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PARTISAN REVIEW
the good surely prosper. It is, of course , the only thing to do if you are going
on living. Terrence Des Pres, in his luminescent and limited book,
The
Survivor,
understands such tragic solutions very well :
We may find , in the end , that the hero' s death is appointed-that
one of the functions of culture is
to
provide symbolic systems which
displace awareness of what is terrible , and that through death the hero
takes upon himself the condition of victimhood and thereby grants the
rest of us an illusion
of
grace .
A part of Des Pres's argument is that "the age of heroes is gone" and
that the burden of heroism has been shifted to anyone in extreme circum–
stances (preeminently the concentration camps) . 'who manages to stay alive
in body
and
spirit, enduring dread and hopelessness without the loss of will
to carry on in human ways ." This kind of courage is not absent from
tragedy-Oedipus possessed it, certainly, at Colonus-nor has the sense of
it ever been lacking in the world. Think, for example, of the mana, the
magical power, the luck, that attaches itself to certain boulders , and the
holy awe with which primitive peoples came to regard them, simply because
the old stones had endured so long. Surely Des Pres is right to think of the
tenacity of his heroes-clinging to their humanity, indeed growing into it–
as no less miraculous .
By a survivor Des Pres does not mean someone who merely came
through the death camps alive. He knows that for the Nazis, for Stalin,
" the death of the soul was aimed at"; the survivor, then , is someone who
resisted that onslaught. His antithesis is not the man or woman or the child
selected for the gas and the oven, so much as the
Muse/man,
one of the
"walking dead, " who shuffled everywhere, not speaking, not seeing, not
eating even:
dokhodyaga,
"the goners, " they called them in the Soviet
camps. But
Des
Pres's portrait of the survivor- decent , sharing, unafraid,
with his dignity and even a kind of purity intact, burning with the desire
to
bear witness, and above all growing in his sense of connectedness to others–
this portrait, while beautiful, while surely true of the men and women who
speak to us directly throughout the text, nonetheless raises a number of
problems which I have found to my own dismay I cannot ignore .
In the first place, it is difficult to read this book without coming
to
think that the survivor, "the figure who emerges from all those who
fought for life in the concentration camps ," stands for each person liberated
in 1945 . On only one page does
Des
Pres indicate that there is "more than
one way to survive," and nowhere does he state what he must know to be
true-that the men and women he describes were not typical of the hun–
dreds of thousands who were forced, like dogs, to eat dog. Thousands came
