The Holocaust and Literature : Ethics, Representation, Memory

Genocide, particularly the Holocaust, remains a huge question to anyone who seriously considers and pursues what it means to be human. Literature, since it is essentially concerned with representation of the image of human existence, must re-examine its nature, function and capacity in response to any historical incident that shakes the conventional view of humanity and the foundation of civilization. Can artistic discourse meet ethical and historical demands and meet its own at the same time in representing the Holocaust? Are conventional words, conventional literary techniques and genres adequate to represent the overwhelming atrocities? Is it ethical for poets and novelists without any direct expeirnce of the Holocaust to write about it? Is it ethical to deviate freely from the framework of historical facts? Do readers have the right to elict pleasure from Holocaust art? Can artists really imagine and comprehend the Holocaust about which many survivors themselves testify I cannot not believe what my eyes saw and I was there, but I do not understand what it was ? If language is essentially to seek and establish form and meaning, how is it possible that language represents violence and destruction that crush form and meaning? Or are we to ask how the Holocaust is perceived, imagined and represented in various works of art rather than questioning imaginability, comprehensibility and representability of the Holocaust? In the pages that follow I present a summary of views of some representative survivors/authors, historians, philosophers, literary critics, novelists and film-makers on the questions raised and I present my views on them at the end