or the world over there
now
I
no longer know
when I am dreaming
and when
I
do not dream.
LAWRENCE
L.
LANGER
387
If
a line like "Dying over again / The death of those who died"
expresses not merely a memory of the past but an abiding presence, then
we are left dwelling in a middle realm where living and dying merge and
re-form, and for which few narrative strategies help us
to
understand
how they might blend in contemporary consciousness.
Fortunately, at least one writer has made this issue the focus of his
artistic career, and his extensive reflections on the theme allow us to
enter the anteroom of the creative imagination as it struggles to nurture
its vision with the residue of unnatural death. Born in Spain in
1924,
raised and educated in France after the defeat of the Spanish republican
forces, Jorge Semprun joined the French resistance movement as a
teenager and in
1943
was arrested by the Gestapo. In January
1944
he
was deported to the Buchenwald concentration camp near Weimar,
where he remained until his liberation in April of
1945.
Among his
translated works, the novels
The Long Voyage
and
What a Beautiful
Sunday!
and the memoir
Literature or Life
explore the fictional and
nonfictional narrative possibilities of his Buchenwald experience, whose
corrosive influence, as with Primo Levi, remained imprinted on Sem–
prun's consciousness and imagination long after the time of the ordeal
itself.
In
Literature or Life,
originally published in
1994
as
L'ecriture ou la
vie (Writing or Life),
Semprun addresses the question of which obstacles
the writer must overcome in order to evoke the reality of Holocaust
atrocity. He is blunt in dismissing the common charge that the event is
indescribable. "The 'ineffable' you hear so much about," he alleges, "is
only an alibi. Or a sign of laziness." The problem was not with the "form
of a possible account," but with the
content
which, though describable,
might be unbearable. How to tell what is too painful to be told, how to
turn an experience, grotesque and agonizing as it may have been, into
narrative? The French title,
Writing or Life,
implies that whatever model
Semprun devises for a narrative frame, it will sanction an alternative to
rather than an expression of his existence after Buchenwald. The details
of his camp experience were like unwieldy clay, stubbornly resisting
