’s product or service”,53 attention is a rare commodity and highly valuable resource. In such an attention-driven environment, survival is intimately connected to one’s capacities of drawing and being able to sustain attention to oneself. Considering current life-writing or life-in-death-­ writing practices on social media—including Twitter, which was the starting point of this essay—this notion of survival through attention poses several questions regarding ‘the ethics of survival’, as the attention we pay to death and the dying oscillates between an unsettling voyeurism connected to regarding the pain of others and moral attention. The latter, however, requires a deep engagement in the stories we encounter, based on our ability to respond to them cognitively and emotionally. By engaging readers in filling in the gaps left by neurocognitive decay (as demonstrated in DeBaggio’s narrative) and the experience of attentional deficits (as will be shown in connection with Healey’s novel below), dementia narratives call for an active response on the part of the readers.

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It is almost ironic that in the growing attention economy, dementia narratives which are essentially concerned with attentional deficits are on the rise. In addition to the increase of neurocognitive diseases, the anxiety of losing one’s attentional capacities seems to have contributed to their success. At the same time, these narratives reveal the deficits in what Stephen Post has called a “hypercognitive society”54 where “[c]ognitive tests amount […] to ‘defectology’: they show what the person cannot do, not what they can”.55 As emphasised by Julian Hughes, “What is missing is the human-person perspective”.56 This is what dementia narratives provide by conveying subjective experiences of living with dementia and refocusing our attention from the disabilities to the mental abilities and senses of selfhood of people suffering from this disease. Healey’s novel is a particularly interesting example in this context, as it reveals the disabilities of readers to recognise the mental capacities of a character suffering from dementia, exposing what can be regarded as an instance of inattentional blindness. The latter describes moments when we miss objects that appear in our visual field because our attention is bound to another object or task.57 Though related to visual attention, this phenomenon can also be transferred to our perception on a more general scope. Regarding the novel Elizabeth is Missing, for instance, readers’ perception of the protagonist, Maud, is guided by their expectation of encountering a demented mind. Consequently, their attention is directed to Maud’s cognitive inabilities, her forgetfulness, confusion, and misperception of her environment. As we become aware towards the end, however, despite her cognitive failures, Maud was able to solve a crime which was long forgotten. Ironically, the narrative includes several hints at her inquisitive mind in her persistent quest for the whereabouts of Elizabeth, the results of which she carefully notes down to ensure their retrieval: There is a click at the end of the line, and a long beeping noise. He has hung up. I quickly retrieve my pen. Elizabeth all right says son, I write, Said fuck on the phone, I add, though I’m not sure why it’s significant.58

These humorous hints are easily overlooked by readers, dismissed as quirky habit of a deranged mind. Drawing on strategies derived from crime fiction, Healey’s novel plays with readers’ attentional capacities while exposing their propensity to misjudge people suffering from dementia by revealing our propensity to inattentional blindness, which is based on the biases with which we approach neurocognitive diseases.

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Dementia has been referred to as ‘literary disease’ (“‘literarische’ Krankheit”)59 based on the loss of the abilities to speak, memorise, and tell stories. It demonstrates what is left of us, ‘the story-telling animals’, if we lose our ability for storytelling and life writing. As noted in Scar Tissue, “when you strip us right down, when illness pares us back to our core, we remain creatures of the word. Nothing can save us but the word, the messages we send from deep in the shaft of sickness”.60 Survival in dementia is possible, but only through (shared) narratives—narratives which are ultimately thought experiments, as none of us can imagine what living with dementia feels like. These thought experiments are not “voyeuristic”,61 but they can train our moral attention. As emphasised in Scar Tissue, “We’re all moral tourists here. Illness is another country. None of us has any idea. That’s what thought experiments are for”.62 In our contemporary attention economy, narratives of disease have become part of a new moral tourism industry—an industry which capitalises on a heightened interest in attention deficits—while holding up the mirror to our own inattentional blindness, thus creating a profound dis-­ ease which prompts moral attention and ensures the survival of these narratives. Dementia narratives in particular raise new questions about the ethics of survival when survival is not a choice but a matter of responsibility, enabled by shared narratives. At the same time, they help expose ‘the invisible gorillas’63 in our encounters with life-in-death diseases such as Alzheimer’s by drawing attention to the survival of selves that have frequently been deemed lost in a society where survival is (too) often associated with the desire to forget.

Notes 1. DeBaggio (2003, 94). 2. Sontag (2004). 3. Sontag (2004). 4. Hodges (3 Sept. 2018). 5. Debord (1995). 6. Barad (2012, 81). 7. Barad (2007, 178). 8. Haraway (2016, 1). 9. Short-term memory losses, caused by medication etc., are not subsumed under the term ‘dementia’ as used in this essay. 10. DeBaggio (2003, 5, 6, 41).

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11. Wolfson et al. (2011, 1111). 12. Shakespeare (2006 [1603], 2.7.166–167). 13. Franzen (2003, 22). 14. Franzen (2003, 24). 15. Hughes (2011, viii). 16. Franzen (2003, 37). 17. DeBaggio (2003, 5). 18. DeBaggio (2003, 181). 19. Ignatieff (1993, 1). 20. Ignatieff (1993, 4). 21. Ignatieff (1993, 90). 22. See WHO (2020, n.p.). 23. WHO (2020, n.p.). 24. See Nussbaum (1985). 25. Nussbaum (1985, 527, 516; emphasis in original). 26. Nussbaum (1985, 522). 27. Barad (2007, 178). 28. Couser (2011, 3; emphasis in original). 29. See Vedder (2012). 30. DeBaggio (2003, 6). 31. DeBaggio (2003, n.p.). 32. DeBaggio (2003, 194). 33. Ignatieff (1993, 126). 34. Ignatieff (1993, 112). 35. Ignatieff (1993, 159–160). 36. Herskovitz (1995, 148). 37. Basting (2002, 96), see also Kitwood (1997) and Post (1995). 38. Franzen (2003, 29–30). 39. Genova (2007, 230–231), cf. Kontos (2012, 8). 40. Kontos (2012, 4), cf. Merleau-Ponty (1964, 5). 41. Bourdieu (1977), see Kontos (2012). 42. Kitwood (1997, 8). 43. Kitwood and Bredin (1992, 275). 44. Kontos (2012, 8). 45. Falcus (2014, 86). 46. Cf. Vedder (2012, 283). 47. Franzen (2003, 25). 48. Roy (2009, 42). 49. Kitwood (1997, 69). 50. Kontos (2012, 9). 51. Healey (2014, 18–19). 52. See Baumbach (2019).

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53. Williams (2018, 33). 54. Post (2000). 55. Hughes (2011, 232). 56. Hughes (2011, 256). 57. See Mack and Rock (1998). 58. Healey (2014, 50). 59. Vedder (2012, 288). 60. Ignatieff (1993, 140–141). 61. Ignatieff (1993, 144). 62. Ignatieff (1993, 144). 63. Chabris and Simons (2010).

References Barad, Karen. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke University Press. ———. 2012. “Intra-actions.” Interview by Adam Kleinman. Mousse Magazine 34: 76–81. Basting, Anne Davis. 2002. Looking Back from Loss: Views of the Self in Alzheimer’s Disease. Journal of Aging Studies 17: 87–99. Baumbach, Sibylle. 2019. Mind the Narratives: Towards a Cultural Narratology of Attention. In Narrative in Culture, ed. Astrid Erll and Roy Sommer, 37–57. Berlin: De Gruyter. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1977. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Translated by Richard Nice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Chabris, Christopher, and Daniel Simons. 2010. The Invisible Gorilla and Other Ways How Our Intuitions Deceive Us. New York: Crown. Couser, Thomas G. 2011. Memoir: An Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. DeBaggio, Thomas. 2003. Losing My Mind: An Intimate Look at Life with Alzheimer’s. New York: The Free Press. Debord, Guy. 1995. The Society of the Spectacle. Translated by Donald Nicholson-­ Smith. New York: Zone Book. Falcus, Sarah. 2014. Storying Alzheimer’s Disease in Lisa Genova’s Still Alice. EnterText 12: 73–94. Franzen, Jonathan. 2003. My Father’s Brain. In How to Be Alone, 7–38. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Genova, Lisa. 2007. Still Alice. New York: Pocket Books. Haraway, Donna J. 2016. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press. Healey, Emma. 2014. Elizabeth Is Missing. London: Penguin.

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Herskovitz, Elizabeth. 1995. Struggling Over Subjectivity: Debates about the ‘Self’ and Alzheimer’s Disease. Anthropological Quarterly 9 (2): 146–164. Hodges, Rachael. 2018. Twitter. https://twitter.com/Rachael_Hodges. Hughes, Julian C. 2011. Thinking Through Dementia. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ignatieff, Michael. 1993. Scar Tissue. London: Vintage. Kitwood, Tom. 1997. Dementia Reconsidered: The Person Comes First. Buckingham: Open University Press. Kitwood, Tom, and Kathleen Bredin. 1992. Towards a Theory of Dementia Care: Personhood and Well-being. Ageing and Society 12 (3): 269–287. Kontos, Pia C. 2012. Alzheimer Expressions or Expressions Despite Alzheimer’s? Reflections on Selfhood and Embodiment. Occasion: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities v.4. https://arcade.stanford.edu/occasion/alzheimerexpressions-or-expressions-despite-alzheimers-philosophical-reflections-selfhood. Mack, Arien, and Irvin Rock. 1998. Inattentional Blindness. Cambridge: MIT Press. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1964. The Primacy of Perception. Edited by J.  Edie. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Nussbaum, Martha. 1985. ‘Finely Aware and Richly Responsible’: Moral Attention and the Moral Task of Literature. The Journal of Philosophy 82 (10): 516–529. Post, Stephen. 1995. The Moral Challenge of Alzheimer’s Disease. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. ———. 2000. The Concept of Alzheimer Disease in a Hypercognitive Society. In Concepts of Alzheimer Disease: Biological, Clinical, and Cultural Perspectives, ed. Peter J. Whitehouse and K. Maurer, 245–256. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Roy, Wendy. 2009. The Word is ‘Colander’. Language Loss and Narrative Voice in Fictional Canadian Alzheimer’s Narratives. Canadian Literature 203: 41–61. Shakespeare, William. 2006 [1603]. As You Like It. Edited by Juliet Dusinberre. London: Arden Shakespeare. Sontag, Susan. 2004. Regarding the Pain of Others. London: Penguin. Vedder, Ulrike. 2012. Erzählen vom Zerfall. Demenz und Alzheimer in der Gegenwartsliteratur. Zeitschrift für Germanistik 22 (2): 274–289. Williams, James. 2018. Stand out of Our Light: Freedom and Resistance in the Attention Economy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wolfson, Christina, et al. 2011. A Reevaluation of the Duration of Survival after the Onset of Dementia. The New England Journal of Medicine 344: 1111–1116. World Health Organization (WHO). 2020. https://www.who.int/news-­room/ fact-­sheets/detail/dementia.

CHAPTER 9

Surviving: Jenny Diski, Illness, and Gratitude Gerd Bayer

Let me start with the cruellest of statements about surviving: while a survivor is somebody who has not died, it is nevertheless somebody who will eventually die. Surviving is a state of living affected by mortality: the mortality narrowly escaped in the past but also the mortality accepted as final destination; it is an experience of life marked by an encounter with death. And like Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s figure of life-in-death that haunts the Ancient Mariner, surviving acts as a reminder of life as precarious, as easily exposed to vulnerability and suffering. In the same way that Judith Butler’s writing about precarious lives grows out of her concern with the political in a time of global crises and ever more frequent examples of hegemonic violence,1 the trope of survival increasingly puts in appearances in literary works and other cultural texts, reminding readers about the potentially cataclysmic futures of our pre-apocalyptic or anthropocenic age.2 When we look at recent literature, film, and other art forms that address the issue of survival in such diverse topical contexts as ageing, refugees, homophobia, and neo-colonialism,3 we are often tempted to see the

G. Bayer (*) University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Erlangen, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 R. Freiburg, G. Bayer (eds.), The Ethics of Survival in Contemporary Literature and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83422-7_9

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overcoming of one obstacle, miraculous as it might be in many instances, as an unspoken indication and possibly even guarantee that the survivor has now somehow managed to cheat death, that he or she is somewhat immune to the vicissitudes and vagaries of dying.4 Yet this quasi eternal state, this notion of finality, of surviving as a form of super-life (so grotesquely presented in various TV formats about survivors) is precisely not what survival is all about. Rather, surviving is about the very death of life, of the living before the surviving began and of the kind of life that ensues in the aftermath of having survived. The academic discourse on living and surviving makes this rather clear: survivorship, for instance in the context of cancer, is the time that follows upon the crisis. The use of the phrase “cancer survivor”—arguably one of the most frequently used collocations, along with Holocaust survivor— goes back to Dr Fitzhugh Mullan’s essay “Seasons of Survival: Reflections of a Physician with Cancer”, published in The New England Journal of Medicine in July 1985, where Mullan powerfully explains how a patient’s life after a diagnosis is marked by its specific temporality: an awareness of limited life-expectancy combined with the insecurity that comes with not knowing whether any form of treatment will be efficient. Mullan’s candid discussion of the mental make-up of the post-diagnosis cancer patient has paved the way for the realization that, in the case of survival, it makes sense to speak of and reflect on “the discontinuities of subjectivity”.5 Extending Mullan’s medical scholarship into the literature-and-medicine discourse, Emily Bartels further reflects on the simultaneity of rupture and continuity when she observes that the “representative person, that permanent survivor, is never cured: life after cancer—after disease, treatment, and extended remission—is still life with cancer”.6 To be a survivor, then, is to live with the acuteness of mortality having taking on a significantly greater significance. To survive, therefore, is not a state that places the survivor at a greater distance from death but rather the opposite. It is this double sense of surviving that also shapes one of the most influential texts on the topic, namely Jacques Derrida’s last interview, about learning to live finally, conducted by Jean Birnbaum at a moment in time when Derrida was violently battling cancer, the illness that took his life only a few weeks after the interview was published in its French original in 2004. In his comments about his past work and its future importance, Derrida returns to the matter of surviving when he states that “survival is not simply that which remains but the most intense life possible”.7 So, for Derrida, survival is not the experience of overcoming a

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challenge, but what follows upon such a crisis, what results from it and hence what extends beyond the imaginable, into a future beyond one’s death. As Lee Edelman notes in his comments on Derrida’s reflections, survival is not “supplementary to living and dying”, it rather “precedes and determines both”.8 Loosely building on Walter Benjamin’s distinctions between “überleben” (making it through a crisis) and “fortleben” (continuing to live)—and silently bypassing the fact that Benjamin also toys with the notion of “nachleben” (of a living-on after life, in particular when it comes to the lasting legacy of an art work)9—Derrida insists that to survive is always already a form of living that goes beyond life, it aims to transcend life similar to how surrealism reaches beyond mere reality. It is for this reason that Derrida prefers the term “survivance”, since unlike “survie” and its implications of closure, it evokes, or offers traces of, the notions of process, agency, and force. One reason Derrida may have been drawn to the notion of survival— beyond its painful urgency due to his medical condition—could be the term’s semantic richness and ambiguity, the way in which it transports deconstructive ideology easily across various language boundaries. Dianne Enns, commenting on Derrida’s reflections, points out that, when thinking about surviving and survival, it is necessary to consider “the doubled meaning that the German terms fortleben and überleben provide: as living­on and living-through. That is, living-on in what remains, consoled by life beyond death (or life over-life, as sur-vie implies), as opposed to living-­ through or enduring”. Moving Benjamin’s überleben close to Derrida’s survivance, Enns contrasts this aspect of survival with Benjamin’s fortleben as it resurfaces in Derrida’s survie: “Survival as endurance (überleben) essentially refuses the consolation of survival as living beyond (fortleben)”.10 Survival, then, again like trauma, can affect life beyond death, in the sense that the experience of having survived continues to shape not simply the moment of survival, and not even exclusively the life of the survivor but may well extent into the next generation. As Veronica Estay Stange contends: “la survie concern[e] non seulement les acteurs eux-­ mêmes, mais aussi leur descendance”.11 Survival as living-on (fortleben) attaches both to the person who went through a moment of existential crisis, to the descendants of that person, and also to the question of that person’s legacy. Seen this way, survivance, the exquisite but at the same time painful, strained, even estranged experience of being alive that follows an incidence of survival or results from insight gained, often for acute reasons, in the

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precariousness of existence, is the exact opposite of what Giorgio Agamben describes as “bare life”, the mere physical existence of a life not seen as worth living; a life that is less than living.12 Both survivance and bare life thus mark departures or extreme points at a distance from the everyday and normal experience of living. Looked at in this way and drawing on this sense of survival, the research on surviving complements and extends the extensive body of scholarship that deals with questions of trauma. But whereas trauma studies are largely defined by a temporality that is directed backwards at the moment of initial traumatization, questions related to surviving are more focused on the present and the projection of any sense of futurity. Many texts that deal with trauma will also deal with survival, given the effect of Nachträglichkeit that accompanies traumatic memories.13 Where trauma research frequently remains focused on the traumatic event, the focus on survival draws attention to the kind of life that follows after trauma.14 It extends the question about memory and continuity beyond the lifespan of the individual who went through trauma. With trauma studies having grown to a substantial degree out of the cultural engagement with the memory of the Holocaust that is tied to the living witnesses of the concentration camps, the focus within Holocaust Studies stands to benefit also from a shift in focus that reflects on the survival of memory,15 and on the conceptual engagement with what the legacy of the Holocaust will mean once survivors are no longer amongst the living.16 All qualitative deliberations aside, survival clearly also has temporal implications: it is here that the debate about survival resonates with what Paul Ricoeur, in Oneself as Another (1992), teases apart as an always already implicit encounter all individuals can have over time with their earlier selves as both different and the same. In reflecting on the discontinuous temporality of identity, Ricoeur differentiates between two aspects he addresses via the Latin terms idem and ipse, with “ipse” standing for one’s own self at any particular point in time, whereas “idem” evokes an aspect of the self and the person that stays true to itself over time despite loss and mutability. To follow this thought, the question over identity is one closely connected to matters of sameness and identity; and even more sharply so when an instance of survival places the supposed continuity of existence, as experienced by the survivor, into even greater contrast. This gains even more importance in moments when the self is turned—as is the case in all matters of survivalist memoirs—into a narrative object. This aspect is also addressed by Ricoeur: “the polarity I am going to examine

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suggests an intervention of narrative identity in the conceptual constitution of personal identity in the manner of a specific mediator between the pole of character, where idem and ipse tend to coincide, and the pole of self-maintenance, where selfhood frees itself from sameness”.17 Ricoeur draws on the notion of survival himself when he ponders, in an aside, the tricky enigma of whether personal identity can survive across time: “What can I expect from the future? Am I going to die or survive in my replica?”18 So for Ricoeur, who spent much of World War II trying to survive as a prisoner of war, living almost invariably, or so one could deduce from his writing in Oneself as Another, implies a form of surviving, a form of living that transforms the self into an other that is simultaneously one’s present true self, ipse, and a veritable continuation of one’s earlier self, idem. The very fact that his philosophy of alterity allows for such a distinction underlines the importance of a life beyond itself.19 Taken together, the commentary by Derrida on the duality of existence that results from the experience of survival—in particular its processual understanding in survivance—as well as Ricoeur’s reflections on the ethically activating (dis-)continuities of selfhood that may accrue within the self-same individual as time goes by, address facets of the literary representation of survival that point to the ambiguity that attaches to identity. When such a fraught sense of identity is joined by an existential crisis, for instance in the shape of a terminal diagnosis, matters of survival may well inspire reflections on temporal existence that not always limit themselves to anaphoric references to the past experience of crisis but also cataphorically extend to the living-on that may or may not take place.

Jenny Diski, a Dying Survivor In the Jenny Diski cancer memoir that provides the focus for this essay, the built-in ambiguity of her corporeal (and hence also mental) state is compared to Schrödinger’s cat: when Diski has had radio therapy but is waiting to have a new MRT, she is reflecting on the fact that her body is simultaneously more and less ill than before, with her mind struggling with the fact that any knowledge about her health and thus about herself will now forever be couched in probabilities and statistical forecasts: “So I’m living with Schrödinger’s tumour. There it is: both smaller and bigger; spreading via the lymph nodes to the brain (or whoknowswhere) and halted in its tracks; […]. Until Onc Doc opens the box next week”.20 Diski’s sense of her existence having bifurcated into two parallel forms of

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living—one narrative bound towards death, the other towards living— puts in appearances at various places throughout her cancer memoir that doubles as an extended reflection on a number of other moments in her life that were determining its trajectory in essential ways. Later in her narrative, for instance, she describes a panic attack, resulting from severe breathing problems, in a way that expresses the simultaneous duality of her existence: Without doubt, I was dying of suffocation. It wasn’t a metaphor, it was an inability to breathe, to take in air; and I knew that I wouldn’t survive this attack. I did survive, of course.21

It is in these entirely non-binary—and, one could add,22 decidedly post-­ structuralist experiences—that surviving exists. In writing about survival, Diski thus employs tropes of survival that connect with the double existence of having survived and being a survivor. For a reading of Diski’s In Gratitude, Ricoeur’s thinking reminds us that when we deal with one or more moments of survival, we always also deal with multiple identities: or rather, that to survive is to become many, which is just another way of saying that the aftermath of having survived, the lasting impact of survivance, is the kind of existence that gives life to the writing about surviving. In Diski’s In Gratitude, this multiplicity becomes even more acute since she is not only a writer who had to overcome serious difficulties and challenges during her teenage years and early adulthood; she is furthermore, at the moment of writing her last book, undergoing very aggressive cancer treatment. Diski’s early novels, beginning with Nothing Natural in 1986, have always traced extreme mental states and the psychoanalytic thinking and institutional tinkering directed at them, religious probing, and the oftentimes extreme physicality of existence; these themes she also addressed in her various non-fiction travel accounts, her numerous essays and reviews published in the London Review of Books. Born in 1947, Diski has also written an insightful and rather provocative monograph on the supposedly permissive culture of the 1960s;23 and in In Gratitude, published shortly after her death in 2016, she contextualizes her own life, now cut short by fatal illness, as marked by the historical and intellectual environment she grew up in. In Gratitude starts with the announcement by her oncologist that Diski only has two to three years to live, describes her initial reactions (a

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frivolous joke about Breaking Bad) and the quick decision that since she has always written about her own experiences in life, she will now simply continue to do so: “I’m a writer. I’ve got cancer. Am I going to write about it? How am I not? I pretended for a moment that I might not, but knew I had to, because writing is what I do and now cancer is what I do, too”.24 Yet her book does not restrict itself to her reflections about writing a cancer diary; and while it does make a powerful contribution to this genre, with painfully unfiltered descriptions of the dehumanizing process of having less and less of a functioning human body, In Gratitude quickly delves into two other narratives: on the one hand, the narrative of young Jenny Simmonds, the wild and truant teenager almost not making it through life; and on the other hand, an account of—one could even say a reckoning of—Doris Lessing offering survival as a gift that—like any other, or so Marcel Mauss has shown—comes with all sorts of consequences. Diski’s memoir frequently touches on her painful memories of her early adulthood, of the neglect by her parents, the at times life-threatening seriousness of her mental health, and the rescue at the hands of Doris Lessing. That rescue, though, Diski cannot help but view, now, with mixed feelings, realizing that when she was taken on by the mother of a friend from school, a single parent who had never even met her prior to sending her a very kind and life-changing letter into the mental health facility where she was trying to recover, this narrative sounded too much like a fairy tale, a generic resonance she explicitly acknowledges: “Still, it was close enough to the old tales. I was a sort of foundling. I was sort of recognized as or was elevated to being worthy of attention. I did proceed into another life. Or at least into a life that was probably different from the one I might have had if Doris had not issued her invitation”.25 It is this memory of another narrative, another life taking over, of two lives,26 of a bifurcation where she ended up taking one path, abandoning the other, whose possible destinations were never to be explored again, that mark and mar the experience of Diski’s surviving. Part of Diski, who assumed this new and made-up last name just before she turned 30 with her first marriage in 1976, seems to regret this interference, this outside force that provided her with a moment of survival. It is only one page later that Diski, now writing from her knowledge that she is dying from cancer, tells herself that “I would have had some life, a life, had Doris not intervened, which would still have been my own”.27 The “still” in this statement implies that there would have been a continuity of identity, a co-existence of Ricoeur’s idem and ipse

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aspects. Diski’s memory of her survival, thanks to but also at the hands of Lessing, thus reveals clear signs of regret and of discontinuity; and it makes visible an acute understanding that the life that comes with surviving plays to a different tune. Her comments about Lessing’s overpowering impact on her own life also find an echo when Diski speaks about the children that Lessing left behind in Africa when she moved to England in 1949. Diski later met Lessing’s daughter, Jean, during a visit in London, and she notes that “[…] at Doris’s funeral, Jean […] stood and spoke of being glad that Doris has left her and let her (Jean) have a life of her own”.28 Again, it is the question about whose life one lives; or rather, whether one is allowed to have control over one’s life that appears to fascinate Diski. Tellingly, the passage just cited, written as a form of obituary for Peter, Lessing’s son, notes: “Peter had no life of his own, ever”.29 By having or not having had a life, Diski differentiates between her own biography, carved out of trauma and rescue, and her quasi-surrogate brother Peter, whose life narrative appears to have been dominated entirely by his mother’s personality and her needs. Her memoir, thus, speaks about the necessity, in her life, to move repeatedly from one identity to the next, to assert her identity, to survive her crises, and to live on as a survivor, up to and beyond her terminal illness.

Literature, Legacy, Nachleben Diski’s On Gratitude actually is the story of two survivings: of two moments in her life when one life is replaced, even sur-placed, by another; when the idem-life that continues is only partly providing the kind of ipse-­ continuity of identity that allows for easy identification. Both incidents share the crucial feature of survival: they have a clear moment of crisis, catastrophe, and trauma, and they segue into a form of living, the surviving (survivance), that makes a simple continuation of the life before an impossibility. The first moment in Diski’s life is really a period in her life, a sequence of crises that, in many cases, would have individually been sufficient to end a life: sexual abuse, total collapse of a family environment, drug abuse, suicidal tendencies, total disregard for health and well-being.30 Diski famously ran afoul with the educational institutions where she was placed when her parents proved incapable of looking after her, and it was only the rather random and totally unexpected offer by the mother of one of her class mates of a home that provided her with an environment that allowed her not just to live but to survive.

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That surrogate mother, the later Nobel Prize for Literature laureate Doris Lessing, is therefore, and tellingly, also one of the two recurrent topics of Diski’s memoir, alongside her observations about her body and mind as they fight against the fallout from her dual diagnosis of lung cancer and pulmonary fibrosis. While being rescued as a teenager and being confronted with one’s imminent death in one’s late sixties may not sound like comparable experiences, they nevertheless both confronted Diski with a moment of survivorship. The cancer diagnosis, and any form of survival, is thus not a death sentence but a life sentence, in the true sense of the word: it is a commitment to the actual act of living, a form of living that is not the living before, the ante-living, but the living beyond one’s earlier living, the survivance of survival.31 In the epilogue to On Trying to Keep Still, a travelogue that continues Diski’s newfound and somewhat scorned fame as a travel writer, Diski had already speculated about whether travelling around the world is worth the bother, arguing that the more exciting experience she foresees relates to her own body and its future health: Death was the most novel experience she would ever have, but why book ahead? Before that culminating event, there was the experience of ageing to look forward to—the pull of gravity on her flesh, organs wearing out, joints creaking to a halt. All these experiences could be had in the comfort of her home, her own particularly and personally arranged environment.32

Travel, for Diski, has repeatedly been little more than a spatialized performance of her own search for identity, a metaphorized discussion, or peripatetic exercise, of the life of the mind trying to keep up with the mundane realities of pain and sorrow. Both in Skating to Antarctica (1997) and in Stranger on a Train (2002), Diski travels to more or less remote corners of the world as a means to reconnect with a sense of self, and a form of identity, that has undergone various and severe crises, in a move that, as Karin Sanders suggests, provides a suspension of trauma in a location that offers a form of oblivion.33 Forgetting and remembering thus accordingly plays a major role, and both aspects of how people deal with their past selves also feature prominently in In Gratitude. In one of the extended sections of this memoir that address Diski’s prolonged stay in the Lessing household, she reflects on the way in which her own biography transmuted into a fictionalized form in texts written by Lessing. Speaking specifically of her own self as a model for one of the main protagonists in Lessing’s Memoirs of a Survivor (1974), whose title

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tellingly puns on Diski’s own theme in In Gratitude, she begins the passage with a highly revealing assessment of her own past as existing in an uncanny version of doubled existence, turning her life, again, into a Schrödingeresque Doppelgänger-existence: “I recall two versions of me as I look back over the first few months of living with Doris. One conforms to a description in Doris’s Memoirs of a Survivor, of how twelve-year-old Emily Cartwright settled in with the unnamed female narrator she’d been left with”.34 However, this version is contrasted with Diski’s own memories: “The other me I recall at that time is the me of my own feelings and behaviour, which seemed always at odds or out of true with Doris’s analysis”.35 While Diski feels clearly unhappy, or at least uncomfortable, with her conclusion that Lessing’s portrayal of the fictional Emily is an “accurate […] reading of me”,36 she nevertheless accepts that her own self, as currently lived and as she now prefers to remember it, may be not entirely a continuation and extension of her earlier self as it lived and suffered during her early adolescence. In having survived her childhood experiences of neglect and trauma and in having lived through the supposedly permissive period of the 1960s that Diski—both in the description of not always very consensual sexual contacts in In Gratitude and more explicitly in the intellectual and cultural climate that existed during this decade in her study The Sixties (2010)—reveals to have been highly exploitative and coercive in the midst of a rhetoric of permissiveness and liberation, Diski’s writing is shot through with imageries of surviving and survival. Diski’s In Gratitude thus traces various forms of surviving. One could furthermore also ask how she and her work will survive, what Benjamin discusses as an artist’s legacy, his or her ability to achieve the gift of fortleben: Will it be as a witness to Lessing? As a public intellectual or also as a literary writer? Will she maybe simply survive as a survivor: will her text garner a place within the booming future of medical humanities, of trauma studies, of disability studies? Will her oncology become her ontology in the sense that her fight with cancer will mark the life she lost to it? Will her portrayal of dying from cancer become her entry into the survivance of living-on, providing her with a literary afterlife that comes out of and thus survives her terminal illness? Similar to how Gerald Vizenor, in Manifest Manners: Narratives on Postindian Survivance (1999), and Meredith M.  Gadsby, in Sucking Salt: Caribbean Women Writers, Migration, and Survival (2006), see survivors and the art of survivance as agents of resistance and therefore as important actants that counter the passivity of victimhood, survivance in general insists on the activity of living-on, of both

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fortleben and überleben; and it is at the added intersection with Diski’s literary legacy, her nachleben, that her fight with surviving in In Gratitude is situated. In their final consequences, literary questions about survival, about what the Derrida interview traces more in “survivance” than in “survie”, are primarily about the archival desire, about the book-to-come. They are engaging with the matter of nachleben. Survival in this sense hinges on a text, an author, a work’s ability to go on, its relevancy for future readers. Seen this way, survival, then, is the core of literary history; and literary criticism, alongside the various players within the book market, increasingly those attached to virtual forms of commerce and distribution, feeds surviving while simultaneously feeding off the survival of writing. It is conceivably also from an awareness of this dynamic that Diski, acutely aware of her own mortality, writes the final instalment of her memoirs precisely as a contribution to how her literary life interacted with that of the much better-known Doris Lessing, whose Nobel Prize has already started to outshine and thus outlast the reputation of even her most famous novel, the once radical The Golden Notebook (1962). As literary history thus ponders (and potentially will continue to ponder) the legacy of Lessing, it will also include an accompanying discussion of Diski as a literary figure both in the orbit of Lessing’s literary fame and as a writer in her own right. The gratitude that Diski expresses in her memoir is thus, at least partly, an anticipatory expression of sentiment: it considers the continuation of her writing life beyond the end of her own life. While surviving her teenage years was arguably the biggest challenge and thus a major source for feeling grateful, it is what developed as a result of that first survival that forms the core of her literary memoir: having survived a personal crisis, Diski grew into a writer whose output has established her as a lasting name. It is the realization that her reputation is firmly established that provides Diski with a source of gratitude. At the same time, this form of survival (of nachleben) is a direct consequence of her initial surviving (überleben) in a way that not simply forms a chronological sequence but a logical consequence. By turning into a writer, Diski became a different person. Her identity formed around the initial survival, giving shape to much of her fictional writing and providing thought for her essayistic output. It is hardly a coincidence that in Apology for the Woman Writing (2009), Diski choses as a protagonist an early-modern French writer, Marie de Gournay, whose life-long struggle to keep Michel de Montaigne’s

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Essays (1580) posthumously in print speaks about the extension of a writerly life beyond mere bodily existence. A further parallel between Diski and her fictional alter ego in this novel consists in the fact that both writers, and their respective legacies, are so closely connected to the force that attaches to major canonical figures like Montaigne and Lessing. It is the ultimate transfer across the mind/body chasm: by aspiring towards culture and art, the fragility of bodies, their very precariousness, translates into a continuation on an arguably higher plane. In writing about Adrienne Rich’s lyrical work in the light of her struggle with looming annihilation during the atomic race, Alexandra Gold attests to moments in the poet’s work that set out to perform “an act of survival through attempted cultivation”.37 Here, survival takes on, again, an optimistic note: it becomes an expression of a positive investment into the future, one that relies on the continuation of specific forms of discussion and activities, precisely those connected to art, culture, and civilization. As long as a functioning network of civil society persists, or so the argument seems to run, there is sufficient grounds for trust in the continuation of positive thoughts. Despite all the pain and trauma that find expression in Diski’s writing, including her final memoir, the simple fact that she continues to write right up to the last possible moment speaks about the confidence she is willing to place into the art form of writing per se. This attitude echoes the way that trauma appears across a range of literary writings. It has been described for the way in which Patricia Chao connects “post-traumatic survival […] with spiritual and cultural survival”;38 and it also resonates with the moral outlook found in Cormac McCarthy’s writing, where “Survival requires finding a way to make sense of the work and of retaining the hope that community is possible”.39 The promise of nachleben that attaches to artistic and cultural output thus transcends into a praxis of cultural production.

Beyond Closure In the end, when we read about Lessing’s literary survival in Diski’s personal tale of trying to survive illness, we are dealing increasingly with Benjamin’s matter of nachleben, with the kind of continuity of what Michel Foucault would call an author’s “work”, defined simultaneously by the author function and the ability of such an author to persist beyond the biographical. Foucault, at one point, defines writing as “something designed to ward off death”.40 Such a sense of survival, needless to say, is

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always fraught with anxiety. And looking for a shared feature of Canadian writing in general, Margaret Atwood finds precisely in this “almost intolerably anxiety”,41 inspired by survival, a theme that shapes aesthetic expression at large. When literature gives voice to the drama of survival, it almost automatically gives voice to “gratitude for having escaped”.42 This “survival against all odds”,43 implicitly admitting to the precariousness of life itself, is also an underlying leitmotif in Diski’s In Gratitude: readers encounter a writer struggling to come to terms with terminal illness and at the same time turning to gratitude and wonder when reflecting on the miracle of having survived earlier crises. When faced with death, Diski does not turn to fatality but instead presents a positive outlook on her life and her legacy. Her memoir—which may or may not testify to the entirety of her mental state during this taxing time—speaks about survival as a form of memory that projects beyond life. So, what, then, survives in Diski’s final writing, in her testimony to her dying? The book’s title offers a somewhat Derridean answer, a semiological pointer to the homonymous transience that oscillates between being in a state that we could describe as “in gratitude” and its exact opposite, “ingratitude”. The antonymous meaning that only surfaces as we read “in gratitude” as if it were actually spelled as one word indeed marks one of Diski’s recurring themes in her book: her feeling that as Lessing provided a much-needed safety net for a very troubled teenager, allowing her to survive, she returned that gift not with gratitude but with behaving in a manner that can only be described as ingratitude. To make matters worse, Diski clearly feels her own version of survivor guilt at how her presence in the Lessing household impacted on an already highly strained relationship between Lessing and her son, Peter, the only child (out of three, from two husbands) that Lessing took with her when she left Rhodesia for England. While it must have been through an intervention that began with Peter, who knew Diski at school, her presence at the Lessing household caused severe consequences for him: “One thing that happened was me. If there is only so much social energy to go round in any social group, you could say that I elbowed in, loud, loving argument and discussion, and took Peter’s part”.44 In the same passage, Diski describes herself as “a cuckoo in Peter’s nest” and admits a little later that “I helped sink Peter”.45 Already alluding to matters of gratitude and interpersonal debt, Diski’s reckoning of her past life even brings up an element of guilt when she writes that “I was not a gift from Peter to his mother, but a curse”.46 At the same time that she is cognizant of the mental turmoil that resulted from her arrival at

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her new home, she is perfectly aware that Lessing’s welcoming a stranger into her house, and one with a history of disturbing behaviour, was remarkable: “Another generous act. A kindness almost beyond measure”.47 Thinking back on this moment, Diski appears struck, reduced to expressing herself in paratactic fragments. Her own lack of gratitude potentially contributed to the deadly nexus between Peter and his mother, eventually preventing him from surviving his mother. Since Diski now, in retrospect, feels that she at least partly returns the gift of survival with ingratitude, her book is also a form of atonement. It is an attempt—even a gesture in the sense described by Ricoeur—at reconnecting her present self and identity with this earlier incarnation of her life, when she was still Jenny Simmonds and raising trouble in the Lessing household. Diski’s memoir thus stands as a powerful reminder that the bifurcations that come with survival can also sometimes be in need of reconnection and even healing: her book demonstrates that we can become answerable, responsible for having survived; that survivance puts that earlier life into a new light, that it enlightens the survivor about the ethical consequences of earlier deeds and behaviours. It therefore also acts as a reminder that even what we think we have left behind will stay with us, demanding working-through and occasionally even active response. There is, then, death in survival; and quite aptly, In Gratitude speaks to us from beyond death, with the spectral voice of fortleben that Derrida so clearly desires in his last interview and that Diski employed to voice her gratitude about having survived her youthful madness as well as her crises as daughter, writer, and human being.

Notes 1. See Butler (2006). 2. For a discussion of an example of contemporary writing that deals with (post)apocalyptic scenarios, David Mitchell’s novel Cloud Atlas, see Bayer (2015). On fiction and the anthropocene, see Trexler (2015). 3. The essays collected in this volume provide gateways into some of these discussions. 4. Donald Trump’s denial of the existence and severity of the Covid pandemic, his subsequent falling ill to the virus and his triumphant (and, fully in character, misleading) claims about not only having survived the illness but being immune to its effects, is a contemporary point in case. 5. Bartels (2009, 239).

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6. Bartels (2009, 241). 7. Derrida (2007, 52). 8. Edelman (2011, 152). 9. On Benjamin’s use of a whole range of terms that, semantically, play with the notion of living and surviving, see Weidner (2019). 10. Enns (2015, 48). 11. Stange (2017, 64). 12. Agamben develops the notion of “bare life” in the context of the Holocaust and the denial of full human rights to the racialist victims of Nazi Germany, transformed into beings whose legal status he compares to that of the “homo sacer” in Ancient Rome; see Agamben (1998). 13. To mention just one recent example for the intersection between trauma studies and survival, see Goodhart (2020). 14. The scholarship on literature and trauma is extensive; see, for instance, Whitehead (2004). 15. The role of surviving in Holocaust Studies was prominently discussed by Terence Des Pres in The Survivor: An Anatomy of Life in the Death Camps (1976), yet his focus was placed on the struggle of individual inmates to survive the camps rather than on questions of how the memory of the Holocaust will live on and thus survive. 16. The consequences of this shift in how the Holocaust is remembered and narrated is discussed in the edited volume by Lothe et al. (2012). On how memory in Holocaust relates to virtual forms of discourse, and thus to a non-material forms of commemoration, see Bayer (2020). 17. Ricoeur (1992, 118–119). 18. Ricoeur (1992, 135). 19. Ricoeur explicitly builds his thinking on alterity on Levinas’s ethical work on othering, seeing in the responsibility owed to others an ethical imperative, one that grows from precisely the fact that one sees oneself as another; see Ricoeur (1992, 188–194). 20. Diski (2016, 110). 21. Diski (2016, 151). 22. On Jenny Diski as a late writer of postmodern aesthetics (potentially even post-postmodern), see Bayer (2008). Diski’s extensive experience as a reviewer, cultural critic, and essayist testifies to her extensive engagement with twentieth-century thought and its diverse intellectual branches; see for instance Diski (1998). 23. See Diski (2010). 24. Diski (2016, 11). 25. Diski (2016, 23).

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26. The potential duality of a biography that bifurcates, at least potentially, into two quite distinct narratives also provides much of the fundamental drive in Vikram Seth’s double biography, Two Lives; see Seth (2005). 27. Diski (2016, 24). 28. Diski (2016, 200). 29. Diski (2016, 200). 30. Diski has both fictionalized parts of her biography in her novels and discussed them quite openly in her essayistic and biographic writing. In Gratitude provides further details in particular about her relationship with Doris Lessing, about whose role in her own life she remained largely silent while Lessing was still alive. 31. See Bartels (2009). 32. Diski (2006, 300). 33. See Sanders (2020) on the treatment of Antarctica; and Price (2013) on trauma and travel writing in Diski’s work. Trauma also features prominently in Diski’s novels; see Bayer (2014). 34. Diski (2016, 70). 35. Diski (2016, 72). One may wonder whether the expression “out of true” is some sort of near-homophonous Freudian slip on “out of tune”, suggesting there is some element of forced veracity at work here. 36. Diski (2016, 71). Here, too, there are overtones of psychoanalysis, with Lessing providing a “reading” in the sense of diagnosis of young Diski. A more than amateurish interest in psychoanalysis and the institutions that cater to patients’ needs is visible throughout Diski’s fictional and essayistic writing. 37. Gold (2017, 615). 38. Rodi-Risberg (2015, 81). 39. Knox (2012, 99). 40. Foucault (1984, 102). 41. Atwood (1972, 33). 42. Atwood (1972, 33). 43. Gadsby (2006, 174). 44. Diski (2016, 202). 45. Diski (2016, 203). 46. Diski (2016, 203). 47. Diski (2016, 204).

References Agamben, Giorgio. 1998. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Atwood, Margaret. 1972. Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature. Toronto: Anansi.

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Bartels, Emily C. 2009. Outside the Box: Surviving Survival. Literature and Medicine 28 (2): 237–252. Bayer, Gerd. 2008. Madness in the City: Crazy Flaneurs in the Writings of Jenny Diski, Tibor Fischer, and Jane Rogers. In (Re-)Mapping London: Visions of the Metropolis in the Contemporary Novel in English, ed. Vanessa Guignery, 21–35. Paris: Publibook. ———. 2014. History, Dreams, and Shards: On Starting Over in Jenny Diski’s Then Again. In Trauma in Contemporary Literature: Narrative and Representation, ed. Marita Nadal and Mónica Calvo, 88–99. New  York: Routledge. ———. 2015. Perpetual Apocalypses: David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas and the Absence of Time. Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 56 (4): 345–354. ———. 2020. On (Not) Watching The Lady in Number 6: Digital Holocaust Film, Copyright Infringement and the Obligation to Remember. Pólemos 14 (2): 337–347. Butler, Judith. 2006. Precarious Life: The Power of Mourning and Violence. London: Verso. Derrida, Jacques. 2007. Learning to Live Finally: The Last Interview. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. Des Pres, Terence. 1976. The Survivor: An Anatomy of Life in the Death Camps. New York: Oxford University Press. Diski, Jenny. 1986. Nothing Natural. New York: Simon and Schuster. ———. 1997. Skating to Antarctica. London: Granta. ———. 1998. Don’t. London: Granta. ———. 2002. Stranger on a Train: Daydreaming and Smoking Around America with Interruptions. London: Virago. ———. 2006. On Trying to Keep Still. London: Virago. ———. 2009. Apology for the Woman Writing. London: Virago. ———. 2010. The Sixties. London: Profile Books. ———. 2016. In Gratitude. London: Bloomsbury. Edelman, Lee. 2011. Against Survival: Queerness in a Time That’s Out of Joint. Shakespeare Quarterly 62 (2): 148–169. Enns, Dianne. 2015. Love, Life, Death, and Survival. Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 48 (3): 47–55. Foucault, Michel. 1984. What Is an Author? In Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Ravinow, 101–120. New York: Pantheon. Gadsby, Meredith M. 2006. Sucking Salt: Caribbean Women Writers, Migration, and Survival. Columbia: University of Missouri Press. Gold, Alexandra J. 2017. Adrienne Rich’s Persistent Survival. Women’s Studies 46 (7): 610–627. Goodhart, Sandor. 2020. Screen Memories: Trauma, Repetition, and Survival in Sidney Lumet’s The Pawnbroker. In Palgrave Handbook of Holocaust Literature

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and Culture, ed. Victoria Aarons and Phyllis Lassner, 459–474. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Knox, Paul D. 2012. ‘Okay Means Okay’: Ideology and Survival in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. The Explicator 70 (2): 96–99. Lessing, Doris. 1974. The Memoirs of a Survivor. London: Octagon. Lothe, Jakob, Susan Rubin Suleiman, and James Phelan. 2012. After Testimony: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Holocaust Narrative for the Future. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Mullan, Fitzhugh. 1985. Seasons of Survival: Reflections of a Physician with Cancer. The New England Journal of Medicine 313: 270–273. Price, Joanna. 2013. ‘I Wanted unheimlich […] But of the Right Kind. Strangeness and Strangerness Without the Black Despair’: Trauma and Travel in the Works of Jenny Diski. In Diseases and Disorders in Contemporary Fiction: The Syndrome Syndrome, ed. T.J. Lustig and James Peacock, 144–159. New York: Routledge. Ricoeur, Paul. 1992. Oneself as Another. Translated Kathleen Blamey. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Rodi-Risberg, Marinella. 2015. Incest Trauma and Survival in Patricia Chao’s Monkey King. Studies in the Novel 47 (1): 80–98. Sanders, Karin. 2020. White Oblivion: Antarctica and the Suspension of Trauma. In Terrorizing Images: Trauma and Ekphrasis in Contemporary Literature, ed. Charles I. Armstrong and Unni Langås, 183–196. Berlin: de Gruyter. Seth, Vikram. 2005. Two Lives. London: Little, Brown. Stange, Veronica Estay. 2017. Survivre à la survie: Remarques sur la post-mémoire. Esprit 10: 62–72. Trexler, Adam. 2015. Anthropocene Fictions: The Novel in a Time of Climate Change. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Vizenor, Gerald. 1999. Manifest Manners: Narratives on Postindian Survivance. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Weidner, Daniel. 2019. Fort-, Über-, Nachleben: Zu einer Denkfigur bei Benjamin. In Benjamin Studien, ed. Daniel Weidner and Sigrid Weigel, vol. 2, 161–178. Paderborn: Fink. Whitehead, Anne. 2004. Trauma Fiction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

CHAPTER 10

Environmental Ethics of Survival: Case Study Analysis of I am Legend and The Revenant Pat Brereton

A tremendous amount of moral thinking and feeling is undertaken when reading literature or watching films. In fact it is not an exaggeration to say that for most people, this is the primary way in which they acquire ethical attitudes, especially within contemporary culture. Drawing on my Environmental Ethics and Film (2016) volume, this chapter seeks to explore how, both in scale and theme, mainstream popular films like I am Legend (2007) project a dystopic urban future, while The Revenant (2015) speaks through a mythic rural American past. Both films focus specifically on various aspects of survival through the lens of environmental ethics, while addressing our long-term future. As a relatively modern phenomenon, environmental ethics remains a totalising concept which is inclusive rather than exclusive, while trying to create and maintain strict guidelines and regulations. This chapter will draw on the growing literature around zombies and their surprising allegorical power to address environmental and ethical issues, which in turn is dovetailed with more conventional action-adventure and survivalist narratives. P. Brereton (*) School of Communications, Dublin City University, Dublin 9, Ireland e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 R. Freiburg, G. Bayer (eds.), The Ethics of Survival in Contemporary Literature and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83422-7_10

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Environmental Ethics and Film: A Literature Review When environmental ethics emerged as a new sub-discipline of philosophy in the early 1970s, it did so by posing a challenge to traditional anthropocentrism. “In the first place, it questioned the assumed moral superiority of human beings to members of other species on earth. In the second place, it investigated the possibility of rational arguments for assigning intrinsic value to the natural environment and its non-human contents”.1 At a prosaic level, traditional environmental ethics is focused around some basic moral questions: what kinds of things are intrinsically valuable, good or bad, or most simply put, what makes an action right or wrong, while addressing a broad range of environmental concerns. For instance, consequentialist ethical theories ostensibly consider intrinsic ‘value/disvalue’ or ‘goodness/badness’ attributes as a binary approach towards striving to become more foundational in teasing out explicit moral precepts. This approach is linked together with so-called rightness/wrongness, which strives to evaluate if an action is simply right or wrong, and whether its consequences are good or bad. Recalling how all types of storytelling foreground and play out a number of ethical debates, film in particular feeds off a range of environmental concerns, which often focus specifically on aspects of human survival. Survival is often dramatised within some inhospitable landscape, which tends to leave little space for anything else, besides quick thinking and spontaneous action or reaction, rather than clear ethical evaluation. From its inception, Garrett Hardin’s highly influential essay “Tragedy of the Commons” (1968), coupled with his exploration of the precarious nature of ‘lifeboat ethics’, underpins an appreciation of various permutations of survival, based on the edicts of environmental ethics. There are at least five basic assumptions implicit in this holistic interconnected perspective: (1) everything is connected to everything else, (2) the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, (3) meaning is context dependent, (4) process has primacy over parts, (5) humans and non-human nature are one.2 This progressive manifestation of environmental ethics remains, however, an idealised dream for a movement, where all aspects of the environment are in harmony and at the centre of everything. Working out how this is dealt with through the ephemeral nature and complexity of the cinematic medium remains a constant preoccupation of eco-film analysis. Going back to basics, the notion of lifeboat ethics encapsulates the tension around how all sentient beings, living on the same precarious habitat

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of earth, must try to co-exist; all the while feeding off various forms of survival stories that speak through tales like The Revenant, alongside futuristic dystopian zombie parables such as I am Legend. Both of these excessive storylines dramatically call attention to a range of dystopic habitats where physical survival is at its outer limits and particularly precarious due to excessive environmental crises. These include food scarcity together with other even more precarious global planetary boundary limitations, while dramatically leading to unfortunate consequences, including mass human infection and other forms of insecurity.3 Hardin in particular painted a bleak picture around various global dilemmas, especially with regard to Third World poverty and the prospect of even greater levels of inequality being sparked off by not fully appreciating the role and importance of the Commons. Furthermore, there are other ethical and philosophical issues and global responses that can also be called upon and co-opted by the environmental activist movement. Utilitarians, for instance, focus on the balance of pleasure and pain, as explored by eighteenth-century thinker Jeremy Bentham (1788), which is often applied to a more pragmatic approach to environmental risk and human survival, as foregrounded in The Revenant. Meanwhile, more recent scholarship remains more nuanced in its ethical philosophies,4 compared with extremist animal activists like Peter Singer (1975), who is most frequently cited. Singer argues that the interests of all sentient beings (i.e. beings who are capable of experiencing pleasure or pain, including non-­ human ones) are affected and thereby should be taken equally into consideration in assessing any actions.5 Representations of (wild) animals as against the struggle for human survival reflect varying levels of engagement and inter-connectivity across these comparative case studies. Eco-film scholarship has found that mainstream cinema (children’s and nature genres in particular) tends to foreground an anthropomorphic approach towards audience engagement, while rarely if ever representing the world and its species from a non-human perspective. In contrast to such anthropomorphic perspectives and values, deontological ethical theories maintain that whether an action is right or wrong for the most part is independent of whether its consequences are good or bad—a proposition that is not always valorised within popular cultural narratives. Nevertheless, studying environmental ethics and their mediation through various forms of popular representation remains a good way of getting behind the top-line news and storylines and explore what is at stake while

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uncovering how to engage with a wide range of environmental and survival dilemmas. Probably the most persistent problem that underpins any engagement with environmental ethics remains this notion of anthropocentrism, which is a worldview that places humans, figuratively if not literally, at the centre of the cosmos. By all accounts this approach dominates most filmic representation of survivalist narratives. Various critics characterise its importance with regard to for instance: • seeing the natural order as arranged in a grand hierarchy (a ‘Great Chain of Being’) • recognising a firm ontological divide between humans and nonhuman nature (metaphysical dualism) • The idea of nature as a machine which follows the mechanical laws of physics.6

Keller most particularly seeks to recognise that humans alone are intrinsically valuable and that non-human nature is valuable only insofar as it has use-value for humans, thereby reinforcing the clear binary division between humans and other (sentient) creatures—a proposition which of course Singer and animal rights activists, alongside some environmentalists, find unacceptable. Taking all these theories and precepts into consideration, deep-­ environmentalists like Paul W. Taylor have laid down a convincing biocentric manifesto titled “The Ethics of Respect for Nature”.7 Central to his thesis is a life-centred system of environmental ethics, as opposed to a human-centred one. Taylor affirms how we have moral obligations that are owed to wild plants and animals, themselves regarded as members of the Earth’s biotic community: “[W]e are morally bound (other things being equal) to protect or promote their good, for their sake. Our duties to respect the integrity of natural ecosystems, to preserve endangered species, and to avoid environmental pollution stem from the fact that these are ways in which we can help make it possible for wild species populations to achieve and maintain a healthy existence in a natural state”.8 This proposition and holistic response to nature, in spite of the continued dominance of an anthropocentric vision of humans, remains central to the ethical value system within Hollywood in particular,9 and it can also help

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explain some inherent tensions that are evident across contemporary action-adventure, including zombie horror as well as science fiction spectacle. At least these tensions can be gauged as apposite, if only while reading ‘against the grain’; explaining for instance how audiences appreciate the Will Smith character in I am Legend surviving in a post-apocalyptic world, as against Leonardo DiCaprio often fighting against all the elements in The Revenant, while being at the same time often visualised as totally serene and at one with nature. Both main protagonists face enormous struggles and have to constantly fight to simply survive, across very different terrains and obstacles put in their way. One is set in a dystopic futuristic urban habitat where literally the whole world has been turned upside down and our hero must fight (alien) zombie creatures—being the only apparent human alive. The DiCaprio survival narrative, on the other hand, remains a more conventional ‘man versus nature’ struggle, as the various enemies pitched against him remain firmly from the known world. The trajectory of this historical narrative feeds off a so-called primitive and wild nature struggle for survival, exacerbated by a harsh and inhospitably habitat.

Framing Survivalist Narratives from an Ecological and Ethical Perspective Even somewhat risible Hollywood spectacles like I am Legend, driven by techno-utopian trajectories, call attention to a range of environmental and related ethical agendas, which have particular resonance at present through our ongoing global pandemic. By all accounts, the growing back-­catalogue of ‘end of the world’ post-apocalyptic zombie films foregrounds the presence of destabilising historical social anxieties and risks, which coalesce around the ever-expanding environmental and population growth crises. Using rich generic fantasy scenarios, such audio-visual storytelling protocols actively call attention to pressing environmental concerns for a broad range of citizens, who might not otherwise consider, either consciously or unconsciously, engaging in such issues or debate. Stories remain a principal mode of human communication that readily permit the incorporation of contributions from many different perspectives to help build collective frames-of-engagement and most importantly, according to many scholars, gain knowledge through the very act of stories being told.

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Whether local or international, such fictional narratives can help enable audiences to connect across social, economic, political, cultural and technological ways that are most meaningful to them.10 Of course, ecocriticism needs to further develop robust empirical strategies to test and evaluate the overall effectiveness of such media and creative stimuli;11 nevertheless such explicit preparatory and literary-driven eco-textual analysis can help prepare the way.12 All the while there remains increasing resistance within the mainstream business-controlled media to any form of radical transformation in society, especially with regard to environmental issues, as most clearly evident through the dominant ‘business as usual’ mode of political, economic and social behaviour that has become normalised within mainstream storytelling and is evident throughout society in general. Consequently, one might suggest that more creative and alternative transgressive, even disruptive aesthetic genres like horror and zombie movies are needed to dramatise alternative visions of survival, while calling attention to the consequences of not making robust and timely decisions to stave off dire apocalyptic scenarios. Such cautionary storylines, even those not necessarily regarded as transgressive in the first place, are useful as a bulwark towards dramatising such urgent dilemmas. For instance, zombie apocalypse world-views are often paradoxically valorised as helping to put flesh on these otherwise (in)tangible environmental cautionary scenarios.13 At another level, Anthony Giddens talks of how the politics of climate change has to cope with what he (hubristically) calls the “Giddens’s paradox”,14 which infers that—since the dangers posed by climate change aren’t tangible (for many in the West at least), immediate or even visible in the course of day-to-day life—active engagement, much less behavioural change, remains difficult to secure traction, not to mention building much needed consensus across the general public. However, waiting until the phenomenon becomes “visible and acute, before being stirred to serious action, will by definition be too late”.15 Consequently, audiences need and probably desire powerful alternative “creative imaginaries” that can help to dramatically foreground and call attention to a possible future of dystopian survival scenarios.16 Especially addressing a majority of non-­ environmentally invested global citizens, such provocative texts can help kick-start and support cognitive and emotional engagement with these coded scenarios, through the dramatic fantasy and logics embedded within these sensational cautionary tales.

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Most pointedly, environmental scholars like Mike Hulme are probably close to the mark in suggesting that climate change needs to be recognised as “an imaginative idea, an idea constructed and endowed with meaning and value through cultural activity”, with climate issues being “read” in the memory, behaviour, text and identity, as much as “measuring through meteorology”.17 Such survival narratives can assist in this agenda, while incidentally the 2020/2021 global pandemic may be further contributing to and assisting in this new mode of experiential engagement with disaster survivalist scenarios. This is especially encapsulated by provocative generic zombie fare that can help in this process of developing environmental awareness, while providing some tangible appreciation of the global environmental time-bomb facing the planet. Yet as environmental communications scholar Patrick Murphy notes in an engaging study: while the field of global media studies has produced “rigorous interrogations of key global issues, such as cultural imperialism, dependency, cultural identity, cultural hybridity, global flows, post colonialism, representation, the social imaginary, and so on, there is a pervasive silence when it comes to questions concerning the environment”.18 In the end, survival, from an environmental perspective, remains the primary goal embedded within the climate science crisis and trumps all other forms of global injustices and abuse of power relations. Nevertheless, there is an increasing need for much more sophisticated and reflexive survival narratives and creative imaginaries to speak to the wicked problems of climate disaster and human survival generally. Meanwhile, first-hand primal survival for our cinematic heroes—basically involving the fear of dying (much less, total human extinction)—helps to keep contemporary global environmental survival tropes in the public consciousness, either through post-apocalyptic scenarios, or from re-imagining of our primitive hunter-­ gatherer past. Solving our global climate crisis remains fraught if we do not also seek to reinforce our globally applicable ethical values—as allegorically evident by the survival struggles of both our contrasting heroes.

Environmental Zombie Myths: Beyond Survivalism As a (sub-)genre, zombie movies are grounded in themes of collapse, survival, security and resource scarcity and various other ways in which commercial media-rendered tales of the undead can present environmental issues. Drezner (2011) most notably teases out contrasts between zombies, human individual and collective behaviour, while Giuliani highlights

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how at least since George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968), the genre has remained preoccupied with dramatising “society’s subaltern and outcasts” displayed in anonymous shopping centres. Furthermore, their cannibalism can be explained as encapsulating the need for the undead to consume the living as “payback for the pains they suffered in life”.19 From the view of the zombie’s prime directive, the notion of ‘nature’s revenge’ for some environmental disasters seems particularly relevant. This all-­ encompassing mindset echoes James Lovelock’s (1972) thesis that the Earth is a living, dynamic interconnected system, highlighting the need to survive at any cost, as harmony and balance is needed for long-term survival. Several critics talk of an element of “equilibrium thinking” in his Gaia hypothesis,20 as if a system will always, in the end, revert back to its ‘perfect’ moment of stasis. Basically ‘Gaia’ does not suffer opposition from organisms—even humans—that do it harm. Hence, the climate crisis remains an emergency for humans who need to take it more seriously, as the earth itself will not necessarily be destroyed. It is human survival that is at stake within the climate emergency and this needs to be constantly teased out and affirmed. Scholars including Patrick Murphy have provided insight into how such sensational “image events”, like the rise of the zombie and the horror movie generally, serve as a form of transformative environmental politics.21 Murphy and others in turn posit a range of possible environmental visions and ethical frameworks being set up through the use of recurring tropes (e.g. “wilderness”, “pollution”), narratives (such as “jeremiad and apocalypse”) and metaphors (“a place apart, tipping point, mother earth and so on”); all of which are evident in art, literature and media.22 Zombie and horror movies surprisingly provide a clearly defined and a useful prism to explore newer aspects of ethical environmental agency and tease out some of these broad ranging tensions within more clearly understood and popular generic formats. Some key environmental and ethical questions which dystopic horror and zombie narratives address, if only by omission, include the difficult issue around how does one live a sustainable lifestyle within a throwaway consumer society. With so many historical zombie movies foregrounding scenes of shopping centres as a short-hand signifier of conspicuous consumption, this connection with food and consumerism generally seems an obvious reference point. Alternatively, what choices might a person make to minimise his or her ecological footprint, or more radically, how can one live ‘off the grid’, as visualised most effectively in The Revenant. These are

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very difficult environmental questions to engage with, while at the same time trying to confront an all-pervasive global, capitalistic-driven system that does serious damage to the earth, alongside its human and non-­ human inhabitants. Most explicitly, one can uncover within the surface pleasures of science fictional, horror and dystopic narratives more generally the constant appeal of ‘quick fix’ solutions, using various forms of geo-engineering and technology, as called out at the start of I am Legend. Rather than ostensibly worrying about any form of moral hazard or taking into account various precautionary principles, much less foregrounding how “everything is connected”,23 such narratives can help hold these tensions at play and still encourage immersive engagement within the fantasy storyline. One could further argue that such narratives help sow the seeds of disaffection and call attention to seismic environmental problems germinating within the fabric of society. Mainstream zombie films have certainly captured the public imagination with global audiences and can be interpreted as also foregrounding critiques of untrammelled capitalistic impulses, while sometimes hinting at the overarching need to adopt counter-­veiling environmental and sustainable narrative trajectories. Most noticeably the prevailing dilemma of addressing various levels of survivalism, from physical to mental and emotional, is brought to the surface. This pervasive preoccupation with survival further draws attention to limitations within the earth’s finite resources, while often prescribing draconian military and economic solutions in response that appear to accept, even legitimise, quick fix and high-tech environmental resolutions. Meanwhile, zombies embody the underbelly of basic or instinctive survival modes of existence, being solely preoccupied with ‘food’ to eat and appear to have no deeper ethical, much less any sense of individual identity, or (human) memories to live by. Consequently, zombies often end up questioning the ethics embedded around human survival.

I am Legend: Surviving a Pandemic! This cautionary tale, directed by Francis Lawrence, begins with the zombification of almost six billion people on earth; destroyed apparently as a direct result of a new measles-like vaccine which paradoxically appeared to cure cancer. Re-balancing the conventional use of white male action heroes, Will Smith plays Robert Neville, who is an army scientist and somehow survives, being immune to the virus. Every day he appears at the

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same place with his faithful German Shepherd dog on a peer in New York, longing to find other survivors. Coping with (invisible) horrors occurring outside at night, where the vicious law of the jungle is in full progress, a herd-like zombie hoard are feeding on whatever live (human or animal) flesh they can access, in their ceaseless struggle to survive. In some ways this struggle is reminiscent of many alpha-carnivores, explored within nature documentaries, or through a more sophisticated ontological study of animal-human behaviour, as found in Grizzly Man (2005).24 Unlike animals hunting for prey to survive, the ethical imperative of protecting human life as sacred appears to be succeeded by a nihilistic zombie struggle to live off human flesh and blood, with no sense of any countervailing values being propounded. Such action is represented as both instinctive, yet at the same time almost malevolent, with such generic zombie creatures afforded—at least not till the ending of the story in the basement—no sense of individuality or other ethical values, but simply the imperative to survive at all costs. Meanwhile, Neville uses all his accumulated cultural and civic capital, coupled with his human ingenuity, to stock-pile food and survive relatively well—certainly beyond hand-to-mouth—having access to so many types of food, from processed to cooked foodstuffs. Meanwhile the zombies, like many early wilderness survivors, must constantly depend on a precarious diet of hunting prey. Our urban hero never faces even the prospect of malnutrition, unlike his historical rural counterpart, with his constant struggle for survival in The Revenant. Nevertheless, Neville struggles more with mental and emotional problems, while coping with survival and living alone for so long, facing the constant fear of personal attack by zombies when he strays out of his enclosed habitation. He stays safe and secure while sleeping in a large bath with his beloved dog, all the while enduring the shocking violent sounds of the anarchical ‘jungle’ outside. Neville constantly affirms that “God did not do this, we did”, which in turn calls attention to ethical theories around making very bad decision. As a result all human nature has to face the consequences of a world in total chaos, with its erstwhile human population degenerating into the lowest form of bodily survival and cannibalism. This dystopic turn of events recalls the precautionary principle and other well-tuned ethical strictures, designed to help put the brakes on poor decisions. Recalling, for example, when authorities end up abusing instrumentally based quick decision making, which has become a staple of so much science fictional dystopian narratives. The cancer vaccine, used without sufficient scientific

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trials, unfortunately had disastrous side effects; except for lone survivors like Neville, who pronounces mantra-like, “I am immune—I am the last human. I’m the last hope”. All of this further recalls the ever-popular heroic survival trope, involving individual heroes striving to save humanity, or at least standing up for human(e) ethical values, as embedded across so many Hollywood blockbusters and action-adventure tales. Neville is alone with his dog in a strange, rewilded and other-worldly desolate New York city-space, which both helps to keep him motivated, while also encouraging his everyday rituals. Flashbacks afford basic exposition of his dilemma and provide historical context for the critical moments in his beloved city’s past—the rest of the world is not even contemplated within such American-centric Hollywood tales. His own personal recurring nightmare recalls his attempts to protect his family, by having his wife and child—played by his own real-life son Willow—and puppy dog escape on a helicopter. While as hero of course he intends to stay and help overcome the severest form of ‘lock-down’, namely full martial law, which has just been declared in the region to help halt the infection spreading through the population. Missiles are used to destroy an escape bridge to ensure total lock-down, which coincidentally causes the helicopter with his family as precious cargo to explode. Coping with such personal grief remains his greatest struggle and permeates the whole movie. This echoes the environmental communications belief that using personal stories remains the best strategy to transmit global dilemmas, such as survival in a climate crisis; otherwise audiences struggle to both contemplate, much less engage with such so-called wicked problems. Neville’s personal ballast and survival strategy is maintained throughout, by striving to produce a more fully tested vaccine to help save what is left of humanity. Unfortunately, for over three years now he has had little success. The horrors of the 2020/2021 pandemic gives such a storyline added resonance, which is further echoed by Kylie Bishop (2009), who talks of how such SF horror film function as a barometer of cultural anxieties and zombie movies in particular represent the inescapable reality of facing up to unnatural death. Reflecting further on the current state of American society with huge numbers of deaths from a very real pandemic—more than the total number of American casualties from the Vietnam war—while also being deeply divided across both ideological and cultural divisions, is it any wonder, as Jeremiah Morlock argues, that dangerous forms of ‘tribalism’ have moved to the forefront of public discussion across the political spectrum in

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America today? An extreme manifestation of such tribalism is allegorically presented through further retrospective readings of the so-called zombie apocalypse, embodied in I am Legend. Of course, Night of the Living Dead (1968)—seen as the birth of the zombie movie—also took inspiration from Richard Matheson’s novella I am Legend from 1954. Earlier filmic adaptations of this cult novel include The Last Man on Earth (1964) and The Omega Man (1971).25 Brayton (2011) for instance sees the original story (and film to a lesser extent) as playing into polarising fears of so-­ called socialism—much less tribalism—and also feeding off a white male tribal backlash. Specifically in I am Legend, the resilience of the central character appears, however, to manage such tensions and conflicts, not just through his physical rituals around everyday survival, through regular meals and visits to a music shop, but also with regard to how certain core values are tested and maybe even preserved through struggle in apocalyptic times. According to Gen Donner, the film franchise might also inadvertently admit the insufficiencies of a so-called neo-liberal ethos of individual responsibility; including the performance of consumption leading to psychic breakdown. The home remains forever vulnerable to invasion, and redemption appears only possible (at least in narrative terms) through becoming the monstrous other. Most cogently also for this chapter, rather than agreeing with Susan Sontag’s famous aphorism around the ‘Imagination of disaster’ and her analysis of science fictional fantasies, Mick Broderick (1993) astutely observes that the post-apocalyptic SF cinema predominantly affords an ‘imagination of survival’. In spite of all the felt pressures, this remains the core tenor of the narrative’s progression. Many left-leaning critics attest that neo-liberal policy and politics tend to shift responsibility for security measures onto individuals and further link it to various modes of consumption. As already affirmed, zombie narratives overtly question society’s long-term survival modalities, by calling attention to our over-consumption of food and other resources, while not recognising the long-term consequences of such reckless modes of behaviour that is usually visualised through the foregrounding of sites of consumption like Shopping Malls. Our hero, however, spends much of his time in the Union Square region of New  York, reliving every young man’s dream—driving fast through an erstwhile restrictive city-space in a red Ford Mustang with white stripes. Such unbelievable (video game-like) freedom and

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excitement is, however, interrupted by a galloping herd of deer. All of this feeds off every action-adventure stereotype, especially recalling a scene out in the wilds of a nature reserve, performing the role of hunter while attempting to secure fresh meat, as more dramatically foregrounded in The Revenant. Yet paradoxically the mise-en-scène is framed within an erstwhile urban civilisation, touting frayed posters for much sought-after contemporary cultural experiences such as musicals like Wicked, or blockbuster films like Batman vs Superman. Unfortunately, in this instance he is not successful in his hunt, with another alpha-predator, namely a lion family, beating him to the kill, presumably they escaped from a zoo and are judged to need the food more than him. Back in the safety of the home, audiences are treated to Smith’s well-­ toned upper body, performing his stretches and weights. Even his dog is following a similar exercise programme, positioned on a parallel running machine. Later he proceeds to his basement, donning his white coat and transforms into a virologist and scientist carrying out his scientific tests. His unsuccessful live animal ‘experiments’ have unfortunately gone wild and vicious, reminding viewers of so many illicit experiments and subsequent ethical debates explored in narratives like Alien Resurrection (1997). Nonetheless, as a scientist, much less as an army officer, he apparently has no qualms about such experimenting on animals or other mutant victims of the plague—a survivalist mode of values, which unconsciously justifies excessive violence. Such an ethical strategy is only later called into question by Anna (Alice Braga), who appears a more humane individual, or maybe just a conventionally empathetic character. Ethical inversions of the power dynamics between humans and animals—much less regarding zombies—as envisaged within the Planet of the Apes franchise, are foregrounded when Neville himself is hunted and trapped hanging upside down, using a similar technique deployed on the alpha female zombie captured earlier. In the ensuing conflict, his dog Sam is fatally injured with the virus while protecting his master. This results in an emotional scene for all animal lovers, as Neville himself—much less the camera—has to look away, while using his bare hands to strangle his trusted companion. In a dystopic world, where zombies perform unspeakable acts of cannibalism and disrupt precious human survival, witnessing his beloved pet becoming infected and having to end its life is probably more of a taboo within Hollywood, much less Western culture generally. Now he is truly on his own, after doing the decent thing and ceremonially burying his companion with dignity. Apparently as some form of

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revenge for his beloved pet, he attacks a horde of zombies out at night on a pier, while driving at top speed with full-flashlights on to pick them off. Displaying a death wish, the scene is reminiscent of the actions of such an irrational zombie horde, while forgetting his usually cautious survival instinct. On waking up safe at home, Neville finds it difficult to comprehend such good fortune having somehow survived his ordeal. Mantra-like, he recounts his endlessly repeated call to arms and survival: “I don’t have any friends. This is ground zero—this is my site; I can still fix it”. By all accounts, having suffered so much, 101-survival strategies and instincts are the only bespoke military response he can display. Getting deeper inside his traumatised psychology, viewers are introduced to cherished photographs of his dead family around the house, witnessed now through the eyes of his more ethically sensitive visitor Anna as saviour alongside her son Ethan (Charlie Tahan). But while she posits a more hopeful vision, declaring a level of optimism and even belief in God, Neville responds almost instinctively, as a troubled and traumatised survivor, if not an empirical scientist, “God did not do this—we did”. Preparing for the night and the horrors ahead, Anna entreats him to have hope and faith and escape with them to the colony, affirming how God told her. “He has a plan. I know it sounds crazy. But if you listen, you can hear God’s plan.” Neville has gone through so much pain and suffering while struggling to survive, even the optimism of Bob Marley’s music that he loves dearly does not ignite any positive transformation; all the while recounting the hard facts and reality of their primal survival options, with the virus having almost wiped out the whole human population. Repeating his survival logic, almost Beckett-like, he recounts a cry of pain and a nihilistic fear for the future of humanity: “there is no plan—there is no God. There is no God”. Moving from such a philosophical and ethical, even cerebral examination of how to remain human(e) and survive, to the practical and immediate reality that Hollywood is good at explicating, the film shows the ‘re-constituted’ family suddenly surrounded and attacked by a horde of mutants. Apparently, on being helped back to the house earlier, a clear trail of blood led directly to their sanctuary. Up to then he was always careful and methodological as a worked-out survival strategy, reminiscent of strategies learned in the wild, such as breaking up his trail and by using any liquid available. Reminiscent of a climactic scene from a Hollywood western or a conventional horror genre, the enemy zombies attack from all

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angles. Eventually all three make their way down to the basement, certainly not a conventional space in fictional narratives to survive, much less find safety. Audiences soon realise that the focus of attention for the invading army of zombies is not their instinctive and vicious survival attack motivation, but rather a more higher order and communal, even familial instinct. Their leader and alpha male (Dask Mihok) simply wants his wife/mate back; having been abducted for experimentation (and torture) by our erstwhile heroic human scientist. This recalls fundamentalist animal welfare ethicists like Singer and calls attention to emotions and feelings of zombies (as sentient beings), who are simply being used as experimentation for eventual human survival. Meanwhile, like so many action heroes—recalling, for example, the iconic ‘time to die’ soliloquy by the replicant in Blade Runner (1982) or the ending of Terminator 2 (1991)—Neville accepts the ultimate (ethical) sacrifice of martyrdom, by doing the right thing and protecting human life, while providing the magical antidote and hope for the future. Survival of the many and looking out for the future protection of the human species remains a justifiable price to pay for the greater good, as constantly affirmed within deep environmental ethical values. The final resolution, unlike in the original novel, has Anna and her son arriving at a sanctuary in Vermont, calling attention to nurturing images of trees with their autumn colours, where they confront a big wooden gate protecting the community inside. In many ways this reflects a more positive image of a gated community protecting and securing the inhabitants within. On opening the gates, a traditional church and spire is revealed in the foreground and an apparently ‘idealised community’ emerges from within, through which they can hopefully go on to ‘rebuild society’. Survival, heroism and martyrdom has its utopian pay-off.26 Alternatively, in a shorter analysis of our comparison film, which also privileges conventional heroic attributes, a primitive but wild and verdant ‘Garden of Eden’ remains the primary focus of raw nature as represented throughout the natural mise-en-scène, as our hero struggles for more elemental aspects of survival in this somewhat lawless habitat from the American historical past.

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The Revenant: A Love Letter to Nature and Survival Directed by Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, the film documents the legend of American frontiersman and fur trapper Hugh Glass, who was left for dead after being mauled by a bear in the early 1820s, a story that had already inspired Richard C. Sarafian’s film Man in the Wilderness (1971), in which Richard Harris starred as ‘Zachary Bass’. Now the story returns to the screen, based in part on Michael Punke’s 2002 book The Revenant: A Novel of Revenge. Hugh Glass (Leonardo DiCaprio) leads in a tale of a frontiersmen seeking to secure pelts in a wintery 1820s South Dakota, while being set upon by marauding Pawnee/Arikara warriors. Within eco-film studies, indigenous natives from all continents are frequently represented as ‘more at one with nature’ and thereby promoting a clear environmental and ethical stance from which to critique the white colonial invaders.27 All of this is a long way from the outsider in a futuristic urban tale, struggling against the dangers of a zombie attack. In many ways this (post)revisionist narrative attempts to go beyond a range of stereotypical representations. To survive this heroic struggle, Glass for instance must be ‘reborn as an animal’—he actually rises from the grave—and with his open sores, unruly snot-­ splattered beards and matted greasy hair, he looks more animal than man.28 Meanwhile, one has to also acknowledge the potent argument made by Courtney Bristow in an online review that the film perpetuates the ‘white saviour’ narrative (which was somewhat revised in I am Legend), in spite of casting native Americans to act as Pawnee and Arikara tribes and even hiring a native expert, Craig Falcon, as a cultural educational consultant who taught the crew and actors how to positively represent such indigenous cultures.29 DiCaprio—remaining one of the most recognisable environmentalist actors in Hollywood today—delivers a barnstorming performance as the embattled Glass, whose quest for survival takes him on an animal-human trajectory, recalling Grizzly Man cited earlier and its ‘Herzogian odyssey’ to the very borders of life and death. Survival is not simply allegorised, as in so many zombie movies, but brought to more primal and visceral real-­ life attention. These ethical struggles around survival (of the fittest) in an inhospitable country, framed through the generic conventions of the western, remains most potent and memorable. His struggle is visualised through the demand for extensive sensory and visual suffering, in contrast with the more emotional and mental survival anguish displayed in I am

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Legend. The Hollywood academy likes its actors to physically struggle for their art, and he certainly does: plunging into icy waters, being buried alive, chomping down on raw bison liver and crawling into a still warm animal (horse) carcass to sleep. Meanwhile, the freezing temperatures of the breath-taking harsh environment—all filmed in pristine natural light— appear to seep into his very bones. Audiences in turn can discover new ways of empathising and emotionally engaging with such primitive survival patterns, which foregrounds the importance of core instincts for survival above all else. Such generic tensions recall the growth and appeal of so-called misery porn literature, while gaining pleasure from stubbornly ‘living with a character’ who suffers more than audiences could possibly imagine, much less endure. While audiences can easily relate to scenes of icy water flowing and characters physically engaging with environmental extremes, soundscapes are also effectively used to constantly evoke the immersive, almost synesthetic, nature of the survival experience. Through the technical brilliance of Emmanuel Lubezki with his digital Arri Alexa cameras and sweeping widescreen lenses, these technical features are used to viscerally drag audiences through the wilderness, witnessing violent ambushes and life-threatening confrontations caught in superbly orchestrated lengthy takes. The landscape and habitat is never just kept in the background, but constantly foregrounded and made part of the human drama. The camera follows on foot, on horseback, through woods and plains, air and water; often without apparent edits. Lubezki, by all accounts, is a connoisseur of light, and his lens savours wild nature’s ordinary miracles: “the absinthe wash of the aurora boralis, the shadow-­ dance of a campfire, the Rocky Mountains spread out like a string of fangs. A dawn sun breaks through the trees and sparkles like a pincushion made of rainbows”.30 This is certainly muscular (if not conventional romantic) film-making, and much has been made of the punishing physicality of the ‘living hell’ shoot in Canada and Argentina, with “a digital grizzly bear” being one of the few obvious “concessions to artificiality”.31 Alternatively, however, there is hokey spirituality too, as Glass’s traumatised mind drifts back to the Native American mother of his Pawnee-­ speaking son, Hawk (Forrest Goodluck), offering life lessons beyond the grave. At times there is little sense of questioning values or ethical precepts being developed in any provocative way, as most explicitly alluded to in I am Legend, rather instead remaining locked into the pleasure/pain of sensory experience. Audiences are kept in the moment and focused on the

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raw struggle for survival. But unlike the all but solo performance of the hero in I am Legend, the stalwart supporting cast in The Revenant is headed up “by a partially scalped Tom Hardy who chews the rugged scenery with spittle-flecked gusto as the wretched John Fitzpatrick, while Domhnall Gleeson is spot on as the strait-laced Captain Andrew Henry”.32 A cynical response to the film might hence infer that the storyline is simply co-opting pain, suffering and survival techniques within an inhospitable ‘wild’ landscape to afford an acting career more credence and authenticity, rather than specifically connecting with the ethical and environmental agendas under consideration. While there might be some truth in this—further justifying spending more time earlier discussing the less self-conscious I am Legend—Hollywood is continuously seduced by an anthropocentric frame of reference. The visualisation of survival in nature probably remains in the memory for most audiences, more than many other tales, including dare I say it more reflexive zombie fare. All forms of physical survival techniques are called attention to and cinematically foregrounded in these (erstwhile) primitive survival narratives.

Concluding Remarks: Promoting a ‘Tipping Point’ in Ecological Engagement Taylor’s provocative form of ‘biocentrism’ can be decoded as an explicitly deontological example of deep environmental ethics and encapsulate the trajectory followed by these two popular films. Taylor suggests that each individual living thing in nature—whether animal, plant or micro-­ organism—is a teleological-centre-of-life having a well-being of its own, which can be either enhanced or damaged. Environmental activists, from established politicians like Al Gore, to young global activists like Greta Thunberg, and to a lesser extent their fictional equivalents, help to keep such contentious environmental issues in the public consciousness. Characters like Leonardo DiCaprio, who remains the embodiment of a ‘benevolent’ nature survivalist in The Revenant, much less the zombie apocalypse survivor Will Smith in I am Legend assist in this creative imaginary. Both survival-focused heroes in their own way have a surprisingly important role to play in reflecting and promoting such deep ethical values. But of course such philosophical expositions around ethical and environmental values become more problematic and contentious when visualised and embodied within the audio-visual aesthetic, especially

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taking into account the strictures and limitations of a (commercial) generic narrative structure. Both films call attention to varying dynamics of personal survival, with the futuristic tale focusing more clearly on the emotional and psychological trauma associated with the dilemma of global (pandemic) survival, The Revenant in turn focuses more on physical and bodily trauma around surviving and all that wild/raw nature puts in its way. Within very contrasting natural and post-apocalyptic circumstances, both very different case studies vicariously speak of coping with what our exemplary heroes have to face up to, while struggling to stay alive. In these contrasting eco-readings, however, one suggests that they encourage broader environmental and ethical thinking around this process of striving to survive within an extremely unbalanced or inhospitable climate. While neither tale is totally successful in this primal struggle, both nonetheless function as popular creative imaginaries and allegorical illustrations around how to engage with environmental and ethical struggles. Wendell Berry’s Think Little (1972), for instance, remains a classic statement on environmental activism; instead of using emotional appeals to blame others and motivating us citizens by guilt and fear, Berry suggests that the people’s voice needs to be acknowledgeable and rooted in personal change.33 Trying to move beyond primal forms of physical and emotional empathy around survival—embodied by The Revenant and I am Legend—to more sustained, provocative and hopeful scenarios, remains a challenge for all forms of media and communications, and certainly more sophisticated big-budget audio-visual tales will be needed to support this survival trajectory into the future.

Notes 1. See Brennan (2015, 1). 2. See Brereton (2016, 4). 3. Environmentalists constantly use this metaphor of the earth as a fragile spaceship, to both highlight and reflect upon the ethical dangers of pollution and waste, alongside the limitation of scarce natural resources, as humans face the ultimate challenge of climate crisis and ecocidal disaster. 4. See eco-feminist scholarship by Adams and Gruen (2014) and Gruen (2011). 5. For a useful critique of Singer’s over-dominance in the field, see Thomas Wells’s (2016) critique.

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6. See Keller (2010, 59). 7. Taylor (1981, 1). 8. Taylor (1981, 1–2). 9. See Brereton (2016). 10. See Cronon (1992). 11. See Brereton and Gomez (2020). 12. While such evocative audio-visual formats and mainstream genres at first sight seem to have little connection with the real world—including science fiction or even horror and zombie movies—they can help encourage audiences to imagine and inhabit, at least in their minds and imaginations, multiple alternative visions of the future that draw on stark uni-directional political choices made today. For instance, such evocative and visceral narratives, as explored in this chapter, can at least allegorically enable audiences to envision the consequences for future landscape sustainability, based on economic and sometimes short-term decision-making premises, while teasing out how people fit into and interact with such ever-changing environments and exposing what such futures might mean for lives and livelihoods. 13. For an allegorical reading of Irish zombie movies and how they speak to a difficult cultural and environmental debate around agriculture and food production, see Brereton (2020). 14. Giddens (2009, 2). 15. See Castree (2010, 156). 16. See Brereton (2020), drawing on Tim Morton’s study of the hyper-object. 17. Hulme (2008, 7). 18. Murphy (2017, 6). 19. Giuliani (2015, 367–368), cited in Murphy (2017, 9). 20. See Onori and Visconti (2012). 21. See DeLuca (2006). 22. Murphy (2017, 6). See also Corbett (2006); Heise (2008). 23. See Morton (2018, 27). 24. For a reading of this film, see Brereton (2012). 25. There are of course numerous differences between this 2007 film version and others, not to mention the roots of this original novella—which basically spawned the whole zombie sub-genre. In particular much is made of the contrasting endings of the book, as against the alternative happy ending suggested for this film version. Bookended by the film’s opening with a report by doctor Alice Krippin (Emma Thompson) who announces a cure for cancer, using a repurposed measles vaccine. This reality of global destruction and individual survival is embodied by the ‘money shots’ of the Big Apple, visualised not as an iconic site of conspicuous consumption but rather as desolate and almost totally rewilded space.

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26. But at what cost, as for example underpinned by the allegorical image of a butterfly—attested to by his daughter earlier and most violently reflected in the marks on the shattering glass as the zombies try to break into his basement experimental zone, or finally recognised as the tattoo on the arm of Anna, who supports the survival narrative for the human species. The allegorical and potency of the butterfly marks the transition from innocence and primal survival to hope and the Garden of Eden. 27. For a reading of Dances with Wolves, see Brereton (2005, 98–102). 28. See also Gavin Burke’s review in Movie Review (6 January 2016). 29. https://www.aptnnews.ca/national-­news/meet-­the-­man-­who-­taught-­ leonardo-­dicaprio-­to-­speak-­the-­arikara-­language-­in-­the-­revenant/. 30. See also the review by Jason (2015). 31. Kermode (2016). 32. See RTE review ‘No Pain, No Gain for Gleeson on The Revenant. 5 January 2016. https://www.rte.ie/entertainment/2016/0104/757719-­the-­ revenant-­domhnall-­gleeson/. 33. Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue (1981, 204) offers a similar critique in historical terms. One great mistake of the Enlightenment Project, he says, was “the tendency to think atomistically about the human action and to analyse complex actions and transactions in terms of simple components”. MacIntyre advocated a new perspective on moral philosophy rooted in the way humans actually experience life and how they interpret it, that is, in community.

References Adams, Carol J., and Lori Gruen, eds. 2014. Ecofeminism: Feminist Intersections with Other Animals and the Earth. New York: Bloomsbury Press. Berry, Wendell. 2019 [1972]. Think Little: Essays. Kindle ed. Counterpart. Bishop, Kyle. 2009. Zombie Movie: Dead Man Still Walking. Journal of Film and Television 37 (1): 16–25. Brayton, Sean. 2011. The Racial Politics of Disaster and Dystopia in I am Legend. Velvet Light Trap 67 (1): 66–76. Brennan, Andrew. 2015. Environmental Ethics. Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy. (first published 2002). https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ ethics-­environmental/. Brereton, Pat. 2005. Hollywood Utopia: Ecology in Contemporary American Cinema. Bristol: Intellect. ———. 2012. Appreciating the Views: Filming Nature in Into the Wild, Grizzly Man and Into the West. In Ecocinema Theory and Practice, ed. S. Rust et al., 213–232. London: Routledge. ———. 2016. Environmental Ethics and Film. London: Routledge.

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———. 2020. Cultural and Visual Responses to Climate Change: Ecological Readings of Irish Zombie Movies. In Ireland and the Climate Crisis, ed. David Robbins, Diarmuid Torney, and Pat Brereton, 185–202. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Brereton, Pat, and Victoria Gomez. 2020. Media Students, Climate Change and YouTube Celebrities: Reading of Dear Future Generation: Sorry Video Clip. ISLE 27 (2): 385–405. Broderick, Mick. 1993. Surviving Armageddon: Beyond the Imagination of Disaster. Science Fiction Studies 20 (3): 342–382. Castree, Noel. 2010. Extended Review: The Paradoxical Professor Giddens. The Sociological Review 58 (1): 156–162. Corbett, Julia. 2006. Communicating Nature: How We Create and Understand Environmental Messages. Washington: Island. Cronon, William. 1992. A Place for Stories: Nature, History and Narrative. Journal of American History 78 (4): 1347–1376. DeLuca, Kevin. 2006. Image Politics: The New Rhetoric of Environmental Activism. Mahwah: Erlbaum. Drezner, Tammy. 2011. Cannibalization in a Competitive Environment. International Regional Science Review, 32 (3). Giddens, Anthony. 2009. The Politics of Climate Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gruen, Lori. 2011. Ethics and Animals: An Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hardin, Garret. 1968. The Tragedy of the Commons. Science 162: 1243–1248. Heise, Ursula K. 2008. Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hulme, Mike. 2008. The Conquering of Climate: Discourses of Fear and Their Dissolution. The Geographical Journal 174 (1): 5–16. Jason, Mark. 2015. In Review: The Revenant. Sierra Club Magazine, 23 December. https://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/2015-­6-­november-­december/ green-­life/review-­revenant. Keller, David, ed. 2010. Environmental Ethics. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell. Kermode, Mark. 2016. The Guardian Review of The Revenant Jan. 17th. https:// www.theguardian.com/film/2016/jan/17/the-­r evenant-­r eview-­leonardo-­ dicaprio-­alejandro-­gonzalez-­inarritu-­tom-­hardy-­domhnall-­gleeson. Lovelock, James. 1972. Gaia as seen through the atmosphere. Atmospheric Environment 6 (8): 579–580. Morton, Timothy. 2018. Being Ecological. Cambridge: MIT Press. Murphy, Patrick D. 2017. The Media Commons: Globalisation and Environmental Discourse. Chicago: University of Illinois Press.

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Onori, Luciano, and Guido Visconti. 2012. The Gaia Theory: From Lovelock to Margulis: From a Homeostatic to a Cognitive Autopoietic Worldview. Rendiconti Lincei 23: 375–386. Romero, George A. 1968. Director of Film Night of the Living Dead. Singer, Peter. 1975. Animal Liberation: A New Ethics for Our Treatment of Animals. New York Review/Random House New York. Taylor, P.W. 1981. The Ethics of Respect for Nature. Environmental Ethics 3 (3): 197–218. Wells, Thomas. 2016. The Incoherence of Peter Singer’s Utilitarian Argument for Vegetarianism. ABC Religion and Ethics, 24 October. https://www.abc.net.au/religion/the-­i ncoherence-­o f-­p eter-­s ingers-­ utilitarian-­argument-­for-­vegeta/10096418.

PART III

Survival and the Holocaust

CHAPTER 11

Close Reading of a Title: On Survival in Auschwitz Maria Anna Mariani

Survival in Auschwitz Survival in Auschwitz: this was the title of the first American translation of If This Is a Man. It was an unfortunate translation, made worse by careless editing. The edition is still available on online book stores, where customers frequently denounce the mass of typos and the fact that the text has been mutilated by the removal of two crucial elements: Levi’s introductory page and his poem “Shemà”. In the midst of these anonymous online voices, the name of Hayden White stands out. The great literary critic seals his comment with a decisive verdict: “This is a disgrace”.1 A bad translation, especially the bad translation of a title, is a symptom. We need, then, in this case to set aside our value judgments and instead diagnose the phenomenon, examining the underlying causes that brought the words Survival in Auschwitz to the surface. What is emphasized in the title is survival: survival in an extermination camp. Why introduce it in

M. A. Mariani (*) Romance Languages & Literatures, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 R. Freiburg, G. Bayer (eds.), The Ethics of Survival in Contemporary Literature and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83422-7_11

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place of the original title, Se questo è un uomo, If This Is a Man? The original title (now restored in the new American version) is expressed as a conditional clause: If This is a Man.2 It encourages readers to think about what makes a man a man, a human being a human being. It prompts us to dwell on the boundary line separating the dignity of a person from that which lies below or beyond it. It provokes readers to reflect on the difference between a life worth living and its alternative: mere biological existence, what Giorgio Agamben would discuss as “bare life”.3 But, as it happens, instead of This is a Man, the English words first chosen to summarize Levi’s text were Survival in Auschwitz. Apparently, it must have seemed at the time that there was a better expression to promote the book than the original. Perhaps the alternative title seemed to encapsulate the testimonial content of the book more immediately: Survival in Auschwitz instantly guides readers’ expectations and removes the need to ponder on the consequence implied by that conditional clause. It could even be said that Survival in Auschwitz is a possible response in the reader to the hypothetical question of the original title. Survival continuously erodes the confines between a good life and mere existence. What kind of life is it that goes by the name of survival? Is someone who is floundering to survive still a man? When does his death really begin? Survival in Auschwitz could very well be complementary to If This Is a Man, as if a dialog were taking place between the alternative titles: one (If This is a Man) urging patient reflection and the other (Survival in Auschwitz) responding to this reflection and zeroing in on the word— ‘survival’—that calls for a re-examination of every point of the biological threshold. But there is something else that needs to be said: something to do with the cultural history of this word. Survival in Auschwitz came out in 1961. Twenty-three years later, in 1984, Christopher Lasch published The Minimal Self. According to Lasch, our contemporary cultural and psychological moment is defined by a mindset of survival, one that makes any problem at all a matter of life or death, even the most microscopic or trivial. If everyday life is approached as a series of minor emergencies, to the point that everything can be included in a weighty instruction manual on self-preservation, then what, asks Lasch, happens to heroism? What happens is that it evaporates; or rather, the category of hero gets superimposed on top of the category of survivor. The important thing is to have small goals, to get by. If danger lurks everywhere, then one hardly needs grandiose undertakings to demonstrate one’s valor. The hero becomes an everyday creature: anyone who

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has managed to come out unharmed from the series of sharp edges pressed against him during a blunt day. The hero who has survived is thus a victim: this is how these opposing statuses are made identical. The survivor makes the condition of victim prestigious and dulls the bearing of the hero. How, Lasch continues, did we arrive at this “modern deification of survival per se”?4 One possible cause can be traced to the temptation to extract a universal lesson for all humanity from the atrocities performed in the extermination camps—to apply the lessons of the Shoah to everyday life, imagined as a domestic concentration camp. One of the people who, in Lasch’s reading, encouraged this analogy was Terrence Des Pres, who in 1976 published The Survivor: An Anatomy of Life in the Death Camps. The book effusively praises mere survival, life that seeks to preserve itself even when the reasons for continuing to exist have been swept away. Des Pres rejects the image of the survivor as a helpless victim and opposes those, like Bruno Bettelheim above all,5 who take survivors to task for being incapable of rebelling, for regressing to the stage of infantile, idiotic children, for letting their personalities shrink and then splinter. Bettelheim’s view might seem paradoxical: he himself survived Dachau and Buchenwald. But it was precisely in the camps that he arrived at this conclusion, by observing the uniform submissiveness of the other inmates. He studied his companions so that what was happening to them would not happen to him. Devoting his resting hours to thinking about their infantilization was exactly what allowed him to reach the goal he had tenaciously set for himself: to preserve his lucidity. But, to return to questions posed by Des Pres, how is one supposed to rebel? The ideals of heroic ethics—strength, courage, loyalty—have no place within the walls of the concentration camp universe. For Des Pres, the fact of remaining human, life itself, was the most extreme act of rebellion in the camp. This obstinate, blind attachment to life is what survivors teach us. And they do teach us: according to Des Pres, we can all learn something from the survivors’ experience—no less than the value of life per se: The survivor is not a metaphor, not an emblem, but an example. For us the camps are terminal images. They are the realized archetypes of eternal victimhood and of evil forever triumphant. As such they confirm most forcefully our vision of man as monster and victim. And yes, we are monsters. We are victims. But we are also survivors; and once we see the central fact about the survival experience—that these people passed through Hell—the

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a­rchetypes of doom are, if not cancelled, at least less powerful in their authority over our perceptions. Survivors return from the grave, they come through Hell, and some, after descent into darkness and the defiling filth of underground sewers, rise again into the common world of sun and simple life. Existence at its boundaries is intrinsically significant. Whatever we make of this fact, we should keep in mind that for survivors the struggle to live— merely surviving—is rooted in, and a manifestation of, the form-conferring potency of life itself.6

The force that bends down to lift us up, treat our wounds, defend us— against everything that opposes it—is once again life, an image of life. This minimal grade of existence holds out even at Auschwitz. Incredible as it may seem, this remains the case: because there are some who made it back from Auschwitz. And if anyone came back after passing through death, or having been traversed by death, then everyone, says Des Pres, must learn from him or her—even though Auschwitz is not our everyday world. But it can be a paradigm of it, a magnifying glass, a deforming mirror: there have been and still are many figures employed to establish parallels between the extreme and the ordinary.7 The image of the deforming mirror was used by Levi himself, thus making him the first person to encourage the metaphorical significance of the Shoah; the first perhaps, despite himself, to have diluted the specificity of the event, risking to transform it into what many fear it has now become today: an empty shell to be filled up by any painful content.8 If the everyday takes on the characteristics of a concentration camp, then, yes, survival does become deified. In that case, a title like Survival in Auschwitz really can guarantee publishing success: fascination and multiple reprints. Ann Goldstein, the editor of Levi’s Complete Works, suggests as much in her introduction, claiming that the original publishing house’s choice of a title was precisely due to the practical demands of commercial sales.9 To be fair, I am not sure that, at the time, there was any presentiment of the semantic stratifications of the word ‘survival’. But a variety of meanings have wrapped themselves around the term over the years, impacting the reception of Levi’s book. In recent years Levi’s text has engendered works aimed at extrapolating a set of instructions from his words on “how to live in a ‘slightly inhospitable’ world”.10 The reasons for the success of the initial English title are the same as those that lead to a view of mere survival as a minimal form of heroism, a form that we can all embrace,

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because it gives value to every little setback we encounter on a regular day. The reason that the effect produced by this title is so powerful is because we have come to celebrate mere survival as “a talent for life”.11 These are the words of Des Pres; and yet Des Pres killed himself.12 Primo Levi also killed himself. But look at what he wrote in If This Is a Man, or Survival in Auschwitz: The conviction that life has a purpose is rooted in man’s every fiber, it is a property of the human substance. Free men give many names to this purpose, and think and talk a lot about its nature. But for us the question is simpler. Today, here, our only purpose is to reach the spring. We care about nothing else now. Behind this goal there is now no other goal.13

Today, here, now: these are the only adverbs that count in the camp. These insistent adverbs, isolated by commas that splice the syntax, coagulate time into an absolute present, obliterating desire and memory. But this absolute present, it would seem, does not obliterate the need to live— the desire to “reach the spring”. What is the instinct that induces human beings to cling doggedly to being? Why do we continue to live when the life we live is so unbearable that we can scarcely call it by that name—life? Levi’s book rivets us to this thought. We must therefore plunge into his text, leaving its surface behind, along with that unfaithful yet symptomatic title that demands further examination. We will return to the first translation of this title at the end of this article. In the meantime, entering into the heart of Levi’s book will allow the problem of survival to be probed in a more pointed fashion than we have so far.

Pronouns I thus enter into the book accompanied by the question Levi presents to us: why continue living when one’s life is a bad life? We have seen that this question is precipitated by the words: “But for us the question is simpler. Today, here, our only purpose is to reach the spring”. The most striking thing about these lines is the disappearance of the pronoun I, replaced by we. What happened to the I ? It is hardly a marginal element; on the contrary, its importance is such that I would like to start my exploration of the immense question Levi puts to us precisely by focusing on the first-person pronoun and on the plural one destined to replace it. My study of these

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pronouns follows the example set out by Maurice Blanchot, who was confronted with the same problem (‘Why go on with life, in spite of everything?’) in his study of Robert Antelme’s concentration camp memoir, L’Espèce humaine (The Human Race). Blanchot noted that Antelme’s writing is marked by an insistent use of the pronoun we and by an I that absconds and disappears. For Blanchot, this vanishing of the I is where bare life makes its appearance. Thus, commenting on Antelme, he writes: The man of the camps is as close as he can be to powerlessness. All human power is outside him, as are existence in the first person, individual sovereignty, and the speech that says I. It is truly as though there were no Self other than the self of those who dominate […] leaving him to an anonymous presence without speech and without dignity.14

Even in this anonymous, mute, worthless presence, which is denied the status of human being, there still remains what Antelme calls the extreme sense of ‘belonging to the human race’.15 This sense is translated into a radical lack, in which, as Blanchot contends, “the bread one eats responds immediately to the demand of need, just as need is immediately the need to live”.16 The passage continues: Man, bent on survival, and attached in a way that must be called abject to living and always living on, bears this attachment to life as an attachment that is impersonal, as he bears this need as a need that is no longer his own need proper but as a need that is in some sense neutral, thus virtually the need of everyone.17

What does ‘impersonal’ mean here? It means that in the death camps there are no more persons, there are no more individuals with distinct lives replete with a myriad of experiences. The lives of individuals no longer exist; and yet there is still life. This immanent form of life can be conceived of as an animated essence that circulates in all beings before or after they embody it. It can also be found in the abstractness of newborns—each one identical, each one shot through with the same need—and in the terminal stages of existence, when one dies.18 Before individuality is formed, or when it is receding, we are no longer confronted with lives, but with life: the flow of life, impersonal life. This is what we see described in the stories of the former deportees.

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The capacity to say ‘I’, to think of oneself as a subject, disintegrates as soon as one enters the camps. In the texts of Antelme and Levi, speech is hardly ever expressed by a first-person singular; instead it issues from a plural that aggregates all the deportees into a single magma of pure need— the relentless need called bare life. But did the survival instinct in the camps really only originate from this faceless need? Antelme seems to believe that there is another explanation for it. Sometimes in his work survival is imbued with agency and injected with a jolt of heroism, to the point that at times it converges with a militant duty: “Here, the course of the militant is to struggle rationally against death”.19 And if this is the case, it is because “All of us are here to die. That’s the objective the SS have chosen for us”.20 And therefore, writes Antelme, “You mustn’t die, that is the real objective of the battle here. Because every death is a victory for the SS”.21 Antelme dismantles any equivalency between vulnerable and passive here, deploying a military vocabulary that turns fragility into a political task. Levi did not view it this way: for him, there was nothing heroic about bare life. In a famous chapter of If This Is a Man, entitled “The Last One”, he describes the admiration for a member of the Sonderkommando at Birkenau who managed to summon up the strength to rebel, planning a mutiny in the crematorium. For this he was publicly hanged, in a ceremony composed of gallows, glaring light, and the rasping voice of the SS officer who condemned and threatened: The man who is to die in front of us today took part in the revolt in some way. […] He is to die today before our eyes: and perhaps the Germans will not understand that this solitary death, the death that has been reserved for him as a man, will bring him glory, not infamy. At the end of the German’s speech, which nobody understood, the rasping voice of before again rose up: “Habt ihr verstanden?” Did you understand? Who answered “Jawohl?” Everybody and nobody: it was as if our cursed resignation had taken shape by itself, as if it had become a collective voice above our heads. But everybody heard the cry of the doomed man, it pierced the thick, ancient barriers of inertia and submission, it struck the living core of the man in each of us: “Kameraden, ich bin der Letzte!” (Comrades, I am the last!) I wish I could say that from among us, an abject flock, a voice had arisen, a murmur, a sign of assent. But nothing happened. We remained standing,

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bent and gray, our heads bowed, and we did not uncover our heads until the German ordered us to do so.22

The reason the death of the Last One is heaped in glory and not infamy is because it is a solitary act, lifting it out of the formless, obedient mass destined to pass away in the anonymous, improper mode that had already begun in life.23 His voice articulates the power of saying ‘I’ —an I that rises up exactly in the instant of death, because only then can he oppose an existence torn apart by the SS and transformed into tormented survival. Death approached as if it were a form of rebellion, returning to him back his singularity and dignity; while the living, the so-called living, have no I: they are everyone and no one, pure horizontal submissiveness. And yet, precisely during those moments of confronting the Last One, stretched out in his terminal verticality, they sense that there still exists “a living core of the man” inside each of them. But this core is buried too deeply: it is impossible to unearth: “I wish I could say that from among us, an abject flock, a voice had arisen, a murmur, a sign of assent. But nothing happened”. In this wish for a sympathetic gesture for the dying man, who becomes a hero by dying, Levi seems to momentarily reclaim the ideas of the heroic ethics that he had always rejected and that have no place within the concentration camp universe. But no: heroic ethics has nothing to do even with the hanging of the Last One. What Levi admires is the Last One’s capacity to assert a burst of resistance through death,24 because only death seems capable of eluding the power that governs life, tearing it to shreds and leaving it bare. So, there is a difference between heroic ethics and what Levi admires in the Last One, there is a difference between being courageous in a battle, and resisting the biopolitical regime of twentieth-­ century totalitarianism. The death of the Last One may not be illuminated by epic glory, but at least it is his own.

The Drowned and the Saved One possible alternative to the heroic ethics that had died out in the concentration camp is provided by the critic Robert Gordon, who wrote an influential book entitled Primo Levi’s Ordinary Virtues.25 What are these so-called ordinary virtues? They are remnants of ethical actions, intermittent gestures of solidarity, of friendship, of mutual comfort that allowed a skeleton of society to be established among the deportees, and to instill a morality even in the camps. And they made it possible to lead a good life,

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even there.26 Most critics agree that this is Levi’s most incisive contribution to the analysis of human nature.27 However, this recent emphasis on minimal virtues has perhaps led to overlooking the passages in which Levi reminds us that it was the worst who survived and that survival was a product of abjection. Perhaps, then, the question to ask ourselves when reading his work is not a moral one: in other words, it is not about how to live a good life in a bad life. The question needs to be reformulated with biopolitical concerns in mind, pushing aside the ‘how’ and shifting attention to the ‘why’: asking why it is such a difficult, almost impossible task. I would like to formulate this inquiry while evoking as a theoretical filter words by Judith Butler. She has made various contributions to the problem of why it is so difficult to live a good life in a bad life, including a fierce lecture called Can One Lead a Good Life in a Bad Life? Let us take the key chapter of If This Is a Man, “The Drowned and the Saved”, in which Levi urges us to think of the Lager as a gigantic biological and social experiment: Let thousands of individuals, differing in age, condition, origin, language, culture and customs, be enclosed within barbed wire, and there be subjected [quivi siano sottoposti] to a regular, controlled life, which is identical for all and inadequate for all needs. No one could have set up a more rigorous experiment to determine what is essential and what acquired in the behavior of the human animal faced with the struggle for life.28

Levi’s prose in these lines is aseptic, like an instruction manual—mimicking the rhetoric of the experiment. The appearance of “there”, using the Dantesque quivi,29 creates an effect of estrangement, infiltrating itself into the heart of the verb of experimentation, “to be subjected to”. That adverb quivi appears as a tremor of linguistic resistance that covertly produces a distance from what the rest of the paragraph crudely thrusts upon us; namely, to reproduce with the imagination the conditions that determine a life deprived of every moral structure. Denying freedom, eliminating individual differences, governing existence by forcing it to struggle continuously in need: these are the prior conditions of a bad life. Hence, “why should I act morally, or even ask the question of how best to live (such that I might then be leading a good life), if my life is already not considered to be a life, if my life is already treated as a form of death”,30 asks Judith Butler. She continues: “It may be that the question of how to live a good life depends upon having the power to lead a life […] the sense

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of being alive”—and it really seems that this is the most urgent question to pose here for Levi, more than the attempt to salvage a few fragmentary ethics, a cluster of minimal ordinary virtues, from the abject brutality of the camps. I have quoted Butler word for word because I believe her reflection can help bring to light a few acute passages in Levi’s work that have remained in the shadows until now. One of these stands out in the chapter we are examining, “The Drowned and the Saved”, which unravels a catalog of the most abject ways of surviving, but without passing any judgment on them. Levi’s desire here seems to be to demonstrate the impossibility of pursuing a behavior shaped by morality when the body is subjected to a regime in which beings are forced to maintain themselves in conditions inadequate for all needs. Levi talks more pointedly about this problem in 1986, when he reworked the chapter we are examining, “The Drowned and the Saved”, and put it out as a book with the same title—a title so famous today that the categories of “the drowned” and “the saved”, taken from Dante’s tercets,31 have crystallized into exact synonyms of “the dead” and “the survivors”. In these new pages of The Drowned and the Saved, the last Levi ever finished,32 the author invites us to attempt a thought experiment similar to the one he encouraged us to conduct in If This Is a Man: to think about the concentration camp as a gigantic biological and social laboratory. The experiment proposed to us in The Drowned and the Saved is more difficult, though, and more specific. This time he asks us to participate in the life of a member of the Sonderkommando, one of those prisoners who were forced to take part in the execution of their former inmates: I would invite anyone who dares to attempt judgment to undertake, with sincerity, a conceptual experiment: imagine, if you can, spending months or years in a ghetto, tormented by chronic hunger, by exhaustion, by forced proximity to others, and by humiliation; seeing your loved ones die around you, one after the other; being cut off from the world, unable to either send or receive news; in the end being loaded onto a train, eighty or a hundred per boxcar; traveling toward the unknown, blindly, for sleepless days and nights; and finally finding yourself cast within the walls of an undecipherable hell. At this point you are offered a chance for survival: you are given a proposal, or rather an order, to perform a gruesome but unspecified job.33

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There is an ultimate goal for the experiment we are asked to perform: namely, to suspend judgment. This life must be meditated upon “with compassion and rigor”,34 but not judged, writes Levi. Although it is a life imbued with evil, Levi forbids us to condemn it—and not because he would rather have us note its banality.35 This is not a matter of simply observing human banality at the service of the most merciless evil, as the product of a simple, everyday job. We must make another effort. The issue that really demands our understanding is the fact that this job could have been our own; this bad life could have been ours. Levi challenges readers to feel the same ravages in their veins and on their bones. The passage is dense with passive verbs, designed to make us perceive our personhood as the defenseless recipient of an unrelenting sequence of aggressions that culminate in the assignment of an abject task. Levi penetrates here into territory forbidden to historians and bids us to enter into the inner life of a being whom we would define as abominable.36 Although he still situates the case of the Sonderkommandos within a moral sphere, Levi excludes any temptation toward judgment from our horizon.37 He does so by pushing us to think through, independently, what it means to keep oneself alive and to act under conditions that make it difficult to even use the world “life”.

Survival After Auschwitz It is thus possible to speak about the virtues of the ordinary man, and Levi invites us to do so. But the attention given to moral behavior by the critical discourse should not distract us from the fact that the most pressing problems for Levi are those of injured life and of how the preconditions for this onslaught against dignity are created. If This Is a Man ceaselessly challenges us to reflect on existence evacuated of dignity. When dignity is stripped away, all that remains of life is an exhausted and degraded form of survival—that which “is offered” to the Sonderkommandos in exchange for their labor. This survival must be pondered in its vulnerability. Survival in Auschwitz. It was from here that we began, from this translation and its emotional impact on the text’s reception. This is the title that I criticized at the beginning of the chapter—however, at this point, seeing as the writer touches on survival in practically every sentence, it might very well be the most appropriate one for Levi’s book. But now my puzzlement shifts, passing from one element in the title to another, to nestle inside a preposition: in.

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Inside the camp survival does not pose a problem, because, in spite of everything, it was almost always desired in Auschwitz, and it mattered little how it came about, just as long as it happened. Of utmost difficulty instead is how to continue to live once you are outside Auschwitz, after conquering back a self, after existence no longer orbits around an abysmal, irremediable void, and instead becomes the unremitting strain of why you are here, now, still. The problem is not how to survive, or how to preserve yourself, but why survive, why you have survived—at what price, at whose expense—and why you continue to do so, and whether this makes the slightest bit of sense. The title that most demonstrably encapsulates Levi’s work—his first book and all the following ones—is thus Survival After Auschwitz.

Notes 1. The full editorial process behind the title has been reconstructed by Michael Rothberg and Jonathan Druker, who reveal that the first British edition of Se questo è un uomo was published in the autumn of 1959 (by The Orion Press), and the title was translated literally: If This Is a Man. But two years later, in the United States, the publishing industry decreed a change: the paperback reprint that appeared in 1961 was retitled Survival in Auschwitz, with the subtitle The Nazi Assault on Humanity; see also Rothberg and Druker (2009, 205). 2. The new version, revised by the original translator Stuart Woolf, is included in The Complete Works by Primo Levi, see Levi (2015). 3. See Agamben (1998). 4. These are the words of the American philosopher and psychologist William James, which appear as the epigraph to Lasch’s book, sparking off its main argument argument; see Lasch (1984). 5. See Bettelheim (1980a). After The Survivor came out, Bettelheim revisited the topic, publishing a long article in The New Yorker (August 2, 1976) in which he responds to Des Pres: “any discussion of survivorship is dangerously misleading if it gives the impression that the main question is what the prisoner can do”. In addition: “One can only wonder at the audacity of Professor Des Pres in speaking about survivors embracing life without reserve when one recalls the many who, because of what happened to them or their parents or children in the camps, have never been able to live anything like a normal life”; see Bettelheim (1980b, 288, 297). 6. Des Pres (1976, 176–177; emphasis in original). 7. The image of the deforming mirror that Levi himself uses comes from an interview with Ferdinando Camon (1989, 19–20): “the concentration

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camp is a mirror of the external situation, but a distorting mirror. For example, the automatic and inevitable establishment of a hierarchy among the victims is a fact that has not been sufficiently discussed; the fact that the prisoner who gets ahead on the backs of his comrades exists everywhere”. See also the interview with Virgilio Lo Presti (Levi 1997, 49), in which Levi states that “il campo era l’estremizzazione della società, non dico industriale, ma della società tout court” (“the camp was the extremization of society—not industrial society, but society tout court”). It must be said, however, that although Levi encouraged the meaning of the Shoah to be broadened, at the same time he tried to preserve its specificity, never failing to point out that his expanded use of the camp condition was exclusively metaphorical. 8. The bibliography on this issue is massive: some of the most incisive contributions include Traverso (1999), Novick (1999), Postone (2001), and Assmann (2010). 9. This profit did not benefit Woolf though, because he had done the translation with no contract, purely in the interest of making Levi’s text known to English speakers. On the “good sales” promised by the title Survival in Auschwitz, see Goldstein and Scarpa (2015, 94–95). 10. Homer (2001, 256). 11. Des Pres (1976, vii; emphasis in original). 12. The suicide of Des Pres remains controversial: the Madison county medical examiners’ office in New York ruled his death ‘accidental’. Nevertheless, according to other sources and accounts, such as Nathan (2008), Des Pres committed suicide on November 16, 1987. A 1990 article in the Boston Globe reports Des Pres’s death by hanging. 13. Levi (1961, 1:66): “La persuasione che la vita ha uno scopo è radicata in ogni fibra di uomo, è una proprietà della sostanza umana. Gli uomini liberi danno a questo scopo molti nomi, e sulla sua natura molto pensano e discutono: ma per noi la questione è più semplice. Oggi, e qui, il nostro scopo è di arrivare a primavera. Di altro, ora, non ci curiamo. Dietro a questa meta, non c’è, ora, altra meta.” 14. Blanchot (1993, 132). On Blanchot’s decision to confront Robert Antelme’s memoir, see Rothberg (2000, 93–94). For a critique of Blanchot’s reading, see Davis (1997). 15. Antelme (1998, 5). 16. Blanchot (1993, 133). See also Nancy (2006, 126–127). 17. Blanchot (1993, 133). 18. See Simmel (2010). 19. Antelme (1998, 40). 20. Antelme (1998, 39). 21. Antelme (1998, 66).

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22. Levi (1961, 1:142). “L’uomo che morrà oggi davanti a noi ha preso parte in qualche modo alla rivolta. […] Morrà oggi sotto i nostri occhi: e forse i tedeschi non comprenderanno che la morte solitaria, la morte di uomo che gli è stata riservata, gli frutterà gloria e non infamia. Quando finì il discorso del tedesco, che nessuno poté intendere, di nuovo si levò la prima voce rauca: -Habt ihr verstanden?- (Avete capito?) Chi rispose “Jawohl”? Tutti e nessuno: fu come se la nostra maledetta rassegnazione prendesse corpo di per sé, si facesse voce collettivamente al di sopra dei nostri capi. Ma tutti udirono il grido del morente, esso penetrò le grosse antiche batterie di inerzia e di remissione, percosse il centro vivo dell’uomo in ciascuno di noi. - Kameraden, ich bin der Letzte!—(Compagni, io sono l’ultimo!) Vorrei poter raccontare che fra di noi, gregge abietto, una voce si fosse levata, un mormorio, un segno di assenso. Ma nulla è avvenuto. Siamo rimasti in piedi, curvi e grigi, a capo chino, e non ci siamo scoperti la testa che quando il tedesco ce l’ha ordinato.” 23. See Arendt (1951, 452): “The concentration camps, by making death itself anonymous (making it impossible to find out whether a prisoner is dead or alive) robbed death of its meaning as the end of a fulfilled life. In a sense they took away the individual’s own death, proving that henceforth nothing belonged to him and he belonged to no one. His death merely set a seal on the fact that he had never really existed.” 24. On thanatopolitics and necroresistence, see Foucault (2003, 80). For a selection of recent critical perspectives, see Vatter and Lemm (2014), Mbembe (2003) and Fassin (2010). 25. Gordon (2001, 25): “The central claim of this book is that Primo Levi’s writing, his narrative and other reflections, works its way around ethical issues by figuring out just such a practice of virtue(s), even in the face of the void of Auschwitz.” For the concept of ordinary virtues (and ordinary vices), Gordon refers to Shklar (1984) and to Todorov (1996), who was inspired in his turn by Montaigne. See also Gordon (2004, 37–66). A number of critics have intervened in this territory of moral action. See, for example, Farrell (2013, 87–102) and Lang (2013, 120). 26. Referring to Sources of the Self by Charles Taylor, Gordon invites us to read Levi’s text while allowing the sphere of moral action to shift from the heroic or sanctified life to that of ordinary life (see Gordon 2001) and Taylor (1989). 27. See especially Lang (2013, 121). 28. Levi (1961, 1:82): “Si rinchiudano tra i fili spinati migliaia di individui diversi per età, condizione, origine, lingua, cultura e costumi, e siano quivi sottoposti a un regime di vita costante, controllabile, identico per tutti e inferiore a tutti i bisogni: è quanto di più rigoroso uno sperimentatore

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avrebbe potuto istituire per stabilire che cosa sia essenziale e che cosa acquisito nel comportamento dell’animale-uomo di fronte alla lotta per la vita.” 29. On the use of the adverb quivi in Levi, see Cases (1997, 5–14). A different intertextual resonance of this adverb comes from Galileo Galilei’s Dialogo sopra i due massimi sistemi del mondo (1632), as has been noted by Bucciantini (2011, 3–15, 133–135). 30. Butler (2012a, 11, 16). This does not mean that the fight for survival precedes morality, because even under these conditions it was possible to perform sympathetic gestures of solidarity, and we know that Levi insists on these gestures. And yet—it bears repeating—I believe that the critical discourse needs to reformulate the question, or at least consider it from its biopolitical side in addition to its moral aspect. It is important to note that Butler has often written about Levi’s works, especially in the essay “Primo Levi for the Present”; Butler (2012b). 31. Marco Belpoliti (2015, 508) recalls this fact, citing an interview with Giorgio Calcagno and a comment by Lorenzo Mondo. The tercets from Dante that are believed to have inspired Levi are three in number: Inferno X, 1–3; Inferno IV 62–63; Inferno VI 13–15. 32. The epistolary love novel that Levi stopped working on a few months before his death remains unfinished. It was going to be called Il doppio legame (The Double Bond), as noted in the biography by Angier (2002). 33. Levi (2015, 2:2448): “Vorrei invitare chiunque osi tentare un giudizio a compiere su se stesso, con sincerità, un esperimento concettuale: immagini, se può, di aver trascorso mesi o anni in un ghetto, tormentato dalla fame cronica, dalla fatica, dalla promiscuità e dall’umiliazione; di aver visto morire intorno a sé, ad uno ad uno, i propri cari; di essere tagliato fuori dal mondo, senza poter ricevere né trasmettere notizie; di essere infine caricato su un treno, ottanta o cento per vagone merci; di viaggiare verso l’ignoto, alla cieca, per giorni e notti insonni; e di trovarsi infine scagliato tra le mura di un inferno indecifrabile. Qui gli viene offerta la sopravvivenza, e gli viene proposto, anzi imposto, un compito truce ma imprecisato.” 34. Levi (2015, 2:2449). 35. The only time Primo Levi spoke directly about Hannah Arendt and her argument on the banality of evil was in an interview given in April 1979 to Giorgio Segrè, published in the Jewish magazine Ha-Tikwa. Another reference appears in the interview with Marco Vigevani that appeared in the Bollettino della Comunità Israelitica di Milano, XL (5 May 1984). Both the interviews are included in Levi, Conversazioni e interviste, respectively on pages 279 and 213. On the relationship between Primo Levi and Hannah Arendt, see Forti (2002).

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36. Levi really does enter into a territory forbidden to historians, inviting us to probe the inner life of someone who is different from us; but he does not advance into its furthest reaches the way a novelist or a filmmaker would. These artists have the introspective privilege afforded to them by fiction, which allows them to describe hypothetically the emotions and thoughts of individuals who no longer have the right to be called human beings; see Cohn (1987). A few recent works have taken full advantage of this privilege, giving a human dimension back to the members of the Sonderkommando. These include the Martin Amis novel The Zone of Interest (2014) and László Nemes’s film The Son of Saul (2015), which Georges Didi-Huberman (2015) comments on in a moving, open letter to the director. 37. See Lang (2013, 129): “The Gray Zone is […] beyond or at least outside good and evil but morally significant, at the boundaries of those ethical judgments and yet warranting a place of its own within ethics.” On the gray zone, see also Mesnard and Thanassekos (2010) and Brown (2013).

References Agamben, Giorgio. 1998. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Amis, Martin. 2014. The Zone of Interest. London: Cape. Angier, Carole. 2002. The Double Bond: The Live of Primo Levi. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux. Antelme, Robert. 1998. The Human Race. Translated by Jeffrey Haight and Annie Mahler. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Arendt, Hannah. 1951. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Schocken Books. Assmann, Aleida. 2010. The Holocaust—a Global Memory? Extensions and Limits of a New Memory Community. In Memory in a Global Age: Discourses, Practices and Trajectories, ed. Aleida Assmann and Sebastian Conrad, 97–117. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Belpoliti, Marco. 2015. Primo Levi di fronte e di profilo. Milano: Guanda. Bettelheim, Bruno. 1980a [1943]. Individual and Mass Behavior in Extreme Situations. In Surviving and Other Essays, 48–83. New York: Vintage. ———. 1980b [1976]. Surviving. In Surviving and Other Essays, 274–316. New York: Vintage. Blanchot, Maurice. 1993 [1969]. The Limit-Experience. In The Infinite Conversation, trans. and foreword by Susan Hanson, 202–237. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Brown, Adam. 2013. Judging “Privileged” Jews: Holocaust Ethics, Representation, and the “Grey Zone”. New York: Berghahn. Bucciantini, Massimo. 2011. Esperimento Auschwitz. Torino: Einaudi.

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Butler, Judith. 2012a. Can One Live a Good Life in a Bad Life? Adorno Prize Lecture. Radical Philosophy 176: 9–18. ———. 2012b. Primo Levi for the Present. In Parting Ways. Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism, 181–204. New York: Columbia University Press. Cases, Cesare. 1997. L’ordine delle cose e l’ordine delle parole. In Primo Levi: un’antologia della critica, ed. Ernesto Ferrero, 5–14. Torino: Einaudi. Camon, Ferdinando. 1989. Conversations with Primo Levi. Translated by John Shepley. Evanston: Marlboro Press. Cohn, Dorrith. 1987. Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Davis, Colin. 1997. Duras, Antelme, and the Ethics of Writing. Comparative Literature Studies 34 (2): 170–183. Des Pres, Terrence. 1976. The Survivor: An Anatomy of Life in Death Camps. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Didi-Huberman, Georges. 2015. Sortir du noir. Paris: Les éditions du Minuit. Fassin, Didier. 2010. Ethics of Survival: A Democratic Approach to the Politics of Life. Humanity 1 (1): 81–95. Farrell, Joseph. 2013. The Humanity and Humanism of Primo Levi. In Answering Auschwitz: Primo Levi’s Science and Humanism After the Fall, ed. Stanislao Pugliese, 87–102. New York: Fordham University Press. Forti, Simona. 2002. Banalità del male. In I concetti del male, ed. Pier Paolo Portinaro, 24–38. Turin: Einaudi. Foucault, Michel. 2003. “Society Must Be Defended:” Lectures at the College de France, 1975–1976. Translated by David Macey. New York: Picador. Galilei, Galileo. 1632. Dialogo sopra i due massimi sistemi del mondo. Firenze: Landini. Goldstein, Ann, and Domenico Scarpa. 2015. In un’altra lingua/In Another Language. Turin: Einaudi. Gordon, Robert. 2004. ‘How Much Does a Person Need?’ Primo Levi and the Ethics of Home. In Primo Levi: The Austere Humanist, ed. Joseph Farrell, 37–65. Oxford: Peter Lang. ———. 2001. Primo Levi’s Ordinary Virtues: From Testimony to Ethics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Homer, Frederic D. 2001. Primo Levi and the Politics of Survival. Columbia: University of Missouri Press. Lang, Berel. 2013. Primo Levi: The Matter of a Life. New Haven: Yale University Press. Lasch, Christopher. 1984. The Minimal Self: Psychic Survival in Troubled Times. New York: Norton. Levi, Primo. 1961. Survival in Auschwitz: The Nazi Assault on Humanity. Translated by Stuart Woolf. New York: Collier Books.

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———. 1997. Conversazioni e interviste 1963–1987. Edited by Marco Belpoliti. Turin: Einaudi. ———. 2015. The Complete Works by Primo Levi. Edited by Ann Goldstein. New York: Liveright. Mbembe, Achille. 2003. “Necropolitics.” Trans. Libby Meintjes. Public Culture 15 (1): 11–40. Mesnard, Philippe, and Yannis Thanassekos, eds. 2010. La zone grise: entre accommodement et collaboration. Paris: Kimé. Nancy, Jean-Luc. 2006. Robert Antelme’s Two ‘Phrases’. In Multiple Arts: The Muses II, edited by Simon Sparks and trans. Sara Guyer, 126–127. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Nathan, John. 2008. Living Carelessly in Tokyo and Elsewhere. New York: Free Press. Novick, Peter. 1999. The Holocaust in American Life. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Postone, Meishe. 2001. The Holocaust and the Trajectory of the Twentieth Century. In Catastrophe and Meaning: The Holocaust and the Twentieth Century, ed. Meishe Postone and Eric Santner, 81–114. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Rothberg, Michael. 2000. Traumatic Realism: The Demands of Holocaust Representations. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Rothberg, Michael, and Jonathan Druker. 2009. A Secular Alternative: Primo Levi’s Place in American Holocaust Discourse. Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies 28 (1): 104–126. Shklar, Judith N. 1984. Ordinary Vices. Cambridge: Belknap Press. Simmel, Georg. 2010. The View of Life: Four Metaphysical Essays, with Journal Aphorisms. Translated by Johan A.Y. Andrews and Donald N. Levine. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Taylor, Charles. 1989. Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Todorov, Tzvetan. 1996. Facing the Extreme: Moral Life in the Concentration Camps. Translated by Arthur Denner and Abigail Pollak. New  York: Henry Holt and Company. Traverso, Enzo. 1999. The Jews & Germany: From the “Judeo-German Symbiosis” to the Memory of Auschwitz. Translated by Daniel Weissbort. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Vatter, Miguel, and Vanessa Lemm, eds. 2014. The Government of Life: Foucault, Biopolitics, and Neoliberalism. New York: Fordham University Press.

CHAPTER 12

Narrative Closure and the “Whew” Effect: The Ethics of Reading Narratives of Survival of the Holocaust Erin McGlothlin

While many of the essays in this volume center on the ethics of representing survival in narrative, my contribution will deviate slightly from this focus to explore a related matter: the ethical dimensions and implications of reading narratives of survival. In other words, I am less interested here in how survival is figured in literary texts than I am in how readers receive and interact with such depictions of survival, particularly in terms of emotional engagement. According to James Phelan, “the very act of reading entails ethical engagement and response”; when we, as readers, embark on an encounter with a text (whether fictional or non-fictional), we commit ourselves to a complex intersubjective relationship with the characters and conflicts it depicts and position ourselves vis-à-vis the moral framework and value system it constructs or implies.1 Such ethical positioning, Phelan

E. McGlothlin (*) Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures, Washington University in St. Louis, St. Louis, MO, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 R. Freiburg, G. Bayer (eds.), The Ethics of Survival in Contemporary Literature and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83422-7_12

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points out, is reciprocally related to our cognitive and affective engagement with the text: While the ethical dimension of reading engages our values and judgments, it is deeply intertwined with cognition, emotion, and desire: our understanding influences our sense of which values the text is calling forth, the activation of those values influences our judgments, our judgments influence our feelings, and our feelings our desires. And the other way around.2

The reader’s experience of a given text, then, involves cognitive, affective and ethical aspects, each of which necessarily impinges on the other two in critical ways. One’s emotional reaction to a text is thus inherently also an ethical response to it. This essay explores a set of interrelated questions concerning the ethical and emotional dimensions of the reading experience. Drawing not only on my intellectual engagement with my areas of research expertise, namely the literature of the Holocaust and narrative theory, but also and especially on my experience teaching that literature, particularly to contemporary American students, I wish to contemplate a particular ethical dilemma that emerges in popular—and by this, I mean non-scholarly—practices of reading non-fictional narratives of Holocaust survival. My object of consideration here is the survivor memoir, which, over seventy-five years after the end of the Holocaust, has become, in Ruth Franklin’s words, “the dominant form of Holocaust writing”.3 As scholars such as Lawrence Langer, James Young, Geoffrey Hartman, Robert Eaglestone, Zoë Waxman and others have argued,4 the survivor memoir (sometimes referred to more generally as “testimony”) exemplifies discernable features that both link it to and differentiate it from the larger genre of autobiography, including aporias, traumatic fragmentation, tensions between the discourse and the story as well as between the narrating I and the narrated I, strategies of alienation, resistance to closure and what Langer has termed “a lexicon of disruption, absence, and irreversible loss”.5 However, I am focused here less on such features that are intrinsic to the survivor memoir and more on the ways in which this by-now commonly recognizable genre arouses specific expectations on the part of the reader who encounters it—expectations that, according to N. Ann Rider, are “influenced in no small part by the culture in which these memoirs are produced and consumed”.6 In particular, I will consider the conventional practices of reading that have developed around this body of texts and identify a form of narrative desire

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endemic to survivor memoirs that motivates some non-scholarly readers— in this case my students—in their consumption of such texts and that in fact is directly antithetical to the estranging generic features I just mentioned. This desire, as I will argue, stimulates a practice of reading that encourages or even indulges in narrative closure, a phenomenon that complicates the generally held position among scholars of Holocaust literature that survivor memoirs, in Eaglestone’s words, “disrupt[t] the expectations of closure and comprehension”.7 While it is without question true that many survivor memoirs—particularly ones with more literary objectives—are resistant to closure, non-scholarly readers are less willing to eschew closural readings. I will thus reflect on the dynamics of reading, identifying the generic conventions of survivor memoirs that engage readers’ narrative desire for closure. The conclusion will also briefly explore strategies that one particular memoir employs to both temporarily indulge such desire and ultimately impede or subvert it.

Survivor Memoir and the “Whew” Effect Having taught undergraduate and graduate courses on the literature of the Holocaust at Washington University in St. Louis for two decades now, I have come to recognize a particular phenomenon that invariably occurs when my students read and engage with memoirs written by Holocaust survivors. I call it the “whew” effect (“whew” describing the sound that pent-up air in the lungs makes when one suddenly exhales it in a moment of released anxiety and subsequent relief). I use the term to refer to students’ relieved reaction to that singular moment in the survivor’s account that describes his or her eventual liberation or escape from a concentration or death camp, ghetto, death march or other experience of incarceration and oppression. For all intents and purposes, the “whew” effect represents the kind of affective response one associates with catharsis; however, in this case, it is helpful to view my students’ reactions as a sort of inverted version of the Aristotelian concept of the phenomenon. In Aristotle’s theory, the spectator experiences catharsis as the purgation of fear and pity aroused by her identification with the demise of the tragic hero (usually his death). In what I am describing here, however, students’ experience of relief occurs not in response to the emotions engendered by tragedy, but rather in relation to an almost diametrically opposed twist of plot: the revelation that the narrator of the text, who throughout the narrative has been threatened with near-certain genocidal death, is almost miraculously

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able to evade that seemingly ironclad fate. In other words, while the “whew effect” provides the emotional release we typically attribute to catharsis, its textual origin—the protagonist’s experience of liberation or escape—is radically opposed to the source of catharsis that proceeds from tragedy and the death of the fatally flawed tragic hero.8 In many survivor memoirs, the moment of liberation, which effectively marks the author’s transformation from a victim into a survivor, represents the emotional apex of the narrative. For example, in her memoir Hope is the Last to Die: A Coming of Age Under the Nazi Terror, the Israeli writer Halina Birenbaum, a Polish-Jewish survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto and the Majdanek, Auschwitz, Ravensbrück and Neustadt-Glewe camps, describes the moment in which she comprehends her liberation as one of alleviation and release: The next morning was a sunny May day. I went out into the open air with Celina. On the highway we were greeted by a mild breeze, carrying from afar the sound of a song sung by marching troops. Only then did I take a deep breath and know that at last, at last, we were free. The first free song I heard on German soil was the Russian “Fishing by the river…” To this day, the song sounds to me as grand as any elevated, magnificent hymn, and always arouses in me the same emotions.9

This passage, which concludes the main body of Birenbaum’s text (the 1971 version of the memoir includes a separate conclusion and the 1996 edition an additional epilogue), exemplifies the singular moment of liberation and escape that elicits the “whew” effect from my students (particularly my undergraduate students). In fact, with the protagonist Halina’s deep breath of reprieve and relief and the narrator’s repeated reference to being free “at last”, it overtly models such a cathartic response for the reader both in interpretive and somatic terms. My students sigh—both figuratively and literally—along with Birenbaum’s narrator-protagonist, adopting and indulging in the emotions she experiences when hearing (and when remembering hearing) her “first free song” and naturalizing this relief in narrative terms as a sort of “happy ending”. Some students begin their reading with the conscious expectation of encountering the “whew” moment and in fact are impatient to get there, since they know even before they begin to read that the author, by virtue of having written the memoir, has survived the Holocaust (a paratextual phenomenon I will discuss later). Other students are only vaguely aware

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that one reason they are willing to read through the survivor’s description of horrific experiences is that they hope to eventually get some emotional “payoff” when they finally reach the yearned-for moment of liberation or escape. But nearly all of my students approach the text with some degree of desire to arrive at that moment, which they hope will be cathartic and reward both the survivor for his or her hardship and them as readers for following such a difficult account. The “whew” effect can be quite gratifying for the reader and additionally can offer much-needed relief to the experience of reading about traumatic events, an important affective dimension of the encounter with Holocaust literature on the part of everyday readers that we as scholars often undervalue. Moreover, such a response is, historically speaking, not exceptional; it can be seen as part of what Langer calls a “natural but misguided impulse to romanticize staying alive and to interpret painful endurance as a form of defiance or resistance” that characterized much “writing of Holocaust history after the liberation of the camps”.10 Langer argues that this natural inclination to focus on—and even celebrate—the experience of liberation likely developed historically in postwar attitudes toward survival as a kind of defense mechanism or “psychological mutiny against the facts and details of mass murder” that sought to provide ameliorative effects, for “German atrocities were so unprecedented, the cruelty so extreme, the anguish of their victims so unfathomable that some balancing idea had to be found to offer relief from the frightful stories that accrued in survivor testimonies”.11 With their eagerness to experience the “whew” moment, my students thus are not anomalous but rather follow a longer tradition of reading practices. Moreover, such a relieved response can also indicate the degree of the reader’s emotional investment in the narrative, a phenomenon that Suzanne Keen, Patrick Colm Hogan, N. Ann Rider and other theorists of emotions and empathy in the reading process have investigated.12 However, the phenomenon of the “whew” effect can also be deeply troubling, for it implies that the reader is invested in the survivor memoir precisely for its allegedly positive outcome and thus uses it, in part, to suppress the more distressing aspects of the Holocaust, not least the facts that six million European Jews and five million people from other victim groups were murdered and that survival in most contexts was the exception rather than the rule. When readers respond to survivors’ accounts with “whew”, they often transform their stories into what Lawrence Langer terms “redemptive” narratives that may leave readers feeling better but that can

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in fact contribute more to their forgetting of the Holocaust than to their remembrance of it. For this reason, what seems to constitute a turning to the Holocaust in such responses to survivor memoirs can also often be a simultaneous gesture of turning away from them. In her synthetic history War and Genocide: A Concise History of the Holocaust, Doris Bergen indicates that what I call the “whew” effect is not just operative in students’ reading of individual survivors’ accounts, but also at play in larger cultural attempts to create a coherent narrative of the immense and complex set of events associated with the Holocaust. In her final chapter, “Legacies of Atrocity”, Bergen writes explicitly about what it means to make conclusions about the Holocaust and its aftermath, particularly as they are filtered through the tropes and structures of liberation and closure: Deciding how to end a history of the Holocaust may be even more difficult than choosing where to begin. The Holocaust and its repercussions extend beyond May 1945 in so many ways. And what about the fundamental question: is the ending happy or sad? Do we conclude with uplifting and inspiring themes—liberation, survival, resilience, success, justice—or with grief, loss, and the suffering and failure evident in displacement, persistent antisemitism, and subsequent genocides? Reflection on the Holocaust, its reverberations, and legacies suggests that resilience and devastation, survival and loss, life and death cannot really be separated, not in this case. With destruction of such magnitude, every outcome, no matter how triumphant, is steeped in sadness. At the same time, even the most horrific accounts seem to include some spark of light—a gesture of kindness, expressions of defiance and dignity, the miracle of survival. Efforts to conclude a history of the Holocaust neatly or to achieve closure oversimplify the past and its influence on the present and future. Even worse, such attempts often end up appropriating the power of the past for current agendas.13

Bergen cautions us here to avoid easy answers or redemptive readings when considering the outcomes of the Holocaust, even if at times we can perceive “some spark of light” in accounts of the darkness of the genocide (as with Birenbaum’s “deep breath” of freedom). The moment of liberation and escape, while removing the threat of imminent violence and mortal danger, rarely signaled a “happy ending” for those individuals who were fortunate enough to survive; as Primo Levi writes in his essay “Shame”, “In the majority of cases, the hour of liberation was neither joyful nor lighthearted. For most it occurred against a tragic background of

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destruction, slaughter, and suffering […] Leaving pain behind was a delight for only a few fortunate beings, or only for a few instants, or for very simple souls; almost always it coincided with a phase of anguish”.14 Although survivors escaped with their lives, the aftermath was, for them, rarely unremittingly positive; many lost whole families and entire communities, were displaced from their homes and countries of origin, were subject (particularly in the case of those living behind the Iron Curtain) to continued political oppression, and often suffered (and continue to suffer) significant physical and emotional effects of the genocidal violence. For most survivors, the “whew” moment of liberation and escape, even if they perceived it as such at the time, did not as a rule bring cathartic relief or emotional redemption to their experience. Bergen reminds readers to be wary of assigning the triumphal happy ending to what was in reality a much more ambivalent and complex experience.15 In its privileging of and emotional gratification in the desired-for arrival of freedom and escape (a desire that of course is not just held by the reader but the figures in the text as well), the “whew” effect thus leaves unassimilated those aspects of the survivor’s story that complicate or contradict the ostensibly “happy ending” of liberation and point to the greater narrative and historical context in which the experience of liberation is embedded. This phenomenon is observable in my students’ reading of Birenbaum’s memoir, whereby the protagonist’s “ecstasy over [her] youthful freedom”, as we learn in the separate conclusion that directly follows the narrator’s description of liberation in the main body of the account, is attended by “ghastly dreams, nightmares of persecution”.16 The narrator further describes a chance encounter with her brother, her sole surviving relative, one month after her liberation from Neustadt-Glewe: In the middle of the street, surrounded by a crowd of interested and touched people, we threw ourselves into one another’s embrace. But after a moment Marek moved away a little, looked at me closely, and began asking me my name, my mother’s first name, what had happened to her? He did not believe it was me.17

Though Birenbaum’s reunion with her brother is as “miraculous” and emotionally affecting as might be expected, as an event of unqualified joy and relief it is clouded over by his inability to truly recognize his sister.18 Birenbaum’s conclusion thus paints a bleak picture of her experience in the aftermath of the Holocaust, offering a bitter, ironic revision to her

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emotional description of her liberation in the main body of the account and thus mitigating its “happy ending”. Yet, in their relief that Birenbaum has escaped the Holocaust, my students prefer to remain with their “whew” response and to linger on the last sentences of the scene of her liberation, which in their expression of the protagonist’s incredulity to have survived, bracket for a brief moment both the painful loss of her family and the lasting effects of her traumatic experience.

American Holocaust Pedagogy and Narrative Closure The predilection for the “whew” moment on the part of my students is inherent to the developed conventions of the Holocaust survivor memoir itself, particularly as the latter, by virtue of its focus on survival and with its unavoidable reliance on idioms associated with freedom and escape, encourages such closural responses. Indeed, according to Langer, “Conventionally, liberation meant survival, the beginning of renewal, the end of oppression. The very language we use here is ripe with a spirit of inspiration”.19 However, before I investigate the generic conventions that enable narrative closure, I find it helpful to briefly contextualize this phenomenon culturally, as my reflections here proceed not from a consideration of the experience of readers in general, although I do think that some aspect of the “whew” effect, as Langer suggests in his evaluation of postwar redemptive narratives, is operative in readers of Holocaust memoir more broadly. Rather, my theorization is directed more specifically at the responses of the undergraduate students at my American university, although I should be clear that I refer exclusively to my anecdotal knowledge of their reading practices, as I have not conducted any empirical research on their experiences.20 Although a significant fraction of students in my Holocaust literature courses is not American-born, most of them completed secondary education in the United States and have internalized the literary methodologies used in the American public high school classroom, which for better or worse tends to privilege students’ emotional responses to literary texts and to minimize attention to the formal features of literature. This is particularly true in the teaching of Holocaust literature, which is often used in American secondary education to forge ethical awareness through emotional identification, often through readings of such emotion-engendering memoirs as Elie Wiesel’s Night or even such

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seductively deceptive fictions as The Boy in the Striped Pajamas. As Rachel N.  Baum argues, “Holocaust literature teaches us, in part, how to feel about the historical facts. If Holocaust education cannot help but impart lessons in ethics and civics, emotion is central to such an education”.21 In fact, as Thomas D.  Fallace has demonstrated, Holocaust education in American secondary schools, which began to materialize in the 1970s, emerged within the greater pedagogical movement of the late 1960s and 1970s known as the “affective revolution”, which looked to link curricula to “students’ identity, morality, emotions, and values”.22 The movement’s intense focus on stimulating student affect, particularly through engaging personal narratives, “provided a theoretical foundation for introducing Holocaust education into American public schools” as well as a curricular template focusing on the emotional resonance of survivors’ stories that would become the primary vehicle for teaching about the Holocaust.23 In its focus on students’ affective experience of personal narratives, including not only memoirs but also diaries (most notably Anne Frank’s), interviews, video testimonies and even face-to-face encounters with Holocaust survivors, this pedagogical strategy, according to Rider, possessed the “laudable goal” to “engender a multiplicity of perspectives on historical events by expanding the sources from which to draw analyses, moving away from a myopic victor’s history [and, one might add, identification with the perpetrator’s gaze] and making the experience of the other visible”.24 At the same time, she writes, the focus on the student’s empathetic attachment to the survivor’s narrative in particular may have been achieved at the expense of “other access points to historical knowledge, especially understanding of the socio-historical structures that influence social movement”.25 As Rider summarizes the history of Holocaust education in US secondary schools, although “the affective revolution was short-lived within the educational environment, affective pedagogies continued to influence Holocaust education and decades of students. By the 1990s, a generation of Americans was trained in addressing historical and moral issues primarily through experiential modes that foregrounded empathy and affect”.26 My own experience beginning in the early 2000s teaching Holocaust literature to undergraduates who had been taught in high school about the Holocaust using similar methods suggests that such affective pedagogies are still at least somewhat in place today. The students who enroll in my courses often associate the Holocaust (and Holocaust literature in general) with previous emotional reading experiences that induced either extreme pathos or the “feel-good” response associated

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with the “whew” effect. They hope to continue such exercises in emotional engagement in their reading of memoirs in my classroom and in fact are often motivated to register for the course based on this desire.27 Rider connects the pedagogical predilection for such experiential modes in Holocaust education to what she calls the larger “American cultural cognitive model of the Holocaust”, which foregrounds a “progressive telos of survival”, seeks out what she calls the “triumph of the human spirit narrative” and valorizes the survivor for having “individually shown the grit to survive evil”.28 Such a model taps into the American master narrative of the Second World War, which frames the history of that conflict as one in which the US “saved” Europe from fascism and even implies that the US halted the Holocaust and rescued the survivors; according to Natania Rosenfeld, this narrative “leads, inevitably, in American students, to a triumphalist conclusion”.29 Further, I suggest, such a preoccupation with the notion of survival as triumph can be regarded as part of a greater American cultural proclivity to impose happy endings on narratives of various kinds (a phenomenon that is recognized by the German language with its somewhat awkward designation “das Happy End”, which refers to the closing title screen in stereotypical Hollywood films). Contemporary Americans, as Megan Garber writes in her article “The Problem with Happy Endings”, “are in constant need of happy things. We will look for them even in—especially in—the stories that are, manifestly, tragic”. Garber connects this tendency to the uniquely American bias toward optimism and “desire for a happy ending”, which causes Americans to “look away” from difficult, frightening or sad events in search of “a satisfying conclusion”. In this way, according to Garber, “the full story, and its attendant horrors, will get washed away in the easy rituals of false closure”.30 Such dynamics are also at play in some of my students’ paradoxical engagement with Holocaust literature: they often read survivor memoirs, which represent systematic violence and persecution through events that are excruciatingly painful and ethically complex, in order to ritually and repetitively experience the happy ending, the moment when the protagonist exits the dangerous space of the Holocaust for the safety of the postwar world. Indeed, the radical phenomenological and ontological distance between these two spheres makes the happy ending and its attendant “whew” effect that much more pronounced and thus that much more pleasurable. My students’ drive toward the happy ending is, according to Peter Rabinowitz, part of a “phenomenon” that “can be explained by a tendency of readers to find what they expect and want in a text”, whereby

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they “apply rules of coherence in such a way that disjunctures are smoothed over so that texts are turned into unified wholes—that is, in a way that allows [them] to read so that [they] can get the satisfaction of closure”. Rabinowitz connects such a reading practice to pedagogy as well, arguing that “This interpretive technique is taught explicitly at school, and it may be connected to an innate psychological drive for closure”.31

The Narrative Logic of Closure in the Survivor Memoir To be sure, I do not wish to suggest that the “whew” effect, as it is desired and experienced by my students, is solely a matter of a propensity toward happy endings on the part of American culture or the failure of American secondary education. Rather, I maintain it is also linked to the historical evolution, widespread circulation and relative prominence of the survivor memoir in the last decades and to the popular practices of reading that have developed in response to it.32 In particular, it is the result of both the generic conventions attendant to the survivor memoir and the expectations aroused by it, particularly in non-scholarly readers. For, as Robert Eaglestone argues, genre is not just a way of writing: it is a way of reading, too. It is where reading and writing meet. Genre—with all its signs, both textual and extra or meta-textual—forms a horizon of expectations which illuminates (or conversely can cover over) texts. Genre is the context of a work that, as it were, both frames it and makes it comprehensible ‘externally’ and gives it a shape ‘internally’.33

Genre thus not only refers to the conventional templates that writers adopt when composing their texts or to the cultural and aesthetic categorization and grouping of texts (meaning the activity of literary criticism), but also—and perhaps even more fundamentally—designates particular practices of reading, or as Rabinowitz terms them, “different packages of rules that readers apply in construing [texts]” that essentially constitute “ready-made strategies for reading”.34 Indeed, as Thomas Kent reminds us, “our ability to comprehend a text is related directly to our generic perception of it; how we read a text and what we learn from it are related to what we perceive the text to be”.35 Such “preliminary generic judgment” is, according to Rabinowitz, activated in readers even before the

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actual process of reading commences; readers come to the text with particular sets of expectations based on their understanding of the conventions that govern the genre to which they attribute the book they are about to begin reading.36 Perhaps the most pertinent generic convention of the survivor memoir is the simple fact that the survivor memoir exists and is known as such. In other words, the very concept of the survivor memoir predicates the practices of reading that readers bring to bear on texts that are associated with that designation. To state the obvious, we define texts associated with this genre of testimonial literature predominantly by the fact that their authors survived the Holocaust; as Young writes, “A survivor’s writing after the Holocaust is proof that he has defeated the ‘final solution’; it is indisputable evidence that he now exists”.37 This single common denominator among survivor texts—not their style, their literary objectives, their national, cultural and linguistic particularities, the gender, class and cultural background of their authors, or even the authors’ specific historical experiences of persecution during the Holocaust—unites all of the autobiographical texts we classify as survivor memoirs. The focal point of one’s reading of the text is thus by default the experience of survival, as crystallized in the moment of the author’s liberation or escape, which is the exact instant in which two critical things occur: first, the protagonist transforms from a potential victim into a survivor; and second, the text not only accords with its generic definition but also fulfills its functional purpose. The author’s experiences leading up to that moment—the traumatic travails in ghettos, in concentration camps or in hiding; the anguish over the murder of loved ones, friends and neighbors; and the perpetual fear for one’s own life and of what lies ahead—are of course absolutely indispensable aspects of the text, as they form the baseline against which the protagonist’s survival can be read as exceptional. At the same time, from the perspective of narrative logic, they also exist in a sense in order to turn the protagonist into a survivor, one who can then author the survival memoir, since the narrator of the memoir is axiomatically someone who has survived and who, as Young argues, “begins his testimony with full knowledge of the end” and thus shapes his Holocaust experience within a framework of eventual survival.38 In a way, the survivor memoir functions in an opposite manner to how autobiographical texts have been read, particularly by poststructuralists, as operating under the oblique shadow of their authors’ eventual deaths and indeed as written in intimate interrelationship with their inevitable mortality; this, according to Peter Brooks, is

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“the death that writes finis to the life and therefore confers on it its meaning”.39 In the survivor memoir, however, in contrast to conventional autobiography, death—not life—is the baseline norm that establishes the boundaries of the protagonist’s experience in the Holocaust; indeed, the entire genocidal machine was activated to make death ubiquitous and by and large ineluctable for those caught in its cogs. Consequently, the eventual horizon that determines the finality of the survival memoir is not the survivor’s death but rather his or her escape from death, meaning his or her survival. Thus, while the narrator of the conventional autobiography constructs his life story in opposition to a certain but vaguely apprehended future death, the narrator of the survivor memoir writes her narrative in relation to a preordained but unexpectedly eluded near-death in the past. The narrative logic of the survivor memoir thus activates what Rabinowitz terms “rules of configuration” that govern the reading experience, prompting readers to develop particular expectations and to make predictions about the likely trajectory of the course of events represented in the text.40 The primary rule of configuration for the survivor memoir predicates that the protagonist will survive and eventually transform into the narrator recounting that experience; the reader can thus count on this one expectation to be fulfilled.

Paratexts, Masterplots and Reader Desire Compounding the effects of the generic designation and narrative logic of the survivor memoir are those narrative and publishing conventions that manage the reader’s expectations and desires regarding the focal point of the text. Chief among these are paratexts that encourage readers to prioritize the author’s survival (again, as embodied in the moment of the protagonist’s liberation) as the prime dimension of Holocaust experience. These include elements located on its cover, such as the author’s name, a paratextual biography or photograph and a generic designation. Via such “external cues or paratextual markers”, Malcolm Hayward argues, “[r]eaders generally know, when picking up a book, just what kind of book they are about to open”.41 Especially important for the reader’s position vis-à-­ vis the text is the author’s name, or its “signature”, which manifests what Phillipe Lejeune terms its “autobiographical pact” with the reader, guaranteeing that the protagonist within the text and the author of the text are identical.42 Even more important than the author’s signature is the paratext represented by the text’s title. Titles, as Rabinowitz writes, can be

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critical for priming the reader’s experience of a text: “Titles not only guide our reading process by telling us where to concentrate; they also provide a core around which to organize an interpretation. As a general rule, we approach a book with the expectation that we should formulate an interpretation to which the title is in fact appropriate”.43 In the case of the survivor memoir, the title, which may result in part from the publisher’s marketing strategy, often indicates in no uncertain terms that the author has survived. Even the titles of texts that resist the closural practices of reading I investigate here, such as Charlotte Delbo’s Auschwitz and After, Ruth Klüger’s weiter leben: eine Jugend (or its English-language revision Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered) and the American edition of Primo Levi’s If This is a Man, which bears the title Survival in Auschwitz, strongly encourage the reader to focus on the fundamental context of the survival of its author.44 As H. Porter Abbott argues, “Paratexts have the capacity to inflect the way we interpret a narrative, sometimes powerfully”.45 In the context of Holocaust memoir, such paratexts set the stage for readers’ experience from the beginning, informing them that the authors of the texts under question have indeed survived and priming them to engage during their reading in a readerly variant of what Michael André Bernstein terms “backshadowing”, which refers to “a kind of retroactive foreshadowing in which the shared knowledge of the outcome of a series of events by narrator and listener is used to judge the participants in those events as though they too should have known what was to come”;46 in this case readers apply backshadowing when they interpret the events of the Holocaust related throughout the memoir through the lens of their knowledge of the author’s eventual survival. The expectations encouraged by the genre of the Holocaust memoir and its narrative conventions (particularly its paratexts) thus create a strong interpretive framework in which non-scholarly readers operate that privileges survival as the fundamental, even primary element in the text. In texts that readers understand to be Holocaust memoirs, then, survival, particularly as it is embodied in the moment of liberation, functions as what Abbott calls a “masterplot”. Masterplots, according to Abbott, are “Recurrent skeletal stories, belonging to cultures and individuals, that play a powerful role in questions of identity, values, and the understanding of life”.47 As “coded narrative formulas that end with closure”, masterplots “can also exert an influence on the way we take in new information, causing us to overread or underread narratives in an often unconscious effort to bring them into conformity with a masterplot”.48 Masterplots are thus

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an expression of the desire that readers bring to the text and that they hope that the text will satisfy, particularly through endings that indicate strong closure. They are, in the sense I am using the concept here, less a matter of internal narrative mechanics than of readerly practice; readers thus impose particular masterplots on the narratives in which they expect to find them, even if such masterplots are not easily accommodated by the narratives in question. The masterplot of the survivor memoir is of course the experience of survival, which represents the culmination of the memoir’s plot, in which the protagonist has beaten the odds, escaped brutal violence and overcome inconceivable persecution and hardship to emerge on the other side, if not in triumph than at least with relief. And the feature that most forcibly makes possible the reader’s activation of the masterplot of survival is the text’s representation of the moment of liberation, which, when it induces the “whew” effect, mobilizes the operations of narrative closure. Closure, as Abbott writes, “brings satisfaction to desire, relief to suspense, and clarity to confusion. It normalizes. It confirms the masterplot”.49 With regard to the reader’s engagement with survivor memoirs, closure goes even further, transmuting what in the overwhelming majority of cases was and is at best a fraught, uncertainly experienced and ambivalently remembered event into a sort of happy ending that D. A. Miller calls “an act of ‘make-believe’, a postulation that closure is possible”.50 In an effort to satisfy their desire for relief, readers seeking the “whew” experience thus latch onto those textual moments that offer consolation and at the same time read past or discount troubling cues that indicate that whatever reprieve the experience of liberation provides is at best a fragile and chimerical construct. In such cases, the happy ending that the reading experience generates is thus chiefly a product of the reader’s precarious emotional engagement with the text and the narrative of survival it purports to deliver. As Abbott argues, “Probably the most difficult thing about reading narratives is to remain in a state of uncertainty. If a narrative won’t close by itself, one often tries to close it, even if it means shutting one’s eyes to some of the details and imagining others that aren’t there”.51 To be clear, I do not claim that the content of individual survivor memoirs itself automatically or inevitably animates readers’ interpretation of liberation as a happy ending; on the contrary, I endorse Langer’s assessment with regard to the related genre of oral testimony, which stresses the ways in which survivors themselves represent liberation less as an experience of deliverance and relief than as one of “a new and unexpected (hence

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unfamiliar) form of imprisonment”.52 Rather, I argue that such closure is made possible by the ways in which readers’ expectations and desires are primed by the American cognitive cultural model of the Holocaust, the generic features of the survival memoir and the connotations of such attendant concepts as “survival” and “liberation”, which, as Langer argues, “with their root meanings of life and freedom, entice us into a kind of verbal enchantment that too easily dispels the miasma of the death camp ordeal and its residual malodors”.53 In the case of the survival memoir, the practices of reading that readers such as my students bring to bear on it overwrite the scene of liberation through their narrative desire for a happy ending and its promise of closure.

Countering the Masterplot of the “Escape Story”: Ruth Klüger’s Memoir In my students’ responses to Birenbaum’s book and other survivor memoirs, I thus perceive a reading practice that runs directly counter to the ways in which scholars typically define the intrinsic generic properties of Holocaust memoirs as constitutionally antagonistic to closure. In other words, I argue that non-scholarly readers themselves often disregard or defy the ways in which such texts attempt to inhibit their desire for a happy ending. However, at the same time I prefer not to conclude my discussion here too easily or neatly with this story of narrative closure, for the interactive relationship between readers and memoirs of Holocaust survival is not as dire, total or monolithic as I have been representing it. On the contrary, some memoirists are aware of the “whew” effect and employ strategies aimed to deliberately contravene it. One prominent example of a Holocaust memoir that anticipates the magnetic appeal of its scenes of liberation on readers and consciously attempts to deflate the “whew” effect and readers’ sighs of relief is Ruth Klüger’s Still Alive, the 2001 English-language revision of her 1992 German memoir weiter leben. As Klüger tells us in the epilogue to the second text, she not only rewrote her memoir in a second language (the language of her adopted country, the US), she also reconceptualized her experience of survival for an entirely new audience: “What you have been reading is neither a translation nor a new book: it’s another version, a parallel book, if you will, for my children and my American students”.54 As I have previously argued, Klüger formulated weiter leben as a fraught dialogue with postwar German readers, “who have inherited the

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legacy of perpetration”, in Still Alive she crafts her address to “a specifically American audience, one that is more separated temporally, geographically, and culturally from the events of her youth”.55 Still Alive is, in Caroline Schaumann’s words, “an exceptional cultural translation that attempts to make the Holocaust relevant for an American audience”; in this way, as Rider argues, it engages intentionally with the American cultural cognitive model of the Holocaust, particularly its “progressive telos of survival”.56 Whereas weiter leben prods German readers to accept their historical responsibility for the Holocaust, the American readers of Still Alive “find themselves challenged with regard to their beliefs and constructions about the Holocaust”.57 Further, it bears mentioning here that Klüger, at the time of writing a professor of German at the University of California, Irvine, explicitly names her American college students as a specific subset of the general audience to which she addresses her “parallel book”; she thus directs her critical examination of Holocaust memory to an audience that—despite the time interval, the evolution of the media landscape, and changing modes in the American discourse on the Holocaust—is strikingly similar to the students who enter my classroom. Still Alive prods Klüger’s students (and, by extension, my own) to rethink particular problematic myths and reading practices, such as the master narrative of American liberation and rescue (as epitomized in the concept of the “greatest generation”) and the readerly experience I call the “whew” effect, that they have acquired in part through the affective pedagogical models in which they were instructed in high school. In both weiter leben and Still Alive, Klüger leads her readers to engage in critical reevaluation of questionable ethical positions by first allowing them to reflexively assume and identify with those positions and then systematically problematizing them and rendering them unsustainable; the goal of this method is, in Rider’s words, “to train the reader in new receptive models”.58 In the latter text, she employs this strategy to great effect in her representation of the moment in which she, a fifteen-year-old girl, along with her mother, a close friend and three other women, is able to escape a death march at the end of the war. In a critical passage located in the last third of the memoir, Klüger, describing this escape, creates the narrative conditions through which the reader can experience the “whew” effect: During the next minutes, as we six ran down the street, away from the freezing, hungry prisoners and their enforced wait for shelter, we passed the

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­ arrier from the world of the camps into Germany. […] We were free—free b to be hunted down if our luck should turn. But I remember the exuberance, the euphoria, of those moments. […] As we stepped out onto the road, the countryside seemed freshly washed, too. Nature had thus far been largely a matter of cold and heat to be endured during roll call and work. Now it was full of gleaming objects. The land seemed to welcome us, as if asking us to live up to our new roles. […] Simply to walk down a country road of one’s own volition was like conquering the world. […]. The air smelled different, more springlike, now that we had it to ourselves. […]. What was new was that life could be light as a feather, where it had been leaden the day before, and I wasn’t thinking “You can be blown away”, I was thinking “I am flying”. My hopes, what I had been waiting for all these years, had come true all of a sudden.59

In this passage, Klüger unmistakably renders the relief, even exhilaration, that her younger self felt in the moments of her (self-)liberation, when she “passed the barrier” that divided both her experience of incarceration from that of freedom and her identity as a potential victim from that as a survivor. As with Birenbaum’s description of her own liberation, the feeling is atmospheric; both narrators represent through a somatic idiom the ways in which nature plays the role of co-celebrant in the sudden moment of freedom. Moreover, both narrators implicitly invite their readers to share in their memories of their ebullient emotions. However, Klüger also expressly limits her readers’ celebration of her newfound liberation. As is typical for her, who throughout her memoir pushes her reader to reflect on his consumption of the text, Klüger quickly admonishes the reader against rejoicing too much: Now comes the problem of this survivor story, as of all such stories: we start writing because we want to tell about the great catastrophe. But since by definition the survivor is alive, the reader inevitably tends to separate, or deduct, this one life, which she has come to know, from the millions who remain anonymous. You feel, even if you don’t think it: well, there is a happy ending after all. Without meaning to, I find that I have written an escape story, not only in the literal but in the pejorative sense of the word. So how can I keep my readers from feeling good about the obvious drift in my story away from the gas chambers and the killing fields and towards the postwar period, where prosperity beckons? You cannot deduct our three paltry lives from the sum of those who had no lives after the war. We who escaped do not belong to the community of those victims, my brother among them, whose ghosts are unforgiving. By virtue of survival, we belong with you,

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who weren’t exposed to the genocidal danger, and we know that there is a black river between us and the true victims. Therefore this is not the story of a Holocaust victim and becomes less and less so as it nears the end. I was with them when they were alive, but now we are separated. I write in their memory, and yet my account unavoidably turns into some kind of triumph of life.60

In her direct appeal to her readers here, Klüger avails herself of what Rider calls “narrative strategies that provoke metacognitive reflection in the reader” by explicitly addressing the problem of their desire for closure and happy ending,61 which she views as both expected and escapist. Klüger thus takes her readers to task for this desire to feel good about her escape, thereby interrupting their long-awaited “whew” moment in mid-sigh, at precisely the moment at which it could achieve its most cathartic effect. Moreover, by explicitly confessing her anxiety that the narrative vehicle available to her—the survivor story—might transform, without her intention and against her will, into a story of triumphal escape, Klüger also problematizes the generic form in which she writes and asks her readers to explicitly reflect on the desire for closure that they bring to the text. According to Klüger, the “escape story” (her authorial counterpart to my readerly “whew” effect62) is not only a problem of the reader’s expectation and response, but also one that is actually built into the genre of the survivor memoir itself. The conventions of this genre—Rabinowitz’s “rules of configuration”—axiomatically shape the survivor’s experience (which may or may not have included in the original moment a sense of “triumph of life”) according to particular narrative patterns inherited from the storytelling frameworks available to make sense of personal and historical events, particularly those that coalesce around stories of improbable escape from unbelievable circumstances or unlikely elusion of certain death. Michael Rothberg argues that such frameworks, which “necessarily impose a false teleology of survival”, are in fact intrinsic to the narration of survival, since they are located “at the level of emplotment—the meaningful shape given to the events—not at the level of fact”.63 In other words, in and through the very act of narration of the experience of survival, the masterplot of survival—the “escape story”—automatically arrogates that experience. In order to disrupt the problematic teleological momentum built into the survivor memoir—the force that stimulates in my students the desire for the relief of the “whew” effect—the memoirist is therefore forced, in Rothberg’s words, “to use narrative against itself” in an effort

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to disrupt “the potential comforts of narrative, such as the imposition of closure and meaningful wholeness”.64 By interrupting her account of her exuberant moment of escape with a direct appeal to her readers to reject their affective impulse to celebrate her self-effected emancipation as a “happy ending”, Klüger works purposively to use her “escape story” against itself and thereby to write in resistance to the automatic drive toward closure inherent to the masterplot of survival. Thereby, she reminds readers that their cathartic pleasure in her escape and survival involves a troubling ethical failure in which they avert their attention from the fate of the many millions who did not survive to the ostensible “happy ending” of one person who did. By deliberately disrupting readers’ immersion into the emotional gratification of the “whew” effect, Klüger channels their affective response into an explicitly ethical posture, making them aware of the ways in which they consume the life narratives of others in part in order to satisfy their own craving for the emotional experience of controlled anxiety and guaranteed—if temporarily deferred—relief. In so doing, she challenges them to attend to the ethical dimensions and implications of their own narrative desires and reading practices.

Notes 1. Phelan (1998, 320). 2. Phelan (1998, 320). 3. Franklin (2011, 3). 4. Langer (1975, 1978, 1982, 1991, 1995, 1998), Young (1988), Hartman (1996), Eaglestone (2004), Waxman (2008). 5. Langer (1991, xi). As Eaglestone (2004, 40) writes, “To understand testimony as a genre it is necessary to look at the radical doubt and the self-­ consciousness of each of these texts, to read them with an eye to gaps, shifts, breaks, and ruptures, which show how they are not, in any simple way, easily consumed”. 6. Rider (2021, 47). 7. Eaglestone (2004, 67). 8. In After Such Knowledge: Memory, History, and the Legacy of the Holocaust (2004, 41), Eva Hoffman, the daughter of Holocaust survivors, makes a forceful argument against using the concept of tragedy—which after all has its roots in Aristotle’s concept of the fatally flawed tragic hero—to designate the traumatic events of the Holocaust: “War is always utterly deplorable, and the suffering it causes is incalculable. And yet that suffering can come in different valences, different affective tonalities. […] But perhaps

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tragic ­suffering is more resolvable than the traumatic kind. For tragedy, of course, involves a conflict—agon—between opposing principles and agents. Trauma is produced by persecution of subjects to whom all agency and principle have been denied. Tragic struggle may entail moral agony, but it leaves the sense of identity and dignity intact”. In the same vein, I think we have to be careful in our application of concepts related to tragedy, such as catharsis, to narratives of survival of the Holocaust and other historical mass traumas. 9. Birenbaum (1996, 197–198). 10. Langer (2000, xiv). 11. Langer (2000, xiv–xv). 12. Keen (2007), Hogan (2003, 2011a, b), Rider (2013). 13. Bergen (2016, 297). 14. Levi (1988, 70–71). 15. David Patterson (1995, 210) writes with regard to the representation of liberation in Holocaust memoir, “Liberation comes not only with the breaking down of the prison gates but with the opening up of a path to follow. If that path has been erased, then there can be no liberation. When the gates of the camps were unlocked, many did not move, for they had nowhere to go. Having lost a home and a center to which they might return, the Jews were faced with a movement of return that could never be consummated”. 16. Birenbaum (1996, 200). 17. Birenbaum (1996, 199). 18. Birenbaum (1996, 199). 19. Langer (1991, 175). 20. Although there have been a number of empirical studies of Holocaust pedagogy in secondary education, to my knowledge there has been a neglect of empirical research on the subject with regard to university education, particularly with regard to the teaching of Holocaust literature; for a notable exception to this see Rider (2013). 21. Baum (1996, 45). 22. Fallace (2006, 81). 23. Fallace (2006, 81). 24. Rider (2021, 53). 25. Rider (2021, 53). To be sure, Rider (2021, 54) does not see the possibilities for Holocaust pedagogy as a strict binary, with the affective and experiential modes preferred by US secondary schools on one end and methods that focus purely on historical and social context on the other: “That is not to say that Holocaust education [in American secondary education] eschews the socio-historical dimensions or civic questions; rather it is a question of emphasis”. Lisa Jenny Krieg (2015, 115) writes that the binary

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is in fact fairly entrenched in discussions of Holocaust education: “In Holocaust education, emotions are frequently discussed and evaluated in opposition to fact-based, rational approaches. This opposition between emotion and reason has a tradition in the sciences, but cannot be upheld, as research from various disciplines shows”. 26. Rider (2021, 54–55). For a fascinating deep-dive into a particular implementation of this educational model in a single US high school classroom, please see Schweber (2003). 27. Certainly, affective pedagogies in Holocaust education are broadly used outside the US context as well. Mary J.  Gallant and Harriet Hartman (2001, 10), in their review of Holocaust education in the United Kingdom, write that “a direction in pedagogy which is gaining in importance is the idea of ‘pedagogical emotions’, or ‘what I have learned to feel’ as a result of Holocaust education”. The history of Holocaust pedagogy in Germany, on the other hand, has taken a very different trajectory. Björn Krondorfer (1995, 34), writing about the “third generation” of post-Holocaust, non-­ Jewish (West) Germans born in the 1960s and 1970s (the same era in which Holocaust education in secondary schools began to emerge in the US), argues, “Because their teachers were themselves ambiguous about their emotional and personal investment in the history and memory of the Holocaust, the third generation was instructed in mostly intellectual, political, analytical, and sometimes moral terms. Teachers did not help them develop mechanisms for coping with either the emotional impact of the material or encounters with Jews”. Krieg (2015, 124) demonstrates that Holocaust pedagogy in German secondary schools has in the meantime adopted a much more emotion-based approach: “one can see that educational practices circulate the Holocaust as an educational and affective object, which becomes saturated with dominant and obligatory emotions. These are experienced and navigated by educators and learners, and become interconnected with their emotion ideologies”. 28. Rider (2021, 48, 55, 56). 29. Rosenfeld (1999, 70). 30. Garber (2018). 31. Rabinowitz (1987, 201). In his famous essay “The Gray Zone”, Primo Levi (1988, 37) suggests that such drive toward closure is part of a greater “desire for simplification” characteristic of education (especially of young people) more broadly: “Popular history, and also the history taught in schools, is influenced by this Manichaean tendency, which shuns half-tints and complexities. […] The young above all demand clarity; a sharp cut; their experience of the world being meager, they do not like ambiguity”. Levi thus implies that what I have been connecting in particular to American secondary education might be more generally applicable.

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32. See Wieviorka (2006). 33. Eaglestone (2004, 38). 34. Rabinowitz (1987, 177). 35. Kent (1986, 26). 36. Rabinowitz (1987, 176). Rabinowitz (1989, 120–121) writes elsewhere, “the sense or meaning of a work […] is not simply ‘in’ the text, but is construed or constructed by the reader, using techniques learned— through education and/or experience—before approaching the particular text in question”. 37. Young (1988, 37). 38. Young (1988, 30). 39. Brooks (1984, 22). 40. Rabinowitz (1987, 111–113). 41. Hayward (1994, 409). 42. Lejeune (1989, 11). 43. Rabinowitz (1987, 61). 44. Focusing on the titles of canonical Western texts that signpost to their readers the plot trajectory of the opposite experience—that of death— Rabinowitz (1987, 113–114) writes, “it is not only modern ‘category’ texts […] that announce the basic shape of their plots on their covers. Calling a play The Tragedy of Hamlet is not that much more subtle a way of warning us about how it is going to end. Nor, for that matter, is calling a novel the Death of Ivan Ilych”. 45. Abbott (2008, 239). 46. Bernstein (1994, 16). 47. Abbott (2008, 236). 48. Abbott (2008, 58, 236). 49. Abbott (2008, 64). 50. Miller (1981, 275). 51. Abbott (2008, 89). 52. Langer (1991, 171). 53. Langer (1991, 171). 54. Klüger (2001, 210). 55. McGlothlin (2004, 56–57). 56. Schaumann (2004, 326), Rider (2021, 48). 57. McGlothlin (2004, 59). 58. Rider (2021, 58). 59. Klüger (2001, 135–136). 60. Klüger (2001, 138). 61. Rider (2021, 57). 62. In weiter leben, which differs from Still Alive in essential ways, Klüger addresses the phenomenon of the “whew” effect even more directly. In a

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passage that addresses the problem of the “escape story”, she writes, “Wie kann ich euch, meine Leser, davon abhalten, euch mit mir zu freuen, wenn ich doch jetzt, wo mir die Gaskammern nicht mehr drohen, auf das Happy-­ End einer Nachkriegswelt zusteuere, die ich mit euch teile? […] Wie kann ich euch vom Aufatmen abhalten?” [“How can I prevent you, my readers, from rejoicing with me as I’m heading, now that the gas chambers no longer threaten me, toward the happy ending of a postwar world that I share with you? […] How can I prevent you from breathing a sigh of relief?” (Klüger 1992, 140; my translation). 63. Rothberg (2000, 226). 64. Rothberg (2000, 226–227).

References Abbott, H.  Porter. 2008. The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Baum, Rachel N. 1996. ‘What I have learned to feel’: The Pedagogical Emotions of Holocaust Education. College Literature 23 (3): 44–57. Bergen, Doris. 2016. War & Genocide: A Concise History of the Holocaust. 3rd ed. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield. Bernstein, Michael André. 1994. Foregone Conclusions: Against Apocalyptic History. Berkeley: University of California Press. Birenbaum, Halina. 1996. Hope is the Last to Die: A Coming of Age Under the Nazi Terror. Translated by David Welsh. Armonk: M. E. Sharpe. Brooks, Peter. 1984. Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Delbo, Charlotte. 1995. Auschwitz and After. Translated by Rosette C. Lamont. New Haven: Yale University Press. Eaglestone, Robert. 2004. The Holocaust and the Postmodern. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fallace, Thomas D. 2006. The Origins of Holocaust Education in American Public Schools. Holocaust and Genocide Studies 20 (1): 80–102. Franklin, Ruth. 2011. A Thousand Darknesses: Lies and Truth in Holocaust Fiction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gallant, Mary J., and Harriet Hartman. 2001. Holocaust Education for the New Millennium: Assessing our Progress. Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History 10 (2): 1–28. Garber, Megan. 2018. The Problem with Happy Endings. The Atlantic, July 18. https://www.theatlantic.com/enter tainment/archive/2018/07/ the-­problem-­with-­happy-­endings/565388/. Hartman, Geoffrey H. 1996. The Longest Shadow: In the Aftermath of the Holocaust. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

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Hayward, Malcolm. 1994. Genre Recognition of History and Fiction. Poetics 22: 409–421. Hoffman, Eva. 2004. After Such Knowledge: Memory, History, and the Legacy of the Holocaust. New York: Public Affairs. Hogan, Patrick Colm. 2003. The Mind and its Stories: Narrative Universals and Human Emotion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2011a. Affective Narratology: The Emotional Structure of Stories. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. ———. 2011b. What Literature Teaches Us About Emotion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Keen, Suzanne. 2007. Empathy and the Novel. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kent, Thomas. 1986. Interpretation and Genre: The Role of Generic Perception in the Study of Narrative Texts. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press. Klüger, Ruth. 1992. weiter leben: eine Jugend. Göttingen: Wallstein. ———. 2001. Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered. New  York: Feminist Press. Krieg, Lisa Jenny. 2015. ‘Who Wants to Be Sad Over and Over Again?’ Emotion Ideologies in Contemporary German Education about the Holocaust. Journal of Educational Media, Memory, and Society 7 (2): 110–128. Krondorfer, Björn. 1995. Remembrance and Reconciliation: Encounters between Young Jews and Germans. New Haven: Yale University Press. Langer, Lawrence. 1975. The Holocaust and the Literary Imagination. New Haven: Yale University Press. ———. 1978. The Age of Atrocity: Death in Modern Literature. Boston: Beacon Press. ———. 1982. Versions of Survival: The Holocaust and the Human Spirit. Albany: State University of New York Press. ———. 1991. Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory. New Haven: Yale University Press. ———. 1995. Admitting the Holocaust: Collected Essays. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 1998. Preempting the Holocaust. New Haven: Yale University Press. ———. 2000. Foreword. In Witness: Voices from the Holocaust, ed. Joshua M. Greene and Shiva Kumar, xi–xix. New York: The Free Press. Lejeune, Philippe. 1989. The Autobiographical Pact. In On Autobiography, trans. Katherine Leary. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Levi, Primo. 1988. The Drowned and the Saved. Translated by Raymond Rosenthal. New York: Summit Books. ———. 1996. Survival in Auschwitz: The Nazi Assault on Humanity. Translated by Stuart Woolf. New York: Touchstone. McGlothlin, Erin. 2004. Autobiographical Re-vision: Ruth Klüger’s weiter leben and Still Alive. Gegenwartsliteratur 3: 46–70.

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Miller, D.A. 1981. Narrative and Its Discontents: Problems of Closure in the Traditional Novel. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Patterson, David. 1995. The Annihilation of Exits: The Problem of Liberation in the Holocaust Memoir. Holocaust and Genocide Studies 9 (2): 208–230. Phelan, James. 1998. Sethe’s Choice: Beloved and the Ethics of Reading. Style 32 (2): 318–333. Rabinowitz, Peter J. 1987. Before Reading: Narrative Conventions and the Politics of Interpretation. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. ———. 1989. End Sinister: Neat Closure as Disruptive Force. In Reading Narrative: Form, Ethics, Ideology, ed. James Phelan, 120–131. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Rider, N.  Ann. 2013. The Perils of Empathy: Holocaust Narratives, Cognitive Studies and the Politics of Sentiment. Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History 19 (3): 43–72. ———. 2021. Ruth Klüger’s Narrative Challenge to Cultural Cognitive Models of the Holocaust. German Studies Review 44 (1): 47–66. Rosenfeld, Natania. 1999. On the Problems, Pitfalls, and Possibilities in the Teaching of Holocaust Literature. Shofar 17 (4): 68–75. Rothberg, Michael. 2000. Traumatic Realism: The Demands of Holocaust Representation. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Schaumann, Caroline. 2004. From weiter leben (1992) to Still Alive (2001): Ruth Klüger’s Cultural Translation of Her ‘German Book’ for an American Audience. The German Quarterly 77 (3): 324–339. Schweber, Simone A. 2003. Simulating Survival. Curriculum Inquiry 33 (2): 139–188. Waxman, Zoë. 2008. Writing the Holocaust: Identity, Testimony, Representation. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wieviorka, Annette. 2006. The Era of the Witness. Translated by Jared Stark. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Young, James. 1988. Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust: Narrative and the Consequences of Interpretation. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

CHAPTER 13

With All the Force of Literalness: Ruth Klüger’s Survivor Testimonies in Erwin Leiser’s We Were Ten Brothers and Thomas Mitscherlich’s Journeys into Life Brad Prager

In writing about his memories of Auschwitz, Primo Levi made it clear to readers that he was not among those who, in his words, encountered the face of the “gorgon” and emphasized that he was, after the war, only capable of writing indirectly about the pain of those who suffered most and died in the camps—he could not fully convey the extent of the horrors they had endured.1 Writing could, at its best, evoke the mindsets of Auschwitz’s victims, merely approximating the abyssal depths of their experiences. Levi’s testimony is thus not that of a person describing his own death—indeed, no one could claim to do so—but it is instead the testimony of a witness who has no choice but to speak at a remove.

B. Prager (*) School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, University of Missouri, Columbia, MO, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 R. Freiburg, G. Bayer (eds.), The Ethics of Survival in Contemporary Literature and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83422-7_13

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Levi nearly died at Auschwitz, but he was not speaking from the grave. In this regard, his descriptions were consigned to remain figurative rather than literal. He writes: We who were favored by fate tried […] to recount not only our fate but also that of the others, indeed of the drowned; but this was a discourse “on behalf of third parties,” the story of things seen at close hand, not experienced personally. […] [N]o one ever returned to describe his own death. Even if they had paper and pen, the drowned would not have testified because their death had begun before that of their body. Weeks and months before being snuffed out, they had already lost the ability to observe, to remember, to compare and express themselves. We speak in their stead, by proxy.2

In understanding himself as a “proxy” Levi means that he is speaking in the place of those who “drowned”. His testimony is thus something he sees in terms similar to metaphor: his words function as an imitation or a reflection of their object. He requests that his accounts be construed as second-hand, rather than first-hand, and, in the language of metaphor, he wanted his account to be treated as the figure rather than the ground. Any claim that traumatic experience can serve as a ground for others’ testimonies is inherently problematic. By nearly anyone’s standards, Levi would be regarded as a survivor, but can a survivor (i.e., not one who died in the camps, but one who, in close proximity to the victims, witnessed their deaths) be said to establish truths on which historians and others may base their work? Their accounts are inherently unstable: traumatic experiences often devastate those who survive them. Traumas, by definition, undercut survivors’ abilities to speak about them, and there may be a “lack of direct access to the event within the conscious memory of the sufferer”.3 This is not to say that traumatized subjects cannot or should not speak, nor is it to say that their accounts are in any way untrue, but rather that traumatic experience makes for an unsteady ground, and the underlying instability presents a challenge to those who create testimonial archives. A traumatized subject who came close to death is capable of speaking only approximately of his or her experiences. Survival is not death itself; it is unique—it is a near death, or an experience adjacent to indescribability. Because the dead do not speak, survivors are left to speculate into things that both feel and are irreal, for both the listener and the speaker. Cathy Caruth writes, “The problem arises not only in regard to those who listen

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to the traumatized, not knowing how to establish the reality of their hallucinations and dreams; it occurs rather and most disturbingly often within the very knowledge and experience of the traumatized persons themselves”. She adds that the fact that a traumatic memory “is not a possessed knowledge, but itself possesses, at will, the one it inhabits, often produces a deep uncertainty as to its very truth”.4 Much of the contemporary discussion concerning how to interpret Holocaust survivors’ testimonies took shape in the 1990s, not long after archives of video testimonies were initially established. Yale University’s Fortunoff Archive was founded in 1981, followed by smaller archives such as the Baltimore Jewish Community Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, which was founded in 1988, and, later, the USC Shoah Foundation archive, which was created in 1994 and became a major, extensive collection. Annette Wieviorka writes that when the Yale Archive was first opened to the public in 1982 it contained approximately 200 testimonies and “by 1995, the […] Archive […] had collected approximately 3,600 testimonies—close to 10,000 hours of interviews”.5 At that time, a new degree of authenticity was being attributed to survivors’ faces and voices: their testimonies were thought to convey a truth that written texts could not. It is little wonder that critical writings about the reception of testimony, by figures such as Caruth, Henry Greenspan, Dominick LaCapra and also Dori Laub, who worked at the Fortunoff Archive, emerged around this time. Critical scrutiny of the testimonial process arose as a counter-­ position, a corrective to the uncritical fetishization of Holocaust survivors’ perceived authenticity. Steven Spielberg, who became one of the major funders of a testimonial archive subsequent to the success of Schindler’s List (1993), participated in the fetishization pervasive during that period. Wieviorka writes that, in an interview in the French newspaper Libération, Spielberg explained that he wanted “to conserve history as it is transmitted to us by those who lived through it and who managed to survive. It is essential,” he added, “that we see their faces, hear their voices, and understand that they are ordinary people like us who went through the atrocities of the Holocaust.”6

Spielberg asserted that we could reach understanding through seeing and hearing survivors. But the picture, so to speak, is much muddier than that. One has to consider critically the media practices involved, not only because they determine and shape testimony but also because, as Noah

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Shenker observes, video testimony “is an audiovisual form of historiography that renders history legible in embodied form. It draws from voices, faces, and other expressive elements that work not only in concert, but also in conflict with one another, revealing a more complicated picture of a witness’s experiences and how he or she grapples with [their] aftermath”.7 Shenker’s observation that testimonial elements may be “in conflict with one another” highlights the extent to which videotaped testimonies are polyvalent and cannot be treated as though they speak for themselves. Testimonies are never transparent; tensions and contradictions, even within individual accounts, produce multiple layers of meaning, and viewers must always take into consideration the contexts in which those testimonies appear. Akin to the survivors themselves, testimonies survive, and they can be seen as artifacts that stand in for absences or that substitute for the voices of the dead. To pretend that the varied contexts in which recorded testimonies appear are not themselves made of shifting sands is, according to documentary theorist Janet Walker, to deal with testimony “without regard for the frailty of memory and without regard for the mediated nature of historiographic forms”.8 She explains, “We have an ethical and political obligation to remember, acknowledge constantly, and deal with the aftermath of traumatic events. At the same time, though, we must recognize that these events are subject to interpretation [in that] they are experiences, reimagined, reported, written down, and visually communicated”.9 To attribute fixed meaning to videotaped or digitized images of a speaking survivor redoubles the fundamental problem that inheres in these testimonies’ mediation: how do we describe the relationship between the face of a survivor, someone in the process of describing an atrocity, and a moving image that depicts bodies ravaged by those same atrocities? Does an image of a survivor’s face, which is, according to Spielberg, “essential” to see, present itself as a mediator between a viewer and an image of violence (regardless of whether such an image exists in our archives or in our minds)? In these respects, survivor testimony is always already representative of something abstract; it is an attempt to provide an image or a figure for something that is difficult if not impossible to convey literally, regardless of whether that unseen event is the experience of the dying victim or a survivor’s own close encounter with horrific violence. Even referring to the unspeakability of a testimonial narrative—that is, asserting that an experience is so horrible that it cannot be expressed—constitutes a historically contingent form of figuration.

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Interpretations of filmed survivor testimony are thus subtended by these two major concerns: the traumatic ground of testimony is unstable, and neither the face nor the voice of the victim is identical with filmed traces of Holocaust violence (i.e., images from concentration camps). The former problem, that some surviving witnesses avoid claiming that they are the true victims, was one with which Levi’s writings are concerned, and it remains a question that still today permeates our testimonial hermeneutics.10 Witness testimony, as Levi describes it, is supplemental to others’ encounters with death—a supplement to the now-dead victims’ confrontations with “the gorgon”. It is therefore external to those experiences, but those same experiences can only be imagined and, apart from the testimonies of Levi and others, they can never appear before our eyes; neither the encounter nor its testimonial supplement can exist for us without its counterpart. Along these same lines, the types of visual experiences in question are also distinct from one another: filmed images of atrocity are considered to be real or literal and are treated as though they contain a force greater than videotaped oral descriptions. Witnesses can speak before a camera about the horrors they have seen, but filmed testimony occupies a register distinct from that of well-known atrocity images. In Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah (1985), a film that is constituted almost entirely from witness testimonies, the director excluded footage of the camps’ liberations because he was concerned that those images would overpower the accounts of the survivors in his film. Those accounts, which like Levi’s memoir can only evoke the irrecoverable words and experiences of the murdered victims, are, for this reason, supplements to an idealized archive of unimaginable testimony.

A Stamp of Reality: We Were Ten Brothers During the mid-1990s, Ruth Klüger, the Auschwitz survivor who penned the well-known Holocaust memoir weiter leben, spoke on film about her experiences. She was an interview subject in two documentaries, in 1995 and 1996, not long after her memoir was published in German in 1992.11 Klüger is featured in Erwin Leiser’s Zehn Brüder sind wir gewesen (We Were Ten Brothers), which premiered in 1995, as well as in Thomas Mitscherlich’s Reisen ins Leben (Journeys into Life, 1996), which was filmed from February to October of 1995 and which aired on television in 1997. Distinct from the kinds of testimonies one finds at the Fortunoff or USC Shoah Foundation archives, the testimonies in these German films,

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which are feature-length works rather than compilations of interviews, have been edited together with archival footage and in this way contextualized by the director. As Klüger’s testimonies were integrated into feature-­ length films, they were placed into constellation with carefully selected material from the past—specifically, with images of anti-Semitic violence from the 1930s or footage of the camps’ liberations. Her appearances in these films can be explored in light of the questions raised above: how do we determine where the testimonies of survivors such as Levi or Klüger stand relative to the positions of victims and proxies (or relative to the question of figure and ground), and in what relation do such persons’ videotaped testimonies stand to the images of atrocities that a film’s director chooses to present alongside them? Leiser, who directed We Were Ten Brothers, made films that were meant to contribute to what was, at the time, a rapidly growing archive of video testimony, and he was also interested in combatting Holocaust denial. He had been an émigré: born in Germany, his family fled in 1938, when he was 15, and he later settled in Sweden, where he worked as a newspaper editor and translator from 1950 to 1958. In 1960 he wrote and directed the documentary film Mein Kampf, which was a breakthrough insofar as it presented to Germans the rise of the Third Reich while integrating into its narrative archival footage of Jewish persecution. Leiser told the story of the Second World War not only in terms of the impact it had on Germans, but in terms of its impact on European Jews, a perspective that had rarely been integrated into German documentaries before then. He went on to make other documentaries about the Jewish experience of the Holocaust, including Die Feuerprobe—Novemberpogrom 1938 (Ordeal by Fire, 1988) and Pimpf war jeder (Everyone was a ‘Pimpf,’ 1993). During the time he was making We Were Ten Brothers, Leiser had begun to grow concerned about the escalation of right-wing extremism. His film, as a record of testimony, thus employs atrocity footage as evidence, or supporting documentation. In describing We Were Ten Brothers in relation to his earlier Mein Kampf, Leiser explained, “In 1960, I felt it was necessary to make a film about the history of the Nazi state because swastikas were once again visible in many places in Europe. In 1993, right-wing extremists and Holocaust deniers made their way into the media, and their lies remained uncontested, even in films and television programs directed against them”.12 Mein Kampf includes a lot of archival footage filmed between 1933 and 1945. We Were Ten Brothers also contains archival footage, but it centers

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primarily on the survivor testimonies of Henry Meyer, Erika Rothschild and Klüger, crosscutting between their accounts. Leiser’s film allows us to see their faces and hear their voices, while it now and again presents us with atrocity images. As in her memoir, Klüger details her recollections from her childhood in Vienna and explores her perceptions about the growth of Austrian anti-Semitism. Her testimony acquaints her audience with aspects of wartime Jewish experience with which many German viewers might not have been familiar. She recounts the initial parts of her story, and the film then cuts to archival black and white footage of Reinhard Heydrich, of SS men, and of the violence that took place during Kristallnacht. Her personal account eventually includes a description of the time she spent in the camps, and she tells the story, familiar to those who have read her memoir, about how she survived a Selektion at Auschwitz by lying about her age.13 When she was 12 years old, she pretended to be 15 and in this way narrowly escaped the gas chamber. One of the film’s most emotionally challenging moments comes when Klüger explains that the hardest thing to deal with at Auschwitz was the unnerving presence of the dead. At this point Leiser includes footage of a concentration camp’s liberation, images similar to those that were included in films such as Alain Resnais’s Night and Fog (1956), but which had seldom been on German screens since the immediate postwar years.14 The reasons for the infrequency with which this footage had been viewed are obvious: most of the images of camp liberations—footage featuring emaciated survivors and piles of bodies including those who died from gunshot wounds, starvation or tuberculosis—had been filmed by the allies, either US and British soldiers in the case of German concentration camps, or Russian soldiers, in the cases of Auschwitz and Majdanek. The footage is not only horrifying, but it also presents the cinematographic point of view of camerapersons who were, at that moment, the Germans’ subjugators. For these reasons, one would, of course, expect such footage to have been unpopular. Leiser incorporates this footage not only so that Germans, many of whom were unfamiliar with it even in the 1990s, might encounter it. It serves a second function with respect to establishing a difference between the survivors and the victims. Echoing Levi’s assertion that he was not one of the “true” victims, Klüger, in Leiser’s film, explains that she considers the real victims to be those who were murdered, and that the survivors were victims “only to a more limited extent” (nur in beschränktem Maße). When she explains how hard it was to be in the presence of the dead,

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Leiser presents her to us seated on a couch, and he then cuts away to atrocity images—a pile of bodies that appears as a mostly undifferentiated mass—as if to acknowledge that, in this way, these limbs, seemingly attached to no individuals in particular, speak for themselves. The film here, through its contrast, makes an assertion about the ineffability of the encounter with the dead. The survivor’s contention that she is not speaking for the dead and that she only speaks about their experience in a limited way invites the silent corpses to do their share of the speaking; the image of Klüger’s face yields to the atrocity images. Owing to a decision on the part of the filmmaker, the survivor’s portrait here makes way for an image of the dead. It is a cinematic stylization one would never find in archived survivor video testimony. In asserting that asking the question of how we speak about the unspeakable is the wrong one to ask, Naomi Mandel explains that the question itself “assumes that ‘the unspeakable’ has already happened and is somehow ‘out there,’ an independent if amorphous presence, somewhat detached from the culture that produced it and that posits itself in its wake”.15 She adds, “After all, ‘the unspeakable’ is not merely an entity toward which we can gesture, with compelling injunctions to speak, witness, testify, or remember; it is […] a discursive production that is re-­ created and reinforced whenever the limits of language, of comprehension, and of thought are evoked”.16 In this way Leiser’s film conditions our response to its testimonies. They would not, it seems, stand on their own without these images, the bodies of the victims, to which the survivors’ words act as a supplement. Like Levi, Klüger did not see the gorgon’s face; that encounter’s ineffability is, as Mandel expresses it, a “discursive production”, one that exceeds but is also contingent upon the survivor’s oral account. This is not to say that either the face or the voice of the survivor is inadequate to what it expresses, but that survivors such as Levi and Klüger have assented to locate their own testimony in a position of supplementarity. With the support of a visual analogue, Leiser’s documentary admits, consistent with the standpoints of Levi and Klüger, that the validity of survivors’ voices’ is predicated on the evocation of victims who are unable to speak for themselves. In this film and elsewhere, Klüger expresses beliefs similar to Levi’s about survivors’ survival, specifically that no one survived because they were superior, more moral or chosen by god. She ultimately makes what has become her now famous version of this claim—that when it comes to survival, “there is only accident” (es gibt nur Zufall). Klüger here rejects

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the notion that her survival was a consequence of fate, because that would mean that those who died were not among the elect, that they were fated to die. When she comes to this point in her testimony, Leiser introduces atrocity footage from Buchenwald. Speaking in the present tense, the film’s narrator, in very direct terms, says that the Allied soldiers “film what they see” (Sie filmen, was sie sehen). The most horrific of the images are accompanied by total silence. Klüger’s assertion echoes the famous claim made by Levi in The Drowned and the Saved, in which he recounts that a friend of his, immediately after the war, told him that his having survived “could not be the work of chance”, but rather “of Providence”. The friend speculates that Levi survived so that he could write, so that he could “bear witness”. Entirely consistent with Klüger’s maxim that “there is only accident”, Levi writes that his friend’s opinion “seemed monstrous”. He was not chosen by fate, and many of those who survived were among the worst—in his words, they were “the selfish, the violent, the insensitive”. They died “not despite their valor but because of it”.17 This sentiment likewise reflects the idea that the survivors’ survival was an indirect effect, arguably contingent on other prisoners having made less selfish choices than their own. Klüger’s observations about survival are thus edited together with portraits of a sea of victims; these are not the drowned who became Muselmänner, those whose starvation-induced delirium and suffering was never captured on film, but rather images of dozens, possibly hundreds of lifeless bodies, filmed after the camps’ gates had opened. These atrocity images are intended to serve as a challenge to Holocaust deniers, as images that can carry a force of literalness. The liberators’ images are neither metonymies nor synecdoches; they are not intended to represent but to be. It is as though the force contained within them, a reality borne by the impressions left upon the film by the dead, constitutes a sort of bottom line, one that is more incisive and authoritative than the oral descriptions. It is as though leaving these impressions constituted the last acts of the victims. The images’ register is distinctive—more powerful, more evidentiary. They are intended to highlight the idea that testimony, even testimony as articulate and compelling as Levi’s or Klüger’s, cannot capture the literal horror of Nazi atrocities. Words may be denied, but it is difficult for skeptics and anti-Semites to maintain that they are not seeing large numbers of corpses, persons whose lives have been ended by violence. Surely, from Leiser’s perspective, the witnesses’ powerful accounts offer a measure of truth against Holocaust deniers, yet the footage of victims is intended to place a stamp of reality on the films’ testimonies.

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The Water That Swallows You Down: Journeys into Life Owing to its integration of testimony and archival footage, Thomas Mitscherlich’s documentary Journeys into Life, like Leiser’s film, establishes a relationship between the oral accounts one would find in a testimonial archive and atrocity images that were filmed at the time of the camps’ liberations. Mitscherlich, in part because of his parents, who authored The Inability to Mourn: Principles of Collective Behavior (1967)—a book that argued that Germany had not worked through the psychic investments that lingered after the war, in particular the loss of Hitler, to whom the public was affectively attached—made efforts to confront Germans with their individual culpability.18 His approach, however, differs from Leiser’s. Journeys into Life has an unusual conceit, one that establishes a frame for addressing German guilt. It begins with images taken by “Captain Carter”, a reference to Ellis Carter, who was indeed head of a military film unit, yet what we see are images that, we are told, were seen and filmed through the eyes of a fictional persona named Sargent Mayflower. Mayflower has returned to Germany from the US after the war. The German-speaking narrator’s voice reads Mayflower’s reminiscences aloud as we are shown liberation images and informed that most Germans were not interested in looking at this type of footage. The problem—as Mayflower, whose words are paraphrased for the viewer, understood it—was not that Germans contested the images’ truthfulness, but that almost no German felt a sense of personal or collective guilt upon seeing them. Mitscherlich was aware of the challenge of convincing Germans to look at images of the victims’ suffering. He explains: At the end of the 1950s, images such as these appeared, in films like Night and Fog and Triumph Over Violence (Obyknovennyy fashizm, 1965). The moral impetus of such films is similar to that of Death Mills (Die Todesmühlen, 1945). Formulated simply and naively: the hope is that everyone who has seen these images, if he admits that what is depicted actually happened, can and will not commit this kind of crime.19

While Leiser hoped that his images would put an end to Holocaust denial, Mitscherlich believed that including these images in his film would contribute to preventing history from repeating itself. Speaking in particular

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about the earlier film Death Mills and about some of the issues that arose in connection with that film’s reception, Mitscherlich adds: “denial of historical reality and the defenses against these images can enter into a kind of symbiotic relationship”.20 By including a mediating, fictional persona in his film, one who is acutely aware of the German reaction to atrocity images, Mitscherlich aimed to overcome his viewers’ defensiveness. He did not rely on the images to speak for themselves and was conscious of the fact that such images could have an effect utterly contrary to their intended one. Journeys into Life includes testimony from Klüger as well as from Gerd Durlacher and Yehuda Bacon, survivors who explore what they endured during the postwar era. Mitscherlich’s film deals with postwar experiences and postwar survival, rather than with what happened during the war. Durlacher, for example, who was born in 1928, deported to Westerbork at age 14, then to Theresienstadt, and finally to Auschwitz, describes the feeling of having remained unconscious for two to three weeks after the liberation. He speaks about his return to Holland, including a sad story about the family who expropriated his own family’s home, and how these people simply stood and stared at him, one of them wearing his dead father’s suit. Durlacher was rejected for Dutch citizenship and remained stateless until 1953. He also recounts how he met another survivor, a woman who died in 1978, and had remained by her deathbed over a long period. As a survivor, now watching a fellow survivor suffer, he determined that if he did not work through his own trauma, the anguish would fester, becoming as painful as hers. Addressing the camera, he concludes that his earlier traumatic experience—his proximity to death—left a hole in his life, and he feared it would swallow him up. Archival footage is included in the spaces between Durlacher’s testimonies and those of the film’s other survivors. The film’s integration of camp liberation footage is complex insofar as Journeys into Life is not an expository documentary. It takes no pains to label or explain its historical sources, and even Sargent Mayflower’s persona is a performative, fictional conceit. Viewers are repeatedly made to question what they are seeing and for what reason particular images have been embedded within the film. The fictional Mayflower, who speaks from the US perspective, has returned to Germany, headed for Ohrdruf, a subcamp of Buchenwald that US soldiers had liberated. The site made a strong and possibly traumatic impression upon the fictional character. We are told that the images we are seeing were filmed with telephoto lens in order to maintain a much-needed

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distance. Some of the images are out of focus, and the colors appear to bleed. Mitscherlich may have altered some of the original Allied footage to underscore the extent of his documentary’s many mediations.21 Some of the film’s images are explicitly meant to seem subjective, as when, for example, we are sutured to Mayflower’s gaze as he looks through a rainy windshield. Leslie Morris asserts that Mitscherlich may be, in this way, accenting the mediated nature of the film’s testimonies. She writes, “The fact that these [survivor] testimonies are interspersed with the other narratives [Mitscherlich] inserts into the film (such as the documentary footage shot by the fictive Sargent Mayflower) raises the question of their authenticity and transparency, of whether they can be taken at face value or if they too participate in a similar slippage between fact and fiction”.22 The film’s survivor testimonies cannot be understood without accounting for the context in which they appear. When the name Ebensee is mentioned, in reference to the camp established by the SS close to Mauthausen, we see beautiful images of an Austrian landscape and hear a Waltz, and the film then cuts, without signaling, to a shot of barbed wire. Regardless of how striking such montaged images may be, they remain only loosely moored in their meanings; images of barbed wire, generally taken to be the most literal and impactful signifiers of Holocaust violence, remain figurative in this context insofar as they can be constellated in a plethora of ways and become one among many elements in a symbolic network. Like Leiser’s film, Mitscherlich’s Journeys into Life eventually turns its camera on Klüger, who relates a series of episodes from her life that would be familiar to anyone who has read weiter leben. She describes the end of the war, including her flight from the camps, and it is as though it is picking up precisely where she left off in Leiser’s film. She tells the story of her escape, much as it is recounted in her memoir; the story of arriving at Straubing, of making contact with the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA); and she also speaks about her long wait to emigrate. She explains that the youthful poems about her experiences that she published at that time aroused anger, even when she showed them to Germans she trusted. Klüger adds that it was, on their parts, a kind of “defense against the victim” (Abwehr gegen die Opfer). The Germans demonstrated disdain for the survivors, because they “ha[d] the nerve to talk”. Writing verses was her way of coping; yet, when she spoke of the Holocaust, others acted as though she were speaking of something obscene.

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Klüger then explains that when she hears about the suicide of a fellow survivor, she thinks of the ballad “The Rider and Lake Constance” (“Der Reiter und der Bodensee”), describing it as a “parable”.23 Having become, in the intervening decades, a well-read professional literary historian, Klüger draws the viewer’s attention to a story famously captured in a work by the Swabian poet Gustav Schwab. The poem was written in 1826, but it was based on an incident involving an Alsatian postman in 1573. According to the folkloric story, the postman rode out over the ice, crossed a frozen lake without knowing it, and then died of shock upon reaching the other side and realizing how narrowly he escaped death.24 The poem that describes these events is famous in the region in which it is set: in Überlingen, on the north shore of Lake Constance, now stands a sculpture by Peter Lenk called “The Rider of the Bodensee”. It is sculpted to resemble Martin Walser, a famous author who happened to have become friends with Klüger before either of them was well known. Given that Walser is now famous for divisive comments he made in 1998 about the Holocaust (chiefly, that it was time to draw a Schlußstrich or “final line” under the horrors of the past and place discussion of them in Germany’s rear-view mirror), the juxtaposition of Klüger’s account in which she identifies with the traumatized rider and Walser’s own immortalization is striking. For Klüger, who has staged herself as a living countermonument to German atrocities—when she speaks, in the film, of her Auschwitz tattoo, she concludes that it made her “a walking piece of evidence of what happened”—there is no comparable statue.25 The only monument that exists to her experience is in her oral and written testimonies. The parable itself thematizes what Caruth describes as “belatedness”, the shock of recognizing one’s situation too late—a condition from which someone looks back on an experience he or she underwent but neither processed nor understood.26 The story of the rider allegorizes that situation, but it is also a figure for the survivor’s isolation. Schwab’s postman begins to cross the frozen waters without realizing it. Suddenly finding himself on level ground, he sees the snow spread out before him like sand. The path grows even, the trail becomes flat, and the shore falls out of sight, leaving nothing behind but empty space. In this sense, the poem tells a story about the leveling effects of loneliness, about total isolation and silence, a space where not even the sound of water can be heard. Only after the rider has crossed over does the woman on the other shore inform him that the lake now lies behind him. The subsequent stanza begins: “The stranger shudders, his breathing heavy” (“Der Fremde schaudert, er

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atmet schwer”)—the rider has thus become a Fremder, reaching the other side as a “stranger”. The narrative concludes with him dying: he sinks down from his horse, and the shore becomes “a waterless grave” (“ein trocken Grab”). He drowns, but only afterward, on dry land, in sorrow and after the fact. As part of an effort to speak figuratively about her trauma, this parable makes an appearance in both the German and English versions of Klüger’s memoir. In the German version, she describes how her fear of death turned into depression and how she, as a survivor, regularly felt that she was drowning. Her atrocious past came to life after she arrived in New York, stretching itself out in her psyche as if in a barren wasteland. “We were riders on Lake Constance”, she writes, “who first recognized in retrospect, what this body of water was, which almost swallowed us down”.27 In the English version, she writes, similarly: “In New York the fear of death which had haunted me in Auschwitz gradually turned into its opposite, into depression, the temptation of death”. She continues, “there is an apt German legend about a winter so cold that Lake Constance was frozen solid, which never happens in reality, since the lake is much too large”.28 In the English version, she highlights the unreality of the parable, taking note of the poem’s metaphorical qualities. One finds a striking analogue to this metaphor in Levi’s recollections. Often returning to the concept of drowning, he writes of his memories in terms of looking back on perilous waters. In what has become one of his most famous passages, Levi describes the postwar moment—the aftermath of liberation—and observes, Coming out of the darkness, one suffered because of the reacquired consciousness of having been diminished. […] we had lived for months and years at an animal level […]. Only at rare intervals did we come out of this condition of leveling, during the very few Sundays of rest, the fleeting minutes before falling asleep, or the fury of the air raids, but there were painful moments precisely because they gave us the opportunity to measure our diminishment from the outside. I believe that it was precisely this turning to look back at the ‘perilous water’ that gave rise to so many suicides after (sometimes immediately after) Liberation.29

Not only does Levi, in an uncanny parallel, describe how his gaze landed upon the perilous water, but the “condition of leveling” to which he refers also speaks to the imagery in Schwab’s poem, in which the town and the

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city disappeared behind the rider, the path grew even and the trail flat. In Schwab’s words: “In the wide space, no hill, no house/ the trees go away, the cliffs drop out” (“In weiter Fläche kein Bühl, kein Haus,/ die Bäume gingen, die Felsen aus”30). The two survivors, Klüger and Levi, each alight on similar metaphors.

Conclusion: The Figurative and the Literal There are differences between speech we treat as figurative and speech we treat as literal. They come into clearest relief where Klüger, in Still Alive, points us to a poem about her father’s death, one that she wrote after her arrival in California. Because she struggled to mourn his loss, she writes that for her, he “drowned in every sea” she encountered. She continues, rhapsodizing that in San Francisco Bay, he “turns his salt-washed face to me,/ The sockets of his eyes are gray/ above the flood of memory”. Of this poem, she reflects, “these were meant to be symbolic oceans, but they still sound more like echoes of Dylan Thomas, wanting his father not to go gentle into that good night, than of the Holocaust”.31 She clarifies, for the sake of her readers, that this was a metaphor, rather than a literal story of drowning. These poems for her father were a kind of exorcism, to gloss over the fact that he didn’t drown in every, or even in any, sea, but was made to breathe poison in a cramped room full of people. The symbolic claptrap was a kind of security blanket, for since we have researched everything about the fate of the victims, we know how they died in the gas chambers. The strong climbed on top of the weak in that last agony, as they choked. So the men were always on top when they pulled out the corpses, and the women and children at the bottom.32

Why did Klüger later describe her own metaphors as symbolic “claptrap”? These last phrases, her description of death in the gas chambers, are as close as one can get to putting the victims’ dying experiences into language, to describing accurately the horrors of the camps. In contrast to the “symbolic claptrap”, that type of descriptive writing is meant to be assertively literal, an axe that the survivor can wield against his or her reader’s frozen defenses. Is the difference she invokes, the difference between figural language (symbolic claptrap) and literal language akin to difference between the depiction of violence and its metaphors? Does her description of her father’s death and her poem about it map onto the

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difference between a description of drowning in a sea of victims, of drowning in a waterless grave, and a filmed or photographed image of atrocities—a difference between the figurative and the literal? Klüger explained her pressing desire to write about her experiences afterward—the fact that she survived and coped, in some ways through her writing. Frustratingly, for those who hope to reach defensive listeners with the literalness of their accounts, language is inevitably and invariably at a remove from what it depicts. As Geoffrey Hartman writes, “the disjunction between experiencing (phenomenal or empirical) and understanding (thoughtful naming, in which words replace things, or their images), is what figurative language expresses and explores. The literary construction of memory is obviously not a literal retrieval but a statement of a different sort”.33 Klüger’s reflections on that difference, and her desire to speak with a rhetoric free of “claptrap”, recalls the question as to how one determines the difference between figurative ideas and those that have a force of literalness. All memories are expressed in language, but some words seem to function like axes. Words are never the things themselves, and for this reason testimony is always destined to lie at a distance from its object. Testimonies are always figurative. Whether we determine that one form of testimony is more authentic than any other is only a matter of how it is constructed and contextualized. Leiser was working on the basis of an agenda when he incorporated atrocity images into his film, and Mitscherlich had one as well. The movement back and forth, between archival footage and testimony, is always part of an agenda’s pursuit. Making something seem more literal or less figurative can be a question of how one records it, edits it into a film or organizes its meaning relative to other meanings. There are those who would take a position akin to Claude Lanzmann’s, averring that atrocity images have no place in their films, and that their inclusion transgresses an invisible boundary. But oral descriptions can be presented in stark terms with all the force of literalness in order to meet other ethical demands. Klüger did not hesitate to speak with the force of literalness—describing brutality in the most vivid terms—nor did she hesitate to write poetry, and she explicitly rejected Adorno’s injunction.34 On the one hand, one may not need to include atrocity images in films in order to convey the extent of the atrocities; testimony alone can surely convince. We are, on the other hand, always at a remove from atrocity itself, the question really only concerns the extent or the degree. When it comes to the force of literalness, all representations are fated to remain figurative.

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Notes 1. Levi (1988, 83). 2. Levi (1988, 84). 3. Hunter (2018, 67). 4. Caruth (1995, 5–6). 5. Wieviorka (2006, 108). 6. Wieviorka (2006, 110). Wieviorka is quoting an article from Libération, April 20, 1995. 7. Shenker (2015, 6). 8. Walker (2005, 142). 9. Walker (2005, xviii). 10. See, for example, Agamben (1999); see also Trezise (2014, esp. 134–156). 11. A revised English language version of Klüger’s memoir appeared several years later, in 2001, under the title Still Alive. Her last name on that edition appears without an umlaut. On the differences between the German and English versions, see Schaumann (2004). 12. Leiser (1996, 227). On the spate of anti-Semitic attacks prior to the release of Leiser’s Mein Kampf, see Schönbach (1961). 13. See Klüger (2012, 128–136) and Kluger (2003, 103–109). 14. Exceptions to this are films by Irmgard von zur Mühlen, who had produced and directed several Holocaust documentaries including Majdanek 1944—Opfer und Täter (1986) and The Liberation of Auschwitz (1986). 15. Mandel (2006, 4). 16. Mandel (2006, 4). 17. Levi (1988, 82–83). 18. Thomas Mitscherlich is the biological son of Alex but not Margarethe Mitscherlich. 19. Mitscherlich, in Johr (1997, 224). 20. Mitscherlich, in Johr (1997, 228). 21. Ellis Carter’s footage, seen in Mitscherlich’s film, appears in the film Lest We Forget (1945), which documents the liberation of Buchenwald, and which is archived at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn1004371. See also the footage “Buchenwald Survivors: German Civilians View Camp”, shot by Carter and Arthur Mainzer. https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/ irn1000302. 22. Morris (2003, 294). 23. Klüger refers to this same poem at the end of a 1986 English language review of Shoah, which she published under her maiden name. See the final paragraph of Angress (1986). 24. Kluger (2003, 184–185).

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25. On Klüger’s self-fashioning as a “countermonument”, see Prager (2015, 145–147). 26. See Caruth (1995, 6). 27. Klüger (2012, 239; my translation). 28. Kluger (2003, 184–185). 29. Levi (1988, 75–76). 30. Schwab (1826, 579). 31. Kluger (2003, 38–39). 32. Kluger (2003, 39). 33. Hartman (1995, 540). 34. Klüger (2012, 127).

References Agamben, Giorgio. 1999. Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive. New York: Zone Books. Angress, Ruth K. 1986. Lanzmann’s Shoah and its Audience. Simon Wiesenthal Center Annual 3: 249–260. Caruth, Cathy. 1995. Trauma and Experience: Introduction. In Trauma: Explorations in Memory, ed. Cathy Caruth, 3–12. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Hartman, Geoffrey H. 1995. On Traumatic Knowledge and Literary Studies. New Literary History 26 (3): 537–563. Hunter, Anna. 2018. The Holocaust as the Ultimate Trauma Narrative. In Trauma and Literature, ed. J.  Roger Kurtz, 66–82. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Johr, Barbara, ed. 1997. Reisen ins Leben: Weiterleben nach einer Kindheit in Auschwitz. Mit der Textliste zum gleichnamigen Film und Beiträgen von Susanne Benöhr und Thomas Mitscherlich. Bremen: Donat. Kluger, Ruth. 2003. Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered. New  York: The Feminist Press at CUNY. Klüger, Ruth. 2012 [1992]. Weiter leben: eine Jugend. Göttingen: Wallstein. Leiser, Erwin. 1996. Auf der Suche nach Wirklichkeit: meine Filme 1960–1996. Konstanz: UVK-Medien. Levi, Primo. 1988. The Drowned and the Saved. Translated by Raymond Rosenthal. New York: Simon & Schuster. Mandel, Naomi. 2006. Against the Unspeakable: Complicity, the Holocaust, and Slavery in America. University of Virginia Press. Morris, Leslie C. 2003. Berlin Elegies: Absence, Postmemory and Art after Auschwitz: The Holocaust in Art. In Image and Remembrance: Representation and the Holocaust, ed. Shelley Hornstein and Florence Jacobowitz, 288–304. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

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Prager, Brad. 2015. After the Fact: The Holocaust in Twenty-first Century Documentary Film. London: Bloomsbury Publishing. Schaumann, Caroline. 2004. From ‘weiter leben’ (1992) to ‘Still Alive’ (2001): Ruth Klüger’s Cultural Translation of Her ‘German Book’ for an American Audience. German Quarterly 77 (3): 324–339. Schönbach, Peter. 1961. Reaktionen auf die antisemitische Welle im Winter 1959/1960. Frankfurt: Europ. Verlagsanstalt. Schwab, Gustav. 1826. Der Reiter und der Bodensee. In Auswahl deutscher Gedichte, ed. Hermann Kluge, 10th ed., 579. Altenburg: Oskar Bonde, 1905. Shenker, Noah. 2015. Reframing Holocaust Testimony. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Trezise, Thomas. 2014. Witnessing Witnessing: On the Reception of Holocaust Survivor Testimony. New York: Fordham University Press. Walker, Janet. 2005. Trauma Cinema: Documenting Incest and the Holocaust. Berkeley: University of California Press. Wieviorka, Annette. 2006. The Era of the Witness. Translated by Jared Stark. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

CHAPTER 14

“The Four Brothers”: Claude Lanzmann’s War Refugee Board Interviews Sue Vice

The outtakes of Claude Lanzmann’s 1985 documentary Shoah, all 220  hours of which are held at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC, reveal his sustained and unexpected interest in questions of rescue and resistance during the Holocaust years.1 Apart from encounters with former Warsaw Ghetto Uprising fighters, none of these outtake interviews, which take place with former partisans, Jewish negotiators, “righteous gentiles” and representatives of Allied institutions, appears in the finished film. This might seem to be because the topics of rescue and resistance are tangential to Shoah’s central focus, which is on the mass murder of the Jews in the extermination camps between 1941 and 1945. Equally, the painful post-war debates associated with accusations of acquiescence or collaboration on the part of the survivors, and these controversies’ becoming enmeshed with the politics of the newly formed state of Israel, arise when resistance is discussed, with the potential

S. Vice (*) School of English, University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 R. Freiburg, G. Bayer (eds.), The Ethics of Survival in Contemporary Literature and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83422-7_14

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to distract attention from the fact that the majority of the Jews of occupied Europe were murdered. However, this essay will argue that the interviews Lanzmann undertook in relation to rescue and resistance could indeed be imagined as a filmic meditation on the commission of genocide, either as a part of Shoah itself, or as a separate release. While rescue and resistance are often associated with triumphal survival, Lanzmann’s interviews on the varied attempts of this kind show them rather to have been fraught with ethical dilemmas. The often irresolvable debates of the time on the part of the Jews in occupied Europe included questions about choosing between individuals, rescuing some at the expense of others when whole communities were threatened, and the advisability of armed rebellion versus the brutal reprisals which made such actions in effect suicidal. From the Allied perspective, which forms the focus here, the survival of the Jews in occupied Europe was seen to be best achieved through military victory, despite the arguments of campaigners that the rescue of the Jews should be a war-aim on its own account. This essay focuses on the series of interviews that Lanzmann conducted in the late 1970s with four individuals whose wartime roles were central to the campaign for the War Refugee Board (WRB), the US government agency established in January 1944 in an effort to assist primarily Jewish victims of Nazi atrocity. Like all the outtake material, these interviews exist in their unedited form of 11-minute film-reels, available to view online at the USHMM website and often accompanied by a volunteer-transcribed script. The focus on an institution as evidenced by the WRB interviews is just as unusual in Lanzmann’s oeuvre as that on the notion of attempted rescue. Analysing the outtake footage in this case suggests that the director had envisaged editing the material using an experimental method of communal yet conflicting utterance, as a way of formally registering the distinctive nature of the topic addressed in these encounters. The interviewees chosen for such a purpose have such varied positions as that of Peter Bergson, an emissary of the paramilitary Irgun organization from Mandate Palestine, the WRB director John Pehle, the board’s representative in Switzerland, Roswell McClelland, and the former State Department official Robert Borden Reams. Their voices when edited together would represent the WRB in filmic terms as an embodiment of varied Allied attitudes towards the rescue that Bergson and his pressure-group argued was essential for the Jews’ survival. The polarity between the active

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commission of rescue, versus the more neutral eventuality of survival, is voiced from different perspectives throughout Lanzmann’s WRB interviews. Lanzmann’s interviews centring on the WRB, and whether its contribution to the survival of a remnant of European Jews can be described as rescue, make clear the live status of such a question in the late 1970s and its persistence in the present. For some recent commentators such as Rebecca Erbelding (2018), it is imperative to acknowledge the remarkable contribution of the Board’s members, in the USA and overseas, to the preservation of the lives of at least 200,000 people at the war’s end. For others, the WRB represented action that was “too little and almost too late”, in the phrase used as the title to a collection of essays edited by the historian Rafael Medoff, its belated establishment ascribed to unconcerned or unsympathetic attitudes towards the Jews on the Allies’ part. In his suite of interviews on the WRB, Lanzmann’s directions, even before any cutting and editing has occurred, tend towards a montage-driven form, since he puts to the interviewees a range of the same questions and provocations, often drawing on contemporary documents from which they read. These include such matters as the possible bombing of the tracks to Auschwitz, the Bermuda refugee conference of 1943, whether the Jews’ survival should have been an Allied war-aim, attitudes towards negotiating with the Nazis by means of bribery or ransom payments and a version put to each interlocutor of Lanzmann’s question to Peter Bergson: “What is the meaning of Treblinka or Auschwitz seen from New  York or Washington?” Lanzmann uses such matters to explore what are his consistent concerns, including the epistemological difficulty of accepting that genocide was taking place, and the many practical obstacles placed in the way of its being effectively combatted. Lanzmann’s WRB interviews are equally full of potential for visual contrast. This is evident where elements of the mise-en-scène are deliberately constructed, in the case of Peter Bergson and John Pehle, or have a fortuitously apposite appearance, as they do in the encounter with Robert Reams, where the interviewee’s reluctance to speak is played out against the backdrop of the Florida community in which he lives. McClelland is the only one of the four to have been stationed in Europe during the war, and he is enlisted to give an eyewitness account of events in Vichy France and neutral Switzerland. In this way, these four interviews are full of the promise to constitute a case study of an unprecedented kind in Lanzmann’s work, that of a shared yet disputatious testimony.

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Peter Bergson: The “Nuisance Diplomat”2 Lanzmann’s interview with Peter Bergson might seem destined to take centre-stage in any final version of the WRB-related interviews. This is due to Bergson’s outsider position as an émigré from Mandate Palestine, as well as the “forceful and charismatic” persona that made him a public figure in wartime USA and which is equally evident on screen.3 His fellow-­ campaigner Samuel Merlin is present throughout the interview, but the majority of the screen-time is devoted to the more voluble Bergson. Indeed, Bergson’s role as a “maverick” campaigner who pressured the US government to act in order to save the Jews of Europe has made him the narrative centre in other documentary films about the WRB’s history, including Laurence Jarvik’s Who Shall Live and Who Shall Die? (1981) and Pierre Sauvage’s Not Idly By: Peter Bergson, America and the Holocaust (2019). In these cases, Bergson is presented as an embattled prophet whose disregarded warnings came to terrible fruition, even given the founding of the WRB. However, in Lanzmann’s case, Bergson’s distinctive qualities have the rather different potential to be interleaved with those of interviewees with quite other perspectives, suggesting that a final film would take a polyphonic rather than a tragic form centred on an individual. Bergson was born as Hillel Kook in Lithuania in 1915, emigrating with his family to Palestine in 1924. He took an “Americanized pseudonym”,4 in Mark Raider’s phrase, on arrival in the USA as an envoy of the Irgun in 1940, in part to avoid political embarrassment for his family, a celebrated religious dynasty which included his uncle Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, the Chief Rabbi of Mandate Palestine, and his father Rabbi Dov Kook. Despite his orthodox background, Bergson became an activist in pre-war Palestine as a member of Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s secular right-wing Revisionist Zionist group, working in particular to subvert British immigration restrictions. Lanzmann’s encounter with Bergson opens without preamble on the event that prompted the rescue campaign, as one of the director’s repeated efforts in the outtake interviews to provoke a return to the moment of recognizing that genocide was taking place. In the present case, this revelation “exploded one day”, as Bergson puts it, on his reading a report in the Washington Post in November 1942, “on an inside page, about the tenth page”, about the death toll in Europe: “It simply said, ‘Rabbi Wise says two million Jews slain’. I read it again and again, you know, I didn’t believe what I was reading”. Along with the numbers killed came the

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revelation of a sustained campaign of murder, “a war of extinction”, in Bergson’s phrase, displacing the idea that the atrocities were random acts of violence.5 In response to this “explosion” of awareness, Bergson and a small group of followers launched high-profile publicity campaigns in the USA.  These aimed to win over public opinion in order to provoke the American government to engage in “action, not pity”, as the Bergson Group’s slogan had it, over the fate of the Jews, by means of eye-catching newspaper advertisements, a protest march to the White House of over 400 rabbis, and a staged pageant, We Shall Never Die, scripted by the writer Ben Hecht. Bergson’s mastery of what Eran Kaplan calls “the representational as an agent of political change”,6 as evidenced in these strategies, is enacted in the interview at the level of both dialogue and imagery. We witness this in the form of an incident the interviewee recounts to show the extent of his priorities differing from those of Stephen Wise, the renowned Reform rabbi and American Jewish Congress president, who opposed the Bergson Group’s high-profile campaigns. In the present encounter, Bergson sardonically repeats Wise’s declaration that “Bergson is worse than Hitler, because Hitler brought antisemitism to Europe, and Bergson is bringing it to America”. By contrast to Wise, Bergson insisted on avoiding any mention of Palestine in his campaign for rescue. As he says to Lanzmann, the Group members were bent on “ignoring the fact of the political argument with the British over Palestine”, thus “separating” the question of rescue from that of a Jewish state. Bergson’s crucial ability to dramatize complex situations is embodied for the camera as he recounts Wise’s assertion at a meeting that “we had to say, ‘Open the gates of Palestine’”. Bergson repeats to Lanzmann the riposte that he put to Wise: BERGSON

If there was a fire in this building, and I managed to run outside for you, would you want me to scream, “Rabbi Wise is burning inside, save him!”, or “Rabbi Wise is burning, save him to the Waldorf Astoria!”

Bergson’s retort to the rabbi’s demand succeeds in satirizing Wise’s Zionist thinking by likening the insistence on Palestine to one on a landmark New York hotel, as a luxurious but limited space. The detail of the Waldorf Astoria, which defeated the transcriber on this occasion, highlights Bergson’s compelling grasp of local social detail, as well as his turning the tables on Wise by imagining him as the one who is being burnt.

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Such a moment of re-enacting wartime debates on Bergson’s part is emphasized by the camera’s close-ups on his face and bright blue eyes, while his habit of rapid blinking, in its hint at tears restrained, signals the high level of his emotional investment over 30 years after the war’s end. It is also a present-time enactment of the eloquence and “charm” on which Bergson’s lobbying depended, supported by the “English accent” he had acquired before the war in the language lessons he took at the London School of Economics.7 The Bergson Group’s advertising campaign takes a prominent role in the interview’s mise-en-scène, since magnified versions of over 20 of their newspaper headlines are shown pinned to a wall. At the beginning of a reel half-way through the interview, the camera follows Bergson as he leaves his seat at the table opposite Lanzmann to gesture at these copies, uniting his testimony with objects from the past. Thus we are shown a headline from the New York Times of 16 February 1943 about the Romanian government’s offer to release Jews in Transnistria into Allied hands for monetary payment: “For Sale to Humanity: 70,000 Jews. Guaranteed Human Beings at $50 a piece”. This phrasing parodies the very advertising discourse on which it relies, presenting an urgent political argument in the way in which “you would advertise Chevrolet motor cars or Players cigarettes”, in the words of the Group member Eri Jabotinsky.8 Bergson’s reading out a section from one of Ben Hecht’s verse advertisements, the “Ballad of the Doomed Jews of Europe”, stands in for the polarized reception following this and the writer’s other compositions. The ballad’s reference to the likely vanishing of the Jews “by Christmas” was in response to a speech by Goebbels in 1942, in which he declared that Germany and Austria would be free of all Jews by that date: BERGSON

It says, “the world is busy with other news all the time, be quiet Jews”, and so forth, then it says,

Oh World be patient—it will take Some time before the murder crews Are done. By Christmas you can make Your Peace on Earth without the Jews.

This sequence of Bergson’s talking through the advertisement campaign offers an insight into Lanzmann’s predilection for the reading out of documents by those who wrote or were addressed by them. Such moments constitute what could be described as scripted stagings of the return of the past. In this sense, the impression of Bergson’s reading voice, including his

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particular way of summarizing the burden of the ballad’s sentiment—“and so forth”—and reciting only the fifth and final stanza, is crucial to the cinematic representation of his convictions as they stood in 1942. As viewers, we are invited to experience the urgency of the Bergson’s Group’s conviction that survival could only be guaranteed by the positive commission of rescue by returning to a moment when that was still a possibility. Bergson’s concluding estimate of the Allies’ “criminal” inaction extended to his regret that a “refugee” rather than a “rescue” board was established. As he reports to Lanzmann: BERGSON

We said, “If you are not going to fight this war and the extermination separately, there will be no Jews to save when the war is over”, which is more or less what happened.

Bergson’s quoting the voices of the past, as he does in this case, retains their persuasive orientation, which is now directed at the spectator in the present. He remains convinced that, since he judges the pressure-group tactics that did take place to have been successful, only their wider support by established Jewish groups in the USA was needed for even greater salvific effect. However, as commentators have argued, in the circumstances of Allied decisions “it is doubtful that Jewish unity would have significantly altered the outcome of the Holocaust”.9

John Pehle: “A Good Guy, but a Bureaucrat”10 John Pehle was one of the Treasury Department employees whose memorandum to Roosevelt, exposing the obstructive behaviour of the State Department, led to the foundation of the WRB, of which he became the first director. The potential for material from his interview to be interleaved with Bergson’s arises from the notion that they were both working towards the goal of rescue. Yet this impression of a shared agenda is destabilized by the striking differences between them in demeanour and role. During the encounter with Lanzmann, Pehle, a tax lawyer who had worked in the foreign funds control unit earlier in the war, is reserved and judicious in his utterances on the questions of bombing Auschwitz and whether rescue should have been an Allied war-aim. This contrasts with the impassioned and uncompromising statements on such topics from Bergson, the self-designated “foreigner” and “outsider”. The greatest irony to be conveyed by placing the two encounters side-by-side is the lack

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of any direct link between the Bergson Group’s lobbying for a rescue commission and the Treasury Department’s action in exposing malpractice that did result in the WRB’s establishment. If the WRB interviews were to be edited for release, a system of crosscutting between utterances on the part of Bergson and Pehle would highlight such an absence, in the face of their actions in these distinct spheres of civil society. The preparations for a visual contrast to the emphasis in Bergson’s interview on his deployment of mass-media advertising are evident in the footage for Pehle’s. No less than the first three film-reels are devoted to showing the latter sweeping up leaves among the trees surrounding his modern, single-storey house in Washington, inside which the interview subsequently takes place. These actions, filmed in an unmistakably North American setting, stand in for Pehle’s efforts to sweep away malpractice and injustice in the USA during the war and their role in the WRB’s establishment. It is tempting to imagine such footage accompanied by Pehle’s voiceover recounting just such past actions. The slow progress of the governmental process as it is represented in Pehle’s interview seems destined to be considered in parallel with the details of Bergson’s publicity campaign, as these emerge during his interview, especially in those instances where the same events are cited in these two encounters. This is clear in relation to the questions Lanzmann puts to Pehle about the Romanian offer in early 1943 to release Jewish deportees for a cash payment, brought to the latter’s attention at the foreign funds unit but not acted upon until the end of that year. Such a sense that “time races death”, as phrased by one of the Bergson Group’s headlines from December 1943, visible during Bergson’s interview, is represented in contrastingly official terms in the encounter with Pehle. Lanzmann spends the best part of two 11-minute reels asking Pehle to anatomize the steps that were needed to grant a licence to transmit funds for the Romanian Jews’ sake. The temporal cost is emphasized in the instance quoted below by means of the gaps and fragmentariness of the dialogue: LANZMANN PEHLE LANZMANN PEHLE LANZMANN

This means from March to July … That’s right. There is already a lot of time which passed. The Treasury indicated in July we would do it and it was in December that the license was issued … and of course, then it was too late. Yes, it was too late for the Jews of Romania whatsoever.

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Just as he persuaded Bergson to recite the texts of the past, Lanzmann uses Pehle throughout their encounter to ventriloquize a range of governmental voices raised in opposition to State Department delay and mendacity. Such a technique emphasizes the shared effort of pressing for action and charting the gradual progress towards establishing the WRB. Thus we hear Pehle’s rendition of protests by members of Congress, most notably Emanuel Celler’s description of the visa application committee as one that “has been glacial in its slowness and cold-bloodedness. It takes months and months to grant the visas, and then it usually applies to a corpse”. Such rhetoric reveals to us, as it did to the original Congress audience, in stark terms that bureaucratic barriers to enabling survival could themselves result in death. Pehle’s reciting the debates and documents of the past, using phrases like Celler’s which are clearly not his own, gives him the status of the spokesperson for a group, and that of one dedicated specifically to voicing silenced truths. The State Department’s granting the license to transmit foreign currency to Romania for the sake of the Jews in Transnistria in December 1943 was the result of a voicing of this kind, and forms the subject of Pehle’s second act of communal ventriloquism. In this instance, Pehle reads aloud the detail of a cable, one now known as the Riegner Telegram, sent from the US legation in Bern to the State Department. The cable brought specific news of the “horrible situation concerning the plight of the Jews in Europe”, including “mass executions of Jews in Poland”. In this instance, it is not only the detail of the mass murders themselves that is significant, but the State Department’s subsequent reply to the legate in Bern. The response was aimed to prevent any further such bulletins being sent, and this “repression of information”, in Pehle’s phrasing, was itself illicitly suppressed. The resulting memorandum of complaint to Roosevelt from the Treasury forms the third and final instalment of Pehle’s recitative journey. It takes the form of a blunt outline of the situation, invoking the government’s stated “policy” to “work out programmes to save those Jews and other persecuted minorities who could be saved”. The quotation marks in the transcript, as they appear below, signal the presence of two voices, as Pehle’s reading aloud brings the memorandum into the present: PEHLE

“One of the greatest crimes in history, the slaughter of the Jewish people in Europe, is continuing unabated […]. You are probably not as familiar as I with the utter failure of certain individuals in our State Department […] to take any effective

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action to prevent the extermination of the Jews in Germanoccupied Europe. [These] officials have failed to take any positive steps to save these people […]. In fact, nothing has been accomplished”. This address to the President has the strongest sense of direct confrontation with the facts of mass murder of all Pehle’s readings. The memorandum’s first-person utterance encompasses the reality of its shared composition, making it well suited to Pehle’s assumption of that position as he reads aloud in the present.11 These details of governmental process and its being delayed or covered up might seem confusing and dry, yet are horrifying for the very reason that such “red tape” considerations, as Lanzmann puts it, took precedence over people’s lives. The experience of hearing the extended readings conducted by Pehle gives the viewer a correlative for such a sense in the very act of watching. Throughout the interview, Pehle’s legal training is evident in his pronounced reticence and formality. He often avoids looking at his interviewer and instead scrutinizes the paperwork Lanzmann has provided, seems reluctant to respond and surprised when addressed, does not look up when reading aloud and, if he does, his eyes are cast into shadow by his horn-rimmed spectacles. At times, the noise of rustling as Pehle browses through the documents even drowns out the dialogue. The imagery of Pehle’s being engaged by documents rather than by Lanzmann or the camera seems to be footage that might eventually have been discarded from any edited version of this interview. However, its value lies in its giving a sense of Pehle as one who did, in the past as he does during the interview, sift through paperwork and rely upon record-keeping, even as he worked towards offering rescue or assistance within official constraints. Although he and Bergson barely mention each other in their respective interviews, Bergson’s pithy estimate of Pehle, as used in the subheading for this section, sums up how he comes across here: “John Pehle fundamentally was a good guy, but a bureaucrat”.

Roswell McClelland: The View from Europe Roswell McClelland’s WRB-inflected perspective on rescue differs from Pehle’s in relation to his vantage-point as the board’s representative in Switzerland. His bluff and expansive demeanour as an interlocutor also contrasts with Pehle’s, as does his explicit reflection on his “duty” to

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consider the past in relation to the present. McClelland’s status as an American eyewitness to events in occupied Europe, arising from his work for a Quaker refugee charity in France and then for the WRB in Bern, means that his testimony often stands on the border between reportage and re-enactment. During the war, as he recounts, McClelland acted to pass on the report by the Auschwitz escapees Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler to the US government, and he ensured the rendering of its maps into English to assist with possible plans to bomb the camp or its railway. Unlike Pehle’s low-­ key account of the refusal of a WRB request to John McCloy in November 1944 to bomb the tracks to the camp, McClelland roundly dismisses the reasons given for not doing so as “absolute nonsense”. Despite his disinclination to enter into payments for bribery or ransom, McClelland took part in negotiations with Kurt Becher, the head of the SS economic department in Hungary, alongside the Swiss representative of the American Joint Distribution Committee, Saly Mayer. His account of these activities, as well as his talkative mien, is of clear value to Lanzmann’s constellation of WRB interviews. However, in what might seem a contradiction to his efforts at rescue in the WRB role which he later described as “challenging [and] harrowing”,12 McClelland’s testimony addresses another topic of interest to the director in relation to the overall failure to rescue. This is the disinclination on the part of western would-be rescuers to trust the efforts of orthodox Jewish campaigners, either those on the spot in occupied Europe, or those in the USA. Lanzmann’s collection of outtake interviews on the efforts by the Working Group in Slovakia to bribe the Nazis, led by Rabbi Michael Weissmandl, hints at the director’s valuing such a figure exactly because of his combining an emotive and religious discourse on the imperative to preserve life with a prescient pragmatism. Like the topic of the WRB itself, the implications of the wartime reception of orthodox rescuers continue to be debated. Max Wallace argues that the “role of the Orthodox rescuers”, particularly Recha and Isaac Sternbuch, who ran the Va’ad Ha’atzalah rescue initiative in Switzerland, has been “shamefully overlooked” for ideological reasons.13 In a way that dramatizes differences even between those working for rescue, during the encounter with Bergson, Samuel Merlin reports in the opposite terms on orthodox Jewish figures, praising them for being “emotionally involved [people who] co-operated with us to the full extent”.

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Indeed, it is Isaac Sternbuch about whom McClelland’s opinions are particularly solicited by Lanzmann. In response to the director’s asking what his “recollection” is of the Sternbuchs’, McClelland does not address their activities or views, but the appearance and bearing of Isaac Sternbuch: McCLELLAND

Well, I suppose it is the stereotypical recollection of the sort of medieval rabbi out of a Polish ghetto, a little busy man with a wild little beard […] who was always in a hurry, who was always harassed, who was taking things terribly hard.

Even as he describes them, McClelland acts out Sternbuch’s “busy” actions with a quick shoulder-shrugging motion, while a slow zoom as he speaks reaches the closest point to his face when he concludes, citing the Swiss Jewish Distribution Committee representative, “In comparison to Saly Mayer—night and day”. The interviewee defines himself in two different ways during this part of the interview, first as a “rational white Protestant American” and then as a “practical Scotsman”. This choice of religious, ethnic and cultural labels emphasizes the fact that McClelland views his position as one diametrically opposed to that of what he calls “eastern Jewry”, so that even his own immigrant ancestry is of a kind to be set against theirs. Such a view disposed the interviewee, as he claims, to prefer dealings with the assimilated Saly Mayer, who was his contact in Geneva. The “rational and businesslike” Mayer’s appearance and lifestyle were more “congenial” to McClelland than Sternbuch’s: McCLELLAND

[Mayer] in every sense of the word was a solid citizen, not to say almost a ponderous man in some ways, always dressed in severe black suits, wore a black Homburg—a lace and embroidery manufacturer of the commercial city of St Gallen.

As Lanzmann did in response to Pehle’s similar attitude towards Rabbi Kalmanowitz in New  York, whom that interviewee describes as “a very emotional man, with a long beard, who would come to my office and pull his beard and cry”, in a way the WRB director found “very hard to take”, the interviewer poses pointed counter-questions to McClelland.14 Just as

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Lanzmann asks Pehle why he refers to Kalmanowitz’s suggestions for rescue as “unreal”, as if implying that, for his interviewee, the rabbi’s orthodox status automatically discredited his advice, so he prompts McClelland to acknowledge the justice of Isaac Sternbuch’s demeanour: McCLELLAND An old Jewish friend said to me, “You be careful, McClelland, because you’re going to be the wailing wall, and people are going to come to you and tear their hair out and beat their poor heads against the wall and the world is coming to an end” … LANZMANN Yes, but the statement of your friend was quite true, because the world really was going to end. The culmination of this striking section of the interview is a disjointed interchange, characterized by incomplete sentences and mishearings, which sums up the attitudes towards orthodox rescue that Lanzmann aims to tease out. The more McClelland tries to explain the position which seemed self-evident to him in relation to the emotional and Biblical rhetoric of orthodoxy, the more its reliance on what he twice calls “stereotypical” thinking seems plain: McCLELLAND [A] completely open-ended and kind of hysterical plea for unlimited amounts of money to save unlimited amounts of people was just too—too imprecise, too emotional. LANZMANN Why do you say “hysterical”? McCLELLAND Why do I—? LANZMANN Why do you say “hysterical”? McCLELLAND Well, hysterical in comparison to practical proposals. LANZMANN Yes, but— McCLELLAND I mean proposals in practical terms, said in a quiet voice, in simple language. Indeed, ultimately Lanzmann attempts a deconstruction of this position, by citing Rabbi Weissmandl’s pleas for money just as McClelland declares that the WRB’s activities were limited by its small-scale funding: “That means you agreed completely, as a matter of fact, with these religious rabbinical Jews”.

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Robert Reams: “Fac[ing] Up to the Realities Demanded by the Over-All War Effort”15 Lanzmann’s encounter with Robert Reams is at first sight an unpromising addition to the community of WRB voices. It is clear why the director sought him out, since Reams had worked during the war in the State Department’s European Division alongside the Assistant Secretary Breckinridge Long, a figure identified by all the other interviewees as the source of the misinformation and delay which prompted the WRB’s establishment. Reams had particular responsibility for refugees, and he was Long’s proxy at the Bermuda Conference in 1943, its record on refugee welfare described as a “cruel mockery” in one of the Bergson Group’s advertisements, visible in the encounter with Peter Bergson. As the director tells Reams, in his efforts to persuade the interviewee to talk freely, since all the other wartime State Department officials had died, “you are a historical figure … and the only survivor”. Such an epithet, used by Lanzmann as a way of attempting to enlist Reams’s sense of his own historical significance, also resounds with irony in relation to his wartime role in obstructing any offer of asylum to refugees from occupied Europe. However, despite Reams’s declaration that he is “extremely fond” of the director, and that he “loves” Lanzmann’s entire film-crew, he cannot be persuaded to give any detailed commentary during nearly two hours of film footage. His having made the reasons for this refusal plain to Lanzmann in an unfilmed conversation the day before makes Reams’s agreeing to be interviewed informally, yet in conditions of his continuing reticence, an intriguing record of this kind. The enactment of his refusal to discuss the WRB was itself openly filmed. The encounter takes place in Florida’s Bay Point, near Panama City, a community of which Reams and his wife Dotty, who is also present throughout, had been one of the “founding families” four years earlier in 1975.16 Dotty Reams was herself a former State Department employee, and met her future husband in that setting. Although she was one of four secretaries working in Breckinridge Long’s office, and reveals her first-hand knowledge of his diary-keeping and temperament, Lanzmann’s interest lies solely in the public role of her husband. Over the course of a day, Lanzmann participates in the couple’s pastimes of fishing and golfing. This is followed by an evening conversation at their home, aspects of which tentatively address the past. However, as well as giving a sense of the lengths to which the director had to go in

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order to persuade people to speak for the camera, these activities yield visual and aural material with unexpected symbolic potential for Lanzmann’s WRB-related purposes. In this sense, they resemble the footage from John Pehle’s interview of his sweeping the leaves outside his house, although without being the prelude to the kind of detailed exchange that gave verbal substance to the footage in that case. Lanzmann clearly recognized the fitting nature of the fishing and golfing scenarios which substitute for testimony in Reams’s case. The interview begins with several reels showing Reams fishing at the marina in Bay Point, giving him an excuse for a disinclination to talk that characterizes the entirety of his encounter with Lanzmann. Nonetheless, the look of this sequence and its accompanying snippets of utterance possess their own significance and potential for future use. At the marina, Reams is shown either in close-up, casting off, baiting and reeling in his line, or from a high angle, where he is a distant but eye-catching figure in a tweed trilby hat and scarlet waterproof jacket. Despite having to be shown by Reams how to use the tackle, Lanzmann catches a fish while his instructor does not, lending visual substance to their allusive exchange: LANZMANN REAMS LANZMANN

Well, I’m very happy to fish with you, Mr Reams … I’m happy. I’m sorry we’re not getting anything big … But we will.

At the opening to one of the several film-reels of the water’s edge, Lanzmann gives a commentary in French on the remarkable nature of his encountering the former State Department official in such a setting, part of which he repeats in English for Reams’s benefit: “If someone would have told me, my dear Ambassador, that I would be once fishing with you on the Mexican Gulf in Panama City, I would have been very, very surprised”.17 However, the director does not translate for his interlocutor the very last of his comments in French, on the ironically fitting nature of the present scenario: LANZMANN:

Mais c’est plus difficile de l’attraper que d’attraper un poisson! [But he’s harder to catch than a fish!].

While these moments of dialogue might seem only tangentially related to Lanzmann’s purpose here, they act as a commentary on Reams’s efforts to evade addressing the past, as we hear them later the same day. Reams’s

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leisure activities in the present embody the challenge faced by the wartime pressure-group campaign as described by Bergson: “the whole task was to break the routine of daily life”. Although Lanzmann does not give any commentary, French or otherwise, on the evocative dialogue at the golf-course, the director maintains an ironic tone during his tuition by Reams in the techniques of the game, even as his laudatory words seem designed to draw out his interlocutor: LANZMANN REAMS LANZMANN

But you were—you are the best in golf and you were the best in bridge too. I’m afraid I hit your ball in the sand-trap … Now, you hit the ball with this. Tell me what I do. You are my master.

It is not Lanzmann but rather Reams himself who draws on the potential relationship of the game of golf to the events of the war. Just as the interviewee seems glad to retreat behind the silence required of fishing to avoid reminiscence, so Reams invokes golf in the evening portion of the interview to shut down any idea of a return to the past. Indeed, accounts of Breckinridge Long’s concerns during the period of the State Department’s obstruction of rescue include the verdict that he was “more interested in golf putts than human lives”, making the game a signifier of mistaken priorities.18 Immediately after their discussion of Reams’s taking on the role of responsibility for refugees during the war, Lanzmann seems to be angling for some self-reflection or retrospective regret on the interviewee’s part: LANZMANN REAMS

You said yesterday that you felt that you had faults. Everyone has faults … I tend to slice on the golf course and I shouldn’t.

This detail casts light on Lanzmann’s suggestion to John Pehle that he too be filmed on a golf-course. The director was prompted by Pehle’s story from the post-war era, about seeking out a golf-club that would accept him along with his Jewish friends as members, to ask if he could film his interviewee playing “Jewish golf, a Jewish club!” Pehle turns this suggestion down, noting that the leaf-raking scene was sufficient. Although this implies Pehle’s awareness of the portentous nature of both activities, it means that there is no footage of a different kind of golf links to contrast with that of Reams at the Bay Point Golf Club.

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In the context of these apparently minimalist exchanges, which are nonetheless emblematic of the stances taken in the past, Reams is alert to Lanzmann’s efforts to try and draw him into further disclosure. This is the case in relation to the director’s remarks about their conversation of the evening before: LANZMANN REAMS LANZMANN REAMS

The policy of the United States, of the State Department, the Bermuda Conference—we didn’t talk about this … Nope. And we’re not going to, either. I know. But you should tell me why not … If I told you why not, I’d be talking to you.

Nonetheless, Lanzmann elicits from his interlocutor some comments which offer a more specific contrast to the other American interviewees than his simply being unwilling to talk. Of Breckinridge Long, Reams says that he was “honest” and “gentle”, while his adding that, “I felt that I could trust him absolutely—if he told me something I believed it”, has a pointed resonance in the context of the State Department’s suppression of cables and falsified figures which, as emerged in the encounter with Pehle, led to the WRB’s founding. Lanzmann’s encounter with Reams shows us a resistant witness whose performance of the refusal to answer questions is evident throughout. Reams directs his gaze anywhere but at the camera, by contrast to his wife, who looks and smiles directly at it. He rarely volunteers any information, answers questions laconically and denies knowledge or recall of such factors as Long’s wartime diary or when he learnt about the existence of Auschwitz. That such utterance emerges at all is credit to Lanzmann’s in turn enacting a role, that of an agreeable and guileless conversation partner and good sport. No utterance of the kind that seemed during the war years to place Reams firmly in the obstructionist camp of Long is read aloud or repeated in the present. Yet what we see during the course of the encounter, including the activities of fishing and golfing, as well as the concluding exchange in Reams’s home, does constitute in its unusual way a correlative for the events of the past. The inaction, reticence and obfuscation on the part of the wartime State Department is the subject of critique and lament by the three other interviewees, and, during the day’s filming of Reams, we experience these features again in the present. It is their very obliquity that makes Reams’s words so well suited to taking their place in the community of voices about the WRB.

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Conclusion I have titled the present chapter “The Four Brothers”, following the example of Lanzmann’s The Four Sisters (2018), his final release of repurposed outtake footage. In the case of that film, self-contained interviews with four female interlocutors, Ruth Elias, Ada Lichtman, Paula Biren and Hanna Marton, follow one after the other. Although the clear distinctions between the four “chapters”, each of which has its own title, might encourage their being viewed separately, these stories gain cumulatively from being watched in close succession on a single occasion.19 Viewed thus, their shared elements become apparent, including the witnesses’ recounting the fate of family members, hairsbreadth escapes, interactions with non-Jewish neighbours, ethical choices in the past and survivor guilt in the present.20 However, Lanzmann’s chosen title for the four-hour film implies that the commonality of female experience in the Holocaust years is so strong that it is as if the women were actually related. The same is not true of the present example of the four interviews with male testifiers on the subject of the War Refugee Board. To describe them as “brothers” is to acknowledge the significance of their lack of agreement on the shared topic of the WRB in a way that might be seen as akin to a sibling rivalry. Although each had met or knew of the others, their positions are at odds, as well as distant to varying degrees from that of persecution in occupied Europe. These are not interviews with survivors, but ones which centre on the question of how to ensure the survival of others. Such a concern calls for a matching format, one that could be constituted by a filmic interleaving between all four encounters for the greatest sense of contrast between the interviewees’ responses to the same topic. This is a communal testimony in the sense of its having to be edited into such a form, rather than sharing the same burden of witness, as is suggested by the presence of both Bergson and his colleague Samuel Merlin in the same interview. The director’s WRB-related encounters differ equally from another pattern of communal eyewitness accounts, that of the “social collective” of survivor video testimony. Indeed, instead of a therapeutic communal construction, along the model of one described for survivors of the Balkan war of the 1990s, in which such a record connects “the survivor’s story with a larger collective history”,21 the “collective history” of the WRB is one characterized by its interviewees’ regret and dissent.

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Lanzmann’s interest in the banal, cynical or Realpolitik reasons which meant that only a relatively small number survived the Holocaust as a result of the WRB’s actions is not aimed at establishing an “understanding” of the mass murder or responses to it, an aspiration he has elsewhere described as an “obscenity” (1991). Nor does the director plan simply to demonstrate that Allied rescue was an eminently realistic prospect that was wilfully turned down. Rather, it is by reconceptualising what we might expect of Lanzmann’s filmmaking that the cinematic significance of these WRB encounters can be envisaged as parts of a polyphonic whole which would give communal voice to the history of an institution at a time of genocide.

Notes 1. The outtakes were created by Claude Lanzmann during the filming of Shoah and are used and cited by permission of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority, Jerusalem. 2. Bergson’s phrase about himself, quoted in Penkower (1981, 301). 3. See the review by Medoff (2001, 136). 4. Raider (2004, 318). 5. Peck (1980, 370). 6. Kaplan (2005, 100). 7. Penkower (1981, 284, 340). 8. Quoted in Kaplan (2005, 348). 9. Penkower (1981, 309). 10. Peter Bergson, quoted in Wyman and Medoff (2002, 165). 11. A document drafted by Randolph Paul, entitled “Report to the Secretary on the Acquiescence of this Government in the Murder of the Jews”, dated 13 January 1944, was redrafted by Henry Morgenthau under the final title “A Personal Appeal to the President”, dated 16 January, and submitted along with a “rough draft of an executive order creating the War Refugee Board”; see Mashberg (1977, 174). 12. Roswell and Marjorie McClelland Papers, Series 2: Biographical Information 1948–1995, USHMM. 13. Max Wallace, quoted in an interview with the USC Shoah Foundation, https://sfi.usc.edu/news/2018/05/22041-­n ew-­b ook-­c hallenges-­ conventional-­wisdom-­about-­why-­nazis-­destroyed-­killing. 14. In an interview from 1978, Henry Morgenthau’s secretary Henrietta Klotz describes overhearing an exchange in Yiddish between Kalmanowitz and a fellow rabbi, in which the former asked if he had “cried well”, suggesting

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that he was performing the image of the emotive orthodox Jew in an effort to live up to such expectations, quoted in Medoff (2017, 63). 15. Robert Reams, quoted in  “Roosevelt’s Actions on  Jews Defended”, the New York Times, 26 October 1967, 3. 16. Memorial Page for Dorothy Reams, Kent-Forest Lawn Funeral Home, https://www.kentforestlawn.com/tributes/Dorothy-­Reams. 17. The French version is as follows: “Si on m’avait dit un jour que je pêcherai avec M. Robert Borden Reams dans les canaux de Panama City, j’aurai été tout a fait étonné.” 18. McNulty (2008). 19. See Zeitz (2018). 20. See Kenigsberg (2018). 21. Weine and Laub (1995, 251).

References Erbelding, Rebecca. 2018. Rescue Board: The Untold Story of America’s Efforts to Save the Jews of Europe. New York: Doubleday. Kaplan, Eran. 2005. A Rebel with a Cause: Hillel Kook, Begin and Jabotinsky’s Ideological Legacy. Israel Studies 10 (3): 87–103. Kenigsberg, Ben. 2018. Review of The Four Sisters. New York Times. https:// www.nytimes.com/2018/11/13/movies/shoah-­four-­sisters-­review.html Lanzmann, Claude, et  al. 1991. The Obscenity of Understanding: An Evening with Claude Lanzmann. American Imago 48 (4): 473–495. Mashberg, Michael. 1977. Documents Concerning the American State Department and the Stateless European Jews, 1942–1944. Jewish Social Studies 39 (1/2): 163–182. McNulty, Charles. 2008. Review of Accomplices by Bernard Weinraub. Los Angeles Times, July 25. https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/la-­et-­ accomplices25-­2008jul25-­story.html Medoff, Rafael. 2001. Review of Louis Rapoport, Shake Heaven and Earth: Peter Bergson and the Struggle to Rescue the Jews of Europe. Holocaust and Genocide Studies 15 (1): 136–139. ———, ed. 2017. Too Little, and Almost Too Late: The War Refugee Board and America’s Response to the Holocaust. Washington: David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies. Peck, Sarah E. 1980. The Campaign for an American Response to the Nazi Holocaust. Journal of Contemporary History 15 (2): 367–400. Penkower, Monty. 1981. In Dramatic Dissent: The Bergson Boys. American Jewish History 70 (3): 281–309.

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Raider, Mark. 2004. ‘Irresponsible, Undisciplined Opposition’: Ben Halpern on the Bergson Group and Jewish Terrorism in Pre-state Palestine. American Jewish History 92 (3): 313–360. Weine, Stevan, and Dori Laub. 1995. Narrative Constructions of Historical Realities in Testimony with Bosnian Survivors of ‘Ethnic Cleansing’. Psychiatry 58 (3): 246–260. Wyman, David S., and Rafael Medoff. 2002. A Race Against Death: Peter Bergson, America, and the Holocaust. New York: The New Press. Zeitz, Matt Soller. 2018. Review of The Four Sisters. https://www.rogerebert. com/reviews/shoah-­four-­sisters-­2018

Index1

A Abbott, H. Porter, 278, 279, 287n45, 287n47, 287n48, 287n49, 287n51 Abjection, 255 Abolitionism, 111, 113, 114, 121, 122 Abraham, Nicolas, 177 The Shell and the Kernel, 177 Abscesses, 61 Abstractness, 252 Absurdity, 56, 135, 137, 138, 142, 160n69 Abuse, 51, 139, 142 Access, 54, 56, 57, 59, 61, 64n16, 89, 90, 99, 101 Accountability, 80 Accumulation, 171 Accusation, 171 Achille Lauro, the, 71, 78

Acknowledgment, 153 Activism, 92, 103, 107n54 Activist, 91, 97, 102, 103 Activist refugee support groups, 91 Actors, 91 Adaptation, 156, 158n22 Addicts, 52 Addressee, 50, 58 Adjudication, 89, 90 Adorno, Theodor, 69, 83n6, 83n7, 83n8, 306 Negative Dialectics, 69 Adverb, 251, 255, 261n29 Advocacy, 96, 103 Aesthetic, 137, 145–148, 153, 155 Aesthetics of parallel periodizations, 71, 78 Aevum, 152, 154, 155 Affection, 170, 179, 180 affective response, 60

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 R. Freiburg, G. Bayer (eds.), The Ethics of Survival in Contemporary Literature and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83422-7

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INDEX

Affects, 175, 178 Affinity, 173 Afflictions, 140 Afghanistan, 61, 73, 170 Africa, 71, 80, 85n90, 89, 93, 94 African, 115, 121, 126n8, 126n9 Afterlife, 134 Agamben, Giorgio, 49, 50, 52, 64n1, 64n2, 64n3, 65n31, 69, 74, 82n3, 82n4, 83n5, 83n33, 83n34, 84n35, 206, 217n12, 248, 258n3 Remnants of Auschwitz, 49, 69 Age, 134, 140, 157, 255 Agency, 92, 96, 97, 253 Aggression, 178, 257 Ailments, 140, 141 Al Gore, 238 Alien Resurrection, 233 Alienation, 150 Allegory, 136 Alliteration, 75 Alterity, 78 Alternation, 172 Alzheimer, 187, 189–191, 193–195, 199 Ambiguity, 60, 155 America, 71 America and the Holocaust, 314 American, 247, 248, 258n4 Améry, Jean, 49 Amis, Martin, 52 Time’s Arrow, or, The Nature of the Offence, 52 Anachronism, 54 Analysis, 255 Anders, Günther, 153 Anger, 101, 102, 149, 174, 175, 182 Anguish, 69, 135 Animal, 76, 79, 255 Animosity, 173, 182 Anonymity, 97

Antagonism, 148 Antarctica, 211, 218n33 Antelme, Robert, 49, 252, 253, 259n14, 259n15, 259n19, 259n20, 259n21 L’Espèce humaine, 252 The Human Race, 252 Anthology, 90, 96 Anthropocene, 26 Anxiety, 138, 140, 142, 148, 159n47, 171 Aquinas, Thomas, 154 Arab, 78, 79 Arabic, 93, 95 Archetype, 249, 250 Argentina, 237 Arghuri, 70 Arikara, 236 Aristotle, 267, 284n8 Army, 168–170, 174, 175, 181 Arnds, Peter, 58 Art, 94, 135–140, 145, 146, 150, 152, 154–156 Artist, 94, 136–139, 146–148, 154 Assent, 253, 254 Assimilation, 92 Association, 98, 171 Asylum, 89, 90, 93, 96, 98, 99, 103, 107n48 Asylum seekers, 89, 90, 96, 98, 99 Atheist, 135, 158n13 Atonality, 145 Atonement, 175 Atrocity, 175, 249, 294–301, 306 Attachment, 53, 55, 249, 252 Attempt, 256 Attention, 49, 53, 54, 57, 60–62, 74, 78, 85n81, 96, 255, 257 Attention economy, 197–199 Atwood, Margaret, 112, 215, 218n41, 218n42 Aurora, Simone, 176

 INDEX 

Auschwitz, 70, 79, 80, 83n4, 247–258, 258n1, 259n9, 260n25, 313, 317, 321, 327 Australia, 93, 99, 100, 102, 104, 106n25, 106n35, 107n46 White Australia policy, 99 Australian border force, 93 Austria, 49 Authenticity, 90, 146 Author, 90, 256 Authorities, 62, 103, 153, 250 (Auto)thanatography, 135 Autobiographical fiction, 93 Autobiography, 96, 104 Autonomy, 58, 78 sovereign subject, the, 58 Autopsy, 53–55, 58, 59 Awareness, 91, 98 B Bach, Johann Sebastian, 144 Bacon, Francis, 9 Bacon, Yehuda, 301 Baltimore Jewish Community Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, 293 Banality, 257, 261n35 Barbed wire, 255 Bare life, 248, 252, 253 Barnes, Julian, 69–82, 84n44, 84n45 Before She Met Me (1982), 134 Flaubert’s Parrot (1984), 134 A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters (1989), 70, 75–77, 79, 81, 134 The Lemon Table (2004), 134 Levels of Life (2013), 135 The Noise of Time (2016), 136 Nothing to Be Frightened Of (2008), 134 The Only Story (2018), 135 The Porcupine (1992), 134, 158n22

335

The Sense of an Ending (2011), 134 “Three Simple Stories,” 76 Basra, 168 Batman, 233 Battle, 253, 254 BBC Radio, 188 Beatings, 100 Becher, Kurt, 321 Beckett, Samuel, 103, 138, 234 Waiting for Godot (1952), 138 Beckford, William, 116 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 144 Behavior, 255–257 Belatedness, 168 Belonging, 91–93 Belsen, 77 Benjamin, Walter, 154, 205, 212, 214, 217n9 Bentham, Jeremy, 223 Berg, Alban, 145 Berger, John, 60 King, A Street Story, 60 Bergson, Peter, 312–321, 324, 326, 328, 329n2, 329n10 Bermuda, 313, 324, 327 Bern, 319, 321 Bernstein, Michael André, 278, 287n46 Berry, Wendell, 239 Bettelheim, Bruno, 20, 21, 69, 249, 258n5 Bhabha, Homi, 92, 106n16 Bible, 78 Big House, The, 142–144 Biographer, 136 Biography, 136, 137, 150, 156, 161n81 Biopolitics, 60 Bios, 60 Biren, Paula, 328 Birenbaum, Halina, 268, 270–272, 280, 282, 285n9, 285n16, 285n17, 285n18

336 

INDEX

Birkenau, 52, 253 Black Lives Matter, 112 Black Mediterranean, the, 89 Blade Runner, 235 Blanchot, Maurice, 80, 252, 259n14, 259n16, 259n17 Bland, Rachel, 188, 189 Blassim, Hassan, 105 Bloodthirstiness, 142 Boats, 93, 94 Bodensee, 303 Body, 59, 60, 63, 90, 98, 256 Boethius, 5 Bones, 257 Boochani, Behrouz, 99–104 No Friend but the Mountains, 99–105 Book, 248–251, 254, 256–258, 258n4, 260n25 Borders, 89, 91, 92, 99, 103, 176 Bosnia, 57, 170 Boundary, 248 Bourdieu, Pierre, 195, 200n41 Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE), 169 The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, 273 Brain, 171 Bravery, 178 Bread, 252 Breakdown, 134, 143 Breaking Bad, 209 Breckinridge Lodge, Samuel Miller, 324, 326, 327 Britain, 90 Brontë, Charlotte, 117, 118, 127n30, 127n32 Brooks, Kevin, 2 Brooks, Peter, 276, 287n39 Brotherhood, 75 Bruises, 61 Brutality, 256 Buchenwald, 249, 299, 301, 307n21

Bureaucratic procedures, 89 Burial, 170, 172, 180 Butler, Judith, 58, 74, 80, 81, 83n26, 85n80, 85n82, 85n83, 85n96, 85n97, 91, 98, 104, 105n9, 105n10, 105n11, 106n12, 106n13, 106n22, 106n32, 107n60, 203, 255, 256, 261n30 Can One Lead a Good Life in a Bad Life?, 255 frames of perception, 91 Frames of War, 92, 104 Giving an Account of Oneself, 58 precarious lives, 91, 92 C Cacophony, 151 Cadaver, 156 California, 73 Cambodia, 99 Camp, 69, 85n81, 139, 143 concentration camp, 249, 250, 252, 254, 256, 259n7 detention camps, 89, 102 extermination camp, 247 Camus, Albert, 20, 30 The Stranger, 103 Canada, 237 Cancer, 149, 168, 204, 207–209, 211, 212 Cannibalism, 228, 230, 233 Capriciousness, 143 Care, 54, 56, 59 Caribbean, the, 71, 75 Caring for the other, 179 Carter, Angela, 112 Carter, Ellis, 300, 307n21 Caruth, Cathy, 51, 75, 84n41, 114 Unclaimed Experience, 51 Catastrophe, 169, 183n21 Category, 248

 INDEX 

Cattle disease, 169 Celler, Emanuel, 319 Central Committee, 139, 159n47 Cervantes, Miguel de, 2 Challenge, 257 Chaos, 73 Character, 54, 56, 57, 61, 70, 72, 74, 75, 81, 134, 136, 138, 144, 149, 155, 162n92, 172 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 97, 98, 104 The Canterbury Tales, 97 Chernobyl, 71, 76 Childhood, 101, 102, 178, 179 Children, 71, 74, 102, 249, 258n5 Choir, 81 Chorus, 74, 81 Christchurch, 100 Christmas Island, 99, 100 Circumstance, 89, 98, 105 Citizen advocacy, 90 Citizenship, 89, 91–93, 99, 103 Climate, 92 Cluster, 256 Coffin, 182 Cognitive dissonance, 148 Cohabitation, 81 Coherence, 136 Cohesion, 168, 178 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 55, 203 Collaboration, 98 Collaborator, 91 Collection, 97 Collective enterprise, 97 Collectivity, 91 Collins, Sara, 112 The Confessions of Frannie Langton, 112, 114, 115, 121 Colonialism, 70, 77, 100, 105n11 Comfort, 254 Commentary, 98 Commodification, 96 Communality, 81

337

Communicability, 90 Communication, 172 Communism, 145 Communist, 139, 145 Communist movement, 72 Community, 75, 77, 79–82, 96–102, 104 post-traumatic community, 82 Compassion, 92, 257 Composer, 136–144, 147, 149–151, 155–157, 162n91 Concentration camp, 72, 75, 80, 82n3 Condition, 249, 255, 259n7 Confinement, 101 Conflict, 169, 173 Confrontation, 59, 103 Connections, 70, 75–78, 82, 84n45 Connotations, 51 Conscience, 138 Consciousness, 51 Consolation, 56, 182 Consolidation, 89 Consumerism, 94 Contamination, 57 Conversations, 178 Coping mechanism, 119 Coroner, 55 Corpse, 52, 53, 55, 59, 79, 152, 161n85, 170, 180 Coryphaeus, 53 Cost, 98 Countervisuality, 62 Courage, 249 Coward, 141, 146, 147 Cowardice, 141, 156 Cow disease, 168, 169, 173, 174 Craps, 114, 126n17 Creativity, 63 Cremation, 53 Crematorium, 253 Crime, 50, 71, 102 Crime novel, 117

338 

INDEX

Crisis, 50, 59, 134, 144 crisis of representation, 90 Criticism, 146, 150, 155, 158n25 Critique, 91, 94, 99, 102 Cross-cultural connections, 77 Cry, 253 Crypt, 178, 180, 181 Cult, 148, 155 Cultural heritage, 93 Cultural production, 104 Culture, 82, 255 Custom, 255 Cyprus, 72 D Dabydeen, David, 111 A Harlot’s Progress, 111 Dachau, 249 D’Aguiar, Fred, 111 Feeding the Ghosts, 111 The Longest Memory, 111 Dante Alighieri, 6, 55 Dantesque, 255 Inferno, 55 Darkness, 250 Darwin, Charles, 1 de La Mettrie, Julien Offray L’homme machine (1748), 147 de Sade, Marquis, 116 Death, 49, 51, 53, 55, 74, 91, 93, 95, 100, 104, 107n54, 134, 135, 137, 139, 140, 142–146, 149–151, 153, 156, 157, 160n73, 161n82, 168–171, 173–177, 180, 181, 248, 250, 252–255, 259n12, 260n23, 261n32 Death camp, 49 Death Mills, 300, 301 DeBaggio, Thomas, 187, 189, 191, 193, 194, 197, 199n1, 199n10,

200n17, 200n18, 200n30, 200n31, 200n32 Debate, 91 Debilitation, 93 Decency, 173 Declamation, 101 Defoe, Daniel, 2, 3, 11, 39n52, 41n111, 116 Degradation, 100 Dehumanisation, 102, 175 Deification, 249 Delbo, Charlotte, 80, 278 Deleuze, Gilles, 78 Demand, 252 Dementia, 134, 135, 187–199, 199n9 Denial, 57, 175, 182 Denmark, 93 Denunciation, 80, 101, 139, 142 Dependence, 56, 58, 63 Depoliticisation, 92 Deportation, 99 Deportees, 252–254 Deprivation, 53 Deracination, 169 Dereliction, 54 Derrida, Jacques, 74, 83n25, 204, 205, 207, 213, 216, 217n7 Des Pres, Terrence, 74, 217n15, 249–251, 258n5, 258n6, 259n11, 259n12 Desert trip, 93 Desire, 171, 173–176, 182 Despair, 135, 138, 149 Despoliation, 80 Despondency, 172 Destruction, 144, 179 Detainees, 96, 98, 101 Detention, 89, 91, 93, 96–99, 101–104, 105n3, 108n61 Detention policies, 91, 102 Deterrence, 93, 99, 102–104 Deterritorialisation, 176

 INDEX 

Deviance, 100 Devon, 168, 169, 171 Dialogue, 98 Diaspora, 89, 101 DiCaprio, 225, 236, 238 Dictator, 134, 139, 142, 145, 147, 148, 154, 161n81 Dictatorship, 147, 148 Didi-Huberman, George, 49, 51, 63, 64n10, 64n11 La survivance des lucioles, 63 Survival of the Fireflies, 63 Die Feuerprobe – Novemberpogrom 1938, 296 Dignity, 75, 98, 248, 252, 254, 257 Dilemma, 146, 179, 182 Disappearance, 251 Disappointment, 157, 179 Disbelief, 57 Discrimination, 76, 78, 89 Disease, 140, 175 Disempowerment, 101 Disgrace, 247 Diski, Jenny, 203–216, 217n20 Disorientation, 101 Displacement, 71, 90 Dispossession, 58, 63 Dissemination, 62 Distance, 82, 255 Distortion, 90 Distress, 101 Documentary, 136 Documentary films, 90 Domination, 81 Donat, Alexander, 14, 22 Dossers, 52 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 2 Doubts, 172 Dov Kook, Rabbi, 314 Dream, 75, 101, 107n48, 181 nightmare, 181 nightmarish dream, 181

339

Drug-addiction, 74 Dumbness, 57 Durlacher, Gerd, 301 Duty, 253 Dystopic, 221, 223, 225, 228, 230, 233 E Eaglestone, Robert, 266, 267, 275, 284n4, 284n5, 284n7, 287n33 Ebensee, 302 Echo, 71, 72, 76, 78, 97 Eddo-Lodge, Reni, 112, 122 Editing, 247 Edition, 247, 258n1 Editors, 96–98, 103 Efficiency, 62 Effort, 257 El Dorado, 95 Election, 99 Elegy, 19, 53–56, 62, 156, 182 elegiac, the, 53, 62 elegiac form, 56 Elevator, 138 Elias, Ruth, 328 Elite, 144, 145, 155 Elite discourse, 96 Eloquence, 52 Emancipation, 77 Emblem, 58, 249 emblematic, 137, 139 Emergency, 248 Emotions, 170, 180, 181 Empathy, 91, 92, 94, 96, 102, 104, 136, 141, 170, 172, 174, 180 empathic unsettlement, 173 Empiriocriticism, 147 Encrypted voice, 179 Endurance, 91 Enemy, 140, 141, 147, 149, 175 enemies of the people, 142, 145

340 

INDEX

Engagement, 56, 61, 63, 92, 94, 98, 105n11 England, 71, 72, 169 English, 102, 106n30 Enlightenment, 9, 10, 25 Enslavement, 111, 112, 121, 122, 124 Environment, 61, 98 Environmental, 221–239 Epigraph, 55 Epilogue, 71, 74, 75 Epiphany, 134, 157n5 epiphanic, 134, 137, 158n7 Epistemology, 133 Epitome, 79, 134, 139 Equiano, Olaudah, 111, 113, 122, 123, 126n9, 126n12 Eritrea, 93, 94 Eritrean, 93 Erosion, 144, 146 Escape, 101 Essay, 52, 53, 70, 160n66, 160n74, 162n94, 177 essayistic, 134, 136 Essence, 252 Estrangement, 156 Ethical thinking, 156 Ethics, 90, 91, 97 ethical actions, 254 ethical act of sharing, 178 ethical bond, 81 ethical capacity, 52 ethical encounter, 82 ethical faithfulness, 62 ethical gesture, 60 ethical paradigm, 74 ethical reflection, 60 ethical sense of responsibility, 79 ethical thinking, 148 ethics of alterity, 177 ethics of care, 78 fragmentary ethics, 256 heroic ethics, 249, 254

Levinasian ethics, 78 western ethical value system, 89 Ethics of survival, 170 Ethiopia, 94 Ethiopian, 72 Etymology, 58 Europe, 71, 89, 145 Fortress Europe, 89 Evaristo, Bernardine, 111 Event violent event, 51 Evil, 249, 257, 261n35, 262n37 Evilness, 147 Example, 249, 252, 259n7, 260n25 Excendance, 174 Exclusion, 89 Execution, 140 Exhaustion, 256 Existence, 134, 140, 144, 147, 149–151, 154, 156, 157, 176, 178 biological existence, 248 good life, 248, 254, 255 Exodus, 93, 106n11 Expense, 258 Experience, 49, 51, 53, 54, 56–60, 62 survivors’ experience, 249 Experiment, 145, 146, 255–257 Experimentation, 52, 59, 255 Explanation, 253 Exploitation, 72, 73, 76, 80 Exploration, 251 Exposure, 51, 53, 56, 58, 59 Extermination, 50, 52, 76 Extremity, 52, 57, 90 F Face, 70, 81 Facilitator, 57 Factography, 136 Failure, 50

 INDEX 

Faithfulness, 56, 62 Falklands, the, 57 Family, 56, 72, 79, 82, 98, 168, 169, 171, 175–178 Fantasy, 56, 178, 182 Farsi, 102 Fascination, 250 Fear, 57, 97, 99, 138, 141, 143 Feelings, 169, 178, 180 Feiner, Yehiel, 21 Felman, Shoshana, 114 Feminine, 169 Feminist theory, 100 Fetish, 115 Feuerbach, Ludwig, 148 Fiction, 52, 57, 59, 64n16, 171 retrospective fiction, 172 Fight, 182 Filmmaker, 99 Final closure, 182 Finney, Brian, 76 Flanagan, Richard, 102 Flashback, 51 Flaubert, Gustave, 2 Flight, 94, 96, 104 Focalisation, 170 Folktales, 101 Formalism, 139 Formalist, 145 Forter, Greg, 168 Fortleben, 74 Fortunoff Archive, 293 Foucault, Michel, 12, 100, 107n43 Fragility, 253 Fragment, 91, 95, 102, 117, 124, 137, 146, 156, 157 fragmented structure, 70 Fragmentation, 146, 147 Fragmented, 114, 117, 119, 120, 127n39 Frame, 70 Framework, 93

341

France, 49 Frank, Anne, 273 Franzen, Jonathan, 190, 195, 196, 200n13, 200n14, 200n16, 200n38, 200n47 Freedom, 102, 140, 147, 171, 177, 255 Freud, Sigmund, 18, 55, 177 Friction, 176 Friendship, 254 Funeral, 170, 172, 175, 180, 181 G Gaia hypothesis, 228 Gallow, 253 Ganteau, Michel, 78, 82, 85n70, 85n71, 182 The Ethics and Aesthetics of Vulnerability in Contemporary British Fiction, 78, 182 Garden of Eden, 235, 241n26 Gas chambers, 152 Gatwick Detainees Welfare Group, the, 97 Geiger, Arno, 192 Gender, 70 Genealogy, 103 Geneva, 322 Genius, 141, 142, 145, 147, 148 Genocide, 70, 77 Genova, Lisa, 192, 195 Genre, 96, 105 Georgia, 74 German, 72, 82, 253 Germany, 139 Gestapo, 77 Gesture, 254 Ghana, 93 Ghetto, 256, 261n33 Ghost, 136, 180–182 Ghost writers, 96

342 

INDEX

Giddens, Anthony, 226, 240n14 Gilroy, Paul, 77 Glikman, Isaak, 155 Glory, 253, 254 Goal, 249, 251, 257 God, 148 Goebbels, Joseph, 316 Goldstein, Ann, 250 Gordon, Robert, 254, 260n25, 260n26 Primo Levi’s Ordinary Virtues, 254 Gospel, The, 151 Gothic, the, 103, 116, 118, 120 Government, 91, 99 Government policy, 93 Gramsci, Antonio, 72, 83n18, 100 Prison Notebooks, 72 Grave, 52, 250 Great Terror, The, 142, 145, 150–152 Grief, 91, 135, 174, 178 Grizzly Man, 230, 236 Grotesqueness, 137, 138 grotesque, 142 Grotius, Hugo, 9 Group, 57, 79, 176, 183n23 Guantánamo, 73 Guardian, the, 100 Guilt, 69, 71, 73, 82n4, 84n35, 157, 175, 181 survivor guilt, 70 Gulag, 138 Gun, 171, 173, 174, 181 H Haft, Harry, 16 Happiness, 137 Happy ending, 182 Haraway, Donna, 189, 199n8 Hardin, Garrett, 222, 223 Hardness, 175 Harlem, 74

Harmony, 168, 178 Hartman, Geoffrey, 306 Healey, Emma, 193, 196–198, 200n51, 201n58 Health, 140 Heart, 95, 251, 255 Hecht, Ben, 315, 316 Hegemony, 72 Hell, 249 “The Drowned and the Saved,”, 256 Herd, David, 98, 106n27, 106n28, 106n29, 106n31, 107n55 Heritage, 101 Hero, 141, 143, 146, 147, 156, 248, 254 Heroism, 141, 248, 250, 253 Herzog, Werner, 236 Heterodiegetic, 138 Heterotopia, 100 Heydrich, Reinhard, 297 Hierarchy, 96 Hirsch, Afua, 112 Historian, 136, 257, 262n36 History, 51, 70, 71, 73–76, 137, 138, 142, 144, 151–153, 155, 161n83, 175 cultural history, 248 Hitler, Adolf, 139, 147 Hobbes, Thomas, 9 Hole, 50 Hollywood, 224, 225, 231, 233, 234, 236, 238 Holocaust, 50, 69, 72, 77, 204 Holocaust terminology, 77 Homeland, 82, 98 Homer, Frederic D., 2 Homodiegetic, 138 Homo homini deus est, 148 Honesty, 146, 147, 153, 156, 160n68 Hopelessness, 101 Horizon, 257 Horror, 92, 100, 104

 INDEX 

Hostility, 173 Huberman, Didi Images in Spite of All, 49 Hulme, Mike, 227, 240n17 Human being, 248, 252 Humanism, 91, 105n11 Humanity, 93, 96 Human rights, 91, 97, 102 Human substance, 251 Humiliate, 174 Humiliated, 144, 150 Humiliation, 150–153, 156, 256 Humility, 62 Hunger, 256 Hybridity, 70 Hysteria, 100 I I am Legend, 221–239 Idealism, 138 Identification, 103 Identity, 101, 144, 152, 157, 176, 183n23 Ideology, 100 ideologies, 139, 141 Ignatieff, Michael, 191, 194, 200n19 Illegal entry, 99 Image, 60, 62, 90, 92, 100, 101, 137–139, 249 Imbrication, 77 Immigration, 91, 93, 96, 100, 102 Immigration Detention Centres, 99 Immortality, 154 Impersonality, 148 Impossibility, 52, 53, 56–58, 256 Imprisonment, 139 Inarritu, A.G., 236 Incapacity, 50 Incarceration, 100, 102 Incarnation, 60, 63 Inclusiveness, 103

Incompleteness, 50 Incomprehensibility, 51, 52 Indestructibility, 63 India, 73 Individual, 252, 255, 262n36 Individualism, 145 Individuality, 145, 146, 252 Individuals, 71, 73, 76, 79 Indonesia, 93, 100 Inequality, 91 systemic inequality, 92 Inertia, 253 Infamy, 253, 254 Infantilization, 249 Inhumane practices, 100 Injection, 61 Injustice, 92, 104, 106n11 Inmate, 249, 256 Inquest, 54 Inquiry, 255 Inspiration, 52 Instinct, 137, 251, 253 Instruction, 250 Instruction manual, 248, 255 Integrity, 78, 82, 140, 144, 146 Intellect, 144 Intention, 97, 177 Interaction, 101 Interdependence, 56, 58, 70, 78 Interdependency, 98 Interior monologue, 171, 172 International obligations, 92 Internment, 100 Interpretation, 74, 80, 92 Interregnum, 72 Interrelations, 77 Intertextual relationship, 97 Intervention, 91, 93 Introjection, 177, 179 Invisibility, 53, 54, 60–62, 90 Iran, 99, 101, 107n48 Iranian, 100–103, 107n48

343

344 

INDEX

Iraq, 168, 169 Irish, 79 Irmgard von zur Mühlen, 307n14 Iron Curtain, 271 Irony, 136, 148–150, 161n78, 161n81 Isolation, 70, 148, 149 Israel, 72 Italy, 72 J Jabotinsky, Ze’ev, 314 Jail, 101 Jamaica, 114 Jamaican, 116, 121 Jealousy, 177–179, 182 Jens, Tilman, 192 Jewish, 70–72, 76, 77, 81 Jew/Jews, 72, 77, 78 Joint Committee on Human Rights, 104 Journal, 80 Journalists, 99 Journey/journeys, 71, 73, 90, 93–95, 98, 170, 171 Judgment, 256, 257 Justice, 90–92, 96, 104, 106n25 Justification/justifications, 74, 94 K Kafka, Franz, 103, 138 “Before the Law” (1915), 138 The Trial, 103 Kalmanowitz, Rabbi, 322, 323, 329n14 Kavanagh, Pat, 135 Kay, Jackie, 111 Keen, Suzanne, 269, 285n12 Kent Refugee Help, 97, 102

Khaal, Abu Bakr, 93–95, 104, 106n18, 106n20, 106n21 African Titanics, 93–96, 101, 103, 104 Khorana, Sukhmani, 92 Khrennikov, Tikhon Nikolayevich Khrennikov, 142 Killer instinct, 174 King, Martin Luther, 75, 100 Klotz, Henrietta, 329n14 Knowledge, 133, 154 Kook, Rabbi Abraham Isaac, 314 Korte, Barbara, 60 Kral, Françoise, 71, 78 Kristallnacht, 297 Kurdi, Alan, 90 Kurdish-Iranian, 99 Kyriarchal System, the, 100, 101 L Laboratory, 256 Lacuna, 50, 52, 53 Lager, 49 La Mettrie, Julien Offray de, 147 Lament, 93 Lamentations, 81 Landscape, 89, 101 Language/languages, 75, 81, 96–98, 178, 255 Lanzmann, Claude, 311–329, 329n1 Lasch, Christopher, 248, 249, 258n4 The Minimal Self, 248 Latency, 60 Lateness, 51 Laub, Dori, 50, 55, 57, 58, 64n5, 64n6, 64n16, 64n17, 64n25, 114 Laudanum, 115, 120, 123 Laughter, 149 Laugier, Sandra, 60 Lazarus, 4

 INDEX 

Le Blanc, Guillaume, 60 Lec, Stanislav Jerzey, 141 Legal advice, 90 Legal conditions, 90 Legends, 93 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 11 Leiser, Erwin, 291–306, 307n12 Lejeune, Phillipe, 277 Lenin, Vladimir, 147 Lenk, Peter, 303 Lessing, Doris, 209, 211–216, 218n30, 218n36 Lesson, 249 Lest We Forget, 307n21 Levi, Primo, 49, 50, 69, 79, 80, 82n1, 82n2, 82–83n4, 85n78, 85n79, 247, 248, 250, 251, 253–258 “The Drowned and the Saved,” 69, 255, 256 If This Is a Man, 49, 247, 248, 251, 253, 255–257, 258n1 Se questo è un uomo, 248, 258n1 Shemà, 247 Survival in Auschwitz, 247, 248 Levinas, Emmanuel, 81, 85n102, 184n49 Levine, Michael G., 56, 73 Levy, Andrea, 111 Liberation, 72, 80, 94, 267–272, 276–280, 282, 285n15 Liberia, 73, 80, 93 Liberty, 149 Lichtman, Ada, 328 Life, 52, 54, 57, 60, 63, 91–99, 102, 104, 133, 135–137, 139–141, 143–145, 148–154, 156, 157, 160n60, 161n81, 161n82, 168, 169, 172, 173, 175–179, 183n22, 248–252, 254–257, 258n5, 260n23, 260n26, 262n36 bad life, 251, 255, 257 bare life, 60

345

impersonal life, 252 normal life, 55 Life-writing, 188, 192, 193, 196, 197, 199 Ligens, Ella, 69 Limbo, 55, 56 Liminality, 154 Limitation/limitations, 50, 52, 53, 56, 57 Lingens-Reiner, Ella, 79 Prisoners of Fears, 79 Literary canon, 98 Literary studies, 52 Literature, 51, 56, 60, 63 Lithuania, 314 Litvinova, Flora, 141 Living dead, 152 Lokuge, Chandani, 90 London, 114, 118, 120, 128n50, 171 London School of Economics, 316 Loneliness, 54, 135 Loss/losses, 50, 53, 55, 56, 90, 91, 95, 98, 168–170, 176–179, 181, 182, 183n24 Lovelock, James, 228 Low, Gail, 74 Loyalty, 249 Lucidity, 249 Lyotard, Jean-François, 27, 49 The Differend, 49, 50 M Madness, 135, 142, 173 Magic, 94 Magma, 253 Majdanek, 268, 297, 307n14 Malaise, 170 Males, 167, 179 Malpractices, 100 Maltreatment, 102 Man, 248, 249, 251–254, 257

346 

INDEX

Mandelstam, Osip, 151 Manhood, 167, 173, 182 Manifestation, 250 Man in the Wilderness, 236 Manipulation, 97 Manliness, 179 Manne, Robert, 104 Mansoubi, Moones, 102 Manus, 99–103, 106n35, 107n46, 107n61 Marginality, 104 Marionette, 147 Marleston, 168, 170, 181 Marley, Bob, 234 Marton, Hanna, 328 Marxism-Leninism, 148 Mass, 247, 254 Mass media/mass-media, 90, 91, 318 Mass media reports, 90 Master, 80 Materialism, 147 Materiality, 63 Matheson, Richard, 232 Mauthausen, 302 Maverick, 149 Mayer, Saly, 321, 322 Mayflower, Sargent, 300–302 McCarthy, Cormac, 2, 214 McClelland, Roswell, 312, 313, 320–323, 329n12 McCloy, John, 321 McEwan, Ian, 2, 13, 27, 39n58, 40n63, 40n64 McGregor, Jon, 49–63, 64n13 Even the Dogs, 49–63, 64n16 McIntyre, Alasdair, 58 Meaning, 51, 53, 62, 168, 172, 173, 178, 181 Media exposure, 90 Media support, 90 Medusa, the, 70, 78, 79 Mein Kampf, 296, 307n12

Melancholia, 56, 177, 178, 182 melancholic mourning, 56 survivors’ melancholia, 56 Melancholy, 19, 135 Memoir/memoirs, 113, 114, 123, 124, 150, 151 political memoir, 91 Memory, 49, 50, 54, 101, 115, 118–121, 124, 126n18, 127n39, 133, 137, 143, 153, 157, 160n63, 161n85, 251 cultural memory, 77 knots of memory, 70, 77 memories, 170, 175, 178, 179, 183n23 multidirectional memory, 70, 77 Mental health, 98 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 195, 200n40 Merlin, Samuel, 314, 321, 328 Metanarrative, 71 Metaphor, 140, 155, 161n82, 162n99, 162n100, 249 Mexican Gulf, 325 Meyer, Henry, 297 Middle East, 89 Migrants, 90, 93, 97–99, 103 Migration, 94, 100, 105 Migration bug, 94 Migratory influxes, 89 Milton, John, 115 Mind, 250, 255 Mindset, 248 Mirror deforming mirror, 250, 258n7 Mirzoeff, Nicholas, 62 Misery, 73, 135 Misery porn, 237 Misrepresentation, 90 Misunderstanding/misunderstandings, 172, 176

 INDEX 

Mitscherlich, Thomas, 291–306, 307n18, 307n19, 307n20, 307n21 Mobilisation, 94 Mode, 182 Modernist influences, 103 Modernity, 58 Molotov, Vyacheslav Mikhailovich, 142 Moment, 248 Money, 137, 140 Monologue, 54 framing monologues, 71 Monster, 249 Mood, 53 Morality, 72, 148, 254, 256, 261n30 moral sphere, 257 Moral respectability, 93 Moral structure, 255 Morgenthau, Henry, 329n11, 329n14 Morrison, Toni, 112 Mortification, 150 Mortuary, 55, 58 Motif/motifs, 71, 72, 78, 94 Mourners, 54, 64n13 Mourning, 55, 56, 64n13, 135, 167, 172, 177, 178, 182 Mouth-and-foot disease, 169 Mozart, Amadeus, 144 Munro, Alice, 193 Murmur, 253, 254 Muselmänner, 299 Music, 94, 138, 139, 141, 144–157, 160n63, 162n91, 162n97, 162n98 Musician/musicians, 140, 144–147, 151, 152 Mussorgsky, Modest, 144 Mutilation/mutilated, 137, 138, 140, 146, 147 Mutiny, 253 Mutism, 172 Mythic, 221

347

N Nabokov, Nikolas, 151 Nachleben, 51 Nachträglichkeit, 206 Nagasaki, 73 Narcissism, 182 Narration, 71, 74, 78, 136, 170, 171 choral narration, 52 chorus, 53–55, 57 collective narrator, the, 53 common voice, the, 57 narrative web, 75 spectral chorus, 53, 55, 57, 58 Narrative/narratives, 49, 50, 52, 55–57, 59, 61–63, 71, 74, 82, 83n26, 93, 95–98, 102–104 asylum narratives, 90 Narrative voice, 52 Narrator, 93, 94, 96, 104, 112, 119, 121, 122, 124, 125n1, 169, 170, 172 Nation, 168 Nationalism, 72 Nation states, 89 Native American, 237 Nature, 168, 169 Nauru islands, 99, 102 Nazi SS, the, 253, 254 Nazi Germany, 77 Nazi persecution, 71 Nazis, 50 Need, 247, 251–253, 255 Negative phenomenology, 61 Negativity, 70 Neocolonial practices, 100 Neoliberalism, 25, 42n118 Neo-slave narrative, 111, 112, 114, 122, 124, 125n1 Nerves, 141 Neustadt-Glewe, 268, 271 New materialism, the, 63

348 

INDEX

New Orleans, 74 News, 256 New York, 73, 151 New York Times, 316, 330n15 New Zealand, 99 Night and Fog, 297, 300 Nightmare/nightmares, 57, 105 Noah’s Ark, 70, 76, 79 Non-citizen/non-citizens, 90, 92 Non-refoulement, 99 Norm/norms, 91, 103, 150 Northern Ireland, 57 Not Idly By: Peter Bergson, 314 Novelist, 136 Novel/novels, 52, 53, 55–58, 60–63, 64n13, 70–73, 75–78, 81, 82, 90, 93, 95, 167, 170, 171, 173, 179, 182 Numbness, 179, 182 Nussbaum, Martha, 60, 192, 200n24, 200n25, 200n26 O Objectal correlative, 178 Oblivion, 152 Ocean voyage, 100 Oedipus complex, 182 Offence, 52, 53 Official stories, 98 Ohrdruf, 301 Old Bailey, 114, 122 Olusoga, David, 112 Omnipresence, 54, 57 Omniscience, 58 Ontology, 133 Operation Sovereign Borders, 93, 99 Opinion, 92, 93, 103 Oppression, 72 Oral culture, 101 Ordeal, 70, 71, 138, 142, 144, 155 Order, 175, 176, 180, 256

Organization, 81 Origin, 255 Orphan, 82 Ostracism, 138 Othello, 72 Outrage, 102, 104 Outsider, 149 Overexposure, 90 Oxfordshire, 170 Oxymoron, 150 Oyster, 155 P Pacific Solution, the, 99, 102 Paean, 74 Pain, 82, 140, 148 Pakistan, 73 Palestine, 72, 312, 314, 315 Panama City, 324, 325, 330n17 Pandemic, 94, 229–235 Papua New Guinea, 99 Papua New Guinean Supreme Court, 99 Paradigm, 250 Paradigm shift, 78 Paradise, 94 Paradox/paradoxical, 50, 135, 249 Parallels, 97 Paralysis, 140 Parasite/parasites, 79, 90 Paratexts, 102, 103, 277–280 Paris, 74 Party, the, 149, 153, 155, 161n80 Passivity, 55 Patterns, 71, 76 Pawnee, 236, 237 Pearl, 155 Pedwell, Carolyn, 92 Pehle, John, 312, 313, 317–323, 325–327 Pelluchon, Corine, 60

 INDEX 

Perception/perceptions, 58, 61, 62, 90, 154, 250 Peril, 93 Permanence, 51, 57 Perpetrator, 52, 175 Persecution, 72, 92, 99 Persian, 101 Person, 248, 250–253 Personality/personalities, 144, 146, 149, 152, 156, 160n69, 179, 249 Personhood, 91, 194–196, 257 Perspective, 62, 170 Phelan, James, 265, 284n1, 284n2 Phenomenon, 247 Phillips, Caryl, 69–82, 83n12, 83n13, 111 Cambridge, 111, 122 Crossing the River, 70, 71, 73–75, 80, 81, 111 Higher Ground, 70–72, 77, 81 The Nature of Blood, 70, 72, 75, 80, 82 Philomela, 3 Philosophy, 49, 60, 134 Physical, 137, 140, 141, 144 Pimpf war jeder, 296 Pity, 99–103 Plague/plagues, 93, 94, 169, 175 Plaintiff, 50 Planet of the Apes, 233 Plantation, 77 Plight, 91 Plot/plots, 70 Plural, 52, 57, 251, 253 Poem, 247 Poetics of mnemonic relation, 71 Poetics of obscenity, 61–62 Poetry, 53, 101, 104 Policy, 93, 96, 98–100 Political agenda, 62 Political aims, 97, 100 Political debate, 90

349

Political impact, 105 Politics, 60, 63, 90, 91, 102, 107n54 Pollution, 63 Polyphony/polyphonic, 145 Polyptych, 78 Poole, Adrian, 167, 182 Pope, Alexander, 140 Port Moresby, 99 Postcolonial, 113–115 Posterity, 155 Post-mortem reconstitution, 54 Potency, 250 Poverty, 74, 94, 223 Power, 61, 92, 93, 136, 137, 140, 142–144, 146, 148–150, 154, 156, 252, 254, 255 Powerlessness, 252 Pravda, 139, 143, 145, 146 “Muddle instead of Music,” 139, 143 Precariousness, 70, 77, 79 Precarity, 80, 81, 90, 92, 96, 104, 105n11 Presence, 56, 57, 95, 252 Presentiment, 250 Pressure group, 91 Price, 258 Prince, Mary, 111, 113 Principle, 79 Prison, 99, 100, 104, 146 Prison narratives, 100 Prize, 147 Prokofiev, Sergei Sergeyevich Prokofiev, 144 Prolepsis, 137 Prologue, 71 Prometheus, 3 Pronoun, 79, 80, 251 Propaganda, 154 Property, 251 Prose, 58, 65n32, 100, 101, 103, 104 Prostitution, 74

350 

INDEX

Protagonist, 52, 55 Protection, 91, 174 Proximity, 101, 256 Psyche, 168 Psychoanalysis, 51 Psychological, 136, 137, 141, 144 Public sentiment, 90 the public sphere, 90, 105 Publishing house, 250 Pufendorf, Samuel von, 9 Punishment, 175, 182 Punke, Michael, 236 Puppet, 147 Purges, 139, 145, 160n70 Purpose, 251 Puzzlement, 257 Q Quaker, 321 Queer, 112, 117, 119 Question, 248, 251, 255, 258n5, 261n30 R Rabinowitz, Peter, 274, 275, 277, 283, 286n31, 287n34, 287n36, 287n40, 287n43, 287n44 Race, 70 Racism, 72–74, 77, 100 Rage, 176, 177 Ramazani, Jahan, 56, 182 Rape, 115 Rationale, 103 Ravensbrück, 268 Readers, 90–93, 96, 102, 104 Realism, 105, 136 Reality, 55, 58, 59, 62, 176 reality effect, 59 Reams, Robert Borden, 312, 313, 324–327, 330n15, 330n16, 330n17

Rebellion, 75, 81, 101, 249, 254 Reception, 91, 103, 250, 257 Recipient/recipients, 91 Recollection, 168, 170 Reconsideration, 103 Recovery, 54 Recuperation, 95 Re-education, 147 Reflection, 173, 175, 248, 256 Reforming purpose, 104 Refoulement, 99 Refuge, 73, 100 Refugee/refugees, 91 refugee crisis, 89 refugees, 72, 76 refugee stories, 90, 91, 102 Refugee Tales, 96–98, 101–104 Refugium, 155 Refusal, 172, 175, 180 Reggae, 75 Regime, 134, 138–140, 142, 145, 151, 153, 155, 161n80, 254, 256, 260n28 Regional Processing Centres, 99 Regressus ad uterum, 52 Relationality, 56, 58, 91 Relativity, 133, 154 Reliance, 58 Remembering, 171 Remembrance Day, 168, 169 Renegotiation, 103 Repatriation, 80, 85n90, 99 Repetition compulsion, 171, 175, 177 Repetitions, 71, 72, 78 Representation, 59, 60, 90, 92, 94, 96–98, 101 Repression, 175 Reprint, 250 Reputation, 94, 143 Resignation, 253 Resilience, 63, 70, 73, 77, 82, 100–102, 104, 114, 123, 124

 INDEX 

Resistance, 62, 63, 104, 105, 254, 255 Resnais, Alain, 297 Respect, 101 Response/responses, 89, 91, 92, 95, 96, 103, 248 affective response, 92 Responsibility, 52, 56, 63, 64n16, 91, 92, 98, 105n11, 106n35 Responsiveness, 78 Revault d’Allonnes, Myriam, 59 Revenance, 51 The Revenant, 221–239, 241n32 Revision, 56 Revolution, 72, 75 Rhetoric, 94, 255 Rhizomatic networks, 77 Rhodesia, 215 Rhys, Jean, 112 Wide Sargasso Sea, 112, 117 Ricoeur, Paul, 206–209, 216, 217n17, 217n18, 217n19 Rigor, 257 Rimsky-Korsakov, Nikolai, 144 Rio, 74 Rocky Mountains, 237 Role, 94, 98, 102 Romania, 318, 319 Romanian, 72, 82 Romero, George, 228 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 317, 319, 330n15 Rosenfeld, Natania, 274, 286n29 Rothberg, Michael, 29, 70, 75, 77, 78, 84n40, 84n52, 84n53, 84n54, 84n69, 283, 288n63, 288n64 Rothschild, Erika, 297 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 116 Routine, 181 Ruin, 169 Rushdie, Salman, 73 Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights, 73

351

Russia, 136, 137, 139, 142, 145 Russian/Russians, 82, 137, 139, 151 Rygiel, Kim, 103 S Sadism/sadistic, 147 Safety, 171 Said, Edward, 76 Culture and Imperialism, 76 Saint Louis, the, 71, 76 Sale, 250, 259n9 San Francisco Bay, 305 Sarafian, Richard C., 236 Sarcasm, 136, 150 Sayability, 57 Scapegoat, 90 Scars, 182 Schadenfreude, 24 Schindler’s List, 293 Schizophrenia, 179 Schönberg, Arnold, 145 Schrödinger, Erwin, 207 Schwab, Gabrielle, 51 Schwab, Gustav, 303–305, 308n30 Science fiction, 225, 240n12 Second World War, 274 Security, 171 Selection, 78 Self-alienation, 149 Self-atonement, 173 Self-contempt, 152 Self-denial, 146, 148, 150 Self-estrangement, 150 Self-fashioning, 96 Self-harming, 100, 102 Self-preservation, 248 Self-writing, 104 Sense, 168, 170–172, 174, 176, 178–181, 183n22, 252, 254, 255, 258, 260n23 Seth, Vikram, 218n26 Sexism, 100

352 

INDEX

Sexual abuse, 99 Shakespeare, William, 127n27, 155, 190, 200n12 Shame, 69, 80, 82–83n4, 151, 152, 157 Shamsie, Kamila, 72 Burnt Shadows, 72, 77 Shelley, Mary, 116 Shipwreck, 70, 134, 155, 162n100 Shoah, 49–52, 77, 249, 250, 259n7 Shock, 169, 170 Shortage, 141 Shostakovich, Dmitri Dmitrijewitsch, 136–157, 159n39, 159n40 Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk (1934), 139, 146 Show trial/show trials, 139 Siberia, 139 Significance, 137, 160n74, 172, 250 Silence, 58 Simplification/simplifications, 90 Simultaneity, 171, 172 Sin, 152 Singer, Peter, 223, 224, 235, 239n5 Singularisation, 60 Singularity/singularities, 52, 60, 64n16, 70, 80, 254 Sisyphus, 3 Skype, 100 Slaughter, 169 Slavery, 70, 71, 74, 77, 80 Slavery Abolition Act, 112 Slave/slaves, 71, 73–75, 77, 80, 81, 85n90 Slave trade, 71, 73, 74 Slave Trade Act, 112 Slovakia, 321 Smith, Ali, 97 Smith, Will, 225, 229, 233, 238 Smithereens, 137, 157 Social capability, 94 Social change, 105

Social construct, 61 Socialism, 141, 145 Social media, 102 Social realm, 177, 179 Social relations, 98 Socio-political change, 92 Solace, 80 Solicitation, 60 Solicitude, 104 Solidarity, 70, 75, 78–80, 96, 102–104, 254, 261n30 Solitude, 135, 172 Solution, 92 Somalia, 93 Sonderkommando, 72, 253, 256, 262n36 Songs, 93, 94 Sorcerer, 94 Sorcery, 93 Sores, 61 Soul, 95, 144, 149, 150, 153 South Dakota, 236 Sovereignty, 74, 80, 252 Soviet State, the, 145 Space, 98, 100, 172, 176–178 Space-montage, 172 Spain, 74 Speaking, 178 Spectrality, 52 Spectral soul, 52 Spectre, 51 spectral device, 58 spectral status, 54 spectral survivors, 53, 55, 59, 62 spectres, 61, 74, 100 Spell, 53 Spencer, Herbert, 1 Spielberg, Steven, 293, 294 Spivak, Gayatri, 96, 97, 106n24 subaltern, the, 96 Spring, 251

 INDEX 

Stalin, Joseph, 138–145, 147–155, 159n36, 159n43, 160n69, 160n70, 160n73, 161n81 Stalinism, 141, 147–149, 154 Stalinistic, 139, 145, 154, 156 Starvation, 93 Stateless people, 90, 105n2 Stateless subjects, 89, 102 Stereotype, 90 Sternbuch, Isaac, 321–323 St Gallen, 322 Stowaway, 70, 79 Strategy/strategies, 96, 101, 176 Stratification, 250 Stravinsky, Igor, 144, 151–153 Le Sacre du Printemps (1913), 151 Strength, 249, 253 Stress, 98 Struggle, 143, 250, 253, 255 Style, 136, 146, 158n25 Subaltern/subalterns, 96 Subjectivity, 93 Subjugation, 81 Submission, 253 Submissiveness, 249, 254 Sudan, the, 93, 106n25 Suffering, 53, 73, 75, 77, 78, 82, 90, 92, 98, 104, 136, 137, 142, 150, 155, 158n25, 173 Suicide, 71, 72, 134, 162n92, 170, 181 suicide attempt, 71 Superiority, 74, 97 Superman, 233 Superstes, 53, 58, 59 Supremacy, 74 Surreal, 100, 101, 103 Surveillance, 100, 139 Survival, 49–54, 56–58, 60–63, 91–94, 96, 98, 100, 102, 104, 121–123, 133–138, 140, 141, 143, 144, 147–150, 156, 157,

353

158n8, 161n82, 174–177, 221–239, 247–258, 261n30 cost of survival, 148 physical survival, 73 Survival stories, 134 Survivance, 51, 63, 74 Survive, 117, 120, 123, 124 Surviving, 49, 51–53, 56, 58, 60–63, 135, 144, 250, 256 Survivor/survivors, 50, 51, 53, 54, 56, 57, 59, 69–72, 74, 75, 80, 82, 83n26, 134, 135, 137, 144, 150, 160n61, 161n82, 248, 249 diasporic survivors, 75 hibakusha, 73 mystery survivor, 79 survivor refugees, 91 vulnerable survivors, 76 Susceptibility, 91 Suspicion, 78, 142 Swift, Graham, 167, 170, 182, 183n4 Wish You Were Here, 167, 182 Switzerland, 312, 313, 320, 321 Sycophant, 145 Sydney, 100, 107n61 Symbol, 137 Synergy/synergies, 101, 145 Synonym, 256 Syntax, 251 Syria, 89 T Tale, 93, 96–98, 102, 104 Taylor, Paul W., 224, 238, 240n7, 240n8 Tchaikovsky, Pyotr, 144 Technique, 137, 138, 145 Telepathy, 179 Temptation, 249, 257 Tercet, 256, 261n31 Terminator 2, 235

354 

INDEX

Territory, 93, 105n3, 176 Terror, 139, 140, 143, 153, 170, 174, 179 Terrorist, 170 Testimony/testimonies, 50, 52–54, 56, 58, 60, 64n16, 93–95, 114 testimonial writing, 91, 104 Text, 91, 97, 98, 100, 102, 103, 247, 248, 250, 251, 257, 259n9, 260n26 Themes, 71, 72 Theodicy, 10, 11, 21, 22 Theresienstadt, 301 Third Reich, 139 Third World, 223 Thomas, Dylan, 305 Threshold, 248 Thunberg, Greta, 26, 238 Time, 168, 171, 172, 174, 177–180 Time levels, 136 Titanic, the, 70, 76, 79 Title, 247, 248, 250, 251, 256–258, 258n1, 259n9 original title, 248 titles, 96 Tofighian, Omid, 100 Togetherness, 81 Tomb, 178, 181 Topos, 150, 158n8, 161n83 Torok, Maria, 177 Torture, 100, 140, 143, 148, 156 Totalitarian, 134, 139, 155, 156 Totalitarianism, 148, 160n66, 254 Totality, 60 Tragedy/tragedies, 53, 70, 73, 75, 77, 78, 82, 94, 95, 141, 142, 159n51 Transcendence, 182 Transformation, 169, 175 Transition, 177, 179 Transitoriness, 154 Translation, 58, 247, 251, 257 Translocal spaces, 91

Transmission, 51, 62 Transnistria, 316, 319 Trauma, 50–52, 69, 72, 75, 77, 78, 92, 97, 98, 104, 112–114, 117–119, 121, 123, 124, 126n15, 126n18, 127n36, 168–170, 172, 175, 177, 178, 181, 183n21, 183n22, 183n23, 183n24 cultural trauma, 170 refugee traumas, 90 traumas, 70, 74, 75, 170, 175, 176, 181 trauma studies, 51 trauma theorists, 75 trauma theory, 50, 51 traumatic event, 69, 168 traumatic losses, 176 traumatic memories, 74 traumatic presence of the past, 56 traumatic re-enactment, 51 traumatic shock, 168 Treachery, 71 Treblinka, 313 Trinidad, 74 Tripoli, 93 Triumph Over Violence, 300 Trump, Donald, 216n4 Truth, 90, 133, 134, 136, 149, 153, 155 crisis of truth, 50 truths, 139 Tukhachevsky, Michail Nikolajewitsch Tukhachevsky, 142, 143, 159n60 Tunisia, 93 Typos, 247 U Überleben, 74 UK, 96, 97, 103 Uncertainty, 90

 INDEX 

Understanding, 51, 74, 75 UNHCR Refugee Convention, 99 United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, 302 United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 311, 329n1 Unsayability, 53 Unspeakability, 294 Uprooting, 74 USA, 99 USC Shoah Foundation, 293, 295 Utalitarianism utilitaristic systems, 156 Utopia, 154 V Valor, 248 Value, 50, 247, 249, 251 van der Hart, Onno, 74 van der Kolk, Bessel, 73–74 Venice, 72 Verbs, 257 Vermin, 90 Verticality, 254 Vichy France, 313 Victimhood, 249 Victimisation, 171 Victim/victims, 50, 51, 69, 70, 72, 73, 77, 78, 90, 153, 175, 249 Victory, 253 Vietnam war, 231 Vigil, 55, 56 Violence, 51, 52, 92, 104, 140 Virtue, 254–257, 260n25 Visa, 100 Visibility, 90, 96, 97 Vision, 56, 59, 134, 249 Visuality, 62 Vivisection, 144, 146, 147, 156 Vocabulary, 253

355

Vocation, 98 Voicelessness, 97 Voice/voices, 57, 72, 74, 75, 80, 90, 93, 95, 96, 102, 104, 253, 254 collective voice, 97 Volkov, Solomon, 136, 149, 150 Testimony (1979), 136 Voltaire, 11, 39n56, 116 Vulnerability, 56, 61, 63, 70, 77–82, 90, 91, 171, 173, 175, 257 W Wajsbrot, Cécile, 192 Waldorf Astoria, 315 Walker, Janet, 294, 307n8, 307n9 Wall, 171, 173, 176, 180 Walpole, Horace, 116 Walser, Martin, 303 War, 54, 57, 94, 101, 102, 104, 107n48, 137, 169, 174 First World War, 137, 138, 168, 174 nuclear war, 75, 76, 81 Second Word War, 52, 72, 73, 138, 151 Warburg, Aby, 51 Warmth, 81 Warsaw Ghetto, 268 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, 311 Wasteland, 63 Waters, Sarah, 112 Weakness, 147 Wealth, 93 Weissmandl, Michael, 321, 323 Welfare, 97, 98 Westerbork, 301 Western subject, the, 97, 105n11 West Indies, the, 77 WhatsApp, 100, 102 Whistleblowers, 99 White, Hayden, 247 White House, 315

356 

INDEX

Who Shall Live and Who Shall Die?, 314 Wicked, 233 Wiesel, Elie, 69, 272 Wilde, Oscar, 100 Wilkomirski, Binjamin, 3 William, James, 197 Willingness, 94, 97 Will to survive, 73 Wilson, Elizabeth, 136 Windrush, 112 Witchcraft, 93 Witness/witnesses/witnessing, 50, 53–59, 61, 62, 64n16, 74 Woman, 94 Woolf, Virginia, 134 Woolley, Agnes, 90 Words, 98, 104 World, 250, 256, 257 World Health Organization, 192 Wound/wounds, 182, 250

X Xenophobia, 99 Y Yad Vashem, 329n1 Yiddish, 329n14 Yurodivy, 149, 161n79 Z Zehn Brüder sind wir gewesen, 295 Zeitgeist, 89 Zero tolerance, 100 Zeus, 3 Zipp, Georg, 60 Zoe,̄ 60 Zombie, 223, 225–234, 236, 238, 240n12, 240n13, 240n25 Zoo of cruelty, 103