Abstract
Drawing from Emmanuel Levinas’s philosophical ethics and Paul Celan’s dialogical poetics, this article interrogates the impossible memorial and ethical demands that literary responses to the Holocaust place upon their readers. While Levinas reveals our position as summoned to radical responsibility, Celan shows us how that responsibility plays out in the form of ethical reading. By attending to the imperative commands found in Celan’s longest poem, “Engführung”, this article demonstrates how Holocaust literature memorializes the Shoah through an invocation of Levinasian ethics and the concept of the immemorial—that which exceeds memory. Following the discussion of Levinas, Celan, and “Engführung”, I turn to Primo Levi’s “Shema”, a paradigmatic text that likewise directly challenges us, calling us into question as readers during the moment of reading and demanding an attentiveness to the text that proves beyond our ability to deliver. Throughout, I aim to show how dialogical memory enables us to better comprehend the ethical burden we encounter in the literary texts of the Holocaust.
Highlights
Why do we read Holocaust literature? What is it that draws us to these texts that document the destruction of human beings and the very idea of human being? What value does this reading bring? In order to fashion an answer, I propose we consider that Holocaust literature operates by way of ethical imperatives that speak to and hold hostage those of us who chose to venture into its terrain
In 2009, Michael Rothberg published his groundbreaking Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization, in which he sought to move beyond the stifling environment of “competitive memory” to open up a possibility of a “more just future of memory” (Rothberg 2009, p. 21)
Aleida Assmann extols the virtues of what she calls “dialogic memory” against the old, “monologic” memory policy: “Two countries engage in a dialogic memory”, she writes, “if they face a shared history of mutual violence by mutually acknowledging their own guilt and empathy with the suffering they have inflicted on others” (Assmann 2015, p. 208)
Summary
Why do we read Holocaust literature? What is it that draws us to these texts that document the destruction of human beings and the very idea of human being? What value does this reading bring? In order to fashion an answer, I propose we consider that Holocaust literature operates by way of ethical imperatives that speak to and hold hostage those of us who chose to venture into its terrain. The texts directly challenge us, calling us into question as readers during the moment of reading and demanding an attentiveness that proves beyond our ability to deliver To investigate this dilemma, I employ Emmanuel Levinas’s philosophical ethics and Paul Celan’s dialogical poetics. Dialogical memory describes the relation between reader and text, imbued with an ethical responsibility derived from Levinas’s engagement with Paul Celan. We must read the handshake in a Levinasian way: the movement of the hand that Celan’s image evokes is one of reaching out to enact a handshake, a reaching out towards the categorical Other This movement is one of uncertainty: the reaching-out of the physical greeting—the extended, open hand—signifies for Levinas the corporeal movement of responsibility attending any encounter with the Other. Requires a radical vulnerability; in order to properly “listen” to the literary texts of the Holocaust, we must first be claimed by the summons to responsibility
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