Trapped Humans and Disabled Language in the Frenzy of War: A Study in Search of Home and Meaning

Abstract

Trapped in the frenzy of war the whole humanity, transfixed at the bewildering catastrophic situation in the wake of wars, is not only unable to join dots and find the foothold on the ever shaky grounds but the overpowering war situations make it distrust the power of long established traditions and other means of existence in their incapacity to hold it safe and secure. The present paper drives home a point that the historical reality of immeasurable suffering of soldiers at the war frontlines and that of civilians under the grip of fear for being bombarded and rendered homeless gets further accentuated when the language finds itself helpless and fails to sustain the enormity of this calamity in the literary representations through its alphabets of pain and fear. In order to represent a reality that shatters the existing frames of reference, one has to strain against the boundaries of sayable. The paper shows some of the powerful testimonies of the concentration camps as literary artifices challenging the conventional limits of language, form and genre. This research paper shows civilian on the one hand and the language on as the creative faculty on the other hand in a stranded state, both in search of home and meaning respectively. Eventually cinema and the responsibility of the readers as a witness to survivors’ testimony are brought to the rescue of language to redeem it of its incapacity to and portray reality in its entirety, just as the nuanced renderings promise some success to humans in their pursuit to connect dots of past, present and future on the canvas of life