Disarchiving Anguish

Acknowledgments

I would like to extend my gratitude to the following institutions for making my research possible: The Polish-American Fulbright Commission; The New York Public Library; The Archive for New Poetry, University of California, San Diego; The John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies at Freie Universität Berlin; Corbridge Trust at Robinson College, University of Cambridge, England; Fordham University in New York; and The Estate of Charles Reznikoff. My special thanks go to Michael Davidson, Elizabeth Frost, Maria Farland, Marin Elsky, Jarosław Ławski, Jurek Kamionowski, Karol, Bartek and, last but not least, Ula.

In altered forms, some parts of the present study appeared earlier as articles in scholarly journals and as chapters in monographs: “Mowa zależna. Charlesa Reznikoffa (prze)pisanie Holocaustu” (Żydzi wschodniej Polski. Studia. Tom 1 Świadectwa i interpretacje. 2012. Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu w Białymstoku); “Literackie formy graniczne (Weiss – Reznikoff – Grynberg)” (Zagłada Żydów. Studia i Materiały. Pismo Centrum Badań Nad Zagładą Żydów IFiS PAN 2013, tom 9); “Writing of Crisis, Crisis of Writing: Charles Reznikoff’s Testimony (1934)” (Eating America: Crisis, Sustenance, Sustainability. 2015. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang); “Archives of the Machine Age: Charles Reznikoff’s Testimony. The United States (1885–1915): Recitative” (Er(r)go. Theory–Literature–Culture, no. 4, 2021); “Charles Reznikoff and the Rhetoric of Witnessing through Silence” (Res Rhetorica, vol. 7, no. 4, 2020); and “Stitch, Stich and Stichomancy: Poetry by Other Means in Susan Howe’s Spontaneous Particulars: The Telepathy of Archives,” (Polish Journal for American Studies, vol. 11, 2017).

List of Abbreviations

Introduction

‘Regarding the pain of others,’ which now is immediately associated with the title of Susan Sontag’s classic essay, seems an all-too-common experience of contemporaneity, enabled as it is by the abundance of technological means to record and transmit images of atrocities from all corners of the world. The persistence and prevalence of human and non-human anguish is matched only by the effortlessness with which we witness it, if only vicariously. Confrontation with the scenes of suffering piling up from day to day before our eyes evokes a whole spectrum of responses—from compassion to indignation to excitement to indifference, the latter one a form of defense mechanism, often resulting from helplessness. Considered from the viewpoint of a witness who happens to be occupied with literature, as is the subject of the present study, the anguish of others demands its preservation in language that, nonetheless, in the end of the process, can either clarify or falsify the experience, or miss the point completely. The greatest challenge of the job does not consist in looking at things or tracing the facts, but in choosing a verbal context in which they are meant to be represented. This, in turn, often comes at the cost of coping with the not-so-rare, perverse enamor with what Julia Kristeva calls the abject (l’abject, the repulsive), which “cannot be assimilated” but nevertheless “beseeches, worries and fascinates desire,” and can permeate the fabric of language (1). Moving along an analogical path, Sontag—but restricting her remarks to the medium of photography—points to a “prurient interest” aroused by “depictions of tormented, [or] mutilated bodies” (95).

In 1932, William Carlos Williams, the editor of Contact, a modernist “little magazine,” added a new member to the editorial lineup. From now on Nathanael West’s work was to search for European avant-garde ideas and adapt them for typically American use—in other words, the aim was “to cut a trail through the American jungle without the use of a European compass … not only in but against the American grain and yet in idiomatic pain” (Goldman 322, emphasis added). The 1932 October issue of Contact featured his artistic manifesto, in which he recognized and endorsed the excessive use of violence in literature as the most adequate mirror of American experience:

Is there any meaning in the fact that almost every manuscript we receive has violence for its core? They come to us from every state in the Union, from every type of environment, yet their highest common denominator is violence. It does not necessarily follow that such stories are the easiest to write or that they are the first subjects that young writers attempt. Did not sweetness and light fill the manuscripts rejected, as well as accepted, by ←15 | 16→the magazines before the war, and … those immediately after it? We did not start with the ideas of printing tales of violence. We now believe that we would be doing violence by suppressing them.