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Reading Holocaust Poetry: Singularity and Geoffrey Hill’s ‘September Song’ During the last decade of teaching an interdisciplinary module in Holocaust studies, I have found that students outside literary studies often admit that they struggle to read Holocaust poetry. They sometimes assume that the poem is an intensely subjective message that needs decoding, and contend that poems such as Paul Celan’s ‘Todesfugue’ are unhelpfully opaque. I have attempted to persuade them that resistance to accommodation is an integral aspect of the literary: as Derek Attridge argues in The Singularity of Literature , literary works precisely fail to answer to ‘our habitual needs in processing language’.^1 Literature students have then pointed out to those from other disciplines that the reader needs the objective tools of close reading in order to understand Holocaust poems properly. Such a subjective/objective dichotomy between the student groups is telling, and actually demonstrates that non- specialists in the field may have something important to tell us about reading, as a potentially missed encounter in the classroom, and in professional practice. The latter has resulted in three different ways of reading Holocaust poetry in recent years: Susan Gubar responds to such poems as ‘stymied testimony’, and I have argued elsewhere for the consideration of ‘awkward poetics’ - in which writers self-consciously discuss the problems of representation within the texts – as well as lyrics as a form of testimony in and of themselves.^2 This article takes these critical positions forward by exploring the interaction between recent theories of engaging with poetry more widely, and the specific case of Holocaust poetry. Can the concept of the singularity of literature fruitfully account for the ‘events’ of Holocaust poems, or does it obscure the importance of the metatext, and possibilities of ethical response? Also, in response to Attridge’s work since The Singularity of Literature , can the ‘objective’ close readings that critics and literature students engage in be too ‘powerful’ for Holocaust poetry?^3
Attridge demonstrates a way of reading poems in The Singularity of Literature that draws heavily on, but is also subtly different to, traditional close readings.^4 His approach attends to the singular ‘event’ of the utterance and performance of poems, and how they – and literature more widely - can be read at different times in various ways that should still be attentive to the materiality of the work. What, I ask in this article, are the challenges of singularity to the reading of Holocaust poetry, and how, conversely, might Holocaust poems challenge theories of the singular? In a subsequent article, Attridge argues persuasively that practical criticism – still widely (and rightly) taught - can fail to engage with poems adequately, since the advent of syntactical complexity, rhyme, assonance (etc.) can be found in examples of writing (he cites Bob Dylan’s lyrics) that many critics would not find singular.^5 Attridge’s approach to poetry in general opens out the possibility that close reading could fail to respond adequately to Holocaust poetry, if it is not attentive to the materiality and performance of the poems. In addition, practical criticism could be charged with an inability to provide an adequate ethical response to witness literature. In this context, does Attridge’s work similarly have to confront a missed opportunity with testimony, because of singularity’s resistance to the pressure of the metatext, and the ways in which Holocaust literature is consumed; for example, through Susan Suleiman’s notion of the ‘conventional’, where readers may assume the autobiographical ‘truth’ of the text due to the way in which the book is marketed?^6 These questions will be explored in relation to one of the most well- known Holocaust poems by a non-survivor: Geoffrey Hill’s ‘September Song’. Hill is a British poet who worked as a Professor of Literature and Religion at the University of Boston between 1988 and 2006. ‘September Song’, along with another poem from the same collection (‘Ovid in the Third Reich’), is printed in the most popular anthology of poems for Holocaust studies modules: Hilda Schiff’s Holocaust Poetry.^7 Hill’s archive was inaugurated at the University of Leeds in 2012, and includes substantial drafts of ‘September Song’: his
(with, in this instance, good reason) in their adherence to close reading over the machinations of instrumentalist theory. Attridge accounts for this tenacity as a partly excusable adherence to the notion of a text’s singularity, even if such critics would never explain their views in such terms (p.10). As he points out, ‘New Critical preconceptions and procedures – born in the second third of the twentieth century – still govern a great deal of literary pedagogy and critical practice, as a glance at most “introductions to literature” will quickly reveal’ (p.12). Attridge is characteristically modest in his claim that he is not proposing a new way of reading: his focus on the ‘eventness’ of literature has the potential to transform literary studies, even if, in reality, it is unlikely to dissuade many critics from instrumentalist approaches.^12 As opposed to the New Critical techniques noted above, he argues that much of current literary criticism brings pre-conceived ideas to bear on the reading of subsequent texts in order to process them efficiently (pp.6-10). Such a danger of drawing the ‘other’ of the literary text into the ‘same’ ideological tapestry surrounds the conclusions of John Barrell’s critique of practical criticism, in which a focus on ‘balance’ in literary texts is suspiciously bourgeois, and does not take account of the class and gender status of readers.^13 Instead, Attridge calls for critical vigilance against unreflective instrumentalism, and ideological readings that fail in their ‘responsibility to the text and to the institution of literature’ (p.119). Later in this article, however, I ask: does the reader’s responsibility consist primarily of an appreciation of singularity, or with the initiation of a ‘committed’ response that might go beyond the black print on the white page? In his subsequent discussion of William Blake’s ‘The Sick Rose’, Attridge utilizes familiar techniques of close reading in order to outline the singularity of the poem, including an analysis of register (p.68), ambiguity, apostrophe, and rhythm (p.69). Just as the critic must be wary of instrumentalism, however, Attridge’s later research proposes that close reading itself is not a panacea, and also has an ability to distort the potential singularity of a
literary text. The critic may, for example, be so concerned with their own rhetorical pyrotechnics that the ‘otherness’ of the poem in question becomes lost in the expression of the critic’s ingenuity. Tools of close reading can in this sense be too ‘powerful’.^14 Attridge recounts the eminent Christopher Ricks recalling a scene in which the young William Empson impressed I.A. Richards with his bravura account of a Shakespeare sonnet. Empson is meta-critical and modest, arguing that ‘“You could do that with any poetry”’. Ricks retorts that such superb criticism can only happen ‘“if the poetry truly teems”’. Attridge takes issue with this fait accompli : it allows Ricks to conclude that pyrotechnic criticism will always arise a priori from intricate literature. The former then exposes the limitations of close reading in relation to Ricks’s account of Dylan’s lyrics: Ricks lauds a passage in ‘Lay Lady Lay’ due to its deployment of parallel syntax, rhyme, internal assonance and syntactical echoes, but Attridge points out that it would be easy to construct poetic lines that have the same features, but which would be banal.^15 Ricks’s most effective technique is to ‘draw on the language of the lines in his own description, creating the illusion of an extraordinarily close relationship between his words and Dylan’s’. Attridge follows with several examples of this ‘power’ from Ricks’s wider criticism, in which the latter’s ‘immense skill as a writer is deployed to move, delight and persuade the reader’. These examples can be extended to Ricks’s criticism on Geoffrey Hill’s work: in his essay ‘“The Tongue’s Atrocities”’ - named after a phrase from Hill’s poem ‘History as Poetry’ - Ricks produces a swarm of Empsonian rabbits from Hill’s phrase ‘regaled with slaughter’ (from Mercian Hymns ). The astonishing sentence reads as follows: ‘Regaled, with its regalia (and regalo means a gift); but ‘regaled with slaughter’ opens up a grim fissure – the poem uses the word ‘fissured’ – between the barbaric opulence and the jaded prurience: regaled with good stories, with Christmas fare (the poem speaks of ‘Christ’s mass’), and with deliciously domesticated slaughter’.^16 The parenthetical connections to the source text, and their assurances that the poem ‘uses’ and
The Singularity of ‘September Song’ How could I perform a reading of this poem that emphasises its singularity? Attridge emphasises that accounts of singular literature change in subsequent readings: after commenting on the linguistic power of ‘The Sick Rose’, he offers the caveat that, ‘if I read the poem tomorrow, I will experience its singularity differently’ (p.70). This is certainly true of my encounter with ‘September Song’ twenty years after first writing about it, in which I stressed, for example, how the diction about economy represents the economic ways (or lack of them) in which the Nazis disposed of their victims.^19 I would still support this reading, but wish to account for how I experience the poem differently now. Abrams’ focus on the materiality of poems influences the following reading, and the drafts in Hill’s archive make the critic appreciate more acutely the suggestive richness and precision of words such as ‘flake’. Semantic ambiguity is the starting point for Attridge’s account of the singularity of ‘The Sick Rose’: the words have a ‘density of suggestiveness’ (p.68) and ‘multiplying significations’ (p.69) which activate ‘unfurling meanings’ (p.69). Accounts of ‘September Song’ by Jon Silkin and Christopher Ricks respond fully to its semantic richness; the poem’s ‘density’ certainly constitutes one reason for the poem’s status as one of the most anthologised Holocaust poems by a non-survivor, just as much as the later stanza of awkward poetics.^20 As in the opening line of ‘The Sick Rose’ (‘O rose, thou art sick’), at the beginning of ‘September Song’ the reader experiences an ‘arresting initial statement’, and a ‘strongly articulated phrasal movement’ (p.69): Undesirable you may have been, untouchable
you were not. Not forgotten or passed over at the proper time.^21 The development from ‘untouchable’ to ‘undesirable’ is immediately striking, and Hill’s notebooks reveal that he wrestled with various possibilities for the initial word: ‘wretched’ becomes ‘polluted’ on the next page, then ‘Animal’, which, above it, has the words ‘Odious’ and ‘Unlovely’.^22 Above these rejected suggestions, a box surrounds ‘Undesirable’ with six ticks: it forms a concretion of Yeats’s argument that a poem clicks shut like a box when the right words are found.^23 The semantic development from ‘untouchable’ to ‘undesirable’ is in place by the third page of the drafts, although here the words appear on separate lines: ‘Undesirable’ you may have been Untouchable you were not Neither forgotten nor passed over At the allotted time (p.120) The quotation marks around ‘Undesirable’ (which are still present in the subsequent notebook) indicate that Hill was concerned, at this stage, about a perpetrator voice entering the poem. By this point, the repetition of ‘un’ is already key to the euphonious language of the opening stanza, however, which continues with the repetition of ‘you/you’, and ‘not/Not’ in the final version. These performed repetitions and variations form part – if we follow Abrams and read the poem aloud – of the memorable ‘evolution of the speech units’ (p.5).^24 ‘Not’ following ‘not’ encourages the reader to think of the possible meaning of a double negative at the same time as the punctuation denies it: a critic writing in the style of Ricks might state, creating the ‘illusion of an extraordinary close relationship’ between the poem
Thoughts of artistic exploitation are inseparable from the perpetrator rhetoric of words such as ‘estimated’, ‘sufficient’, and ‘routine’ in the second stanza, which I focussed on in my previous reading: As estimated, you died. Things marched, sufficient, to that end. Just so much Zyklon and leather, patented terror, so many routine cries.^30 ‘Things marched’ creates an intertextual link to ‘Things happen’ in ‘Ovid in the Third Reich’, the opening poem of King Log.^31 After the recent ‘turn’ to perpetrators in Holocaust studies, it can also be seen more clearly that the latter poem is prescient in its engagement with a perpetrator perspective. ‘Things happen’ intimates the speaker’s lack of control over the ‘troughs of blood’, whereas the poem as a whole presents someone at least complicit with historical events. Similarly, ‘Things marched’ avoids culpability; the phrase may also echo the March of Time , which was a newsreel series shown in movie theatres between 1935 to 1951, and which suggests, in its title, a (potentially fascistic) inevitability of historical ‘progress’.^32 Alongside this semantic density, reading the poem aloud draws attention to the stanza’s materiality: the repeated /t/s, and velar plosive of the /k/ in ‘Zyklon’, again evoke a bitter and ironic tone that undermines the perpetrator rhetoric. The harsh /t/ sounds work most memorably in the shortest line, both in sense of the graphic surface, and number of syllables. ‘[S]ufficient, to that end’ repeats the sound three times, and emphasises the horror that ‘end’ implies, but the poem – without the lost knowledge of Polláková’s death - cannot represent. The ‘teeming’ diction also counters the expectations of other words: the reader might expect ‘Efficient’ rather than ‘Sufficient’; in other words, the process of killing was sufficient but
chaotic, and certainly not efficient. ‘Sufficient’ then reaches forward to the variation of ‘Just so much’: the initial word at the beginning of the line stresses the irony between ‘Just’ in its noun and adverb form; these actions are patently only ‘just’ from a perpetrator perspective. This Ricksian rhetoric would also stress the semantic link between the ‘patented/ Terror’ of a totalitarian government and the ‘leather’ before ‘patented’. As the reader performs the poem, the word initially seems to qualify ‘leather’: ‘patented’ refers to japanned leather with a glossy finish. As with the emphasis on ‘Just’ at the beginning of the antecedent line, the stress on ‘terror’ at the beginning of the next one then underlines the chilling concept of a Government-controlled distribution of fear.^33 After the euphony and semantic richness of the first two stanzas, it is hard to recreate the ‘distinctiveness and surprisingness’ many readers sense when they then read, for the first time, the most famous lines of this poem (and post-Holocaust poetry as a whole).^34 Early on in the drafts, the third stanza appears as follows: I have made An elegy for myself. That Is true.^35 This self-castigatory section is almost complete long before the other stanzas, and indicates that singularity for artists sometimes comes more easily than achieving ‘the same’ (such as metrical regularity). There are only slight variations across the two notebooks, as when Hill extrapolates: [...] That Is true. For me only, [...]
argued in relation to the exactitude of rhyme, such effects must appear to the reader ‘as natural as breathing’, and yet they are the product of intense labour.^39 In the notebooks, Hill works his way towards ‘flake’ after several variations: roses first ‘Crack’ and ‘Drop’ from the wire, and then ‘decay’, ‘burst’, ‘gash’ and ‘soften’ on the next page, before ‘Flake from’ is circled with approval; ‘blood-red roses’ is rejected as too clumsy.^40 Semantic precision then continues in the last line and stanza, in which, instead of the ‘crescendo of intensity’ in ‘The Sick Rose’, we experience the singularity of memorable bathos: ‘ This is plen ty. This is more than e nough ’. ‘This’ could refer to the last stanza, the penultimate stanza, and the entire poem: Hill emphasises the ambiguity with two metrical breaks on the most important word, which – along with the punctuation - slow the pace of the line. Hill’s sensitivity to metrics emphasises the caution and forbearance of the post-Holocaust poet, but ‘This’ also ‘challenges cultural norms’, and its ‘web of associations’, in which we are meant to pity the child victim automatically.^41 Just one broken pentameter (the only one in the poem) is enough: Hill is wary – to rephrase Wilfred Owen – of putting too much pity into the poetry, and questions the troubling ease in which readers might be drawn into expressing whatever pity and empathy might mean.^42 Clearly, ‘enough’ is an important word in the development of the poem, since it occurs first in a different line: ‘Just so much Zyklon and rubber, enough/ Terror, so many routine lies’.^43 In the context of King Log , ‘enough’ extends to the palinode of ‘September Song’, ‘I Had Hope When Violence Was Ceas’t’. This poem is printed opposite ‘September Song’ (p.18): it adopts the voice of a camp inmate, and risks being ‘enough’ after only four lines, with descriptions of the ‘flesh oozing towards its last outrage.’ ‘[E]nough’, the emphatic last iamb, also functions like ‘finished’, the last word of ‘Funeral Music’ (p.32): both words, rich in semantic allusion, draw attention to the poems’ ‘snapping shut like a box’; the dying soldier in ‘Funeral Music’ cries that he is not finished at the same time as, mortally wounded, he is finished, and the poem is finishing. Manuscript versions of
‘Funeral Music’ separate the drafts of ‘September Song’: the notebooks prove that Hill was thinking about the ending of both poems simultaneously, as the repeated phrase ‘“I have not finished”’ is written into the early drafts of ‘September Song’.^44 The singular last line also draws attention to the finite nature of singularity. For a variety of reasons, a poem read in a hundred years’ time may not have the same resonance as it does today. ‘September Song’ is an astonishing product of its historical moment, written at a time when post-Holocaust writers were beginning to intensify their engagements with war atrocities, particularly after the Eichmann Trial in 1961. The poem challenges the notion of Holocaust representation, and errs on the side of a respectful silence, or the poetics of awkwardness. Such deliberations, and self-censorship, are evident in some of the first lines in the notebook, which were rejected as, presumably, stilted and overly pious: Let them keep [line break] their dignity of silence in death (6) Hill initially wishes Holocaust victims to be ‘silent’ at the same time as he threatens their dignity by beginning to write about that silence. However, if, nearly fifty years after the completion of the poem, we are moving into an era of ‘impious’ representation – as Matthew Boswell argues – then it is possible to imagine a time in which this tentativeness towards Holocaust representation will be regarded quizzically.^45 Artists and critics in the US and Britain do not, over a hundred years after the events, worry about aesthetic larceny in relation to the Crimean War (1853-56) or the American Civil War (1861-65). ‘Locust Songs’ in King Log contains a section on the massacre at Shiloh Church in 1862, but, with the lack of
reading of Ricks - close readings of the poem could be too ‘powerful’, over-determined, and insular in their focus on the text.^48 If Hill’s short poem is ‘enough’ about Polláková, maybe the critic should be aware of when they have written ‘enough’ on an aspect of post-Holocaust literature. If this article ended before the subsection, would there be a failure to apprehend, or an obfuscation of, the limitations of critical rhetoric in my reading above? Perhaps there is something beyond the aesthetic trickery of the elegy for itself, and the singularity of its performance, that is important in reading and apprehending the poem. Any account of the poem’s singularity will emphasise its literariness, but does close reading obscenely forget the metatext, the fate of the child, and neglect the possibility of a different kind of readerly witnessing? Just as Tom Paulin was appalled at Ricks’s attention to linguistic minutiae in Minatour , the former critic might be exasperated to read someone discussing the poetry of atrocity in terms of fricatives.^49 Singularity might be critiqued as indulging in an ahistorical ‘divine liberty’, apparent, as Albert Camus writes, ‘“in the work of Mozart”’.^50 Camus argues instead that contemporary art loses ‘“Ease”’ with its ‘“ constant obligation ”’ to history, so that the artist is now ‘“lying”’ or ‘“indulging in useless woes if he pays no attention to history’s woes”’ (p.115). Yet singular writing can still engage with the uneasiness of history, as Attridge demonstrates with his account of Mongane Wally Serote’s ‘The actual Dialogue’ in The Singularity of Literature (pp.112-8): this poem was written during the era of Apartheid in South Africa, and the ‘Context is already there in the words’ (p.114). Instead of recourse to instrumentalist metanarratives, a ‘charged’ witnessing must therefore confront the large questions of art and everyday life, such as, How do we respond to otherness within texts, and beyond our own idiocultures? Yet an adequate ethical response to a poem such as ‘September Song’ cannot be the impossibility of thinking about the poem constantly, as Primo Levi demands of his poem ‘Shemà’.^51 It might constitute the more manageable response of dwelling on the poem for a
while, and ‘living’ with it, but this could be a self-deceptive ethical move in that, as Hill puts it in another poem, the text may be forgotten next week as the reader moves on to more pressing events.^52 Attridge’s work draws attention to the ethics of accounting for a text’s singularity and literariness, but, having done so in relation to ‘September Song’, is it unethical to finish with the poem, and then, as Patricia Yaeger writes in relation to consuming trauma, put the text away and the butter the next bagel?^53 How, in other words, do we - to re-phrase Paul Celan - witness for the witness?^54 What does it mean to be part of a ‘chain of witnesses’, as Shoshana Felman discusses in The Future of Testimony?^55 In Felman’s essay, the chain consists of literary and philosophical figures who engage with each other’s work, from Sigmund Freud through Jacques Derrida to Cathy Caruth, but what does it mean for lesser mortals to respond ethically to autobiography, and vicarious testimony? One answer is to respond carefully, as Attridge suggests, to the aesthetics of representation, and avoid a reading that colonises the experience of the other: poets such as Wilfred Owen and Charlotte Delbo deliberately resist such attempts at over- identification with their autobiographical material.^56 For Attridge, the ethics of ‘sympathy’ are more productive than empathy: whilst there is a danger that ‘a term like this may seem to imply a simple matching between mind and work, it helpfully captures something of the positive openness that characterizes a fully responsive reading’ (p.81). How, however, can the critic be sympathetic towards the absent voice of the victim in a post-Holocaust text? An openness to ‘September Song’ must acknowledge that there is no metatext, in the sense that Polláková’s fate - beyond the death date - is unknown: the poet has the choice to desist from writing a poem, to let the victims keep ‘their silence of dignity/ in death’, or, alternatively, to elegise the few details we know about Polláková in a more general elegy, where the material demands of poetry strive (as Hill’s notebooks indicate) for singularity, with the self-conscious injection of awkward poetics. In other Holocaust poems, the metatext functions differently: in
Poems : the opening lyric, Janka Abrami’s ‘Last Lullaby’, imagines the author’s sister accompanying her daughter into the gas chamber, and ends with the whisper of ‘the last lullaby of Auschwitz:/ “Shash, my darling, Shash...”.’^60 Nevertheless, the historian Otto Dov Kulka admits that the ‘“safe and well-paved way of scientific discipline”’ does not allow him to confront, and make sense, of his childhood memories of Birkenau: similarly, is it possible that the disciplinary pressures of close reading entail missed encounters with poems such as ‘Last Lullaby’?^61 Yet reading literature, Attridge argues, ‘understood in its difference from other kinds of writing (and other kinds of reading), solves no problems and saves no souls’ (p.4). What Holocaust poetry certainly does do, however, is focalise the specific ways of reading relevant to all forms of testimony, autobiography, and memoir, as opposed to literature in general. The context, as Attridge argues, is ‘in’ the text, ‘already there in the words’ (p.114), but when the metatext is obscured - as in case of false testimony - one of the primary tasks of the reader is to pick through the pitfalls of the ‘conventional’, and address the key issue of who is writing to whom. Some readers, such as Sue Vice, may detect singularity in Benjamin Wilkomirski’s Fragments , but it still makes a vast difference to reading, interpreting and evaluating the book as to whether the author was a child survivor of the Holocaust, like Otto Dov Kulka, or a child living in a Switzerland orphanage.^62 As Wilkomirski’s novel demonstrates, the singular can exist aside from such troubling matters of authorship and library classification. The specific case of false testimony also demonstrates that singularity, so important to the ‘pleasures and the potency’ of literature can, like the power of close reading, be unethical.
1 Derek Attridge, The Singularity of Literature (London/New York: Routledge, 2004), p.120. 2 Susan Gubar, ‘The Long and Short of Holocaust Verse’, New Literary History , 35: 3 (summer 2004), 443- 69 (also available online at http://lion.chadwyck.co.uk); Antony Rowland, Holocaust Poetry (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005) and Poetry as Testimony (New York/London: Routledge, 2014). 3 Derek Attridge discusses close readings that are too ‘powerful’ in ‘Conjurers turn tricks on wizards’ coat- tails’ (http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&s). This article originated in Attridge’s inaugural lecture at the University of York (June 2006), and is work in progress. 4 In Poetry, Language and Politics (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), John Barrell points out that there are many different versions of practical criticism, yet it is still possible to generalise (albeit problematically) about the assumptions that underwrite the practice. Extracts from the introduction to this book are anthologised in Dennis Walder’s Literature in the Modern World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp.131-7, p.137. 5 Attridge, ‘Conjurers turn tricks on wizards’ coat-tails’, n.p.n. 6 Susan Rubin Suleiman, ‘Problems of Memory and Factuality in Recent Holocaust Memoirs: Wilkomirski/Wiesel’, Poetics Today , 21: 3 (Fall 2000), 543-59, p.546. 7 Hilda Schiff, Holocaust Poetry (London: HarperCollins, 1995), p.96. For the differences between Holocaust and post-Holocaust poetry, see Rowland’s Holocaust Poetry , pp.1-3. 8 Attridge, The Singularity of Literature , pp.1, 9. Rather than summarise Attridge’s well-known argument in detail at this point, I return to his book throughout the following close reading of ‘September Song’. 9 M.H. Abrams, The Fourth Dimension of a Poem and Other Essays (London/New York: W.W. Norton, 2012), p.2. In practice, Abrams’s readings account for much more than the physical utterance of poetry: like Attridge’s response to the poems in The Singularity of Literature , much of Abrams’s writing necessarily draws on the wider efficacies of practical criticism. An account of poems that focused only on delivery might be able to account for particular readerly pleasures, and the uniqueness of the writing, but it could not, on its own, respond to their singularity as a whole.
