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The Edge of Modernism Kalaidjian, Walter Published by Johns Hopkins University Press Kalaidjian, Walter. The Edge of Modernism: American Poetry and the Traumatic Past. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006. Project MUSE. doi:10.1353/book.60333. https://muse.jhu.edu/. For additional information about this book https://muse.jhu.edu/book/60333 [ Access provided at 25 Sep 2021 02:14 GMT with no institutional affiliation ] This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. FM_7074_Kalaidjian_JHUP 10/21/05 10:20 AM Page i The Edge of Modernism 00_FM_6155_JHUP 3/15/05 10:01 AM Page ii This page intentionally left blank FM_7074_Kalaidjian_JHUP 10/21/05 10:20 AM Page iii The Edge of Modernism American Poetry and the Traumatic Past The Johns Hopkins University Press Baltimore FM_7074_Kalaidjian_JHUP 10/21/05 10:20 AM Page iv © The Johns Hopkins University Press All rights reserved. Published Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper The Johns Hopkins University Press North Charles Street Baltimore, Maryland - www.press.jhu.edu Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Kalaidjian, Walter B., – The edge of modernism : American poetry and the traumatic past / Walter Kalaidjian. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references ( p. ) and index. ISBN --- (hardcover : alk. paper) . American poetry—th century—History and criticism. Literature and history— United States—History—th century. Holocaust, Jewish (–), in literature. Anti-communist movements in literature. Modernism (Literature)—United States. Genocide in literature. Cold War in literature. 8. History in literature. Slavery in literature. I. Title. PS.HK Ј.—dc A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library. FM_7074_Kalaidjian_JHUP 10/21/05 10:20 AM Page v In memory Elizabeth Barron Kalaidjian (–) 00_FM_6155_JHUP 3/15/05 10:01 AM Page ii This page intentionally left blank FM_7074_Kalaidjian_JHUP 10/21/05 10:20 AM Page vii Contents Acknowledgments ix Introduction History’s “Black Page”: Genocide and Modern American Verse The Holocaust at Home Harlem Dancers and the Middle Passage Specters of Commitment in Modern American Literary Studies The Enigma of Witness: Domestic Trauma on and off the Couch Epilogue: Reading Abu Ghraib Notes Index 00_FM_6155_JHUP 3/15/05 10:01 AM Page ii This page intentionally left blank FM_7074_Kalaidjian_JHUP 10/21/05 10:20 AM Page ix Acknowledgments My thinking for this book began in response to the graduate students in my “Literature and the Real” seminar at Emory University and to the participants in the trauma seminar that I led for the Modern Studies Association. In particular, I am grateful to Aimee Pozorski, Patricia King, and Diana Miles for what they taught me about reality. Through an Emory University Research Committee grant I had the opportunity to examine genocide survival testimony at the Zoryan Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts. A number of talks given at the Modern Language Asso- ciation, Modern Studies Association, American Studies Association, and the Asso- ciation for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society as well as lectures at the Uni- versity of Minnesota, Colgate University, and the University of Kentucky helped to refine the scope and method of this book. Earlier drafts of parts of this book ap- peared in Modernism, Inc. (), ed. Jani Scandura and Michael Thurston; Market- ing Modernisms: Fates and Fortunes of the Literary Text in Commodity Culture (), ed. Kevin Dettmar and Stephen Watt; and College Literature (). For advice along the way, I owe a debt of gratitude to Cathy Caruth, Deborah Lip- stadt, Peter Balakian, Chris Lane, Elissa Marder, Charles Shepherdson, Rita Barnard, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Cary Nelson, Gordon Hutner, Dale Bauer, and Caroline Betensky, among others. Special thanks go out to Willa, Andrew, and Ted, to Lisa Rosof, and especially to Pat Cahill who, as reader and companion, kept me together in the life of this writing. In addition, I gratefully acknowledge permission to reprint the following: Excerpts from Selected Poems, by Diana Der-Hovanessian, copyright © . Reprinted by permission of the author. Excerpts from Sad Days of Light, by Peter Balakian, copyright © . Reprinted by permission of the author. Excerpts from Dyer’s Thistle, by Peter Balakian, copyright © . Reprinted by permission of the author. FM_7074_Kalaidjian_JHUP 10/21/05 10:20 AM Page x W. D. Snodgrass, excerpts from The Fuehrer Bunker: The Complete Cycle. Copy- right © by W. D. Snodgrass. Reprinted with the permission of BOA Edi- tions, Ltd., www.BOAEditions.org. Excerpt from “The Eighth and Thirteenth” from The Crack in Everything, by Alicia Suskin Ostriker, copyright © . Reprinted by permission of the University of Pittsburgh Press. Excerpts from “That Year” from Satan Says, by Sharon Olds, copyright © by Sharon Olds. Reprinted by permission of the University of Pittsburgh Press. From Holocaust, by Charles Reznikoff. Reprinted by permission of Black Spar- row Books, an imprint of David R. Godine, Publisher, Inc. Copyright © by Charles Reznikoff. “Kotov” and “The Swastika Poems” from Falling from Heaven: Holocaust Poems of a Jew and a Gentile, by Louis Daniel Brodsky and William Heyen. Copyright © by Time Being Books. “The Book of Yolek” from The Transparent Man, by Anthony Hecht, copyright © by Anthony E. Hecht. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a divi- sion of Random House, Inc. The lines from “Sources” from Your Native Land, Your Life: Poems, copyright © by Adrienne Rich. Used by permission of the author and W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. Excerpts from Drafts 1–38, Toll, by Rachel Blau DuPlessis, copyright © . Reprinted by permission of the author. From The Complete Poems, by Anne Sexton. Copyright © by Linda G. Sexton and Loring Conant, Jr., executors of the will of Anne Sexton. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved. Excerpts from “The Angel of History” and “The Testimony of Light” from The Angel of History, by Carolyn Forché. Copyright © by Carolyn Forché. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers. FM_7074_Kalaidjian_JHUP 10/21/05 10:20 AM Page xi The Edge of Modernism 00_FM_6155_JHUP 3/15/05 10:01 AM Page ii This page intentionally left blank Intro_7074_Kalaidjian_JHUP 10/21/05 10:21 AM Page 1 Introduction Trauma of the kind that haunted twentieth-century modernity—total war, genocide, terrorism—has hardly been left behind in today’s public sphere. Inaugu- rating the new millennium, the historic destruction of the World Trade Center drove home the violent stakes of contemporary globalization even as it signaled the persistence of modern social trauma in the new times of postmodernity. The ur- gency of coming to terms with trauma’s relation to narrative, material culture, and society has never been more pressing. Since , the year that the American Psy- chiatric Association defined Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), an array of psychological, neurological, legal, ethical, and cultural methodologies has compli- cated how trauma is represented in literary studies. Throughout the s, trauma studies exfoliated through a cross-disciplinary enterprise that was as provisional as it was dynamic. Several of the key questions that emerged from trauma’s relation to testimony remain site-specific, or “unique” to such singular events as the Holo- caust. Other issues of comparative witnessing probe trauma’s imprint across mod- ern cases of genocide, the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, rape and incest narratives, racial and ethnic antagonisms, not to mention the ontic sources of trauma that may well be rooted in the human condition as such. What trauma studies has lacked, however, is the kind of searching metacom- mentary that would adjudicate among its several emergent logics, truth claims, intellectual strategies, and objects of study. That dream of totalization—the aim of mastering trauma’s disciplinary field—is precisely what Dominick LaCapra has questioned in Writing History, Writing Trauma (). Discerning trauma’s place in historical narrative, LaCapra distinguishes between, on the one hand, the docu- Intro_7074_Kalaidjian_JHUP 10/21/05 10:21 AM Page 2 mented, evidentiary truth claims of “objectivist historicism” and, on the other hand, the “radical constructivism” of critical historians such as Hayden White and Frank Ankersmit, who locate a deep structural affinity in the tropological rhetoric that historical and aesthetic narratives share.1 Negotiating between historical refer- ence and textual representation, however, reaches a certain limit in the wake of the Holocaust, where what can be verified in the facts of genocide will take one only so far in addressing their force, significance, and meaning. Coming to terms with this challenge entails a certain rapprochement between historicity and the literary. The risk in writing trauma lies in succumbing to a melancholic acting out of its original event. But as Judith Butler, David Eng, and others have argued, melancholic at- tachment to traumatic loss can also produce new modes of aesthetic and cultural representation, social identity, and political agency.2 For his part, LaCapra accepts a certain “empathetic unsettlement” as a requisite for working through trauma without, however, confusing past and present, loss and absence, the experience of the other with that of one’s own. In recovering traumatic memory, the ethical stan- dard here would observe the limits of difference as such in sustaining what Kaja Sil- verman describes
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