Cover of The Conflagration of Community
The Conflagration of Community Fiction before and after Auschwitz
by J. Hillis Miller
University of Chicago Press, 2011
Cloth: 978-0-226-52721-5 | Paper: 978-0-226-52722-2 | Electronic: 978-0-226-52723-9
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226527239.001.0001

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ABOUT THIS BOOKAUTHOR BIOGRAPHYREVIEWSTABLE OF CONTENTS

ABOUT THIS BOOK

“After Auschwitz to write even a single poem is barbaric.” The Conflagration of Community challenges Theodor Adorno’s famous statement about aesthetic production after the Holocaust, arguing for the possibility of literature to bear witness to extreme collective and personal experiences. J. Hillis Miller masterfully considers how novels about the Holocaust relate to fictions written before and after it, and uses theories of community from Jean-Luc Nancy and Derrida to explore the dissolution of community bonds in its wake.

Miller juxtaposes readings of books about the Holocaust—Keneally’s Schindler’s List, McEwan’s Black Dogs, Spiegelman’s Maus, and Kertész’s Fatelessness—with Kafka’s novels and Morrison’s Beloved, asking what it means to think of texts as acts of testimony. Throughout, Miller questions the resonance between the difficulty of imagining, understanding, or remembering Auschwitz—a difficulty so often a theme in records of the Holocaust—and the exasperating resistance to clear, conclusive interpretation of these novels. The Conflagration of Community is an eloquent study of literature’s value to fathoming the unfathomable.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

J. Hillis Miller is Distinguished Research Professor of Comparative Literature and English at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author of many books and articles on literature and literary theory, most recently of For Derrida.

REVIEWS

“As much a literary memoir as a project in critical theory, The Conflagration of Community is masterly from beginning to end. Through Kafka, Miller conjures an Auschwitz of the Imaginary with global, nondenominational dimensions. His chapters are rich literary and cultural explorations, and they bespeak the combination of fluidity and deep concerted meditation of critical commentary at its best. A magnificent achievement.”

— Henry Sussman, SUNY at Buffalo, Henry Sussman, University of Buffalo

“With The Conflagration of Community, J. Hillis Miller demonstrates why criticism matters, and why there is no substitute for good reading, reading which takes time, which is open and responds to the other, and which takes responsibility for its ethical acts. This profoundly moving and politically urgent, eloquent study offers both an invitation to attend to our most pressing concerns with all seriousness, while issuing on every page an injunction that we take literature seriously. Far from being barbaric or impossible to write poetry after Auschwitz, as Adorno claimed, Miller lets his community of readers know why, now more than ever, such writing is necessary, and its reading an implacable necessity that befalls us all.”

— Julian Wolfreys, Loughborough University

“This book, published 53 years after his first, is extremely powerful, and perhaps his most powerful. It is powerful in its subject matter, in the acuteness of its analysis and in the anguish that burns on every page. . . . There is no ‘cool and amused insouciance’ here, but an angry and tenacious demand to pay the closest attention to literature, and to the reading of literature, because of its importance in showing us, in detail, the political storms in which we are living.”

— Times Higher Education

“This is an unsettling book. It is also strangely reassuring. It is the latter because, in a climate in which the significance of the humanities is in danger of being reduced to the measurable social and economic impact they can claim to have beyond the academic pale, it makes a strong case for the general relevance of literature, of reading, and of our efforts at comprehending, at interpreting literary texts—in short, of criticism.”
— Modern Language Review

 “In successfully completing the Benjaminian constellation he tells us is his intention to construct in the preface, Miller creates something that is both profound and that persists beyond the page.”
— New Books Network

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface

Acknowledgments

Part One: Theories of Community

- J. Hillis Miller
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226527239.003.0001
[community, dissolution, dislocation, conflagration, Jean-Luc Nancy, Holocaust, Wallace Stevens, The Auroras of Autumn, Auschwitz]
The meaning of the word “community” has differed and evolved throughout the different philosophical and theoretical works written about it. In modern times, community has undergone great changes—its dissolution, dislocation, or conflagration. “Dissolution” implies that something once whole was destroyed or disintegrated. “Dislocation” implies that modern communities have been displaced—either set outside or beside themselves. “Conflagration” suggests that the whole community has not only been dissolved but has also been consumed—an allusion intended by Jean-Luc Nancy to the Holocaust. Wallace Stevens “The Auroras of Autumn” is studied and cited by the chapter as a work which occupies an important piece in this study. This chapter aims to build upon the recent theoretical investigations of community to build a collection of tentative hypotheses for studying community’s conflagration in fiction before and after Auschwitz. (pages 3 - 36)
This chapter is available at:
    https://academic.oup.com/chica...

Part Two: Franz Kafka: Premonitions of Auschwitz

- J. Hillis Miller
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226527239.003.0002
[Auschwitz, Kafka, The Trial, The Castle, Jules Michelet, Gustav Janouch, Walter Benjamin, Holocaust, prefiguring of the Holocaust]
Kafka’s The Trial and The Castle suggest a foreshadowing of Auschwitz. Under the aegis of Jules Michelet’s dictum, the chapter aims to show just how. In Kafka’s conversation with his friend Gustav Janouch, he fears the possible prophetic power to bring about large scale sufferings and catastrophes his works might contain. Even Walter Benjamin, upon reading Kafka’s work in 1938, saw it as a prefiguring of the Holocaust that had not yet come. The chapter then argues, in line with Benjamin’s concerns, that the experiences that Kafka portrays in the protagonists of his novels and stories would become realized as a collective experience of masses of persecuted people. (pages 39 - 66)
This chapter is available at:
    https://academic.oup.com/chica...

- J. Hillis Miller
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226527239.003.0003
[Kafka, Shosana Felman, Claud Lanzmann, Shoah, Der Process, Josef K, Guantánamo Bay, The Trial, Auschwitz]
With the book’s claim that literary work can be viewed in retrospect to have had a prophetic ability to foreshadow future events, this chapter first suggests that Kafka’s work foreshadows Guantánamo Bay’s current situation. The chapter explores Shosana Felman’s classic essay on Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah. The film itself is made of a metonymic series of videoed testimonies by victims, perpetrators, and bystanders of the Shoah, evading any form of complete or total understanding. Der Process is also examined in this chapter, exploring the case of Josef K., who suffered from the lack of a fair trial and was instead sentenced to execution. Josef K.’s life experience of this unjust social structure, in a way, also anticipates the situation of Guantánamo Bay’s detainees today. This chapter examines these works as well as Kafka’s own The Trial and investigates in detail one salient feature of their foreshadowing of Auschwitz. (pages 67 - 102)
This chapter is available at:
    https://academic.oup.com/chica...

- J. Hillis Miller
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226527239.003.0004
[community, The Castle, Mitsein, Heidegger, intersubjectivity, being with, Auschwitz, foreshadowing of Auschwitz]
This chapter investigates another of Kafka’s works, The Castle. The founding hypothesis in this chapter revolves around the notion that “community” depends on the assumption that each member of a community has access, in some form or another, to the thoughts and feelings of his or her neighbor. This, in a way, recounts Heidegger’s idea of Mitsein or “being with” (intersubjectivity). In The Castle there is a certain lack of this aspect. The characters have no connection or access to the minds of other characters. The narrative voice is also limited in its accessing of the protagonist’s mind. In a way, it forms an incomplete novel that simply denies interpretation. The Castle seems to work as a premonition of Auschwitz in terms of the breakdown of community togetherness, including the belief in the Mitsein. The goal of the chapter, then, is to determine whether The Castle can be viewed as a foreshadowing of Auschwitz. (pages 103 - 146)
This chapter is available at:
    https://academic.oup.com/chica...

Part Three: Holocaust Novels

- J. Hillis Miller
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226527239.003.0005
[Holocaust literature, secondary literature, testimony, witnessing, Jean-Luc Nancy, Forbidden Representation, Toni Morrison, Beloved]
This Prologue outlines and gives overview of the chapters following. A certian amount of anxiety comes from this study of Holocaust literature, and this analysis might be destined for failure. Concerns relate to the size of the task of examining the enormous body of primary and secondary Holocaust literature. Can something new be said on the subject? Another concern relates to the nature of testimony and witnessing. How important is it to have witnessed? The next few chapters examine amongst other things Jean-Luc Nancy’s “Forbidden Representation” and Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved. (pages 149 - 154)
This chapter is available at:
    https://academic.oup.com/chica...

- J. Hillis Miller
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226527239.003.0006
[Thomas Keneally, Schindler’s List, Ian McEwan, Black Dogs, Art Spiegelman, Maus: A Survivor’s Tale, Shoah, rhetorical reading, aporia, testifying to the Holocaust]
Thomas Keneally’s Schindler’s List, Ian McEwan’s Black Dogs, and Art Spiegelman’s Maus: A Survivor’s Tale are all discussed in this chapter in relation to the Shoah. It begins with the intended presumption that all these works bear witness in an honorable and honest way to the Shoah, or at least seek to give inheritance to the facts about it to readers. The chapter performs a “rhetorical reading” on the texts, studying the way this sort of reading operates its performative magic of testifying to the Holocaust. The question of community is also looked at with regards to these works. These works, however, are subject to the double obstacle, a complex “aporia”: the facts of the Holocaust might be inherently unthinkable and unspeakable by any means of representation and “aestheticizing” the Holocaust creates suspicion in that the more successful a novel, the further it may be from the actual experience of the Holocaust. (pages 155 - 176)
This chapter is available at:
    https://academic.oup.com/chica...

- J. Hillis Miller
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226527239.003.0007
[Imre Kertész, Fatelessness, Holocaust, Auschwitz, Black Dogs, Maus, bear witness to the Holocaust]
This chapter exaimes Imre Kertész’s Fatelessness and its testimony of the Holocaust. Fatelessness being Kertész’s first novel was published some thirty years after his liberation from the concentration camps. The novel itself is not autobiographical, nor is it perceived by Kertész to even be a novel. Employing sophisticated novelistic techniques, the novel tells the story of a fifteen-year-old boy from Budapest who is transported and survives Auschwitz—bearing some resemblance to Kertész’s own experience. Fatelessness along with Black Dogs and Maus all share the same element of being narrated in the first person. This suggests that writings about the experience of the Holocaust hold more bearing when done in the form of testimony rather than in the third person. Thus the central question of this chapter relates to the possibility of a work of fiction as an illustration bearing witness to the Holocaust. (pages 177 - 228)
This chapter is available at:
    https://academic.oup.com/chica...

Part Four: Fiction after Auschwitz

- J. Hillis Miller
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226527239.003.0008
[rememory slavery, Toni Morrison, Beloved, Shoah, terrorists, War on Terror, cyberspace, tele-techno-military-capitalism]
Toni Morrison’s Beloved is a novel whose chief aim is, in her own words, to “rememory” slavery despite the obvious implication that it is better to forget it. Slavery and its aftermath is perhaps the closest thing to the Shoah in United States history. In her foreword to the Vintage International Edition of Beloved (2004) Morrison writes about the attempt to make the slave experience an intimate one, and in the process of doing so, she states, it creates a violence in the quietude of everyday life, keeping the memory of enslavement and its inherent involvement of suffering, alive. The reading of Beloved surprisingly creates a useful and even indispensable means of understanding the mechanisms that govern our present-day world of “terrorists,” the War on Terror, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, cyberspace, and global tele-techno-military-capitalism. In turn, this moving story creates a sense of responsibility to avoid any future emergences of this memory of slavery. (pages 231 - 270)
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Coda

Notes

Index of Names, Titles of Works, and Characters

Book published by University of Chicago Press, 2011. Page maintained by BiblioVault.