146
PARTISAN REVIEW
flated symbolically to create the fictional mood. Textually, the
experience of the Holocaust has been woven into the novel by incor–
porating a kind of spatial inarticulateness into the accents of mun–
dane conversation and daily activity . This is not an easy task, and
probably only a writer with Appelfeld's command of tone and
language could have carried it off. Except for a few lapses, probably
in the translation , the writing has a flawless simplicity.
Here is a sample of the taut, spaced-out conversation - remi–
niscent of
Codot:
"Schmugler," Bartfuss called out loud . "You haven't changed."
Something of the old, lost liberty came back to him.
"Why change?"
"I don't know." Bartfuss was embarrassed .
"I, at any rate, haven't found any good reasons to change."
"I wanted to see you," said Bartfuss. "So few are left, and even
the few, how can 1 say?"
"What?" Schmugler twisted his lips.
"What about you? . . . " he asked Schmugler.
"I," he answered quietly, "have stopped talking about myself."
"I remember that you used to tell a lot about your sister," about
your sister the pianist."
"I?" Schmugler's face narrowed.
Bartfuss said, "Now 1 find myself remembering a lot."
"Not
I."
"Why not? Are you under orders?"
"There's no need for orders."
If
the term
postmodern
is to have any meaning, I think it can
be applied to both of these novels. Neither is experimental nor
technically modernist. Nor do they belong, strictly speaking, to
the
modernist tradition of large thematic structures or transformations
of the medium into the subject. But like many fictional works,
mostly from abroad, though also found here in writers like Bellow
and Roth, these books by Lessing and Appelfeld present fiction that
both simplifies and transcends the narrative itself. Thus they are to
be distinguished from novels that rotate around themselves and are
essentially self-indulgent, psychologically and literarily- the kind of
writing Czeslaw Milosz calls the fiction of erotic complications. Even
if
The Fifth Child
and
The Immortal Bartfuss
might not be described as
