LAWRENCE
L.
LANGER
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to leave behind them the aura of death derives from unfamiliarity with
how durational time assails the memory of many witnesses. On the
deepest level, their life stories are also death stories, which include the
partial death of the self in ways that still need to be interpreted. The
quest for a rebirth of that part of the self is as futile as would be any
effort to transform Hanna E's pile of corpses into a sacred community
of the dead. This may be a dark view, but there is overwhelming evi–
dence from Holocaust narratives that it is a realistic one, from which we
have much to learn. The effect of atrocity, and not only Holocaust
atrocity, on the modern sensibility is a virgin territory into which few
analysts have yet ventured .
One of the many victims of these narratives is the very notion that we
can expel from consciousness, and hence from being, zones of memory
that threaten our intact spirits. Unnatural death creates an inversion of
normality that we cannot easily dismiss. In her Auschwitz trilogy, Char–
lotte Delbo reproduces a monologue by a fellow survivor named Mado
that because of its stylized intensity approaches the level of art, but
nonetheless conveys the despair of a woman who is denied the remission
of amnesia. She begins:
It
seems to me I'm not alive. Since all are dead, it seems impossible
that I shouldn't be also. All dead....All the others, all the others.
How could those stronger and more determined than I be dead,
and I remain alive? Can one come out of there alive? No, it wasn't
possible... .I'm not alive. I see myself from outside this self pre–
tending to be alive. I'm not alive. I know this with an intimate, soli–
tary knowledge.
Mado's paradoxical refrain-"I'm not alive"-accents the need for a
narrative form to capture the postwar effects of the daily rule during her
imprisonment that to be alive was to be a candidate for death. Delbo
has taken the liberty of discarding the chronological text of her friend's
testimony, forcing us to face the full unblemished impact of Auschwitz
time.
The thrust of Mado's existence is backwards, as if loyalty to her dead
and sometimes murdered friends requires her to embrace a rupture
between then and now that infiltrates and finally pollutes the purity of
her aspirations toward the future. When her son is born she tries to feel
happy. But memory will not allow her to. "The silky water of my joy,"
she says, "changed to sticky mud, sooty snow, fetid marshes. I saw again
this woman-you remember this peasant woman, lying in the snow,
