RESPONSIBLE FOR EVERY SINGLE PAIN:
HOLOCAUST LITERATURE AND THE ETHICS OF INTERPRETATION
turned
out to be evil ghosts, monstrous and weird.
Ashamed and
dismayed,
we ask: Who is responsible?
Abraham
Joshua Heschel
THE STUDY OF LITERATURE is widely presupposed to be the interpretation of texts. As an object a book can sit around for years, resting comfortably on a library shelf, but as a text it does not exist at all unless it is read, interpreted, understood. A book is printed and bound; a text is worded and meant. The problem, then, is to discover the meaning beneath the words. With the aim of study never in dispute, the critical wars of the last fifty years have been largely methodological: one side chants that a text means just what its author intended; the other that its meaning exceeds the author's intention; and meanwhile, smaller units gather under the banners of differing and rival approaches to getting beneath the words. But what if a literary text makes a claim on its readers that is logically prior to meaning? What if it has an existence that is not merely independent of interpretation, but threatened by interpretation?
Imagine listening to a 70-year-old
woman as she reads from the diary that she began to keep-in a little black book
she found at Sachsenhausen-in April 1945, when she was eighteen. She recites the Hungarian as her husband
translates sentence by sentence into English:
The
train stopped at Auschwitz. And the
next moment happened to me the most horrible thing in my life. Now came the moment when I was torn from my
mother. She pleaded with a German
soldier: "We want to go together." But he was heartless; he pushed her
aside. I had only a few seconds to look
back and see my mother and sister.
Another soldier-that animal-shoved me along: "Go, go." Since then I
have not seen my mother's brown eyes and I have not felt any love. There has been no one to mean well by
me. Every man looks after himself. In the whole world only a mother's love is
selfless.
Here is a text, as brief as a lyric, for which the training and working habits of academic criticism leave me unprepared. Is interpretation the appropriate response? And if so, how do I proceed? Do I point out to the woman what she has just said? Do I draw attention to her assumptions and rhetoric? Do I observe that she turns the ideology of difference back onto the German soldier, finding him-just as the Germans found the Jews-subhuman and immoral? Do I remark upon the gendered quality of her account? Imagine that the woman begins softly to weep. That her husband joins her. That she goes to him, saying, "You are thinking of your mother too?" That they cling to each other. How am I to respond . . . ?
In this essay I want to
develop the intuition that Holocaust literature demands an ethical response
that not only precedes interpretation but also serves as it basis. I don't mean to be a scold; I am not arguing
that the response to Holocaust texts should
be ethical, but simply that it is ethical
before it is interpretive. The interpretive
position adopted by critics of Holocaust literature is determined not by the "interpretive
community" to which they belong, nor by their a priori biases and ideological perspective, but by the
responsibility they assume toward the Holocaust text. The community to which a critic belongs and thus the biases and
perspective that give shape to her interpretation are themselves determined by the
critic's responsibilities. How we
respond to others establishes our commitment to them. The response to a literary text is a pledge: critics bind
themselves to a view of it by what they take themselves to be responsible for.