Voicing the Void: Muteness and Memory in Holocaust Fiction (review)

Sara R. Horowitz, Voicing the Void: Muteness and Memory in Holocaust Fiction (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997). vii + 276 pages.

Elie Wiesel speaks eloquently about the meaning of the silence of those murdered in the Shoah. "Tell them [the victims]," he writes, "that silence, more than language, remains the substance and the seal of what was once their universe, and that, like language, it demands to be recognized and transmitted. " ¹ Although they perished, Wiesel observes, "they have survived their deaths. ² These observations establish a threefold challenge that itself is based on the abyss separating survivors from nonwitnesses. Writers of Holocaust literature must find a way to give voice to that which is essentially beyond speech; to use language against language. Literary critics, for their part, need to learn how to listen to this silence; muteness itself is a form of communication. Nonwitnesses who read such literature have a moral obligation to recognize the significance of what is not present in the text; these readers are permanent outsiders, although some may become empathic readers.

Sara Horowitz has written an important book of postmodernist literary criticism that addresses the trope of muteness and memory in both literary and visual texts, while simultaneously extending Wiesel's insights. Her study treats philosophical, theological, and narrative concerns while inquiring into the nature of language and truth in attempts to represent the Shoah. The author's thesis deals with the frailty and necessity of language and focuses on the theme of muteness as a new language. Four main points buttress this theme. We who live in the shadow of Auschwitz must struggle to master an unmasterable trauma. We do so "with language, against language, and beyond language." Second, nonwitnesses must learn how to read these mute texts, not only for the sake of the victims, but for the sake of the future. Third, even the radical muteness of death must be "read" properly. Fourth, language and linguistic difference function as emblems of otherness. Otherness is a fatal disease.

Incessantly and insightfully, the author's nine chapters address the gap between the Holocaust world, l' universe concentrationnaire, and its linguistic representation. For example, she discusses the inescapable contradiction between the necessity and the impossibility of bearing witness. In other words, Horowitz's study focuses on what happens when experience becomes history. This dilemma occurs immediately and is not related to the passage of time. Illustrating this point, Horowitz analyzes Jorge Semprun's The Long Voyage. Two days after Buchenwald is overrun, Semprun's narrator--himself a survivor of the camp--gives a tour to two French women. The women think the camp, although littered with corpses, is not too bad. "The narrator's personal experience," writes Horowitz, "has become history, and he cannot communicate it to anyone who has not shared it."

One of the major contributions of Horowitz's study is the intelligence with which it treats the wounding, perhaps fatal, of language in the aftermath of Auschwitz. Her study reiterates the legitimacy and role of literature in "the critical discourse about the Holocaust" and the complexities of Holocaust fiction itself. Insightful discussion of the works of survivors such as Wiesel, Charlotte Delbo, Primo Levi, and Ida Fink illuminates the issue of the inadequacy of language. The trope of muteness ranges from Jerzey Kosinki's nameless youth in The Painted Bird, to Wiesel's Gregor/Gavriel in The Gates of the Forest. But language uttered is experience betrayed. Horowitz cites Delbo's cri d'couer concerning ordinary words such as fear, hunger, evil, and fatigue, which are simply unable to bear the burden of the Shoah. Horowitz encapsulates the twofold dilemma confronting Holocaust writing: the survivor is unable to "speak the unspeakable," and nonwitnesses are unable to "imagine the unimaginable."

Discussing the work of Art Spiegelman, a second-generation witness, she skillfully deconstructs the false opposition between fiction and fact. It is not a matter of deciding which is...