In a reading from last week, John Treat helped present us with the unique challenge of approaching, reading and writing ‘atomic’ literature. A text attempts to effectively or even adequately communicate what happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and “at the same time it must help us comprehend what it means to be living today in a nuclear age” (19). Dueling purposes clash where a writer attempts to describe a moment when everything changed but cannot put to words what exactly did change. Such a conflict demands writing that modifies or subverts traditional forms to push the reader (and writer, survivor) towards an understanding of what happened. The reader is tasked then with recognizing the inherent failure of language to fully capture such a meaning, and “the cooperation atomic-bomb writers ask of us is a kind of ethical restraint, a sort of respectful restraint from naively ‘understanding what we read” (33). The closest we as readers can come to ‘understanding’ or ‘knowing’ what happened is in recognition of the fact that any attempt to describe an atrocity is inherently incomplete, that we can only truly understand that we cannot understand.
Cue Svetlana Alexievich’s Voices from Chernobyl, a collection of oral testimonies from various survivors of the Chernobyl disaster in the modern-day Ukraine. In it, interviewees seek to account for their experiences in the days and years following the explosion of the reactor core at the Chernobyl power plant. A pattern emerges in the inability to communicate the experience. “I’m not a writer. I won’t be able to describe it. My mind is not capable of understanding it” (34). Another survivor recounts “I don’t say anything. No one can speak to me in a way I can answer. In my own language. No one can understand where I’ve come from. And I can’t tell anyone” (82). The disaster has produced a barrier in communication between the people who were there to witness it and those who were not. Accounts from other survivors attempt to approximate this feeling that of experiencing war and death (68), but even that comparison resists reification.
For her part, Alexievich seems to understand this aspect of the stories behind Chernobyl, and she runs with it. Form in Voices from Chernobyl is often hard to grasp, and the focus of the work often seems chaotic and haphazard. One testimony may follow the resettlement of villages after the explosion, then the next will remember a childhood of fighting German soldiers in the second world war. Names are provided but are rarely attached to quotes. New sections begin without page breaks, jarring the reader. Stories are brief and often have no preface or epilogue. The result is like walking through an unlit room crowded with people, each trying and failing to tell their story. Such an organization (or lack thereof) contributes to the reader’s sense that they do not fully grasp what has happened, even after reading dozens of pages of eyewitness accounts. The reading experience reflects the experience of the survivor. What better way to convey something incomprehensible than by making your medium itself somewhat incomprehensible.
All this incomprehensibility is compounded by the invisible nature of the radiation that these survivors are exposed to. Alexievich juxtaposes the intangibility of experience with the invisible radiation our survivors were exposed to. A testimony from Lena M. recounts her family’s flight from Chechnya and the eventual incredulity of her neighbors when she resettles near Chernobyl. “They say ‘Would you bring your kids to a place where there was cholera or the plague?’ But that’s the plague and that’s cholera. This fear that they have here in Chernobyl. I don’t know about it. It’s not part of my memory” (64). Like the readers of the testimonies that came before, Lena cannot fully grasp a horror that she has not witnessed firsthand. To her, the slow and quiet violence of radiation cannot compare to the immediacy of the danger where she once lived. Up to this point, the reader has seen every reason for residents to get out of Dodge and get out fast. Now we are confronted with a person with a compelling argument for staying, and we are jarred with the cognitive dissonance of it. Alexievich thus undermines our last assumption of what can be the right choice when faced with evacuating or resettling the exclusion zone around Chernobyl. The reader finishes this text with no clear answers and definitely no understanding of this cataclysm, but rather with a better understanding of the questions they must ask in order to approach literature on Chernobyl. To assume otherwise is to do an injustice to those who experienced this event.
Alexievich, Svetlana. Voices from Chernobyl. DALKEY ARCHIVE Press (IL), 2005.
Treat, John Whittier. “Writing Ground Zero: Japanese Literature and the Atomic Bomb.” AbeBooks, University of Chicago Press, 1 Jan. 1995, www.abebooks.com/9780226811772/Writing-Ground-Zero-Japanese-Literature-0226811778/plp.
I found your discussion of Alexievich’s structure really insightful, Alex. As you put it, “the reading experience reflects the experience of the survivor.” You made me think of another effect this structure has. The disorienting nature of the text and the polyphony of voices also serve to remind us of the scale and scope of the event. As you note (drawing from Treat), it is incomprehensible to the reader because we weren’t there, but I think we also get a sense that it was incomprehensible to those who experienced it. (And, one imagines, to those who are still experiencing it.) Time and again we hear these survivors struggle to understand even what radiation is, much less what is happening or why. In the words of one of Alexievich’s survivors:
“What’s it like, radiation? Maybe they show it in the movies? Have you seen it? Is it white, or what? What color is it? Some people say it has no color and no smell, and other people say that it’s black. Like earth. But if it’s colorless, than it’s like God. God is everywhere but you can’t see Him.”
That final comparison, to God, also gestures to a sense of the inconceivable bigness of the disaster’s effects— consider all the people, plants, animals, neighborhoods, cities, regions, schools, fields, foods, families (I want to be able to write an exhaustive list but it literally cannot be done). No single survivor can possibly comprehend the scope of the thing, any more than the scope of God. This is something, I think, they are painfully aware of. Alexievich’s structure helps give us a dizzying sense of just how uncannily large and long this event was/is/has been/will be.
I like what you’re saying here about a pattern “in the inability to communicate the experience” of the Chernobyl disaster. I see this pattern emerging as well, but am at the same time surprised by just how much these voices manage to communicate. It may be that this very resistance to the act of telling or being heard is what captures the cumulative experience of Chernobyl. How can so many “want to bear witness” (Alexievich 34) while still repeating variations on the refrain, “I’m not supposed to be talking about this” (55)? More is said when we see a person giving in to the urge to speak, or giving up on the ability to do so, than any straightforward response could. This tension is especially revealed by the interjections in brackets: a brief pause, a long moment of silence, a movement of the face, or of the body, a cry or a laugh—these express what words can’t. I agree that the reader gets a sense that they cannot “fully grasp” what the Chernobyl disaster was and continues to be, but I would also suggest a sense that each excerpt is fully grasping something. Together, these glimpses compose a rich and complex view, the sum of a thousand pieces.
The “chaotic and haphazard” form of “Voices” gives it a mimetic quality more convincing, and at times more moving, for me, than anything we’ve read so far. There is disorder, “short and jumbled and jangled,” as Vonnegut writes, because there can be no order to a tragedy of this magnitude (Treat 30). Although Alexievich remains present by way of her absence, in what we might call a present absence, the voices seem to come with little mediation, maybe because they are printed in a context where greater mediation is expected. Each voice simply shares its truth, peppered with speech patterns and folk beliefs that contrast the “old ways” of Soviet culture against an invasive new way of life. “Voices” brings me closer to finding a personal answer to the question raised in my last comment: which genre or medium is best-suited for [nuclear] narratives? The prologue, “A Solitary Human Voice,” spoke to me more than the video footage from last week, for example (though I admit there’s something crude in making the comparison at all). As I understand it, moving images might better attest to the effects “on human flesh,” and words “on the soul of every survivor,” especially the so-called Slavic soul, in this case (8). The voice-over narration of “Hiroshima Nagasaki, August 1945,” also stands in sharp contrast to the many voices in Alexievich’s work.
Reading is, as you describe, like walking through a dark room “crowded with people.” A community event, especially a tragedy or disaster, requires a chorus of voices, building off of one another, echoing and replying and calling out, even screaming (Alexievich 118), all in an effort to spin a thematic web, fragile but intact. The result, a chamber of harmonies and dissonances, shows the many different ways of looking at one event, much like the simultaneous perspectives of a cubist painting. These voices invite the reader to make comparisons, such that the relativity of human suffering comes to the fore. How can I read the testimony of a veteran who would rather die in a war like Afghanistan than Chernobyl (82–83) and those of women who prefer Chernobyl to the wars of Tajikistan or Kyrgyzstan (54–64) and still feel that I understand something of both? The polyphonic form resonates with the meaning of atrocity, which, as Treat defines it, requires “scale, intention, and ruthless logic” (8). The voices reflect the scale not just in the number of people affected, by also in the intensity and variety of effects. When voices are named and identified to varying degrees, some with first name, last name, no name, a role or occupation, and many without direct attribution, we see that there’s “no distinction or rationality” to who is a victim (9). Even more, we see to what degree and in what way voices are, or consider themselves to be, victims.
I wonder what other significance we might draw from the reference to “voices” in the title (and it’s no coincidence that the same word appears in the title of “Little Voices from Fukushima”). There is an urgency to preserving the voices of bodies that are deteriorating in inexplicable ways. In this context, voices imagine a story disembodied, and yet voice necessarily comes from the body. It comes from the interaction between a body’s organs and its environment, vocal cords and air. While radiation confirms the power of environment over the body, voice empowers the body to make use of its environment. On a more basic level, looking at dictionary definitions of the term, “voice” signifies the ability or authority to speak. This definition is at odds with the inability to communicate, but it also sheds light on what such narratives achieve—giving voice to the experience of nuclear disaster. The definition I find most helpful in understanding the “voices” from Chernobyl is the plural form of voice: “voices” invoked or overheard from the spirit world, which tend to warn of misfortune and/or give counsel. Voices from Chernobyl (and Fukushima) are, if nothing else, haunting.