The Unsettled Surface of the Document:Seams, Erosion, and After-images in Charles Reznikoff’s Holocaust

James Belflower (bio)
Siena College

Abstract

The psychoanalytic trope of “unsettlement” in American postmodern documentary poetry typically aims to narrate the emotional intractability of historical records into an impasse: a position of emotional unintelligibility designed to interrupt a reader’s conventional modes of empathic identification with trauma. However, the affective dimension of this impasse—and its capacity to reconfigure the emotional negotiations required for empathic response—remains largely under-examined. This essay theorizes that impasse by arguing that Charles Reznikoff’s documentary poem Holocaust rewrites it as an affective surface on which emotional contracts are unsettled by a textual materiality inflected by affect’s somatic “touch.”

Can a poem have a surface? Jean-Luc Nancy suggests that it can. He frames a mingling of sensory surface and sign as a system formed in part from language’s material dynamism: “words are nature and matter, order of place, changing place and force” (Fortino 113). Words swell and undulate, pressing on consciousness and touching us in a very physical way: “Words exert pressure. They go straight ahead of meaning, pressing at its sides: they sway themselves. The poem is a swaying of words” (Fortino 113). At the distended thresholds of the poem, the motion and matter of language’s pressure disclose its lively materiality and transmute it into sensory expression; the poem is a place where “words are no longer just words, language is no longer just language. It touches its limit, and displays it” (Nancy, Finite 28). In this essay, I ask what constitutes the sensory pressures of this limit and how it displays the material maneuvers of language that “move” the reader in Charles Reznikoff’s Holocaust (1975), an exemplar of one form of American postmodern documentary poetics. American postmodern documentary poetry “moves” the reader by drawing attention to the materiality of this limit as a genre trope.¹ In this essay, genre operates through Lauren Berlant’s definition of it as “a loose affectual contract that predicts the form that an aesthetic transaction will take” (847).² For Reznikoff’s Holocaust, and documentary poetry generally, the material of this affectual contract consists of found text from corporate, governmental, and/or institutional archives. The text is typically reorganized and scored, then juxtaposed with more figurative language to narrate and excavate “diverse constituencies”: alternative discourses, emotions, and social injustices from within the unspoken or silenced voices that linger in the historical record.³

The sensory limit of the documentary contract is equally defined by narrating maneuvers—the motions of Nancy’s “sway”—which predict that readers will undergo processes of emotional signification. Chief among these processes is the event of emotional emplotment: the organization of linguistic trajectories that attempt to forecast a reader’s emotional response to the text. Although emplotment plays a large role in much postmodern documentary poetry, the techniques I focus on gravitate toward the fragmentary end of the spectrum, where the cause and effect sequences common to conventional forms of emotional emplotment are disrupted. Though diverse in their approaches, poets working in this vein (such as M. NourbeSe Philip, Robert Fitterman, and Mark Nowak) generally employ linguistic configurations that attempt to “unsettle” vicarious adoptions of the victim(s’) subject position, no matter how mundane or extreme the subject matter.⁴ However, these approaches often result in an emotional impasse, a threshold at which the narrative of emotional identification is occluded by language’s failure to voice it. For much documentary poetry, this event of the “unspeakable” is ultimately designed to elicit empathy from the reader. However, because this impasse is typically theorized linguistically, it disregards sensory experiences that remain untranslatable but crucial to the reading event. Encountering such unintelligible emotional impasses, the text seems to suggest, is to realize the breakdown of emotional codification that aims toward empathy and thereby represent trauma’s extremity more accurately. But the emotional impasses predicated on this breakdown are better understood as perceptual contact zones, sensory transactions that ultimately form a surface of affect. Affect is, of course, distinct from emotion; it cannot be intended, but its perceptual atmosphere can be shared socially.⁵ In addition to inflecting matter, its sensory dynamism presses on words and their referents. As Brian Massumi explains, language “can resonate with and amplify [affective] intensity at the price of making itself functionally redundant . . . Intensity is qualifiable as an emotional state, and that state is static—temporal and narrative noise. It is a state of suspense, potentially of disruption” (25-26). For this essay, affect emerges in the way words distend their semantic fields when they are pushed to the limit of their capacity to qualify emotion. By mapping this affective “sway” in the text, I reveal its capacity to inflect alternative forms of transaction between reader and text, and demonstrate how these transactions alter the typically narrow contractual prediction that emotional emplotment must lead either to identification or to unintelligibility.

In Reznikoff’s Holocaust, affective maneuvers are often transversal, splitting referential seams, eroding cause and effect narratives, and flickering after images of violence through presupposed emotional contracts to reveal that the impasses defined by these transactions are not decided, but are yet-to-be-determined experiences, guided as much by asignifying perceptual phenomena as by signifying processes. Holocaust chronicles the Jewish experience of World War Two, from the forced deportation of German Jews in 1933 to the few prisoners and students who escaped to Denmark in 1945. Unlike more popular accounts such as Elie Wiesel’s Night trilogy, Holocaust is composed exclusively of court transcripts from the Nazi Criminal war trails in Nuremberg (1945-46) and the Adolf Eichmann Trial (1960). Although Reznikoff had used similar methods in his two volume Testimony: The United States (1885-1900), he did not reduce that source material as drastically and left much of it in prose. For Holocaust, he employed a meticulous practice of “selecting, editing, scoring, and rewriting” over 100,000 pages of court transcripts (Franciosi 249).⁶ He did not add new imagery or language. Editing consisted mostly of redacting traces of authorial interpretation and judgment from the testimony by eliminating rhetorical embellishments and reducing emotional signals. Using techniques from his early training as a journalist and writer of trial summaries for the law encyclopedia Corpus Juris, he organized much of the testimony into short, pithy scenes, where surprising juxtapositions of time, space, and violence are linked, delinked, and reshaped by the gaps that separate them.

What remains is a book-length poem so stripped of rhetorical appeals to emotion that Reznikoff’s wife, Marie Syrkin, claims it expunges “any subjective outcry” over the violent torture and genocide of Jewish prisoners during the Holocaust (Syrkin 64). Paul Auster’s description of the pre-verbal world of Holocaust is comparable, though more generous: Reznikoff’s Holocaust “yields a style that is pristine, fastidious, almost stiff in its effort to say exactly what it means to say” (161). Robert Alter challenges the book’s purpose, arguing that it lacks the imagination necessary to repsychologize its traumatic history: “the ultimate breakdown of his whole problematic relation to the past is starkly evident in the flattened landscapes of disaster that take the place of round imagined worlds” (132). And David Lehman asserts that Reznikoff “leaves unspoken the emotions” so that a reader “may be counted on to provide [emotion] for himself” (39). Though their diction—”flattens,” “stiff,” “expunged,” and “unspoken”—speaks to their attitude toward Reznikoff’s rhetorical choices, it also implies an empathic emotional structure necessary for approaching the text: emotion that manifests itself through subject/object recognition is “expunged;” emotion cannot be produced in response to a style that does nothing to elicit it, and emotion remains unspoken without imagination. Lacking this emotional architecture, it would seem that Holocaust is flat; it does nothing aesthetically to frame the “round imagined worlds” required to predict empathic encounters. However, by attending to the emergence of affect that resides in these same configurations, I suggest that an empathic encounter confronts the reader with a surface where emotional limits meet affect’s insistent sensibility.

Affect’s Tonal Seams

Throughout Holocaust, Reznikoff stacks tonal registers edge to edge. Like his sentences, these registers operate paratactically, binding and loosening emotional connections to the content like an affective seam. This content is generally presented in a detached tone: almost clinical descriptions of the horrors of daily camp life. For example, the diction in the section titled “Gas Chambers and Gas Trucks” remains relatively impartial in the first two lines of the passage. Its tone is informative and objective, the traditional voice for legal documents designed to reduce tonal fluctuations almost completely. However, because it is the voice of a speaker, we must consider that alternative tones linger, and that they unsettle the objectivity of this narrative of Nazis industrial genocide.

The bodies were thrown out quicklyfor other transports were coming:bodies blue, wet with sweat and urine, legs covered with excrement,and everywhere the bodies of babies and children.Two dozen workers were busyopening the mouths of the dead with iron hooksand with chisels taking out teeth with golden caps;and elsewhere other workers were tearing open the deadlooking for money or jewels that might have been swallowed.And all the bodies were then thrown into the large pits dug near the gas chambersto be covered with sand. (Reznikoff 31)

The passage describes the plundering of Jewish bodies by Sonderkommando, and although it begins impartially, a subtle sense of urgency floats into the speaker’s voice as it indicates that the bodies were thrown out “quickly.” ⁷ This urgency reappears when the speaker describes the “busy” scene where “two dozen workers” dissect the dead for valuables. In both instances, clinical diction describes the decay of the bodies, their color (blue), the types of excrescence that occurred during and after death, and how they were mined for valuables. At first, this visceral content eclipses the subtly urgent tone of the opening passage. However, the frank diction of violent dissection—”opening … with iron hooks,” “chiseling… teeth,” “tearing open”—inflects that urgency with a note of despondence. For this reason, it is difficult to interpret whether the speaker has witnessed so many identical scenes that typical emotional reactions have been exhausted, or if the objective voice of the court glosses other, more subdued tonal timbres in the testimony. In both examples, the objective/despondent tone resonates in part from the generalization of “bodies,” signifying an unknown quantity and identity. However, after the first colon, the coordinating conjunction (“and”) distinguishes specific bodies—”women” and “children”—who are “thrown out” from the transports into an unspecified space, and the tone changes. The awkward syntax of the speaker—who places “everywhere” before identifying specific bodies—delicately contributes to the timbre of despair by amplifying its tone of hopelessness, quelling further emotional motion as the speaker is confronted with the magnitude and rigor of the scene. Despair murmurs again in the final line, a grainy sigh that reverberates into the inevitable future (“to be covered”) with the sound of sand sliding into the mass grave as it covers the dead.

These small modulations of tone stacked using coordinating conjunctions reveal where the seams of emerging emotional structures separate from narrative forms. To put it another way, the tonal sway throughout this scene fluctuates so minimally that it almost completely eliminates emotional expression in the passage. Although tone is minimized, its micro-fluctuations form an intensive series, Gilles Deleuze’s term for a sequence of motions that tend toward a critical instant (Cinema 1 87). As tone minimally emplots emotion into the speaker’s narrative, it also marks how it unfastens determinate exchanges of feeling and resists establishing an emotional contract with the reader in spite of the passage’s visceral subject matter. The scene “moves” me, but not because its narrative sequence predicts my capacity to respond emotionally; I can’t determine much of its emotional motion. So what moves me? Affect moves me here, tonally pushing me against the magnitude, mass (both size and material density), scale of genocide, and efficiency of murder. To be clear, I am “moved,” but I do not move, because that would require emotional cognition. The tension of exchange remains, for I cannot yet identify the emotional currency of this scene. Rather, for a moment, I am wound in the seams of its affective economy by the absence of the expected motion toward emotion.

Of course, the passage requires further analysis to identify its emotional trajectories, which would, no doubt, yield further labels. The important point, however, is that affect accompanies these tonal undulations, rending obvious emotional trajectories from narrative flow. In this more autonomous condition, affect signifies emotional static. A similar indeterminate suspension of emotional motion often emerges with(in) more overt tones, as in this description of an honorary dinner for the Nazi officials of the camp:

At a dinner to honor the officials of this camp—and others like it—the Professor of Public Health was making a speech:”Your task is a duty, useful and necessary.Looking at the bodies of all those Jewsone understands the greatness of your good work—all its greatness! Heil Hitler!“And the guests shouted, “Heil Hitler!“(Reznikoff 31)

In this scene, the “Professor of Public Health” gives a speech that reframes the brutal business of the previous episode into a National Socialist narrative of “good work.” The tone of the Professor’s speech is overt; its diction is celebratory, lauding the camp officials (“your task is…useful and necessary”), and decidedly exuberant when the guests and the Professor exchange salutes. In addition to the Professor’s tone, at least two other tonal strata in this passage correspond with the witness and reader. The narrative starts with an unidentified speaker, who we might assume also witnessed the atrocities in the previous stanza. The speaker’s tone is flat, objective like the previous speaker’s, and only quietly supplemented with another tone of despondency when s/he mentions the large number of camps “and others like it” (Reznikoff 31). This flat tone is stacked in blunt juxtaposition to the celebratory salutes of “Heil Hitler” (Reznikoff 31). A third tonal stratum emerges if the reader aberrantly decodes the Professor’s speech as an expression of verbal irony, an interpretation implied by the genocidal labor in the first stanza, where “Good Work” becomes a euphemism for state-sanctioned “Public Health” services.⁸ However, it is not possible to determine whether the speaker who expresses this quotation inflects it with irony. As a result, the tone is doubly encoded and registers meaning not by antiphrasis, but by a relational process of differentiating and combining both explicit and implicit meanings that emerge from at least three different discursive contexts. The first discourse is judicial and flattens the tonal peaks into the objective voice of the witness. The Professor’s diction in the second discourse is earnest, evoking a range of emotions from his sense of national fraternity (“your task is a duty”) to feelings of collective pride (“one understands the greatness of your good work”) (31). In the third discourse, verbal irony becomes situational irony; readers are confronted with the fact that they perceive the Professor’s tone ironically, although no rhetorical devices support this reading. Tone thereby becomes structural, maneuvering a rhetorical surface on which affective seams flatten a movement toward emotional “depth:” the capacity to adopt perspectives from tonal emplotment that lead to identification (or—in the case of the Professor—the attempt not to adopt them).

Instead, in this passage, tone both rubs against and opens onto moments of affective intensity, drawing attention to the problems inherent in how we appraise the emotional structures through which we feel what another person feels. In the passages I have examined so far, emotional vantage points remain subdued, suggesting that empathy does too. However, empathy is a highly elastic phenomenon—so elastic that affect’s unfastening of the necessary rhetorical conventions of situational irony in the previous passage might undercut a move from emotion to empathy. This cut reveals another dimension of empathy, one with less access to the cognitive or emotional possession of another’s subject position, in which we feel the affective seams between these perspectives whether or not we can empathically adopt the viewer’s or the speaker’s perspective. Affective seams “move” us by suspending empathy’s adoptive vantage points and instead instantiating functionally redundant feeling that binds us sensorily in the moment: “two sidedness as seen from the side of the actual thing” (Massumi 35).

Affective Erosion

Affect also emerges in Holocaust through the erosion of humanizing and dehumanizing referents. In an episode that shows more of the genocidal labor of the camps, one prisoner drags another toward a wagon that will carry his body to a mass grave. Note the repetition of many different pronouns, but particularly the way the identifying terms “man” and “body” erode into near meaninglessness.

From “Work Camps”

Once a transport came from another camp.
Something had gone wrong with the gas chambers there
and those who came spent the night in the open courtyard.
They were almost skeletons:
did not care about anything 5
and could hardly speak.
When beaten, they just sighed.
The Jews working in the camp
were ordered to give them food;
but those who had come had trouble just sitting up 10
and stepped on each other
to get what little food they were given.
Next morning they were taken to the gas chambers.
In the courtyard where they had spent the night
were several hundred dead. 15
Jews of the camp they had come to were told:
"Undress the bodies
and carry them to the wagons.
"But these Jews were too weak to carry the bodies on their shoulders
and had to drag them, 20
take them by the feet and drag them along;
and the Germans beat those who dragged to go faster.
One Jew left the body he was dragging to rest for a moment
and the man he thought dead
sat up, 25
sighed and said in a weak voice,
"Is it far?"
The Jew dragging him
stooped and put his hand gently around the man's shoulder
and just then felt a whip on his back: 30
an S.S. man was beating him.
He let go of the body—
and went on dragging the man to the wagons.
                                                                                                   (Reznikoff 42-43)

Starting in line three with the demonstrative pronoun “those,” the iterations of “man” and “body” alternately humanize and dehumanize the various stages of a prisoner’s dying moments. “Bodies” [17] refers to the dead who had arrived and died overnight. The second iteration of “bodies” [19] refers to the previous “bodies” [17]. However, the third repetition [23] destabilizes this link, strongly associating the dragged “body” with connotations of death and the erect “man” with connotations of life: “One Jew left the body he was dragging to rest for a moment / and the man he thought dead / sat up” (Reznikoff 25). A similar destabilization occurs in the final iterations. As the Jewish prisoner comforts the dying “man” [29], referring to the “man he thought dead,” he is whipped by the S.S. “man” until he continues dragging the “body” and “man” to the wagons [30-33]. The pronouns here are not exactly reversed; instead, the tragic absurdity of the dragged man’s question (“is it far?”) perturbs this binary relationship. “Body” in this iteration is paradoxical, implying a kind of living death. As the prisoner lets go of the “body,” the term also releases any humanizing associations accumulated in its previous iterations. In the final iteration, “man” returns like a hyponym of “body”; a “man” becomes a type of body, its humanizing diction eroded, and, like the bodies thrown into the wagons, made indistinct from them in the semantic field of the poem.

This type of referential disruption is common in postmodern documentary poetry. Among other things, it revives the materiality of the language, foregrounding alternative connections within its semantic field. Additionally, emotional emplotment is disrupted when referents are delinked and reoriented, and emotional structures founded on cause and effect relationships are often reconfigured, as when the prisoners who have just arrived to the camp “just sigh” in response to beatings (42). In many cases, this disruption can lead to emotional impasses in the text, areas where emotional identification is muted because its emplotment appears arbitrary. However, following my reading of an affective materiality in Holocaust, these impasses can also be read as formalized affect. To understand this from the vantage point of affect, we must recall that the prisoners who sigh when beaten are historically called Müselmann. Jean Améry describes the Müselmann’s condition in the camps:

The so-called Müselmann, as the camp language termed the prisoner who was giving up and was given up by his comrades, no longer had room in his consciousness for the contrasts good or bad, noble or base, intellectual or unintellectual. He was a staggering corpse, a bundle of physical functions in its last convulsions. (qtd. in Agamben 41)

Without the capacity to cognitively structure reality using emotional responses, the Müselmann’s sigh indicates the erosion of a typical cause and effect relationship with the brutal beating. Although the sigh may be read as an emotional signifier, this reading overlooks the fact that even though it is elicited by the beating, it is equally an asignifying noise, a merely physical function: two sidedness as heard from the side of the person.⁹ In fact, the Müselmann’s sighing sonically expresses Améry’s condition of dissociation by formalizing the physical convulsions of affect. Read in this way, the sigh testifies through sensory non-language to the inadequacy of language to represent the Müselmann’s condition, and likewise to the auditory potential in noise to give witness to that condition without reducing it to the expression of a psychological state. This is an important point, because if the affective sigh discloses the threshold where language erodes into noise, then by attending to what was considered extraneous to the system (the sigh), language can insist on this threshold as a crucial part of redirecting empathic processes of identification along this affective seam.

Affective After-Image

With haptic seams that tighten and loosen empathetic bonds, and noise that erodes and inflects the signification of emotional trajectories, affect interrupts our felt responses, revealing the complexities of the emotional contract we enter into by reading Holocaust. In addition to these affective structures, Reznikoff also employs an after-image of the face, a flickering image more felt than seen that troubles the legibility of one of the most semantically-encoded signifying systems in literature.¹⁰ Historically, the face is considered the most complex signifying surface of the body because its features are assumed to express the activity of the mind behind it. As a literary trope, the face is typically understood to represent the internal psychology of a character through a wide range of facial expressions. Faces appear throughout Holocaust, often in encounters directly preceding murder: “The German looked into their eyes / and shot them both” (Reznikoff 20); “And he lashed her across the face with his whip / and drove her into the gas chamber” (30). Many encounters show that the face of the victim was forcefully attacked or destroyed, but other scenes do not mention the face, instead focusing on small motions of the head: “Then he aimed at her: took hold of her hair / and turned her head around. / She remained standing and heard a shot / but kept on standing / He turned her head around again…” (21). These scenes usually operate antithetically; they imply parts of the face through synecdoche, initiating the empathetic exchange commonly associated with viewing a face only to have that moment of identification cut short. Yet, rather than end the exchange there, in the lingering after-image I propose, parts of the face emerge through motion toward a trajectory of emotion, without forming a “round imagined” image. The following scene is no exception:

As always, S.S. men were walking about with pistols loaded
to shoot at those too weak to climb the steps leading to the vans.
And one of those on the night shift
saw a girl about ten
coming from a heap of dead bodies 5
and beginning to walk feebly—
an S.S. man shot her in the neck;
saw a little boy,
half naked,
quietly sitting in the middle of the path. 10
The S.S. man, head of his group—
the Jews among themselves called him "grandfather"
because he was elderly—
tried to shoot the little boy in the neck.
The little boy turned his head 15
and just managed to say the first two words of the prayer orthodox
Jews about to die say
when he was killed,
and his body thrown on one of the trucks.
                                                                                                        (Reznikoff 35)

The murder of a young girl and boy in this episode are particularly violent moments, because they emplot a more recognizable emotional series that aims the reader toward a tragic encounter with the young boy’s face. Synecdoche associates the girl’s execution style “in the neck” with the proximity of her face, and anticipates the identical execution style of the little boy later in the scene (35). Likewise, the spatial intimacy required for the guard to carry out such specifically targeted executions shares an oxymoronic conceptual closeness to the familial nature of his moniker: “grandfather.” Lest we dismiss this as verbal irony, which we could not do in previous passages, Reznikoff includes the reason behind the guard’s moniker: “because he was elderly.” As in other passages, he abuts a banal detail against the objective description of the guard’s murderous “familial” narrative, suspending a judgmental tone that might sharply define and thus elicit a presupposed emotional response.

Any determinate emotional state is further suspended because the familial associations signaled by “grandfather,” combined with his murderous narrative path through the scene, initially parallel the emotional trajectories leading to the visual intersection of the gun and the after-image of the boy’s mouth in prayer. However, the intersection of these trajectories does not ultimately qualify an emotional event, but an intensive, affective one. Reznikoff’s editing destabilizes the parallel trajectory between emotional and narrative motions in this passage. Of utmost importance to this disruption is the fact that the boy’s face is not initially seen in the final sentence, but rather evoked through synecdoche, causing a facial outline to emerge. In contrast, Reznikoff subtly troubles the narrative certainty of his death, noting that the guard tries “to shoot the little boy in the neck,” his weapon aiming at the turning profile of the child’s head as the boy speaks (35). The sequence of sensual perceptions—the turning outline of the bewildered boy’s face, the movement of his mouth in prayer, the resonance of his spoken words, the crack of the gun, the damage to the boy’s face, his falling body, and his body being thrown onto the trucks—does not result in an imaginative leap into a round imagined “I,” through which an image of the boy’s face responds to or expresses an emotional state. Instead, the series of uncertain movements, particularly the boy’s minor ones—turning head and moving mouth—assemble into an affective after-image of his sensory presence that lingers after he is killed.

Crucially, just as the boy’s face never entirely appears, the spoken words of the boy’s prayer are not included in the text. The first two words of the Hebrew Vidui—the prayer before dying—are “I acknowledge,” a declaration that brings the boy’s mouth, and the associated after-image of his face, into greater conceptual and visible relief. This statement (“I acknowledge”) is one of the most affirmative enunciations of a prisoner’s identity in the text. Yet because the boy’s final utterance remains unwritten, which also effaces his capacity for (a culturally recognizable) subjectivity, readers are obligated to “fill in the blank.” In this way, the after-image operates like the affective seams discussed above. While the flickering outline of the boy’s face stitches readers into a contract of confrontation with the affective after-image of the boy’s face, the fact that the prayer’s text is not printed reworks this contract by distinguishing readers who do not know Orthodox Hebrew custom from those who do. In a sense, their act of response—mouthing the words of the Orthodox prayer or trying to imagine what that vocalization might be—visually and vocally stitches them into a “witnessing” position. And this is vantage point which has become more of an intensive series than a qualitative one because it lacks a qualifying emotional configuration. Much as they do the Müselmann’s non-referential sigh, readers feel the visual and auditory transition from a signifying to an asignifying chain in this affective moment more than they can identify its emotive demands.

Because of the overt sensory nature of the boy’s after-image, this intensive series establishes a relationship between affect and ethics. The boy’s flickering profile evokes Emmanuel Levinas’s well-known theory of the intersubjective encounter. Levinas argues that perceptual judgments can become capable of justifying murder, because they rely on a reductive logical grasp of the profusion of sensory experience. In opposition to this reductive grasp, affect is a type of perceptual “interruption” that counters sensory logics predicated on control and domination.¹¹ In this system of control, the face is as much a sensed affective intensity as a qualifiable sensory experience, and thus always exceeds the grasp of perception. For Levinas, the resistance of this affective excess to qualitative logic produces an ethical resistance to murder. The resulting “epiphany of the face” exceeds consciousness, and as a result, actualizes an intensive insistence—an undeniable, unqualifiable encounter with the presence of another that is as affective as it is material (Levinas 199). The after-image of the boy’s face is this actualized affective insistence. The boy’s after-image “interrupts” perceptual judgment’s qualifying narrative and emotional clutches to emerge affectively. His face flickers to the extent that its insistence remains felt more than cognizable. And this affective flicker of the face appositionally accompanies the delicate narrative indeterminacy Reznikoff weaves through what is an otherwise inevitable sequence of murder. In essence, this perceptual unsettlement is the affective material of the ethical, the “unique matter” of the face that inherently resists the industrial ideology of murder in this scene and throughout Holocaust (Levinas 199).

The Surface of the Document

I have argued that Holocaust formalizes a surface of affective blocks, seams, and after-images by unsettling presumed intersections between emotional and narrative emplotment. This reading reveals that the contract between reader and emotion is affectively formed and unsettled by the sensory surface of American Postmodern Documentary Poetry. Most importantly, noting documentary poetry’s affectual contract with trauma in Holocaust reveals how affect can redistribute what we sense in a text and reorient emotional structures of response; we haptically sense a young boy’s after-image in the moment of his murder, we hear the testimony lingering in a Müselmann sighing, and we feel the sensory sway of National Socialist fervor. In reading for affect, I do not suggest that emotional structures are inadequate for interpreting Holocaust. Rather, I claim that by contending with the seamed, eroded, and after-imaged unsettlement of presumed parallels between narrative and emotional trajectories, our reading does not culminate in impasses, but instead travels across affective surfaces on which presupposed emotional exchanges are renegotiated. Emotional contracts in this exchange resemble a “sustained ‘act of attention,'” in which active listening, feeling, and seeing constitute as much or more of our engagement with the representation of suffering than does identification (Gubar 9).

But what do we gain by revealing a type of affective cognition in the surface of this genre of documentary poetry? What is the benefit of tracing the seams, erosion, and after-images that formalize affect’s pressures? And, in attending to these fluctuations between typical emotional structures, what do we learn by showing how affect resists the impulse for identification through emotional classification? Reading Holocaust as a text with a surface discloses a “nervous system” connecting the somatic and the social, demonstrating how the public voices of eyewitness testimony intertwine the private embodied experience of the reader within a larger socius.¹² The testimonies demand that we contend with the contiguity of representation and represented—think body/human. To be sure, affective cognition emerges from this contiguity, specifically from the growing awareness that reading embeds us in an event that both inflects and reorients the ways in which we identify with its content. As Michael Davidson believes, Reznikoff’s use of eyewitness testimony from court transcripts “produces a kind of collective witness” that can “transcend [a reader’s] local conditions” (151). In addition to Davidson’s focus on the symbolic dimension of this collectivity, I would argue that an affective contract musters this collectivity and presses readers into the apposition of representation and represented. Given that the surface of much of American postmodern documentary poetry is crisscrossed by the transmission, translation, and transformation of affect, it might plausibly capture affective residue across time and space. Theresa Brennan, theorizing the transmission of affects, suggests that they are contagious, “carried in the blood, and with them is carried the presence of the other and the social in the system” (139). Similarly, affect could be transported by a linguistic contagion transmitted with, through, and across readers embedded in affect’s transhistorical seams, erosion, and after-images. Read this way, Reznikoff’s Holocaust discloses “the presence of the other and the social” in the historical document by establishing the conditions for a collective event of emotional negotiation that exceeds socio-cultural and historic boundaries, because its affective intensity lingers in the document whether it emerges or not. What Reznikoff transmits through Holocaust is thus the potential for a type of affective cognition to reinscribe the historical particulars of the court transcripts into a contingent materiality, a surface that, because of its unsettled nature, is capable of transforming a reader’s emotional contract to the Holocaust by confronting them with the influences of affect on their emotional production. Ultimately, Reznikoff’s emphasis on the surface of the document—where affective cognition reorients the processual nature of empathetic identification—reveals how an emotional relationship to the victims of the Holocaust must begin anew in each episode through one of the many faces of testimony.

Footnotes

The excerpts from Holocaust cited herein are © 2007 Charles Reznikoff/Black Sparrow Press.

1. The American postmodern documentary poetics I examine share these aesthetically productive techniques for sequencing, rearranging, and selecting from the historical document with “Investigative Poetics,” the genre defined by Ed Sanders in his manifesto Investigative Poetry (1976).

2. Raymond Williams’s seminal work on the “structures of feeling” in Marxism and Literature (1977) also inflects my essay. Throughout this analysis I emphasize the nascent formation of Williams’s explanation. Structures of feeling are “a kind of feeling and thinking which is indeed social and material, but each in an embryonic phase before it can become fully articulate and defined by exchange” (131).

3. In Ghostlier Demarcations, Michael Davidson describes a similar sensual contract with Reznikoff’s text, noting that the work is composed of “surfaces of identification” on which understanding is constructed (138). These surfaces are also political for Davidson. He explains that in the 1930s, the new documentary culture of the American Left, of which Reznikoff was a part, read “American history not as a narrative of Adamic discovery and perfectibility but as a material record of diverse constituencies” (140).

4. “Empathic unsettlement” is Dominick LaCapra’s term for aesthetic techniques in a text that trouble empathic modes of identification that tend toward an occupying strategy of victim subject positions.

5. Theresa Brennan looks primarily at the social forces of affect in The Transmission of Affect, but her argument that affects are “carried in the blood, and with them is carried the presence of the other and the social in the system” does support reading as an historicizing moment of meaning making, and therefore a part of the social forces she theorizes. For my purposes, this means that reading documentary poetry draws us into a particular type of presence of the other and thus makes possible a particular type of affective transmission (139).

6. In “‘Detailing the Facts:’ Charles Reznikoff’s Response to the Holocaust,” Robert Franciosi describes Reznikoff’s four-part writing process:

Selection: This involves the reading of many volumes of law records (in the case of Testimony literally thousands of volumes) to find suitable material…Editing: Reznikoff cuts the selected testimony to a core of material that he feels has poetic value. Often he reproduces the legal language verbatim, but he does not hesitate to alter it for the sake of clarity and direction. Scoring: The edited law case is lineated, typed out as verse. Those details Reznikoff wants to emphasize are strategically placed, both within the line itself and in the entire selection. Rewriting: This process may consist of a number of drafts and is essentially a honing of the rhythms, lines’ and details in order to enhance the intended emotional and poetical effects. (249)

7. The SonderKommando were work units made up of prisoners. They were composed almost entirely of Jews who were forced, on threat of their own deaths, to aid in the plunder and disposal of gas chamber victims during the Holocaust.

8. “Aberrant decoding” is Umberto Eco’s term for interpreting a text or other communication with a different code than the source code used to create it.

9. In Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, Giorgio Agamben describes the Müselmann’s erosion through “biopolitical caesuras,” the Nazis’s state sanctioned reduction of a prisoner’s biological continuum to the point at which there is no more possibility for degradation. For Agamben, the Müselmann’s existence testifies to “the emergence of something like an absolute biopolitical substance that cannot be assigned to a particular bearer or subject, or be divided by another caesura” (85). Though he emphasizes the biopolitical dimension of this degradation, his concept applies equally to the reductive linguistic movement I have traced in the passage above. There, the reduction of identifying terms to an indeterminate position between functional and non-functional reference diminishes their capacity to identify a particular subject or be further divided with semantic distinctions. In other words, by the end of this passage, the terms “man”/”body” do not evoke a psychological depth characteristic of emotional or intellectual signification. In this limit condition, they “identify” the Müselmann as an organism to which orienting terms can only loosely adhere. Ultimately, to think the Müselmann is not to fix the terms into a designation that establishes a classical subject, but to attend to the ways the transition from signification to its limit sustains a tensile surface of indecipherability between language and extra-linguistic intensities.

10. I draw on both Gilles Deleuze’s and Emmanuel Levinas’s theorizations of the face in this section; respectively, they delineate the two fields of theory from which my analysis benefits: film and ethics. I employ Deleuze’s framing of the face in cinematic terms as a “reflecting surface” where “micro-movements” create intensive affective series that tend toward the open-ended processes of virtual and material actualization. I employ Levinas to frame the face as an ethical encounter with the affective and signifying dimensions of another’s face. See Deleuze 87-101 and Levinas 194-219.

11. Levinas writes, “The very distinction between representational content and affective content is tantamount to a recognition that enjoyment is endowed with a dynamism other than that of perception” (187). Although Levinas recognizes the pleasurable aspects of affective content, his explanation of the affective dynamic interruption of perception can equally be applied to trauma.

12. “Nervous System” is Michael Taussig’s concept for a text’s stylistic embodiment of the relationship between content, historical event, and reader. “[The Nervous System] calls for an understanding of the representation as contiguous with that being represented and not suspended above and distant from the represented—what Adorno referred to as Hegel’s programmatic ideas—that knowing is giving oneself over to a phenomenon rather than thinking about it from above” (10).

Works Cited

• Agamben, Giorgio. Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive. Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen, Zone Books, 1999.
• Alter, Robert. “Charles Reznikoff: Between Present and Past.” Defenses of the Imagination: Jewish Writers and Modern Historical Crisis. Jewish Publication Society of America, 1977, pp. 119-135.
• Auster, Paul. “The Decisive Moment.” Charles Reznikoff: Man and Poet. National Poetry Foundation, U of Maine at Orono, 1984, pp. 151–165.
• Berlant, Lauren. “Intuitionists: History and the Affective Event.” American Literary History, vol. 20, no. 4, Winter 2008, pp. 845-860. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1093/alh/ajn039. Brennan, Theresa. The Transmission of Affect. Cornell UP, 2004.
• Davidson, Michael. Ghostlier Demarcations: modern poetry and the material world. U of California P, 1997.
• Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 1: The Movement-Image. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam, U of Minnesota P, 2006.
• Franciosi, Robert. “Detailing the Facts: Charles Reznikoff’s Response to the Holocaust.” Contemporary Literature, vol. 29, no. 2, 1988, pp. 241–264. EBSCOhost, doi:10.2307/1208439. Gubar, Susan. Poetry After Auschwitz: Remembering What One Never Knew. Indiana UP, 2003.
• LaCapra, Dominick. Writing History, Writing Trauma. John Hopkins UP, 2001.
• Lehman, David. “Holocaust.” Poetry. vol. 128, no. 1, 1976, pp. 37-45, JSTOR, www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?volume=128&issue=1&page=49. Levinas, Emmanuel. Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Translated by Alphonso Lingis, Duquesne UP, 1969.
• Massumi, Brian. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Duke UP, 2002.
• Nancy, Jean-Luc. A Finite Thinking. Edited by Simon Sparks, Stanford UP, 2003.
• —, and Virginie Lalucq. The Overflowing of the Poem. Translated by Sylvain Gallais and Cynthia Hogue, Omnidawn Publishing, 2004, pp. 100-189.
• Reznikoff, Charles. Holocaust. Black Sparrow, 2007.
• Syrkin, Marie. The State of the Jews. New Republic Books, 1980.
• Taussig, Michael. The Nervous System. Routledge, 1992.
• Williams, Raymond. Marxism and Literature. Oxford UP, 1978.