388
PARTISAN REVIEW
efforts to mold or shape them into a form that an audience not used to
such dense matter might recognize and accept.
Semprun left Buchenwald still bathed in the odor and memories of
the death that had consumed so many of his underground companions,
to say nothing of the thousands of others, especially Jews, who had per–
ished in other parts of the camp. Indeed, as we learn from the text, he
initially planned to call his memoir
L'ecriture ou
La
mort, (Writing or
Death),
here suggesting an equivalency rather than an opposition, but
subsequently changed his mind, leaving to his readers the chore of deci–
phering the subtle meaning of the shift. What he had discovered was
that the joy of writing could not dispel the sorrow of memory. Having
learned to identify the many smells of death in Buchenwald, Semprun
was left with the dilemma of luring readers committed to life into the
perimeters of this lethal regime, the domain of what he called "despair–
ing memory." This was no easy task. One who outlived the catastrophe
wrote about it with a ghost mentality, struggling to connect to the liv–
ing while mired in the reminiscence of a doom that changed the identity
of virtually all victims into effigies of future corpses.
Despairing memory is a prime source of narrative consciousness, as
Semprun searches for the precise brew that will combine the sense expe–
rience of unnatural death with its verbal expression. "And suddenly," he
writes, "borne on the breeze, the curious odor: sweetish, cloying, with
a bitter and truly nauseating edge to it. The peculiar odor that would
later prove to be from the crematory oven." The transition is swift:
"The strange smell would immediately invade the reality of memory. I
would be reborn there; I would die if returned to life there. I would
embrace and inhale the muddy, heady odor of that estuary of death."
He has only to close his eyes, and in an instant he is sucked from what
he calls "the shimmering opacity of life's offerings" back into the maw
of death at Buchenwald. There is memory as recall and memory as
affliction, and Semprun nurses both until they swell into a deluge that
submerges him without offering warning or refuge.
Semprun is left with two problems: finding a style to depict how the
reign of death in Buchenwald has afflicted him, and making this feeling
accessible to his audience without shocking them into disbelief or flight.
Death is a constant companion of the survivor: "I'm struck by the idea,"
he writes, "if one can call it an idea...struck by the sudden over–
whelming feeling, in any case, that I have not escaped death, but passed
through it. Rather that it has passed through me. That I have, in a way,
lived through it. That I have come back from it in the way you return
from a voyage that has transformed and-perhaps-transfigured you."
