Ghent University Faculty of Arts and Philosophy

In the Shadow of the Gulag: Martin Amis's Koba the Dread and House of Meetings

Supervisor: Dissertation submitted in partial fulfilment of the Dr. Stef Craps requirements for the degree of “Licentiaat in de Taal- en Letterkunde: Germaanse Talen” by Nele Ostyn

May 2007 Ostyn 2

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Acknowledgements

THANKS TO

Dr. Stef Craps, for his continuous advice and thorough proofreading

my parents, for their help and support

my aunt Kaat, for layout-business

my friends, for being there

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Rothko, Mark. Black on Maroon. 1958. Tate Modern, London. Oil on Canvas, 2667 x 3812 mm

Rothko, a Jewish-American painter often associated with abstract expressionism, was born in Dvinsk, Latvia. As a child, Rothko witnessed the occasional violence brought upon Jews by Cossacks, attempting to suppress revolutionary uprisings. The rectangular shapes in his work are, according to certain critics, a formal representation of the dug-up pits, where Cossacks were alleged to have buried Jews they kidnapped and murdered. However, Rothko‟s memory may be disputed, as no mass executions were said to have been committed in or near Dvinsk during this period.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

1 INTRODUCTION ...... 7

1.1 Trauma Theory ...... 8 1.2 Martin Amis ...... 15

2 KOBA THE DREAD: LAUGHTER AND THE TWENTY MILLION ...... 17

2.1 MAIN TRAUMA THEMES IN KOBA THE DREAD ...... 17 2.1.1 Memory ...... 18 2.1.2 Truth ...... 21 2.1.3 Laughter ...... 28 2.2 COMMUNISM VERSUS NAZISM ...... 37 2.3 AMIS‟S PERSONAL TRAUMA ...... 46 2.4 DENIAL AND COLLECTIVE TRAUMA ...... 52 2.4.1 Sympathy for the revolution ...... 52 2.4.2 Causes of Denial ...... 54 2.4.3 Camus and Sartre ...... 58 2.4.4 Amis and Hitchens ...... 78

3 HOUSE OF MEETINGS: TRAUMA AND LITERATURE ...... 81

3.1 Literature as a means for working through trauma ...... 81 3.2 House of Meetings ...... 84 3.2.1 Memory, Truth, Laughter and Denial ...... 89 3.2.2 Trauma ...... 92

4 CONCLUSION ...... 102

5 ABBREVIATIONS ...... 108

6 WORKS CITED ...... 108

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1 INTRODUCTION

When animals find themselves in life-threatening situations, they react instinctively. Lions and bears go on the attack. Horses are known to flee from every danger they encounter.

Deer and donkeys just stiffen and do nothing when faced with danger, just like rabbits caught in the headlights of a car. All animals, including human beings, flee, fight, or freeze when confronted with an unforeseen threatening or painful situation. Human beings, however, sometimes find themselves in situations in which they are completely helpless, in which neither fleeing, fighting nor freezing will be of any help, in which none of these options can be chosen to effectively overcome the events unharmed. In a situation like this, it seems as if the human body tries to combine these three defence mechanisms, which causes our perceptive system to malfunction to a certain extent. A temporary blocking of that system, a failure of our normal way of processing sensual information then occurs. This is generally called trauma. It is a “crisis of experience itself” (de Graef et al. 248); it is an extraordinary way of dealing with an extraordinary situation.

The purpose of this dissertation is to examine the way trauma is dealt with in the work of the contemporary British writer Martin Amis, in particular in his two texts that deal with Stalinism, namely Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million and House of

Meetings. I want to examine the connection between literature and trauma, both in how trauma can be represented through literature, and in how literature can offer a means to work through trauma. Before looking into Amis‟s works, I will try to explain what is implied by the term “trauma theory,” and give some introductory information on Martin Amis. In chapter two on Koba the Dread, I will begin by discussing the main trauma elements in the book, namely memory, truth and laughter. Those three concepts acquire a different meaning in the USSR of Stalin. Next, I will look into the way Amis represents differences and similarities between Nazism and Stalinism. After a chapter that deals with Amis‟s personal

Ostyn 8 trauma in Koba the Dread, I will discuss the question that dominates Koba the Dread: Why is

Stalinism not looked upon with the same horror and disgust as Nazism? Why are the attitudes towards both aberrations so very different? The general indifference towards the agony of the USSR under Stalin can be regarded as a sort of collective trauma, shared by everyone. I will elaborate on this trauma by comparing the disagreement between Amis and the journalist Christopher Hitchens that Amis initiated by addressing a letter to Hitchens in

Koba the Dread– in which Amis challenges him to denounce his communist sympathies – with the famous rift between Camus and Sartre. In this comparison, I will rely on theoretic work of Shoshana Felman, who connected the disagreement between Camus and Sartre with different ways of dealing with trauma. Amis and Camus will try to work through trauma, wherears Hitchens and Sartre deny the problem, and continue to be blinded by the Soviet ideology. In the chapter on House of Meetings, I will try to show how Amis presents House of Meetings as a sort of solution to the trauma problem. Fictionalizing traumatic events, reworking the themes of the horror stories of our times, can be a remedy against denial, and might help people in coping with and working through our collective traumas. Nevertheless,

House of Meetings exemplifies that testimony to trauma is not simple and straightforward, but that it is a trial-and-error process. Amis delivers a very ambiguous message with this novel. As a writer, he seems to believe in the power of art to achieve redemption and cure, but the main character of House of Meetings has given up any hope for closure. There is no ready solution for trauma on hand, so coping with trauma, working through trauma will always remain an attempt, never a certainty.

1.1 Trauma Theory

According to the Oxford Advanced Learners Dictionary, a trauma is “a mental condition caused by severe shock, especially when harmful effects last for a long time” (“trauma,” def.

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1). However, there is more to trauma than this seemingly simple explanation would suggest.

Cathy Caruth, one of the leading trauma theorists, speaks of a remarkable connection between “the elision of memory and the precision of recall” (“Recapturing” 153) concerning traumatic experiences.

First of all, a traumatic event is not assimilated by the victim in the same way other events are: “The trauma is the confrontation with an event that, in its unexpectedness or horror, cannot be placed within the schemes of prior knowledge” (Caruth, “Recapturing”

153). Established frames of reference are not valid to contain an event that is terrible and shocking to such an extent that the normal modes of understanding malfunction:

Central to the very immediacy of this [traumatic] experience […] is a gap that

carries the force of the event and does so precisely at the expense of simple

knowledge and memory. The force of this experience would appear to arise

precisely, in other words, in the collapse of its understanding. (Caruth,

“Trauma” 7)

Confronted with traumatic experiences such as rape, unwarranted violence, war, genocide, or terrorism, people have difficulties grasping, understanding what exactly is going on:

“Massive trauma precludes its registration; the observing and recording mechanisms of the human mind are temporarily knocked out, malfunction” (Laub, “Bearing” 57). The traumatic event is not fully perceived, and consequently, when asked about their experiences, many trauma survivors are unable to recount the events; often they seem to have had some sort of blackout. The traumatic event is thus not remembered in a conventional way; recollection is problematic. Nevertheless, a traumatic experience is not something that passes and can be forgotten, because it does not fit in the conventional course of time:

The traumatic event, although real, took place outside the parameters of

“normal” reality, such as causality, sequence, place and time. The trauma is

thus an event that has no beginning, no ending, no before, no during and no

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after. This absence of categories that define it lends it a quality of

“otherness”, a salience, a timelessness and a ubiquity that puts it outside the

range of associatively linked experiences, outside the range of comprehension,

of recounting and of mastery. Trauma survivors live not with memories of the

past, but with an event that could not and did not proceed through to its

completion, has no ending, attained no closure, and therefore, as far as its

survivors are concerned, continues into the present and is current in every

respect. The survivor, indeed, is not truly in touch either with the core of his

traumatic reality or with the fatedness of its re-enactments, and thereby

remains entrapped in both. (Laub, “Bearing” 69)

Trauma has no temporal quality and therefore does not “end.” The very character of trauma lies in the fact that it implies “a response, sometimes delayed, to an overwhelming event or events, which takes the form of repeated, intrusive hallucinations, dreams, thoughts or behaviors stemming from the event, along with numbing that may have begun during or after the experience, and possibly also increased arousal to (and avoidance of) stimuli recalling the event” (Caruth, “Trauma” 4). A traumatized individual will thus often suffer from disturbing recollections, such as recurrent nightmares and flashbacks of the event; he or she might behave or feel as if the event were recurring and will be intensely distressed at anything that reminds him or her of the traumatic event. Trauma victims will most likely avoid thoughts, topics, or activities associated with the event; often they suffer from insomnia, angry outbursts, extreme stress, and other tense behaviour. Trauma survivors frequently have difficulties coping with everyday life and surroundings, precisely because the traumatic experience continues to haunt them in a very literal and frightening way:

[W]hat returns in the flashback is not simply an overwhelming experience that

has been obstructed by a later repression or amnesia, but an event that is

itself constituted, in part, by its lack of integration into consciousness. Indeed,

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the literal registration of an event – the capacity to continually, in the

flashback, reproduce it in exact detail – appears to be connected, in traumatic

experience, precisely with the way it escapes full consciousness as it occurs.

(Caruth, “Recapturing” 152; emphasis in original)

The medical term used to indicate the phenomenon of trauma is PSTD, Post-

Traumatic Stress Disorder, officially acknowledged by the American Psychiatric Association since 1980. Psychological difficulties caused by a traumatic experience have been described as "soldier's heart" during the American Civil War, "shell shock" during the First World War and "combat fatigue" during the Second World War. It is thus not a new problem, and it occurs more often than one would think. Nevertheless, a lot of research still needs to be done in the area of trauma theory. It is very difficult to understand the specific mechanisms of trauma, just because the characterization of trauma is based on an apparent paradox:

Trauma victims have difficulties remembering what exactly happened to them, but at the same time, they suffer from very precise flashbacks, dreams, hallucinations and intrusions.

These recurring phenomena are “absolutely literal, unassimilable to associative chains of meaning” (Caruth “Trauma” 5); they make the victim go through his or her traumatic experience over and over again. Such a recurrent scene or thought is “not a possessed knowledge, but itself possesses, at will, the one it inhabits” (Caruth, “Trauma” 6). The traumatic event cannot be accessed voluntarily, but the event obtrudes itself upon the trauma victim again and again, in a very literal way. So while a traumatized individual cannot fully and accurately remember voluntarily what he or she experienced, he or she relives the experience repeatedly and involuntarily; a reliving of the traumatic event forces itself upon the victim. Caruth writes:

[T]rauma is not experienced as a mere repression or defense, but as a

temporal delay that carries the individual beyond the shock of the first

moment. The trauma is a repeated suffering of the event, but it is also a

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continual leaving of its site. The traumatic reexperiencing of the event thus

carries with it what Dori Laub calls the “collapse of witnessing,” the

impossibility of knowing that first constituted it. (“Trauma” 10; emphasis in

original)

In Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History,

Shoshana Felman claims that we live in an “age of testimony,” an age in which witnessing and testifying to the numerous traumatic events that have recently happened is important for the sake of the witnesses themselves, for the victims of those events, and for history. In spite of the difficulties involved in testifying to traumatic experience – the difficulty of testifying to something one has no clear recollection of; the difficulty of recounting, of putting into words what one can remember –, it is of major importance to try to accomplish this task, because “the essence of the testimony is historical, and […] its function is to record events and to report the facts of a historical occurrence” (Felman, “Education” 8). Dominick

LaCapra writes:

[O]ne may contend that the past is significant in its bearing on the present

and future to the extent that it makes contact with problems of memory. It is

what is allowed or made to enter into publicly accessible memory – not

historical research in general – which enables the past to be available for both

uses and abuses, and the precise manner in which it becomes available (or is

suppressed, distorted, or blocked) is of the utmost importance. (LaCapra 95)

Testimony is essential for the development of a collective memory that can help us to deal with problems and traumatic situation of the present and the future. The witness of a traumatic event alone bears the responsibility to testify to it, to overcome the symptoms of trauma, to cope with that trauma, and to try to recount what happened in spite of deficient assimilation of the event in memory. The witness has no choice but to bear this burden

Ostyn 13 alone, as no one can help him or her in dealing with his or her experiences – except maybe for lending an ear:

Since the testimony cannot be simply relayed, repeated or reported by

another without thereby losing its function as a testimony, the burden of the

witness – in spite of his or her alignment with other witnesses – is a radically

unique, noninterchangeable and solitary burden. “No one bears witness for

the witness”, writes the poet Paul Celan. To bear witness is to bear the

solitude of a responsibility, and to bear the responsibility, precisely, of that

solitude. (Felman, “Education” 3; emphasis in original)

This testimony is necessary, not only for the sake of procuring history, but also for the witness‟s own good. Only by recounting his or her traumatic experience to a listener, he or she will be able to fully grasp and understand the event for the first time. It is the first step towards a cure. According to Dori Laub, the listener is a very important factor in this process:

[T]he listener (or the interviewer) becomes the Holocaust witness before the

narrator does. To a certain extent, the interviewer-listener takes on the

responsibility for bearing witness that previously the narrator felt he bore

alone, and therefore could not carry out. It is the encounter and the coming

together between the survivor and the listener, which makes possible

something like a repossession of the act of witnessing. This joint responsibility

is the source of the reemerging truth. (Laub, “Event” 85; emphasis in original)

With the help of a caring listener, a trauma witness can thus work through and overcome his or her traumatic experience. In this way, giving testimony can be seen as a step in the healing process. Felman writes that “the capacity to witness and the act of bearing witness in themselves embody some remedial quality and belong already, in obscure ways, to the healing process” (“Education” 4). Trauma has to be faced, has to be worked

Ostyn 14 through in order for the victim to be able to get on with life, to function fully in this world plagued by horrific and traumatizing events. The only way to efficiently deal with trauma, to bridge the gap between the part of life before the traumatic event and the part after, is testimony:

It is a dialogical process of exploration and reconciliation of two worlds – the

one that was brutally destroyed and the one that is – that are different and

will always remain so. The testimony is inherently a process of facing loss – of

going through the pain of the act of witnessing, and of the ending of the act

of witnessing – which entails yet another repetition of the experience of

separation and loss. It re-enacts the passage through difference in such a

way, however, that it allows perhaps a certain repossession of it. (Laub,

“Event” 91)

By integrating the traumatic experience into a narrative and communicating it to others, the trauma can become a part of the victim‟s own memory, and in that way, step by step, the traumatic experience can start belonging to the past. LaCapra writes: “Testimonies are sigi- nificant in the attempt to understand experience and its aftermath, including the role of memory and its lapses, in coming to terms with – or denying and repressing – the past”

(LaCapra 87). Trauma will never be forgotten, but it can be given a place in memory, a place in history, in a way that it no longer haunts and burdens its victim, in a way that gives the victim space and time to heal. The only way to achieve this goal is through the medium of language – we have no other means to express our inner feelings – but language is not perfect. Recounting trauma will always be a process of trial and error:

As a relation to events, testimony seems to be composed of bits and pieces of

a memory that has been overwhelmed by occurrences that have not settled

into understanding or remembrance, acts that cannot be constructed as

knowledge nor assimilated into full cognition, events in excess of our frames

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of reference. What testimony does not offer is, however, a completed

statement, a totalizable account of those events. In the testimony, language is

in process and in trial; it does not possess itself as a conclusion, as the

constatation of a verdict or the self-transparency of knowledge. (Felman,

“Education” 5)

Nevertheless, people have to continue testifying to the major traumatic events of our past in order to preserve memory and remember those who suffered and those who died.

1.2 Martin Amis

Whether he is conscious of it or not, Martin Amis has already dealt with a lot of elements of trauma theory in his work. This is not very surprising, as Amis has been writing about some of the principal traumatic events of the past century. In Time‟s Arrow – shortlisted for the

Booker Prize – he forges a story with the theme of the Holocaust and the technique of time running backwards; Einstein‟s Monsters is a collection of short stories that all in one way or another deal with life before during, and after a nuclear disaster; London Fields is a black comic novel about a world facing a nuclear Holocaust; and his most recent works, Koba the

Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million and House of Meetings, grapple with the horrors of the gulag and the USSR under Stalin. Though highly controversial and often slated, Martin

Amis is considered by the critics as one of the most influential and innovative writers of contemporary British literature. A lot of print has been dedicated to him, but often for the wrong reasons: numerous pages have been published about Amis‟s relationship with his famous novelist father Kingsley Amis and the disapproving comments of his father on his work; about Amis leaving his wife and children and his long-time agent Pat Kavanagh in the mid-nineties; about the huge advance for his novel Information and the $30000 of it he spent on dentistry; about his cousin Lucy Partington who was murdered by Fred and

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Rosemary West; about the death of his father in 1995 and the death of his sister four years later; and so on and so forth. Some call him the “Mick Jagger of literature,” some the “enfant terrible of British fiction.” Amis has a colourful, virtuoso prose style with an eye for rhythm and cadence, and a use of words that will cause even a highly experienced reader to reach for a dictionary now and then. He writes with skill, originality, and humour, and is not afraid to commence ambitious projects, like his two books about Stalin.

In Koba the Dread Amis recounts the events in the USSR, starting with the February

Revolution of 1917 and the fall of the autocracy of the last Tsar Nicolas II of Russia. It is a sort of documentary work in which he extensively makes use of other sources in citations and examples to demonstrate the horror of that time. Strangely enough, he complements this account with personal anecdotes and personal letters to his friend Christopher Hitchens and the ghost of his father, in such a way that Koba the Dread seems a sort of extension of

Amis‟s earlier memoir Experience.

House of Meetings then, is a fictional novel relating the story of a triangular relationship involving two brothers serving time in a gulag camp in Norilsk and a beautiful Jewess, Zoya.

Both brothers are desperately in love with her, but she married the younger brother. House of Meetings is conceived of as one long testimony; the elder brother recounts his life story and confesses his awful deeds in a long letter to his stepdaughter Venus.

In both texts, trauma is undeniably present on several levels. Amis himself is working through a trauma while writing Koba the Dread; he writes about the traumas of so many people in the examples of the horror of the Stalin era; he creates individual traumas in the fictitious characters of House of Meetings; but also, he talks of the trauma of a part of the world, a collective trauma of Western Europe: It did not see or did not want to realize what was happening right there before its eyes: the catastrophe of Stalinism.

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2 KOBA THE DREAD: LAUGHTER AND THE TWENTY MILLION

2.1 MAIN TRAUMA THEMES IN KOBA THE DREAD

Koba the Dread is about the failure of Western intellectuals to condemn the horrors committed in the USSR, and their refusal to give up their communist sympathies – “To put this in perspective, the horrors include the murders of some 20 million people and the misery of almost everybody else” (Bernhard). Amis wants to shatter their delusions and deals with the historical events under Stalin in over fifty relatively short chapters, with striking, sometimes ironic titles such as “The Epic Agony of the Gulag,” “The Taste Inside Stalin‟s

Mouth” or “It loves blood/The Russian Earth.” Passages that give a rough outline of the events in Stalin‟s USSR and individual testimonies, often quoted from the works of Robert

Conquest, Anne Applebaum, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and other historians, are alternated with personal comments by Amis on life under communism, the reaction of the West, and Stalin as a private person. He also deals with quite a few personal matters in the novel, including the death of his father and the death of his sister four years after that. The book is “part intellectual memoir, part essay, part historical chronicle” (Murphy 123).

Amis begins Koba the Dread by quoting Robert Conquest‟s The Harvest of Sorrow:

Soviet Collectivization and the Terror Famine:

We may perhaps put this in perspective in the present case by saying that in

the actions here recorded about twenty human lives were lost for, not every

word, but every letter, in this book. (qtd. in Amis, KD 3)

“That sentence alone represents 3040 lives. Conquest‟s book is 411 pages long” (Amis, KD

3). Stalin, his allies, and his predecessors are the cause of an interminable amount of suffering. The subtitle of Koba the Dread reads “Laughter and the Twenty Million.” The

Twenty Million are the twenty million dead; the laughter is one of the striking characteristics

Ostyn 18 of the Soviet project: laughter is never completely out of sight. Memory, truth and laughter are the basic themes in Koba the Dread. These concepts are recurrent motives in events and actions in the USSR of Stalin and have acquired a specific meaning and sense in Stalin‟s regime.

2.1.1 Memory

A first motive is the rather unusual influence of the horrific facts under Stalin on the memory of that horror; because of the brutal contents of the memory, the memory or even the mind of the victims itself is affected. In Koba the Dread, in a passage about the isolator-cell in the camps, a note in the margin is made about Nadezhda Mandelstam, a Russian writer and the wife of the poet Osip Mandelstam. She sheltered a certain journalist who had been in one of the gulag camps, and tried to question him about the fate of her husband. She had to establish that his “memory was like a huge, rancid pancake in which fact and fancy from his prison days had been mixed up together and baked into one inseparable mass” (Amis, KD

77n). In another footnote, David Remnick, an American journalist, tries to interview one of

Stalin‟s former underlings: “He found what he expected to find: a twitching amnesiac on a state pension” (Amis, KD 112n). The health condition of the survivors can be the reason of the mixing up of reality and fiction, the blending of objectivity and subjectivity, and the faltering of memory. In the camps, bare necessities of life were not fulfilled at all. Torture, overall abuse and famine had their effect on the mental condition of the “zeks,” the inmates of the gulag, and simple mental processes like the recollection of one‟s name and the names of siblings was no longer self-evident. All other thoughts and emotions made way for the unquenchable craving for food. Amis relates:

They all dream the same dream “of loaves of rye bread that flew past us like

meteors or angels.” And they are forgetting everything. A professor of

philosophy forgets his wife‟s name. A doctor begins to doubt that he ever was

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a doctor: “Real were the minute, the hour, the day . . . . He never guessed

further, nor did he have the strength to guess. Nor did anyone else.” “I had

forgotten everything,” says one narrator: “I didn‟t even remember what it was

like to remember.” All emotions evaporate: all emotions except bitterness. (KD

156)

But even after Stalin‟s death and the agonies of the Stalin era, when people tried to pick up the thread of their lives, memories of the traumatic past were and are still wavering and confused. The survivors are not able to recollect details about the traumatic episode in their lives. They often mix up a certain extent of fiction with the reality of what happened, or they are simply unable to give an account of it. There is elision, but at the same time, trauma victims repeatedly relive their experience. The traumatic past cannot be forgotten, even if the trauma survivor desperately tries to do so, as a certain Stepan Podlubny does:

December 6, 1937. No one will ever know how I made it through the year of

1937. . . . I‟ll cross it out like an unnecessary page, I‟ll cross it out and banish

it from my mind though the black spot, the massive ugly spot like a thick

blood stain on my clothes, will be with me most likely for the rest of my life.

It will remain because my life during these 341 days of 1937 has been as ugly

and disgusting as the clotted blood that oozes out in a thick red mass from

under the corpse of a man dead from the plague. (qtd. in Amis, KD 186-87)

The trauma clings on to its victims and continues to poison them for the rest of their lives.

Brigade Commander Karpunich-Braven, who had been beaten by the Cheka (the Soviet secret police) for twenty-one days in a row, declares: “Even after thirty years all my bones ache – and my head too” (qtd. in Amis, KD 62). Trauma is present, but not as a part of memory. The essence of trauma, as we have seen in the first chapter, lies in the fact that the impression of events fails to be assimilated in the brain, and therefore haunts the victim in the form of intrusive recollections, flashbacks and nightmares. The victim relives his or her

Ostyn 20 traumatic experience over and over again, without being able to communicate to anyone what he or she is going through. The trauma victim is unable to integrate his or her traumatic past in a narrative and convey it to fellow human beings. The traumatic past is thus like a shadow that never parts from its companion; it is a burden that continuously weighs down on the trauma survivors. This phenomenon is exemplified in the behaviour of

Amis‟ friend and historian Tibor Szamuely, who also experienced the horror of purge, arrest and gulag and therefore has to deal with the effects of trauma:

Tibor was an unusual late riser, and Kingsley [Amis] once complained to Nina

[Tibor Szamuely‟s wife] about it. She said that her husband sometimes

needed to see the first signs of dawn before he could begin to contemplate

sleep. [...] He needs, said Nina, “to be absolutely certain that they won‟t be

coming for him that night” (Amis, KD 19-20).

Upon this, Amis comments “We cannot understand it, and there is no reason why we should”

(KD 20).

Trauma is interwoven with incomprehension. Some of the practices under Stalinism are too cruel, too mad, too outrageous to be graspable. To quote just one example out of the many in Koba the Dread:

Conquest notes the case of an eight-man cell at Zhitomir prison containing

160 inmates. “Five or six died every day,” wrote a survivor. The bodies

“continued to stand up because there was no room to fall down.” It was

known as “cell torture” (Amis, KD 62n).

When absurdities of this scale happen before your eyes, it is impossible to comprehend your sensory impressions. Traumatic events exceed the boundaries of what a human mind can bear; it exceeds the boundaries of consciousness. The experience is so unbelievable that the mind cannot incorporate it into the faculty of memory. When Boris Pasternak, a Russian poet and writer, travelled to the countryside in the early 1930s, he “fell ill and wrote not a word

Ostyn 21 for an entire year. „There was such inhuman, unimaginable misery, such a terrible disaster, that it began to seem almost abstract….‟ What he saw „would not fit within the boundaries of consciousness.‟ No, not his consciousness. What he saw was the reification of another‟s consciousness, another‟s mind, another‟s rage” (Amis, KD 128).

As you read Amis‟s book or the more historical works of scholars like Conquest and

Solzhenitsyn, the absurdity splatters you in the face. Events and acts are recounted that are far beyond comprehension. As you are reading, you almost fail to comprehend what is printed, because the events recounted simply do not fit in your frame of reference. Amis states that Stalin was “far advanced toward his […] objective of breaking the truth. Or it may have been the other way about: actuality, under Stalin, was such that dread and disgust forbade you to accept it – or even to contemplate it” (KD 152). Dread and disgust forbade you to accept, to believe reality: “Perhaps there is a reasonable excuse for believing the

Stalinist story. The real story – the truth – was entirely unbelievable” (Amis, KD 9).

2.1.2 Truth

Lenin accepted defeat, withdrawal and compromise. In other words, he accepted reality. Stalin did not. […] He would not accept reality. He would break it.1

Iosif Vissarionavich Dzhugashvili, or Stalin, or Koba the Dread, forged his own truth, his own reality. In that reality, Stalin was Koba, a Robin Hood-like character and a Georgian legendary folk hero from the book the Patricide by Alexander Cabbage. “Koba” means “the indomitable”, which turned out to be all too true, but a Robin Hood-figure he was absolutely not. We could state that Koba turned out to be a patricide, or rather a matricide, namely in crushing his mother country, Georgia. At a party meeting, Stalin is reported to have stated the following:

1 (KD 127)

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You hens! You sons of asses! What is going on here? You must draw a white-

hot iron over this Georgian land! . . . It seems to me you have already

forgotten the principle of the dictatorship of the proletariat. You will have to

break the wings of this Georgia! Let the blood of the petit bourgeois flow until

they give up all their resistance! Impale them! Tear them apart! (qtd. in Amis,

KD 100)

As Amis puts it, “Why take it out on your parents, when you can take it out on a province?”

(KD 99) But not only Georgia was severely attacked, and not only the blood of the “petit bourgeois” was flowing. Everybody suffered, except Stalin. He was the centre of his own delusional reality, the strong safe keeper of the Soviet nation, the “man of steel”. “Stalin” or

“man of steel” was the other self-imposed nickname that quickly replaced the nickname

“Soso”, the Georgian diminutive of “Iosif”. “Stalin” was the name under which the whole world came to know Iosif Vissarionavich, “Koba the Dread”: “When he mused about historical destiny, Stalin‟s thoughts turned to the great Russian tyrants, in particular Ivan the

Terrible (the first to style himself Tsar) and Peter the Great (the first to style himself

Emperor). […] Peter I was Stalin‟s lodestar during the Collectivization period. Later in the

1930s, as the Terror approached, Stalin looked to Ivan IV, Ivan Vasilievich Grozny – Ivan the

Dread” (Amis, KD 167-68). Stalin imagined himself to be a man he was not. His own persona and the reality he constructed around him were entirely spurious.

It is quite striking how, besides Stalin, many of the communist leaders of the Soviet

Union use nicknames. “„Lenin‟ is thought to derive from the River Lena.. […] „Kamenev‟: man of stone. „Molotov‟: the hammer. „Trotsky‟ (né Lev Bronstein) was the name on one of his false passports; it stuck” (Amis, KD 43n). Those communist party members seemed to be in need of a revolutionary persona, a secondary self. Secondary selves to serve in the secondary, delusional, Stalinist, communist, revolutionary reality. Those nicknames

Ostyn 23 contribute to the atmosphere of hypocrisy that overshadows the Soviet project. The abyss between words and deeds was enormous. In the words of Robert Conquest:

Above all, what characterizes the period [of 1930-33] is the special brand of

hypocrisy or evasion which he brought to it. These are not the necessary

concomitants of terror. But in this case, deception was the crux of every

move. […] In the dekulakization, he pretended that there really was a “class”

of rich peasants whom the poorer peasants spontaneously ejected from their

homes; in the collectivization, his public line was that it was a voluntary

movement, and that any use of force was a deplorable aberration; and when

it came to the terror famine of 1932-33, he simply denied that it existed.”

(Conquest, Harvest 7)

Iosif Stalin engaged in a struggle with truth, in “a personal battle with reality”2. Amis calls the Collectivization “the first stage in Stalin‟s opaque – indeed barely graspable – attempt to confront the truth, to bring it into line, to humble it, to break it” (KD 121). To give an example, Stalin led people to believe, and seemed to believe himself, that Collectivization was a voluntary movement. The whole Stalinist system was based on hypocrisy, on the delusions of a callous dictator. A significant example of this hypocrisy can be found in the so- called “Show Trials” of the period 1935-38. Old Bolsheviks such as Bukharin, Kamenev,

Zinoviev and Trotsky “confessed” to a series of crimes. “[T]orture, among its other applications, was part of Stalin‟s war against the truth. He tortured, not to force you to reveal a fact, but to force you to collude in a fiction” (Amis, KD 61). The aspect that strikes

Amis the most, is “Stalin‟s confidence (not at all widely shared by his circle) that world opinion would, as he said, „swallow it‟” (KD 172).

2 “In Russia‟s War, […] Richard Overy says that in 1941 Stalin was engaged in „a personal battle with reality‟ ” (KD 198).

Ostyn 24

Many details in Amis‟s book and the books of renowned historians reveal Stalin‟s complete lack of sense of reality. For example, Milovan Djilas comments on Stalin, attending a Kremlin movie theatre: “[T]hroughout the performance Stalin made comments – reactions to what was going on, in the manner of uneducated men who mistake artistic reality for actuality” (qtd. in Amis, KD 171). Another, more weighty example is to be found in the period of operation Barbarossa. Stalin thought it completely impossible that Hitler would attack the Soviet Union. When he did, Stalin reacted by ignoring it. He did not react. He seemed to be “under the impression that if he couldn‟t see reality, reality couldn‟t see him”

(Amis, KD 199). Stalin was completely baffled at this attack on the western front by his former ally. Most of the historical sources claim him to have done nothing for the first several days. As Amis writes: “To [Stalin‟s] obvious surprise, Molotov and Kaganovich and the rest of them patiently suggested that the country should resist the Germans and that Stalin should lead this effort. His reply is usually given as „Fine‟ – though Conquest‟s „All right‟ sounds more appropriately robotic” (KD 202).

Stalin closed his eyes for reality, and forced his whole nation to do the same. He compelled the people of the Soviet Union to believe in a fictional world which he enforced by torture and abuse, while they were living in the harsh reality of famine and deprivation. In other words, “the Terror enforced Stalin‟s version of reality (past and present). It endeavoured to concretize his alternate world” (Amis, KD 177). The populace found itself in a situation of dichotomy, in which reality was not compatible with Stalin‟s own reality. Amis quotes Marxist Leszek Kolakowski:

Half starved people, lacking the bare necessities of life, attended meetings at

which they repeated the government‟s lies about how well off they were, and

in a bizarre way they half-believed what they were saying… Truth, they knew,

was a Party matter, and therefore lies became true even if they contradicted

the plain facts of experience. The condition of their living in separate worlds at

Ostyn 25

once was one of the most remarkable achievements of the Soviet system. (KD

152-153)

Truth had become a party matter. Truth was no longer what you sensed, what you experienced; it was something the Party prescribed, something Stalin prescribed. He forged his own truth, his own reality. While over half of his people were starving, Stalin was boasting off about his achievements and about his glorious communist nation, flourishing in equality. As Michiko Kakutani phrases it in a review of Koba the Dread: “It was a world in which truth was a casualty and reality became a chimera.”

Not only did he engage in a personal battle with reality, with truth, he also embarked on a campaign against history. Camus states that “[i]n denying every stable truth, [the

USSR] was compelled to go to the point of denying the very lowest form of truth – the truth of history” (Rebel 236). First of all, Stalin wanted to rewrite his own history. Stalin was raised in a peasant family in Gori, Georgia. Thus, he had been part of the two categories of people that later on were hardest hit by his tyrannical fury. The peasants were harshly crushed by the iron fist, and Georgia was one of Stalin‟s first targets. Amis writes: “Lenin was now

[around 1921] favoring a softer line on the nationalities question, and especially on Georgia.

Stalin was for maximum force” (KD 100). Even towards his family, he showed no lenience.

His first wife Yekaterina (Kato) Svanidze died of typhus in 1907. At her funeral, Iosif Stalin is reported to have said: “This creature softened my stony heart. She is dead and with her have died my last warm feelings for all human beings” (Amis, KD 130). His second wife,

Nadezhda (Nadya) Alliluyeva, committed suicide in 1932, amidst the storm of Collectivization.

At her funeral, he made a gesture of dismissal and muttered: “She left me as an enemy”

(qtd. in Amis, KD 131). Nadya‟s suicide note was declared to be “partly personal, partly political.” One can wonder, as Amis does, “if Stalin was still divisible in these terms. He was already nearly all political, and after the events of this night he would finally dispense with the personal …” (KD 133). Iosif Stalin despised his son Yakov, born from his first marriage,

Ostyn 26 and was absolutely indifferent towards the son from his second marriage, Vasily. Only for his daughter Svetlana did he have any paternal feelings. To give an account of the way Stalin treated his family, and his wives‟ families, Amis quotes Alan Bullock:

On the side of his first wife […], her brother Alexander, once one of Stalin‟s

closest friends, was shot as a spy; at the same time his wife was arrested and

died in camp, while their son was exiled to Siberia as “a son of an enemy of

the people.” Ekaterina‟s sister, Maria, was also arrested and died in prison. On

the side of his second wife […], her sister Anna was arrested in 1948 and

sentenced to ten years for espionage; Anna‟s husband, Stanislav Redens, had

already been arrested in 1938 as “an enemy of the people” and was later

shot. Ksenia, the widow of Nadezhda‟s brother Pavel and Yevgenia, the wife

of Nadezhda‟s uncle, were both arrested after the war and not released until

after Stalin‟s death. (KD 135)

Stalin seemed to want to wipe out his past, to sweep away his connections with his Georgian origin, and with anyone who ever had a more or less personal contact with him:

The specific nature of Stalin‟s antipathy is in any case clear. It is usually

attributed to his intense insecurity and his shame about his origins. Perhaps,

too, he was trying to sever his last connections to anything human. He was

[…] killing everyone who had ever known Stalin – known him or seen him or

breathed the same air. (Amis, KD 102)

Along with his own past, Stalin wanted to change the past of the country. He had history books rewritten. He claimed that the revolution was mainly his doing, he minimized the role played by Lenin and he bluntly ignored Trotsky. A poem of 1936 about

Collectivization pictures Stalin on his horse in the countryside:

Past lakes, through hills and woods and fields

Along the road he rides

Ostyn 27

In his grey trenchcoat with his pipe.

Straight on his horse he guides.

He stops and speaks

To peasantfolk

Throughout the countryside

And making necessary notes,

Goes on about his ride.

(Amis, KD 124n)

Stalin never rode that horse. The whole poem is fictional. Volkogonov asserts: “Throughout his life he visited an agricultural region only once, and that was in 1928, when he went to

Siberia to see grain deliveries. He never set foot in a village again” (qtd. in Amis, KD 124n).

Stalin wrote The History of All-Union Communist Party: Short Course in 1938. Amis ascribes its “success” (tens of millions of copies were printed) not only to coercion:

The Short Course, after all, was the best-known guide on how to avoid being

arrested. By […] 1938, almost everyone who remembered things differently

was dead. (KD 107)

Stalin could break the truth because there was no one there to contradict him. Fellow

Bolsheviks that dissented were shot, or else their family was slaughtered or sent to the gulag. At the height of Stalin‟s terror, there was absolutely no free ticket to safety left. Stalin distrusted everybody, and could have everybody executed, even his close associates and their families. Nobody was safe for the crushing power of his iron fist. He owned history as he owned the country, and he did not like the history that had really happened, since he had not been the revolutionary hero he wanted to be:

This was one of the obscure desires of the Terror: to make a tabula rasa of

the past . . . . As the Short Course tells it, Stalin made the Revolution (and

won the Civil War) more or less singlehanded [sic] – with the help and

Ostyn 28

colleagueship of Lenin, and with the sinister hindrances of Trotsky. And the

truth is […] that Stalin played no part in October at all. (Amis, KD 107)

But truth, by that time, did not really matter anymore. All people that could testify differently were exterminated, and all Soviet sources were altered to fit Stalin‟s “history of the Soviet

Union.” Camus explains: “[He] had to rewrite history, even the most recent and the best- known, even the history of the party and of the Revolution. Year by year, sometimes month by month, Pravda corrects itself, and rewritten editions of the official history books follow one another off the presses. Lenin is censored, Marx is not published” (Rebel 236). Amis writes: “I spent an hour with [the book „The Great Terror‟, by Robert Conquest], and never forgot the cold elegance of the following remark about „sources‟: „Contemporary official accounts require little comment. They are, of course, false as to essentials, but they are still most informative. (It is untrue that Mdivani was a British spy, but it is true that he was executed.)‟” (KD 10) How absurd must it be to live in a country where the untruthfulness of historical sources goes without saying.

2.1.3 Laughter

Considering that Trotsky Did not ski, It was a bit thick To fricassee his brains with an ice-pick.3

Amis quotes his friend Robert Conquest: “The reality of Stalin‟s activities was often disbelieved because they seemed to be unbelievable. His whole style consisted of doing what had previously been thought morally or physically inconceivable” (KD 262). Throughout Koba the Dread, Amis gives us tens of examples of Stalin‟s actions that seem unbelievable because they are wholly absurd. A very ironic example can be found in the Soviet census of 1937.

3 Amis writes: “You could always joke about [the Soviets]. This was a contribution by Robin Ravensbourne to a clerihew competition in the New Statesman (another notable winner was Basil Ransome‟s „Karl Marx / Provided the clerks / With a dialectical reason / For their treason‟).” (KD 45)

Ostyn 29

Based on the results of a census of 1926, “Stalin said that he expected a new total of 170 million. The Census Board reported a figure of 163 million – a figure that reflected the consequences of Stalin‟s policies. So Stalin had the Census Board shot” (Amis, KD 97). This of course lowered the number even more. Even something as trivial as the names of “new crimes” that were “invented” during the Stalin era, such as “PZ, for instance (Abasement before the West), or VAD (Praising American Democracy), or the presumably more minor

VAT (Praising American Technique)” (Amis, KD 216), can easily evoke a wry smile. A gulag camp was named after Maxim Gorky. People were accused of being “enemies of the people” and executed or sent to the gulag because they had stolen a potato. Since 1917, Bolsheviks had been undermining the family. To divorce you simply had to notify your spouse by postcard. A certain Nikolaenko became a national heroine because she denounced hundreds of people to Stalin. “But then Nikolaenko denounced Khrushchev, a first-echelon toady and placeman, for „bourgeois nationalism‟, and Stalin finally conceded that she was nuts. She helped destroy about 8,000 people” (Amis, KD 145). In the same vein: “On June 11, 1933, the Ukrainian paper Visti praised an „alert‟ secret policeman for unmasking and arresting a

„fascist saboteur‟ who had hidden some bread in a hole under a pile of clover” (Amis, KD 4).

Another example is the anecdote about Pavel “Pavlik” Morozov, a fourteen-year-old peasant boy that denounced his father, who was consequently shot. The boy was hereafter murdered by a band of villagers, reported to include his grandfather and his cousin. “Stalin briefly interrupted his preparations for exalting Pavlik as a hero and martyr of socialism (statues, songs, stories, inscription in the Pioneer „Book of Heroism‟, the Moscow Palace of Culture renamed in his honor)” but was heard to remark privately: “What a little swine, denouncing his own father” (Amis, KD 193). Absurdity after absurdity were piled up under Stalin‟s rule.

On “election day” one of the Soviet people, Lyubov Vasilievna Shaporina testifies:

Quelle blague! I went into the booth, where supposedly I was going to read

the ballot and choose my candidate for the Supreme Soviet – “choose” means

Ostyn 30

you have a choice. There was just one name, already marked. I burst out

laughing uncontrollably, right there in the booth, just like a child. It took me a

long time to compose myself. […] It was just hilarious. […] Shame on them

for putting grown people in such a ridiculous, stupid position. Who do we

think we‟re fooling? We were all in stitches. (qtd. in Amis, KD 191)

Elections in the USSR were a joke, so they evoked laughter – not a warming, cheerful laughter, but the wry laughter of despair.

The economic situation in the Soviet Union, too, was a joke. For the Soviet people, and especially the Soviet peasants, life was pushed to such an extent that it was almost laughable. The irreconcilable gap between reality and the former ideals of the Revolution could but evoke a grim and bitter smirk. Amis writes:

Throughout this period the Russian people heard nothing from their leaders

but a drone of self-congratulation. And the truth, no longer postponable by

the standard Bolshevik means (violence), screamed with laughter at what it

saw. Napoleon said that power is never ridiculous (and despotic power is

presumably doubly unsmiling); but Bolshevism, by this stage, was ridiculous.

(KD 48)

The collectivization of 1929-33 can easily be named the biggest failure in Soviet history. Amis states that “the most salient feature of Collectivization was the abysmal depth, and gigantic reach, of its failure. In his introductory administrative push, Stalin ruined the countryside for the rest of the century” (KD 121). Nevertheless, the fact that his first planned feat turned out to be a disaster did not hinder Stalin in any way. He did not rest his iron fist.

Collectivization was followed by the Terror Famine: over six million people are believed to have starved to death in the years 1932 to 1934. Amis sees Stalin as the personification of famine. Famine is as old as humankind, and has occurred all over the world, but this famine was an enforced famine. Stalin used hunger to bring his people to

Ostyn 31 their knees, if they had not already fallen down. Amis writes: “Famine belongs to the

Communist tetrarchy – the other three elements being terror, slavery, and, of course, failure, monotonous and incorrigible failure” (KD 30). Stalin‟s failure was responsible for the starvation of millions of people, while he had promised them prosperity:

Unprecedented power was his, and he had launched it on an experiment. The

experiment had failed (and become, simply, a war of extermination waged

against the guinea pigs). In the countryside, now, instead of growing fat on

the loyally thrumming grain factories of which a German philosopher had

fleetingly dreamed, the peasants were eating each other, and eating

themselves. (Amis, KD 134)

Compulsory grain requisitioning left the people on the countryside with nothing to eat but each other: “Some parents killed their children. And other parents ate their children”, Amis bluntly states (KD 141). A victim relates:

It was then that I saw for myself that every starving person is like a cannibal.

He is consuming his own flesh, leaving only his bones intact. He devours his

fat to the last droplet. And then his mind goes dim, because he has consumed

his own mind. In the end the starving man has devoured himself completely.

(qtd. in Amis, KD 141)

In a country under a government that promised communism, which was meant to stand for equality, solidarity, unity, and freedom for the masses, those masses were now consuming themselves because there was simply nothing else left:

We were all supposed to be one big family after collectivization. But everyone

was pitted against everyone else, everyone suspicious of everyone else. Now

look at us, a big stinking ruin. Now everyone lives for himself . . . . What a

laugh, what a big goddam laugh. (Amis, KD 50)

Ostyn 32

The industrialization at a rapid pace that Stalin had in mind also met with utter failure. Amis gives the following examples: “The regular unavailability, in the whole of

Moscow, of a singe „light bulb or a bar of soap‟ (Tibor Szamuely), for instance, or the inability of the White Sea-Baltic Canal, constructed by the „fart power‟ (Solzhenitsyn) of hundreds of thousands of slaves, to carry heavy shipping” (KD 146). And how horribly comic is Remnick‟s remark that the “leading cause of house fires in the Soviet Union was television sets that exploded spontaneously” (Amis, KD 49). The economist Anatoly Deryabin wrote in an official journal that “[o]nly 2.3 percent of all Soviet families can be called wealthy, and about 0.7 of these have earned that income lawfully . . . . About 11.2 per cent can be called middle-class or well-to-do. The rest, 86.5, are simply poor” (qtd. in Amis, KD 49). In the meantime, foreign guests were invited to visit the so-called Potemkin villages, and as a result, H. G.

Wells, for example, was lead to declare about Stalin that he had “never met a man more candid, fair and honest,” and that “no one is afraid of him and everyone trusts him” (qtd. in

Amis, KD 21n). In the same vein, George Bernard Shaw proclaimed the Russian people to be the best-fed people in Europe– at a time when over ten million people were dying of starvation.

Not only Stalin‟s actions and the economic situation in the USSR were a sick joke, also his old “comrades” were forced to act as clowns. Devouring the countryside was not enough; Stalin was never sated. About the mid-fifties Stalin started to have a go at his “own people,” the Old Bolsheviks: “The differences between the regimes of Lenin and Stalin were quantitative, not qualitative. Stalin‟s one true novelty was the discovery of another stratum of society in need of purgation: Bolsheviks” (Amis, KD 32). Starting from 1936 on, no one in the vast expanse of the Soviet empire was safe from harm. Stalin‟s paranoia and bloodthirstiness drove him to kill, as was pointed out before, “everyone who had ever known

Stalin – known him or seen him or breathed the same air” (Amis, KD 102). By 1933, everyone that came in touch with Stalin was in danger. At party gatherings, for example,

Ostyn 33 nobody dared to stop applauding after Stalin spoke, so the applauses were lengthy and enthusiastic. But what was to be done if Stalin was not there to end the applause?

At a Party conference in Moscow Province, during the Terror years, a new

secretary took the place of an old secretary (who had been arrested). The

proceedings wound up with a tribute to Stalin. Everyone got to their feet and

started applauding; and no one dared to stop. In Solzhenitsyn‟s version of this

famous story, after five minutes, “the older people were panting with

exhaustion.” […] The first man to stop clapping (a local factory director) was

arrested the next day and given ten years on another charge. (Amis, KD 151)

These wild applauses were part of a cult of personality surrounding Stalin. Stalin was everywhere, as represented in place names: there was a Stalingrad, six Stalinos, Stalinabad,

Stalinsk, Stalinogorsk, Stalinskoye, Stalinksi, Staliniri, Stalin Bay, the Stalin Range, and the highest peak in the USSR was called Mount Stalin. In his official biography, the Short Course,

Stalin proclaims the following:

At the various stages of the War Stalin‟s genius found the correct solution that

took account of all the circumstances . . . . His military mastership was

displayed both in defense and offense. His genius enabled him to divine the

enemy‟s plans and defeat them. […] Although he performed his task of leader

of the Party with consummate skill and enjoyed the unreserved support of the

entire Soviet people, Stalin never allowed his work to be marred by the

slightest hint of vanity, conceit or selfadulation. (qtd. in Amis, KD 240)

But the saddest of all facts must be that “[n]o other man in the world has ever accomplished so fantastic a success as he: to exterminate millions of his own countrymen and receive in exchange the whole country‟s blind adulation” (Amis, KD 214). This was Stalin, a man who was responsible for so many dead and so much suffering, a man who propagated the motto

“Death solves all problems. No man, no problem.” Lenin bequeathed him with a police state;

Ostyn 34

Stalin turned this state into something that could barely be called a state. Bolshevism and the Soviet project turned out to be one big joke. Amis writes:

One might adapt the old joke. Q: What‟s the difference between a Communist

car and a Communist proselytizer? A: You can close the door on a Communist

proselytizer. [… I]t has always been possible to joke about the Soviet Union.

[… L]aughter intransigently refuses to absent itself. Immersion in the facts of

the Bolshevik catastrophe may make this increasingly hard to accept, but such

an immersion will never cleanse that catastrophe of laughter. (KD 12)

The events recounted by Amis are in essence enormously sad. They are not compatible with merry laughter; they are not funny in the common sense, but they seem to be elements of a bitter farce. Stalin‟s deeds are so irrefutably entangled with complete failure that there is something horribly comic in the whole Stalinist project. Everything went so awfully and absurdly wrong that it brings laughter in the matter, albeit a sad, grievous, cynical kind of laughter; in a way comparable with the laughter in a tragicomic play. In a tragicomedy, the origin of laughter lies in the fact that the viewer realizes that discrepancy between reality and appearance.4 The comic character does not realize his foolishness, but the public laughs at him because it understands and feels the distance between the character he pretends to be and what he really is in the eyes of the public. The humour comes from the conscious contradiction between pretence and reality. The bridging of this gap between reality and appearance brings forth the laughter, and this was also the case in the USSR of Stalin:

The Bolsheviks promised paradise and delivered hell. They boasted of massive

gains in productivity while the entire country starved. They trumpeted the

“freest elections in the world” when there was only one candidate – and he

was a mass murderer. This “gap between words and deeds,” Amis believes, is

4 See for example, L‟avare by Molière. The main character thinks himself to be a serious man, while the audience realizes that he is in fact a pitiful miser.

Ostyn 35

fertile ground for humor, and has allowed the horror of that time to be

laughed off in a way the Nazi era could never be. (Bernhard)

Amis‟s positioning that “we will all go on joking about it because there‟s something in

Bolshevism that is painfully, unshirkably comic” (KD 48) met with a lot of resistance on behalf of literary critics. Edward E. Ericson, for example, writes: “Twenty million innocents

(and probably more) were done to death by Soviet power. That‟s not funny. But there they are, those big numbers, conjoined with laughter in the subtitle of this new book about Stalin.

Twenty million dead. Ha, ha, ha” (Ericson). Michiko Kakatuni calls the laughter in Koba the

Dread “a literary construct.” Amis had to endure countless reviewers that sabred him down on account of the connection he uncovers between Stalinism and its twenty million dead, and laughter. Several critics brand Amis as being pretentious, over-ambitious, narcissistic or plainly crass to connect laughter with the suffering of so many. Some call Koba the Dread an insult to the survivors and their families. But that is not what it is, and that is certainly not what Amis wants to achieve. Yes, it is true jokes have also been made about Hitler and up to a certain extent we can laugh with Nazism. We have all seen Chaplin‟s The Great Dictator, or the series Allo Allo, which has been and still is very popular in Belgium and in which the

Nazis and the Gestapo are ridiculed. Still we should stress, as Amis does, that there is a certain grim laughter, connected with the absurdity and utter despair that Stalinism evoked, which is present in the case of Bolshevism but absent in the case of Nazism: “Laughter […] will never absent itself from the black farce of Bolshevism; laughter will never raise its hands to its lips, bidding adieu. By now we recognize the kind of laughter we hear; we hear it when we witness epiphanic moral sordor” (Amis, KD 267).

Even today, Stalin‟s words still evoke laughter. When Khrushchev reported in his

Secret Speech of 1956 Stalin‟s remark that he wanted to deport the entire people of

Ukrainians, but that there were still too many of them, the assembled delegates reacted with

“wild laughter”. Amis writes:

Ostyn 36

Were they amused by the elephantiasis and demented circumspection of

Stalin‟s paranoia? Partly, perhaps. More likely, though, the laughter was an

expression of moral aftershock, and an expression of sheer relief that such

enormities were now in the past. They laughed because they could laugh. But

the sound of that laughter, one imagines, remained disturbingly confused. (KD

208n; emphasis in original)

So Bolshevism still evoked laughter then, and it still does now. The desperate, grievous laughter of Stalin‟s victims transformed into laughter of moral aftershock, laughter of relief and of hope for the future. One wonders when the descendants of Stalin‟s victims will laugh in merriment again.

Ostyn 37

2.2 COMMUNISM VERSUS NAZISM

The Holocaust is generally considered to be the major traumatic event of the twentieth century. When people discuss or contemplate trauma theory, the first example they will think of will indisputably be the Holocaust. Everybody knows of the Holocaust, everybody knows of its six million victims and everybody has heard about the horrors of Nazi-Germany. Countless films, documentaries, books, plays etc. have been made on the subject, and the rising popularity of the Nazi Party and its disastrous consequences is taught in the history lessons of every high school in Europe. The Stalinist story, however, is far less well known. Amis comments:

There are several names for what happened in Germany and Poland in the

early 1940s. The Holocaust, the Shoah, the Wind of Death. In Romani it is

called the Porreimos – the Devouring. There are no names for what happened

in the Soviet Union between 1917 and 1953 (although Russians refer,

totemically, to “the twenty million,” and to the Stalinshchina – the time of

Stalin‟s rule). What should we call it? The Decimation, the Fratricide, the

Mindslaughter? No. Call it the Zachto? Call it the What For? (KD 75)

For what happened in the USSR under Stalin, we do not even have a name. When you search for video documentaries in an ordinary public library, you will find a dozen or so documentaries on the Second World War and Hitler‟s role in it, on the life of Hitler, on the rise of the Nazi Party and so on. You will probably find, if you are lucky, one about Stalin‟s role in the Second World War, or none at all. Nevertheless, everybody with some degree of education knows about Stalin and his victims. We know more or less what happened. But we do not seem to know much. We are dowsed in information and literature about the

Holocaust, in such a way that we can almost physically “know” about it. About Stalinism on

Ostyn 38 the other hand, we do not really know. We only heard from a distance about what happened there, as Ericson too acknowledges in his review of Koba the Dread:

Not many [people really know]. And certainly not today‟s college students,

few of whom have ever heard of even Solzhenitsyn. They “know,” instead,

from their Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English, that “although Stalin

was responsible for developing farming and industry in his country, and for

successfully leading it in the war against Germany (1941-45), he is now

remembered also for his great cruelty. Thousands of political opponents were

killed or sent to prisons in Siberia . . . .” [Successfully. Remembered also for.

Thousands.]

Why is it that so many people do not really know of the horrors of Stalinism, or when they know, they do not take it very seriously; this in contrast with the automatic overall repulsion towards Nazism? What theory can explain this paradox adequately? What is the difference between these two aberrations, between the two dictators that formed a pact in 1939, Hitler and Stalin, the right-wing dictator and the (so-called) left-wing dictator?

They do of course have a lot in common. They were both born on the fringes of their later empire, and both hated the environment they were born into. Hitler was the son of an

Austrian bastard, and some claim him to be the son of a Jew. Stalin was born into a

Georgian peasant family. He later tried to extinguish the Georgians, and with dekulakization and collectivization swiped away a large percentage of the peasant population. Amis names other similarities: “[B]oth Adolf and Iosif served as choirboys; and both would grow to a height of five feet four” (KD 98). And they both had a craving for power up to the point of insanity. Amis writes that “when you read Alan Bullock‟s thousand-page Hitler and Stalin:

Parallel Lives, in which the protagonists are considered in roughly alternating chapters, you feel like a psychiatric-ward inspector unerringly confronted by the same two patients. The

German patient exhibits a florid megalomania of the manic variety. Hitler, indeed, created a

Ostyn 39 whole new style of insanity – in which the simulacrum of preternatural self-assurance is repeatedly dispersed in a squall of saliva” (KD 89). That Stalin suffered insanity too, can be easily deduced from the previous paragraphs. Despite their positioning on the opposite extreme sides of the political spectrum5, Nazism and Bolshevism are in fact quite similar systems. They are both aberrations, historical mistakes that share the same enemy, democracy:

[W]hat makes a comparative analysis [between fascism and communism]

inevitable is not just their date of birth . . . it‟s also their mutual dependence.

Fascism was born as a reaction against communism: communism extended its

term thanks to anti-fascism . . . the greatest secret of complicity between

Bolshevism and fascism remains, however, the existence of that common

adversary, which the two ideologies belittled or exorcised through the notion

that it was in its death agony . . . quite simply, democracy. (François Furet

qtd. in Lloyd 12)

Camus speaks in this respect of “le fait concentrationnaire”, the “fact of a concentration- camp universe”: “a concept forged by our ear and whose capacity for generalization as a concept exceeds the specific fact of concentration camps in Stalin‟s Russia, the corollary concept of „authoritarian socialism‟ is given the potential to allude not merely to the

Communist authoritarianism of the rule of Stalin but also, to the pseudo-socialist authoritarianism of the rule of Hitler, to Nazi Germany and to the revolutionary claims of national socialism” (Felman, “Fall” 180).

In spite of the similarities between the two, Amis is right to point out that there are major differences between “the big moustache” and “the little moustache,” between Stalin and Hitler. It is not his goal, nor ours, to establish which of the two was “worse”: he is not

5 It could nevertheless be argued that Bolshevism was in fact not a leftist, but an extreme-rightist dictatorship under the guise of Socialism.

Ostyn 40 comparing them on a moral level. Bidding up the numbers of casualties would not only be useless, but also respectless and inappropriate. Taylor writes:

Inevitably, Amis‟ attempt to put [Bolshevism] on a moral par with [Nazism]

comes up against the question of “Which was worse?” Too often, the answer

has been decided by tallying up the dead. By that measure, Stalin‟s 20 million

wins handily over Hitler‟s 6 million Jews (and the number rises significantly if

you add in the rest of the Nazi‟s victims). But morally, counting bodies is a

mug‟s game.

Still, Stalinism has never been regarded as the Holocaust has. Even Robert Conquest, when asked whether he found the Holocaust “worse” than the Stalinist crimes in an interview with

Le Monde in 1997, declared: “I answered yes, I did, but when the interviewer asked why, I could only answer honestly with „I feel so‟” (qtd. in Amis, KD 82). Amis comments:

Conquest, anti-Sovietchik number one, feels so. […] We feel so. When you

read about the war, about the siege of Leningrad – when you read about

Stalingrad, about Kursk – your body tells you whose side you‟re on. You feel

so. In attempting to answer the question why, one enters an area saturated

with qualms. (KD 82)

So how do Nazism and Bolshevism really differ? Why is Nazism thought of with disgust, while

Bolshevism can be thought of with a smile of nostalgia for the ideal of the Revolution? Amis points out the differences between the two systems, while stressing the fact that both were equally repulsive, equally insane.

First of all, there is a big difference of ideology. Stalinism was based on the positive ideas of Karl Marx, on the utopian ideas of the revolution of the people. As Orlando Figes states:

The Bolshevik programme was based on the ideals of the Enlightment – it

stemmed from Kant as much as from Marx – which makes Western liberals,

Ostyn 41

even in this age of postmodernism, sympathise with it, or at least obliges us

to try and understand it, even if we do not share its political goals; whereas

the Nazi efforts to “improve mankind,” whether through eugenics or genocide,

spat in the face of the Enlightment and can only fill us with revulsion. (qtd. in

Amis, KD 85)

Communism started off with the overthrowing of the tsarist regime, a regime that abused its power and oppressed its people. The Revolution of 1917 marked the beginning of a new era, a time in which people would be equally treated, property would be divided and everybody would live harmoniously together. Nevertheless, the reality turned out to be totally different from the communist utopia. Hitler, by contrast, started off with ideas that are now considered reprehensible. He wanted to create a vigorous and pure German race, a race that would populace the biggest empire of Europe. Aryans were the future, and he urged blond and blue-eyed women to give birth to lots of strong, German youths. He wanted to create

Lebensraum for his Aryan Übermensch – Nietzsches concept misunderstood and misused –, so his planned war was a war of conquest. He even stated beforehand that he wanted to invade the USSR. Amis writes: “Hitler had never been diffident about his plans for the USSR.

In Mein Kampf (1925) he had proposed to cut a path eastward with fire and sword, and to enslave the Slavic undermen” (KD 195). Elsewhere Amis ironically comments on Hitler‟s plans to turn Russia into a “slave empire”: “But then it occurs to you that a slave empire is what they had already” (KD 209n). All in all, the Nazi vision was in essence a biomedical vision, as witness the fact that the Nazi doctors were seen as healers who rid the German people of its cancerous tumour, the Jews, and other “vermin” such as gipsies, disabled people, and homosexuals. Taylor phrased it like this:

Stalin‟s ends – collectivization, industrialization, even the attainment of

absolute power – were at least comprehensible (which is not to say right,

desirable or even thought-out), although the means he used to achieve them

Ostyn 42

were barbaric. Hitler employed rational, industrialized means (one could even

call them “neat,” and therein lies part of the offense) toward an irrational end:

the physical elimination of every Jew.

Amis also writes: “The distinction may be that Nazi terror strove for precision, while

Stalinist terror was deliberately random. Everyone was terrorized, all the way up: everyone except Stalin” (KD 85). Stalin killed more randomly, and everybody could be executed or sent to the gulag. Nazism was much more aimed at the direct extinguishing of a group of people. Consequently, there was also a difference between the Nazi concentration camps and the gulag camps. Amis recounts:

The gulag had no death camps of the Nazi type, no Belzec, no Sobibor

(though it had execution camps). But all the camps were death camps, by the

nature of things. Those not immediately killed at Auschwitz, which was a slave

camp and a death camp, tended to last three months. Two years seems to

have been the average for the slave camps of the gulag archipelago. (KD 18)

Alexander complies with Amis and writes that “Nazi camps existed primarily either to cage

(but generally, keep alive) party-political opponents or to kill designated categories of people. In contrast, the gulag blurred the lines between caging, killing, and extracting labor.”

In Germany, there was still a majority of people that was not a target, while in Stalin‟s USSR everybody was in danger. Stalinism did not really care about race. Stalin did go after Georgia and Ukraine, but the extinction was never as total, as precise as the Nazi extermination was.

The difference between life and death or the decision to be sent to the gulag depended entirely on Stalin‟s whims and did not have any deeper meaning. Taylor states that “[t]he accounts of Stalinist Russia are best summed up by the slogans of 1984 – „WAR IS PEACE,‟

„FREEDOM IS SLAVERY,‟ „IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH‟ – representing as they do the complete eradication of meaning.”

Ostyn 43

Moreover, Amis claims that “[n]azism did not destroy civil society. Bolshevism did destroy civil society. This is one of the reasons for the „miracle‟ of German recovery, and for the continuation of Russian vulnerability and failure” (KD 88). Hitler indeed achieved some economic goals, while Stalin failed on all levels. Amis writes: “And yet, unlike Hitler, who announced his goals in 1933 and, with a peculiarly repulsive sense of entitlement, set about achieving them, Stalin is to be seen at this time as a figure constantly fantasticated not by success but by failure” (KD 123). Failure was Stalin‟s keyword. Hitler had helter-skelter conquering successes (“Poland in twenty-seven days, Denmark in twenty-four hours, Norway in twenty-three days, Holland in five, Belgium in eighteen, France in thirty-nine, Yugoslavia in twelve, and Greece in twenty-one” (Amis, KD 195).) They crossed paths at Stalingrad, and once again, Stalin made the wrong decision: “If, instead of decapitating his army, he had intelligently prepared it for war, Russia might have defeated Germany in a matter of weeks.

Such a course of action, while no doubt entailing grave consequences of its own, would have saved about 40 million lives, including the vast majority of victims of the Holocaust” (Amis,

KD 207). Nevertheless, the final victory was Stalin‟s. Sided with the allies, the Bolsheviks ended the Second Wold War in 1945. In the Second World War, Hitler was the big enemy;

Stalin turned out to be the big ally. The role of the USSR in the Second World War may well have played an important part in the evoking of a positive feeling about communism in general.

For two ideologies that were in a way very much alike – and both very repulsive, it is surprising how different the Western attitude is towards Bolshevism and Nazism. In this respect, the critic Brendan Bernhard speaks of “the „chief lacuna‟ of the 20th Century: the failure of Western intellectuals to condemn the grotesque horrors perpetrated in the USSR even as they were happening, and their reluctance to fully repudiate some of their communist sympathies since.” Bolshevism is often explained away, saying that the ideas of

Trotsky and Lenin in themselves were good, and that Stalin was the evildoer, the devil

Ostyn 44 incarnate. If Lenin had lived longer, and Stalin had been pushed aside, the Bolshevik project allegedly would have turned out better. But that is probably just a utopia, because “[d]espite the fact that it can be plausibly argued that true communism has never been achieved, by now it‟s clear that every state that has attempted it has perpetrated totalitarian outrages”

(Taylor)

Amis makes a fascinating effort in Koba the Dread to prove that Stalin only followed the path that was laid out for him by Lenin. He wants to show that the communist ideals were betrayed immediately after October 1917: “The main obstacles were people, of all kinds: old regime supporters, party-political rivals, peasants reluctant to surrender land, suspect ethnic groups, and so on. Amis emphasizes that from the start, the Communist dictatorship monopolized power by killing or caging these possible resisters, including through mass executions, a budding camp system, and famine as a political weapon. Stalin

„merely‟ put this machinery of repression in overdrive” (Alexander). Lenin was just as bad as

Stalin was; he only had less time. Amis writes:

Lenin wanted executions; he had his heart set on executions. And he got

them. The possibility has been suggested that in the period 1917-1924 more

people were murdered by the secret police than were killed in all the battles

of the Civil War. (KD 34)

Furthermore, Trotsky cannot be exculpated either. Amis quotes him: “We must put an end once and for all to the papist-Quaker babble about the sanctity of human life” (KD 35).

Terror was a planned mechanism to turn the USSR into a Soviet society, and Stalin, Lenin and Trotsky were not reluctant to use it. The latter declared: “Terror is a powerful means of policy, and one would have to be a hypocrite not to understand this” (qtd. in Amis, KD 236).

The target of their Red Terror was, in the first place, the bourgeoisie. John Lloyd quotes

Trotsky:

Ostyn 45

We are forced to seize it [the bourgeoisie] and cut off its hands. The red

terror is the weapon used against a class doomed to perish, but which has not

resigned itself to its fate . . . the immediate needs of history cannot be

satisfied by the mechanism of parliamentary democracy. (12)

Courtois claims that this speech is an example of “the deification of history, to which everything must be sacrificed, and the incurable naivety of the revolutionary who imagines himself able, thanks to his dialectic, to assist the emergence of a more just and humane society through criminal methods.” (qtd. in Lloyd 13) It is undeniably true that Stalin went further down the pathway of atrocity and insanity, way further then Lenin and Trotsky did, but all three of them honoured the principle that the end justifies the means, which is morally unacceptable. Amis concludes: “An admiration for Lenin and Trotsky is meaningless without an admiration for terror” (KD 250).

He then adds: “But progress has already been made. The argument, now, is about whether Bolshevik Russia was “better” than Nazi Germany. In the days when the New Left dawned, the argument was about whether Bolshevik Russia was better than America” (KD

25). In any case, the communist utopia story was – and for some still is – successful, despite the Soviet terror, which has been denied, or at least not condemned the way Nazism is.

Ostyn 46

2.3 AMIS’S PERSONAL TRAUMA

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old: Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn. At the going down of the sun and in the morning We will remember.6

A very important element in Koba the Dread that I want to address before elaborating further on the differing attitudes towards Nazism and Stalinism is Amis‟s own private trauma.

Trauma is present on several levels. In the book, the suffering of millions in the Stalin era is interwoven with Amis‟s own grief about the passing away of his father, Kingsley Amis, and his younger sister, Sally Amis, at the age of 46. He seems to want to connect his sorrow with that of the victims of Stalinism. The middle part of the book is flanked by an introduction and an epilogue that plunge into Amis‟s personal sphere. In the introductory chapters, he quotes the afterword of another famous novel of his, Time‟s Arrow:

This book is dedicated to my sister Sally, who, when she was very young,

rendered me two profound services. She awakened my protective instincts;

and she provided, if not my earliest childhood memory, then certainly my

most charged and radiant. She was perhaps an hour old at the time. I was

four. (KD 5)

He then dryly adds: “It feels necessary to record that, between Millennium Night and the true millennium a year later, my sister died at the age of forty six” (KD 5). Amis‟s sister Sally died just a few years after his father Kingsley Amis, and it is clear throughout Koba the

Dread that Amis has not really dealt with these losses yet, and even feels some responsibility about his little sister‟s death. In the concluding chapters of the book, he expresses in a letter to his friend Christopher Hitchens how much he misses her. Elsewhere he writes:

6 “For the Fallen” by Laurence Binyon, originally written for the British dead in the First World War (qtd. in KD 269)

Ostyn 47

Many times, as a child, I silently promised to protect her. And I didn't do that,

did I? No one could have protected her, perhaps. But those promises, never

uttered, are still inside me and are still part of me. (KD 268)

Martin Amis mourns his deceased relatives while and by mourning the Twenty Million, and many critics have taken very ill the fact that he parallels his own suffering with that of

Stalin‟s victims in the USSR. Kakutani, for example, writes the following:

Mr. Amis suggests that by looking at one individual death – namely, his

sister‟s – he is delivering a kind of response to the assertion attributed to

Stalin that “a single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic.” The

problem is that Sally Amis turns out to be little more than a footnote in this

volume, and Mr. Amis‟s other personal asides, plopped in the midst of what is

a historical survey of Soviet crimes against humanity, feel like the narcissistic

musings of a spoiled, upper-middle-class litterateur who has never known the

kind of real suffering Stalin‟s victims did.

I would disagree with Kakutani, because I think Sally Amis is more than a footnote in this book; she is the very reason Amis started this book, and it seems to me that the whole book is drenched with grief for her loss. Of course Amis has never known the suffering of the gulag, but in and of itself that does not mean that he would not have anything interesting to say about the gulag. Amis was right in connecting his personal grief with those Twenty

Million, because by adding a personal level, the grief, the suffering, the hurt is made far more tangible and sore. It is necessary for a book about Stalin‟s atrocities to touch people, to let them feel just a hint of that immense agony, and it is clear that a personal anecdote contributes to that purpose. “If the relatively peaceful death, admittedly at a comparatively young age, of one woman is so hard to take,” Amis recently said, “then what is an avalanche of death like?” (qtd. in Daley). Amis indeed responds to Stalin‟s assertion that “a single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic,” but he does it in a sensitive way. Stalin reduced

Ostyn 48 the dead to an abstraction, in such a way that they became anonymous, depersonalized faces. If death comes about in enormous numbers, it becomes too abstract, too vague to realize the extent of tragedy behind those deaths. Camus‟s narrator in The Plague phrases it as follows:

[W]hat was a hundred million deaths? When one has served in a war, one

hardly knows what a dead man is, after a while. And since a dead man has no

substance unless one has actually seen him dead, a hundred million corpses

broadcast throughout history are no more than a puff of smoke in the

imagination. (Plague 36-37)

One tragic death is already hard to imagine if you have never witnessed it; imagining the impact of twenty million – and more – is impossible. Amis aids us in this imagining, in this understanding, by bringing those Twenty Million closer to us in a personal example of one tragic death. Amis clearly states that he does not agree with Stalin‟s assertion:

Stalin […] once said that, while every death is a tragedy, the death of a

million is a mere statistic. The second half of the aphorism is of course wholly

false: a million deaths are, at the very least, a million tragedies. The first half

of the aphorism is perfectly sound – but only as far as it goes. In fact, every

life is a tragedy, too. Every life cleaves to the tragic curve. (KD 277)

Every life has its tragedies, and by relating to our own personal tragedies, we can better understand and feel those of others. In that way we will be able to thoroughly feel and know what Amis writes about when he talks about the victims of Bolshevism. Without this personal anecdote, it is harder to link the world in which a Stalin can rule to the world which we live in every day:

[A]lthough we know that the world in which people die too quickly to count

and the world in which we ourselves get and spend are in fact the same

world, this is difficult to feel. It‟s like putting one hand under hot water and

Ostyn 49

the other under cold; you won‟t be able to experience both temperatures at

once. (Ericson)

By recounting his own traumatic experience with the death of his father and sister, Amis hands us a way in which to approach the mountain of misery described in Koba the Dread.

Moreover, by writing this book and writing about his dead sister and father, Amis himself finds a way to cope with his own personal trauma. He is able to externalize his feelings by devoting himself to other subjects. In a letter to his father‟s ghost, he talks about the death of his sister, her funeral, and the meeting he had with the daughter of his late sister.7 He describes the feeling he has about the death of his sister by recounting a story about his little daughter who was stung by a bee. She said: “Something just hurt me very much” (qtd. in KD 276; emphasis in original). Amis comments:

Well, that was exactly how I was feeling about Sally‟s death. Remembering

her, and you [Kingsley], and you and her, has filled me with an exhaustion

that no amount of sleep can seem to reach. But the exhaustion is not

onerous. It is appropriate. It feels like decorum. Naturally, it feels like self-

pity, too. But pity and self-pity can sometimes be the selfsame thing. Death

does that. Don‟t you find? (KD 276)

Linking personal trauma to a grand trauma in history is daring, and it takes a highly self- confident and ambitious author to risk it; nevertheless Amis very well succeeded in making the suffering and the horror of Stalin‟s rule tangible, palpable. Berman writes:

It is the rhythm of grief as experienced by a man who would rather

experience anything else – the rhythm of a man who would rather pick a fight

with a beloved friend, or take up a scholarly interest in Soviet history, but who

keeps finding that no matter where he puts his attention, every new thing

leads back to the old thing, and there is no escaping. […] [T]his book carries a

7 Sally Amis had a daughter given away for adoption. They never met, yet the daughter showed up at the funeral and wanted to meet the “Amis clan.”

Ostyn 50

punch, artfully delivered, a punch that comes from looking at death and

finding in it nothing but pain, cruelty, sadness, pointlessness and loss, a punch

that comes from gazing at the indescribably horrific prison camps of the Soviet

Union, or that comes from watching one‟s father and sister die.

Amis realizes that death is similar in all situations, whether it is in England or in Russia. One death is a tragedy, Twenty Million dead is – at least – Twenty Million tragedies. All the grief and suffering over the death of a close relative should be multiplied by twenty million or even more, to understand what the outcome of Stalinism was. Amis gives the example and incites his readers to try to grasp the scale of twenty million multiplied several times, because with every dead, grief is imposed on all the people who loved that person. Twenty

Million is thus too small a number to represent the amount of suffering that the Bolsheviks caused, and Amis wants to make his readers understand and grasp this.

This is why his – for many critics unforgivable – statement that the cries of his baby daughter resembled the cries of tortured inmates of the gulag seems so surprising. He describes one of the three main prisons for “politicals” only, called “Butyrka.” Then he describes his six-months-old baby daughter:

I staggered into the garden and started weeping myself. Her cries had

reminded me of the clinically explicable anguish of my younger boy, who, at

the age of one, was an undiagnosed asthmatic. She had reminded me of the

perfect equipoise of nausea and grief, as the parent contemplates

inexpressible distress. (KD 260)

He later says to his wife that “[t]he sound she was making would not have been out of place in the deepest cellars of the Butyrki Prison in Moscow during the Great Terror” (KD 260).

Since that day, “Butyrki” is established as one of his daughter‟s nicknames. Amis has been harshly criticized for this statement. Critics have thought it a lack of respect, or a sign of inappropriate self-importance. Those critics should, in my opinion, read the book more

Ostyn 51 thoroughly, because Amis does realize that this is an inappropriate remark to make. It is out of place to assert that your daughter has crying fits that evoke the suffering of the gulags.

But this is exactly Amis‟s confession. He too does not always take Bolshevism seriously; he too sometimes goes lightly over the millions of victims. He confesses, shamefacedly, but this confession gives extra power to his plea. He calls for the final fading of laughter in regard to

Bolshevism, for consciousness of the Stalinist horrors, for an end to indifference about the past, and he admits he is, in a way, guilty too. Amis too is an accomplice in the glossing over of Stalinism, and in a way, we all are. Amis admits that he is not as bad as a Holocaust denier, or a skinhead for that matter, but still:

It isn‟t right, is it? My youngest daughter has passed her second birthday, and

her cries are not particularly horrifying anymore, and I still call her Butyrki.

Because the name is now all braided through with feeling for her. Nearly

always, when I use it, I imagine a wall-eyed skinhead in a German high-rise

[…] with a daughter called Treblinka. […] I‟m not as bad as the wall-eyed

skinhead. But the Butyrki was a place of inexpressible distress. In 1937 it held

30,000 prisoners crushed together. And it isn‟t right. Because my daughter‟s

name is Clio: muse of history.

In the light of history, of that mountain of corpses, it may be unforgivable that Amis calls his daughter Butyrki, but it is certainly unforgivable that so many people have been denying and glossing over Stalin‟s atrocities.

Ostyn 52

2.4 DENIAL AND COLLECTIVE TRAUMA

2.4.1 Sympathy for the revolution

Know that he who fell like ash to the earth Who long ago became enslaved Will rise again, winged with bright hope, Above the great mountains. 8

The Western world seems to have blinded itself for what was going on in the USSR. Most of the Western intellectuals believed the Stalinist story:

[D]espite more and more voluminous and unignorable evidence to the

contrary […] the USSR continued to be regarded as fundamentally progressive

and benign; and the misconception endured until the mid-1970s. What was it?

From our vantage it looks like a contagion of selective incuriosity, a mindgame

begun in selfhypnosis and maintained by mass hysteria. And although the

aberration was of serious political utility to Moscow, we still tend to regard it

as a bizarre and embarrassing sideshow to the main events. (Amis, KD 39)

“Why” is the big question that Amis asks in Koba the Dread. Why did the West close its eyes for the reality of the USSR, for the atrocities and crimes committed by the USSR regime, for the people that were crushed under Stalin‟s iron fist? Why are the Twenty Million passed over so lightly so often? Why has “[a]nti-communism […], in some essential way, never been accepted as the moral equivalent of anti-fascism?” (Taylor) Why has laughter still not absented itself from Bolshevism?

One of Amis‟s main reasons for asking this question is “his close personal connection both with the Communist Left and with a revulsion against Communism” (Murphy 123). This close connection lies in the fact that both his father and his best friend were once supporters of the communist regime. Concerning his father, Martin Amis writes: “The world was offered

8 These lines are believed to be written by Stalin. (Amis, KD 99)

Ostyn 53 a choice between two realities; and the young Kingsley, in common with the overwhelming majority of intellectuals everywhere, chose the wrong reality” (KD 8). Kingsley Amis joined the Communist Party of Britain in 1941, when the Soviets became Britain‟s allies in the war after they had been attacked by Germany. He remained a member for fifteen years, until his vehement and famous turn right after the USSR invasion of Hungary in 1956. He discusses his political change of heart in the essay “Why Lucky Jim Turned Right” (1967). Amis‟s best friend and journalist Christopher Hitchens needed more time to let go of his communist sympathies. Peter Wilby describes him as “a Trotskyist rather than a Soviet sympathiser but nevertheless a writer who calls Lenin „a great man‟ and who, until recently, turned his formidable scorn more on capitalist America than on Bolshevik Russia” (14).

Koba the Dread can be conceived of as a hefty question mark, presented to Amis‟s late father, Kingsley, and to his friend Christopher Hitchens. Neal Ascherson puts it like this:

Amis has loved two men who have found reasons not to dismiss what

happened after October 1917 in Russia as an inexcusable moral atrocity. […]

[He] is asking how could they have. But of course he is also asking how could

I have, how can I continue to love them?

Amis wants to find their motives, and he wants to understand how they, and the majority of

Western intellectuals with them, could continue to deny that they chose the wrong side. He blames leftists – especially Hitchens – for their lingering sympathy for the Revolution, for their reluctance to give up the communist ideals of Lenin and Trotsky. They tend to dismiss

Stalin as an aberration, a madman that soiled the communist ideals, ideals that were morally good in essence:

Stalin was reportedly fond of a certain saying: “There is a man, there is a

problem. No man, no problem.” The left, to save the history it wants to

embrace, has removed Stalin from it. Despite countless testimonials from

Louis Aragon, Lillian Hellman, Pablo Neruda, Jean-Paul Sartre, and others, he

Ostyn 54

wasn‟t really of the left, it turns out; he was merely an “aberration.” No Stalin,

no problem. (Freund)

Those leftists, those sympathizers of Stalin‟s regime, do probably not have bad intentions:

“These old comrades perpetrated nothing like great terror: operating within British democracy meant such a thing was fanciful. But they were in great error, or worked with those who were; and they have let fall a great silence” (Lloyd 13).

They are complicit in the act of denying, forgetting, or glossing over Stalin‟s atrocities. In that way, they are guilty of denying the Twenty Million their place in history.

They have a specific way of dealing with the trauma of Stalinism, a specific way of dealing with an event that in fact was missed instead of experienced – the West did not know what was really happening in Stalin‟s USSR.

2.4.2 Causes of Denial

In Amis's quest, the themes of truth, memory, and laughter, which we dealt with in previous chapters, turn out to be significant reasons for this strange way of coping with the past. The

Western world seemed to be in a sort of denial after the Soviet carnage became clear, and it still is today, to some extent. The distortion of memory, the blurring of reality and the evoking of laughter caused by the Stalinist trauma can be considered the main causes for that denial.

First of all, many of the testimonies of survivors of the gulag, or other victims of

Stalin, are not always perfectly reliable, as we discussed previously. Their memories are often chaotic and incorrect. Similarly, the collective memory of Europe seems to be damaged too. Europe witnessed Stalin's rule, but did not really incorporate it into its collective memory. It was a traumatic experience that did not fit in accepted frames of reference. Most of the people are aware of the basic outlines of what happened, but they do not know the details, or else they mix up fact and fancy. Others know the truth about one fact, but err on

Ostyn 55 other aspects. Edmund Wilson, American writer and critic, for example, continued to explain away the faults of Lenin and Trotsky and put all the blame of the failed Bolshevism on

Stalin's shoulders: “Wilson was not lastingly gulled by Stalin, but he could never give up on the essential purity of October. So he played his part in the great intellectual abasement”

(Amis, KD 38). Another important factor in the distortion of information about the USSR was of course the fact that it was hermetically closed for the Western world, until the fall of the

Berlin Wall in 1989. The Iron Curtain only let through positive information about the Soviet

Union, and obstructed the critical gaze of the Western intellectuals. So the memory of the

West is not complete. It failed to integrate a part about the horror in the Soviet states, and as a result, Westerners are unable to recall the elements of their past that involve their treatment of and their opinion on the USSR.

During the Stalin era, the Western world as a whole suffered delusions and did not discern the reality behind Stalin‟s smoke screen. It did not see the starvation, the abuse, the overall horror in the gulags. Amis writes:

There were public protests in the West about the Soviet forced-labor camps as

early as 1931. There were also many solid accounts of the violent chaos of

Collectivization (1929-1934) and of the 1933 famine (though no suggestion,

as yet, that the famine was terroristic). And there were the Moscow Show

Trials of 1936-1938, which were open to foreign journalists and observers,

and were monitored worldwide. […] And yet the world, on the whole, took the

other view, and further accepted indignant Soviet denials of famine,

enserfment of the peasantry, and slave labor. (Amis, KD 7)

The communists were on “our side of the war” and helped the allies to defeat the Nazis. This was a strong factor for the West to keep on believing Stalin‟s claptrap. Truth seemed to be postponable, as it was in the prose of Christopher Hitchens, according to Amis:

Ostyn 56

“What about the famine?” I once asked him. “There wasn‟t a famine,” he said,

smiling lightly and lowering his gaze. “There may have been occasional

shortages…” He knew it wasn‟t true. But the truth, like much else, was

postponable; there were things that, for now, were more important. Although

I always liked Christopher‟s journalism, there seemed to me to be something

wrong with it, something faintly but pervasively self-defeating: the sense that

the truth could be postponed. (KD 47; emphasis in original)

The truth can no longer be postponed. With the fall of the Iron Curtain, “[t]ruth had at last become time-urgent,” says Amis. Even today not everyone knows the reality. Like Edmund

Wilson, several people still defend Lenin or Trotsky. Ericson states:

Stalin‟s defenders are drastically diminished in number these days, even in the

American academy. It is harder for some to let go of Lenin. Amis works to cut

off the escape route to the “Stalin bad, Lenin good” sanctuary. He reminds

readers that Lenin initiated the terror from above. Lenin was the one who

called intellectuals “shit.” A “fully functioning police state” was Lenin‟s

bequeatheal, not Stalin‟s. Coming to proper terms with Stalin requires coming

to term with his lineage, which, for that matter, extends back well beyond

Lenin.

And then there is the wry laughter that Bolshevism ineluctably evokes. The essence of the Stalinist rule is its utter failure, and the absurdities that accompanied that failure. The enormous gap between the ideals of communism and its real consequences makes it difficult to take the Soviets seriously. Amis wants this laughter to stop, and repeatedly wonders why it did not stop, after all the things that became clear about Stalin and his regime, after The

Great Terror, after the Gulag Archipelago: “The laughter should have stopped around then.

Why didn‟t it?” (KD 50) Wilby claims Amis‟s questions to be “important ones.” He writes: “To this day, it is perfectly acceptable, in a jokey sort of way, to call somebody „an old Stalinist‟;

Ostyn 57 to call anybody „an old Nazi‟ would be the most terrible insult. Men can admit, albeit with embarrassment, to helping out the KGB; if they admitted to helping the Nazi equivalent, they would be hounded out of the chattering classes” (14). The laughter is still there and it continues to taunt the memory of the victims. That is why Amis pleads for an adjustment of the collective memory, recognition of the truth, and the extinction of this terrible laughter.

Lloyd writes: “The question „why‟ is still, on the British left, sitting up and begging. Amis gives it a poke, and tells it to chew our ankles, again.”

Despite these good intentions, Amis‟s plea has not met with much praise. Especially the personal dimension of Koba the Dread has met with much criticism. Besides the private aspect of the death of his father and his younger sister, he also touches the personal level in his address to his pal Christopher Hitchens. Figes talks of a “self-indulgent, boring discourse with Kingsley Amis and Christopher Hitchens,” and Ericson writes that “the wisdom of parading [this disagreement] in public is debatable.” Nevertheless, this dispute is most interesting to examine, and, moreover, a parallel can be drawn with the famous rift between the French writers and philosophers Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre. They had a disagreement over political and philosophical matters that ended up in a breach in their former friendship. Amis and Hitchens are still friends today, despite the fact that a similar quarrel evolved from Amis‟s attack on Hitchens‟s ideas on communism. He initiated the argument by addressing a letter to his friend Hitchens in Koba the Dread, in which he challenges Hitchens to account for his communist sympathies. Hitchens answered Amis‟s allegations in “Lightness at Midnight,” his review of the book, and as a consequence the disagreement between the two friends acquired bigger proportions. The polemic was grist to the mill of the media, as was the case with Camus and Sartre. Both Amis, with Koba the

Dread, and Camus, with The Rebel,9 took on a political stance that caused a dispute with a good friend; both renounced communism and blamed their friend for not doing the same.

9 L‟Homme Révolté, usually translated as The Rebel although a better rendering would be Man in Revolt.

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2.4.3 Camus and Sartre

The writer‟s function is not without its arduous duties. By definition, he cannot serve today those who make history; he most serve those who are subject to it.10

Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre, both French authors and philosophers, were two of the most influential French writers of the mid-twentieth century, as witness the fact that both were granted the Nobel Prize in Literature.11 “Each was a novelist, a playwright, a philosopher, and a political intellectual, and in these various lines of work both were the acclaimed eminences of their time and place” (Valiunas 59). In spite of their very different background – Camus grew up in a working-class family in Algiers, while Sartre came from a bourgeois family and was educated at the prestigious Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris –, they became good friends and gradually started to belong to the same literary company.

They met in Paris during the Second World War, at the opening of Sartre‟s play The Flies in

1943. At that time, Camus was editing the underground resistance newspaper Combat, to which Sartre became an active contributor later on. Even before they met, Camus had reviewed Sartre‟s Nausea and Sartre had praised Camus‟s The Stranger. Both novels inclined towards existentialism and absurdism; both expressed “a spirit of unease and meaninglessness” (Jacoby 25). Nevertheless, the seeds of their later conflict were already present then, and in the course of time it became clear that their political and philosophical stances were slowly diverging: “It was their differing attitudes to Communism that would ignite the fuse destined to destroy the Sartre-Camus friendship” (Orme 360).

10 Camus in his Nobel acceptance speech (Felman, “Plague” 96) 11 Camus was the second youngest to be awarded with the prize; Sartre declined it, claiming that he had always refused officials honours and that he didn‟t want to align himself with institutions.

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2.4.3.1 Political Disagreement

In the years after the Second World War Camus and Sartre shared ideas and sympathies, frequented the same circles and mingled with the same people, and yet it slowly became clear that their divergent views on communism and revolution were irreconcilable. The break was sealed with a harsh review of Camus‟s The Rebel in Les Temps Modernes, the periodical that Sartre edited. The Rebel is a long essay in which Camus airs his ideas about revolution and history, and in which he remarkably renounces Soviet communism as the failure it turned out to be. The critical denigration of his book took Camus by surprise, and he reacted with a long and vicious rebuttal addressed to Sartre, the editor of Les Temps Modernes. This to-and-fro deteriorated into “an angered exchange between Camus and Sartre published in a later issue of [Les Temps Modernes] (August 1952), an exchange consisting in a virulent articulation of Camus‟s and Sartre‟s mutual criticisms and consummating a political and personal rupture both of their friendship and of their intellectual alliance” (Felman, “Fall”

173). At a time when Camus was challenging conventional leftist revolutionary ideas and renouncing the violence that accompanied them, Sartre became a member of the French

Communist Party, proving their diverging and irreconcilable political paths. “While Sartre now increasingly regarded violence as morally justified in the pursuit of revolutionary justice,

Camus did not” (Orme 361). The conflict was given a great deal of print in the papers, as both Camus and Sartre were by that time public figures. In the polarized environment of the

Cold War, more precisely the conflict between Western democracy and Soviet communism, each of them chose sides and stubbornly stuck to their opinion in so far as making reconciliation impossible:

The decisive quarrel boiled down to this: Camus spoke for freedom and

nature, two of the central principles of liberal democracy; Sartre spoke for

justice and history, the guiding lights of socialist dictatorship. Theoretically, an

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intelligent liberalism could accommodate all of these competing claims. Of the

two men, Camus was more willing to approach such a compromise than the

intransigent Sartre. But each had his hierarchy, and in the throes of

disputation each hardened his own position so that any reconciliation became

impossible. (Valiunas 60-61)

In much the same way, Amis and Hitchens had their disagreement over Amis‟s denunciation of Soviet communism on the on hand, and Hitchens‟s defence of it on the other. In Koba the Dread, Amis addresses a letter to Hitchens that gibingly starts with

“Comrade Hitchens!” (KD 245) and in which he confronts Hitchens with his refusal to turn away from the Soviet ideals, from the nostalgia for the revolution, from his admiration for

Lenin and Trotsky. Like Camus, Amis clearly holds the view that a regime that uses violence and terror to achieve its goals is unsupportable.

2.4.3.2 History

In her analysis of Camus‟s The Plague and The Fall in her book Testimony: Crises of

Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History, (co-authored with Dori Laub), Felman has an interesting view on the quarrel between Camus and Sartre in linking it convincingly with the vicissitudes of trauma theory. In the ideas of both men, she sees two very different ways of dealing with traumatic events. In Camus‟s philosophical evolution, she discerns a definite turning point with The Rebel (1951), a change in his way of thinking that is exemplified in his novel The Fall.12 Camus lives through a sort of intellectual turning point, while Sartre sticks to the same way of thinking; a way of thinking that can be seen as a stubborn form of denial. Felman examines the different philosophical views behind The

Plague (1947) and The Fall (1956). In the lapse of time between the two novels, Camus articulated his change of heart in The Rebel, in which he expresses his disappointment in

12 La chute

Ostyn 61 communism, and his resistance to an ideology that uses violence and terror to achieve its goals, an ideology that cherishes the idea that the end justifies the means at all costs, including human lives. Sartre deeply disagreed with the philosophy of The Rebel, vehemently condemned it and started the public quarrel by publishing a slamming review by Francis

Jeanson, one of Sartre‟s protégés, in his journal.

According to Felman, it all boils down to a divergent view of history:

[I]n fact, the clash between Camus and Sartre revolved around their differing

diagnoses of – and their differing approach to – history. With the 1951

publication of L‟Homme Révolté, Camus emerged as an outspoken critic of

dogmatic Marxism and, in particular, of the political labor camps of Soviet

totalitarianism, which he analyzes in [The Rebel]as an exemplary historical

degeneration – through ideological exacerbation and fetishization – of the

constitutively human revolutionary impulse and of what originated as

legitimate political revolt. Sartre, on the other hand, was a firm political and

philosophical apologist for Stalin. (“Fall” 174)

In trauma theory, and in this Sartre-Camus dustup, history is a problematic concept. Its inherent relationship with narration makes it difficult to define. History, as it is written and documented in books, films, documentaries, plays, and other forms of art, is never an exact representation of the reality of the past. It is a rendering of that reality, but very much filtered and adjusted by the people who passed it on, by the people who witnessed and testified to it: “This distinguishes history as interpretive narrative from chronology on the one hand and „science‟ on the other” (Felman, “Plague” 94). Without witnesses, without survivors, history ceases to exist. History is therefore to a certain extent always subjective, as Hegel acknowledges:

The term history unites the objective and the subjective side, and denotes . . .

not less what happened than the narration of what happened. This union of

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the two meanings we must regard as of a higher order than mere outward

accident; we must suppose historical narrations to have appeared

contemporaneously with historical deeds and events. (qtd. in Felman,

“Plague” 94; emphasis in original)

History and narrative have a strong reciprocal bond, thus history as a concept is problematic in that it needs to be integrated into a narrative in order to be passed on to the following generations. History is thus in need of narrative forms to exist, and it is in need of people to construct this narrative. This is where the problem arises when it comes to traumatic events.

Felman asks the following question in connection with the Holocaust:

Can contemporary narrative historically bear witness, not simply to the impact

of the Holocaust but to the way in which the impact of history as holocaust

has modified, affected, shifted the very modes of the relationship between

narrative and history? (“Plague” 95; emphasis in original)

We can generalize this question to all sorts of traumatic experiences. In other words, how can trauma be represented in history when the most striking feature of trauma lies in the fact that it cannot easily be represented, that it cannot simply be narrated? How can traumatic events be integrated into the narration of history if these events are not even integrated into the memory of survivors and witnesses? How can an experience be recounted if that experience was not fully experienced, not assimilated by consciousness?

How does trauma change the bond between narration and history? Felman proves in her book that Camus recognized this complex problem and tried to solve it in The Fall. Camus acknowledged that this inherent relationship between history and narration is problematic, especially when it comes to traumatic experiences. When bearing witness to trauma, one is actually involved in making and changing history, precisely in acting on this bond between history and narrative:

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Camus […] exemplifies the way in which traditional relationships of narrative

to history have changed through the historical necessity of involving literature

in action, of creating a new form of narrative as testimony not merely to

record, but to rethink, and in the act of rethinking, in effect transform history

by bearing literary witness. (Felman, “Plague” 95; emphasis in original)

By comparing The Plague and The Fall, Felman investigates this change in the bond between history and narration. Both books deal with the trauma of the Second World War and the

Holocaust in an allegorical way: “Both […] are endeavouring, each in its own way, to assimilate the trauma. Both are explicitly preoccupied by the very possibilities – and impossibilities – of dialogue between history and language” (Felman, “Plague” 96). Trauma creates impossibilities in the sense that the traumatic character of the events makes it impossible for the witnesses, the survivors, to represent, narrate, and create history in a straightforward manner. The events are not fully integrated into their memories, and neither are they fully integrated into the collective memory of our civilization. The horrors of the

Stalin era can be seen as events that were not fully integrated into history, as has been shown in the previous chapters. The difficulty is thus that Stalinism – and in Camus‟s The

Plague, the epidemic, as an allegory for the Holocaust – is “disbelieved because it does not enter, and cannot be framed by, any existing frame of reference (be it of knowledge or belief). Because our perception of reality is molded by frames of reference, what is outside them, however imminent and otherwise conspicuous, remains historically invisible, unreal, and can only be encountered by a systematic disbelief” (Felman, “Plague” 103).

In the Soviet case, people rather believed Stalin‟s delusions than reality, because reality was, without any frame of reference, unbelievable. As Figes writes, “history is a debt the living repay to the dead”, and the living have not yet repaid this debt to the USSR dead.

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2.4.3.3 The Plague

In 1947, Camus wrote The Plague, a story about the outbreak of an epidemic in Oran, a little village in France. It presents itself as a chronicle, a pure recounting of the events of the time; yet, one can easily understand that it is in fact a dramatic allegory for the suffering from Nazism in the Second World War:

[T]he horror of the epidemic constantly suggests that of the war through the

Plague‟s potential for massive killing. What the Plague, above all, means is a

mass murder of such scope that it deprives the very loss of life of any tragic

impact, reducing death itself to anonymous, depersonalized experience, to

statistical abstraction. (Felman, “Plague” 97-98; emphasis in original)

A parallel can here be noted with Stalin‟s famous saying “One death is a tragedy, a million dead is a mere statistic.” The horror of the epidemic could thus very well represent the horrors of Stalinism as well, as it describes killing on a massive scale, to such an extent that the victims become an abstraction. Yet, The Plague is conceived of as an explicit allegory for the horrors of the Second World War. The isolation of the village in quarantine represents the isolation of concentration camps, and the volunteers who offer their medical help in the fight against the plague, evoke the efforts of the resistance movements throughout Europe.

Parts of the novel itself were first published as a testimony to the war misery in Camus‟s underground paper Combat and can thus be seen as an act of resistance, one that has its influence on the connection between narration and history. Thus, “Camus‟ narrative intends to be not merely a historic witness, but a participant in the events it describes” (Felman,

“Plague” 99). In that way, Camus influences the history that is being made while narrating it at the same time, and as a result has a severe impact on the relationship between history and narration. Consequently, his testimonial, his narration of history, is a way of surviving the events, just as the narrator of The Plague, doctor Rieux, survives the Plague, and feels compelled to testify to it. Testifying and survival become in this way reciprocal acts: “Tied up

Ostyn 65 with survival, bearing witness is then not just a linguistic, but an existential stance” (Felman,

“Plague” 117). The witness cannot testify unless he or she survives, and the survivor cannot but testify to his or her experiences. Witnesses will thus always be survivors and survivors will always be compelled to testify. They need to testify, they have a responsibility towards the victims of the traumatic events. Solzhenitsyn exemplifies this attitude:

[W]hen people say to him, “Why drag all that up from the bad times?,” his

answer is that a country‟s or a dogma‟s evasion of its own past, on this excuse

or that, is as fatal to the quality of life as it is to the private heart. He is not a

political; he is without rhetoric or doublethink, he is an awakener. (Amis, KD

261)

It is here, in this need for awakening, that the problem is to be found, and Camus too realizes it. Testifying to the past is not always without difficulties. A traumatic event can be horrible to such an extent that the events are not integrated into our frame of reference:

The event […] occurs, in other words, as what is not provided for by the

conceptual framework we call “History,” and as what, in general, has no place

in, and therefore cannot be assimilated by or integrated into, any existing

cultural frame of reference. (Felman, “Plague” 104)

If the event has no place in any frame of reference, it is not that simple to give it a place in history. For the survivors, that place in history, in our collective memory, is important in order for them to be able to work through their traumatic experience, but it is also very important for the ones that did not survive. They should not be forgotten, they ought not to have died unnoticed, and therefore their memory must be honoured by way of passing on the story, passing on history, and remembering, always. However, this task is not an easy one. Camus realized that his testimony to the plague – to the Holocaust – was too simple, and that it is in fact not that simple to recount traumatic events:

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The Plague‟s testimony to the Holocaust, “unqualified” though it may be,

nonetheless leaves out the “judicious” residue of a radical and self-subversive

question: In a holocaust, is a […] testimony truly possible? (Felman, “Plague”

118-19)

Felman‟s question can be extended to testimony to other traumatic events. Is it possible to testify to a traumatic experience using conventional, traditional means? In other words, is it possible to testify to trauma by means of a conventional, closed and consistent story? Has anyone ever testified unproblematically and justly to the horrors of the Stalin era; and how many testimonies will it take to obtain the full picture? Is it possible at all to truly and profoundly testify to a traumatic past?

2.4.3.4 The Rebel

Camus deals with these questions in his novel The Fall, but the theoretical foundation of the ideas behind it are to be found in The Rebel. In this long essay, Camus elaborates on the nature of rebellion and revolution, and firmly denounces the state terror of Soviet communism. Whereas Amis makes his case by abundantly using citations and examples of horror that profoundly affect the reader, Camus substantiates his opinion with a philosophical, rather abstract analysis of the mechanisms of revolution and rebellion, and the philosophy of revolt. According to Camus, revolt is a concept essential to the human being.

We must resist and rebel to the absurd situation we are destined to live in. Resistance and rebellion to this situation makes us human, and helps bring us to full existence:

The movement form thinghood to full existence Camus calls revolt. […] When

the movement succeeds, it has the following form: first, rock-like somnolence;

then a shock or crisis during which the “absurdity” of the world around us

becomes clear and inescapable; then the free choice of reaction or attitude

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toward this absurdity; and then finally the use of our freedom to act (we do

something about this absurdity). (Hallie 26; emphasis in original)

If this revolt is taken to a higher level, if people start to rebel together, a revolution is in the make.

The idea behind a revolution is the revolt of the masses, of the people, a revolt that ends in an overthrow of the government and the rule of the people. But history shows us that a real revolution in fact has not yet occurred. Camus writes that “[t]here could only be one, and that would be the definitive revolution” (Rebel 106). All of the revolutions that history has known have overthrown old governments but have installed new governments that were not always better than the preceding ones. In other words, revolution has always implied the establishment of a new government:

In theory, the word revolution retains the meaning that it has in astronomy. It

is a movement that describes a complete circle, that leads from one form of

government to another after a complete transition. A change of regulations

concerning property without a corresponding change of government is not a

revolution, but a reform. (Camus, Rebel 106)

Thus, the idea of an overall revolution has always turned out to be an illusion. However beautiful the ideas and ideals were, once the new government has had a taste of power, it is no longer self-evident to be true to former principles: “Each act of rebellion […] inevitably contains at its conceptual and imaginative core the seeds of renewed oppression” (Sanyal

32). The rebel has beautiful ideas, dreams of a utopian state and claims that he or she can achieve it, if only the old government is overthrown. The rebel dreams of freedom and will do the utmost to achieve it:

Freedom […] is the motivating principle of all revolutions. Without it, justice

seems inconceivable to the rebel‟s mind. There comes a time, however, when

justice demands the suspension of freedom. Then terror, on a grand or small

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scale, makes its appearance to consummate the revolution. Every act of

rebellion expresses a nostalgia for innocence and an appeal to the essence of

being. But one day nostalgia takes up arms and assumes the responsibility of

guilt; in other words, adopts murder and violence. (Camus, Rebel 105)

The Bolsheviks too fought for freedom, for the removal of the Tsars that had oppressed their people for so long. The illusion of revolution was all the more painful in the case of Bolshevism. In spite of initial ideals and plans, an enormous void appeared between reality and the Soviet principles and ideologies. A communism based on the ideas of Marx and Engels turned out to be a vicious dictatorship. The Russian people went from the dictatorship of the Tsars to the dictatorship of the Bolsheviks. The Bolsheviks maliciously betrayed the people, and betrayed Marx‟ ideas:

The very core of his theory was that work is profoundly dignified and unjustly

despised. He rebelled against the degradation of work to the level of a

commodity and of the worker to the level of an object. He reminded the

privileged that heir privileges were not divine and that property was not an

eternal right. […] To him we owe the idea which is the despair of our times –

but here despair is worth more than any hope – that when work is a

degradation, it is not life, even though it occupies every moment of a life.

Who, despite the pretensions of this society, can sleep in it in peace when

they know that it derives its mediocre pleasures from the work of millions of

dead souls? […] One of his phrases, which for once is clear and trenchant,

forever withholds from his triumphant disciples the greatness and the

humanity which once were his: “An end that requires unjust means is not a

just end (Camus, Rebel 209).

This is the core of Stalin‟s betrayal: he held the conviction that the end always justifies the means. He hid his loathsome actions behind a benevolent, but illusory

Ostyn 69 philosophy. Eventually, Soviet communism turned out to be nothing more than a dictatorship of a Georgian madman, drunk with power. Millions of people suffered, all in the name of communism, while Soviet communism had already brutally betrayed the ideas of the beginning. Oppression by the Tsars was followed by oppression by Stalin and the Bolsheviks, and so the revolution swapped one oppressor for another. Thus it was not a real revolution, as the revolution Marx had foretold:

Marx recognized that all revolutions before his time had failed. But he claimed

that the revolution announced by him must succeed definitely. Up to now, the

workers‟ movement has lived on this affirmation which has been continually

belied by facts and of which it is high time that the falsehood should be

dispassionately denounced. (Camus, Rebel 225)

Camus does with The Rebel what Amis would do half a century later with Koba the

Dread: he vehemently condemns Soviet communism and lashes out at leftists that still do not realize the scale of their delusions. Sanyal describes The Rebel as “a sweeping denunciation of all utopic political and philosophical forms of messianism – irrespective of their ideological affiliation – that sacrifice living and suffering bodies to their idealized ends”

(31). Both Camus and Amis, in their own style, want to persuade people to see the danger in ideological fanaticism. A utopic image of the ideal state can lead people to put aside their moral values and their principles in order to achieve that illusory goal, that ideal fantasy society. It is then that people will reach for violence and terror, because if the other citizens cannot be persuaded by words, force will be inevitable for the ideologue. In the USSR, a state ruled by terror was the result.

In The Rebel, Camus not only acknowledges state terror, he also distinguishes terror in literature:

In what appears to be a startling gesture, Camus situates literary tropes of

closure and mastery on the same conceptual spectrum as the concentration

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camp and the Soviet gulag. Sade‟s carceral imaginary, the tropes of Romantic

poetry, as well as the terroristic irrationality of surrealism, in this account, find

their historical and political correlatives in modern state terror. (Sanyal 33)

If a novel or a story about traumatic events in reality recounts the events in a closed, conherent way, the novel or the story in a sense denies the problematic nature of the traumatic event. In that way, literature can lie or distort reality, in order to construct a harmonious, unified narrative. This action can be compared with political terror, terror on the level of the state. Presenting the people with a utopic ideology, a closed rhetoric of the ideal state that will be realized in the future, can be put on the same level as the harmonious story of unity in literature. Both involve doing injustice to reality, both are untrue and involve a denial of the traumatic reality. Camus explains it as follows:

All rebel thought, as we have seen, expresses itself in a closed rhetoric or

universe. The rhetoric of ramparts in Lucretius, the convents and isolated

castles of Sade, the island or the lonely rock of the romantics, the solitary

heights of Nietzsche, the primeval seas of Lautréamont, the parapets of

Rimbaud, the terrifying castles of the surrealists, which spring up in a storm of

flowers, the prison, the nation behind barbed wire, the concentration camps,

the empire of free slaves, all illustrate, after their own fashion, the same need

for coherence and unity. In these sealed worlds, man can reign and have

knowledge at last. (Rebel 255)

His novel of 1947, The Plague, describes the events as a unity, as a closed story in which everything is interdependent and logical. In this way, literature can be considered a form of terror, because it enforces its ideas of unity and harmony on reality. It twists the reality it describes – the Second World War in the case of Camus‟s The Plague – until it seems to be an unproblematic, logical story, while in fact it is not that simple. Trauma theory teaches us that it is not self-evident to integrate events from reality into a narration in, for example, a

Ostyn 71 novel. Camus realizes that his The Plague is too simple to catch the spirit of the events it describes completely, to incorporate truly the traumatic nature of the experience. The Plague is conceived of as a story with a happy end, while the truth is more complicated and problematic. The Plague does not acknowledge that it is not self-evident, not that simple, to talk about traumatic experiences. In fact, it is not possible to render the events of trauma in a simple, narrative way. Camus therefore reworks the theme of the Holocaust in his novel of

1956, The Fall.

2.4.3.5 The Fall

The Fall, written nine years after The Plague, reworks the same thematic elements and represents the experience of the Second World War, just as The Plague did. This time, however, the story does not so much bear witness to the events as question the very possibility of witnessing itself. Felman asks the question: “How does one survive the witnessing?” (“Fall” 165) In other words, how is it possible to testify to what has happened; how exactly can the events be rendered into a narrative? The story in The Fall again revolves around a traumatic event, but this time the event is not really experienced, so one could say that the trauma of the experience lies exactly in the fact that it was missed.

The main character of The Fall, Jean-Baptiste Clamence, walks home one night along the Seine and passes a woman standing on the bridge who seems to be staring at the water.

He walks on, and a moment later he hears a body hitting the water surface and a loud cry, going downstream. The main character continues his path and never talks about the experience with anyone. Clamence did not actually see the suicide; he did not really experience it. In The Plague, the traumatic events were clearly and fully witnessed and testified to; this has become impossible in The Fall:

In The Plague, the scene of witnessing is thus the scene of the historical

recording – and of the historical documenting – of an event. In The Fall, the

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scene of witnessing is, paradoxically enough, the scene of the non-recording

and of the non-documenting of an event. […] In The Plague, the event is

witnessed insofar as it is fully and directly experienced. In The Fall, the event

is witnessed insofar as it is not experienced, insofar as it is literally missed.

The suicide in effect is not seen and the falling in itself is not perceived: what

is perceived is the woman before the fall, and the sound of her body striking

the water after the fall; there is a seeing which takes place before the

occurrence and a hearing which takes place after it, but too late. The Fall

bears witness, paradoxically enough, to the missing of the fall. (Felman, “Fall”

169; emphasis in original)

Clamence never really experienced the suicide, though he was in the immediate vicinity when it occurred. He missed the suicide, and therefore he is only able to testify to the failure of the witnessing of the event. In the same way, all witnesses of traumatic events are unable to truly experience what is happening. They too can only testify to the failure of witnessing.

They witness a traumatic event up to a certain level, while at the same time, the witness fails to assimilate and experience the event thoroughly, just as Clamence did not actually see the woman jumping off the bridge. With The Fall, Camus acknowledges that there are major difficulties in testifying to traumatic experiences, because those experiences are, as is the suicide in the story, not really experienced; they are missed experiences. This failure to be a true witness brings about a change in the relationship between history and testimonial narration. Felman writes:

I propose now to sketch out a reading of The Fall that would indeed consider

it as, fundamentally and crucially, a transformation of The Plague, a narrative

of critical rethinking of the stakes of witnessing in history and a recapitulation,

at a distance of nine years, of the relation between testimony and

contemporary history, in a retrospective commentary on his own highly

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successful novelistic wartime writing, by a Camus whose transformation and

whose difference from himself and from his own successful image has not yet

begun, I would suggest, to be appreciated. (“Fall” 186; emphasis in original)

Felman writes that Camus wants to reshape his narration of the traumatic experiences of the

Second World War. He realizes now that this narration cannot be straightforward and simple, that it cannot represent a sealed world with a happy ending like The Plague. In The Plague, the story is finished; the circle has closed, after the vanishing of the epidemic. The masses come out on the streets cheering and they start forgetting their horrific experiences almost right there on the spot. It is as though they think of the past as if it was only a bad dream.

Camus hints at the problematic character of this ending already in The Plague, by staging the character of the sniper, Cottard, at the end of the novel. While everyone is celebrating the end of the epidemic, Cottard unexpectedly starts shooting at the crowds, almost as if he wants to prevent them from celebrating the end of the plague, the end of a horrific period in time. It seems as if he wants to point out to them that they cannot celebrate the ending of trauma unproblematically, that the suffering will go on. It is as if he wants to prevent the story from ending by adding even more dead to the death toll of the plague. “Thus,” Felman states, “the story of the ending of the Plague becomes the story of the non-cessation of the Fall” (“Fall” 171; emphasis in original).

The Fall testifies to the non-cessation of trauma, in the sense that it wants to make clear that it is impossible to impose closure on the traumatic experience, just as it is impossible to impose closure on a narrative that testifies to that traumatic experience.

Precisely because every traumatic experience is in a way “a missed historical encounter with the real” (Felman, “Fall” 177), it is a delusion to write about trauma in a way that suggests an clear and transparant reflection of reality, as Camus did with The Plague:

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Camus now realizes that the very moral core that gave its momentum to The

Plague – the establishment of a community of witnessing – was itself in some

ways a distortion, a historical delusion. (Felman, “Fall” 182)

All the testimonies in Koba the Dread too are evidence of the lingering character of trauma.

It is impossible to impose closure on the period under Stalin‟s rule. The victims of that period are still victims today; their suffering did not end with Stalin‟s death or the end of Soviet communism. Many of those people have been scarred for life, and many of them still today are not able to speak about the past. The trauma will haunt them for the rest of their lives.

Amis reports a chocking fact about the traumatized veterans of the Vietnam War: “[I]n the late 1980s, the number of home casualties in the war was officially exceeded by the number of suicides among its veterans” (KD 13). This is a strong evidence of the fact that one cannot impose closure on trauma.

The Fall also testifies to a testimonial crisis, and this testimonial crisis brings about a change in the relationship between witness, history, and narration. The status of history is modified as a result of the failure of the witness to testify, the failure to construct a testimonial narrative: “Narrative has thus become the very writing of the impossibility of writing history” (Felman, “Fall” 201). Trauma causes the relationship between history and narrative to disintegrate, and the trauma becomes in that way also a trauma of a testimonial crisis. Testifying to an event that is not experienced, not assimilated, is complicated because it is difficult to integrate the non-experienced event into a narrative, as is exemplified in The

Fall. The witness has difficulties recounting the events, and that is why “The Fall has lost at once the narrative consistency of The Plague and the claim of the former novel to historical monumentality” (Felman, “Fall” 171). The transition of an experience witnessed to history through the testifying to the event, has become difficult because the very witnessing itself needs to be redefined:

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[I]t no longer is the unproblematical phenomenon – the transparent mediation

between seeing and telling, private experience and public testimony – that

grounds The Plague and grants it its self-evident historical authority.

This modified perspective, in The Fall, on what it means to witness (or what

constitutes the energy of the perception of a historical event), radically

displaces, moreover, the very concept of what history is, in relation to

narration. This displacement, from now on, renders impossible the very style

of an account like The Plague. And The Fall, indeed, reflects on this historical

narrative impossibility. (Felman, “Fall” 193)

The testimonial status of the witness is no longer secure, and herein lies the failure of witnessing a traumatic experience. The traumatic events themselves, and Nazism and

Stalinism in particular, are intent upon eliminating their witnesses, and in a way they succeed by taking away from the surviving witnesses the power to testify to what happened.

The Holocaust and Stalinism, for example, systematically tried to eliminate their victims, and in that way, eliminate everyone who could possible testify to the experience of trauma.

Testifying to trauma in a straightforward allegorical narrative like The Plague has thus become impossible. The Plague “fails precisely to account for the specificity of a disaster that consisted in a radical failure of witnessing, an event to which the witness had no access, since its very catastrophic and unprecedented nature as event was to make the witness absent, absent to the very presence of the event; present in, but not to, what was taking place” (Felman, “Fall” 194; emphasis in original). Nazism and Stalinism succeeded in their intent to eliminate their witnesses, or at least deprive them of the means to testify to the occurrences. Survivors are thus confronted with a failure of testifying, a failure of representation in both senses of the word:

[F]ailure of representation in the sense of making present the event [and]

failure of representation in the sense of truly speaking for the victim, whose

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voicelessness no voice can represent. (Felman, “Fall” 197; emphasis in

original)

This failure of witnessing brings about a problem in the relationship between testimony and history. History depends on true testimonies, so its status is in danger as a consequence of this failure of witnessing.

Camus tries to testify truly to the Holocaust by acknowledging the difficulties of that process, while Sartre denies the problematic nature of testifying to trauma:

While Sartre thinks Camus has failed as a witness since he has ceased to be

the witness of a cure, Camus thinks it is Sartre who is failing as a witness,

since he neglects to witness and to take into account the labor camps in

Soviet Russia, and fails to recognize through them the non-cessation of the

Plague. While Sartre sees Camus as a man of the past who fails to recognize

the progress made by history and thus essentially fails to march toward the

future, Camus sees Sartre as a man who, in the name not of the real future

but of the prophetic gesture – and projection – of an ideology, fails to

recognize the present and thus denies, specifically, the implications of the past

and the ineradicability of these implications from any possible future

construction. (Felman, “Fall” 178; emphasis in original)

Sartre, according to Felman, does not see the importance of history as testimony; he sees history as primordially a history of action. He chooses to practise politics instead of contemplating it, and chooses not to ponder over the past. In that way Sartre “betrays” history, because he is not an honest witness. He chooses not to see Stalin‟s horrors, and he continues to palliate Soviet communism. Sartre thus betrays his task as a witness, and according to Felman, commits a double crime in suppressing both the voice of the victim and the voice of the witness:

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[W]hat is particularly grave and particularly rich in implications in the vision of

The Fall is that Sartre, or the fellow intellectual, has betrayed the testimonial

task, betrayed, precisely, as a fellow witness, since he chose not to

acknowledge Russian concentration camps. (“Fall” 186; emphasis in original)

Sartre has betrayed his role as a witness in not fulfilling the task of testifying to the events occurring, and in that way he has betrayed history. The narrator of The Fall remains silent,

Sartre remained silent and the majority of Western intellectuals remained silent. All of them did not want or neglected to acknowledge reality; they did not want or neglected to attempt to testify to the actual situation. They remained silent; they continued the denial of the traumatic situation, in a way that does injustice to the victims of that traumatic situation. By minimizing or denying the horrific reality, they in a way smirch the memory of those millions that died during Stalin‟s rule. This act makes them accomplices in the evil done to the victims. Just as the narrator of Camus‟s The Fall evokes a little indignation for not informing anyone about the suicide he witnessed, the Western intellectuals like Sartre, like Hitchens and like so many others that remained and still remain silent, deserve our indignation. They have become accomplices in the suffering of millions:

The narrator witnessing the suicide scene without response, in much the same

way as the Marxist intellectuals accepting Stalin‟s labor camps and the

Western Allies witnessing the genocide with a conspiracy of silence, become,

in fact, historical participants, accomplices in the execution of the Other.

(Felman, “Fall” 192; emphasis in original)

In that way, denying the fact that so many millions died because of Stalin or palliating his deeds equals being accessory to Stalin‟s crimes:

The surrender of oppositional thought, considered irrelevant to the course of

history, dooms the intellectual to participate in forms of oppression that are

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seen as structurally inevitable, and to become complicit with the violent

workings of power. (Sanyal 40)

2.4.4 Amis and Hitchens

In a very similar way, Amis reproves Hitchens for being complicit in the Soviet atrocities.

Hitchens calls Lenin “a great man” (Amis, KD 25). In Koba the Dread, Amis enumerates “Ten

Theses on Ilyich” (KD 25-34), ten reasons why Lenin was not a great man at all.

Hitchens denies the famine, and in so doing, he becomes complicit in the Soviet crimes.

Amis acknowledges reality, and tries to testify to it as best he can, while Hitchens prefers to remain silent; he prefers to postpone the truth. In the closing part of the book, Amis addresses a letter to Hitchens:

Comrade Hitchens! There is probably not that much in these pages [in Koba

the Dread] that you don‟t already know. You already know, in that case, that

Bolshevism presents a record of baseness and inanity that exhausts all

dictionaries; indeed, heaven stops the nose at it. So it is still obscure to me

why you wouldn‟t want to put more distance between yourself and these

events than you do, with your reverence for Lenin and your unregretted

discipleship of Trotsky. These two men did not just precede Stalin. They

created a fully functioning police state for his later use. And they showed him

a remarkable thing: that it was possible to run a country with a formula of

dead freedom, lies and violence – and unpunctuated self-righteousness. (KD

248)

Hitchens responded to Koba the Dread in “Lightness at Midnight: Stalinism without Irony,” in which he, despite of some comments, more or less positively receives Amis‟s book, and in his text “Don‟t. Be. Silly.” in the Guardian, in which he defends himself from Amis‟s accusations.

He first of all reproaches Amis for taking on such a weighty topic:

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What did you imagine would happen if you elected to write on such a

Himalayan topic, and then pygmified it by addressing so much of it to me?

[…] I find myself embarrassed almost every day at the thought of an actual

gulag survivor reading this, or reading about it, and finding his or her

experience reduced to a sub-Leavisite boys‟ tiff, gleefully interpreted as

literary fratricide by hacks who couldn‟t care a hoot for the real subject.

(“Don‟t”)

Hitchens has a point when he condemns critics who had more interest in the rift between befriended writers, than in the problem Amis points out in Koba the Dread. It is indeed an ambitious project of Amis to try to give account to the mountain of corpses of the USSR. But

Hitchens refuses to accept the Amis‟s comparison of Stalinism with Nazism, or Hitlerism, as he terms it. He still finds something defendable in the communism of the USSR, and this is, according to Amis precisely the root of the problem. Hitchens writes:

Some exemplary people and causes, in other words, could not be said to be

quite decided on the lethal question of bolshevism: the only revolution that

had ever defeated its enemies. That there was an element of power-worship

here I‟m quite prepared to concede, and those involved, including myself, are

obliged to subject themselves to self-criticism. But your attempted syllogism

invites a direct comparison with Hitlerism, and levels the suggestion of moral

equivalence to the Nazis at, say, the many “hard left” types who worked for

Dr Martin Luther King. My provisional critique of this ahistorical reasoning

would fit into three short italicised sentences. Don‟t. Be. Silly. (“Don‟t”)

Nevertheless, Hitchens admits that he thinks Amis is right in his demand for the adjustment of people‟s attitudes towards Stalinism. The disagreement between Hitchens and Amis did not go as adrift as the disagreement between Camus and Sartre. Hitchens is not that harsh on Amis and sees, despite the defaults, the critical value in Koba the Dread:

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You demand that people – you prefer the term “intellectuals” – give an

account of their attitude to the Stalin terror. Irritatingly phrased though your

demand may be, I say without any reservation that you are absolutely right to

make it. A huge number of liberals and conservatives and social democrats, as

well as communists, made a shabby pact with “Koba,” or succumbed to the

fascinations of his power. (“Don‟t”)

Both Camus and Amis wanted to awaken people‟s conscience and point out the wickedness of failing to understand and acknowledge the suffering of so many, and they did this by writing literature, by using art as a way to reach people‟s consciousness.

In regard to a review of The Gulag Archipelago, entitled “When We Dead Awaken,” Martin

Amis writes: “When We Dead Awaken: yes, I thought. That is the next thing now …. And it hasn‟t happened. In the general consciousness the Russian dead sleep on” (KD 22). We are in need of an awakening, of an awakening of the USSR dead, an awakening of consciousness about their past, and our past, about history.

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3 HOUSE OF MEETINGS: TRAUMA AND LITERATURE

3.1 Literature as a means for working through trauma

Only in art will the lion lie down with the lamb, and the rose grow without thorn.13

When Pasternak travelled to Russia in the early 1930s, he “fell ill and wrote not a word for an entire year” (Amis, KD 128). Confronted with traumatic events, human nature tends to turn silent. The only appropriate response to human suffering on such a scale seems to be silence, as witness Adorno‟s famous saying that it is barbaric to write poetry after Auschwitz.

Nevertheless, it is of the greatest importance for humanity to break this silence and testify to the past. The conservation of history depends entirely on witnesses; if they will not testify, no one else will. A traumatic experience is “a radical experience to which no outsider can be witness, but to which no witness can be, or remain, outsider” (Felman, “Plague” 108). On the witnesses rests now the burden to testify to the past, to remember those who did not survive, and to remember the events so as to prevent them from ever happening again.

Amis writes: “We badly need to know the numbers of the dead. More than this, we need to know their names. And the dead, too, need us to know their names” (KD 83). Felman too stresses the importance of this kind of testimony. We need to testify, “so as to rescue from the death of an oblivion not just the evidence of survival, but the evidence – the knowledge

– of its cost” (Felman, “Plague” 112).

She also explains why it is art that will have to take on the task of testimony:

It is precisely because history as holocaust proceeds from a failure to imagine,

that it takes an imaginative medium like the Plague to gain an insight into its

13 KD 45

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historical reality, as well as into the attested historicity of its unimaginability.

(“Plague” 105; emphasis in original)

Because it is impossible to explicitly express trauma, it has to be done in subliminal way.

Images, allegories, stories, etc. are needed to gain insight into reality. The reader of literature about traumatic events, for example, becomes a belated witness to those events, in that way that he or she, through literature, can gain some insight in those events, according to Felman. A good literary testimony is a testimony that causes the reader to be touched, to be affected by his or her reading, and to understand and know about the traumatic events of which he or she has read:

The specific task of the literary testimony is, in other words, to open up in that

belated witness, which the reader now historically becomes, the imaginative

capability of perceiving history – what is happening to others – in one‟s own

body, with the power of sight (of insight) usually afforded only by one‟s own

immediate physical involvement. (Felman, “Plague” 108; emphasis in original)

Literary testimony needs to bring about a form of cognition in the reader, allowing him or her to really know about the titanic misery and failure under Stalin, in a sort of physical knowing. Felman describes this cognition as “a firsthand, carnal knowledge of victimization, of what it means to be „from here‟ […], wherever one is from; a firsthand knowledge of a historical passage through death, and of the way life will forever be inhabited by that passage and by that death; knowledge of the way in which „this history concerns us all,‟ in which „this business‟ of the Plague „is everybody‟s business‟; knowledge of the way in which history is the body‟s business; knowledge of a „total condemnation‟” (Felman, “Plague” 111).

In this way, attempts can be made to save history, to resolve the crisis of the relationship between narration and history. According to Felman, we live in “the age of testimony”:

[A]n age whose writing task (and reading task) is to confront the horror of its

own destructiveness, to attest to the unthinkable disaster of culture‟s

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breakdown, and to attempt to assimilate the massive trauma, and the

cataclysmic shift in being that resulted, within some reworked frame of culture

or within some revolutionized order of consciousness. “It is true that

consciousness is always lagging behind reality,” writes Camus in one of his

editorials in Combat (1948): “History rushes onward while thought reflects.

But this inevitable backwardness becomes more pronounced the faster History

speeds up. The world has changed more in the past fifty years than it did in

the previous two hundred years.” The “literature of testimony” is thus not an

art of leisure but an art of urgency: it exists in time not just as a memorial but

as an artistic promissory note, as an attempt to bring the “backwardness” of

consciousness to the level of precipitant events. (Felman, “Plague” 114;

emphasis in original)

“The Rebel and The Fall together suggest that the ethical imperative of a literary work is to create the grounds for refusing our consent to the logic of terror” (Sanyal 49). It is literature‟s task to attempt to represent trauma in a way that lends the reader insight into the traumatic experience.

Amis too realizes this necessity and tries to elaborate on the trauma he discussed in

Koba the Dread, this time in a fictitious way with House of Meetings. To give an account of an unimaginable trauma, Amis uses imaginative means.

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3.2 House of Meetings

Say sorry, someone. Someone tell me they‟re sorry. Go on. Cry me the Volga, cry me the Yenisei, cry me the Moscow River.14

“There were conjugal visits in the slave camp of the USSR,” the blurb of House of Meetings reads. “Valiant women would travel continental distances, over weeks and months, in the hope of spending a night, with their particular enemy of the people, in the House of

Meetings. The consequences of these liaisons were almost invariably tragic” (Amis, HM cover). House of Meetings recounts the story of such a liaison, complicated by the fact that three people are involved. It is a triangular relationship, but an inequilateral, “brutally scalene” one, as Amis phrases it. House of Meetings is the life story of an elderly Russian emigrant, written in a letter to his American stepdaughter Venus who is the only person he still cares about. It is a testimony to his life, a testimony to his war crimes and immoral behaviour. He fought, raped, killed. He wants his stepdaughter to make one single copy of his memoirs, his testimony, for her to read and to preserve. The narrator – described as a

“psychotic over-tipper” in his high-eighties – is travelling on a tourist steamer, the “Georgi

Zhukov,” on a “Gulag tour” (“The Gulag Tour, so the purser tells me, never quite caught on…” (Amis, HM 8)). He is travelling back to Norilsk, the place on the Arctic plain where he spent a decade in a gulag camp along with his younger brother Lev, planning to commit suicide at the end of this trip. We never learn his name.

The narrator was sent to the gulag in Norilsk on charge of being an “enemy of the people”, a “fascist”, a “fifty-eighter”15. His brother Lev arrives in the same camp, on the same charge, and brings with him the shocking news that he married Zoya, the beautiful, wasp-waisted Jewess that both the narrator and his brother are desperately in love with:

14 Amis, HM 171 15 Article 58 of the USSR Penal Code was put in force on February 25, 1927 to arrest those suspected guilty of counter-revolutionary activities.

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Has it ever happened to you, Venus? The colour of the day suddenly changes

to shadow. And you know you‟re going to remember that moment for the rest

of your life. Registering an impressive contraction of the heart, I said,

Not Zoya.

He nodded. „Zoya.‟

… You little cunt, I said. And I wheeled away from him into the yard.”

(Amis, HM 25; emphasis in original)

The brothers used to call Zoya “the Americas,” referring to her pretty figure: California for breasts, Panama for a waist, Brazil for bottom – “Every male was condemned to receive its message” (Amis, HM 29).

The rivalry between the brothers gets more complicated as July 31, 1956 approaches.

This is the day that Zoya comes to the gulag to pay a conjugal visit to Lev; the day that they are given a night together in the House of Meetings, the little cabin where conjugal visits were taking place: “Considering the variety and intensity of the suffering it almost always caused, I was astounded by how longed-for and pushed-for it remained: the chalet on the hill” (Amis, HM 101). The protagonist hopes for a disastrous outcome of the visit as he is fulminantly in love with his brother‟s wife, and several times he wishes his younger and weaker brother dead; yet he continues trying to protect his “pacifist” brother from the ubiquitous violence and the dangerous affection of much stronger fellow inmates in the camp. He wavers between love for his brother and anger, hate and jealousy for the fact that his brother married the woman he loves, the woman who he is utterly obsessed with. The protagonist is an “experienced” rapist; during the First World War, he “raped his way across what would soon be East-Germany” (Amis, HM 26). Women for him are mere sex objects, are mere limbs and flesh. But with Zoya, everything is different:

I surprised myself: I, the heroic rapist, with the medals and the yellow badge.

My first thought was not the first thought I was used to – some variant of

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When can I wrench her clothes off? No. It was this (and the sentence came to

me unbidden and fully formed): How many poets are going to kill themselves

because of you?” (Amis, HM 29; emphasis in original)

The protagonist and his brother endure in the gulag, where live is rock hard and where temperature sometimes reaches a forty degrees below zero, causing one of the inmates‟ hands to freeze off, when he falls asleep outside in the frost. This inmate, Uglik, will continue to haunt both Lev‟s and his brothers memory, because they both painfully remember Uglik, lying on the floor, trying to pick up a cigarette. He kept forgetting he had no hands. Camp hierarchy consists of, from top to bottom: “pigs”, “urkas”, “snakes”, “leeches”, “fascists” – the caste of Lev and his brother – “locusts” and “shiteaters” at the very bottom. The narrator takes part in the everyday violence and killing to sustain their place in the hierarchy; Lev remains pacifist and refuses to fight, which brings about even more tensions in the complicated relationship between the brothers. Lev gradually gets stronger, working hard to get the right to correspondence, and eventually the right to a conjugal visit in the House of

Meetings. But everything changes for Lev after that night with his wife in this little cabin; he totally crashes and never really recovers to his former self. The narrator is anxious to get to know what happened – he in a way hopes his brother was not able to “perform” – but Lev refuses to talk about it, though he promises his brother that he will explain what happened in the House of Meetings before he dies.

After Stalin‟s death in 1953, the camps are closed, the inmates sent home and the narrator starts working again, makes a fortune; everyone tries to pick up the threads of their lives. Lev is no longer the man he used to be, and eventually he divorces Zoya. He remarries a girl named Lidiya, and together they have a son, Artem, who is later on tragically killed in the Salang tunnel during an Afghan-Soviet battle. Lev dies shortly after. Some personal items of his are sent to the narrator, the older brother, along with a letter: the letter in which Lev explains what happened in the House of Meetings that day in July. The narrator

Ostyn 87 decides not to read it until the moment before he dies. After the funeral of his brother, he visits Zoya, who got married again in the mean time to an old Russian playwright. The narrator‟s obsession for her has not vanished, and he asks her to come with him to America.

He wants to settle down there, with her. She declines:

America? No. I‟m touched, but no. And if you want me to just kiss goodbye to

what I have here and put myself back at risk, at my age, you‟re wrong …

America. It‟s months since I‟ve been out in the street. It‟s months since I‟ve

been downstairs. I‟m far too drunk. Can‟t you tell? […] I‟m so finished.

Anyway. Not you. Never you. Him. Him. (Amis, HM 151; emphasis in original)

Yet a few days later she visits the narrator in his hotel. She has left her playwright husband:

“I‟m not going anywhere with you – but I am going to change my life” (Amis, HM 154; emphasis in original). She is sober, and she has left the Russian playwright, but she is still very unstable:

You‟re right. I hate me. I hate me. And I want to say sorry to you. If you were

being truthful then I‟m sorry. I bet you think you‟re quite a plum, compared to

him. But look at you. Look at your eyes. You‟re not kind. And I don‟t have a

choice: I must be with the kind. Ooh, I know you‟d find a way to torture me.

And anyway you‟re Lev‟s brother. So sorry again, mate. There isn‟t much in

this for you, I‟m afraid. I need to talk about Lev. Will you listen for an hour?

And then we can say goodbye as brother and sister. (Amis, HM 155; emphasis

in original)

She wants to talk about Lev, but all the narrator can think about is that “she had come to my rooms for quite another purpose” (Amis, HM 155). Zoya talks about Lev, about how she loved him. She still does not understand why he turned away from her: “At night he turned away. And the words. They went too. It all went” (Amis, HM 156). Zoya goes on, talking about all the men she had after Lev, but suddenly she feels unwell. The narrator comforts

Ostyn 88 her and puts her into bed, where she falls asleep, in “one of the shallow comas that normally precede recovery” (Amis, HM 158); and then, the narrator does his worst:

I began to kiss her lips. […] And up she flowed from the depths, all at once,

her seizing arms, her tongue flooding my mouth, the jouncing shove of her

groin. I thought, with a whisper of panic: one night will not be enough. For

such an inundation – one night, one year, will not begin to sustain it. “Oh,

fuck, yes,” she said. So, Venus, I had several seconds of that. I had several

seconds of that. And then she opened her eyes. And awoke.

I suppose that this is the best you can say of what followed: technically

speaking, it was not a rape from scratch. And it was very quick. Zoya opened

her eyes and saw, inches away, a horrible delusion: it was I, Delirium

Tremens. She had had the bad dream, then the good dream, then the horrible

delusion. Now she had reality, and the locked shape beneath me at once gave

way to infuriated struggle. But I remembered how you did it. You see, I

remembered how you did it: the heavy palm over the airway, while the other

hand … At a certain point her struggle ceased, and she pretended she was

dead. It was very quick. (Amis, HM 160)

A few weeks after this encounter, the narrator gets the disturbing message of his sister:

Zoya has thrown herself off a bridge over the frozen Moscow River.

The narrator then moves to America, alone; he remarries Venus‟s mother – a chaste marriage, he claims. In his late eighties, he embarks on the “Gulag Tour” to Norilsk, to see once again the place where he spent those horrific years. At the end of this trip, and the end of his life, the narrator finally reads the letter of his brother, the letter that explains what happened in the House of Meetings:

With the removal of each piece of clothing came the delivery of enormous

stores of fascination. If there was an unwelcome feeling, at this stage, it was

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a kind of humorous mortal fear. […] Before very long, in the House of

Meetings, we were doing it – the thing that people do. I was so awed by my

readiness, my capability, that it took me a while before I started asking myself

what was wrong. It was this – and at first it felt entirely bathetic. As I made

love, I wasn‟t thinking about my wife. I was thinking about my dinner. […] Of

course I could say to myself, You haven‟t had food in front of you and then

done something else for eight years. But it would be untrue to say that I

wasn‟t already frightened. (Amis, HM 180; emphasis in original)

Lev recounts how they had their dinner, some vodka, some cigarettes – all carefully gathered to make that night very special – and after that, washed, and tried to make love again: “This time I was pleased, at the outset, to find that I wasn‟t thinking about food. All that did, though, was delay the recognition that I was thinking about sleep” (Amis, HM 180).

Eventually, Lev and Zoya sleep, and at dawn, they venture another attempt:

By now I had found my subject. All I thought about was what I‟d lost.

And what was that? I remembered the first law of camp life: to you, nothing –

from you, everything. I also thought of the urka slogan (and the text of many

an urka tattoo): You may live but you won‟t love. Now, it would be ghoulish to

say that I had lost all my love. And not true, not true. This is what had

happened to me, brother – I had lost all my play. All. (Amis, HM 181;

emphasis in original)

3.2.1 Memory, Truth, Laughter and Denial

House of Meetings is drenched with traumatic experience, failure, despair. The sense of loss is enormous and oppressive, for the narrator, for Lev, for Zoya. Amis has converted the thematic elements of Koba the Dread into this story of love and despair.

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First of all, Amis again hints at the faltering condition of memory. The narrator does not fully remember everything he has done: “Lev once saw me fresh from a killing: my second. He described the encounter to me, years later. I give his memory of it, his version – because I haven‟t got a memory. I haven‟t got a version” (Amis, HM 85). Hunger, exhaustion, cold, the everyday violence and cruelties, the every-man-for-himself policy … it all influences the inmates of the camp to such an extent that their memory fails to absorb all that happens. The traumatic nature of what the brothers in House of Meetings go through, damages their faculty of memory. What they experience does not fit into any frame of reference. The cruelty, the suffering, is of a scale too enormous to grasp. The narrator of

House of Meetings describes Lev on his first day in the gulag, looking out over the camp:

He was cherishing his fractured spectacles, and trying to believe his eyes.

And what did he see? The thing that was hardest to grasp was the scale – the

inordinate amount of space needed to contain it. (HM 23; emphasis in

original)

Secondly, truth is again an important issue in the book. Reality does not tally with what the state says. The narrator and his brother are, according to the State, both “fascists.”

They are banished to the gulag in Norilsk, where they have to endure their ghastly fate, while both of them know they have done nothing wrong: “[A]t that time we had no idea what was going on. We never had any idea what was going on” (Amis, HM 23). Truth had no importance in the USSR in those days; Stalin and his Bolsheviks constructed their own truth:

At school, Venus, we were taught by people who were prepared to lie to

children for a living; you sat there listening to information you knew to be

false. […] Later on you discovered that all the interesting subjects were so

hopelessly controversial that no one dared study them. (Amis, HM 78)

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Laughter too, is present in this novel. It is often easy to see the irony in Amis‟s passages. Lev, for example, is banned to the gulag in Norilsk for committing the crime of

“Praising America,” while he was in fact praising “the Americas,” meaning Zoya, his future wife. In another anecdote, the narrator describes his “date” with his “ladyfriend” in the camp:

The only impulse resembling desire that Tanya awoke in me was an

evanescent urge to eat her shirt buttons, which were made from pellets of

chewed bread. Oh yes: and the sandpapery grain of the flushed flesh of her

cheeks, in the white dusk, made me long for the rind of an orange (Amis, HM

18).

This is grim irony; this is laughter of despair, and it is shown in several passages in House of

Meetings.

The big question that Amis asks in Koba the Dread – Why have we not condemned the Soviet Union in the same way we have condemned Nazi Germany? – is also hinted at in

House of Meetings. When the destination of the “Gulag tour” is reached, and the narrator visits the place where the gulag was in Norilsk, he describes the site:

Further round the slope I encountered a kind of sentry hut; it looked like a

single-occupancy toilet, but it was in fact a shrine. Inside: icons, an apple, a

wooden cross nailed to the wall. No, this is not a country of nuance… The

Jews have Yad Vashem and an airforce. We have a prefab and a cankered

apple. And a Russian cross. (Amis, HM 175; emphasis in original)

Again the disparity between the attitudes towards Nazism and Stalinism is pointed out. The

Jews have memorials and museums that testify to the Holocaust; the Soviet victims have a shrine that looks like a toilet. But what is worse than the absence of a proper memorial or museum, is the general indifference towards the horror of the USSR and its victims. The narrator of House of Meetings recounts:

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I quite clearly heard a stewardess refer to me […] as “the Gulag bore in 2B.”

It is nice to know that this insouciance about Russian slavery – abolished, it is

true, as long ago as 1987 – has filtered down to the caste of tourism. I let the

stewardess get away with it. Start a ruckus on a plane these days and you get

fifteen bullets in the head. But the indulgent purser (much shaken, much

enriched) now knows that here is one who still swears and weeps, that here is

one who still hates and burns. (Amis, HM 52)

In Koba the Dread, Amis pointed out that it is exactly this insouciance, this indifference that has to be suppressed. In order to do that, people have to continue testifying to the horrors of their lives, of their century, not only for their own sakes, but for the sake of history, for the sake of a collective awareness, a collective insight in history, and a collective working through of the trauma called Stalinism.

3.2.2 Trauma

The characters in House of Meetings all bear their own burdens, carry with them their own traumas, and deal with them – or fail to deal with them – in their own ways. Zoya, for example, is completely crushed by the loss of her love, Lev. When he divorces her, she becomes an alcoholic, and “after that, God. Man after man after man after man after man”

(Amis, HM 157). And then Lev dies. The only person she can turn to after his death to talk about him, is the narrator; when she falls asleep on his bed, he rapes her. A few days later,

Zoya jumps off a bridge over the Moscow River.

Lev is not able to cope with his trauma either. His trauma pivots around one event: the night in that little cabin, called “the House of Meetings” on July 31, 1956:

That night in the House of Meetings all my consciousness of inferiority

returned, and it was reinforced, now, by the meaning of my enslavement. In

Moscow, in the conical attic, I was Lev, but I was clean and free. I thought:

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she should have seen me a couple of hours ago, before the shearer and the

power-hose – a little tumbleweed of nits and lice. So, to the silent but

universal murmur of dismay I always heard, faintly, whenever I entered the

fold of her arms, was added another voice, which said, “Never mind if he

looks like a village idiot. That‟s their business. How about what he is. He is an

ant that toils for the state at gunpoint. What he is is a slave. Nothing to be

done but pity him, pity him.” And I did want pity. I wanted the pity of all

Russia. (Amis, HM 181-82; emphasis in original)

The narrator suffers from a lack of love; Lev suffers from having love, and not being able to live up to it. Lev has lost everything that night in the House of Meetings. He has lost his play and his poetry. The narrator of House of Meetings, Lev‟s brother, writes: “Of course, I never asked Lev whether he still wrote poetry. […] Someone who hated him would have asked him that” (Amis, HM 128). Lev is unable to write or talk about his anguish. He is a changed man, but he cannot explain to anyone why he has changed so much, why he has become the shadow of the man he used to be. His family sees his condition worsen, but they are not able to help him, because Lev does not want to be helped. The narrator writes: “He complained of headaches and nightmares. This was the start of a long decline” (Amis, HM

121). Lev gets ill, and his condition worsens day by day:

For a while, whenever he had a fit of coughing to get through, he would leave

the room; a little later, he was leaving the house. In middle age he was

developing “stress” asthma. These attacks involved him in another kind of

fight. Back went the head. He could breathe it in but he couldn‟t expel it. He

tried. He couldn‟t get the air out. He couldn‟t get it out. (Amis, HM 137)

It is as if his asthma is the externalization of his inner fears and doubts, which he cannot express; he cannot get them out. The trauma, the suffering, he bottles it all up. He does not

Ostyn 94 talk about it with anyone, and he certainly does not tell anything to Zoya. Lev started lying to her, right there in the House of Meetings:

That night in camp I did an excellent impersonation of the old Lev – that is to

say, the young Lev. But the old Lev has disappeared, along with my youth. I

went on doing this impersonation for five years. And she never knew. (Amis,

HM 183)

He pretended being someone else for five years. There was only one thing he could not control: he cried in his sleep. He always dreamt the same dream: “The dream was a dream called House of Meetings” (Amis, HM 183). He lied to Zoya about it. But after five years, Lev just could not do it anymore. He turned away from Zoya and they eventually got divorced.

He could not tell her how the House of Meetings had changed him, how it had broken him.

The only person he is still able to love, is his son Artem, the son he has with his second wife,

Lydia. Lev continues to get weaker, and eventually crashes when he is informed about the death of his son. The narrator comments:

The drawn blind was an acknowledgement and a kind of signal. But the

stricken need the dark. Light is life and is unbearable to them – as are voices,

birdsong, the sound of purposeful footsteps. And they are themselves ghosts,

and seek an atmosphere forgiving of ghosts, and conducive to the visits of

other ghosts, or of one particular ghost. (Amis, HM 141)

A short while after the death of his son, Lev himself dies in a hospital. The narrator describes his last moments: “His eyes swivelled from face to face – Lidiya‟s, Kitty‟s [their sister], mine.

His eyes were the eyes of a man who fears he has forgotten something. Then he remembered” (Amis, HM 141). He remembered the moment that ruined his life, he remembered the House of Meetings. The narrator only learns the truth about that night after the dead of his brother, in the letter he reads just before he himself will die. In that letter,

Lev writes: “No, I couldn‟t do it, that poem. I couldn‟t tell that story. But now I‟m dead, and

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I can tell it to you” (Amis, HM 178) Lev tells his brother about the disastrous night of 31 July,

1956; he tells him about his cynicism, about his faking to be the man he was before for five years; he tells him what he thinks it was, the traumatizing aspect of the camps:

For the both of us, I think, it had to do with our weakened power to love. It is

strange that enslavement should have that effect – not just the fantastic degradation,

not just the fear and the boredom and all the rest, but also the layered injustice, the

silent injustice. (Amis, HM 189)

For Lev it is too late. Everything was too late starting from that night in the House of

Meetings. Lev claims: “They did more than take our youth away. They also took away the men we were going to be” (Amis, HM 189).

The narrator, in turn, has also spent almost all of his life trying to suppress his traumatic past, trying to forget it. In the letter to his stepdaughter Venus, that precedes his memoirs, he writes:

You were always asking me why I could never “open up,” why I found it so

hard to “vent” and “decompress” and all the rest of it. Well, with a past like

mine, you pretty much live for the interludes when you aren‟t thinking about it

– and time spent talking about it clearly isn‟t going to be one of them. (Amis,

HM 1)

He has tried to remain silent about his traumatic experiences. He was not able to talk, to write, he was afraid people would not believe him: “There was a more obscure inhibition: the frankly neurotic fear that you wouldn‟t believe me. […] I said my fear was neurotic, but I know it to be widely shared by men with similar histories. Shared neurosis, shared anxiety”

(Amis, HM 1). The narrator is afraid to tell his story. He has tried so hard to forget it, but that is impossible with a life story like his. His past continues to haunt him, and when he considers his life, he claims: “It isn‟t death that seems very frightening. What frightens me is my life, my own, and what it‟s going to turn out to add up to” (Amis, HM 51). He realizes

Ostyn 96 that he has been suffering his whole life. It is impossible to escape one‟s past, it is impossible to forget: “The past has a weight. And the past is heavy.” (Amis, HM 57). On the tourist tour back to the site of the gulag, where it all began, the narrator finally understands what he needs to do: he has to write his memoirs, he has to testify to what he has been through. Yet he writes his testimony in English, he does not want to use his mother language anymore:

My mother tongue – I find I want to use it as little as possible. If Russia is

going, then Russian is already gone. We were very late, you see, to develop a

language of feeling; the process was arrested after barely a century, and now

all the implied associations and resonances are lost. I must just say that it

does feel consistently euphemistic – telling my story in English, and in old-

style English English, what‟s more. My story would be even worse in Russian.

For it is truly a tale of gutturals and whistling sibilants. (Amis, HM 12)

The narrator‟s agony starts in the First World War, and so do his crimes. Lev writes in his final letter to his brother: “I used to think it was the war, and not camp, that fucked you up.

But you won the war. And nobody won the other thing. Still, whatever the war did, camp trapped it inside you” (Amis, HM 189). We do not get to know a lot about the narrator‟s experiences in the First World War, besides the fact that the narrator was “a rapist in the rapist army.” That fact alone though – the fact that he lost his virginity “to a Silesian housewife, in a roadside ditch, after a ten-minute chase” (Amis, HM 27) – caused a considerable amount of damage to the narrator‟s morals:

Understandably little sleep has been lost over the consequences of rape for

the rapist. The peculiar resonance of his post-coital tristesse, for example; no

animal is ever sadder than the rapist … As for the longer-term effects, what

they were for me I now came to understand. This was the mental form they

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took: I couldn‟t see women whole, intact and entire. I couldn‟t even see their

bodies whole. (Amis, HM 30)

But Zoya, unlike all the others, he saw as indivisible; he could but see her as a whole, as a unity. She was the one that could “save” him from his past; that could be his other half, his consoler. She was the one that cured Lev‟s stutter, and he in a way hopes she can cure his sinful heart. He obsesses about Zoya and consequently, he is in shock when he hears the news of her marriage to his brother. He writes to his stepdaughter:

Venus, you‟re probably marvelling – I know I am – at my calm and

helpfulness, and the superb urbanity of my fraternal exchange with the

husband of the woman I loved, the husband of Zoya, healer of stutterers. The

truth is that I was in shock. And not “still in shock” either: I had hardly

started. I would go on being in shock for over a month, buoyed by buxom

chemicals. They did me good, morally. I got a lot worse when they wore off.

(Amis, HM 41)

It is clear, throughout the book, that its narrator is a broken man. He realizes what he has lost. He could not make Zoya love him because she did not like the taste of his lips. It was as if she could taste the crimes, the rape, the violence. Lev was a pacifist, and he remained a pacifist, even when he was beaten half to death in the camp, even when he had to sleep on the floor down with the “shiteaters,” the dirt and the vermin. The narrator was the strong, handsome war veteran, but Zoya chose Lev. Because he was kind. The narrator writes: “Now I started to look at my losses. And they were serious. I realised that there was nothing, now, nothing at all, that I liked to think about…” (Amis, HM 64) As the narrator approaches the end of his trip, and with that, the end of his life, he gradually realizes those losses, and he fears death:

I am in a terminal panic about my life, Venus; and this is no figure of speech.

The panic seems to come … Seems? The panic comes, not from inside me,

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but from out of the earth or the ether. I outwait it – that‟s all I can do. It rolls

by me, and then it‟s gone, leaving the taste of metal in my mouth and all over

my body, as if I had been smelted or galvanised. Then it returns, not the

same day, and maybe not the next, but it returns and rolls and billows by me.

I think it sweeps the entire planet, and always has. The only people who feel

it are the dying. (Amis, KD 117)

This is a terrified, traumatized and broken man speaking, but the important thing is that he is speaking, he is testifying: “So in this journey am I, as the phrases go, retracing my steps – in an attempt to bring it all back? To do that, I would have needed to descend below the waterline of the Georgi Zhukov, and induce the passengers and crew to coat themselves in shit and sick and then lie on top of me for a month and a half” (Amis, HM 59). The narrator realizes that it is impossible to represent in language all that he has been through. The story he recounts is only a narration of his past, it cannot reproduce that past in all its details.

Language is not perfect; it is a process of trial and error:

When I first assembled the facts before me, black words on a white page, I

found myself staring at a shapeless little heap of degradation and horror. So

I‟ve tried to give the thing a bit of structure. Inasmuch as I could locate some

semblance of form and pattern, I felt less isolated, and could sense the

assistance of impersonal forces (which I badly needed). This intimation of

unity was perhaps delusive. The fatherland is eternally prodigal with anti-

illuminations, with negative epiphanies – but not with unity. There aren‟t any

unities in my country. (Amis, HM 2)

The sense of unity is indeed delusive. No recounting of traumatic experiences can be characterized by unity. Leith writes that the story of the narrator “presents a sort of coming clean, but with a vicious twist.” There is indeed a vicious twist, since the narrator does not even seem to believe in his own redemption. He does not believe he can be healed:

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You see, one of my achievements, in the Rossiya [the hotel where he raped

Zoya], was the disfigurement of the past. And you don‟t want to look at a

disfigured thing, do you, when it clearly can‟t be healed. This is what I was

facing: testimony to the astounding dimensions of my crime – my perfect

crime. (Amis, HM 172)

Amis describes the unravelling of the lives of the three main characters of his novel, namely

Zoya, Lev, and the nameless narrator, “but it is left to our narrator to die in the deepest hell.

Freedom – the liberation of the camps in 1956 – can never heal this man, and nor can affluence” (Merridale). The narrator himself realizes that the story of his trauma will never end. He senses, already in the camp years, that damage has been done that can never be repaired:

I glanced at Lev. And then, I think, it came upon my brother and me – a

suspicion of what this might further mean. I found the suspicion was

unentertainable, and I shuddered it off. But I had already heard its whisper,

saying … The Ugliks, and the sons of the Ugliks, and the reality that produced

them: all that would pass. And yet there was something else, something that

would never pass, and was only just beginning. (Amis, HM 97)

Embedded in his last letter is the gloom, the sense of failure and the thought that redemption is impossible. Catherine Merridale writes: “Human beings cannot evade their legacy of pain, in this man‟s view.” The narrator feels death approaching as he finishes his memoirs, his testimony. It is not a healing, not a relieving testimony. It is a trial-and-error process, and for him it does not bring lightening. He claims:

Why didn‟t I seek “closure”? “Closure”: ech, if I so much whisper it or mouth it

I feel myself transformed into a white-coated, fat-necked peanut in a mall-

style consulting-room. Closure is a greasy little word which, moreover,

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describes a nonexistent condition. The truth, Venus, is that nobody ever gets

over anything. (Amis, KD 192)

The narrator, in his testimony, links his traumatic fate with the fate of Russia. His decline is reflected in the decline of Russia, and that in way consoles him: “It comforted me because I could attribute my failure to historical forces, along with everything else. History did it” (Amis, HM 71). While the narrator is travelling to Norilsk, the siege of the Middle

Number One in North Ossetia, Beslan is taking place. He refers to those events here and there in the novel, as to exemplify the state Russia is in:

Why is it that we are already preparing ourselves for something close to the

worst possible outcome? Why is it that we are already preparing ourselves for

the phenomenon understood by all the world – Russian heavy-handedness?

For what reason are our hands so heavy? What weighs them down? (Amis,

HM 11)

Like he has seem to have given up on himself, on his own redemption, he seems to have given up on Russia too, and he sees this decline of Russia represented in its landscapes:

The planet has a bald patch, and its central point is the Kombinat. There are

no living trees in any direction for over a hundred versts. But some of the

dead ones are still standing. Typically, two leafless, twigless branches remain;

they point, not upwards or outwards, but downwards, and meet at the trunk.

Seen from a distance, the trees look like the survivors of a concentration

camp, wandering out to be counted, and shielding their shame with their

hands. (Amis, HM 167)

The narrator, a dying old man, gives up on himself, and gives up on Russia. Still, it is important to note that he did testify to his past, and that he did thus overcome the fear of talking about it, he did defeat some of his demons. Testimony is important for the present

Ostyn 101 and future. Moreover, House of Meetings implicitly contains a warning to all sorts of ideology, even the one called Westernism. He writes to Venus:

My ghost expects censure. But make it personal, Venus; make it your own and

not the censure of your group and your ideology. Yes, you heard me, young

lady: your ideology. Oh, it‟s a mild ideology, I agree (mildness is its one idea).

Nobody is going to blow themselves to bits for it. (Amis, HM 2)

He is very proud of his American stepdaughter, and he loves her, but the one flaw he can see in her is that she is “affected” by the “ideology” of the West. He writes: “You are as well- prepared as any young Westerner could hope to be, equipped with good diet, lavish health insurance, two degrees, foreign travel and languages, orthodonture, psychotherapy, property, and capital; and your skin is a beautiful colour. Look at you – look at the burnish of you” (Amis, HM 3). It seems as if he sees in Westernism a slumbering danger: “Your crowd, what do they fight? If it‟s the numbness of advanced democracy – I can‟t sympathise. Other systems, you see, flood the glands and prickle the tips of the nerves” (Amis, HM 114).

And elsewhere he writes:

And all your life I‟ve tried to interest you in my ideology: the ideology of no

ideology. It‟s not a bad one, your one; but it‟s an ideology. And it‟s the only

thing I detect in you that remains imperfectly free. (Amis, HM 193)

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4 CONCLUSION

With an hour to go, the train makes a stop at a humble township called Coercion. It says on the platform: Coercion. How to explain this onset of candour? Where are the sister settlements of Fabulation and Amnesia?16

In both Koba the Dread and House of Meetings, Amis deals with the story of the USSR under

Stalin. In Koba the Dread he addresses the big problem attached to that story: it has not been told enough; it has not been heard enough. Too many people do not realize the extent of the suffering that was caused by Stalin and his accomplices, there is too much indifference. For example, teenage kids wearing a T-shirt depicting a swastika would evoke indignation and disgust. Teenagers wearing a T-shirt depicting the sickle and hammer, or a portrait of Che Guevara, are considered fashionable, idealistic or naïve and misguided at the worst. Radley Balko, in an article in which he calls for a Communist Memorial Museum,

Radley Balko gives another example: “In New York City, you can get tipsy at the KGB Bar, a chic spot featuring Soviet-era symbolism and paraphernalia. Imagine what might become of the entrepreneur who tried to open a nightspot themed with Nazi regalia.”

Amis‟s book is thus a useful and a necessary one, as Lloyd claims: “It does matter, especially for the Amis-Hitchens generation, the last, at least until the ambiguous radicalism of the anti-globalists, in which a large section of western intellectual youth proclaimed themselves revolutionary socialists” (12). This partial denial of the reality of what happened under Stalin‟s rule, this huge collective trauma, is still there; the trauma still haunts us. It is high time this trauma was dealt with, high time that everyone acknowledges what Lloyd acknowledged:

I was one such, a largely inactive member of the Communist Party of Great

Britain between 1971 and 1973, and then a much more active participant in

16 (Amis, HM 59)

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the tiny British and Irish Communist Organisation until 1977. I denounced my

comrades, in a 20-page speech, for their Stalinism; I had just read, sweating

with horror, all of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn‟s Gulag Archipelago. So in my late

twenties, I had to admit that my thinking had been in the tradition of a mass

murderer, long after his fellow (if penitent) mass murderer Nikita Khrushchev

had done it in the Soviet Union. That remains a cause for ineradicable shame.

But it is not just my shame; it infects everyone on the left, whether or not

they now feel part of it. (13)

Lloyd is perhaps exaggerating a bit when he says that it infects “everybody on the left,” but he sets an example in looking at his own attitude towards Stalinism and adjusting it.

Literature can be a thorough help in dealing with this collective trauma. As long as authors continue to fictionalize the themes of a blinding ideology such as the Soviet ideology, people will read, understand, and thus be able to gain insight into our collective history. It is important though, not to take the “easy way” and present trauma by means of eroded imagery, clichéd formulations, used similes, and a rhetoric of closure, of unity. Those often familiar subjects of trauma should presented as for the first time. Hitchens quotes Winston

Smith, the main character of George Orwell‟s Nineteen Eighty-Four, “The best books … are those you know already” and comments:

Amis understands that cliché and banality constitute a menace to even the

most apparently self-evident truths. “Holocaust” can become a tired

synecdoche for war crimes in general. Before one knows it, one is employing

terms like “nuclear exchange,” and even “nuclear umbrella,” and committing

the mental and moral offense of euphemism. One must always seek for new

means of keeping familiar subjects fresh, and raw. (“Lightness” 144)

Amis sets the example by blending the elements and issues of Koba the Dread into a novel,

House of Meetings.. Daniel Soar writes: “For the novelisation, his sources – a narrow range –

Ostyn 104 aren‟t so much embellished as systematised, artfully reshuffled and newly dealt.” It is the story of three people who, each in their own way, suffer from their traumatic past. It is a story, according to Douglas Kennedy, that poses questions “about the nature of memory and personal responsibility, and the way we are all enslaved by life‟s infinite moral complexities.”

All the characters in this gruesome story are possessed by their traumatic past, which they cannot escape. The narrator of House of Meetings testifies to his traumatic life story, but fails to attain redemption. His traumatic experiences have never stopped haunting him, and it seems as if there is no solution at all. The man will never recover from his past. One would expect a hope of healing, a sense of acquiescence in the last confession of a dying man; but on the contrary, a sense of gloom, failure, and damnation is intertwined in his last pages:

“The truth, Venus, is that nobody ever gets over anything” (Amis, HM 192). According to

Tom Chatfield, House of Meetings suffers from “an intellectual and moral paralysis – a writerly faith in the efficacy of confession and atonement that does not survive its author‟s horror at the apocalyptic mess of recent history.” Amis thus does not offer a straightforward solution. The narrator of House of Meetings tells his life story, seemingly without any hope for relief or redemption, but yet does the effort to warn his stepdaughter for the dangers of ideology, even if it is a mild and subtle one, like the ideology of “Westernism” he ascribes to

Venus.

Therefore, it is all the more surprising to notice the recent shift in Amis‟s rhetoric.

Since 9/11, Amis has very much been talking in terms of “they” and “we,” in referring to the problem of terrorism – he prefers the term “horrorism” in his long essay “The Age of

Horrorism.” In a recent interview in the Times, he declared:

They‟re […] gaining on us demographically at a huge rate. A quarter of

humanity now and by 2025 they‟ll be a third. Italy‟s down to 1.1 child per

woman. We‟re just going to be outnumbered. […]There's a definite urge –

don't you have it? – to say, “The Muslim community will have to suffer until it

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gets its house in order.” What sort of suffering? Not letting them travel.

Deportation – further down the road. Curtailing of freedoms. Strip-searching

people who look like they're from the Middle East or from Pakistan.

Discriminatory stuff, until it hurts the whole community and they start getting

tough with their children. They hate us for letting our children have sex and

take drugs – well, they've got to stop their children killing people” (qtd. in

Soar).

It is surprising for an author who has always been quite well-considered and cautious in his writing, to be so blunt and straightforward on Islam. Soar writes:

Amis thinks he believes in reason, in the soft liberal universalist sense: be

good to women, hold free elections, drink plenty of booze. But he is uniformly

unreasonable towards Islam. That words fail Amis here – when carefully

attended-to words were once his most reliable friends – is evidence of the

strength of his feeling.

House of Meetings was initially advertised to contain two short stories, “In the Palace of the

End” and “The Last Days of Muhammad Atta,” that appeared in the New Yorker. The former is a story about one of the body doubles of Nadir the Next, the son of the ruling dictator, based on Uday Hussein. The latter is a short story imagining the last few days of the life of

Muhammad Atta before he piloted a plane into the World Trade Center. Both stories were not published in House of Meetings. In those short stories, we can see Amis shift to a less balanced political opinion. In “The Age of Horrorism,” he writes: “All religions, unsurprisingly, have their terrorists, Christian, Jewish, Hindu, even Buddhist. But we are not hearing from those religions. We are hearing from Islam.” A few lines further he states:

That‟s what all this was supposed to be: not a clash of civilisations or anything

like that, but a civil war within Islam. Well, the civil war appears to be over.

And Islamism won it. The loser, moderate Islam, is always deceptively well-

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represented on the level of the op-ed page and the public debate; elsewhere,

it is supine and inaudible. We are not hearing from moderate Islam. Whereas

Islamism, as a mover and shaper of world events, is pretty well all there is.

In his most recent short stories and essays, Amis seems to have lost his sense of nuance.

He seems to be going along with the simplistic rhetorics of “us” against “them,” the logic of the Bush administration and its allies, and it seems that “We” have more rights of mourning than “They”:

That the United States is compelled to mourn its 3.000 dead so publicly and

for so long stands in stark contrast to the base lack of acknowledgment for

the infinitely large loss of innocent life found elsewhere in the last century.

When we promise „we will never forget‟, those who died on Sept. 11, it is a

promise both inspiring in its sincerity and startling in its arrogance. (Kiem)

In spite of the fact that Amis‟s narrator in his last novel, House of Meetings, pleads for “the ideology of no ideology,” Amis does not seem to support this view any longer. In Koba the

Dread, Amis purports to be “non-ideological,” and considers every ideology as a form of denial. In House of Meetings, Amis‟s narrator also seems to hold this view, and therefore he pleads for the ideology of no ideology. Every ideology contains a blinding towards other views and opinions, and the stronger the belief in an ideology, the stronger the blinding. This claim sits uneasily with Amis‟s recent essays and stories, which show a different side of literature. He seems to have lost his impartiality.

Wilby writes:

[E]very single day now some 3,000 children perish from diarrhoea because

they lack clean drinking water. Multiply that over a single year, and you are

already past a million. Over 30 years - Stalin's period in power - you are well

past 30 million. Who is to blame for that? Fate? The market? President Bush?

The IMF? Third world rulers? You? Me? Do we lump these children in with the

Ostyn 107

victims of natural catastrophes? Or do we, as some would, see them as

sacrifices to our own beliefs in the sanctity of liberal capitalism? When our

governments and our banks demand debt repayments from third world

countries - and thus force them to cut projects to improve education, health

and sanitation - are we and our governments as culpable as those who

supported Stalin? (16)

The world will have to continue dealing with its massive ongoing collective traumas.

Literature can still offer an answer. As long as literature stays impartial, and remains unpoisoned by any kind of ideology, it can offer everyone a clear vision on the characteristics of trauma, and it can continue to be an attempt to resolve all traumas: individual traumas, and collective ones.

Ostyn 108

5 ABBREVIATIONS

HM House of Meetings

KD Koba the Dread

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Ascherson, Neal. Review of Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million, by Martin

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Ostyn 109

Bernhard, Brendan. “Bolshie Ballet.” LA Weekly 3 July 2002. 10 May 2007

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---. The Plague. Trans. Stuart Gilbert. 1947. New York: Vintage Books, 1975.

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---. “Recapturing the Past: Introduction.” Trauma: Explorations in Memory. Ed. Cathy Caruth.

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Chatfield, Tom. “Reports from the Gulag.” Prospect Magazine Nov 2006. 10 May <

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Conquest, Robert. The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine.

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Daley, Paul. Review of Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million, by Martin Amis.

“Big Moustache or Little Moustache.” The Age. September 19, 2002. 10 May 2007

de Graef, Ortwin, Vivian Liska, and Katrien Vloeberghs. “Introduction: The instance of

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Laub, Dori. “An Event Without A Witness: Truth, Testimony and Survival.” Testimony. Crises

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Ostyn 110

Felman, Shoshana. “Camus‟ The Fall, or the Betrayal of the Witness.” Testimony. Crises of

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Jacoby, Russell. Rev. of Camus and Sartre: The Story of a Friendship and the Quarrel That

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Ostyn 111

Kakutani, Michiko. Review of Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million, by Martin

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Ostyn 112

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