EJ's World War One diaries recommended by New York Times Kind regards, tw www.waldgaenger.de (c) New York Times October 7, 2001 THE CLOSE READER An Emotion Too Big to Have By JUDITH SHULEVITZ History's symptoms can be diagnosed in a lot of 20th-century writing, particularly the kind that exhibits the numb factuality of a victim's nightmares. Stephen Crane was a late-19th-century pioneer of the objectivist style of military writing; Ernst Junger's diaristic account of World War I brought a new matter-of-fact tone to things too awful to describe. The most famous of those who wrote in this vein was Hemingway, whose bluntness and love of the statistical and clinical soon began to creep into what creative writing teachers now call the Literature of Fact, perhaps still the dominant influence on journalistic nonfiction. A classic of this genre, John Hersey's ''Hiroshima'' (1946), addresses the question that presses upon us now: what happens during and after a heretofore unthinkable catastrophe. The book piles up in crisp detail the minutest facts of the lives of six survivors of the atomic bomb, from the hours just before the blast through their old age or death. Not an! ounce of sentiment weighs down his story. His tone is perfectly flat, presumably because the range of civilized feelings had been flattened. I read ''Hiroshima'' the week of the attack (it's short), and briefly felt better. Hersey's refusal to succumb to grief echoed my own sense of being suspended above an emotion too big to have. His characters underwent things far more horrible than those we witnessed or, God willing, will ever witness, and many of those characters thrived. It was only after I closed the book that it dawned on me that feeling better in this way made everything worse. Polite and respectful almost to a fault, Hersey carefully picks his way around the impossible but urgent questions: How did his characters experience, morally, the chain of events that culminated in their being bombed, given their own country's profound aggression? How did they cope with their enormous loss? It is as if, having been idealized into pure victims, they must be denied their civic and psychic complexities -- anything that would make them messy and difficult to deal with. Macdonald's review of the book identifies this f! ailing: ''The 'little people' of Hiroshima whose sufferings Hersey records in antiseptic New Yorker prose might just as well be white mice, for all the pity, horror or indignation the reader -- or at least this reader -- is made to feel for them.'' The traditional rebuttal to Macdonald's criticism invokes the magnitude of what happened at Hiroshima and the inadequacy of emotions such as pity, horror and indignation in the face of the atomic bomb. Nonetheless, an author who gives up altogether on psychological interiority and larger moral problems has dodged some higher obligation of the chronicler of disaster. He has allowed his readers to believe that they have grasped the terrible strangeness that has entered their world, when they haven't actually begun to understand how thoroughly their previous frames of reference have been shattered. So how are we to cope with the symptoms of history we carry around inside us? Eventually -- though not for a while -- we'll stop playing them over and over. We'll have taken in as many video images as we can stand. When we focus again on reading literature and writing down our feelings about these events, we will have two choices: we can give in to the unspeakability of pain by generating yet more affectless recitations of fact, or we can try to address our emotions. We do not lack examples of a meaningful literary response to disaster. Albert Camus turned the spread of evil ideas during World War II into a viral infection in his devastating novel ''The Plague.'' Paul Celan, the Romanian poet and Holocaust survivor, made the death camp into a death fugue in a poem that poisons our most cherished images of comfort and pleasure -- milk and air and sunshine -- in its incarnation of the otherwise unimaginable: Black milk of daybreak we drink it at sundown We drink it at noon in the morning we drink it at night We drink and we drink it We dig a grave in the breezes there one lies unconfined. I keep flashing back to a biblical passage I read the Saturday before the attack, the day of the year when Jews recite in their synagogues a portion of the Hebrew Bible so frightening it can be read only in a whisper. Deuteronomy 28 catalogs the curses with which God will strike the Jewish people should they fail to obey his laws. The list is long and horrifying: ''The Lord shall smite thee with madness, and blindness . . . and thou shalt grope at noonday, as the blind gropeth in darkness. . . . And thou shalt eat the fruit of thine own body, the flesh of thy sons and of thy daughters . . . in the siege, and in the straitness, wherewith thine enemies shall distress thee.'' These verses are traditionally interpreted, with bafflement and dismay, as a statement of God's punitiveness. But there's another way to read them: as a poem that gives voice to the traumatic memory of a life before God, a near animal existence without laws and civilization. You might even say that the Bib! le and its God were the Jews' literary answer to the alternative. _______________________________________________________________________ 1.000.000 DM gewinnen - kostenlos tippen - http://millionenklick.web.de IhrName@web.de, 8MB Speicher, Verschluesselung - http://freemail.web.de
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