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Since Theodor W. Adorno’s original dictum in  about the supposed barbarity of writing poetry “after Auschwitz,” debates over the ethics of literary representation of the Holocaust have revolved around the problems inherent in depicting, in particular, the suffering of the victims and survivors. Adorno later linked his misgivings about poetry after the Holocaust to his objection to the aesthetic pleasure the reader (or spectator) experiences upon contemplating works of art that portray physical suffering: “the so-called artistic representation of the sheer physical pain of people being beaten to the ground by riflebutts contains, however remotely, the power to elicit enjoyment out of it.” Adorno’s use of the passive voice here is significant. Although he writes of the agony of “people being beaten to death with rifle-butts,” he does not indicate who wields the weapons. By obscuring the agency of the brutality in this manner , Adorno demonstrates that he is concerned foremost with the dangers of depicting the pain of the victims and less with the aesthetic implications of portraying the actions of the agents of that pain. In his view, writing about the Holocaust is synonymous with writing about the suffering of the survivors and victims, and the ethical questions of artistic representation of the Holocaust are thus exclusively a matter of how one might portray the experience of pain and anguish. “Perennial suffering,” he wrote in  as an addendum to his original dictum, “has as much right to expression as a tortured man has to scream; hence it may have been wrong to say that after Auschwitz you could no longer write poems.” Although Adorno revises his original claim about the barbarity of writing poetry after Auschwitz, he remains silent about an equally difficult aesthetic and ethical problem: how does one depict the correlative element of the atrocity, that of the perpetration of the suffering? Critics and writers concerned with the literature of the Holocaust, including George Steiner, Elie Wiesel, Irving Howe, Lawrence Langer, and Berel Lang, 210 11 Theorizing the Perpetrator in Bernhard Schlink’s The Reader and Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow ERIN McGLOTHLIN have assumed Adorno’s pronouncement and added their own objections to and anxieties about representations of the suffering of the victims. Adding to Adorno’s original objection to aesthetic pleasure, these writers problematize various aspects of both the literary portrayal and reception of Holocaust suffering . First among these criticisms (and often linked to Adorno’s pronouncement ) is the conviction that the Holocaust, having caused a caesura in both experience and knowledge, has destroyed the ability of the literary work to convey any essential meaning. In this view—as represented, for example, by George Steiner—language and the literary imagination are no longer adequate to the task of capturing the horror and loss: “It may be that the Shoah has eradicated the saving grace, the life-giving mystery of meaningful metaphor in Western speech, and, correlatively, in that highest organization of speech which we call poetry and philosophic thought.” A second, related objection concerns the notion of a historical and epistemological rift that fundamentally divides the post-Holocaust world from the world that preceded it. This perspective, associated most notably with Elie Wiesel, holds that the suffering endured during the Holocaust occurred outside the usual parameters of human experience. Wiesel writes that the Holocaust was as a “universe outside the universe, a creation that exists outside creation” and thus relegates it to a negative theological domain that mirrors that of God. In this view, any literary representation of Holocaust suffering is akin to “blasphemy or profanation, an act that strikes all that is sacred.” Significantly, both critics who believe in the failure of language and imagination in the face of the extremity of Holocaust suffering and those who hold that the Holocaust, like God, exceeds the human ability to represent it, advocate a sacred silence as the most appropriate form of response, since, according to Wiesel, “silence itself communicates more and better.” However, these critics are not the only ones that display anxiety about the representation of Holocaust suffering. Perspectives that reject the notion that it is impossible or blasphemous to write about the suffering of the victims also reveal apprehensions as to how one should represent it and how the reader is to receive it. Chief among these is the fear that depicting suffering in conventional literary genres might “serve to domesticate it, rendering it familiar and in some sense even tolerable, and...

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