PARTISAN REVIEW
351
his
being . . . turns
his
back on
his
past, . . . declares himself a bank–
rupt and
his
memories to be unreal."
This,
then, is Totalitarian
Art;
it is as much an
art
of success–
ful suicide, as Extremist
Art
is that of the attempt. And in order to
achieve it, Borowski himself underwent a progressive, triple suicide.
Although he had behaved with great courage in Auschwitz, volun–
tarily giving up the relatively easy
post
of an orderly in order to
share the lot of the common prisoners, his first person singular nar–
rator is callous, corrupt, well-placed in the camp hierarchy, a sur–
vival artist who hates his fellow victims more than the guards be–
cause their weakness illuminates
his,
and each new death means a
further effort of denial and a sharper guilt. Thus
his
first
self-de–
struction was moral: he assuaged
his
guilt for surviving when so
many others had gone under by identifying with the evil he described.
The second suicide came after his concentration camps stories were
written: he abandoned literature altogether and sank himself into
Stalinist politics. Finally, having escaped the Zyklon B of Auschwitz
for so long, he gassed himself at home in 1951, when he was twenty–
seven years old.
The politicians and economists of disaster may talk glibly of
"thinking about the unthinkable," but for the writers the problem
is sharper, closer and considerably more difficult. Like the Hiroshima
survivor I mentioned earlier, Borowski seems
to
have despaired of
ever communicating adequately what he knew: "I wished to describe
what I have experienced, but who in the world will believe a writer
using an unknown language? It's like trying to persuade trees or
stones." The key to the language turned out to be deprivation, a
totalitarian art of facts and images, without frills or comments, as
depersonalized and deprived as the lives of the victims themselves.
In the same way, when Peter Weiss created his documentary tragedy,
The Investigation,
he invented nothing and added nothing; he simply
used a blank stage, unnamed, anonymously dressed actors and skill–
fully edited fragments of the Auschwitz trials in Frankfurt. The result
was a great deal more shocking than any "imaginative" re-creation of
the camps could ever have been.
Similarly, Samuel Beckett began at the other end of the spectrum
with an Irish genius for words, words, words and finished by creating
a world of what Coleridge called "Life-in-Death."
His
people lead
