The Holocaust of Texts: Genocide, Literature, and Personification

by Amy Hungerford

Why do we so often speak of books as living, flourishing, and dying? And what is at stake when we do so? This habit of treating books as people, or personifying texts, is rampant in postwar American culture. In this bracing study, Amy Hungerford argues that such personification has become pivotal to our contemporary understanding of both literature and genocide. Personified texts, she contends, play a particularly powerful role in works where the systematic destruction of entire ethnic groups is at issue.

Hungerford examines the implications of conflating texts with people in a broad range of texts: Art Spiegelman's Maus; Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451; the poetry of Sylvia Plath; Binjamin Wilkomirski's fake Holocaust memoir Fragments; and the fiction of Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, and Don DeLillo. She considers the ethical consequences of this trend in the work of recent and contemporary theorists and literary critics as well, including Cathy Caruth, Jacqueline Rose, Jacques Derrida, and Paul de Man. What she uncovers are fundamentally flawed ideas about representation that underwrite and thus undermine powerful and commonly accepted claims about literature and identity. According to Hungerford, the personification of texts is ethically corrosive and theoretically unsound. When we exalt the literary as personal and construe genocide as less a destruction of human life than of culture, we esteem memory over learning, short-circuit debates about cultural change, lend credence to the illusion or metaphysics of presence, and limit our conception of literature and its purpose.

Ultimately, The Holocaust of Texts asks us to think more deeply about the relationship between reading, experience, and memorialization. Why, for instance, is it more important to remember acts of genocide than simply to learn about them? If literary works are truly the bearers of ontology, then what must be our conduct toward them? Considering difficult questions such as these with fresh logic, Hungerford offers us an invigorating work, one that will not only interest scholars of American and postwar literature, but students of the Holocaust and critical theory as well.

Genres: Literary Criticism, Theory, History, American, 21st Century

232 pages, Hardcover

First published January 15, 2003

About the author

Amy Hungerford is Professor of English at Yale. She specializes in 20th- and 21st-century American literature, especially the period since 1945. She is a founder of Post•45, a collective of leading scholars in the field; Post•45 is developing a web journal based at Yale. Professor Hungerford is author of The Holocaust of Texts: Genocide, Literature, and Personification, (Chicago, 2003); her second book, Postmodern Belief: American Literature and Religion Since 1960 is forthcoming in 2009 (20/21 Series, Princeton UP). Her next project is The Cambridge Introduction to the American Novel Since 1945. She serves as an editor at the journal Contemporary Literature.

Source: http://oyc.yale.edu/english/engl-291

Reviews

[Chris Via]

This work of literary criticism aims to invigorate and pioneer a new dimension in postwar literary discourse. Hungerford uses the historical event of the Holocaust and the subsequent academic movements of the New Criticism and deconstruction theory to show how the concept of personification (specifically the conflation of author and text, leading the text to be spoken of as the author) has taken on a new level of meaning in the collective consciousness, given that the genocide of WWII has made the fantastic possible (this is an antecedence to postmodernist thought). In Hungerford’s own words, “the understandings of literature and understandings of holocaust are connected by certain beliefs about the nature of representation and its relation to persons in the second half of the twentieth century” (12). This phenomenon of personification is not new (Hungerford gives the example of the destruction of Don Quixote’s library in the eponymous book), but personification takes on a new galvanization of life and death in our postwar discourse, and in reaction to this conflation, the schools of New Criticism and deconstruction place emphasis on the autonomy of the text, the divorcement of author and text. This is not to say that these schools render texts lifeless; in fact, “deconstructive critics imagined a text that was radically autonomous, even active.” Throughout the critics of this era, we find a tension between critics who want to homogenize author and text, and those who want separation. Hungerford uses five examples to build up her theme. First, she shows how criticism of images of the Holocaust in Sylvia Plath’s poetry effectively personifies the poems into “something like persons” (18). Second, she uses works like Fahrenheit 45, which feature genocide, to show how this personification has made possible the concept of the destruction of persons and culture. For her third example, she focuses on the event of the Holocaust itself. She outlines a group of things that are not texts that have worked to ensure the transmission of the event of the Holocaust to future generation who could not have experienced it. For Hungerford, this raises questions (in light of genocide) around why a particular culture should survive. Fourth, Hungerford turns to leading arguments in trauma theory to show how the reading of certain texts are themselves traumatic experiences which can be experienced by and transmissible to persons. Finally, she turns to Saul Bellow and Philip Roth to show how it can be possible to think about the relationship between a person and a culture without conflating the two. To conclude the work, Hungerford takes the stance that we should work to “resist personifying texts or tying them in literal ways to the people who wrote them” because when we conflate author and text we “constrict our freedom (to disagree, to read, not to read)” and limit our imagination (if a text truly represents a person or culture that we can directly experience, this effectively elides the need for our imagination) (155).