The Use and Abuse of Literature - Marjorie Garber [54]
If so, I think it is because we have forgotten the power of literary reading. When what isn’t literature becomes literature, its power is not diminished but augmented. There is no guarantee that reading such a text as literature will produce a historically faithful or politically agreeable assessment. We might place the text in the context of genres other than tragedy or children’s literature, the two most familiar categories through which the Diary has been read. Other literary options abound, from the historical (the fact that the diary is a mode with its own conventions, one similar to the early epistolary novel) to, for example, the saint’s life, the locked-room mystery, the noir thriller, the captivity narrative. Anne’s diary is also available for Freudian readings, feminist readings, or readings about the paradoxical functions of language.
Anne Frank was a reader, and she wanted to be a published author. Many of her admirers felt, with Meyer Levin, that she was a born writer, and her diary has been prized by writers for being literary. She describes at great length the act of writing (another good genre for this text, which is all about scenes of instruction). If we give the text the credit for being literary, we cannot at the same time so diminish it to the point that we assume it has only one meaning. We need to allow the activity of becoming literature to go where it goes, to understand that literary patterns sometimes write through their authors even as authors think themselves to be controlling the scene.
I understand the desire of some critics to keep the diary as part of the historical record of the period, and I see the way in which Anne’s literary celebrity—from the time of the publication of the diary in the United States but especially since the success of the play called The Diary of Anne Frank—undercut or usurped the place of more difficult, complex, painful, and necessary information about the Holocaust. In such contexts, human suffering is the topic, and human inhumanity a vital theme. But when a text, in this case the diary, is part of a literary investigation, such issues of morality, ethics, and lessons about life are not the whole story. The power of the literary is always divorced from the typical, however much it may be appropriated to support the idea of the type. Once more, it is how the story means, rather than what it means, that is the literary question. Anne Frank produced her diary in two versions, one with pseudonyms and other literary devices, the other supposedly without them, which is to say that the devices lay beneath the surface, at the level of the text’s unconscious. Even without the intervention of her father, who omitted some things and changed others—and the subsequent textual history that produced a critical edition—this mode of literary production opens the diary to the possibility of a sophisticated reading and analysis that is entirely respectful of the text while also reading it against the grain. The protests against such readings would presumably come from the side of the supposed supporters of the literary, not from the side of historians and philosophers. For what multiple literary readings of the diary will surely produce is not a single story but many. Some of these readings will speak of the indomitability