Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics
Toward a Poetics of Documentary Prose--From the Perspective of Gulag Testimonies
Author(s): Leona Toker
Reviewed work(s):
Source: Poetics Today, Vol. 18, No. 2 (Summer, 1997), pp. 187-222
Published by: Duke University Press
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Towarda Poetics of DocumentaryProsefrom the Perspectiveof GulagTestimonies
Leona Toker
English,HebrewUniversity
My readers think that I write for the day because my writings are based on the
day. So I shall have to wait until my writings are obsolete. Then they may acquire
timeliness.
KarlKraus,Half-Truths and One-and-a-Half Truths, 1976
Abstract This essay offers an alternative to the view of documentary literature
as intermediate between artistic and nonartistic discourse: works of documentary
prose are multifunction objects whose different functions become marked in different periods of communal and individual reception. The approach is based on the
theory of Jan Mukarovskyof the Prague Linguistic Circle and on the remarksscattered throughout the work of the writer Varlam Shalamov.
In order to place documentary genres such as the autobiographyand the memoir
into a nonmarginalizing perspective, a paradigm of narrativemodes is constructed
on the basis of the ontological status of the fabula. Concepts associated with this
paradigm are also used in singling out such generic features of retrospective documentary prose as (a) incorporation of three types of material-the public domain,
the private domain, and the domain of privileged access; (b) lack of self-sufficiency;
(c) presence of areas of hesitation; and (d) reflection of differentmnemonic processes.
Several issues raised by this survey,as well as by the discussion of the clash between
My gratitudeto H. M. Daleski,ShlomithRimmon-Kenan,and Meir Sternbergfor their
carefulattentionto thisessayandfor the remarksthathaveled to a significantimprovement
of its conceptualframework.
PoeticsToday18:2 (Summer 1997). Copyright ? 1997 by The Porter Institute for Poetics and
Semiotics.
188
PoeticsToday18:2
the rhetoricalprinciplesof "defamiliarization"
andthe "economyof effort"in docuare
a
brief
illustrated
mentaryprose,
by
analysisof Shalamov'sstory"Berries."
The essaysuggeststhat the reader'shesitation,whetheraboutthe forceof the
factographic
pactwiththe authororabouttheaestheticvalueof nonfictionalrecords
of experience,is an integralpartof the aestheticeffectof documentary
prose;docunarratives
have
the
to
destabilize
or
not
power
mentary
only our view of
modify
but
also
our
habitual
and
cultural
schemata.
literary
history
Documentary literature has traditionally been treated as intermediate between artistic and nonartistic discourse. Adopting some of the principles
of the Prague Linguistic Circle, I shall suggest here an alternative view
according to which works of "documentary prose" are not intermediate
phenomena but multifunction objects.
My main source for the notion of documentary prose is the corpus of
theoretical remarksscattered through the works of the Russian writer Varlam Shalamov, who survived almost two decades of what, following Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, has come to be called the "Gulag."' He wrote several
cycles of short stories and autobiographical sketches based on his experience in prisons and camps- and on his lifelong reflections on short narrative forms.
Shalamov regarded his work as belonging to a "new prose," which he
defined as "not the prose of the document but the prose of the ordeal borne
out as a document [proza vystradannaya kak dokument] (1989: 554).2This
lapidary phrase implies a rejection of the therapeutic effect that writing
may have on the author-in order to write well, it suggests, one has to
allow one's wounds to reopen. It also connotes the preservation of evidence despite the psychological and social pressures to forgive and forget:
instead of trying to travel light, the survivor carries, "bears," his or her
"document" out of the ordeal. Yet the main implication of Shalamov's
memorable metaphor is that his "new prose" (and we can extend this to the
wider notion of documentary prose, a cluster of genres such as autobiography, memoirs, letters, and diaries) must be regarded as aform of art. Its
language is distinct from the language of legal or historical "documents"
proper. It is also distinct from the language of those "human documents"
(including most letters, diaries, and notebooks) that forgo the opportunity
of a retrospectiveprocessing of experience: it is not any correspondence file
1. The word is an acronym for what translates as "Central Camp-Administration Office."
Solzhenitsyn's popularization of the term, and his shifting its meaning to encompass the
camp kingdom as a whole, are artistic achievements in their own right.
2. Here and throughout the extracts from Shalamov's work are given in my translation, unless otherwise noted.
Toker * Toward a Poetics of Documentary Prose
189
that can be regarded as "documentary prose." Indeed, the function of the
word prosein the term documentary
proseis to emphasize not the distinction
from poetry--the phrase documentary
poetrymight oscillate between tautolis
understood
in the broad sense as any record
document
the
word
ogy (if
is used in the narrower
of human experience) and oxymoron (if document
of art.3This connotaa
form
the
as
of
the
status
genre
legal sense)-but
tion is language-bound, since the usage of prosein English is not quite the
same as in Russian, where literature
may mean any kind of written text but
"drab quotidian realities") refers to
mean
used
to
prose(unless
figuratively
texts.
artistic
intentionally
1. Modes and Genres:ClassificationReconsidered
If, following to some extent the example of Northrop Frye (1957),literary
works are classified into modes within which one can distinguish genres
and subgenres, documentary prose appears to be a cluster of genres that
belong to what, diverging from Frye's system, I call thefactographicmode.
The divergence is demanded by the very recognition of the existence of
such a cluster and of the interest that it holds for broad modern audiences:
one needs a paradigm of modes in which documentary prose would hold
a legitimate place, instead of being admitted marginally, on sufferance.
In Frye's Anatomyof Criticismliterary genres are grouped into "modes"
(mythical, high mimetic, low mimetic, etc.) in accordance with the superiority, equality, or inferiority of their protagonists to the reader and to their
own environments (1957:3-69). For the purpose of describing the place of
documentary prose among other forms of narrative literature, one might
try a different system of modal rubrics, namely, a paradigm based on the
ontological status of thefabulaand its constituents.4The factographic mode
to which documentary prose belongs could then be conveniently described
on the basis of its departure from what, in the language of computer software, may be called the defaultmode.5
3. It must be noted that, while imprisoned and unable to write, Gulag inmates often attempted to render accounts of their experience in verse, for mnemonic purposes. See Solof writing and memorizing poetry in the camp
zhenitsyn's account in The GulagArchipelago
(1978: part 5, chap. 5). It stands to reason that some of this instrumental poetry had artistic merit.
4. In Russian Formalist terminology, fabula means the sum total of fictional events in their
chronological and logical order; it may be understood to include all the available circumstances and details of those events. The counterpart of the fabula is the sjuzhet,that is, the
sequence in which the fictional events are presented in the narrative, or, in a broader sense,
the totality of devices and techniques used in the narrative (see Erlich 1969: 242 and Rimmon 1977:30).
5. The default case is that state of the system which is automatically produced (or assumed)
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The most convenient default mode is the one that can be identified with
the "Great Tradition" (Leavis 1962 [1948]: 1-27) and its heirlooms: the
realistic novels and stories, such as the major works of Austen and Dickens,
Balzac and Flaubert, Turgenev and Tolstoy, Chekhov and Bunin. While
this mode may have been brought to its apogee in the nineteenth century,
traditional novels and short stories are still being produced and consumed
in great quantities despite all the talk of the "death of the novel" (talk in
which Shalamov participated, on the side of the grave diggers). I shall refer
to such "normative" fiction as "the realistic mode," even though, owing
to the debates about the limits of realism (does realism mean presenting
ordinary people in ordinary circumstances? or can any literary work be
considered a reflection of a particular reality?), the term realistichas become both too loaded - especially by value-related connotations - and too
blurry. I use the term therealisticmodenot as a term of praise (or criticism)
and not as a measure of the quality or completeness of the reality model
constructed in individual works but as a term for works that can be sufficiently (that is, with inevitable inaccuracies) described by the following
four ontological parameters:
Translated into narratological terms, this can
1. The "as if" convention.
either
mean that
(a) recognizable actions, thoughts, and features are ascribed to imaginary (or, if one wishes, to nondocumented, nondocumentable) subjects or (b) nondocumented actions, thoughts, or features are ascribed to recognizable historical personages.
2. Plausibility.Though fabula details (characters, setting, events) do not
necessarily have concrete counterparts in "reality,"they are recognized as
plausible.
The patterns of the interrelationships among setting,
3. Verisimilitude.
are accepted not merely as plausible but as actuincident
and
character,
ally reflecting regularities that we believe to be operative in the extraartistic world (see Brinker 1982); in other words, the regularities that can be
inferred from the relationships among narrative details are perceived as
exempt from the ludic "as if" status of narrative details themselves, so that
owing to the verisimilitude of these regularities the fictional world is perceived as an "as if" extension of the extratextual world.6
Exclusion or minimization of metafictional tech4. The reality-effect.
unless the parametersare specifiedotherwise.The defaultdoes not have to be a basic,
degree-zero state of the system: it is chosen more or less arbitrarily,with a view to efficiency
of operation.
6. See Brinker (1989: 85-91) on the difference between verisimilitude and plausibility: the
effect of plausibility is based on the consistency of features, whereas verisimilitude can be a
matter of separate features, each in itself, regardless of their "impossible" (grotesque or farcical) combinations.
Toker? Towarda Poeticsof DocumentaryProse
191
niques (techniques described in, for instance, Alter 1975)allows the plausibility of details and the verisimilitude of the relationships among them to
distract the reader's attention from the "as if" status of the fabula.
Rough and provisional as these parameters may be, they serve as a
sufficient basis for the description of the nonselfreferential novels of manners, novels of social criticism, novels of adventure (fantastic adventure
excluded), historical novels, and romansa clef.
The descriptions of other narrative modes can be obtained by "switching off" or varying these default parameters. An overview of the whole
paradigm is beyond the scope of this paper, whose subject is thefactographic
mode. Obviously, in this mode the first default parameter, the "as if"
status of the fabula, is either entirely absent or aspires to zero: the people
and actions described are "real"-the narratives function as, among other
things, testimonies to their actuality. This radical difference from the default mode is accompanied by possible modifications of other parameters.
Factographic narratives (memoirs, autobiographies, travelogues, diaries,
letters, notebooks, historical compilations, etc.) imply the reader's understanding not only that the characters are historically identifiable people
but also that all the narrative details relate, "centrifugally"(Frye 1957:73),
and most often on a one-to-one basis, to actual events, locations, and
realia. These details, then, tend to be understood not as plausible but as
real (or, at least, as "typical"). Paradoxically,whereas in the realistic mode
the regularities that govern the relationships among narrative details tend
to be exempt from the "as if" status, which is reserved for the details
themselves, in the factographic mode it is a significant proportion of these
regularities that tend to be accorded the "as if" status, as interpretations
or working hypotheses. In other words, a work of realistic fiction that assumes, for instance, the self-evidence and earnestness of the behavioral
patterns that are challenged by some of the readers is perceived (by those
readers) as an artistic failure (Richardson's Pamelais, perhaps, the classic
case); by contrast, a work of documentary prose that extrapolates from
the author's individual experience is not perceived as a failure even if an
individual reader rejects its implication concerning human nature or historical events. In Antoine de Saint-Exupery's autobiographical tale Flight
toArras(1943),for instance, a reconnaissance pilot's undesired but miraculously successful braving of death leads him to a new understanding of his
country's unsuccessful military resistance to the Nazi onslaught and, on
another level, of the constituents and limits of individual identity-one
may reject the fruits of this understanding but still accept the work as an
intense, genuine probing of the issues and a truthful account of the origin
and development of the ideas.
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Within the factographic mode one can distinguish testimony and historiography.The former may be imagined as based on the principle of courtroom evidence,7whereas the latter recounts not the author's firsthand experience but the information obtained through the study of other sources.8
The term the literatureof testimonycan be used in two ways. In its narrower meaning, it connotes an ethical urge on the part of the author-one
usually testifies to crimes, atrocities, upheavals. However, the term is often
expanded and can therefore be given the formalized meaning of "eyewitness accounts," whether or not the author intended to give evidence for or
against specific people or institutions. Memoirs, autobiographies, diaries,
notebooks, and letters are genres of the literature of testimony. They are
not based on historical documents so much as they constitutethem by
recording, "documenting,"testifying to what their authors have witnessed.
The corpus of documentary prose is a segment of the literature of testimony. The main genres of documentary prose-the autobiography and
the memoir-are retrospective, yet the notion can also embrace diaries
that are composed with the intention of being made public (e.g., The Warsaw Diary of ChaimA. Kaplan[1973]).What falls outside its scope is the sointimeand interoffice communications-writing with which
called litterature
one definitely does not mean to address broader audiences. In principle,
however, with the passage of centuries, even these documents can be read
with much the same type of interest as works of art, their private mental
shorthand or official "newspeak"presenting a challenge similar to those of
complex narrative techniques.
7. Todorov(1990[1978]:21-26) notes that genrescan be classifiedaccordingto the speech
acts thatunderliethem(seealso Felmanand Laub1992:5, 114).Courtroomevidencecould
then be imaginedas the speech-actdeep structureof the literatureof testimony,bearingin
mind that an individualworkmay incorporateattitudesthat correspondto more than one
kindof speechact: testimony,for instance,may combinewith apologia(e.g.,Lev Kopelev's
Forever
ToBe Preserved
[1977a])and evenwith touchesof the tall tale of adventure(e.g.,AlexanderDolgun'smemoirs[1976]).
andthe documentarygenresone maylocate
8. On the marginbetweenthe historiographic
worksthat describeboth historicaleventsand the author'sfirsthandresearchinto them.
Arc(1982),a second-degreetestimony
This is the case with Thomas Keneally'sSchindler's
of the Holocaust,in which the researchis impliedand adumbratedratherthan presented.
Outwardlyshapedas a novel, this bookhas actuallyretained,in a modifiedform, only the
secondparameterof realisticfiction:the minordetailsof its fabulaareplausibleratherthan
sectionis, in fact, an integralpart
"factual."The seeminglyparatextualacknowledgments
of the narrative:the namesof survivorsgivenin this sectionmakeclearthe author'ssource
for each episodeandhence the reasonswhy someepisodesaredetailedratherthan others.
Just beyondthe borderlinesof documentaryprosewould be a historicalessay such as
VladimirNabokov's"AbramGannibal"(1964),in which the author'semotions and restrainedbetween-the-linesflightsof imaginationare signaledby stylisticfluctuation;see
Toker1989.
Toker* Towarda Poeticsof DocumentaryProse
193
The genres that make up documentary prose can be further classified
on structural and thematic principles. Structurally they fall into extempore documents (diaries, letters, etc.) and retrospective narratives-memoirs (the emphasis falls on the observation of external reality) and autobiographies (the attention is focused on what Alasdair Maclntyre would
call the fiction of the author's identity. (See Maclntyre 1981:190-209; the
wordfictionhere is used in the sense of "construct.")The thematic division
of documentary prose is entirely a matter of what Todorov (1980 [1973],
1990 [1978]) called "historical genres."9Thus among the works of the recent half-century, one clearly distinguishes the literature of disillusionment
(e.g., The God That Failed [Crossman 1949], Margarete Buber-Neumann's
Die erloschene
Flamme[1978], Joseph Berger's Shipwreck
[1971]),
ofa Generation
the literature of the Holocaust, and the literature of the Gulag-to give
but a few examples. Though such rubrics are thematic, the codification of
each "historical"genre is ultimately based not only on the subject matter
and its concomitant morphology of motifs but also on such features as (in,
for instance, the Gulag literature) the intertwining of individual and communal concerns and the tension between ethical and aesthetic impulses.
2. Generic Features
The switching off of the "as if" parameter is associated with features that
may be considered generic attributesof works of documentary prose: (a) incorporation of three types of material-the public domain, the private
domain, and the domain of privileged access; (b) lack of self-sufficiency;
(c) presence of areas of hesitation; and (d) reflection of different mnemonic processes. These features are closely connected with the problem of
"truth,"a philosophical problem that is insoluble in strictly narratological
terms. The author's claims, implicit or explicit, that what he or she is say9. In his study of the literature of the fantastic, Todorov suggests two approaches to the
problem of genre. One consists in constructing a network of genres, based, preferably, on a
paradigm of abstract features; it systematizes the data and predicts that each of the empty
interstices will eventually be filled, like a slot in the periodic table. The genres described
with the help of such a classification of qualities are "theoretical genres." The other approach proceeds from empirical observation to inductive theorizing: if certain existing works
display a number of common properties and if the relationships among these properties
suggest stable regularities, these works can be regarded as making up a "historical genre"
(1980 [1973]: 13-15, 21). In his later work, Genresin Discourse(1990 [1978]) Todorov neglects
all but the historical genres--that is, genres that are perceived as such at the time of their
appearance. This view is amended by Susan Suleiman's suggestion that the emergence of a
number of works that become recognized as belonging to a new genre may lead to the discovery that works of basically the same genre have existed previously as well, waiting, as it
were, for their specificity to be brought to the surface (1983: 14).
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ing is not make-believe but the truth are no guarantee that the memoirs are
not faked (recall the early literary career of Daniel Defoe) or mendacious
(Russian intellectuals, for instance, tend to disbelieve Irina Odoevtseva's
account in JVaberegakh
Nevy[1988 {1967}] of her relationship with Nikolai
dramatic
or
her
conversation with Andrey Belyi). Every sort of
Gumilyov
internal evidence for the authenticity and truthfulness of an autobiography or a memoir can be fabricated. Ultimately, in documentary prose, as
in realistic fiction, the "truth"of the narrative is a matter of an individual
reader's estimation of the artistic achievement of the work and of the ethical stance of the author.
2.1 TheTestof Deniability
And yet narratological analysis is not entirely helpless in judging the truthfulness of documentary prose. What one must do, however, is reverse the
problem and use, as the point of departure, not the notion of truth but the
notion of deniability,which means that whatever is not effectively denied or
disproved is to be regarded as true (cf. Lang [1990: 38-41] on deniability
in politics). Documentary prose can support its claim to giving a "true account" of its subject by presenting information that is in principle deniable
but, in concrete practice, cannot be denied.
Pieces of information (or narrative details) are potentially deniable if it
makes sense to view them in terms of the true/false distinction. Owing
to the make-believe convention, this is not the case with most statements
concerning fabula details in the realistic mode, if only so long as actions
or features are predicated upon nonexistent subjects: in fact, the degree to
which deniabilitybecomes relevant to a work of fiction can be a measure of
the factographic element of that work (cf. Brinker 1989: 93). In documentary prose the issue of deniability is overwhelming. Indeed, by calling his
memoir of early Vishera concentration camps an "antinovel," Shalamov
(199oa) emphasized that the true/false distinction is of major and immediate importance to all segments of his material, since much of his text is
meant to counterweigh falsifications of history and to stop at least some of
what Orwell might have called "memory holes."
Yet in documentary prose the author-readerpact against the "as if" convention is not a sufficient condition for making statements amenable to the
test of deniability. This test is practically inapplicable to the material pertaining to the private domain: the author is the only authority on his/her
-unutteredthoughts and emotions. In Gulag literature the genre of memoir
dominates over that of autobiography in part because there is the need for
material concerning the public domain, so that the testimony might carry
sufficient ethical weight. In the works of this corpus the autobiographical
Toker? Towarda Poeticsof DocumentaryProse
195
element is sometimes present only minimally, just enough to make it clear
that the author was there to see the things described with his own eyes (see,
e.g., Gliksman 1948 and Lipper 1951).
For authors of Gulag literature (Olitskaya [1971], Ginzburg [1985],
Buber-Neumann [1950], Gilboa [1968], Parvilahti [1959], Panin [1976],
Marchenko [1969], and others) the material belonging to the public domain, for example, the conditions in the prisons and camps, the fate of
individuals, the history of arrests, etc., is not only the central subject but
also the way to challenge possible denials. The authors seek the utmost
precision in their accounts of different periods, places, and people; in the
memoirs published after the main acts of de-Stalinization they also tend
to name the right names. They are aware, however, that a measure of inaccuracy is unavoidable. The test of deniability becomes double-edged:
when camp historians and survivorscorrect Solzhenitsyn's GulagArchipelago
(1978) on minor details, the limited scope of the emendations emphasizes
the fact that the overwhelming bulk of his material passes the test.
Hence the lack (or perhaps disowning) of self-sufficiency in works of
documentary prose. Much as one might wish to rely on the consistency of
internal evidence, the truthfulness of the public-domain materials in an
individual work can be confirmed only by other sources-by historical research or by other works of documentary prose that pertain to the same
period and subject. The need for "the evidence of two"-and preferably
more than two-is expressed in the sketch "Through the Snow" that opens
Shalamov's KOLYMA TALES.'?The sketch describes how prisoners are
employed in trampling down the snow to make roads so that cars and tractors could drive in their wake. The last sentence says that the tractors are
driven "by readers"rather than by "writers"--which forces a reinterpretation of the preceding realistic account in allegorical terms. The snow then
begins to remind us of a blank page. Shalamov says that even the smallest
and weakest man in the group can contribute to the common effort if only
he does not walk entirely in the footsteps of others but himself tramples
down at least some portion of the virgin snow. Indeed, Shalamov sought
to write his own stories in such a way that they would have a liberating
effect on other survivors. Other witnesses would be able to tell what they
knew without being hampered by existing literary conventions, would be
encouraged to support, modify, complement, or correct Shalamov's own
1o. I capitalize the title in order to distinguish Shalamov's main triptych of story cycles
(which has not yet been published in the structure the author intended) from the existing
publications by John Glad (Shalamov 1980, 1981), I. P. Sirotinskaya (Shalamov 1989, 1991,
1992), and Mikhail Geller (Shalamov 1985 [19781).
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testimony-whether that means taking the reader where Shalamov himself had not been or challenging his memories and views.
One might say that seepage between individual works of documentary
prose and their intertextual and extratextual backgrounds is mandatory.
Such works often demonstratively forgo hermetic finish: some are printed
with appendixes and sequels (Solzhenitsyn's OakandtheCa/f[1979], Gustav
Herling's WorldApartin the English version [1951], Anatoly Marchenko's
[1969]); others are supplemented by works with "sequential"
My Testimony
titles (Elie Wiesel's Night [1960 {1958}] and Dawn [1961 {1960}]); and still
others reveal their mutual interdependence with (incomplete) precursor
texts (see, for instance, the story of Lorenzo in Primo Levi's If This Is a
Man [1990 {1958}] and Momentsof Reprieve[1986 {1981}]). History itself
plays havoc with the shape of such works: some of them are, for various reasons, forced to exist in different versions (Shalamov's KOLYMA
TALES, Anatoly Kuznetsov's Babi Tar[1970 {1966}], Solzhenitsyn's semidocumentary The First Circle[1968]). Moreover, what in realistic fiction
would be perceived as aesthetic flaws are in documentary prose perceived
as signs of the author's uncompromising pursuit of factual or moral truth.
Arthur Koestler (1952) has noted that the artistic imperfection of Alexander Weissberg's Conspiracy
of Silence(1952) constitutes one source of its
did
not allow his friends to edit his story cycles
Shalamov
ethical strength;
and purge them of repetitions and contradictions (Aigi 1987).
The test of deniability is not a matter of separate sentences. History can
be distorted precisely by taking advantage of the illusion that if a memoir's
separate public-domain statements cannot be disproven, then the work
is telling the truth. A case in point is Boris Dyakov's Taleof Past Experience[Povest' o perezhitom] (1966), one of the most notorious of the Gulag
memoirs written by "loyalists"(see Solzhenitsyn 1978:part 3, chap. 11)who
remained servants of the regime throughout and after their imprisonment.
Dyakov seems to be particularly careful not to make any statements about
specific people or events in his camp that could be straightforwardlyand
in good faith denied by other witnesses or by archival research;his memoir
is, moreover, complete with parascholarly footnotes that record the further
experiences of some of the people whom he met in the camps. Nevertheless, the book is mendacious in its selection of evidence for the purpose of
presenting camp life as quite bearable and defusing some of the most important issues raised in the works of other survivors. In a sense, the author
has an alibi: he worked as a clerk in a camp hospital and throughout his
imprisonment never spent more than half a day at "general works."Thus,
from where he stood, things might indeed have appeared much better than
they really were-unless one chose to look more closely. Dyakov did not
Toker* Towarda Poeticsof DocumentaryProse
197
choose to do so, and he dramatizes the latter aspect of his alibi by recording how he actually turned away in order not to see a terminal hospital
patient (obviously dying of starvation); he also falsifies the issue of the
effects of chronic starvation by misdescribing the patient's body as that of
"the human mummy"--an example of the way in which one can attempt
to subvert some of the central topical issues of camp literature. As is well
known, however, a person canbe blamed for not knowing certain things-for not placing himself in a position from which he could have seen them.
It is all too easy to criticize Dyakov for commenting on his experience
in such a way as to serve the goals of the party propaganda in and after
the last days of Khrushchev's "thaw"-this would not suffice to show that
his work fails the test of deniability. Therefore, in order to dismantle the
patterns into which separate details converge in Dyakov's narrative, Solzhenitsyn (1978: 348, 351) attacks the moral significance of his "perspective"- suggesting not only that Dyakov did not take the trouble to look at
things that his position in the camps allowed him to ignore but also that
he must have employed questionable means in order to maintain that position (in other words, that he must have been a stool pigeon). As far as the
test of deniability is concerned, the first part of the argument and the presence of rival Gulag narratives (e.g., Lev Konson's Kratkiepovesti[1983], set
in approximately the same region where Dyakov's hospital was located)
would have been sufficient even without the second part.
2.2 An Area of Hesitation
The test of deniability is only partly (and with much caution) applicable to
the material that belongs to the privileged-access domain, which consists
mainly of private interviews and of "survivorreports"in the narrow sense
of these words (cf. Job i: 15--"and I only am escaped alone to tell you").
Authors of documentary prose make a point of recording their encounters with well-known personalities, if they have had any. This is a
matter not of privilege but of credibility: a well-known person functions
as a public-domain landmark. The domain of privileged access includes,
rather, unwitnessed communication, whether with famous or ordinary
people, as well as reports about particularly harsh conditions under which
no one else may have survived and of specific places from which no one else
the "special wing," of the Gorky
may have returned. (E.g., the spetzkorpus,
detention facilities in Victor Herman's ComingOutof theIce[1979]: whether
or not others survived the interrogations that took place in that particular
torture prison, one may accept the general truthfulness of Herman's account of the atrocities endured there, if only because survivor testimonies
from other prisons verify that his story is anything but exceptional.) In the
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case of survivor reports, the test of deniability can take the shape of the
critique of sources practiced in historical research, but there may remain a
margin of hesitation similar but not identical to that of nonfictional narratives of parapsychological (not to say supernatural)experience. This is but
one of the several areas of hesitation in documentary prose.
Another such area is, as mentioned above, that of private interviews. In
contrast to survivor reports, here minuteness of detail can be counterproductive. The longer and more detailed the scenically rendered dialogues in
documentary prose, the less credible they appear: with the fictional firstperson narrative conventions ruled out, after a passage of time it does not
seem possible for an author to remember and faithfully record the minute
details of long dialogues-this is one reason why the rich scene of Irina
Odoevtseva's conversation with Belyi (1988: 219-34) defeats its own purpose. The problem of memory will be discussed in the next section; here
it will suffice to note that far more successful, from the point of view of
credibility, are compressed accounts of conversations and scenes, especially those in which summaries of parts of scenes lead up to one or several
memorable utterances presented in direct speech. This technique is often
used by, for instance, Primo Levi, Shalamov, and Solzhenitsyn. Another
technique, one that eschews the problem of precision and thickens the
subjective coloring of the narrative, is that of telescoping a person's typical utterances or position statements made on different occasions into an
avowedly artificial single "dramatic monologue." This procedure is used,
with deftness and philological subtlety, in the memoirs of Lev Kopelev,
Forever
(1977)and EaseMy Sorrows(1983).
especially in ToBe Preserved
the reader may hesitate between
access
of
In the domain
privileged
accepting the material as true or mendacious-or else as precise or approximate. Leaving the private domain out of consideration for a while,
let us now turn to a different area of hesitation, one in which the borderline between the factographic and the realistic modes becomes blurredin other words, where one cannot quite decide whether and to what extent
the "as if" convention might, after all, be operative." This area centers
around two phenomena frequently encountered in documentary prose: the
changed-name convention and the massive inclusion of "iterative"scenes
and events (cf. Genette 1980: 116).
1i. Todorov believes that the essence of the genre of the fantastic is precisely a hesitation between the possibilities of the natural and the supernatural explanation of the fabula events
(see 1980 [1973]: 42). I would not make a parallel claim for documentary prose but would
say that areas of hesitation between, to put it roughly, "fiction and fact" are one of the inescapable features of the genre. It is, moreover, a feature that can yield quite interesting
artistic effects.
Toker* Towarda Poeticsof DocumentaryProse
199
Authors of documentary prose often refer to the people they portray
by invented names-mainly in order to protect them. It stands to reason
that when the people involved have to be protected from the vengeance
of the regime attacked in a specific work of documentary prose, not only
their names but also some of their distinctive features must be changed. (I
believe that this is partly the case with the camp memoirs of Margarete
Buber-Neumann; Elinor Lipper, on the other hand, simply avoided naming names.) These ethically determined departures from precision may
look like a development in the direction of the romana clef.In fact, however,
they are but a small step away from the employment of the classical "as if"
convention (plausible actions and features predicated upon nondocumentable characters). Solzhenitsyn, indeed, takes that step in OneDay in theLife
of IvanDenisovich(1963),where the protagonist is a fictional construct (convenient for the author's purposes in various ways), but several other characters, such as Captain Buinovskii, are actually "based on real people,"
while their physical and moral environment and patterns of conduct are
typical of a particular kind of camp at a particular period (see Toker 1992).
For "typical" one may here read "iterative":this is the kind of thing that
would happen many times with but minor variations. Solzhenitsyn's tale
(and, in fact, his novel The First Circle[1968], built on similar principles)
lies in the area where the realistic and the factographic modes overlap.
The same is true for most of Shalamov's stories. Shalamov places emphatically factual sketches, such as "Through the Snow," and obviously
directly autobiographical stories, such as "My Trial" or "Courses,"side by
side with quite as obviously fictional narratives. "Individual Assignment,"
for instance, relates the experiences and thoughts of a man who is supposed
to be executed after the last sentence of the story-the author could not
have had this experience firsthand. Between these two extremes there are
stories that leave us wondering: do the "I" of"Sententia," Krist of "Handwriting," or Andreev of "Typhoid Quarantine" represent the author himself? Does their experience reflect what Shalamov himself underwent or
observed? Does anonymity or the change of the name signify possible recombinations of various elements of the author's experience? Practically,
the only possible answer to such questions is that "such things happened"
and probably more than once and to more than one person. Owing to total
physical depletion, the identities of the characters of Shalamov's Gulag
stories are almost indistinguishable, and their life stories in the camps unfold along similar lines. These things happened, the author seems to say,
if not to A, then to B--since this is how it worked, with but minor differences. So long as some of the minor differences are reflected in the text, the
story can be read as presenting boththe common fate and the individual
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lot. By placing us in the area of hesitation, the author invites us to treat the
stories as true(whether in the singular or the iterative sense) and yet also
to ask of them the kinds of aesthetic questions that are usually reserved for
works of fiction. The hesitation concerning the test of deniability has, apparently, artistic potentials of its own.
In fact, documentary prose often contains stark scenes avowedly shaped
as iterative. For instance, in order to show us how it could happen that a
fellow prisoner could be sold for a cigarette, Dimitri Panin quotes, as it
were, a "typical" dialogue between freelance stool pigeons and a security
operative in the camp (1976: 117).From here it is only one step to the realmir[World under convoy]
istic mode: Aleksandr Vardi's novel Podkonvoinyi
(1971)is largely constructed of such iterative scenes, with the individual
aspect of the experience presented rather schematically. Shalamov plants
deliberate anachronisms in his play AnnaIvanovna(some of the details set
the action in the late 1930s while others pertain to the late 1940s) in order
to stress the iterative character of its events: such, he seems to say, are
the mechanics of camp relationships, prewar and postwar (see Shalamov
1986)-plus fa change,plus c'estla memechose.Here deniability of detail is, as
in the metafictional mode, built into the plot. Its effect is to emphasize the
author's belief in the truthfulness of his view of the regularities that govern these details, yet also to foreground his awareness of the contingency
of this view. Shalamov believed in his right to the expression of opinion,
while denying literature the right to "teach." Quite a number of his techniques may be accounted for by the tension between these two principles:
he sought ways of conveying authentic truths that broke with literary conventions (he insisted, for instance, that if friendship is born in adversity,
the adversity is not bad enough) as well as with conventions of the history
of ideas (he denied, for instance, the ennobling effect of suffering), yet he
did not seek to shape those truths as iconic.
In documentary prose the ratio between the deniability of details and
the deniability of the regularities that govern them may stand in inverse
coproportion. In Shalamov's AnnaIvanovnathe deniability of details (the
and
and
relationships) actually sugpostwar objects
presence of prewar
of the insights
the
wide
in
belief
author's
the
applicability
strong
gests
that the play dramatizes: two different periods are telescoped together, yet
it is shown that the same type of inhumanity and corruption obtains in
both. By contrast, in a number of Shalamov's stories the philosophical or
12
psychological conclusions that the focalizers draw from their private ex12. I use the term focalizer following Genette's (1980: 186-89) distinction between the
"focus,"or "focal character,"through whose eyes the narrated events are presented, and the
Toker * Toward a Poetics of Documentary Prose
201
perience are called into question either by their further experience ("The
Day Off") or by the same experience rethought ("Quiet").'3The artistic
effect of Shalamov's tales partly hinges on their deconstructions of facile
message-hunting responses to the atrocities of the Gulag, whether these responses are represented in the text or brought to it by the reader.Whereas
the romana thesecreates circumstances that bear out the author's explicitly
formulated thesis (Suleiman 1983: lo-11), Shalamov's kind of documentary
prose evokes "facts"that subject such dictato doubt. Solzhenitsyn likewise
attacks reader attitudes drawn from quotidian experience, with its pat defenses against the irruption of dangerous kinds of knowledge.14
2.3 Memory:Displacementand Return
Authors of retrospective documentary prose often record reflections on the
workings of their memory. Yet even if they neglect this issue completely,
their narratives are first and foremost memory narratives.
As suggested above, the test of deniability cannot apply to the material
pertaining to the private domain, yet the handling of this material is often
precisely what determines the artistic power of the text. The rendering
of the private-domain material is, actually, a problem of the relationship
between memory and discourse, a problem that compounds that of rendering the nonverbal aspects of reality in language and that obviously also
extends to the material of the public and the privileged-access domains.
I propose to approach this problem via the distinction between "displacement" and "return,"based on Wolfgang Iser's (1993) exploration of a distinction between the fictive and the imaginary.
Displacement.Iser described the act of fictionalization in a literary text
as that of selection and recombination of material under the aegis, as it
were, of the "as if" convention (1993: 4-10). In documentary prose, the
"as if" convention is a "switched-off" parameter (though it may linger in
the borderline cases mentioned above), but selection and recombination
of material are practically ubiquitous. These two processes are what, for
want of a better term, I shall here refer to as displacement.
Even if one leaves aside the issue of the dependence of "hardfacts"upon
interpretation, it is obvious that what is rendered in retrospective documentary narratives, even in the public domain, is a selection from the con"voice," that is, the person who is supposed to be performing the narrative act. In Shalamov's stories the focalizer is usually a concentration-camp prisoner, whereas the "voice" is
that of the veteran who is rethinking his experience after his release from the camps.
13. For a detailed discussion of these stories see Toker 1991and 1993.
14. On responses to reports of atrocities see Koestler 1945; on knowledge as amenity and on
"dangerous knowledge" see Harrison 1991:1-8.
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tent of an individual memory rather than an unimpeachably "hard"fact.
Despite the substitution of deniability for the "as if" parameter, documentary narratives are, like realistic ones, based on acts of selection and recombination of elements of reality. A degree of displacement in the factographic mode is as unavoidable as a degree of testimony in realistic fiction.
In retrospectivedocumentary prose the process of displacement is triple:
it starts with the unavoidable selectivity of perception, continues with unavoidably selective storage (memory), and is completed by further sieving and rearrangement in the process of writing. Memory plays a similar
mediating role in the writing of realistic fiction, yet there is a major quantitative difference: the displacements that take place in documentary prose
are limited in scope. In other words, while every kind of displacement that
occurs in the production of documentary prose can also take place in realistic fiction, the reverse is not true. In the composition of a novel or a canonical short story, the incursions upon reality made in order to select and
recombine fabula details involve a recombination of a much wider range
of units and nodes of meaning.
In documentary prose the limitations of the range of displacement (in
comparison with the displacements in realistic fiction) are different for
what Roland Barthes has called "the semic code" (which can be understood as made up of the units of meaning pertaining to the features of
characters, objects, and setting) and the "proairetic code," or the code of
actions (see Barthes 1974 [1970]: 18-19). As far as the semic code is concerned, what is selected and recombined in the novel are not merely characters to be portrayed but also their separate features: for the image of
Dolly Haze, for instance, Nabokov may have used the arm of one little girl,
the face of another, and the voice of a third. Authors of documentary prose
refrain from lifting a feature from one remembered person and giving it
to another; they work with larger memory clusters. In this respect, about
the only licenses that they share with authors of realistic fiction are (a) the
freedom to re-create the portrait of A and leave out the portrait of B who,
in actual fact, may have been in the vicinity of A, and (b) the freedom
to arrange their gallery of portraits or landscapes in a temporal sequence
based on a thematic (or any other) principle and not reflecting the actual
chronology of the encounters.
As far as actions and events (the proairetic code) are concerned, the ratio
of the commutable material is different. In a reconstruction of the scenes
of the past the authors of documentary prose may, consciously or unconsciously, reshuffle minor narrative details (who said what or who closed the
door or offered a cigarette) in terms of sequence and attribution-unless
such details are symptoms of character traits, ideological positions, affilia-
Toker * Toward a Poetics of Documentary Prose
203
tions, or knowledgeability. Such a reshuffling, however, is a question not
of license but of permissible inaccuracy. On the other hand, authors of
documentary prose are not free to redistribute larger clusters or sequences
of actions (equivalent to "plot lines"). Solzhenitsyn's First Circle(1968) is
a case in point. The book is based on the author's authentic experience
at the in-camp research institute whose name is only slightly altered and
whose history is condensed for the sake of the dramatic unities; it contains,
moreover, a near-comprehensive paradigm of the issues of personal and
academic freedom under a totalitarian regime. All the same, the narrative
is a realistic novel (largely a romana clef) rather than a work of documentary prose-not so much because it changes the names of the "real
people" who served as models for its characters but because it inverts or
transposes "plot lines." For instance, Solzhenitsyn makes his Sologdin, the
character based on the historical Dimitri Panin, offer his scramblerproject
to the authorities in a bid for freedom, instead of burning its drafts upon
ascertaining their scientific correctness as the "real" Panin had done; he
also gives Sologdin the love affair that, judging by an episode in Kopelev's
Ease My Sorrows(1983), in reality "belonged" to the character who served
as model for Rubin. Thus deniable actions are attributed to characters in
whom, given the key, one may recognize "real people"-which means that
the "as if" convention is again in force.
Return.If the consideration of the range of displacement in documentary prose is a question of deniability on the one hand and the limits of
the genre on the other, it is not a helpful lead to the problem of the artistic
effect of an individual work. Obviously, artistic achievement is largely a
matter of individual estimation, yet the possibility of a wide consensus on
this matter suggests that narratological exploration (beyond the analysis of
purely stylistic excellence) can go at least part of the way toward accounting for the artistic merit of some works of documentary prose.
The artistic effect of a work of documentary prose is bound up with the
vividness, the energeia,with which it evokes a vision of the reality that is
unfamiliar to the reader. Moreover, the success of a work of documentary
prose depends on its making us accept its material as the truth. The impression of the work'sgiving us the truth is fatally undermined if this work
fails the test of deniability outside the acceptable range of displacement;
yet, when no such failure occurs, the truth is felt to be beyond the question
of deniability. In other words, nondeniability is a necessary but not a sufficient condition of the artistic power of a documentary text. I believe that
its other necessary supplement is our sense of mnemonic
return.The caveat
here is that this element of reader response can be evoked by narrative
techniques that merely simulatethe mnemonic phenomenon in question:
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the background of hesitation on this matter is an integral feature of the
aesthetic effect of a work of documentary prose.
Two kinds of memory are involved in the writing of documentary prose,
both helpfully described by Henri Bergson (1911):mechanical memory and
spontaneous memory. The former kind is a bodily habit, lost if not exercised, such as the memory for dates, names, sequences of events, spatial
or visual arrangements, texts. Needless to say, for a historian the material
provided by this kind of relational memory is of primary interest since it
can be most readily subjected to the test of deniability.
The second type of memory is not subservient to the will: this spontaneous ("genuine") memory is often called up in mysterious ways by unexpected stimuli, and is capable of producing pictures, visual or verbal,
of greater vividness (or what physicists call better resolution) than can be
brought back by mechanical memory (Bergson 1911:93-103). Mechanical memory may be the source of the deniable contour of the text, of the
text's "digital" configuration, its discrete constituents. By contrast, Bergson's "genuine memory" is as generous as it is capricious, as overwhelming
as it is rare.'5Memory that is somehow related to what has been elsewhere
described as "a spell," a touch of "magic," "the grace beyond the reach
of art," can weld together the discrete products of the fictionalizing acts,
can make them converge into a mood, an atmosphere, a sense of emotive
foothold, or any other version of the "analogue" (cf. Iser 1993: 275). It can
conjure up overdetermined scenes and dramatic actions of quite extraordinary subtlety. The "nondeniability" of such scenes (often belonging to
the domain of privileged access) may be problematic: one has to keep in
mind not merely the caveat that fabrication is possible, but also the obvious fact that in dramatizing private and privileged-access events, all memoirists may be half-creating what they think they recall. The credibility of
the narratives of such events is enhanced when they are firmly placed in
the frameworkconstructed by mechanical memory amenable to the test of
deniability; but it is nevertheless safe to assume that a degree of displacement, conscious or unconscious, may have accompanied such a return of
the past. This theoretical assumption, however, tends to lose its relevance
in the reading of truly artistic works of documentary prose.
is to returnwhat Iser's "fictive"is to the "Imaginary."
In fact, displacement
Iser reserves the term Imaginaryfor the nonverbal artistic substratum that
is beyond the control of the author's will, has no intentionality or inde15. In fact, spontaneous memory may counteract the original insufficiency of conscious perception: "something is 'remembered' which could never have been 'forgotten' because it was
never at any time noticed-was never conscious" (Freud 1958 [1914]: 149).
Toker* Towarda Poeticsof DocumentaryProse
205
pendent shape, and can gain articulation only through the medium of the
fictive.'6Like spontaneous memory return, the Imaginary partakes of the
nature of an event (Iser 1993: 171-94), or, if one wishes, an advent. Its
sources are associated with "inspiration"(in whatever terms this metaphor
may be explicated), with the unconscious, with unverbalized intuitions,
with dreams.
In some of the best works of documentary prose the unfolding of spontaneous memory is the equivalent of the Imaginary. It draws the reader into
a special pact: we are implicitly requested not just to exempt minor details
of remembered scenes from the test of deniability but also to receivethese
scenes as "brought back"by genuine memory, or as "relived"by the author
in the process of writing. Once this pact takes effect, the scenes in question
may be understood as yielding, if not more reliable truth, then a richer
(and probably profounder) insight than verifiable historical testimony.
One of the main problems of Holocaust literatureand its study (the same
is to a large extent true of the vast literature of the Gulag) is the inadequacy
of the communicative function of language and the powerlessness of traditional aesthetic forms in the face of the unimaginable experience that the
authors must record (see Rosenfeld 1980: 6-8, 96-114). The memoirists
undertake to present the actual facts that they have observed; and the bare
reference to these facts, even if reduced to statistics, can, in principle, evoke
horror and outrage. But an approximation of an understanding of the
events in question is not a matter of plain factography. An individual witness is often given to see only a segment of what David Rousset (1947)has
called "l'univers
concentrationnaire"
and can reach a "truer"understanding of
own
his/her
experience only retroactively,by comparison with other testimonies or by deduction from historical research (see Fackenheim 1975:27).
Yet the way to insight may also pass through an inductive method based
on the processing of spontaneous memory. Scenes conjured up by Primo
Levi, Varlam Shalamov, or Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (in the autobiographical portions of The GulagArchipelago
[1978]), complete with details beyond
the catalogs of mechanical memory, often contain semiotic double bottoms
that for various reasons are not spelled out in the text yet reward exactly
the kind of thematic analysis that one applies to some of the best works of
fiction (see Toker 1991).The first chapter of The GulagArchipelago
is devoted
to the subject of the arrest; it is permeated with the theme of the need
16. The fictionalizing act "provides a frame for what is to be captured, but the intention of
the act does not provide a concrete picture to fill the frame. At best, it provides an empty
idea that requires substantiation. Without the imaginary, the fictive would remain an empty
form of consciousness, but without the fictive, the imaginary would not be able to appear"
(Iser 1993: 234).
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to resist arrest, as well as of the need to resist every kind of what, in the
language of behavioral psychology, can be called the "aversivebehavior"
(Skinner 1972: 26-31) of the authorities and their servants. Much of Solzhenitsyn's authorial commentary may be read as preaching rather than
as insight, and yet the chapter's final pages arouse no such ambivalent response. Here Solzhenitsyn tells of his own experience following his arrest
at the front lines in East Prussia;the end of the chapter reads precisely as a
case of the return of genuine memory, thematically appropriate but obviously not employed to drive home any point. The finale of the chapter is
the account of the morning after the arrest: the group of arrested officers,
Solzhenitsyn among them, having spent the night locked up in a farmhouse cellar, are led out to the yard to defecate; on this occasion, a mildly
comic dialogue between one of the officers and a convoy guard suddenly
unfolds the issue of resistance to aversive control with absolute persuasiveness-even though (or perhaps because) it is set against the background
of one of the most humiliating predicaments in which a human being can
find himself. This scene, linked to the preceding narrative by the shared
surface theme of arrest and by such semantic undercurrentsas the focus on
resistance to aversive control is a case of "genuine" memory, the reliving
of the past. It shows how the author's "soul labours"(Wordsworth1974:71)
over the data of experience, and it goes a long way toward bearing out the
belief that only an artistic medium can convey something of the realities
of wartime prisons, concentration camps, and other realms of experience
that are felt to be beyond the reach of plain communication.
The return of the memory can give the reader much more of the flavor
of the "real"experience than is available in the most objectively balanced
and comprehensive historical analysis or the most meticulous mechanical
recollection of public-domain materials. Spontaneous memory can "bring
back" not only "scenes" of the past but also complex separate sensations,
emotions, or attitudes: the artist may adjust his medium to such memories
so as to give them the maximum "resolution"and to minimize the simplifications involved in hand-me-down schemata of language or thought. As
suggested above, it is on the success of such an endeavor that the artistic
value of a work of documentary prose often depends. Shalamov frequently
compared the art of documentary prose to the art of photography. Indeed,
the optimization of the attitude in the former is as all-important as the
"angle" in the latter; and this optimization (also a crucial parameter in
much modern poetry) is intertwined with the search for truthfulness beyond "deniability,"truthfulness achieved not merely by a determination
to reject any party line or culture-bound lies, and not merely by the selfcorrection of memory, but also by a rejection of traditional literary styles
Toker * Toward a Poetics of Documentary Prose
207
and philosophical schemata as alien to the entirely new type of thing that
is to be told.17
3. RhetoricalPrinciples
The aesthetic merit of works of documentary prose can also be considered within the frameworksof two rhetorical approaches ("rhetorical"because they deal with the communicative aspect of narratives, in ways that
raise aesthetic issues). Shalamov's letters to Solzhenitsyn indicate that the
two writers disagreed on the problem of the position that an author of
documentary prose should occupy vis-a-vis his material and his readers.
Solzhenitsyn seems to believe that the author should arrange his material
from a perspective similar to that of the uninitiated reader; Shalamov, that
the author should speak from "inside"his material (Shalamov 199ob:71if.):
not from the position of a spectator but from that of a participant with
an intimate knowledge of the "world"described. In The GulagArchipelago,
when talking, for instance, about spiritual growth sometimes caused by the
Gulag experience (1978:part 4, chap. i), Solzhenitsyn does, indeed, process
his subject matter in accordance with the conceptual framework brought
along from the "normal" world. The standards of dignity, resistance, and
supererogation that he applies to the conduct of the people he describes
are taken from "ordinary"life in society- as well as from some of the traditions of classical Russian literature. As a result, the chapter in question is
less powerful intellectually and aesthetically than the chapters devoted to
the camp mores, the sociology of the camp inmates, and autobiographical
moments- chapters in which Solzhenitsyn tends to structure the material
according to concepts born within camp reality. Even here, however, the
ordering of the material is sometimes didactic: the reader is "instructed"
17. In fact, opinions about the artistic merit of a work of documentary prose may differ
precisely on the issue of the work's reproducing or subverting traditional cultural codes.
Alexander Zholkovsky (1988), for instance, has pointed out the same cultural pattern in a
story by Tolstoy, a story by Zoshchenko, and a chapter from the camp memoirs of Evgeniya Ginzburg. The recurrence of such patterns gives Ginzburg's KrutoyMarshrut(1985 [1967,
1979]) (English version: Into the Whirlwind[1968] and Withinthe Whirlwind[1981]) a secure
place in traditional Russian literary history. Some readers may regard this as evidence of the
high artistic value of her work; others, however, may perceive her automatic allegiance to
the thought patterns of this tradition as inappropriate to the subject matter of her memoir:
her probing of camp realities seems to have stopped short of radical subversion. The chapter in question ends with Ginzburg's outraged response to a case of cannibalism: the reader
cannot but sympathize with this response, and yet Ginzburg's treatment of the issue of cannibalism in the camps seems superficial when compared to the handling of this theme in,
for instance, the stories of Lev Konson. Her recourse to traditional cultural patterns
may, in
fact, be viewed as an evasion.
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in camp realities according to the pedagogical principle of escalating difficulty, the starting point usually being the familiar surface reality as created
by Soviet education with its shallowly traditional "humanistic"values.
Shalamov's approach posits a radical break with such a starting point.
Shalamov believed that the literature of the future would (like his own
"new prose") be written not by "novelists" but by people who would be
"experts in their work and in their soul" and who would also have a gift
for writing. By "work"he meant all kinds of employment, voluntary or
forced. This is why his idea of "new prose" involved a record of experience
in which the author participated notin theroleof a writerbut as a goldsmith
and sculptor (e.g., Benvenuto Cellini [1960 {1949}]), or a pilot (e.g., SaintExupery [1943]), or an army officer (e.g., Boris Gorbatov [1964]).18One
could expand the list to embrace a slave in Maryland (FrederickDouglass
[1963 {1845}]), a chemist (Primo Levi [1985 {1973}]), a KZ Hdftling(examples numerous), a resident alien on the run (Koestler [1941]), etc. Some
of Shalamov's most interesting aesthetic achievements lie precisely in his
tour-de-force accounts of what is so difficult to render in literature-the
monotonous slave labor in the gold mines, exhausting because of the interminable hours, the tedium, and the disgusting conditions (g99oa: 20925). Despite the retrospective character of his account, Shalamov insists
on presenting the camp realities from the position of an imaginative solidarity with an inmate: the author of documentary prose is "Pluto who
has risen from Hades, not Orpheus who has descended there" (Shalamov
1989: 549).
Hemingway, according to Shalamov, remained a tourist in Spain, no
matter how long he fought in Madrid. "New prose," Shalamov went on to
say, "rejects this principle of tourism. The writer is not an observer, not a
spectator, but a participant in the drama of life" (ibid.: 549).19In the story
"The Necktie" he contrasts the two rhetorical principles:
It has so farbeen a requirementof successthatthe writershouldbe a foreigner
in the land aboutwhichhe writes.That he shouldwritefromthe point of view
18. The reciprocal appreciation of virtuosimay have played a significant role in Shalamov's
interest in such authors. Consider Cellini's interruption of the account of his legal tribulations with a lengthy compliment to the functioning of French judges: "I have always
this
delighted in watching and experiencing every kind of skill; so I would not have lost
spectacle for much" (1960 [1949]: 291).
19. In a similar vein Saint-Exupery writes: "The notion of looking on at life has always
been hateful to me. What am I if I am not a participant? In order to be, I must participate.
I am fed by the quality that resides in those who participate with me.... I have mentioned
that because I was a writer I might have enjoyed certain advantages, certain liberties in this
war. I might for example have been free to leave Group 2-33 the day I no longer approved
of what I was ordered to do. But that kind of liberty I reject almost with terror" (1943: 121).
Toker* Towarda Poeticsof DocumentaryProse
209
of the people, with their interests and horizons, among whom he has been
brought up and acquired his habits, tastes, views. The writer uses the language
of those, whose spokesman he is. And no more. If the writer knows his material
too well, those for whom he writes will not understand him. He has reneged,
gone over to his material.
One should not know one's material too well. This is true for all the writers
of the past and of the present, but the prose of the future demands different
things. It is not writers who will speak, but professionals who possess the gift for
writing. And they will tell only what they know and have seen. Accuracy-that
is the force of the literature of the future. (Shalamov 1985 [1978]: 152)
History seems to be on Shalamov's side: with the breakdown of the traditional Soviet education, brought about by the recent demise of the Soviet
empire, Solzhenitsyn's massive assault on it has become outdated-though
one has to bear in mind that, in historical terms, this assault may have
played a role in helping to create the cultural climate in which "the second
Russian Revolution" has taken place; ironically, Solzhenitsyn's rhetoric
may have contributed to its own cancellation.
However that might be, the main flaw of the "tourist" approach lies not
so much in its inherently facile defamiliarization of the objects observed
(for an overnight guest many things will be strange in his host's mansion)
but in its tendency to smooth the reader's entrance into a reality that is
strange enough in itself.2 To approximate an understanding of this reality
one should, it seems, undergo the shock of initiation, a personal experience of liminality; only then does one begin to study the unknown and
probably end up with a newly estranged view of one's own familiar world.
Incidentally, it is mainly in his ideologically oriented attempts to facilitate access to his texts, intellectually as well as emotionally, that Solzhenitsyn approaches the "tourist" position. Despite his occasional dogmatism,
Solzhenitsyn cannot be accused of the superficiality we usually associate
with guest narratives: his books on the Gulag reveal the inner workings of
the system with an insight comparable to that of Shalamov.2' This holds
even for the tale "Matryona's House" (1970) (the title ought to have been
translated as "Matryona's Farmstead"), dealing with the life of peasants,
20. For this point I am indebted to Professor Michael Scammell.
21. Shalamov's criticism of OneDay in theLife of IvanDenisovichmainly concerned Solzhenitsyn's choosing to describe a camp in which the conditions were relatively bearable (the
choice was wise, given that no camp narratives had yet broken through Soviet censorship).
Only in a few instances does Shalamov also point to details that signal a simplified attitude
or an incomplete understanding (e.g., the author's treatment of Fetyukov and the captain).
On the other hand, he has high praise for such minor details as Shukhov's throwing down
the mop without wringing it out after he has washed the floors in the guards' room (199ob:
64-65).
210
PoeticsToday18:2
which Solzhenitsyn observed rather than really participated in. His authorial persona here is not, primarily, that of a writer in search of copy but
that of an ex-prisoner who takes the low-profile job of a schoolteacher in
a backwater village in order to write about a totally different sort of thing
and who is then confronted with realities that he has neither anticipated
nor sought. A concentration-camp historian in hiding, he does not belong
to the peasant world he depicts, but neither is he a guest who stays for the
night: he lives in this world for many months, playing a peripheral role in
its events. According to a Russian saying, in order to come to know people,
one should eat a pood(fifty kilograms) of salt with them-but then salt can
be a deficit commodity. "Matryona'sHouse" is a work of fiction situated on
the borderline of documentary prose, partly overlapping with this genre.2
Forwriters of documentary prose, the role models of Pluto and Orpheus
involve conflicting, or perhaps complementary, positions on the issue of
aesthetic effect. Solzhenitsyn seems to lean toward the Shklovskian doctrine of defamiliarization that pitted itself against A. Potebnia's (actually
Herbert Spencer's) theory of art as "economy of effort" (see Shklovsky
1965: 3-24; Spencer 1959: 9-64; Erlich 1969: 26). According to Shklovsky,
the effect of a work of art is not economy of the reader's attention-the
work does not seek to enhance the efficiency of the reading process, on the
contrary, it prolongs the reader's attention to its subject matter by presenthas held
ing it in an unfamiliar way. This theory of estrangement (ostranenie)
sway over a great deal of literary scholarship in the past decades, since it
A proximate location on the map of genres, just beyond the margins of the documentary,
can perhaps be granted to Agnon's ironically titled novel A GuestfortheNight(1968), based on
the author's visit to his native town in 1930: the visit lasted five days but is fictionally transformed into an almost yearlong stay, creating a complex interplay of profound familiarity
and defamiliarization as well as the effect of inverse proportion between the deniability of
fabula detail and the authoritativeness of moral insight. Only at the end of the novel does
the first-person narrator (whose biography replicates Agnon's own) mention that he is a
writer: it is not as a writer in search of materials but as a scholar seeking "to revive the old
values of Jewish learning" (Shaked 1989: 144) or a sentimental traveler seeking a "generic
sense of security in the old study-house world" (Hochman 1970: 119)that he appears in the
microcosmos of Szibusz. As his quests are frustrated and he becomes a somewhat reluctant
witness of the economic and spiritual impoverishment of this once-flourishing Jewish community, the novel begins to unfold as a complex and baffling pattern of digressions (Shaked
1989: 137, 142) and returns (Hochman 1970: 122), both on the level of the story and on that
of the discourse. Incidentally, the fact that the exact psychological reasons why the narrator
of A GuestfortheNighttarries in Szibusz for a long time, away from his wife and children, are
never made quite clear or convincing is in tune with a distinct tendency observable in works
that lie on the border between fiction and documentary prose: they make their counterfactual fictionalizations self-betraying, whether through inconsistencies (Dostoyevski's Houseof
theDead [1959]), through the copresence of different versions (Solzhenitsyn's First Circle),or
through a recycling of fabula details (Shalamov's KOLYMA TALES).
22.
Toker * Toward a Poetics of Documentary Prose
211
was relevant not only to the Russian poetry of the "Silver Age" but also to
romantic poetry and to modernist and postmodernist works like those of
William Carlos Williams, Vladimir Nabokov, and Jorge Luis Borges. The
theory has been so influential that the equally ample scholarship (especially narratological studies of techniques that produce subliminal effects
on the reader23)that lends implicit support to Spencer's central insight
avoids referring to the formula of "economy."In fact, it may be Spencer's
problematic way of arguing his point that makes the notion of "economy
of effort" ideologically suspect. One tends to forget that the theory of the
dynamics of the aesthetic norm developed by Jan Mukarovsky, one of the
most prominent representatives of the Prague Circle, which gave further
life to the Russian Formalist school, also posits "the basic law of the conservation of energy" as the implicit norm and the "maximum expenditure
of energy" associated with Shklovsky's ostranenie as a deviation effective
only because of the underlying presence of the norm (Mukarovsky 1970:
31). Mukarovskygoes on to say that either of these two opposite principles
can become dominant (cf. Jakobson 1978)- against the background of the
other-at different periods of literary history and in different schools or
genres.
In documentary prose it is the aesthetics of the economy of attention that
predominates, since such prose usually aims to communicate the maximum information about its subject while working its (and the reader's)way
to the achievement of the optimal attitude toward its material. The latter
intention, the goal of the rhetorical aspect of the text, places a limit on the
former: attempts to purge one's attitudes of idol-of-the-marketplace patness and to block avenues of simplification involve presenting information
in a way that makes it assimilable with some measure of cooperative effort
on the part of the reader (the principle here being reasonable
economy
rather than elimination of effort: the reader is not expected, and should
not expect, to be passive and undemandingly entertained). This entails not
only a judicious weeding out of irrelevancies, a restriction of pathos, and
similar exercises of tact and taste, but also a provision of sufficient food
for thought. In documentary prose, the rhetoric of the
economy of effort
(or rather the optimal-effort rhetoric) ultimately amounts to the maximum
semantic density short of obfuscation.
To illustrate the rhetoric of documentary prose I shall discuss Shala23. Examples include Wayne Booth's pioneering study of tendencies in the relationship between a number of narrative techniques and the responses that
they elicit (The Rhetoricof
Fiction [1961]) and Meir Sternberg's analysis of the techniques
through which scriptural
texts preclude the possibility of misreading
while allowing for that of
(especially counterreading)
(The Poeticsof BiblicalNarrative[1987]).
underreading
212
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mov's short story "Berries" (1985 [1978]: 78-80).24 The unnamed firstperson focalizer is a prisoner in one of the Kolyma labor camps. After a
day of work, he and his teammates are ordered to carry firewood to the
barracks, but the focalizer is so exhausted that, though his log is a mere
"stick,"he collapses under its weight and cannot get up. Two of the guards,
the politely brutal Fadeyev and the coarse Seroshapka, abuse him and beat
him up. When he rejoins the ranks, his fellow prisoners are angry with
him because the incident has delayed their return to the barracks. The
next morning the prisoners are employed at wrenching out tree stumps in
a felled forest. Where the snow has temporarily receded, it is still possible
to find overripe late-autumn berries (lingonberries, bilberries, sweetbriar
hips) whose taste, the narrator remarks, is inexpressible. The guard Seroshapka has marked the area within which the prisoners are allowed to
move with tufts of dry grass. Several rich bushes of berries are just outside
the limits, and the focalizer's partner Rybakov, who is collecting berries
into a can (if he fills the can the camp cook will give him some bread for
it), cannot resist the temptation, despite the focalizer's warning. Rybakov
crosses the imaginary line between the grass landmarksand is immediately
shot by Seroshapka, who then fires again into the air: according to instructions, there must be two shots, the first a warning. The can rolls close to the
focalizer and he picks it up: knowing for whom it is meant, he can get some
bread for it. The punchline of the story is Seroshapka'sangry remarkto the
focalizer: "I wanted you; but you kept away from there, you bastard"(80).
On a first reading one discerns several motifs common to dissident literature on camp conditions: the overtaxing of the prisoner's strength, the
hunger, the guards'physical cruelty to an exhausted intellectual, the shooting of a prisoner under the false pretext of an escape attempt. There is also
a distinctive Shalamov touch: the text contains no expressions of mourning
or grief for the dead companion; instead, the protagonist is shown taking
an immediate practical advantage (a version of the "inheritance" and, by
implication, the "wake"topoi). Yet when the story is read in the context of
Shalamov's other narratives and those of other survivors of Soviet or Nazi
camps, more radically subversive meanings become apparent- subversive
not only of the official kinds of discourse but, in its semiotic condensation,
also of the dissident counterculture. Here are a few examples. (1)By beating
up the prisoner the guards humiliate him but, paradoxically, also enable
him to get up and walk on, owing to the discharge of adrenaline caused by
the physical pain, which is mitigated by the padded clothing. (2) It is the
24. The story is available in English translation in Graphite(Shalamov 1981: 105-8) and in
KolymaTales(Shalamov 1994: 57-60).
Toker* Towarda Poeticsof DocumentaryProse
213
anger in the focalizer's eyes rather than his collapse that makes him conspicuous for Seroshapka, who is henceforth "after him." (3) Seroshapka's
shooting of the man who has "crossed the line" does not merely exemplify the guards' attitude toward the value of the prisoners' lives; it also
suggests that there is still a residual moral "line" (likewise arbitrary)that
Seroshapka himself does not cross: according to the rules of his game, he
still cannotshoot the prisoner who has not gone offlimits(in the testimonies
of other survivors, guards had no qualms about shooting specially selected
prisoners anywhere, as would-be fugitives). Whereas Seroshapka's moral
barriers have been pushed off far enough to enable him to lure a prisoner
beyond the arbitrary"limit" and then shoot to kill without warning, these
barriers have not been removed altogether-he still cannot imagine that
one can kill first and stage an escape attempt afterwards.The invisible line
between the tufts of dry grass acquires a branching symbolic significance: it
is well known that in the world of concentration camps metaphors become
literalized,25but in this story (as almost throughout Shalamov's work) a
physical detail of concentration-camp life (tufts of grass marking the arbitrary off-limits zone) is transmuted into a metaphor (moral barrier).
As already noted, a work of documentary prose is not self-sufficient; it
gains by being placed in contexts. In Shalamov's work almost every single
detail has either a "centripetal"function or a "centrifugal"meaning (Frye
1957: 73), or both. The former is determined by the place of this detail
in the pattern of motifs within the text (the motif of limits, the motif of
ambivalent pairing-two episodes, two shots, two fellow prisoners, two
guards); the latter, by its relationship with specific facts in extratextual
reality. It takes the reader some initiation into camp realities to understand
the centrifugal meaning of the details-as in the case of the double effect
of the guards' blows.
The centrifugal meaning of some of the details places the story in the
privileged-access area of hesitation. The "polite" Fadeyev's name must
bring to mind the writer Aleksandr Fadeyev, author of The YoungGuard
(1946), a tendentiously fictionalized account of a group of young people
who struggled against the German occupants of their city ("Berries"is set
in wartime). The courteous Fadeyev was known to assist the authorities in
the persecution of other writers (see Mandelstam 1971:352-56). We have
25. The literalization starts in the media discourse of the society that eventually establishes concentration camps; see Kraus 1967 [1952]: 121-23; Rosenfeld 1980: 132-36. Then
the things that actually happen in concentration camps are of the kind that have
formerly
seemed possible only in metaphoric discourse-which can in turn be modified. (Consider,
for instance, Orwell's word for "death penalty" in NineteenEighty-Four-vaporizationrather
than liquidation.)
214
PoeticsToday18:2
no way of knowing whether Shalamov deliberately alludes to the writer
whose moral and aesthetic principles were the photonegative of his own.
Like Rybakov,Fadeyevis not an uncommon name (in contrast to the unfamiliar yet recognizably plain-folk name Seroshapka,
"greycap"): for all we
know, the incident may be entirely factual, and the name of the guard involved may indeed have been "Fadeyev."This reading is further supported
by a guard's observation that the focalizer is tall Shalamov was very tall;
and the speedy exhaustion of tall prisoners, particularlykeenly affected by
the calorie deficit, is a recurring motif of his stories. All the same, we cannot be sure that the "I" of the story is Shalamov himself-any more than
that the Tadek of This WayfortheGas,LadiesandGentlemen
(1967)is Tadeusz
Borowski's self-portrait. Such double-directed clues are among the factors
that, as noted above, make us hesitate in deciding whether the story is
strictly factual (within the accepted limits of displacement) or fictionalized.
Our hesitation is further compounded by wondering whether the exegesis
should stop here or go on (to account, for instance, for the recurrence of
the motif of pairs throughout the story), bearing in mind, however, that
the ethics of documentary prose does not favor long departures from the
literal level of testimony.
4. DocumentaryProse as an Aesthetic Phenomenon
The reader's uncertainties about the ontological status of fabula details,
about the measure of deniability, and about the limits of interpretation
take place against the background of a more general hesitation about the
status of documentary narrative as a work of art. A possible justification
for regarding documentary prose as an "intermediate" kind of discourse
would be that the status of each individual work of this kind depends on
its artistic merit: whereas poor novels are still regarded as "bad art," minimalistic autobiographies or clumsy, unintelligent memoirs are regarded as
"no art at all."
However, we often turn to works of documentary prose in quest of specificfactsand are then struckby their literary excellence. Should such works
be regarded as art or as well-penned historical record? Actually, this very
hesitation also belongs to the realm of aesthetic experience. Documentary prose shares a major feature with modernist art: our doubt whether
modernist paintings, sculptures, music, or texts are, in fact, works of art
is an integralpartof their aesthetic effect. In our response to modernist art
this hesitation takes the shape of a (sometimes well-grounded) "suspicion
of fraudulence" (Cavell 1976: 188-89): perhaps the author is pulling our
leg? In the response to documentary prose the hesitation is of a less vexing
Toker* Towarda Poeticsof DocumentaryProse
215
nature: we do not suspect the writer of prodding us to justify the attribution of artistic value to artifacts that are devoid of it, but we do have
doubts about the extent to which the telling of what one knows (instead
of what one has invented) is "artistic"or merely skillful. Yet such a formulation of the problem is erroneous: what is really at issue in individual
works of documentary prose is the extent to which the author strikes us
as approaching the truth beyond self-serving displacements and cultureboundedness. The question of style in documentary prose is not a matter of
skill so much as of the quality and the intensity of the author's engagement
with the material. Samuel Johnson believed that style was the final elaboration of thought; in documentary prose, style is rather the measure of the
optimization of attitude, a measure also of what, in application to the literature of the Holocaust, Irving Howe (1986) has called "moral poise."26
Treating documentary prose as an art form challenges a number of aesthetic theories, including the view that literature is "autotelic." The New
Critical insistence that literature be an end in itself clashes, and yet has
always coexisted, with the persistent need to define the functions of literature at different historical periods-to please and instruct, to expand
sympathies, to serve as a thrifty repository of values and wisdom, to defamiliarize the familiar, to open the self to the other, to interpret reality, to
make the self present to itself. The anthropological approach to the study
of literature posits unabashedly that literaturefulfills definite human needs
(Iser 1993: ix-xiii, 281-302), needs that may change from one historical
period to another and that cannot be identified with the so-called aesthetic
need, no matter what theory is used to account for the latter.
The theory of the autotelic nature of literature is of great help when literature has to be rescued from the demands of a political, social, or moral
"engagement," as well as from being treated either as material for cultural
studies or as a propagandistic or didactic tool. And yet the difference between, for instance, the view that art should "expand our sympathies"and
the view that a work of art should promulgate a social or political Weltis not so great. The former effect is mainly, but not exclusively,
anschauung
based on the formal properties of a work (thus the handling of the multiple
26. Howe writes: "Reading Holocaust memoirs we respond not just to their accounts of
what happened; we respond also to qualities of being, tremors of sensibility.... to the modesty or boastfulness, the candor or evasiveness, the self-effacement or self-promotion of the
writers. We respond, most of all, to a quality that might be called moral poise, by which I
mean a readiness to engage in a complete reckoning with the past, insofar as there can be
one -a strength of remembrance that leads the writer into despair and then perhaps a little
beyond it, so that he does not flinch from anything, neither shame nor degradation, yet refuses to indulge in those outbursts of self-pity, sometimes sliding into self-aggrandizement,
that understandably mar a fair number of Holocaust memoirs" (1986: 31-32).
216
PoeticsToday18:2
is central to the sought expanplot structure in George Eliot's Middlemarch
sion of sympathies), but for the success of the latter effect formal properties are likewise no less vital than the work's contents. The distinction
between propagandistic and nonpropagandistic fiction is further blurred
by the existence of a number of intermediate forms: one cannot deny, for
instance, that Smollett's HumphryClinkerinvolves a propagandistic attempt
to improve the image of Scottish culture in the eyes of the English reader,
or that Defoe's Journalof thePlagueYearbears the traces of its author's intention to justify the measures to be taken in the face of the threat of an epidemic. Nor can one deny that both of these narratives are quite extraordinary works of art: indeed, their aesthetic function became unquestionably
dominant as soon as history canceled the relevance of their topical issues.
Adopting Mukarovsky'svocabulary, both HumphryClinkerand Journalof
thePlagueYearcan be described as multifunction objects. The same is true
of works of documentary prose. As we know, the aesthetic function is not
the monopoly of art: it can likewise be the property of landscapes, of natural objects, and of man-made pragmatic artifacts. Verbal utterances, oral
or written, can be arenas for the competition among different functions,
such as the informational, the emotive, or the aesthetic. In art "the aesthetic function is the dominant function, while outside of art, even if it is
present, it occupies a secondary position.... The predominance of some
extra-aesthetic function is a rather frequent phenomenon in the history of
art; but the dominance of the aesthetic function in such cases is always felt
as fundamental, 'unmarked,'while dominance by another function is considered 'marked,'i.e. as a violation of the normal condition" (Mukarovsky
1970: 7). If our attention highlights the aesthetic function of a work of
documentary prose, then the work is read as art; if we emphasize the informational function, the work can be reduced to pragmatic status-unless
the aesthetic effect, for which the text creates conditions, overtakes us dematter.
spite the motive that has dictated our initial choice of the reading
modes-the
in
other
than
In other words, in documentary prose-more
dominance of either function is not stable, and this instability is largely a
matter of historical development. At their first appearance, Primo Levi's
Shalamov's
If ThisIs a Man (1990 [1958]), Solzhenitsyn's early fiction, and
informational
their
facts":
the
"for
read
were
Tales
(1980 [1978])
Kolyma
function was dominant. But as soon as this factual evidence was properly
assimilated (often by being integrated into historical studies of a broader
inforscope) and an informed reader no longer needed them as sources of
mation, the works' aesthetic function emerged from its partial eclipse. A
similar shift may take place in the individual response to a work, even duroverwhelmed
ing an early reading: as noted above, one may be suddenly
Toker* Towarda Poeticsof DocumentaryProse
217
by the aesthetic quality of a book that one reads "for the facts."It is significant, for instance, that the authors of the early critical responses to Solzhenitsyn's work (e.g., Erlich 1973) apologized for having offered aesthetically oriented comments on narratives that, they felt, should first evoke
totally different responses. When the informational function of a work that
testifies to atrocities loses its prevalence, neglect of the work's aesthetic
properties may be perceived as obtuseness; yet when alternative sources of
information on the subject matter of such a work are absent, an emphasis
on its aesthetic qualities may be perceived as callousness.
As critics, we ought to engage in an ethical examination of our attitudes
on this issue. And yet a tactful consideration of a work's aesthetic properties is not necessarily tantamount to ideological evasion, not even at the
earliest stage of the work'sreception: it is sufficientlyjustified by the recognition of the fact that aesthetic properties of documentary prose enhance
its practical function by isolatingthe work and making it draw more attention. "Wherever in social intercourse it becomes necessary to emphasize
any act, object or person, to focus on it, to free it from undesirable associations, the aesthetic function emerges as an accompanying factor; cp.
[sic] the aesthetic function of any ceremonial (including religion) or the
aesthetic coloration of public celebrations" (Mukarovsky1970: 21). A work
that has a pronounced aesthetic appeal stands out from less artistic testimonies, defeats boredom and cynicism, and ultimately captures both the
audience that is a prioriinterested in its subject matter and the one that may
have otherwise avoided it. (Thus Primo Levi's If This Is a Man is widely
appreciated even by those readers who tend to protect themselves from exposure to Holocaust literature.)The informational function of such works,
then, depends on the individual reader's estimation of the importance of
the subject matter (with responses ranging from "he writes well, whatever he writes about" through "he really gives one a sense of it" to "yes,
one has to know these things"). But for the aesthetic appeal of individual
works, multitudes of readers would have remained in blissful ignorance of
all too many aspects of their own "interesting"times and antecedents: the
aesthetic appeal keeps open the channels of communication. In a sense,
scholars' diffidence concerning the narratological treatment of the literature of testimony is less threatening to the status of documentary prose
than is the blanket refusal to recognize documentary writing as artistic.
Just as the most forceful testimonies of "l'univers concentrationnaire"
are subversive of national literary traditions (see Rosenfeld 1980: 19-34;
Ezrahi 1980: 13), so the study of the art of documentary prose can be expected to reject some practices of Western literary-critical discourse. In
particular, it can be expected to rebel against the traditional and counter-
218
Poetics Today 18:2
intuitive absolutization of the aesthetic as well as against theories of genre
that marginalize documentary writing instead of recognizing it as a form
of art that creates complex objects whose multiple functions are not activated all at once.
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