636
PARTISAN REVIEW
self a genuine "biological gyroscope," a life-force, has the face of a survivor
to me. (Pace Bettelheim who in his
New Yorker
article is toward Wertmuller
and the nature of art, radically naive; and towards Des Pres, stubbornly,
scandalously unfair.)
Despite these problems, and others, this is an extraordinary book, and
it is good that it has been written. It is a corrective to the generally held
idea-held even by many of the prisoners themselves-that all concentra–
tion camp inmates were childish or passive or brutal to the point of being
indistinguishable from their guards and tormentors. In this connection,
The Survivor
is particularly successful at demolishing psychoanalytical inter–
pretations of death-camp behavior. Bettleheim's notions on infantilism
and identification with the aggressor, Lifton's on survivor guilt, and those of
lesser lights do not hold up well in the face of Des Pres's argument that
interpretation does not work when experience has been collapsed
to
the
point where it has only a single meaning, survival; or in a world where every–
thing is forbidden except what must be done on command.
The Survivor
is most valuable, though, not as a corrective but as a
guide. The prisoners whom Des Pres calls Survivors have been through the
worst that our civilization has yet produced and have left a record behind.
Others will have need of it, both in its details and for its general sense
that, as Des Pres says, "under dehumanizing pressure men and women tend
to preserve themselves in ways recognizably human ." Ironically enough,
for all its disparagement of the tragic vision, and in spite of its ridicule of the
fixed idea that pain is connected with "spiritual depth," what is reaffirmed
by
The Survivor
is the ancient, Aeschylean formula:
suffen'ng bn'ngs
knowledge,
and not only knowledge, but something that those of us who
may never be forced to such limits need most, a "special grace" -satisfac–
tion with life.
This knowledge-the general tendency of men to remain' 'steady in
their humanness" -Des Pres calls biological wisdom. I think it is a mistake
to
do so. Not because it is not a fascinating speculation, and not because
it is also slightly silly (the need to bear witness becomes a species of alarm
call, like a beaver slapping his tail; the "minimal fabric of care," never
entirely torn in the camps, ends up being compared to the "communal
activity" of spermatozoa), but because it opens up a terrible question that
this book, with its limitations, is in no way prepared to answer . What about
them?
Aren't
they
human and so subject to biological wisdom, or dumb
chance, too? Life lives upon life, says Des Pres, but in more ways than he
(intending a "realm of mutual sacrifice' ') thinks of. A soldier with a death's
head on his cap, hurling an infant against a wall, is no less a part of "the
central mystery," and no smaller a marvel, than two prisoners, with their
