Seven Red

For me, one of the more interesting papers published in The Responsibilities of Rhetoric – the proceedings of the 2008 RSA Conference – is Richard Glejzer and Michael Bernard-Donals’ “Synecdoche as Figure of the Holocaust,” largely because it dovetails with Alan Liu’s recent collection of essays, Local Transcendence: Essays on Postmodern Historicism and the Database. Both pieces zoom in on and seek to explain the rhetorical work of the detail in contemporary historical writing, so I think I’ll discuss them together here.

Glejzer and Bernard-Donals are really starting, theoretically, with the problem of figuration in historical writing, building off the work of Hayden White, and his four tropes through which historians “structure” history (metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony). At issue for Glejzer and Bernard-Donals is, first, which of these figures dominates Holocaust history, and, second, more expansively, what the dominant figure tells us about the historical event and our understanding of it. Specifically, the authors identify a purportedly metonymic method in Holocaust history writing that has dominated the field “since Raul Hilberg’s The Destruction of the European Jews” (really, the classic in the field, even 50 years after its first publication), and through the various memoirs and diaries and witnessings. The metonymic structure of these histories, the authors contend, proceeds by a detailed recitation of the “parts” that – both singly and through accumulation – points back to a whole as explanation or cause (220); you would presumably understand something of the Holocaust as some kind of substantive agent that produces the parts (the particular detail) as patient of that agent. But Glejzer and Bernard-Donals find something very different in Daniel Mendelsohn’s memoir, The Lost: A Search for Six of the Six Million. While the memoir would seem, on its surface, to be structured according to the same metonymic logic of historical figuration, it actually, Glejzer and Bernard-Donals argue, operates by synecdoche. If metonymy points back to a whole as cause, synecdoche functions rather as a “part-for-part substitution, in which the associative relation implies a whole rather than expresses it as part of the substitutive relation” (220). It points back to the “hole” rather than the “whole” of the historical event, some essential caesura or excess that, because it is the real – escapes the method of detail, and any method of telling, for that matter.

We might take, for example, the Tower of Sephardic Faces exhibit at the US Holocaust Museum. The “tower” is constructed of portraits of people belonging to the Jewish community in Monastir, Macedonia, almost all of whom were transported to the killing center at Treblinka. It can be said to function metonymically in two ways. First, isolating one town and community of all the communities wiped out by the Nazi destruction process constitutes the first move to detail as focus zooms in on Monastir, an effect explained by the whole. Second, the exhibit itself functions by zooming in on the individuals of Monastir, the hundreds of portraits serving as further parts of the whole of the Holocaust. Like much postmodern memorialization (say, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, as the classic case), the conceptual structure of the exhibit compels one to cycle through these levels of focus, constantly switching between the individual part and the accumulated effect of the whole. What Glejzer and Bernard-Donals urge us to do, however, is to read this method of detail synecdochally; as a matter of event, there is no coherent “whole” of the Holocaust, but rather “an array of events, and a maelstrom of destruction, in which death is individualized and horrifyingly singular” (224). What the authors suggest is that the figure of synecdoche better conveys the disorder of history by resisting – as rhetorical figure – any attempt to draw the “maelstrom of destruction” into an orderly narrative of causation.

Digression: I’d like to return to Hilberg’s monumental work here to at least highlight the value of the coherent whole. There’s no doubt that Hilberg’s work functions, again – on its surface, metonymically, or that his painstaking accumulation of parts points back to to a whole as cause. Hilberg seeks to explain three major points that emerge again and again in his account. First, how did particular legal mechanisms set the stage for what he calls the “destruction process?” On this point, Hilberg is relentless in his minute descriptions of Nazi racial laws, descriptions which include lengthy discussions of ancestry status for a wide variety of people. Second – and this is really the key question Hilberg seeks to answer throughout The Destruction – Hilberg asks how otherwise ordinary people could be induced to participate in mass murder. The ordinariness of the perpetrators, of course, then goes on to live an illustrious life as a historical trope; it is really the root of Arendt’s banality of evil argument (Arendt quotes from Hilberg extensively), and has since become the founding assumption of any number of studies, as even a brief examination of titles will suggest (Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust; Ordinary Men: Reserve Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland, and etc.). Third, and this is the somewhat disconcerting question Hilberg returns to again and again, The Destruction seeks to explain Jewish participation in the destruction process, both active (in the form of complicity in the Jewish community councils) and passive (in the absence of widespread substantive resistance). This final point actually dominates Hilberg’s account, and is really what makes the study so jarring, I’d expect, for modern audiences; one suspects that a similar account written today would immediately (and perhaps properly) draw cries of “blaming the victim,” and, at the very least, would be considered suspect in its motivations. Indeed, Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem, which really takes up  Hilberg’s dispassionate description of the actions of the Jewish community leadership and transforms it into a mini-j’accuse, comes under attack most frequently for its obsessive and largely unmerciful dwelling on active and passive “complicity.”

Incidentally, two contemporary big Hollywood films stage these very questions. Tom Cruise’s Valkyrie asks us to consider German resistance to the Third Reich. Both Hilberg and Arendt discuss the July 20 plot at some length, and both conclude that it was a relatively minor event in the grand scheme of things, and certainly not exculpatory for anybody, having to do more with  developing a strategy for cessation of hostilities than with moral objection to the destruction process. Valkyrie, in any case, conveniently leaves out the fact that even Himmler himself hedged his bets by keeping one foot in the conspiracy, a point that should give anyone pause if they seek to excuse “ordinary” Germans (and especially the aristocracy, business class, or the Wehrmacht) by referring to van Stauffenberg and his cohort (unless, of course, one also seeks to excuse Herr Himmler in the bargain). On the other point, the Daniel Craig vehicle Defiance (a film that was completely stolen from Craig by Liev Schreiber’s performance) tells the story of Eastern front Jewish partisans, the substantive resistance that both Hilberg and Arendt consider too minor to merit much historical importance. Defiance stages the confrontation between a seemingly complicit Jewish leadership and the more militarist elements when the Bielski brothers seek to convince the council to let the community, enclosed in a ghetto, to escape to the woods with them; the overt charge of complicity, in this case, is of course offset by the fighting toughness of the partisans. For Hilberg, the opposite is true. End Digression.

The stakes for Glejzer and Bernard-Donals and the privileging of the historical caesura over the coherence of the total narrative, in any case, seem to be fairly standard pomo fare: we should turn to the figure of historical writing, since our encounters with the “facts of history” are regulated through rhetorical figuration. In itself, this is not much of an advance over White’s thirty year-old arguments, but Glejzer and Bernard-Donals insist that the specificity of the figure (i.e., whether it is seen as metonymic or synecdochal) will itself transform the way the historical event functions as history, which is to say, in the present. Because the upshot seems to be that even those overtly metonymic accounts are really ruled by synecdoche in disguise: they cut off the part-for-part substitution at some random point precisely to cover over the hole of history, but they all more or less fail at this objective.

Query Theory

If Glejzer and Bernard-Donals end up with this figuration of history, Alan Liu’s collection of essays, Local Transcendence, spanning twenty years of his work, turns the question around, seeking to historicize the rhetorical figure: why the method of detail in historical writing (and particularly New – or, Postmodern – Historicism)? What is it about the present that would call forth this particular kind of figuration and its methodological adjunct in the first place?   Where Glejzer and Bernard-Donals see “simply an array of events,” Liu follows out the “nonnarrative form suited to display detailism: the array or matrix” (113), calling it the “rhetoric of a method, the sheer virtuosity of detail” (116).

Liu’s interest in the problem is long-running, with the first essays in the book dating back to the mid-1980’s. It is then when he first begins to examine detailism as the guiding method of New Historicism. Always the particular, the local, the quotidian, the ordinary, the fragmentary and molecular, and – Liu suggests – the random or indefinite, standing in some relation to the (now lost) whole of a historical period: Damien on the scaffold, but it could be anything, anything called up and presented in its rich and putatively contextual fullness. And while such address to the non-totalized, the anti-universal (and we already see it collapsing in such phrasing) would seem to position itself against transcendence, it is here where Liu flips the method, calling it local transcendence, where “immanence is transcendence sunk in the mundane” (131). But Liu wants to climb the ladder of detail to where it really maps culturally, where the “array of events” – the figure itself – plays its own historical role, borrowed from Romanticism and finally exposing itself as the rhetorical figure/historical method of triumphant liberalism:

In its reverence for detail, I suggest, cultural criticism reveals a hidden agenda of Western individualism not clearly distinguished from what Lentricchia recalls to us in his essay on James: an original-pragmatist nostalgia for the colonial or nineteenth-century frontiersman of can-do sufficiency [my note: if all this sounds vaguely Spanosian and boundary 2, we shouldn’t be surprised to find that the original essay appeared in Representations, circa 1990]. Such is true also of all the more or less Marxist authors in our matrix. It may be said about the materialist side of the New Historicism, for example, that detailism is, in part, a sustained allegory for individualism: when we suscribe to “the concrete, the material, and the particular” or “the particular and particularly constrained” we are really rewriting the biography of what old-line Marxism made taboo: individualities behaving with all the relative autonomy of “real” people in the ideal Western democracy. People, as it were, are personified details (Liu 131).

And all the more so in Monastir, Macedonia, not to speak of Treblinka. Which, in any case, begins to reveal the stakes of insistent localism, as it transposes the atom on to the event, the person, the community, and so forth, such that rather than the forces of culture in lively and transformative conflict, you get a grid of bounded contextual instances, which turn out – both alone and in the aggregate – to be as comforting as those abandoned universals. If this was where Liu ended up, I think we’d all be right to see the collection as some weird greatest hits operation in which we’re supposed to replay the late-80’s like a Pet Shop Boys CD. Individual, society, community, identity – these are the bread and butter of culture war cultural studies. But we know a cultural politics has shifted its focus on such questions, and Local Transcendence seems uncomfortable with letting things stand there; Liu continues to run the analysis of detailism through more and more circuits, until we reach what Liu (in what follows The Laws of Cool fairly closely) calls the contemporary “technologic,” which is best seen in XML and the relational database. The method of detailism, and the metonymic or synecdochal character of historical writing today, start to look a lot like the emerging technical space, with its meta tags, random access, and combinatorial functionality.

I will take up some of my disagreements with Liu in another post, but here I’ll just note that the method of detailism, whether through metonymy or synecdoche, gets looped into the logic of the database such that the “New Historicist anecdote,” for Liu, “may well be our best clue to the general relation between postmodern historicism in the academy and postindustrial technologism everywhere else” (259). Liu goes on:

[a]nyone other than a cutting-edge cultural critic (and even the latter when engaged in the act of querying a library database or quickly verifying a date via Google or Wikipedia) knows what the anecdote really is. It is random access. If the New Historicism is a kind of relational database, then the anecdote is its query. As it were: Here is a key incident. It has a microdesign that feels it may be part of a broader pattern. What does the whole data set of history look like if we filter it through that microdesign (in SQL, e.g., “SELECT author, work FROM history WHERE keyword = ‘nature’ OR keyword = ‘Napoleon’ AND year > ‘1802’”)? What other hits might be returned leading toward pattern recognition – that is, the recognition of “episteme,” “mentality,” “structure,” “power,” etc.? (259)

Of course, this looks very much like where Glejzer and Bernard-Donals end up, to the extent that the random access function of the anecdote, or the detail, would seem to be designed precisely for the purpose of the metonymic – the discovery of the determining whole that lurks behind the accumulated or single detail (as episteme, mentality, structure, or configuration of power, etc.). But because it remains random and local, the detail also signals an escape trajectory from determination, both the array and the maelstrom as they appear in Glejzer and Bernard-Donals’ series, with the “compromise between determination and random access” – and what separates the relation between these concepts from its Enlightenment version – being contingency.

Detail, the anecdote, the molecular turn out to be modes of presentation for the more general methodological and epistemological framework: contingency as a novel response to the problem of determination and freedom. It’s no mistake, then, that Liu ends with a bit of tongue-in-cheek scientism, with particles of existence, and “beyond a certain distance,” and contexts slipping along their interface, and local maximization – the whole language of complexity theory, itself now quite popular in the humanities, and in rhetoric and composition studies. It’s certainly odd to think of New Historicism preparing the ground for this recent popularity, but less strange if complexity theory in the science, its various permutations in Internet discourse (a la swarm intelligence and the wisdom of crowds and the like), New Historicism as an entrenched form of teaching history and literature in the universities, and postindustrial market and management logics of flexibility are all strung together as Liu suggests. In this sense, Glejzer and Bernard-Donals are playing out a kind of “Less Filling – Tastes Great” local dispute, where the larger and more effective cultural shift involves not the whole or the hole, the determining causality and the emptiness of random events, but both the whole and the hole, or rather, and this is where Liu is absolutely correct, in the shifting and historically specific relationship between them.

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