Historical catastrophe like Fascism resists adequate dramatic representation

Evidence

The coming extinction of art is prefigured in the increasing impossibility of representing historical events. That there is no adequate drama about Fascism is not due to lack of talent; talent is withering through the insolubility of the writer’s most urgent task. He has to choose between two principles, both equally inappropriate to the subject: psychology and infantilism. — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 165

Categorization

• QUESTION: Adorno writes this before Holocaust literature matured; what would he make of postwar attempts — from Lanzmann to Spiegelman — or does the impossibility claim still hold?
• XREF: Picks up the same territory as his ‘After Auschwitz’ dictum (‘no poetry after Auschwitz’) and extends it to drama and representation generally. — connects to: Trivial and childlike art can encode history better than great drama does — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from…, 170; Real history lacks tidy dramatic arcs and tidy causation. — Hilary Mantel, A Memoir of My Former Self- A Life in…, 1173; Magical realist narrators somatize historical catastrophe by refusing societal progress narratives — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 965

Broader Connections

• Real history lacks tidy dramatic arcs and tidy causation. #corroborates (0.82) — Hilary Mantel, A Memoir of My Former Self- A Life in…, 1173