Pleasure, Memory, and Time Suspension in Holocaust Literature: Celan and Delbo

Un jour viendra où la poésie mourra.
Ce sera l'âge du robot et de la parole prisonnière.
Le malheur des Juifs sera universel.

--Edmond Jabès

Memory insists she stood there,
able to go neither forward nor back,
and in that
Unanimous night,time slowed,
in light pulsing through ash.

--Carolyn Forché

They may be called Heroes in as much as they have derived their purposes . . . from a concealed fount--one which has not attained to phenomenal, present existence--from that inner Spirit, still hidden beneath the surface, which, impinging on the outer world as on a shell, bursts in pieces, because it is another kernel than that which belonged to the shell in question.

--G. W. F. Hegel

Citing clinical evidence, Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok locate a curious yet common phenomenon: after the loss of a loved one, at the time when the most intense mourning is expected to cripple the mourner, many people find that they experience instead an "accroissement libidinal." ¹ Because it is culturally sacrilegious to merge desire with the funerary, guilt, shame, and self-anger frequently accompany this libidinal increase. That Paul Celan's work, for example, has been seen as a poetic exemplar of the inappropriate display of sensuality at the collective Shoah funeral, demonstrates that the aesthetic criteria for Holocaust writing revolve around a mandatory display of the mournfully non-sexual anti-beauty expected to mark such funerals. Nonetheless, what one finds in a group of French Holocaust writers and/or Resistance fighters--Edmond Jabès, Charlotte Delbo, Robert Antelme, and Marguerite Duras--is a strange sexuality, a bittersweet melancholic sexual energy that often seems to act as salvation rather than as sacrilege. That is, instead of producing shame and guilt, the sensual intensities in Jabès, Delbo, Antelme, and Duras demonstrate a potent survival mechanism through which the process of remembering the worst necessarily entails the production of aesthetic beauty.

To remember necessarily means to elide time, and many times function simultaneously in most instances of memory; memory-time therefore suspends chronological time even while the latter continues to pass or progress--thus, during the process of remembering, it becomes unclear in which time one remains. This suspension of time occurs whether one remembers a peaceful childhood playing among the hawthorne bushes, as in Proust, to whom I return later, or one remembers le pire (the worst--as many survivors refer to the Shoah). There are many substantive differences between non-traumatic memories and often deeply involuntary memories of trauma, yet in both types of memory one often finds a curious pleasure in the suspension itself, as though time is an unwelcome weight while memory enacts a liberating lightness. In trying to define more closely this sense of the suspension of time, it is helpful, curiously enough, to turn to Diderot's idea of the délicieux. Apart from the ordinary connotations of tasting good and offering pleasure for him, the enchanting délicieux moment collapes present, future, and past so that time stops and one "existait tout en lui-même." ² Diderot locates the pleasure within the stoppage of time rather than in external sensations that prompt the memory; his délicieux captures the pleasurable sensation of painful memories. The problem with memory of the Shoah, then, is twofold: on the one hand, memory's timelessness pleases structurally, so that even the worst memories can contain release; on the other hand, memories rendered poetically in prose or poetry are expected to annihilate the sensual and the beautiful in order to be truer to the worst.

The possibility of poetry's beauty fusing with sensual images of terror prompts the same concern over the sacrilegious outpourings that catalyzed self-loathing from Abraham and Torok's patients. Because of this link, the first section of this essay revisits Adorno's retracted interdiction regarding poetry after Auschwitz and...