I recently finished reading two harrowing books back-to-back: Ordinary Men and Man’s Search for Meaning. Both are based on the events of the Holocaust. Ordinary Men examines the actions of Police Battalion 101 and the part they played in the murder of thousands of Jews, while Man’s Search for Meaning follows the author’s experience as a concentration camp victim and his subsequent psychotherapeutic methods in finding the “meaning of life.”
These were two books on the same event, but approaching it from different angles, and in particular, from one author who was a historian, while the other was a direct victim of the Holocaust. What amazed me about Man’s Search for Meaning was its ability to be as objective as Ordinary Men. Ordinary Men is a record- and data-led analysis of a battalion’s actions, while Man’s Search for Meaning is a lived experience. Yet, I was surprised to see how Frankl did astonishingly well to remain one step removed from the experience to offer a similarly analytical point of view on the events that occurred.
I found this similar to Primo Levi’s The Drowned and the Saved. Each time I read a non-fiction book of such gravity, it astounds me how the author can remain balanced, level-headed, and objective in the face of such atrocities.
It makes me think about the power of writing as therapy. To recount personal events, no matter what they might be, helps to give them colour, to fill in the gaps, to make sense of it all. Without this ability, the experiences remain stuck in your head, like a prisoner without a key, banging incessantly on the door. We need the ability to write down our experiences to give them the opportunity to be read from a different point of view. To extract a thought is to give it a life of its own – it becomes its own entity. Once it is its own being, then it isn’t as closely attached to you anymore. Only then can you be more objective and look at the experience from a different light.
I wonder if Frankl and Levi felt the same. I wonder if they felt more free of their experiences by writing them down, and then, over time, could even look at the experiences from an objective perspective, psychoanalyse them, and try to find a diagnosis for what occurred. There are hints of desperation in the act of writing things down. Both Levi and Frankl said they spent their time writing and memorising books in their heads, even physically writing notes when they found scraps of paper. Alexander Solzhenitsyn claims to have written his entire Gulag Archipelago in his head before he had a chance to put pen to paper.
So, what has this taught me? That if one can produce an objective perspective on such a deeply personal experience, then so can I.
This sort of analytic writing about events is almost the opposite of what I attempt in my writing. Writing, often about events and situations which I have not experienced myself, I attempt to evoke a strong emotional reaction in the reader. The ability to create strong feelings in one’s readers feels powerful. It is something I hope makes people more sympathetic to others around them.
However I am certain that the objective, factual approach you are describing used to talk about real and terrible events that have occurred, also brings people face to face with the horror of those events, and gives them a cold awareness of those atrocities.
It seems that two sides of the same coin of writing may be used to the same effect. Do you also feel that both non-fiction and fiction can be used like this Michael?