“A thousand times more painful than death”: Survival and Unspeakability in Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore’s Post-1945 Unpublished Writings

People, women and femmes especially, can be wary of using the word ‘trauma’ because it implies victimhood. It also comes entangled in the neoliberal-capitalist narrative of ‘healing,’ as does sickness in general, and then you’ve got to watch out for people talking to you about your ‘journey.’ I can’t stand the concept of healing if you don't also talk about hopelessness, hemorrhaging, the medical-insurance industrial complex, panic, poverty, and boredom. I prefer the term ‘coping’ because it acknowledges that the struggle is real.

—Johanna Hedva[1]

On June 30, 1945, the Jersey Evening Post on the Channel Island of Jersey ran a story boldly titled “Sentenced to Death by Island Nazis: The Story of Two Gallant Frenchwomen.” It was an interview with French Surrealist photographers, writers, sculptors, political activists, Resistance fighters, and life partners Claude Cahun (born Lucy Schwob) and Marcel Moore (born Suzanne Malherbe), just over a month after their release from Gloucester Street Prison in St. Helier, where they had been serving several sentences (including an imminent death sentence) for their Resistance activities on the island in the early 1940s.[2] Their release happened at 2:45 p.m. on May 8, 1945, just fifteen minutes before Winston Churchill’s VE Day speech and the island’s official liberation.[3] This day marked the end of a deeply traumatic nine and a half months, recounted in their postwar writings as multiple episodic and fragmentary accounts in the forms of memoir notes, letters to friends, personal diaries, and notes to each other.[4] Half of this period they had spent in solitary confinement—the couple’s first separation since adolescence—managing chronic illness, malnutrition, and the mental and physical aftermath of two suicide attempts each. Until the day of their liberation, they had been led to believe that their execution or potential deportation to a concentration camp was imminent: a prospect made all the more harrowing as they witnessed their prison mates getting dragged away to camps, committing suicide, or also facing execution.

As soon as Cahun and Moore emerged from prison, they began to write—prolifically, seemingly feverishly—to their friends, to each other, and into the ether, recounting experiences of their secret Resistance activities during the Occupation, their arrest, and their imprisonment. Amongst Cahun’s papers survive two unfinished manuscripts of what would have become their memoir: Confidences au miroir (1945–46) and Le muet dans la mêlée (1948).[5] Moore’s papers—undated letters and notes composed around 1943–45 about their imprisonment, some memoir notes, and a typescript memoir by Cahun and Moore—have not as of yet been collected and are currently held by Yale University Library. Jeffrey Jackson compares the two, somewhat sweepingly, describing Cahun’s Confidences and Le muet as “impressionistic and often rambling, not a cohesive work but notes, sketches, scenes, and strings of thoughts—a stream-of-consciousness attempt to put it all down on the page before it was too late—all filtered through her memory in the years after the war,” whereas “Suzanne’s writings retain a great deal of the immediacy of her experience in that she recounts dialogue, gives specific dates, and offers descriptions of people and places in a way that Lucy does not. When she remembered those days—in fragmented thoughts jotted down on scraps of paper years later—she tended to be more matter of fact than Lucy, who often mused on death or philosophical issues.”[6]

Upon their release, the couple buckled down to restore their brutalized home, La Rocquaise in St. Brelade, recover what they could of their looted possessions, and relocate their senses of their selves and bodies in a reality that they had never expected to survive.

On gender, pronouns, and names

Before historicizing this complex and as yet underexplored period of Cahun and Moore’s lives and oeuvre any further, I would like to take a brief detour to explain my usage of names and pronouns. Pronoun usage in relation to Claude Cahun/Lucy Schwob and Marcel Moore/Suzanne Malherbe is a sensitive and somewhat irresolute issue, as it raises more questions than answers, given how fluid and changeable the artists’ own handlings of their languages of gender and identity were.

Before the war, both artists wrote under alliterative, gender-neutral names--Marcel Moore and Claude Cahun—and they only reverted to their birth names upon relocating to Jersey, which allowed them to fly under the Nazis’ radar while undertaking their Resistance activities on the island. Although I do not believe that any scholar is wrong to opt for either or any of the names and pronouns that the couple used at various points in their lifetimes, I prefer to embrace the fluidity and changeability evident across their oeuvre. With this in mind, my usage of pronouns and names will remain fluid throughout this essay, referring to them as Cahun and Moore in broader references to their oeuvre, including their prewar works, whilst reserving (Lucy) Schwob and (Suzanne) Malherbe for their postwar histories.

On the subject of pronouns, the pair explored genderfluidity in their writings and photographs of the 1920s–30s, to which the vast majority of the queer and feminist scholarship on them has repeatedly attested. Cahun writes in one of the most oft-quoted passages from Aveux non avenus/Disavowals (1930): “Masculine? Feminine? It depends on the situation. Neuter is the only gender that always suits me. If it existed in our language no one would be able to see my thought’s vacillations. I’d be a worker bee for good.”[7] Moreover, virtually all of Cahun and Moore’s photographs, plus significant portions of their writings, were created collaboratively. Each of the “self-portraits,” though often attributed to Cahun (because Cahun is so often the subject posing in them), were captured by Moore. In this sense, the two embodied the “Singular Plural” of Disavowals: “Us. / ‘Nothing can separate us.’ [. . .] I am one, you are the other. Or the opposite. Our desires meet. It’s hard enough just to disentangle them.”[8] As such, my references to either Cahun or Moore as they/them may well be read, by their own framings, as readings of each of their singular selves as well as the two of them together, in their mirroring, mutually constitutive entanglement.

Their refusal to be pinned down and contained by any one signifier permits, and perhaps even invites, a similar performative vacillation on our part as readers responding to their work. My pronoun usage therefore fluctuates between she/her and they/them. She/her seems especially appropriate in reference to their postwar memoirs, where both writers opted for these pronouns and referred to each other as “Lucy” and “Suzanne.” Elsewhere, I embrace the play on the overlapping singulars and plurals in they/them, which holds both the singularity of the genderfluid nonbinary body and the plurality of all genders and subjectivities—the multitudes of masks and mirrors that also form central tropes in Disavowals and the couple’s visual artworks.[9]

After the war

“Since the Germans had overrun the Island,” Moore/Malherbe reflected in her memoir notes, “my conception of the future had been very limited. I made plans about what we could grow, and how to obtain what we could not grow, but I did not visualize us alive in a postwar world.”[10] Their family doctor, John Lewis, attests in his memories of the Occupation that prison had left both in poor health: “Lucille [Schwob] . . . spent long periods in hospital, and was in a very low condition on her release. Suzanne [Malherbe], although much more robust, was in quite bad shape also.”[11] Cahun/Schwob would only survive a further nine years, succumbing to kidney cancer on December 8, 1954, aged sixty; Moore/Malherbe lived on to seventy-nine, but after a particularly painful bout of appendicitis in 1972, she took a lethal overdose of sedatives, curiously echoing her and Cahun/Schwob’s first suicide attempt on July 25, 1944, when they took what they believed was an overdose of Gardenal in the police car on their way to prison.

Through his work with Holocaust survivors in the 1960s–80s, psychiatrist Henry Krystal explains that the aftermath of surviving such violations on the body produces “psychosomatic disease” and “exquisite pain,” which is often chronic and unlocatable, experienced “everywhere” in the body and at unpredictable intervals.[12] Reading Cahun/Schwob’s and Moore/Malherbe’s postwar writings urges us to imagine such an embodied experience as the sensory lens through which they were written. More than a chronicle of the events surrounding their imprisonment and its aftermath, these works represent an alternative and necessarily literary form of both memorialization of a traumatic past and the disorienting, at times excruciating, and self-negating experience of survival in the present. We might compare this to what Langer describes as “an aesthetics of agitation”: how one writes when “one faculty” (such as the intellect) is “not enough to respond to the experience” of trauma.[13]

In Confidences, Schwob perpetually labors over this very question of “afterwards”: what does it mean “to come back to oneself” after surviving a death sentence, multiple suicide attempts, a separation from one’s thus far unseverable other half, and violence some of which neither of them could ever remember?[14] How does one return to, inhabit, or survive in a body so mutilated with physical and emotional illness that it no longer feels safe, or indeed real? “How can you think” or make yourself legible, when “everything [is] incomprehensible,” “when you have no words at your disposal, when you’ve forgotten all the words?”[15]

As one steps into the future they never imagined they’d meet, having psychically and physically crossed the threshold between living and dying, one returns to oneself “to become what in the meantime? This is the big deal,” Schwob ponders. “Numb body, frozen . . . This kind of resurrection is never more than partially possible. As far as I can judge it is a thousand times more painful than death” (Cahun, Confidences, 575; my translation). Malherbe’s postwar memoir notes seldom mention her suicide attempts; and, when they do, they recount them factually and apparently dispassionately.[16] Schwob, on the other hand, frequently returns to what Charlotte Delbo, in her own Holocaust memoirs, refers to as “the full awareness of the state of being dead” (cette impression d’être morte, d’être morte et de le savoir).[17] Michaela Hulstyn theorizes this as “Delbo’s experience of disruptive unselfing” following the inconceivable, “impossible” fact of surviving Auschwitz: “pain releases the mind’s control of reason as willpower collapses. [. . .] The awareness of death expands at the expense of all else.”[18] Malherbe’s memoir notes reflect something of this sentiment: “In a way, it is easier to adjust oneself to the idea of death than to the idea of survival. It is so much more simple.”[19] Schwob, meanwhile, rummages through the complex and paradoxical manifestations of trauma in her body, which Confidences and Le muet performatively mirror in their surrealistic, poetic play with imagery and form.

Indeed, Confidences does not merely deconstruct narration but, in Elaine Scarry’s terms, “deconstruct[s] the structure of making itself.”[20] It quite literally begins with (self-)negation and mirroring questions:

N’est-ce là qu’une confidence personnelle? N’a-t-elle pas d’innombrables échos? [. . .] Les cadavres ça fait parure et c’est facile à manoeuvrer. Non, ce n’est pas seulement un témoignage personnel. C’est un leitmotiv dont les miroirs sont las. Il sert d’indicatif à tous les survivants”

 (Isn’t this just a personal confession? Doesn't it have innumerable echoes? [...] Corpses are ornaments and easy to manipulate. No, this is not only a personal testimony. It is a leitmotiv whose mirrors are weary. It serves as a signpost for all survivors). (Cahun, Confidences, 573; my translation)

Perpetually vacillating between being and nonbeing, self and other, waking and dreaming, demonic possession and “dispossession,” Confidences holds that “peculiar paradox,” as Cathy Caruth puts it, with which trauma presents us: “in trauma the greatest confrontation with reality may also occur as an absolute numbing to it.”[21] Traumatic memory is a “historical enigma,” she argues, as the experiences of pain from which it springs are both palpably immediate (burrowed in the body’s cells and thus perpetually re/producing themselves, psychically and somatically, over time) and yet impossible to consciously grasp, let alone articulate, even (or perhaps especially?) for the survivor. Memorializing that pain in narrative form thus becomes complicated by “the inability to fully witness the event as it occurs [. . .]. The force of this experience would appear to arise precisely, in other words, in the collapse of its understanding”: in the impossibility of its articulation in linear, legible terms (Caruth, “Trauma and Experience,” 7). As Delbo conveys this: “The very fact we’re to speak denies what we have to say” (Delbo, “The Measure of Our Days,” 257).

This paradoxical overlap between “[f]acts so real that, by comparison, nothing is truer” and a reality so unimaginable that it “necessarily exceeds its factual elements” underpins the “knowledge [and narration] of disaster,” of trauma.[22] Blanchot presents the “unnarratable history” of violence as the “passive” “un-story”: the memory of a dying, once totally dehumanized, and therefore, in a sense, an already dead “I”—inhabiting a living body in the present yet retaining in the same body a memory of having died, having abandoned oneself in a numbing, dissociative bid for survival. This “dying, silent intensity” becomes in the moment of remembrance “that which cannot be welcomed, which is inscribed wordlessly; the body in the past, the body of no one, of the interval: being’s suspense, a seizure like a cut in time, which we cannot evoke except as wild, unnarratable history having no meaning in any present)”; “that which escapes quotation and which memory does not recall—forgetfulness as thought. That which, in other words, cannot be forgotten because it has always already fallen outside memory.”[23]

Confidences urges us to think of the survivor’s memoir as both a “confession” and a “confidence,” entrusting the reader with a story that is fragmented by pain, flawed memory, chronic illness, and the sheer dissociative meaninglessness of violence. This peculiarly and paradoxically places us in the role of both jailer/interrogator and confidante. Storyteller and witness, text and reader, mirror each other in mutual interillumination and yet obscurity: a perpetual, parallel inability to remember, verbalize, or comprehend. As Scarry puts it, “as physical pain destroys the mental content and language of the person in pain, so it also tends to appropriate and destroy the conceptualization abilities and language of persons who only observe the pain” (Scarry, Body in Pain, 279).

The inherent unspeakability and unrepresentability of pain and traumatic experience therefore radically disrupt any formal conventions of narrative “sense-making.”[24] As Agamben urges, in working with survivors’ testimonies we must gravitate not towards what is explicitly visible and “readable” but, on the contrary, we must actively listen for what is “absent.” Testimony, “at its core”, contains “an essential lacuna,” because “the survivors bore witness to something it is impossible to bear witness to”; their stories hold “a reality that necessarily exceeds its factual elements” (Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, 13). Thus, how we handle the lacunae, surrealist fantasies, and unwieldy and cryptic metaphorical meanderings of “unreliable narrations” such as Confidences or Le muet becomes a question of political value and necessity—for the storyteller as much as for their witness. Scarry recognizes this in her theorization of “the power of self-description” as a construction of stability in self- and pain-narration, and thus an exercise in “political power”: “Our susceptibility to the prevailing description must in part be attributed to the instability of perception itself: the dissolution of one’s own powers of description contributes to the seductiveness of any existing description” (Scarry, Body in Pain, 279). In other words, though linear, “sense-making” narrations of atrocity can offer the relief of clarity and resolution, clinging to them is not an exercise in objective fact-finding or of releasing fossils of truth from historical stone slabs. Instead, it is one of “rescuing, repairing, and restoring” the hegemony of power (often what perpetrated and created the conditions for violence in the first place) “to its proper path each time it threatens to collapse into, or become conflated with, its opposite” (279). This is what makes the lacunae in survivors’ testimonies (and our desire and methods of listening to them) so dangerous and so politically potent.

The sometimes cryptic, symbol-laden, highly poeticized nature of Confidences certainly renders it a “problematic” and politically powerful testimony. This is by no means a lucid and linear account of “what happened” or what motivated either Cahun or Moore to act, create, or make the choices that they made in their lives, activism, and art. Cahun’s writings, like their creative artifacts (from the sculptures, to the photographs, to the Resistance leaflets), casually and unapologetically dismiss the boundaries between genres, as they move between genders, conventions, and indeed between reality and fiction, waking and dreaming, the political and the personal, morality and immorality. Jackson describes Cahun as “the classic unreliable narrator”: someone whose testimony is to be questioned and “fact-checked” at every turn, lest the historian be inadvertently misled by the fabrications of the multiplicitous and contradictory narrative self (Jackson, Paper Bullets, 281). The fragmentary nature of both the surviving documents and the stories within them create further problems for the tiller of the archive. I would argue, however, that what we must problematize is not the form that the survivor’s testimony must take but the historian who seeks “a single, recognizable monument to the past,” as Langer puts it; and the drive, instilled in us by ideologies of discipline, to excavate a cohesive story of violence that is somehow unadulterated by the embodied realities of pain, ageing, forgetfulness, and trauma (Langer, Holocaust Testimonies, 161).

In his account of interviewing Holocaust survivors, Langer reflects that “the un-story, as Blanchot calls it, raises the issue of how to establish a connection between consequential living and inconsequential dying” (159–60). Indeed, what are either storytellers or witnesses to make of inconsequential living, the unbearable resurrection Cahun writes of, after one has experienced several bouts of dying? As “un-stories,” Cahun and Moore’s trauma narratives awkwardly teeter between being and not being Holocaust survivor testimonies: they hold the paradox of surviving and also not surviving the Holocaust; surviving it while not-quite-having-been-there, yet having occupied a realm of systemic anti-Semitic dehumanization, perpetual losses of loved ones to genocide, and the terrorizing threats of losing oneself and one’s inseparable other in the same way. Where do we place and how do we excavate historical knowledge from these unlocatable, fragmented artifacts of unnarratable pain—ones that collapse the boundaries between past and present, between grammatical order and bodily unpredictability, and, frighteningly, potentially also between survivor and witness, text and reader? Potential pathways lie in exercising Cahun and Moore’s “indirect action” in our practices of reading and witnessing narratives of pain in all of their contradictions and perpetual fragmentations: “setting it going and letting it break down” until we find our own private entryways into the pain of an-other. Perhaps then, as pain becomes transported not only “out onto the external world,” as Scarry suggests, but also becomes communally witnessed and empathically felt, we may lose our “immunity to, unmindfulness of, and indifference towards the problems of sentience” and of an-other’s suffering (Scarry, Body in Pain, 285).

Notes