GEOFFREY HARTMAN
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barns or shoved into mass graves hurt too much to fit the measures of
poetry, the accumulation of cruel facts also scuttles almost every
attempt at a bearable narrative, let alone one still trying to make sense
of a people's collective biography.
This does not mean that the Matter of the Holocaust is impossible to
depict. The problem is one of evoking an original response, of freeing
rather than freezing our feelings and speech. Neither the subtlest nor the
most graphic imaging of the disaster guarantees such a response.
FICTION AT ITS BEST
leads to a recognition scene. "Do you know me?"
is the question haunting
King Lear,
a superbly royal but also ironic ques–
tion, since the king clearly did not have knowledge of himself. Shake–
speare's play stays longer for the absent answer than any other writing
about the human condition. The finest history writing does something
equivalent. Jan Gross asks the Polish people to know themselves, to
focus on this agonizing quest for self-knowledge. One unusually explicit
moral reflection links this quest to the future of Poland: "[I]f at some
point in this collective biography [of Poland] a big lie is situated, then
everything that comes afterward will be devoid of authenticity and laced
with fear of discovery.... [L]ike several other nations, in order to
reclaim its own past, Poland will have to tell its past to itself anew."
Milosz is a precursor of that authenticity. He confronts his postwar
consciousness of the Holocaust in lyrics that shuttle between Poland
and America. He challenges the morality of the bystanders (including
himself), especially those tempted to deny the claims of memory in the
very name of communist dialectics: "He who invokes history is always
secure. /The dead will not rise to witness against him."
History is written by the victors, yet episodes the poet cannot
not
know,
like the burning of the Warsaw Ghetto or massacres like Jedwabne, com–
pel him to honor the dead and become a witness against false witness.
If
Milosz keeps addressing himself as well as his fellow Poles and us, it is to
remove indifference and expose a living wound in need of being healed:
You swore never to touch
The deep wounds of your nation
So you would not make them holy
With the accursed holiness that pursues
Descendants for many centuries.
The truth may be holy, reconciliation may be holy, but the wound
itself is never holy.
