GEOFFREY HARTMAN
Wounded Time: The Holocaust, Jedwabne,
and Disaster Writing
A
N IMPORTANT ATTEMPT TO UNDERSTAND
the decisive impact of
the Holocaust on both fiction and critical discourse is Maurice
Blanchot's
The Writing of the Disaster.
Though Blanchot does
not equate the disaster referred to in the title exclusively with the Holo–
caust, he indicates that what happened is epochal, both for human con–
sciousness generally and for the art of writing in particular. He plays on
the etymology of "disaster" to suggest a radical disorientation linked to
the fall or vanishing of a star. The impasse he faces is that after such a
disaster, writing (in whatever genre) must convey an altered state, a
wounded sense of time, yet cannot change so radically that it would
scuttle either its short-term communicative or long-term transmissive
power. The disaster enters his text, therefore, as a prose that reflects
"the shock of the unintelligible" yet maintains a normative decorum.
Blanchot's solution is to fashion anti-systematic fragments,
pensees
that lack the steadfast "star" of a clear timeline or any synthesis affirm–
ing unity of consciousness or the hope of a progressive merging of sub–
jective desire and objective reality. Though these
pensees
refer
unmistakably to his own intellectual milieu, and are datable that way,
most of them remain "impersonified" (as Mallarme would say). Some–
times this distinctly French mode of literary impersonality, this inertial,
anti-catastrophic formalism (more radical than
T.
S. Eliot's famous
impersonality theory), results in a word or image bearing an unusual
emphasis that can be overlooked-or that overlooks itself, as it were.
This happens, for example, in a definition that describes the Holocaust
as "the
absolute
event of history-which is a date in history-that utter–
burn where all history took fire, where the movement of meaning was
swallowed up."
While the contagious metaphor going from "utter-burn" to "history
took fire" is conventional enough, and encodes the etymology of
"Holocaust," the other phrases, emphasizing both history and its con–
flagration, are more difficult to grasp. There is shock value if Blanchot
is saying that history has come to a stop. But that is not what he is say-
