After Representation?: The Holocaust, Literature, and Culture

3: Death in Language

59 3 Death in Language From Mado’s Mourning to the Act of Writing PETRA SCHWEITZER In Le convoi du  Janvier, Charlotte Delbo, a survivor of Auschwitz, provides a historical gloss on the catastrophic fate of “Mado,” one of the  women deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau on that date: Mado . . . She was coming directly from the depot when she met the convoy going to Compiègne on January rd in , the evening before the departure. While handing out the bread for the trip, Marie-Elisa saw the new arrival and asked her for her name: “Mado.” No doubt, she was with a group in a railcar from which no one escaped. No doubt, she died within the first few days. No one had the time to get to know her. None of those who remain remembers her. [ELLE VENAI DIRECTEMENT DU DÉPÔT quand elle a rejoint le convoi à Compiègne le  janvier , à la veille du départ. Marie-Elisa, qui distribuait le pain pour le voyage, en voyant cette nouvelle venue lui a demandé son nom: “Mado.” Sans doute était-elle dans le wagon avec un groupe dont pas une n’a réchappé. Sans doute est-elle morte dans les tout premiers jours. Personne n’a eu le temps de la conaître. Aucune de celles qui restent ne se souvient d’elle.] The interplay between departure and arrival in this biographical narrative describes Mado’s anonymous death and disappearance in the context of what David Rousset first called “l’univers concentrationnaire” of the camps. Mado’s death is recorded as absolute, and yet her voice would return afterward, in Delbo’s own literary voice, as an afterimage conveying the death-in-survival embedded in the act of mournful remembrance. In the third volume of Auschwitz and After, entitled The Measure of Our Days, Charlotte Delbo attempts to render the experience of survival in the aftermath of the Holocaust. In separate pieces on experiences she and others endured in the camps and after their return to the ordinary world, she conveys not only the devastating experience of life in Auschwitz but also the long-range traumatic impact of the Holocaust on the experience of being human. It is in this context that Delbo offers the story entitled “Mado,” a central text in this third volume. In the story’s fictionalized world, Mado is now a survivor of Auschwitz, who as a kind of stand-in figure for Delbo cannot come to terms with her own survival and so repeatedly identifies herself with the dead by claiming that she also is not alive. At the same time, Mado recognizes that her survival obligates her, as by a binding promise, to speak of the atrocities to which she has been witness. Why should Delbo have made this strange choice to have a historically dead person represent a group of women who actually survived the camp? My answer to this question depends, in part, on obtaining a clear view of the role of literature in the description and elucidation of trauma. As we shall see, if the survivorwriter Delbo animates Mado through the literary device of prosopopeia in order to articulate the agony of survival inextricably linked to the encounter with death, she further develops the testimonial dimension of her literary art by allowing this invented voice to address itself, through apostrophe, to the Holocaust dead. Delbo argues that “only the language of poetry enables one to make people see and feel [Seul le langage de la poésie permet de donner à voir et à sentir].” Just so, Mado’s struggle to come to terms with her trauma becomes what one critic of Delbo’s work calls a “manifesto” for life, expressed as a capacity for remembering countless anonymous victims. My approach is governed by the methodology of trauma theory, which has, at least in the field of literary studies, become central for much of the debate about memory of the Holocaust. More specifically, I am indebted to the work of Cathy Caruth and Geoffrey Hartman, who have in different ways developed a hermeneutics of trauma. Caruth’s work is grounded in Freud’s notion of trauma. Freud introduces the concept of trauma as a near-death experience that is paradoxically—as a consequence of the psyche’s temporary numbness— missed at the time of the event’s initial occurrence. Caruth draws on Freud’s notions of the latency of experience and of the compulsion to repeat traumatic experience to...