PARIS LETTER
501
his mechanistic conception of behavior, by the tautological character
of his political views (but does he still hold them?), I am nonetheless
reassured by the magnificence and subtlety of his vision. What we must
get through our heads, those of us who refuse the world's inconscient
return to Peace, is that we are all survivors; and insofar as we survive,
it is with some measure of Rousset's profoundly human force and humor.
If
the category has any meaning at all, this is a very great man.
L'Univers concentratito>nnaire
ends on this note of strength. To
the "positive account" of the camps, Rousset credits the "dynamic
realization of the power and the beauty of the fact of living, in itself,
brutal, entirely devoid of all superstructures, of living even through
the worst collapses, or the gravest retreats. A sensual freshness of joy
constructed on the completest knowledge of the ruins and, in conse–
quence, a hardening in action, a stubbornness in decisions, in short a
deeper and more intensely creative health. For some, confirmation; for
the greatest number, discovery, and a breath-taking one: the springs of
idealism laid bare; the burst mystification brings to light in the nakedness
of the concentration-camp universe the dependence of man on economic
and social scaffoldings, the true material relations upon which behavior
is founded.... Finally, the passionate discovery of humor, not as a per–
sonal projection, but as the objective structure of the universe."
Les fours de notre mort,
however, probes more deeply into the great
problems of political action. One feels, here, that Rousset is no longer
sure of himself, nor convinced of the adequacy of his Marxist equip–
ment; and perhaps that is one reason why he cast this book in the un–
familiar form of a novel. Rousset's chief insight, the analogy of the
camps with society, is also the source of his chief error, which consists
in displacing the question. To say that the worst evils of our society
are engendered by the putrescence of an economic system is a truism,
and in that broad sense the camps and all their horrors are a "product"
of capitalism. But to say this is, in reality, to say very little about the
camps-and about society. For the particular horrors with respect to
which we are called upon to take a position are directly related to
specific attempts to
jJrovide in action an answer to the ge-neral crisis.
Granting, for example, even that the Communist control of the bureau–
cracy meant saving from physical destruction a larger percentage of
Communists than would otherwise have been saved, it saved them in
such a way and under such conditions, that the survivors can only
function today as the docile instruments of another police-power in
Germany, namely the N.K.V.D.
If
one accepts, if one even compromises
with, the totalitarian answer, one is obliged in the end to accept the
camps.
(I should have liked here to quote the long passage in which an
S.S. justifies the whole system of the camps in much the same terms as
