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• W439764013 abstract "Previous articleNext article FreeJ. Hillis Miller The Conflagration of Community: Fiction Before and After Auschwitz The Conflagration of Community: Fiction Before and After Auschwitz. J. Hillis Miller. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. Pp. ix+309.Sonali ThakkarSonali ThakkarUniversity of Chicago Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreIf you have heard someone describe a trip to the Department of Motor Vehicles or an attempt to file an insurance claim as a “Kafkaesque” ordeal you know that this person was remarking on the resemblance of Kafka’s tales of absurd misfires and maddening bureaucratic dead ends to the way we live now. But he did not just imagine this milieu, some readers like to suggest, he anticipated it—and the force of his representations helped bring it about. J. Hillis Miller argues as much in The Conflagration of Community: Fiction Before and After Auschwitz, installing Kafka’s three novels at the center of a “constellation” of literary, theoretical, and historical texts and contexts that he reads for their relation to the Holocaust (xii). Theodor Adorno’s dictum on the barbarity of writing lyric poetry after Auschwitz, with which the book opens, is the polestar for Miller’s chapters on Jean-Luc Nancy’s theories of community” (chap. 1); on Holocaust literature by Thomas Keneally, Ian McEwan, Art Spiegelman, and Imre Kertész (chaps. 5 and 6); and on Toni Morrison’s Beloved (chap. 7).Miller adopts Adorno’s chronotope, “after Auschwitz,” and affirms the absolute historical rupture this term intimates: “these are the times after Auschwitz,” Miller writes, “when the impossible has turned out to be possible. Auschwitz was a decisive turning point in history” (x).1 Miller observes that while Nancy’s description of the “inoperative community” is largely trans-temporal and universalizing, it occasionally betrays a historical dimension: that is, community might have existed once but it is broken or unworkable in the present. By reading Nancy’s term, “conflagration of community,” as a “more or less explicit allusion…to the Holocaust,” Miller aligns the implied historicity of Nancy’s account with the before-and-after of “after Auschwitz” (6). Similarly, his readings of Keneally, McEwan, Spiegelman, and Kertész are organized around by-now familiar questions about the ethics of representation in the aftermath of an event that Adorno and other critics believe shattered a cultural tradition and its aesthetic forms. In addition, echoing critics like Paul Gilroy and Naomi Mandel, Miller looks to Beloved as a text with which to think comparatively about the memory of slavery and of the Holocaust; despite its nineteenth-century setting, he suggests, Beloved is a “post-Auschwitz” novel about slavery, “the feature of American history that most resonates with Auschwitz” (xiii–xiv). There is more to say, both critical and complimentary, about Miller’s readings of these works, but important for now is that they constitute the “after Auschwitz” part of the book’s subtitle, Fiction Before and After Auschwitz.It is the other part—fiction before Auschwitz—that yields Miller’s most forceful and troublesome claim. While Miller discusses some half-dozen writers of the postwar period, fiction before Auschwitz, in his book, means Franz Kafka. The three chapters on Kafka’s novels (chaps. 2, 3, and 4) are the book’s core, and not just because Miller devotes much more attention to Kafka than to any other author or because he identifies the later works as Kafkaesque in inspiration. Miller’s Kafka is prophetic, and Kafka’s fiction is significant to Miller as Holocaust literature: “What Kafka foresaw,” Miller claims, “was a wholesale destruction of the Jewish people” (40). The trouble with this is that it dissolves the distinction between before and after Auschwitz.Miller is hardly the only critic to assign to Kafka the role of Holocaust prophet, though he may be the most insistent. Theodor Adorno, who thought that identifying any “direct political allusion” in Kafka’s writing “violated its spirit,” was still moved to write that, “nevertheless, it is National Socialism far more than the hidden dominion of God that his work cites.”2 And in his essay, “K,” George Steiner declares that Kafka “was, in a literal sense, a prophet.…The very word for vermin, Ungeziefer, is a stroke of tragic clairvoyance; so the Nazis were to designate the gassed. ‘In the Penal Colony’ foreshadows…the technology of the death-factories.”3 Adorno and Steiner wrote their essays at historical removes of only ten and eighteen years, respectively, from the war’s end. Since then, though, critics have insisted on the infelicity of such claims and on the sheer incoherence of reading as premonitions what are in fact fleeting resemblances between Kafka’s fictional worlds and the concentrationary universe of the Holocaust. When Adorno writes that The Castle’s blond schoolmistress Gisa, “cruel and fond of animals,” “stems from the pre-adamite race of Hitler Jungfrauen who hated the Jews long before there were any,” he is ignoring for a moment that Kafka wrote The Castle some time before there were any Hitler Jungfrauen.4Lawrence Langer, trying to puncture what had become a full-blown cliché at the time of his 1986 essay, “Kafka as Holocaust Prophet: A Dissenting View,” begins that piece by observing: “Someone must have been spreading rumors about Franz Kafka, for without having done anything wrong, he was proclaimed one fine morning the prophet of the Holocaust.”5 Langer objects on several grounds. The most apposite is that extracting signs and symbols of the Holocaust from Kafka’s fiction entails willful misreading. Langer observes, for example, that the strained but recurrent analogy of the Nazis’ mechanistic death apparatus and the inscription instrument in the story “In the Penal Colony” makes no sense, since the latter’s distinguishing feature is that it translates a person’s particular “crime” into indexical marks on the individual’s body—utterly at odds with Nazi technologies of undifferentiated mass murder, not to mention their extensive use of those ordinary but no less lethal weapons, guns.6 Such readings, then, depend on ignoring aspects of Kafka’s representations and fictional worlds that are not assimilable to such identifications and overstating or misconstruing those that are. Langer argues that this critical proclivity, or “fantasy,” both “rewrite[s] Kafka’s art to accommodate [it] to Nazi reality” and also “risks distorting Kafka’s achievement.”7In fact, such comparisons do more than undermine Kafka’s art: they mystify how the Holocaust happened and obscure the fact that it did not have to happen. This is particularly so in Miller’s case. His assertions of Kafka’s prescience are not of the type that Langer describes as “gratuitous observations” which mar otherwise insightful readings; they are the crux of his argument about Kafka and among the central claims of the book.8 Influential Kafka critics, Walter Benjamin and Werner Hamacher among them, have suggested that Kafka’s writing resists interpretation, deferring narrative closure and postponing, in Hamacher’s words, “what is coming” (quoted on 41). Miller recasts this to argue that “what ‘was coming’…was the Shoah, which Kafka obscurely, or perhaps not so obscurely, foresaw” (41). Such a formulation treats the Holocaust as a mystical inevitability. To believe, as Miller apparently does, that when Kafka was writing The Man Who Disappeared, “Auschwitz was hovering already like a looming light coming ever nearer,” is to mistake what were no doubt aspects of Kafka’s experience, such as anti-Semitism and the perception of Jewish precarity in Europe, for a future that was unimaginable to Kafka and to all those with whom he shared the world around 1911 (58). Reading “Kafka’s word as [a] prefiguration of Auschwitz”—that is, typologically—implies that the Holocaust is a fulfillment of a promise that binds past, present, and future to one another in a way that cannot be, and never could have been, altered (50). The language of prefiguration is also peculiarly and in this case incongruously Christian.Miller additionally uses a narratological term, “foreshadow,” to express the relationship of Kafka’s texts to the future. Foreshadowing implies narrative closure, or an already written and already read future toward which events are arcing. In historical (rather than narrative) time, accepting that contingency is at work and that things could have been otherwise means there is no foreshadowing as such: just our astonished feelings of recognition as we see patterns and resemblances only visible from the vantage point of the backward glance. Miller projects onto the text associations only available to him in the present and then recovers them as signs of Kafka’s foresight. So, for example, the train journey in The Man Who Disappeared “anticipates the Judentransporte to Auschwitz,” while K’s experiences of bureaucratic complexity and the nontransparency of other people in The Castle “are premonitions of Auschwitz” (52, 145). Miller notes that the pervasive atmosphere of Kafka’s texts is one in which it seems “that something very bad is always just about to happen, or has always already happened,” and observes that “the relation of this foreboding to the way Kafka’s works are premonitions of Auschwitz is evident”—when in fact, we might ask why such diffuse states of suspension and anxiety seem so readily available to such a rendering (55).Gary Saul Morson and Michael André Bernstein call this projection of the future onto the past “backshadowing,” or “foreshadowing after the fact,” and argue that its “logic must always value the present, not for itself, but as the harbinger of an already determined future.”9 The project of Bernstein’s book, in particular, is a critique of the ubiquity of backshadowing in Holocaust discourse, including in readings of Kafka, but Miller no more engages with this work than he does with Langer’s. Miller contends with the question of whether the future is made or given by suggesting that Kafka’s texts not only foreshadowed the future but created it; Kafka, fearing his writings “might be prophetic or might have the force to bring about on a large scale the individual sufferings and catastrophes they dramatize,” instructed that they be destroyed to try to prevent them “from having their magic performative effect” (40). These attempts failed, Miller argues, because “the author cannot keep the text from creating its own future” (40). While this may certainly be true in a narrow sense—texts, we all know, circulate and signify in ways that far exceed their authors’ intentions—it seems rather too easy an explanation of Kafka’s oracular relationship to the Holocaust.10It is arresting that one of Miller’s other texts is Imre Kertész’s Holocaust novel Fatelessness, whose narrator, upon arriving home after his internment, reflects:Only now, and thus after the event, looking back, in hindsight, does the way it all “came about” seem over, finished, unalterable, finite, so tremendously fast, and so terribly opaque.…Whether one looks back or ahead, both are flawed perspectives, I suggested. After all, there are times when twenty minutes, in and of themselves, can be quite a lot of time. Each minute has started, endured, and then ended before the next one started. Now, I said, let’s just consider: every one of those minutes might in fact have brought something new. In reality it didn’t, naturally, but still, one must acknowledge that it might have.11Miller is well aware of this passage, and he sensitively reads the ironic equivocations of the narrator, Gyuri—epitomized by his incessant use of the word “naturally” to describe the most unnatural events—as “concentrat[ing] in a single word that theory of fateful fatelessness and perpetual inalienable human freedom that gives the novel its name” (24). Asking how Kertész’s Holocaust novel draws self-consciously on Kafka’s writing might have enabled Miller to formulate a compelling argument about the influence of Kafka’s forms and figures on writers contending with the representation of the Holocaust. Instead, Miller’s treatment of Kafka as prophet remains flagrantly irreconcilable with Gyuri’s avowal of fatelessness and with Miller’s own reading of Kertész’s novel.Miller ascribes visionary power to Kafka qua historical person and author. This is unsurprising, maybe even necessary, when one is bent on embedding Kafka’s work in the context of the Shoah, since both the justification for and the resonance of doing so depends in large part on Kafka’s Jewishness: that is, his communal intimacy with the victims and the specter of his own potential victimhood. Kafka, Holocaust prophet, is thus also Kafka, Jewish prophet—precisely the equivalence Miller invokes when he suggests that Kafka’s vision of the destruction of the Jewish people was as though “in fulfillment of the dark anticipations of an Old Testament prophet like Amos or of certain features of the Kabbalah” (40). To authorize one’s readings of The Trial, The Castle, and The Man Who Disappeared on the basis of Kafka’s identity assumes that its traces make their way into the work in a fashion self-evidently available for reading and recovery. Kafka’s Jewishness is not irrelevant to his work but the degree and inflection of that relevance should not be a foregone conclusion, not least because Kafka’s identification with his Jewishness and with Prague’s Jewish community was complicated. Kafka’s reported statement to a friend about the old synagogue in Prague—“they will try to grind the synagogue into dust by destroying the Jews themselves”—is for Miller a “dark prophecy” (41). But what about Kafka’s 1914 diary entry, which reads: “What have I in common with Jews? I have hardly anything in common with myself and should stand very quietly in a corner, content that I can breathe” (53). Miller quotes these lines to highlight the similarity of Kafka’s alienation to the foreignness that Kertész’s Gyuri feels in the camps, as a Hungarian rather than Yiddish speaker, without considering even for a moment that Kafka’s ambivalence about belonging to a community might plausibly complicate declaring him its prophet.12There are compelling readings in the book. Miller offers wonderful interpretations of Freudian kettle logic at work in The Trial, reveals the pervasiveness of failed performatives in that same novel, and convincingly shows how limited focalization and the stubborn opacity of consciousness produces The Castle’s uncanny effects. He also gracefully reconciles Elie Wiesel’s assertion that “a novel about Auschwitz is not a novel—or else it is not about Auschwitz” and Kertész’s insistence that even the most autobiographical account is fiction by suggesting that the narrative protocols of selection and ordering put “the facts in constructed form, though the facts remain facts,” and that narrative is thus “not just an ordering of facts, but an interpretation of them, a passing judgment on them, in short, a bearing witness to them” (187). It is when these close readings are yoked to the larger claims that they are diminished.Miller’s approach to the Holocaust takes its bearings from those accounts that stress its singular rupture of the human and historical continuum, and that consider what, “after Auschwitz,” can be said and done. In one aspect, however, his book also asks how this event risks repetition; as Hannah Arendt observed, “the unprecedented, once it has appeared, may become a precedent for the future.”13 The book’s constellation of topics—among which Miller hopes to identify “resonances…or [a] vibration testifying to analogies”—includes what he calls America’s “drift towards fascism” in the wake of 9/11 (xiii). Unlike the book’s other strands (on community, Kafka, and fiction after Auschwitz), Miller’s treatment of post-9/11 politics is not textually driven. Rather, it is the pressing historical and political context that galvanizes his readings and establishes their personal and ethical stakes. While this is a powerful frame for the book, the analysis it generates is deeply unsatisfying. In much the same way that Miller mistakes resemblances between Kafka’s text and the world of the camps as proof of Kafka’s prescience, the comparisons he draws between 1930s Germany and America after 9/11 depend largely on free association, or what Miller calls “chilling resemblance[s]” (xiii). For instance, Gyuri’s musings in Fatelessness about the meetings that must have taken place to institute the camps incites Miller to “the suspicion that Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and their advisors in the military and in intelligence must have had similar meetings to invent Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay, and the practice of ‘extraordinary rendition’” (43). Similarly, Josef K. “anticipates our situation during the Bush years,” leading Miller to ask how the disasters of Bush’s tenure could have happened “without marching in the streets, without impeachment of the malefactors in order to save our precious democracy” (75). Miller emphasizes the urgency of reckoning with the contraction of civil rights and liberties after 9/11, and with America’s compromising actions in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. But Miller’s version of this recent history is the thinnest possible—one in which Bush and his associates are responsible for ruining America—and so offers no grounds on which we might think rigorously and comparatively about different histories of violence. To ask, apropos of Guantanamo, “can this be happening in the land of the free and the home of the brave?” is to ignore completely all those forms of racism, imperialism, and dispossession that are not among Miller’s repertoire of associations but that bear as much of a “chilling resemblance” to conditions that prevailed in Europe in the 1930s and 1940s as anything Miller singles out (94).This selective history is particularly jarring given that Miller attends to American slavery, though in a fashion that recasts it in the terms of unthinkability so prevalent in Holocaust discourse: “The situation of the reader confronting Kafka’s works…is already like that of someone confronting the facts about Auschwitz. They just do not make sense, just as the facts about American slavery are fully ascertainable, but just do not make sense” (49). Miller suggests that the irregularity and injustice Josef K. experiences in The Trial is “like the experience of slaves in the pre–Civil War United States” and “also like that of Jews under Hitler” as well as “analogous to that of our detainees from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan [who] have been arrested often only because they happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time” (69). But in fact the persistent mystery of Josef K.’s persecution and the nakedly instrumental economic rationale for American slavery are worlds apart. To place slavery, the Holocaust, and indefinite detention within the same frame is not indecorous or uninteresting but it is also not instructive if all that connects them is a universal logic of persecution—something that emerges from Miller’s final chapter, which describes the Holocaust, slavery, and the War on Terror in the terms of immunity and autoimmunity that Derrida formulates to describe the dividedness that “operate[s] in any community mechanically, spontaneously, inevitably” (260). Similarly, in a section titled “The Muselmann and His Witnessing Survivor,” Miller spends many pages discussing Kertész’s representation of the Muselmann (Muslim), without scrutinizing the implications of this term. What are we to make of a work that has nothing at all to say about the identification of the almost dead as Muslims, despite its avowed interest in the abuses at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib and in the resemblance of these interment sites to the Nazi concentration camps?It is hard not to conclude that, for Miller, the operative element in the comparison of fascist Germany and contemporary America is their disconcerting and distressing betrayal of their own carefully wrought cultures of enlightenment. One persistent source of the Holocaust’s inexplicability, Miller suggests, is that it contravenes sense: “Surely human beings, particularly citizens of a ‘civilized’ country, could not be brought to commit evil on such a monstrous scale” (47). Just as “civilized Germany” lost its way, so too, Miller fears, is America “more and more becoming what used to be called ‘a third world country’” (111). This formulation seems to betray lost American power and privilege as the object of Miller’s political melancholy. While such moments do not do justice to the strength of Miller’s political and ethical commitment to the issues this book takes up, they do disclose the limitations of a work in which much remains assumed and unfulfilled. Notes 1On “after Auschwitz” as chronotope, see Michael Rothberg’s chapter, “After Adorno: Culture in the Wake of Catastrophe,” in Traumatic Realism: The Demands of Holocaust Representation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 25–58.2Theodor W. Adorno, “Notes on Kafka,” in Prisms (1955), trans. Samuel Weber and Shierry Weber (1967; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1984), 259.3George Steiner, “K” (1963), in Language and Silence: Essays on Language, Literature, and the Inhuman (1967; New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 121.4Adorno, “Notes on Kafka,” 259.5Lawrence L. Langer, “Kafka as Holocaust Prophet: A Dissenting View” (1986), in Admitting the Holocaust: Collected Essays (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 109.6Ibid., 111.7Ibid., 110, 116–17.8Ibid., 111.9Gary Saul Morson, Narrative and Freedom: The Shadows of Time (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), 234; Michael André Bernstein, Foregone Conclusions: Against Apocalyptic History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 2.10Russell Samolsky, on whom Miller draws, wades into these waters, though more carefully: Apocalyptic Futures: Marked Bodies and the Violence of the Text in Kafka, Conrad, and Coetzee (New York: Fordham University Press, 2011).11Imre Kertész, Fatelessness, trans. Tom Wilkinson (1975; New York: Vintage, 2004), 258.12For a powerful assessment of Kafka’s posture toward community (German-Jewish and otherwise) that opens, incidentally, with this same diary entry, see Vivian Liska, When Kafka Says We: Uncommon Communities in German-Jewish Literature (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009).13Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963; New York: Penguin, 2006), 273. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 112, Number 1August 2014 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/676446 Views: 492Total views on this site For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article." @default.
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• W439764013 title "J. Hillis Miller The Conflagration of Community: Fiction Before and After AuschwitzThe Conflagration of Community: Fiction Before and After Auschwitz. J. Hillis Miller. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. Pp. ix+309." @default.
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