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Sherman | Humor, Resistance, and the Abject: Robert Benigni's Life Is Beautifuland Charlie Chaplin's The Great Dictator Humor, Resistance, and the Abject: Roberto Benigni's Life Is Beautiful and Charlie Chaplin's The Great Dictator by Jodi Sherman University of Texas The Problem of Representation "This is not a story to pass on."1 The final page of Toni Morrison's Beloved addresses the paradox of severe trauma; the language destroying abjection has made the story impossible to "pass on," or transmit, and yet the sheer horrific nature of such trauma has made it essential that the story not "pass on," or die. The 1990s marked fifty years since Hitler's Third Reich attempted a decimation of the Jewish people; Holocaust survivors were aging , neo-Nazi, anti-Semitic, and white supremacist groups were gathering strength and attempting to proclaim that the events of the Holocaust never transpired. It suddenly became vitally important to ensure that the horrors of the Holocaust would be remembered , retold, and passed on to future generations. Lawrence Langer's writings on the Holocaust span the final quarter of the 20th century and cover many of the critical issues at play in the scholarly discussions of the Holocaust. In his 1975 Holocaust and the Literary Imagination, Langer noted that there are "two forces at work in the literature of atrocity—historical fact and imaginative truth."2 Twenty-five years later, the interplay ofthese two forces is still under contention. Toni Morrison, in "The Site ofMemory," notes the significant distinction between fact and truth: "facts can exist without human intelligence, but truth cannot."3 To reach at the truth of an instance oftrauma sometimes requires moving beyond the facts, and realizing that there can be truth outside the realm of the factual recreation. James Young concurs with Langer, noting that it is no longer possible to separate the literary and historical truths of the Holocaust.Young claims that, "the truths ofthe Holocaust—both the factual and the interpretive—can no longer be said to lie beyond our understanding , but must now be seen to inhere in the ways we understand, interpret, and write its history."4 Young is making a call to move the discussion beyond the incomprehensibility of the Holocaust to what seems to be a more provocative discussion of how the Holocaust has and will affect the works of writers, scholars, artists . The discussion is stymied if we continue to focus solely on "you cannot write that." As distance from the Holocaust increases, the means of ensuring that people remember the Holocaust turn towards artistic and creative endeavors, and the necessary interplay of truth and fact. There is no one clear answer, and no easy solution. Langer notes that while art and representation seem dangerous , there is an "equal danger that silence would be a surrenderto cynicism andtherefore aconcessionto the forces thatcreated Auschwitz."5 The Holocaust must be spoken about to be remembered , and to speak requires a way to break through the layers of abjection and silencing that have threatened to continue the destruction of the Jewish people. Roberto Benigni's 1997 film Life Is Beautiful6 functions as a case study on coping with and resisting abjection. Using Julia Kristeva's theories of the abject in her book Powers ofHorror, this paper identifies the ways that the symbolic order of the fascists forces the Jewish people into an abject void, and explores the clown as a figure who is able to use comedy to resist abjection, and enable his son as well to remain outside of the abject space. The symbolic order is defined simply as "the rules of the game," the laws and regulations of the society that are imposed and executed by those in power. Kristeva writes ofthe abject that it is "a place where meaning collapses."7 Outside ofthe boundaries ofthe symbolic social order, which is literally the "rules ofthe game" designed by those in power, the abject is a space in which language, laws, and humanity are devoid ofmeaning. The actions of the Nazis in World War II—corralling the Jewish people into concentration camps, denying them human rights and even the right to live—thrust the Jewish people into...

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