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PARTISAN REVIEW
stretch, gape, and yawn on every page . Here is one quite typical fragment
(on Schwarz-Bart's Ernie, in the gas chamber) :
... the awful void that sucks his vital breath, while space displaces time
as the locus of his destiny, negates the very time that sanctioned his life
in history and orphans him from a past and future that might justify his
merging with a mythical and universalized truth.
It
is all-with its constant and inevitable comparisons
to
'Camus and
Kierkegaard, Dostoyevsky and Lear on the heath, its compulsive use of
French phrases
(" L'univers concentrationnaire")-like
an undergraduate
course on the origins of existentialism.
The most serious flaw in
The Holocaust And The Literary Imagina–
tion
is that it is organized solely according to Professor Langer's taste, which
is lamentable indeed:
Bu t an essential characteristic . . . of almost all the literature discussed
in these pages, is not the transfiguration of empirical reality ... but its
dzSfiguration, the conscious and deliberate alienation of the reader's
sensibilities from the world of the usual and familiar, with an accom–
panying infiltration into the work of the grotesque, the senseless, and
the unimaginable.. .
The grotesque, the senseless,
and
the unimaginable
are in truth the criteria
for inclusion here. Langer has a horror of' 'fidelity to fact," of' 'naked literal
description," of realism, of autobiography. He has learned somewhere that
these things" numb the consciousness"; they make it impossible for the
author to "arouse the empathy of his readers." What he wants, and insists
upon, is a literature able "to evoke the atmosphere of monstrous fantasy,"
to "reconstitute reality in shapes and images that reflect a fundamental
distortion in human nature." The result, as one might guess, is that this
book is one long parade of trick rabbis and people hopping out of graves,
of "nightmare castles" and mad horses and cunning rats, of alter egos
named Mon. It all reaches a kind of apotheosis in Langer's breathless and
awestruck discussion of Kozinski's
The Painted Bird,
which, we are told, is
not only superior to reality, but"goes even further than Shakespeare did in
King Lear."
Here is one such' 'universalized metaphor" from that book,
which Langer quotes in full because we "dare not trespass on the unity of its
images." I have cut it in half.
The massive body of the carpenter was only partly visible . His face
and half of his arms were lost under the surface of the sea of rats, and
wave after wave of rats was scrambling over his belly and legs.. . . The
animals now fought for access to the body-panting, rwitching their
