unspeakable stories of Shoah and Beloved, The

Garbus is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. She fs currently completing her disserta#on, "A Different Failure: Language, Reference, and the Knowledge of Literature."

We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives. Toni Morrison,

The Nobel Lecture in Literature, 1993

WE WHO NEVER WERE THERE Towards the beginning of Toni Morrison's Beloved, Sethe, a former slave, warns her daughter Denver, who never knew slavery herself, that places remain, and that if Denver goes to the place where her mother was a slave, the violence of slavery will happen all over again,

Some things go. Pass on. Some things just stay. I used to think it was my rememory. You know. Some things you forget. Other things you never do. But it's not. Places, places are still there. If a house burns down, it's gone, but the place-the picture of it-stays, and not just in my rememory, but out there, in the world.... Where I was before I came here, that place is real. It's never going away. Even if the whole farm-every tree and grass blade of it dies. The picture is still there and what's more, if you go there-you who never was there-if you go there and stand in the place where it was, it will happen again; it will be there for you, waiting for you. So, Denver, you can't never go there. Never. Because even though it's all over-over and done with-it's going to always be there waiting for you. (Morrison 1988, 35-6)

I used to believe Sethe. I taught Beloved and wrote about it using that passage, solemnly repeating and emphasizing Sethe's words. I always thought she was right: Denver, "who never was there," should not go to that place, or else "it will happen again; it will be there . . . waiting." I thought Sethe was rightuntil I went to Poland. I, "who never was there," went to the site of another historical catastrophe, and to the very place of my mother's suffering as a child-victim of the Holocaust.l

I have to say at this point that it's not my usual practice to analyze literary texts based on my personal identification with certain characters; in fact, it's not my usual practice to talk about myself at all in my work. Also, I don't usually work on Holocaust texts, although in this essay, in addition to Beloved, I discuss Claude Lanzmann's film about the Holocaust, Shoah (1986).2 I am stepping outside of my usual practice because I want to explore two very large questions, questions that seem to require the shaking up of usual practices before they're even asked. The questions are: what is literature? And, why does it matter? The latter question-why does literature matter?-has two parts: first, why does it matter to me? And second, why does it matter in general? Literature matters to me in part because of my family's story in Poland. In this essay I will explore why literature matters in general, which is a question I think about when I'm teaching, as I try to understand why it might matter to my students.

Literature matters because it's about what it means to be human. Literature matters because it's about what it means to live in a world of language and to encounter what is inassimilable by language, for example trauma, logical paradoxes, what has not yet been symbolized, or what symbolization leaves over as a material remainder or residue. Literature is about what it means to be a speaking being faced with things that are unspeakable. Literature goes against Sethe's advice to Denver: it goes to the place of trauma. The novel Beloved is precisely such a voyage, and it takes all of us "who never were there" back to that place. Jean-Claude Milner calls literature "properly subversive" because it operates according to the following theorem: "Letters may be used to spell out what exceeds the letter" (Milner 1991, 40). Literature uses language as the vehicle to arrive at the very place where language breaks down. Similarly, Roland Barthes explains that there's no getting outside of language, but that literature manages to cheat language, to evade it by turning it into its own "permanent revolution." He writes,

Literature busies itself representing something. What? I will say crudely: the real. The real is not representable, and it is because we humans continually want to represent it with words that there is a history of literature. we refuse to come to terms with the absolute lack of parallelism between the real and language, and it is this refusal, perhaps as old as language itself, that produces-as an endless agitation-literature. A history of literature, or of language's productions, could be imagined as the history of the often crazy, verbal strategies that people have used to reduce, tame, deny, or on the contrary, assume what is always a mad delusion: the fundamental lack of adequation between language and the real. (Barthes 1978, 21-22, my translation) Barthes stresses that literature fails to represent the real. Its task is by definition impossible, and its productions can only temporarily hold off inevitable failure, because it exists as a response to the compelling, yet illusory relation between language and the real; it is the product of our stubborn insistence that there is such a relation. Literature plays with a fictive relation, endlessly trying out new configurations, repeatedly returning to and lingering at that impossible point of intersection where speech and the unspeakable might exist at the same moment. Why do we engage in this futile activity called literature? Perhaps it is because what it means to be human is precisely to be at the intersection of language and the real, to defy and confirm their impossible relation. Each time literature fails, we get closer to who we are.