BOOKS
A SENSE OF DOOM
BADENHElM
1939. By Aharon Appelfeld.
6avid
R.
Godine. $10.00.
There has been so much talk lately about language and
structure and the deconstruction of the text, we tend to forget the
simple fact that fiction has a subject. And as theories of interpre–
tation flood the academic scene, it is also forgotten that important
novels create a fictional world out of the more significant tragic
forces and conflicts of the time . Such a novel is
Badenheim
1939, by
Aharon Appelfeld, an Israeli writer who survived World War II and
the holocaust. Short, deceptively light, almost casual, verging on the
satirical, the novel nevertheless has led me to rethink some of the
things about fiction that I had taken for granted .
Despite the easy and staccato tempo of the narrative, as though
it had been choreographed, like a dance, rather than written, its
subject is large and grave, perhaps the largest and gravest of our
time, and one that, because it is so grim, has been dealt with rarely
in fiction.
It
is the weight of the
Badenheim
theme that forces one to
reexamine the ideas about fiction that we have inherited from both
the modernist and the avantgarde traditions . Appelfeld is not alone
in this effect. A number of dissident writers from Russia and the
satellite countries, such as Solzhenitsyn, Kundera, Zinoviev,
Ivanov, to cite only a few of the outstanding figures, are distin–
guished by the fact that their themes are social, not literary; and
though they are all masterful writers, the power of their fiction lies
mainly in the urgency of their material. As against much current
fiction in the West, these writers are concerned not so much with
sexual or psychological mores or with the use of language, as with
the struggle against the new forms of repression. To be sure, it is the
tragic experience of the dissidents and of novelists like Appelfeld,
who knew both fascism and communism, that makes for their differ–
ence from most Western writers. But the work of Naipaul, for exam–
ple, whose sensibility was formed in the West, would indicate that
the emphasis on individual consciousness is not the only choice of
American and European writers.
