Word by Word: The Language of Memory

Drawing on a broad range of texts and textile objects- from the poems of Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, and T.S. Eliot to a college coat of arms, from the history of the Titanic to a collection of Nazi propaganda photographs of the Warsaw ghetto- Jonathan Morse looks at the complex relationship between the human sense of time and space outside language, on the one hand, and, on its own sequentiality. Morse approaches its not as a collection of incidental names, dates, or ideas, but as a semantic constituent that shapes every literary text. Offering a cogent alternative to poststructuralist theories, he seeks to uncover the history underlying a literature so as to arrive at a more profound understanding of what that literature is. Morse discusses an array of nineteenth- and twentieth-century texts, focusing in particular not he literature of the Holocaust, including novels by Aharon Appelfeld, Vasily Grossman, and Kurt Vonnegut; a selection of essays by the American racist Lathrop Stoddard; and Claude Lanzmann's film Shoah. The Holocaust, Morse says, is the central event in the history of language in the twentieth century because one of its intended effects was to destroy all memory of itself. He asserts that this goal of obliterating memory has partially succeeded, to the extent that Holocaust survivors have had to recall what occurred in words that can never make whole the shattered reality of lives before the tragedy. But since words are implicated with time, Morse concludes that we can never holly forget; and that by speaking of the event in language, word by word, we affirm its continued existence in history. Anyone interested in the relationship between language and history will want to read this probing, elegantly written and provocative book.