The Grotesque as a Comic Genre Author(s): Frances K. Barasch Source: Modern Language Studies , Winter, 1985, Vol. 15, No. 1 (Winter, 1985), pp. 3-11 Published by: Modern Language Studies Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3194413 JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Modern Language Studies This content downloaded from 104.214.75.120 on Sun, 27 Mar 2022 21:35:10 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms The Grotesque as a Comic Genre1 Frances K. Barasch Among Candide's early adventures in Voltaire's classic satire of injustice is his escape from enforced service in the Bulgarian army, which is accomplished by God's grace, Voltaire suggests, "while both kings were having Te Deums sung, each in his own camp."2 Candide passes "over heaps of dead and dying," seeking haven from the Bulgarian slaughter in a nearby village, only to find that it has been burned to ashes: ... It was an Abarian village [Voltaire writes] which the Bulgarians had burned in accordance with the rules of international law. Here, old men riddled with wounds watched their wives die, with their throats cut, holding their children to their bleeding breasts; there, girls, disemboweled after satisfying the natural needs of a few heroes, were gasping their last sighs; others, half-burned, screamed to be given the coup de grace. Brains wre spattered over the ground beside severed arms and legs. (P. 20.) Fleeing then to another village, Candide discovers that "the Abarian heroes had treated it in the same way" (p. 20). And so on and on. Despite the cumulative horrors of Candide's adventures in the world of men-indeed, because of the frequency and magnitude of the atrocities-Voltaire stretches reader credibility to its limits and creates an impression of ludicrous-horror that penetrates the work. Satiric style is the essence, for although the sinister manifestations of Candide's world are reported in gruesome detail, they are simultaneously rendered comic by Voltaire's blithe narration, as when the image of Candide "passing over heaps of dead and dying" is conveyed as coolly as a weather report. In Candide, Voltaire runs the gamut of comic devices common to satire, deflating idealist philosophy and clowning with political injustice, social disease, religious intransigence, and romantic love. With foolish consistency of purpose, Candide is made to look for the best in this best of possible worlds, and the equanimity with which he accepts the cruelties of experience renders him a fool, no less credulous than the conventional rustic in burlesque. Structured in thirty chapters or episodes, Candide's life is represented as a passage through misery of a sort no comfortable reader would believe-beatings, vivisection, and cannibalism, for instance, are relieved only by the exceptional and fabulous Eldorado. Yet, the brutal experiences seem to become progressively milder as the reader, and Candide, are increasingly immunized to their grotesque effects. By mid-novel, Candide has survived incredible tortures, has mur- dered three men, recovered his beloved Cunegonde, and lost her again. His optimism remains unshaken until, in chapter twenty, two-thirds into the novel, he witnesses a naval battle and the drowning of a hundred men. Candide then makes a minor concession to the Manicheean views of his friend Martin: "There is something diabolical" about the affairs of men, he 3 This content downloaded from 104.214.75.120 on Sun, 27 Mar 2022 21:35:10 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms understates (p. 66). In the final chapters, true to burlesque convention, all the friends whom Candide had supposed dead are restored to life and placed safely under his protection on a communal farm. But the ending is not meant to be happy. Candide's capacity for fulfillment has been impaired. When our hero finally wins Cunegonde, he no longer desires her; reunited with his once-admired teacher, Pangloss, he perceives him as a bore. Ultimately, Candide adopts Martin's cynical plan: "Let us work without reasoning..., it is the only way to make life endurable" (p. 101). Pervading this burlesque conclusion is the ominous sense that Candide, once an innocent and idealist, has been lobotomized by the fiendish comedy of life. My purpose in reviewing Candide here is to put before us a composition that has in imagery, style, and structure, a major dependency on ludicrous-horror, that medley of form we call grotesque. In Candide, sinister and comic elements are combined consistently to form broad and biting satire that has severely disturbing effects on the reader, perhaps more so in our time than in Voltaire's, as the entire scope of human folly is brought into focus by our modem understanding of the literary grotesque. Candide is illustrative of a special kind of comic literature, recent critics have aptly termed "grotesque" and serves as a model for a definition of genre that would eliminate from our deliberations, works that use the grotesque only on occasion, dwell on horror merely for sensation, employ narrow satire or caricature, or lack a comic perspective of the sinister side of man. What we may observe in Voltaire, as in Rabelais, to name another who worked in the grotesque genre, is a particular idiom with an ancient purpose-to transmute social issues and human dread into creative form and thereby render a truer transcript of harsh reality than literal exposition might provide.3 Modern literature has evolved with increasing tensions of ludicrous-horror into a major form of expression no less vehement than Voltaire's nor less outrageous than Rabelais'. Gunter Grass, Peter Weiss, Fernando Arrabal are only a few who suggest the extent to which recent writers have engaged in its creation. But these observations do not tell us precisely what the grotesque is. Specifically, as I have written elsewhere, the grotesque is a "moment" in literature (as in art) that is manifested in image or event and functions as an "objective correlative of ludicrous-horror." In the best or purest grotesque, conflicting elements of ludicrous-horror occur simultaneously, producing in the reader a confused and uneasy tension between laughter and fear or disgust.4 The simultaneously different phenomena, depending on historical and cultural contexts of either writer or reader, cause varying degrees of tension which we may describe in terms of emotional colora- tion as light or dark. Darker, more threatening manifestations of the grotesque, such as mutilation or violent death, when represented as comic experience, produce a dual effect in the reader that is akin to hysteria. Lighter moments of the kind may simply deal with human vice and folly and produce a duality that is only mild disgust and a titter. The light grotesque, for example, may be produced by a play on cultural aversions, as to certain edibles like lamb's eyeballs or human flesh. That the grotesque in literature is perceived as momentary and 4 This content downloaded from 104.214.75.120 on Sun, 27 Mar 2022 21:35:10 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms variable in effect, Philip Thomson among others also maintained when he described its tendency to impact briefly at two levels, the emotional and intellectual, and promptly slide away.5 In the grotesque genre, however, such moments must be recurrent. While allowing for intervals or valleys of neutral exposition, works in the grotesque genre are sharpened by peaks of excitement upon which difficult phenomena are mounted, there to teeter comically before slipping away. This is to say that instances of ludicrous-horror, although identified as grotesque, in themselves do not constitute a generic structure unless they recur significantly in the text. When, where, and how the grotesque moment appears, whether light or dark, and in what progression are major determinants in recognizing a work as grotesque in genre. In Candide, for example, grotesque instances follow in rapid succession, in dark-to-light progression, from the Bulgarian atrocities to the final burlesque reunion and the unhappy philosophy of survival without reason; the grotesquerie functions organically to produce a forceful anger of protest against injustice and the impotence of the individual in face of this destructive power. In modem literature prior to World War II, the grotesque tends to progress gradually from light to dark; moments are widely spaced and the narrative is leisurely. Generous intervals of harmless exposition give readers time to identify with the characters and the social order of their worlds; but at crucial moments in these works, conventional logic of the fiction is shattered by grotesque imagery or events that destroy the accustomed and recreate fictional realities as irrational experience. This may be said of some of Kafka, Joyce Cary, or Faulkner's novels, even those that plunge the reader immediately into strange worlds that are made to appear natural, for these fictional worlds are allowed to unfold before the writer assails the reader with the surprising grotesque moment just as the reader has become complacent. While reactions among readers differ, most writers on the subject agree that certain unresolved tensions between laughter and fear are produced, at least intermittently, in works that are perceived as grotesque. What has not been noted before, and that we may observe with appropriate critical distance, is that in certain works the grotesque moments are the structural bases of the whole. In more recent literature, comic horrors are piled up with greater frequency, even more rapidly than in Candide, as each successive writer tries to deal with a growing sense of man's fatal imperfection and his increased potential for self-destruction. It is entirely possible, of course, that our proximity to current writing and our distance from earlier grotesquerie cause an illusion of darkening that is not actually there. Neverthe- less, near or far, we observe in these works instances of comic horror, recurring with significant frequency at crucial locations in their structures, which have a cumulative effect and move us, ultimately, by their syner- getic powers to new levels of awareness and emotional response. Thus, works that may be said to belong to the grotesque genre do so, not because they contain a grotesque instance or two (as in Thomas Hardy, for instance), or a series of light grotesques or caricatures (as in Dickens), but because the moments of ludicrous-horror, progressing with varying degrees of impact, are organically structured and cumulatively grotesque in effect. This content downloaded from 104.214.75.120 on Sun, 27 Mar 2022 21:35:10 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 5 The purpose in identifying this genre, as with any genre, is to develop an approach to interpretation and criticism through which we learn more about art forms and meanings implicit in aesthetic structures than we may achieve by analysis of literature isolated from kind or class. Understood as a comic genre, the grotesque represents meanings in which the sinister is acknowledged, made ludicrous, and yet is never destroyed. Ludicrous and horrific elements rest, more or less, in equal balance in the grotesque work, as in Candide, to imply the co-existence of good and evil, of life and death, of hope and despair. Their interchangeability and the inevitability of conflict between these forces is a special meaning embedded in the genre. The conflict, objectified in the grotesque moment, is correlative to the reader's own ambivalence and, no doubt, discomfort with its effect. Invariably, the grotesque structure also implies a failure of conventional systems to provide rational solutions for human interaction. In the darkest, most ludicrous statements about the irrational nature of man, the grotesque conceit is stretched out of proportion to its own logical conclusion by portents of self-destruction, whether through mutation (as in Kafka), insanity (as in Grass or Weiss), mass deaths (as in Joseph Heller), or the world's end (as in holocaust literature). One such holocaust fiction, widely read and rarely critiqued, is A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller, Jr.,6 a science-fiction novel in the grotesque genre that deals with nuclear insanity. It has been overlooked in studies of the Grotesque because of a general failure among moder critics to grasp the comic import of difficult matter when the matter has painful immediacy. Where earlier grotesque works, once held in disgrace, now find acceptance and admiration, moder efforts in the same genre are often cancelled by neglect. A Canticle illustrates the point. In an era of small wars, Voltaire captured the essence of their horror and absurdity, the injustice of their outcomes, and the doomed mission of idealists who step aside from practical realities to contemplate God and goodness as an end. The diabolical realities of World War II, however, have gone beyond the imagination of man, quantitatively if not in quality, and have called for a literature of new dimension to reflect their wider scope. Post-holocaust writers have brought new savage humor to bear on recent events, the more savage as the deeds are closer and darker, the more ludicrous and bitter as technological progress is made the measure of man's moral retrogression. In his post-holocaust science fantasy, whose title alone suggests the multiple ironies of Judaeo-Christian culture and proposes grotesque puns (Leib: body, abdomen, life; Witz: wit, joke, pun), Walter Miller parodies European history since the Middle Ages and explains by way of forecast, the inevitability of a final war to come. To the extent that World War II is symbolic of a last war, A Canticle recapitulates the irrational conditions that have led to it, and sums them up in a futuristic litany sung by the last monks on Earth: We are the centuries We are the chin-choppers and the golly whoppers, And soon we shall discuss the amputation of your head. 6 This content downloaded from 104.214.75.120 on Sun, 27 Mar 2022 21:35:10 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms We are your singing garbage men, Sir and Madam, and we march in cadence behind you, chanting rhymes that some think odd. .......... ... .... ............................... We march in Atrophy, En telling bawd and a traveli We bury you We bury you. Hear then, t Leibowitz, as s Lucifer is Not exactly no ignorance, com end the world. 54). The entire st of science and imaginary wor Deluge of the T tury in Amer pre-holocaust taneously in t Leibowitz's ma skill in the gr torture: the sa Leibowitz can b settled "a disp Miller's recurrent grotesquerie has various shadings, some more painfully hilarious than others. His world is partly peopled by the Misborn, a minority group of one-eyed monsters, creatures with two heads, or sometimes normal beings with invisible deformities of heart or mind. None of the grotesques of art history, from Bruegel's blasphemies to Wilde's word-conception of Dorian Gray, are omitted. These mutants have turned cannibal; they prey on travelers and speak a primitive language in which the single word "eat" expresses their entire reason for being. In an updated version of the cannibal-missionary joke, Brother Francis of the Order of Leibowitz is accosted by the misbegotten on the road to Rome; his life is spared only because he is too scrawny to eat, and his donkey is taken instead. Regardless of grotesque shading, all the solemn concerns of men are diminished by ridiculous exaggerations or sometimes by unremarked absurdities such as the canonization of the Jew Leibowitz who has been adored by a community of industrious monks for six centuries since the Deluge. In his lifetime, the Beatus had established the Order of Leibowitz in order to preserve knowledge for posterity. He is canonized centuries 7 This content downloaded from 104.214.75.120 on Sun, 27 Mar 2022 21:35:10 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms later, after the discovery and authentication of his sacred documents, among these a blueprint for an electrical circuit and a slip of paper in pre-Deluge English, reading "pound pastrami, can kraut, six bagelsbring home for Emma" (p. 22). Another note in Leibowitz's hand, which has no meaning to the novel's characters, is admitted for the reader's amusement: "Remember-pick up Form 1040, Uncle Revenue" (p. 22). Even his wife Emma's terrible grinning skull, found along with the papers in a Fallout Survival Shelter, is made ludicrous because it flashes a gold tooth. As no learning survives the Age of Simplification when "all the smart bastards that caused all this" were destroyed, the monks of Leibowitz Abbey do not understand the texts they have "booklegged," memo- rized, and copied for posterity. Opportunities for grotesque incident abound in this situation: as one watches Brother Francis spread blue ink around white lines and letters in order to copy the Leibowitz blueprint, one is reminded of other ancient errors (as of the copyist who put coma instead of corona on Moses' head) and of the ominous effects human ignorance has had on the human race. In part two of the novel, twelve centuries after the Deluge, electric- ity is rediscovered at the Leibowitz monastery and a renaissance begins. In part three, nineteen centuries after the Deluge, the nuclear bomb and space travel are brought to the world. Each of these passages of time is punctuated by images of happy buzzards and dead corpses. Lyrical language describes the ghoulish birds in gay flight and their delight in "the bounty of good things" as they wait "for the fruitful Earth to yield up her bountiful carrion" (pp. 98, 198). As we approach the last millenium of A Canticle, Miller's grotesque darkens. A new cold war is warming up even while the mutilated of the first holocaust have not yet healed genetically. The mutant Mrs. Grales appears before the Abbot Zerchi and Monk Joshua of the Order of Saint Leibowitz, seeking baptism for her daughter Rachel, which has been denied by her parish priest. The young monk Joshua is transfixed by the woman and calls the Abbot's attention to her appearance, but the worldly Abbot, Miller writes, "saw nothing stranger than usual; her extra head was concealed by a sort of veil.. ." (p. 224). In his darker moments, Miller makes his grotesque imagery function on dual emotional levels, as here in the casual acceptance of the Abbot and Joshua's immobilization at the sight of the two-headed woman. Miller imposes preposterous natural and spiritual fears on the image as well. The parish priest won't baptize Rachel because there is "some question as to whether Rachel is her daughter, her sister-or merely an excrescence growing out of her shoulder" (p. 224). This is not a simple case of Siamese twins, the Abbot explains, reminding us of scholastic disputes that have become part of comic tradition; some "old-timers say that Rachel wasn't there when Mrs. Grales was born." A satiric jibe is added to the comic abominations when the Abbot treats Rachel's baptism as a problem of the Church bureaucracy, which he, thankfully, is not obliged to solve. When in the final chapter, the impending apocalypse occurs, some earthlings escape the planet in a space ship, and the world's only survivor is Rachel, baptized at last by the dying Abbot who has seen her head come 8 This content downloaded from 104.214.75.120 on Sun, 27 Mar 2022 21:35:10 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms alive. It appears-if the pun may be forgiven-that the future of civilization has been resting all along on Mrs. Grales' shoulder. There should be no misunderstanding that Miller's humor is either crass or flippant, for his vision of the human condition affirms as much as it negates. It is this sympathy, in fact, that increases the horror of the fantasy and yet transmutes the grotesque into the sublime where the image of a grotesque Divinity may be apprehended. When the dying Abbot receives the last sacrament from the newborn Rachel, the experience is as mystical as it is ludicrous; it is as if she had learned from "direct instruction" how to minister the Host. Miller's wit is subdued as he writes: "He did not ask why God would choose to raise up a creature of primal innocence from the shoulder of Mrs. Grales, or why God gave to it the preternatural gifts of Eden-those gifts which Man had been trying to seize by brute force again from Heaven since he first lost them" (pp. 276-77). And Miller's demonic analogy of the world's end is made as inspiriting as it is incongruously grotesque when he explains that the survivors entering the space ship that escapes from Earth look back and see "the visage of Lucifer mushroomed into hideousness above the cloud- bank, rising slowly like some titan climbing to its feet after ages of imprisonment in the Earth" (p. 277). The final horror is expressed as a song of nature, malevolent and beautiful; at world's end "a wind came across the ocean, sweeping with it a pall of fine white ash. The ash fell into the sea and into the breakers. The breakers washed up the whiting. The shark swam out to his deepest waters and brooded in the cold clean currents. He was very hungry that season" (p. 278). A Canticle for Leibowitz depends on our understanding of its genre for a just appreciation of Miller's novel. His brilliant use of the "objective-correlatives of ludicrous-horror" constitutes the basis of our appreciation of the comic vision in this book of doom. For, while the sinister import of Miller's work does not escape interpretation, the ludicrous element must be acknowledged as well. This element is often obscured by the reader's excessive proximity to the literary subject, or-as Philip Thomson put it- from a "refusal to see the comic element..., or the refusal, having seen it, to acknowledge its impinging, as the comic, on one's awareness." Novels in the grotesque genre have as a common bond a structural reliance on horror perceived through a saving comic vision of humanity. In Miller, metaphysical as well as social issues are addressed, and human history is mocked as a chronicle of ignorance and folly. Perhaps because his concern is so great, Miller's fiction portrays complete destruction as a logical consequence of our social systems, yet it is an attempt to save. The comic element in the grotesque is that saving element, a creative vision in face of destructive forces. To ignore the comic element in the grotesque or to fail to perceive the grotesque as a comic genre is to miss the affinities of meaning between early writers like Voltaire or Rabelais and moders like Miller, for the grotesque genre has always been a reflection of creative possibility, of hope overlying human anguish;8 in our era, it is perhaps the only positive expression in a potentially self-destructive world. Baruch College, CUNY This content downloaded from 104.214.75.120 on Sun, 27 Mar 2022 21:35:10 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 9 NOTES 1. Portions of this essay were presented in papers to the Comparative Litera Section, Modern Language Association, 1975 and to the Seminar on th Grotesque, Modern Language Association, 1977. 2. Candide, tr. Donald M. Frame (New York, 1961), p. 20. 3. The relationship between the grotesque genre and satire has been wid discussed, especially in connection with Rabelais and his literary desc dants. While Thomas Wright was first among critics in this field to ident Rabelais' "new form of satire, more grotesque and more comprehensive anything that has been before" in which was ridiculed "everything t existed" (A History of Caricature and the Grotesque in Art and Literature Frances K. Barasch [New York, 1968], pp. 330,332), it was Heinrich Sch gans who gave more specific definition to the genre as "grotesque-satir special kind of literature, high in moral purpose, in which caricature extended beyond the limits of possibility, and protest was made wit permanent and moral justice that surpassed the trivial attacks of carica and burlesque (Geschichte der grotesken Satire [Strassburg, 1894], pass Although Schneegans himself is rarely read, his genre theory has passed i twentieth-century criticism via Huntington Brown (Rabelais in Engl Literature [New York, 1928]) and Erich Auerbach (Mimesis [Princeton 1961]), p. 284) as Rabelaisian satire of highly serious purpose. More recen Mikhail Bakhtin objected to Schneegans' "narrow modern interpretation satire as a negation of separate individual phenomena," confirming Wri views when he wrote that Rabelais was a satirist of the broadest sort who aimed at "the entire order of life (including prevailing truth)" (Rabelais and His World [Cambridge, Mass., 1968], pp. 306j-7). Neil Rhodes, in Elizabethan Grotesque (London, 1980), is mistaken in believing that Bakhtin did not recognize satirical purpose in Rabelais (p. 9). My genre reference is to one line of art, disentangled from many grotesque traditions, that is, "to phenomena, like those of the 'decadent' Romans, in which the structure of the familiar world is disintegrated or shattered, made ridiculous, and thereby exposed to a deeper and higher meaning." In this tradition "the modem grotesque, despite its varied forms, could be understood as an eternal device to protest against terror and to shield man from the deep inner anguish of his human condition" (Frances K. Barasch, The Grotesque: A Study in Meanings, 1964; [The Hague, 1971], p. 164). With reference to medieval laughter, Bakhtin has argued similarly, that men overcame "cosmic terror", imposed upon them by religious officialdom, when they transformed fear into a "gay carnival monster" (p. 335 et passim). Rhodes also states that the Elizabethan grotesque flourished in a context of fear which threatened men with "eternal torture in hell," the plague, civil war, and "increasing tensions about the succession" (p. 17). Ergo, a grotesque genre that implies protest through a special kind of ludicrous-horrific imagery. Nevertheless, both Bakhtin and Rhodes, arguing as does Lee B. Jennings (The Ludicrous Demon [Berkeley, 1983]), that the grotesque pertains primarily to visual imagery, imply that a genre theory cannot be sustained. 4. On the co-existence of conflicting elements in the grotesque, see Frances K. Barasch, "The Meaning of the Grotesque," in Wright (1968), pp. vii-x; Mikhail Bakhtin (1968), p. 62; Philip Thomson, The Grotesque (London, 1972), pp. 1-5 et passim; Neil Rhodes (1980), p. 10; and others. 5. The question of the grotesque response to artistic production is still wide open. Historical distance, taste, and cultural context as determinants of 10 This content downloaded from 104.214.75.120 on Sun, 27 Mar 2022 21:35:10 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms reader/viewer response are discussed in Barasch (1968), ibid.; Barasch (1971), Ch. V: Thomson (1972), ibid.; Rhodes (1980), ibid.; and others. Rene Girard has proposed a concept of "distancing" to explain the viewer's ability to laugh at certain mechanisms in classical plots which, if presented in the tragic mode, would incite tears ("Perilous Balance: a Comic Hypothesis," Modern Language Notes (1972), 87: 811-26). In traditional farce, Edith Kern explains, certain non-mimetic elements, such as festivity, costumes, masks, and flytings are "metacommunications" or a "frame" that signal comic "distancing" and predispose viewers to accept and laugh at abasement, insults, beatings, or threats of death (The Absolute Comic [New York, 1980], p. 36). In the modern literary grotesque, signals for comic distancing are still being identified; for example, current critical perceptions of Kafka, Faulkner, Joyce Cary, and others as grotesque (comic) writers were not widely shared by their contemporaries. 6. First printing, 1959; nineteenth printing, New York, 1972. 7. Thomson (1972), p. 55. 8. Barasch (1971), p. 164. Folger Institute French Symposium A symposium on the topic "The Ascendancy of French Culture during the Reign of the Sun King" will be held March 14-16, 1985, at the Folger Institute. For information, write: Lena Cowen Orlin, Acting Chair, Folger Institute, Folger Shakespeare Library, 201 East Capitol Street, S.E., Washington, D.C. 20003. Phone: (202) 5444600. NEMLA 1985 Convention The annual NEMLA convention will be held in the Sheraton- Harford Hotel in Hartford, Connecticut, on March 27-29, 1985. The University of Hartford is our sponsor. For information write Professor Gerald Prince, NEMLA President, Department of Romance Languages, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pa., 19104. Holocaust Studies Annual The topic for the second volume of Holocaust Studies Annual is "Literature, Film and the Holocaust." Articles appropriate to the topic are welcome. Deadline: Sept. 2,1985. Inquiries and submissions to: Prof. Jack Fischel, History Dept., Millersville University, Millersville, PA. 17551. Holocaust Conference The fourth annual conference on the Holocaust will be held April 21-22, 1985, at Millersville University. Proposals for papers and/or complete sessions are invited. Deadline: Feb. 1, 1985. Address inquiries and proposals to: Holocaust Conference Committee, History Dept., Millersville University, Millersville, PA. 17551. Phone: (717) 872-3555. 11 This content downloaded from 104.214.75.120 on Sun, 27 Mar 2022 21:35:10 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms