After Auschwitz, writing poetry is barbaric

I don’t know whether poetry’s encounter with Auschwitz is a historical necessity, but this kind of poetry has nothing to do with Auschwitz. Xin's narrow opposition does produce a thrilling linguistic effect "like a sewing machine and an umbrella meeting by chance on the dissecting table."

“Since Auschwitz, writing poetry has been barbaric, which is why writing poetry today has become impossible.” Since Adorno openly pointed out the connection between poetry and Auschwitz Since this disturbing tense confrontation, poets have fallen into a general embarrassment, and writing poetry has become increasingly difficult. I don’t know whether poetry’s encounter with Auschwitz is a historical necessity, but this kind of poetry, facing the narrow road of Auschwitz, does produce something as thrilling as “a chance encounter between a sewing machine and an umbrella on the dissecting table.” language effect.

Since Auschwitz, poetry certainly will not erase its own existence with a single sentence. If Adorno's words themselves mean the final verdict on poetry, why do we often smell a heart-wrenching smell from it - is it the lingering smell of gas from Auschwitz? ——Because at least we can let out a scream, or just write a poem, a poem of last scream. Even Adorno himself did not deny it: "Day after day suffering has the right to express itself, just as a tortured person has the right to scream. Therefore, say that after Auschwitz you will no longer write poetry "Yes, this may be wrong."

It should be admitted that there have always been various self-proclaimed poets, and they can produce all kinds of things that are called "poetry" under various circumstances. For that matter, there may indeed have been some kind of "art" in the concentration camps. Dr. Frank, another survivor of Auschwitz and a psychiatrist, once wrote an article about this kind of "art activities in the camp", "It depends on what you mean by art."

For a true poet, writing poetry requires no reason; it is as natural as breathing itself. But when we talk about Auschwitz, the painful memories make our tongues tied. We either choose to remain silent, keep our mouths shut from now on, and let the world fall into chaos and namelessness, like a boss who has completely turned away; or we pretend to turn a deaf ear, as if nothing has happened. occur. Or simply regard Adorno's assertion as a kind of Adorno's German, Adorno's alarmism, and continue to make what we call poetry, with or without lines.

Honestly, as I write this I am still wondering whether it is wise for a person to constantly be bothered by questions like this. Writing itself is undoubtedly the best way to participate in discussions. This is indeed one of the most beautiful ways to confront such questions: to respond with a poem.

Grass, the famous German writer and Nobel Prize winner for literature, even believed that "writing after Auschwitz - whether writing poetry or prose, the only way to proceed is to commemorate, for To prevent history from repeating itself, in order to end this period of history."

Poetry and words themselves will show the power of witnessing, and writing finally has to become such a way of witnessing. The Holocaust has thus invaded all fields of literature and art, becoming an inexhaustible writing resource for poetry, novels, dramas, films, paintings, etc. Holocaust has become a literary term. According to Adorno, under the conditions of modern large-scale industrial production, "the murder of millions of people through management methods has made death a seemingly not terrible thing," and has also made it possible to satisfy subconscious masochistic desires. Simulation-style copying and reproduction has become a piece of cake. Therefore, screaming and the pleasure obtained from screaming are nothing but sadistic and masochistic pleasure, a by-product of the capitalist cultural industry. Hollywood movies are a symbol of pushing this pleasure to a climax, and Spielberg has raised the refinement and processing of this subject matter to a critical point, so as to prepare for the favor of the Jewish judges of the American Film Institute. The most recent example is that the actor who played the title role in "The Pianist" directed by Roman Polanski won the Academy Award for Best Actor.

Although humans have been constantly describing stories of murder and massacre since Homer’s epics and the Bible era, this has almost become a convention in literature and art. The struggle is always good material for stories. Genocide enters the story very early with the alternation of floods and droughts, years of plenty and years of famine.” (Grass) Even if it has always been so, its legitimacy is not without its legitimacy. has ever been questioned, especially against a massacre as unprecedented as Auschwitz. Wiesel once warned with concern: "...novelists have casually used the 'Holocaust' as a subject in their works...not only weakening its meaning, but also greatly discounting its value.' The Holocaust 'Now it has become a popular topic, easy to attract attention, and quickly achieved success..." All this makes one can't help but worry like him: Will Treblinka and Belson end up... in words or on the screen? And everything that happened in Auschwitz was just a matter of wording and editing?

It is difficult for a conscientious artist to avoid feeling guilty when using the Holocaust as a subject for literary purposes.

This may help us understand why many of the best writers of this generation, including Mauriac, Faulkner, Thomas Mann and Camus, have chosen to stay out of it. Levi, the founder of Holocaust literature and a writer who survived Auschwitz, committed suicide in the year he learned that he was very likely to win the Nobel Prize. Levi even believed that "the ones that survived are not the real witnesses - the ones that were submerged and did not return are the complete witnesses." Blovsky, another founder of mass murder literature, did not die in the gas chambers, but died in gas suicide.

Survivor Paul Celan almost became an exception. His masterpiece "Death Fugue" is recognized as a successful representation of the tragic fate of the Jews in the concentration camp in poetic language. “Only a few people could do that,” Celan’s fellow poet and friend, Nellie Sachs, who shared Agnon’s 1966 Nobel Prize in Literature, was one of them. In a letter to a friend, she quoted the young German poet Enzenberg, "The philosopher Adorno once said: 'It is no longer possible to write poetry after Auschwitz.' This is a reflection of my time. The strongest judgment. If we are to survive, we must refute this sentence." Celan undoubtedly refuted it with his own poems and eventually drowned in the Seine. Auschwitz had a firm grip on everyone, including those who seemed to have successfully escaped its clutches.

Sophie under the fence of American writer William Stallone had to commit suicide precisely because she could not bear the weight of her memory. For some survivors, it seems that they are just living in place of those who died, retelling or writing things that are on the verge of being forgotten or will be distorted by those with ulterior motives, testifying for the victims, and then following the victims back to their own places. A place I thought I should have gone to long ago. Because in their view, those who died also died for those who survived to a certain extent. Live just to remember and not to gain fame as a poet. But the memory is so heavy that it overwhelms the survivors and makes the sufferers suffer a second time in the memories, and is eventually crushed.

Those authors outside of Auschwitz, in addition to having to face the legality of using the Holocaust as a subject, have also fallen into another kind of confusion. Stallone once described this feeling: "I have been haunted by a suspicion, and I often feel like an intruder, cruelly intruding into an inexplicable realm of pain and death that the survivors have been unable to escape. ." At the end of "Sophie's Choice" Stallone had to admit that even through his work, one cannot understand Auschwitz. "If it were written more accurately, I think it might be like this: 'Sooner or later I will write about Sophie's death and life, and what I write will definitely help to make it clear that evil has definitely not been eradicated from this world.' Auschwitz itself remains in the world as an inexplicable thing. The most profound explanation of Auschwitz that has ever been given is not an explanation at all but an answer to the question: 'Tell me, in Auschwitz, God. Where was it? '/Then the answer was: 'Where was man? '"

In Oswe, it is not only God who is absent, but also man. On a deeper level, Auschwitz presents scenes of human tragedy, and the concentration camp exposes what Gide called the devil's side. Nazi demons are not a new breed of human beings, but the product of evil human nature. In this regard, it was the frailty and dark side of human nature that created Auschwitz. The reason why writing poetry has been impossible since Auschwitz is because the human basis for poetry’s existence has been lost. Auschwitz destroyed not only poetry but also people—which means it wasn’t just the Jews.

As Adorno said, "Under the control of magic, survivors have to choose between unconscious indifference - an aesthetic life born of weakness - and the entangled bestiality. . Both are wrong ways to live.” Survivors often ask themselves: What did I survive for? Happiness itself seems to have become a sin, a synonym for survival, and it involves guilty memories. Survivors have the full right to choose to forget or counter-memory out of self-protection. Therefore, some people believe that memory itself should not be the main subject of writing after Auschwitz. At least in terms of psychological therapy, "the scars are healed and the pain is forgotten" has its own rationality.

In a survey of concentration camp survivors, nearly one-third said "I want to forget all this." When the writer Kertesz was asked "Do you force yourself to face these memories?", his answer was: "No, it is not difficult for me. What I don't understand is why some people have difficulty facing it. These memories. It's true that some of the behavior in the concentration camps was hurtful," Kertesz once said of Roman Frister, another writer who survived the concentration camps and lost his hat in the concentration camps. Showing up to the next day's show without a hat was punishable by execution. So he stole a hat in the middle of the night, and the person who lost the hat would lose his head.

We should also remember the prank played by the Nazi officers in the movie "Escape from Sobibor": the fourteen prisoners who failed to escape were faced with a choice. They were ordered to choose to accompany them to death before being executed. companions; if you refuse to choose, more innocent people will be affected, not fourteen - but fifty! That kind of desire to survive, that kind of struggle and fighting when life is faced with the desperate situation of death, reminds people of the "endurance of the prisoners who have reached a tacit agreement with Auschwitz" revealed in Kertesz's novel, and it is also in line with human nature. of.

Auschwitz opened up the most brutal side of memory. No one is 100% innocent, and everyone was involved in the Holocaust. Those seemingly innocent words become suspicious. "Words have to be redefined, purified, reinvented. A word like 'night' - a beautiful, poetic, romantic word - no longer means to us what it once meant." Something. '" (Wiesel's words) All poems that blindly praise humanity, the human spirit, the beauty of life, and humanitarianism should be questioned and re-examined. Therefore, it can be safely said that after Auschwitz, it is impossible to simply sing about the good side of human nature. Poetry no longer promises happiness, but reveals only critical awareness and sober pain.

The conflict between poetry and Auschwitz is not entirely equivalent to the conflict between good and evil, dream and reality, morality and justice. In this duel, poetry does not represent the highest good, it must even be ashamed of its own praise. Because the people it praises commit the crime of murdering their own kind. And these crimes are often committed in the name of pursuing purity and perfection. Ethnic cleansing is connected to the dream of so-called racial purity, just as it may be connected to the ideal of pure poetry. Although, it is difficult to say to what extent Auschwitz is the inevitable outcome of a pseudo-poetry and a pseudo-lyricism.

Adorno’s warning is therefore not without reason, “After Auschwitz, any beautiful empty talk, even theological empty talk, has lost its rights unless it undergoes a change.” It would be barbaric for those who retained the barbaric memory of Auschwitz to write poetry. To make poetry writing possible again, it seems that the only choice is forgetting and counter-memory, which is what conscientious poets reject. Writing means taking on humanity and all its consequences, and there is no getting around Auschwitz. Poetry cannot help us avoid a bullet, let alone stop a massacre, but it can still show a certain attitude towards life. This gesture makes a person, even in Auschwitz, still shed tears for a flying bird or a piece of green grass, and experience a certain sense of happiness in being alive, and find some form of self-salvation. What the God of Poetry always favors is this kind of individual experience, even if it is just the fragile experience of a mutilated individual living in a concentration camp.

Frank talked about this "aesthetic experience of a death row prisoner", which Roberto Bernini jokingly called "Beautiful Life". Because you can treat everything around you as a drama and try to enjoy a moment of pleasure from this alienation. It all reminds me of a painting: a prisoner dreaming of freedom. He dreamed that he was led by a little angel with wings to fly over the iron bars of the prison, but this could not help him cross the cold wall of reality-poetry may be born from this.

In a sense, poetry has zero effectiveness - no poem has ever stopped a tank. But in another sense, it is infinite. Heaney once quoted Frost's line as a wonderful definition of a poem: "There is a moment when chaos stops."

I think Adorno's original meaning should be clear. , one can even feel a kind of affirmation from his negation: an affirmation of poetry and the power derived from poetry itself. He warns poets to re-examine what poetry has lost since Auschwitz and what it must face and rebuild. If you say that you can no longer write poetry after Auschwitz, it means that you should no longer write the kind of soft lyric poetry, the kind of empty, hypocritical, cowardly, whitewashed poetry. The so-called barbarism in writing poetry may mean that a kind of wild power and critical power must be reawakened. In Adorno's words, it is to use the appearance of ugliness to abandon the ugliness itself and use the internal form of alienation to accuse the external state of alienation. Kafka's novels, Beckett's plays, and Schoenberg's music were thus favored by Adorno. A suffering and shuddering language, images of poverty and fragmentation, fractures and fragments, can more fully embody what he calls negative truth. Poetry is no exception. In Adorno's view, different artistic categories only reflect differences in different materials. Adorno emphasizes incompleteness and fragmentation to combat the desire for unity and perfection. They have the same roots as the desire to create Auschwitz.

Following Adorno’s negative dialectics, art after Auschwitz will become a kind of “anti-art art”, that is, “negative art”. Although Adorno always rejected Sartrean "intervention" and regarded revolutionary language itself as social practice, he successfully incorporated modern art into his critical theory. Adorno expelled metaphysics from aesthetics and replaced it with sociology. Dono's aesthetic theory often falls into a certain ideological prison at its deepest point. The thoroughness of a theory just reflects the blind spots of its own practice, which is also dialectical.

Horkheimer mocked in his letter to Adorno: Habermas regarded philosophy as as powerful as sociology.

In fact, it is entirely possible to return Horkheimer's words to Adorno in full.