The Holocaust Poetry of John Berryman, Sylvia Plath and W.D. Snodgrass Matthew Boswell

The Holocaust Poetry of John Berryman, Sylvia Plath and W.D. Snodgrass Matthew Boswell PhD Thesis Department of English Literature, The University of Sheffield. Funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Board. 1 Summary John Berryman, Sylvia Plath and W. D. Snodgrass are each commonly associated with the poetic movement known as ‘confessionalism’ which emerged in the USA in the late 1950s and early 1960s. They did not, however, write works of undiluted autobiography; through close readings of their Holocaust verse, I take the poetry, rather than the lives of the poets, to be the ultimate authority on what they had to say about history, about the ethics of representing historical atrocity in art, and about the ‘existential’ questions that the Nazi genocide raises. Chapter 1 offers the first sustained analysis of Berryman’s unfinished collection of Holocaust poems, The Black Book (1948 - 1958) - one of the earliest engagements by an American writer with this particular historical subject. In my second chapter I look at some of Plath’s fictionalised dramatic monologues, which, I argue, offer self-reflexive meditations on representational poetics, the commercialisation of the Holocaust, and the ways in which the event reshapes our understanding of individual identity and culture. My third chapter focuses on W. D. Snodgrass’s The Fuehrer Bunker (1995) - a formally inventive cycle of dramatic monologues spoken by leading Nazi ministers, which can be read as an heuristic text whose ultimate objective is the moral instruction of its readers. Finally, I suggest that while all three poets offer distinct responses to the Holocaust, they each consider how non-victims approach the genocide through acts of identification. For Snodgrass, it is important that we do identify with the perpetrators, who were not all that different from ourselves; for Berryman and Plath, however, the difficulty of identifying with the victims marks out the limits of historical understanding. 2 Introduction Interpretation of Holocaust poetry, including the imaginative works which form the subject of this thesis, is inflected by the way that we read Holocaust testimony - something which typically involves a response to a perceived authority. As readers of testimony, we don’t so much ask ourselves what we think, as what should we think, or - more strongly - what are we required to think. This is not simply a corollary of Holocaust piety: a sentimental inclination to regard the Nazi genocide as a case apart - even one which we have no right or ability to form opinions about. It is more a sense that the subject matter, especially when presented in firsthand accounts, challenges the foundations on which literary judgements are based (for example, undergraduates who make forthright contributions to seminars on, say, Romantic poetry or the Victorian novel, are often more reticent as they begin a course on Holocaust representation). This is largely because the reading of testimony is influenced by meta-textual criteria in a far more obvious way than with other kinds of literature: above all, the knowledge that the narrative is a record of, and part of an ongoing response to, traumatic events in the author’s own life, shapes a sense of the human fate which lies behind the writing. These narratives rarely allow us to lose sight of this fact: the author and the process of authoring are frequently foregrounded, as in Primo Levi’s present tense interjection in If This is a Man (1958), ‘Today, at this very moment as I sit writing at a table, I myself am not convinced that these things really happened’, or Charlotte Delbo’s epigraph to None of Us Will Return (1965), which expresses an almost identical sentiment: ‘Today, I am not sure that what I wrote is true. I am certain it is truthful.’1 In making such statements, survivor-writers question their own hold on the past, and even the legitimacy of the methods they use to represent it; but rather than freeing readers to interpret their texts in 3 whatever way they like, these admissions actually bring to the fore the author’s authority in what is the mainstay of interpretive activity: the struggle to establish meaning. The experience of reading testimony (for both students and academics) does not, therefore, tally with those approaches to literature, popularised over the last few decades, which hold that textual interpretation is open and ungovernable, freeing and free. For example, this is Peter McDonald in Serious Poetry: Form and Authority from Yeats to Hill (2002) discussing responses to literature in general: ‘Authority’ is a chilly word, at least in literary criticism: it suggests all kinds of unwelcome things, and makes far too many assumptions. On its own, it seems to be in need of an adjective - ‘monolithic’, perhaps, or ‘overbearing’, even ‘academic’. ‘Authority’ is something that tries to tell you what to read, or what to think, and has views about that; ‘authority’ says one thing is better than another, and that some things take more work than others; ‘authority’ is on your case.2 McDonald ironises the laissez-aller approach which characterises certain strands of literary criticism; but the same could hardly be said of responses to texts written by Holocaust survivors, where a sense of the legitimate authority of the author-witness grows precisely out of the fact that he or she very often does tell readers ‘what to read, or what to think’. Again, If This is a Man is a case in point, with the poem - variously titled ‘Shem’ or ‘If This is a Man’ - which introduces the novelised testimony outlining the demands the text will make on its readers in an even more direct fashion than the testimony itself. After describing the dehumanisation of victims in the Lager, the narrator asks us to ‘engrave’ the words of the poem (or even the testimony as a whole) onto our hearts, promising catastrophic consequences for our houses, our health and our children if we fail: a claim to authority if ever there was one.3 It is not only literary criticism which, in regarding authority as a ‘chilly word’, finds itself at odds with writing such as this. In the Introduction to their anthology The 4 Holocaust: Theoretical Readings (2003), Neil Levi and Michael Rothberg point out some of the differences which have emerged between Holocaust studies and theory: Many scholars demand respect, even piety, towards the Holocaust and the Nazis’ victims, while some theorists are preoccupied with transgression, play, and jouissance. Historians of the Holocaust understandably insist upon the distinction between fiction and reality; theory, especially poststructuralism, questions our ability to know a reality existing independently of our representations of it.4 Poststructuralist models of literary interpretation have had a pervasive influence across academia, especially in reformulating the question of authority in literary interpretation; in its critique of logocentricism, poststructuralism holds that all language - whatever context it is used and interpreted in - lacks a foundation (author/ origin/ referent) on which a hierarchy of meaning can be constructed. Yet such theorising frequently fails to take into account the more urgent questions about truth and memory posed by the likes of Levi and Delbo in light of the Holocaust; at its worst, it can seem like a complete evasion of the horrific reality of a genocide which, as Holocaust scholars insist, certainly did exist independently of literary representations of it. Additionally, as Levi and Rothberg note, there is the problem of the intellectual heritage of theory, especially in the French form that dominated American understandings of the term in the 1980s: poststructuralism and American deconstruction are unimaginable without the influence of Martin Heidegger, Paul de Man, and Maurice Blanchot - each of whom, in one way or another, either endorsed the Nazi party or produced writings complicit with antisemitic currents of the pre-Holocaust period.5 In a recent interdisciplinary study, The Holocaust and the Postmodern (2004), Robert Eaglestone attempts to re-evaluate this traditional understanding of theory’s problematic relation to the Nazi genocide, arguing that the authority of the witness (or, as he sometimes phrases it, ‘the other’) actually underpins the intellectual developments of the postmodern period. For Eaglestone, poststructuralism is the central instance of postmodern thought - ‘a still developing tradition of post-phenomenological philosophy’ 5 which, through the work of Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida in particular, ‘begins with thinking about the Holocaust’.6 Taking his lead from Derrida’s assertion that ‘“Auschwitz” has obsessed everything I have ever been able to think’, Eaglestone holds that the poststructuralist critique of logocentricism can only be understood with reference to the Holocaust (even if it doesn’t seek to explain it). The fact of Auschwitz is, he suggests, ‘all-pervasive’ in this branch of philosophy.7 Eaglestone’s analysis of poststructuralist thought as post-Holocaust thought begins by highlighting how the process of ‘identification’ forms ‘a central and major - but not always necessary - part of our experience of reading’.8 Survivor accounts, however, open up a problem: We who come after the Holocaust and know about it only through representations are frequently and with authority told that it is incomprehensible. However, the representations seem to demand us to do exactly that, to comprehend it, to grasp the experiences, to imagine the suffering, through

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