BOOKS
637
last gasp, propping a third on his feet. If we wish to look into
this
biology,
we have to leave this book and come full around, back to tragedy, to
Lear
even, where the question, if not answered, is anyway asked: "Is there any
cause in nature that makes these hard heartS?' ,
In a conversation once, Kafka remarked that the First World War was
caused by a "monstrous lack of imagination." The diagnosis holds for the
next great war, and for the Holocaust, as well.
It
is, in a way, what George
Steiner meant when he said that, because the archetype of Hell could no
longer be believed in as a place under the ground (while retaining its force
as an unconscious image), it had to be constructed literally, as Treblinka say,
on top of the earth . Those who have thought most carefully about the
imagination in relation to the Holocaust
(Steine~
himself, Adorno, and even
Kafka) have recognized that it has been, perhaps irreparably, ruined. "No
poetry after Aushwitz," Adorno proclaimed, meaning that the very will of
the poet, the shape of his poem, implied a kind of meaning, and gave a
degree of pleasure, that tended to mitigate the horror he wished to depict.
For Steiner, language in our century has become nearly inoperable; and
Kafka's entire work seems to be saying, with a finger to the lips-does it
not?-' 'Silence, please. ' ,
Such judgments represent quite an obstacle for a fellow like Lawrence
1.
Langer who, in his
The Holocaust And The Literary Imagination,
has
never a moment's doubt about the' 'unquenchable impulse of the imagina–
tion to piece together the fragments of mystery we call the Holocaust."
So, in his opening chapter, he attempts, with great crudeness ("Steiner's
genius for expressing significant half-truths," "Adorno never intended his
proposition to be taken literally' ') to dismiss these three figures. To heed
the "critic's cry for silence," he writes, "would indeed stifle a multitude of
richly imaginative voices." That is, certainly, the crux of the matter. Does
what Langer calls "the literary evidence" convince us that there is once
again a reason for the tongues in our mouths? Or ought we, must we, con–
tinue to be hushed?
This book is in no fashion a survey of the imaginative literature of the
Holocaust. There are no critical principles here, no trends, hardly any aware–
ness of the most interesting Holocaust novels, and not even any idea of what
the connections might be between the various books that are discussed.
What Professor Langer has done is to take a dozen or so novels and a few
poems and clump them arbitrarily into sections with titles like, "The
Dominion of Death" and "Suffer the Little Children" (which concerns a
single novel that happens to have children in it). Then he proceeds to
paraphrase these works in a prose style that, all by itself, confirms everything
that Steiner has said about language. Abysses and vacuums and voids
