The ethos of drama: rhetorical theory and dramatic worth

7. Rhetoric and Silence in Holocaust Drama

191 C h a p t e r 7 Rhetoric and Silence in Holocaust Drama Only a relentless bigot would deny the factual reality of the Holocaust . The “Is it?” of stasis theory is indisputable. The “What is it?” inevitably pushes the language of any answer beyond the connotations of words like horror and, as its application has extended to other events, genocide. Humanistic literature, facing its greatest challenge to the values proclaimed by civilized societies , tries to answer or at least pose the moral question: What is it worth? Without raising this question, drama and especially film can represent the factual details graphically and provoke intense emotional reactions. But they do so at a cost, for the artistic and moral danger of graphic imagery is that its painful details have an overwhelming power capable of absorbing all of one’s attention and of arousing such revulsion that a physical reaction forecloses moral reflection. In the criticism of Holocaust literature, language itself is raised as an insurmountable obstacle to faithful and ethical representation. An oft-cited critic, Lawrence Langer, endorses the fictional procedure of Pierre Gascar: his “dramatic incarnation of the principle that the concreteness of the Holocaust repudiates the abstractness V 192   Rhetoric & Silence in Holocaust Drama of the words used to describe it.”1 Later, Langer claims—and he is far from alone in the claim—that the facts (“events”) of the Holocaust prohibit a fitting moral approach: “The literature of atrocity, by design and of its very nature, frustrates any attempt to discover a moral reality behind the events its narrates.”2 Holocaust literature, then, obeys contrary impulses that go beyond paradox to approach flat contradiction; as Elie Wiesel has put it, “What we really wish to say, what we feel we must say cannot be said.”3 The drive to keep the horror before the world’s historical memory and its conscience must confront the impossibility of depicting its reality, and hence of comprehending its moral enormity. As a true survivor, Wiesel commands authority by simply articulating the problem, but other apparently wellintentioned writers so subordinate the awful events to personal artistic goals that they can be faulted for “exploiting atrocity ,” as Alvin Rosenfeld so compelling argues in a devastating critique of “Daddy,” other Plath poems, Sophie’s Choice, Seven Beauties, and The Investigation.4 In the last work, Peter Weiss relies almost exclusively on verbatim “condensations” from German trials held in the years 1964 and 1965, yet even that kind of fidelity to matters of fact—a fairly common strategy in much Holocaust writing—puts obstacles between the rhetorical success of the work and its audience, for not only can graphic imagery be an emotional and intellectual cul-de-sac, but studying it can be cathartic, resulting in a kind of moral self-assurance, a smugness that announces its private honesty: “Yes, I’ve read about the medical experiments,” or “I’ve seen the films.” Indeed , the imperative of the survivor (“The world must not be allowed to forget”) would abstract a lesson from history by first 1. Lawrence Langer, The Holocaust and the Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975), 64. 2. Langer, The Holocaust, 120. 3. Elie Wiesel, “Does the Holocaust Lie Beyond the Reach of Art?” The New York Times, April 17, 1983. 4. Alvin Rosenfeld, “Exploiting Atrocity,” A Double Dying: Reflections on Holocaust Literature (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980), ch. 8. Rhetoric & Silence in Holocaust Drama   193 overwhelming us with painful matters of fact on a scale that cannot be imagined and with a moral significance that cannot be articulated. In Holocaust Representation, Berel Lang approves of the approach taken by Simon Attie who does not consider himself to be a “Holocaust artist” presumably because of “the absence from his work of scenes depicting the manifold horrors of that event.” Lang argues that “this absence, far from removing him from the association of Holocaust artists, places him in good standing among them.”5 To the sensitive artist, then, “Never again” compels expression while at the same time the horror imposes a form of silence as a theme and a stumbling block. The four plays collected by Robert Skloot in The Theatre of the Holocaust employ, variously, Brechtian alienation techniques, historical accuracy, and imaginative extensions of history to work their powerful effects.6 In Dr. Korczak and the Children, Erwin Sylvanus likewise combines historical accuracy (“The author has not...