36 Holocaust Impiety

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1 Part I Poetry The broad centring of authority in personal experience that characterises approaches to testimonial literature has frequently come to extend, as Sue Vice notes, to all areas of Holocaust writing: Authority appears to be conferred on a writer if they can be shown to have a connection with the events they are describing. 1 In a sphere where readers are suspicious of the motives of outsiders, who might have improper reasons for choosing this subject, authority has often been withheld from writers with no demonstrable biographical connection to events as noted, this trend is especially pronounced when the approach to Holocaust representation does not conform to a metaphysic of redemption, which is presumably the proper reason for choosing the subject. 2 The two American poets whose work forms the focus of the following two chapters, Sylvia Plath and W. D. Snodgrass, wrote provocative dramatic monologues from the point of view of putative victims and perpetrators, respectively, exciting much critical agitation on their original publication. Vice observes that the tendency to source authority in the Holocaust writer s biography has had the knock-on effect of turning the relationship between author and narrator into a central literary category of Holocaust writing, even in works that are self-evidently fictional. 3 In the case of poets such as Plath and Snodgrass and their contemporaries notably, John Berryman and Anne Sexton the critical over- determination of this relationship has been heightened by the theories of extremist poetry and confessionalism that were linked to their Holocaust poetry when it was first published, which sought to elide the gap between author and narrator. 35

2 36 Holocaust Impiety Responding to new forms of Anglo-American poetry that rose to prominence through the late 1950s and 1960s, which enacted a dramatic stylistic and emotional break with the dominant impersonal style of modernists such as Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, critics were initially quick to praise these authors for transmitting what they saw as the pathos of absolute sincerity in extremis, to borrow Christina Britzolakis s phrase. 4 Snodgrass s Heart s Needle (1959) and Plath s Ariel (1965) were considered definitive works in this new era of poetic emotionalism. In his prologue to The Savage God (1971), an account of the events leading up to Plath s suicide following her separation from her husband, the poet Ted Hughes, Al Alvarez argued that Plath was able to tap into her psychic life to such an extent that in her verse she felt she was simply describing the facts as they happened. 5 As the extremist poem followed from the bringing together of the writer s self with the imminent possibility of its own annihilation, Alvarez further suggested that Plath s poetry and suicide had their origins in the same elemental self-destructiveness that had turned writing itself into a life-threatening risk. In a memorial address, he famously opined that the achievement of her final style is to make poetry and death inseparable. The one could not exist without the other [... ] Poetry of this order is a murderous art. 6 For M. L. Rosenthal, this newly conceived poetic I was also a cultural seismograph that could register the aftershocks of the destructive events of the modern era. He argued that the genuinely confessional poet placed him or herself in the centre of the poem in such a way as to make his [sic] psychological vulnerability and shame an embodiment of his civilization. 7 Such theories, where subjective, psychological truths were postulated as the ultimate indicators of historical breakdown, understandably exacerbated the worries of those who were wary of the use of the Holocaust as subject matter by those who had not personally lived through the events they were referencing. If the relation between the author of a dramatic monologue and its narrator was thought to be real, as Alvarez and Rosenthal claimed, but the connection between the author- narrator and events manifestly was not, then critics were clearly going to ask whether these poets were simply equating their own suffering with that of Holocaust victims. The backlash came down hardest on Plath. Writing to the editor of Commentary in 1974, Irving Howe tartly asked: Is it possible that the condition of the Jews in the camps can be duplicated? Yes.... But it is decidedly unlikely that it was duplicated in a middle-class family living in Wellesley, Massachusetts, even if it had a very bad daddy indeed.

3 Poetry 37 To condone such a confusion is to delude ourselves as to the nature of our personal miseries and their relationship to or relative magnitude when placed against the most dreadful event in the history of mankind. 8 Even a fellow poet, Seamus Heaney, noted as late as 1986 that a poem like Daddy [... ], however its violence and vindictiveness can be understood or excused in light of the poet s parental and marital relations, remains, nevertheless, so entangled in biographical circumstances and rampages so permissively in the history of other people s sorrows that it simply overdraws its rights to our sympathy. 9 For these critics, there was an absence of any objective correlative to continue the Eliotoan thread of Heaney s thought between the personal miseries of a girl from Massachusetts and the most dreadful event in the history of mankind. As a result, Plath was widely accused of indulging in a form of emotional plagiarism that revealed much about her own pathology but very little about the condition of those who actually experienced the camps. The presupposition that Plath s speakers are transparent representations of herself designed to win her the kind of sympathy one might feel for a Holocaust victim has since been challenged by a number of critics who have argued that straightforward biographical readings tend to iron out the complexity of Plath s representation of, among other things, psychology, history, fantasy and femininity. As Antony Rowland points out, since the early 1990s, it has become widely accepted that many of Plath s famous Ariel poems from October 1962 are not diary entries but rather dramatic monologues primarily concerned with the proclivities of different speakers. 10 The work of Rowland and others has shown that reading Plath s eccentric and complex dramatic monologues as thinly disguised representations of Plath s own self is a reductive, presumptuous approach that does not do justice to their serious engagement with the Holocaust. As Britzolakis notes, the elements of caricature, parody, and hyperbole in Daddy are so blatant that only a very determined misreading could identify the speaker with the biographical Sylvia Plath. 11 Similarly, to borrow a refrain from the poem, there is nothing particularly real about the speaker of Lady Lazarus, Plath s other key post-holocaust poem, which is about a suicidal striptease artist who performs a kind of Holocaust-themed cabaret. Britzolakis s references to Plath s literary technique suggest that taking Plath, Snodgrass and other non-victims seriously as Holocaust poets (and indeed as poets per se) involves, following Peter McDonald, taking

4 38 Holocaust Impiety poetry seriously as an authority. 12 In conceptual terms, this does not simply involve the rejection of confessional poetics; it involves detaching fictional forms of Holocaust writing, such as poetry by non-victims, from factual forms of writing such as testimony, from which, as Vice points out, one might more reasonably demand an authentic connection between the author-narrator and the events described. 13 Robert Eaglestone has described how the sense of authorial authority that we find in testimony is a product of its specific genre, with genre here acting not simply as a pigeon-hole for texts but more broadly as a way of connecting texts with contexts, ideas, expectations, rules of argument and thus a way of describing how reading actually takes place. 14 This sense of authority pertaining to the laws of genre can be extended to Holocaust verse by non-victims; only this genre is wholly distinct from testimony, for as fiction the life of the person who produced the work is an irrelevance, and as poetry it demands that we ask specific questions about its uses of history, its connections with documentary texts and, above all, its form, which is, in McDonald s resonant phrase, the serious heart of a poem where such authority as poetry bears must reside. 15 This focus on poetic form is something that the so-called confessional poets were themselves always keen to encourage. Eliot s influential essay Tradition and the Individual Talent and its concept of a poem s significant emotion that has its life in the poem and not in the history of the poet can be detected behind Robert Lowell s contention that a poem is an event, not the record of an event and Plath s exasperation with critics who did not treat the poem as poem. 16 Berryman also addressed the question in his own inimitable manner. Asked by an interviewer how he reacted to the confessional tag, he replied: With rage and contempt! Next question. 17 So, engaging with what these poems have to say about history and the Holocaust centrally involves refuting Rosenthal s idea that they seem to call for biographical rather than poetic explanations. 18 Through close readings, this chapter will instead analyse how works by Plath and Snodgrass function as Holocaust poetry, considering how, following Eaglestone, works define genres, bodies of knowledge, and their rules and, likewise, how genres, bodies of knowledge, and their rules define works. 19 These poems rarely attempt to reproduce events themselves or to offer detailed documentary accounts. Just as they should not be judged by biographical criteria, neither should they be judged by the criteria which we set for purely historical forms of writing. They actually assume, rightly or wrongly, that their readers know, in the broadest

5 Poetry 39 terms, what took place during the Holocaust; rather than trying to relay facts or elucidate causes, what they offer instead is a critical reflection on our reception of these facts, asking how we might construe meaning from them and what kind of place they should have in art. By taking poetry seriously as an authority we see how these works have an innate capacity to generate commentaries on their own praxis. Combining narrative with visual and sonic forms of making and breaking meaning, poems which are thought to abuse the Holocaust more commonly offer critiques of the forms of identification and victimisation that their narrators indulge in. Even themes such as commercialisation and the exploitation of suffering are preoccupations of artworks that seem prone to intense self-scrutiny in large part due to the unique properties of their form, which allows a single statement to be simultaneously cast in many different lights. Before postmodernism and the rise of self-reflexive narration, poetry after and about Auschwitz had already addressed the need for writing to become meta fictional, as though talking about the Holocaust necessarily meant that poetry also had to talk about itself. This is not a testament to the self-absorbed sensibilities of poets but rather to poetry s double vision: its way of looking outwards onto history through the internality of genre, which is to say its own specific mode of writing and reading, even of thinking.