Narrative

Between the Internet, smartphones, and social media, the modern world has been designed to enable seemingly-limitless communication. While there are certainly economic and political motivations for this construction, social factors have also incentivized this globalization. Namely, it addresses a constant need within all humans: to feel known and understood. That we crave human connection is one of the basic tenets of social psychology, consistently applicable across cultures and environments. But the human experience and spectrum of emotion are infinitely complex and often difficult to accurately communicate.

Boris Pahor, Triestine author and the oldest living Holocaust survivor, undertakes this challenge with careful dignity and poetic justice. Pahor grew up as part of the Slovenian minority in the Italian city of Trieste during a time when nationalism and fascism were infecting his country. The intensifying political atmosphere and increasingly oppressive institutions relegated him and his people to social and political marginalization, culminating in Pahor spending fourteen months between various concentration camps between 1944 and 1945. Much of Pahor’s literary corpus revolves around these experiences, and his sensory-laden writing has been lauded as impressively communicative. He is obviously equipped to reflect on his own experiences, but how does he translate them to the outsider, who cannot possibly comprehend his truths in all their tragedy – a conflict he explicitly struggles with in his semi-autobiographical Necropolis? As discovered through data visualizations produced by Voyant Tools, Pahor relies on different rhetorical strategies to explain the chaos in five of his short stories, encapsulated in the 2008 collection The Pyre in the Port (Italian: Il rogo nel porto). The Butterfly on the Coat Rack and The Persimmons loosely reflect Pahor’s childhood and his early perception of discrimination as a Slovenian in Italy. The Address on the Axis provides anecdotes from concentration camps, while New Fibers details the complexities of returning home. Flowers for a Leper tells the tragic story of a Slovenian’s death at the hands of fascist Italians. All five offer intense emotional accounts regarding marginalization and loss. Pahor recognizes that understanding of these experiences requires different means based on positionality, or from what identities and experiences a person perceives a situation. In other words, positionality considers how facets of identity, ideology, and lived experience contribute to a person’s ability to relate to and process information. With subtle nuance, Pahor rhetorically conveys how his characters process their experiences at the same time he – using different literary strategies – helps his readers process something they have not experienced, and are perceiving from a different position. For characters within Pahor’s texts, a reliance on corporeal realities is most effective for them to digest the world, while for readers, Pahor turns to figurative language such as metaphor and simile to efficaciously convey these characters’ infinitely complicated experiences.

As depicted by the Cirrus and Trends visualizations, Pahor frequently references bodies and body parts throughout his short stories. In an ever-changing and often-perplexing reality filled with terror, paranoia, and enemies at every turn, Pahor uses the more-stable body as a vehicle for truth telling. Only through corporeal experiences can his characters form solid conclusions about the truly unbelievable world around them. For example, in New Fibers, the narrator describes the comfort that he derives only from physical touch upon his return from a concentration camp. While navigating his hometown of Lille, he and his fellow survivors “wonder naively,” as they “feel [sic] alien in that city,” and conclude that “a resident of the jungle would have a similar sensation when setting foot on a crowded city street for the first time.” They feel physically and emotionally disoriented as they reapproach life outside of the camp. However, as he climbs into bed at a rehabilitation center, he muses that“thanks to the clean fabric that offers a sincere, sweet, inviting welcome, our body realizes that it is free.” The crisp sheets, so different from the wooden-planked “beds” in the barracks, are a tangible confirmation of a new, safe environment. While the narrator has yet to emotionally and cognitively adjust to home – a process that he acknowledges may take a long time – his body recognizes his liberation. Bodily functions are also a means of truth-discovery in The Address on the Axis. The imprisoned narrator describes attempts to avoid the reality of burning bodies by “protecting yourself from the wind and the smell it brought with it, keeping [sic] your mouth closed and exhaling [sic] the smell through the nostrils.” Prisoners’ efforts to escape acknowledgement of the crematoria are thwarted by physical experiences, when “at a certain point, however, there was a lack of air… his nostrils sucked in the fate of the corpses.” Despite their desire to distract their threatening thoughts, the tangible makes reality unavoidable, telling a truth that cannot be denied.

Children, too, both discover and project reality through corporeal means. In The Persimmons, for example, a Slovenian boy recognizes ethnic differences between his fellow Slovenians and a neighboring Italian family through physical characteristics. Several times, he references his friend’s “fiery” auburn hair flowing over her shoulders, in contrast to his Italian neighbors’ hair, which is “yellow like a banana.” Their hair colors reflect their relative statuses: “golden” versus “copper” hair, privileged versus marginalized, Italian versus Slovenian. The references to the differently-valued metals confirm the imbalance of power that the narrator, young as he may be, already detects. Conversely, in The Butterfly on the Coat Rack, the oppressive Italian teacher is the one who learns from physicality. After overhearing a student speak in her native Slovenian tongue, he verbally berates her and hangs her from a coat rack as a punishment and a warning to other students. However, despite his enraged power trip, the eyes of his students force a moral reckoning. Just after his initial rant, “those rows of aligned eyes, one behind the other, were now slowly approaching him in a silence that weighed like lead on the atmosphere, on his hand, on the fingers that gripped Julka's ear in a vice. And he felt himself sucked into a whirlwind, and all those eyes pushed him deeper and deeper into the whirlpool. Then he turned to escape.” Pahor references the students’ eyes – and the teacher’s vain attempts to ignore them – nine times before the end of the passage. Here, the cruel teacher cannot break free of the judgment leveled upon him by the eyes of the children – the most innocent, uncorrupted, and honest of judgments. He feels shame, an “abysmal emptiness,” only when he confronts their eyes. Without this bodily interaction, he may not have experienced guilt regarding his treatment of Julka. But in those moments, their body language forces him to consider his actions. They eliminate any potential uncertainty over his immorality.

Across narratives and characters, Pahor consistently uses the body as a revealer of truth. The Cirrus visualization was key in making this discovery as it depicts the relative usage of all words across the corpus. Immediately, it was clear that the body and its sensations are central to Pahor’s storytelling, as words like “body,” “eyes,” and “hair” are among his most frequently used words. The Trends visualization provides more detail on this as it separates the corpus by individual short story. It reveals that almost all of these words are in fact used in almost every text, indicating that Pahor intentionally weaved the idea of corporeal reality into his works. Importantly, it also shows which texts relied on which body parts most heavily. For example, “eyes” were most frequently referenced in The Butterfly on the Coat Rack, while The Persimmons more heavily relied on hair. Consequently, readers can recognize a telling theme: in a world of uncertainty and mistrust, the body does not lie. Pahor’s characters, constantly embattled by internal and external conflicts, must rely on these bodily experiences to deduce truths.

In dramatic contrast, Pahor must rely more heavily on figurative language in order to make sense of his stories’ reality for his readers. Unlike his characters, who find themselves within the confusing and complex ethnopolitical dynamics of the first half of the twentieth century, his readers most likely do not. In order to most effectively convey these experiences, Pahor must go beyond the literal. He so frequently uses similes and metaphors that it almost seems as though he has taken on the task of translating from the language of lived experience to another, more abstract language more equipped to communicate subjective insight. The Context visualization provides lists of each time the words “like” and “as” are used, offering instant lists of similes.

One of Pahor’s most-relied on analogies is the comparison of humans to animals. For example, in The Butterfly on the Coat Rack, analogy serves to juxtapose the traits of Julka, the Slovenian student, and her Italian teacher. After threatening Julka, the teacher circles her “like a watchdog that can only move within the circular space allowed by the chain.” This simile explains the intimidating and oppressive nature of the teacher. His presence and power threaten her as he towers over her, moving methodically before pouncing. In contrast, she is “a butterfly with outstretched wings” as he hangs her by braids from the coat rack. The image of a butterfly portrays Julka’s dramatically contrasting levity, beauty, and fragility in the face of a circling watchdog. The abusive teacher is a predator, and she is his prey. Additionally, the observing students eyes’ extend “infantile palms similar to dove's wings [that] should spring at any moment to lift her body and relieve her pain,” further juxtaposing their innocence to their teacher’s barbarism. Through these analogies, the reader more deeply understands the dynamic between the teacher and his students. Dogs kill both birds and butterflies, after all. Pahor provides a similar analogy in Flowers for a Leper. When Italian fascists interrupt a Slovenian choir, the collective “flock fears the attack of the sparrow hawk.” Here, too, Pahor effectively illustrates the life-or-death nature of these interactions by presenting them in evolutionary terms.

Animalistic analogies appear in The Address on the Axis as well. The author compares the sound of Allied airplanes, inching closer to liberating this concentration camp, to a “dull hum of metal bees,” as “countless swarms of angry wasps follow one another.” This signifies the life that is nearing. In the camp where death is ever-present, presenting these airplanes as animals represents the potential of escape, freedom, and returning to life. It also offers the idea of the Allies as pollinators, existing to travel and spread life throughout a region. Interestingly, a few lines later, bees are used in a different sense: the narrator acknowledges “the hope that comes from a sentence pronounced in that wooden beehive.” Here, he refers to the barracks as a beehive, perhaps to align the prisoners with the Allied forces. This metaphor also conjures up images of the prisoners as bees, overpacked in small spaces and marching tirelessly to serve their ruler. These analogies allow a disconnected reader to more clearly understand the subjective experiences of the characters by expressing them in less literal terms. Atrocities, too, are conveyed through analogy to animals. In New Fibers, a survivor’s rib cage “resembles smoked ribs,” and in The Address on the Axis the narrator observes “scaly skin [under which] you can see the wooden slats of the ribs” alongside “swollen legs, like clubs of meat.” All three present the prisoners as animals, either fit for consumption – “smoked ribs,” “clubs of meat” – or as reptilian. These analogies are far more descriptive than simply calling the prisoners thin or ill, and remind the reader of the way that Nazis treated their victims as sub-human. For these reasons, comparisons to animals help the reader more deeply grasp the dynamics at play.

More generally speaking, Pahor often relies on analogies to convey emotions too intense for more simplistic diction. Figurative language provides the reader with a more linguistically-dramatic and illustrative portrayal of the characters’ experiences. In The Address on the Axis, Pahor accentuates a high when a dangerously ill prisoner, upon hearing news of a white flag waving in the distance, begins “acting like a child who has been promised that he can get up if he is good. All because of that little flag.” Despite his plethora of ailments, even the potential of good news stirs new life into him. Readers can only imagine the hope that that news would inspire; the closest a reader can come to comprehension is the magic of childlike excitement. In Flowers for a Leper, Pahor again relies on analogy to convey strong emotion. After Italian fascists force the Slovenian choir leader to drink a lethal concoction, residents are “immersed in silent grief as if death had thrown open the doors of all Slovenian homes.” The townsfolk feel more than sorrow for their lost comrade. This simile implies the overwhelming sense of despair that accompanies the other Slovenians’ knowledge that the grim reaper could come to their homes next. Analogies help the reader better comprehend these likely-unrelatable emotions by explaining them through more poetic means.

Pahor’s works provide a fascinating case study into the complexities of conveying tragedy to an outside world while also explaining how those experiencing that tragedy process it. With incredible detail, he skillfully depicts the characters’ struggles in understanding their own realities in a way that a contemporary reader can digest. He answers difficult questions of positionality through applying different rhetorical strategies to different audiences. Data processing tools such as Voyant provide opportunities for analysis of his works in a visual manner, offering another means of representation. Though the human experience is indeed infinitely chaotic, nuanced, and individual, Pahor’s works will provide valuable insight for generations to come.