In the Place of Language: Literature and the Architecture of the Referent

1. Referent and Annihilation: ‘‘X’’ Marks the Spot

1. Referent and Annihilation: ‘‘X’’ Marks the Spot there is a moment in Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah that stands, strangely, alone. Shoah, a cinematic document without equal, by reason of the unthinkable acts and experiences it records, intersperses filmed verbal accounts of events participated in and witnessed with long shots of natural landscapes and sites of human engineering: cities, towns, individual buildings, train stations, lines of trains, lines of track, and the remains of extermination camps, of walled ghettos, of mass burial pits, and extermination chambers. Often it shows the merging of landscape with these, as that which already existed and was employed, and that which was expressly built, for the purpose of the daily reduction to nothing (‘‘Vernichtung’’) of tens of thousands of men, women, and children of every age, state, and condition , appeared overgrown with vegetation or returned to its previous, conventional use. The moment I have in mind has remained in my mind from my first viewing of Lanzmann’s film. Extraordinarily brief, it immediately combines, like no other sequence in the four-part documentary, the verbal with the physical, contextual record. Standing a few yards away from the train station at Sobibór, on open, grass-covered ground interrupted only by parallel sets of tracks, Lanzmann, who has been speaking in front of the station with a longtime resident of Sobibór, points to the ground, defines what he is pointing to, and asks for confirmation of what he has said and done. ‘‘Here’’ [Ici], he says pointing to land abutting one set of tracks, one is ‘‘inside the camp’’ [à l’interieur du camp]. His interlocutor, looking down at the designated spot, confirms, yes. Moving some feet toward the train station and a second set of tracks, Lanzmann points down again: 3 4 ‡ introduction ‘‘Here,’’ he says, one is ‘‘outside the camp’’ [à l’exterieur du camp]. His interviewee and guide looks at this spot, too, and once again confirms, yes.1 What Lanzmann creates and records in this scene is a pure moment of reference. No narrative is delivered at this moment, nor is any particular place imaged or panned in silence on the screen. There is Sobibór, with its sign designating the town and train stop, and there are residents of Sobibór who lived ‘‘then’’ and live now, but there is no structural evidence of ‘‘then,’’ of ‘‘what’’ happened for years in Sobibór, none of the material structures that enabled ‘‘this’’ to happen, day in, day out. There is now no extermination camp at Sobibór. And in pointing instead to presently imaginary boundary lines, suggested only by the ongoing presence of everyday railroad tracks, in designating ‘‘here,’’ in one spot, and ‘‘here,’’ in another, Lanzmann compels us to ‘‘see’’ what is no longer, what it was preferred that in Sobibór no one see any longer, just as, in the only ways that mattered at the time, no one ‘‘saw’’ it then, including especially those who saw ‘‘it’’ all. This is terrible achievement enough, lucid and grim enough, but it is only the beginning or pretext of what Lanzmann does. In asking a witness to identify and distinguish ‘‘here’’ from ‘‘here,’’ where no lasting distinction on and in the earth exists, to distinguish ‘‘inside’’ from ‘‘outside’’ where no wall, no enclosure now produces these and divides them, to distinguish the grounds of the comings and goings 1. Lanzmann, Shoah, Part One. As is often the case when his interviewees are Polish- or Hebrew-speaking, and cannot, or choose not to speak in either French, German, or English, Lanzmann speaks here (or rather ‘‘here’’) in French, his words, and those of his interlocutor, translated immediately by an interpreter who is with them. The following comments, focusing on Lanzmann ’s singular effort here to constate a ‘‘scene’’ of historical demarcation where no such scene exists, do not aim to speak to his documentary methods as a whole, from whose characteristic practices of extensive site viewing and insistent interviewing this passing moment is constitutively—verbally, graphically , and cinematographically—distinct, but rather to the power of such a conspicuously staged and recorded ‘‘scene’’ to illuminate precisely by its negative force as counterexample the writing of building as necessary marker of historical existence in fictional and theoretical texts. referent and annihilation ‡ 5 of life from the grounds and factory of the manufacture of death, Lanzmann more horribly indicates...