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PARTISAN REVIEW
death is, for rational thought, the only event that we can never
experience individually...that cannot be grasped except in the
form of anguish, of foreboding or fatal longing... .In the future
perfect tense, therefore.
As the past continued to overtake and displace the future, society had
to consider a new phenomenon, the deathlife of the self that the Holo–
caust had introduced into current dialogue about the possible effects of
atrocity on modern consciousness. Semprun expressed more lucidly
than any of his literary confederates the philosophical and artistic idea
that was invading Holocaust thinking and marked the difference, as he
saw it, between traditional and post-camp sensibiliti es. He drew a dis–
tinction between living life and living death, arguing that rational delib–
eration had no category for the reality introduced by the camp ordeal.
Semprun boldly redefined brotherhood as "having li ved the experience
of death as a coll ective and even fraternal experience ." It took time for
him to understand what this meant. He described the impasse that led
him, some months after his release from Buchenwald, to suspend writ–
ing for more than a decade on the novel that would become
The Long
Voyage:
"The two things I had thought would bind me to life-writing,
pleasure-were instead what estranged me from it, day after day, con–
stantly returning me to the memory of death, forcing me back into the
suffocation of memory." Semprun's meditations on this finding provide
a dramatic instance of the literary imagination at work trying to shape
what I call a narrative of atrocity. "Fundamenta lly, " he concluded, "1
was nothing other than a conscious residue of all that death." As he
elaborates, savoring his words as if they were items on a gourmet menu,
we overhear the voice of the artist in quest of the best means for joining
ordinary present consciousness to extraordinary past experience: "An
individual patch in the impalpable material of that shroud. A dust mote
in the ashy cloud of that agony. A still-flickering light from the extin–
guished star of our dead years." Surviving the unnatural death of oth–
ers, at least
this
death of
those
others, shrinks (without effacing entirely)
the life impulse. Slowly, Semprun drafted the terms for turning this
insight into literature:
I possess nothing more than my death, my experience of death,
to
recount my life,
to
express it, to carry it on. I must make life with
all that death. And the best way to do this is through writing. Yet
that brings me back to death,
to
the suffocating embrace of death.
