Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
Hostname: page-component-76fb5796d-45l2p Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-26T07:40:18.450Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

5 - Arthur Miller: the rememberer

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 September 2009

Christopher Bigsby
Christopher Bigsby
Affiliation:
University of East Anglia
Get access

Summary

‘What I got out of the Holocaust’, Arthur Miller once remarked,

was that memory was being destroyed forever. But if one looks at it from a distance, the Holocaust, dreadful and terrible and significant as it was, was only one part of a wider phenomenon. Count the people who have been killed in wars in this century … Think of the memory that has gone. I often times think of that … Maybe there were six people among the tens of millions who could have saved the world … some philosopher who could have illuminated the whole universe … Maybe one's function, a writer's function, in part anyway, is to remember, to be the rememberer.

For a writer who throughout his life depended on memory as the raw material for his drama, who saw the past not as so many discarded presents, with no organic logic or moral relevance, but as an informing part of present and future actions, to walk down the path of history was not a retreat but a means of illuminating those actions. Besides, to be Jewish, whether religiously practising or not, was to be unavoidably aware of voices from the past, some insisting that he remain true to his heritage, others crying out against a terrible fate. Arthur Miller's plays are full of ghosts, in the Ibsen sense.

Type
Chapter
Information
Remembering and Imagining the Holocaust
The Chain of Memory
 , pp. 176 - 218
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2006

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×