Darkness We Carry

CHAPTER TWO: Tragedy and the Holocaust

C H A P T E R zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQ Two Tragedy and the Holocaust And yet, first of all, I should like to slaughter one or two men, just to throw off the concentration camp mentality, the effects of continual subservience, the effects of helplessly watching others being beaten and murdered, the effects of all this horror. I suspect, though, that I will be marked for life. I do not know whether we shall survive, but I like to think that one day we shall have the courage to tell the world the whole truth and call it by its proper name. —Tadeusz Borowski "Auschwitz, Our Home (A Letter)" I -/IRTISTS and their critics live with the hard and humbling truth that their writing keeps raising the same questions that have been asked for centuries. They also live with the harder truth that despite passion and concern, the answers to significant moral and aesthetic questions remain elusive. WhatzyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGF has changed over the course of much time, especially the accelerated time of the last half-century, is the awareness of a greater urgency to these questions and a greater burden we carry to them. The issue of tragedy, of its nature and possibility, and of how it is related to the Holocaust is the two-edged problem I would like to discuss. In the considerable debate over the relationship of Holocaust literature to tragedy, much attention has focused on the characteristics that distinguish tragedy from other theatrical forms, i.e., comedy and tragicomedy. But before that problem can be addressed, it is necessary to decide where to search for the characteristics that contribute to what 20 Tragedy and the Holocaust 21 zyxwvutsrq can be called tragic in drama: in the play's elements ("the tragic character " or "the tragic action"), in the audience ("the tragic response"), or in the playwright ("the tragic vision"). Since Aristotle, these have been the places where the confirmation of the tragic experience can be found. The kinds of plays that comprise the theatre of the Holocaust usually describe the lives of Jews who succumbed to or survived Nazi persecution . Their stories have both a historical and a fictional dimension. That these victims of violence possess distinguishing characteristics— of their conditions or of their actions—that permit them to represent us, or at least most of us, seems to me indisputable. And because all serious drama seeks its effects through identification with stage characters and emblematic settings, it is possible that the Jewish character in the Holocaust context may represent all people, Jew and non-Jew, in the description of universal human conditions. There is, of course, much debate over whether tragedy can be written at all in the twentieth century, and the dramatized Holocaust experience that reaches for the tragic condition adds to the debate. At various times over the last several generations, the impossibility of writing tragedy has beei credited to a host of disparate (often contradictory) causes, including nineteenth-century theories of determinism, Freudian psychology, political democracy, rejection of classical artistic forms, twentieth-century theories of existential meaninglessness, and Christian salvation. Yet tragedy, or at least the idea of tragedy, refuses to die despite the eloquent refutations of numerous critics, among whom George Steiner is one. Steiner, a prolific and wide-ranging commentator on culture in general and European literatures in particular, has written with extraordinary insight into the issues raised by the Holocaust and its literary manifestations. He was among the earliest critics whose expansive preoccupations with the Holocaust included an anxious personal statement for the future of the Jewish people combined with a professional concern for the implications of genocide on dramatic form. Among Steiner's earliest important works was The Death of Tragedy (1961), a book that surveys the history of Western literature with the objective of charting the demise of the tragic possibility in literary creation. Curiously , The Death of Tragedy begins with a brief discussion of the relationship between "the Judaic sense of the world" and tragedy, a relationship Steiner describes as one of alienation, but one he rarely attends to again in the course of his book. He writes: "The Judaic spirit is vehement in its conviction that the order of the universe and of man's estate is accessible to reason."1 22 Tragedy and the Holocaust zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZ Steiner believes that tragedy can flourish only alongside a conviction of the world's essential irrationality, a perspective...