Figural realism in witness literature

Parallax

Volumn 10, Issue 1, 2004, Pages 113-124

  White, Hayden ^a,b  

^a STANFORD UNIVERSITY   (United States)

^b UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 41849113956     PISSN: 13534645     EISSN: 1460700X     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/1353464032000171145     Document Type: Review

References (8)

1. See Fredric Jameson, Ideologies of Theory, 2 vols. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981).
2. Thomas Vogler remarks that witness literature is 'of all literary kinds most bound up with notions of authenticity and referentiality, a poetry that puts us in touch with raw facts of existence rather than effects produced by rhetorical technique. ' In Ana Douglass and Thomas A. Vogler, eds. , Witness and Memory: The Discourse of Trauma (New York: Routledge, 2003), p. 174.
3. Primo Levi, Se questo è un uomo, (Turin: De Silva, 1947), trans. Stuart Woolf, Survival in Auschwitz, (Orion Press, 1960).
4. Levi, Se questo è un uomo, p. 110. ,
5. Woolf, Survival in Auschwitz, p. 123. I have altered Stuart Woolf's excellent translation a bit in order to capture the 'mood' of Levi's original. In the first sentence, Levi uses the subjunctive mood in the phrase 'perché l'inverno non venisse. ' Woolf ignores the subjunctivity of the phrase and puts the first sentence in the declarative mood: 'We fought with all our strength to prevent the arrival of winter. ' This phrasing suggests an activity that is not suggested in the subjunctive, which refers us to the desire informing the action reported, its imaginary aspect. The result is that an important referent is missed, in this case the 'feeling' of this effort to keep winter from coming on. It is a small point and has to do with theory of translation, which we are not considering here, but it is important for grasping what is original and perspicuous in the way that Levi renders his memory of events in the camps.
6. Cf. Alistair Fowler, Kinds of Literature: An Introduction to the Theory of Genres and Modes (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), pp. 37-38.
7. See Franco Rella, Pensare per figure: Freud, Platone, Kafka (Bologna: Pendragon, 1999), which is a history of the conflict between logic and poetic (or figural) speech.
8. Steinberg's memoir was published in English translation under the title: Speak You Also: A Survivor's Reckoning, trans, by Linda Coverdale (New York: Metropolitan, 2000). The English version carries on its cover a photograph of Paul Steinberg at the age of 17, the year he was picked up and transported to Auschwitz. When Levi knew him, he was 18 (not 22, as Levi says), so it would be legitimate, if one wished to take Levi literally, to compare the photo of Steinberg at seventeen with the Sodoma picture of San Sebastiano which Levi invokes as a 'figure' of Henri. I compared the two and, in my estimation, the only thing that Henri and Sodoma's San Sebastiano have in common is the fact that they are both manifestly young and beardless. I suppose that one could see a certain resemblance in the eyes, 'deep and dark,' as Levi has it. But obviously this characterization of Henri tells us more about Levi than it does about the young man Steinberg. In his own memoir, Steinberg professes to having no memory Levi at the time they supposedly worked together in the Buna chemical labs. Nor does he pick up on the suggestion by Levi that he, Steinberg, was a homosexual or used his boyish charms to 'seduce' his guards and other prisoners. The two students of Levi who spent their time trying to decide if what Levi had literally said about Henri could be established as fact or not utterly overlook the manifest significance of the passage, which is given in its figurative not its literal level of articulation.