"HERE IS NO WHY"
Similarities notwithstanding, there is no use of the phrase "here is no why" in the writings of Elie Wiesel. The phrase originates in an account by Primo Levi.1
According to Levi, an SS guard snatched away an icicle he'd clasped for water. When Levi asked "Warum?" - "Why?" the guard answered "Heir ist kein Warum."
The phrase has come up elsewhere, however. It has been used in the writings of Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Ray Bradbury, and Martin Amis. They themselves may have been alluding to the original 'here is no why.' Whether or not we choose to abrogate intentionality, in each case the words suggest a dynamic and paradoxical absence of cause. In Levi's usage, the phrase evokes the extreme viciousness and irrationality of Auschwitz.
The Smashing Pumpkins song, however, does not situate the phrase. In fact, without a Holocaust reading, it is difficult to make sense of the title in terms of the lyrics; acknowledging the history of the phrase is the only way to impart its relevance. Even then there is a fundamental ambiguity as to how the allusion should be interpreted. Does it mean that every irrationality is isolating and terrible, or that one person's induction to the irrational is trivial as compared to another's. The irreconcilability of this coexistence is as tenacious as the paradox of causality itself, and each ambiguous modality is equally valid as a field of inquiry. Postmodernist theory might suggest that there is no answer at all, yet this is inconsistent in the presence of several legitimate possibilities. Absence of resolution is not necessarily the same as an absence of truth; truth can exist even if we sometimes do not know or cannot identify it. This is, perhaps, one answer to the question, "What is truth?"
1
Primo Levi was an Italian Jew, born in 1919. He fought with the Italian resistance during World War II, and was in his mid-twenties when he was sent to Auschwitz for a year.
He was freed in 1945, returned to Italy, and devoted his life to writing.
He committed suicide on April 11th, 1987.
