LAWRENCE
L.
LANGER
389
It was as if Buchenwald were surrounded by a river Styx: souls ferried
across it into the realm of death left some of their lives behind, while
those who violated its rule by returning in the other direction-we call
them survivors-had left some of their
deaths
behind but brought back
with them the memory of their own partial demise.
The result, in Semprun's language, would be a transfigured ghost,
though I think a more accurate name
would
be a "disfigured" one .
If
the impact of a journey through the otherworld of Buchenwald is to be
properly characterized, then we might do well to avoid terms like
"transfigured" that echo a spiritual reality far from Semprun's inten–
tions. Indeed, Semprun seems aware of this danger when he ironically
introduces a vocabulary of redemption to subvert its relevance to his
ordeal: "Perhaps I have not simply survived death, but been resurrected
from it. Perhaps from this moment on, I am immortal." He invites his
readers to distinguish between a near-death and a "post-death" experi–
ence, knowing that the only language available to them is the language
of immortality that he has just used himself. The main thrust of his dis–
course is to sabotage the value of such words in the context of Buchen–
wald memory. For most of us, the idea of a post-death experience is a
logical impossibility when it is beyond the pale of debate about eternal
life. Semprun invites us to consider an unprecedented passage from life
through death back to life, not as a voyage into a mythical underworld
such as the one undertaken by Odysseus or Aeneas, but as a human
journey on earth. The ensuing paradox is not easy to absorb, to say
nothing of translating it into the art of narrative. But Semprun is ready
for the challenge: "On this April morning [the day of his liberation from
BuchenwaldJ, it is exciting to imagine that thenceforward, growing old
will not bring me closer to death, but quite the contrary, carry me away
from it."
In his novels one of Semprun's greatest innovations was to break the
hold of chronological time and to find a narrative technique to sustain
a new disjointed relationship among past, present, and future. He strug–
gled in his memoir to outline the mortal injury that death in Buchen–
wald had inflicted on chronology:
The essential thing about this experience of Evil is that it will turn
out
to
have been lived as the experience of death ....And I do mean
"experience" ....Because death is not something that we brushed
up against, came close
to,
only just escaped, as though it were an
accident we survived unscathed. We lived it....Because it's not
believable, it can't be shared, it's barely comprehensible-since
