LAWRENCE
L.
LANGER
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of fiction." The revelation freed him to invent the imagined universe of
The Long Voyage,
a novel whose roots reach deep into his Buchenwald
experience but which achieves its narrative form by rearranging in its
narrator's consciousness the details of the deathlife he has survived.
Concepts like "deathlife" and "the coffined self" are not to be found
in histories of the Holocaust. Tracing the course of Germany's mass
murders through documentary records is an essential scholarly task for
our understanding of those events, but their psychological and emo–
tional milieus constitute equally compelling themes whose expression
requires utterly different narrative strategies. The first-person narrator
of Semprun's
The Long Voyage
is in a boxcar on its way to Buchenwald
throughout the novel, but his journey is internal as well as external.
Even as he undergoes the ordeal of the trip in the present, he remembers
and "foremembers," since the experience has fragmented him into a
splintered self: he is simultaneously a partisan in the French under–
ground, a deported prisoner of the Germans, and a survivor of Buchen–
wald. Details of his life in past, present, and future flow through his
mind like multiple currents in an unimpeded stream. Death spreads its
tentacles in both directions, tainting memories of innocent prewar
friendships because he learns later that many of his friends have been
killed, and poisoning his postwar life through his discovery that being
alive after Buchenwald is not the same as having survived it intact. By
recreating consciousness as an intersection of three time zones, Semprun
is able to duplicate for the reader the fluid timeless ordeal of the camp
inmate who has lost his sense of life as a chronological passage from
yesterday through today into tomorrow. He also converts the idea of
death as a single, natural fate into a mutation that plots death as a com–
mon, unnatural doom.
Semprun's narrator begins to learn about this unnatural doom on
the journey itself which rasts for five days and four nights. He is
jammed up against another deportee whom he calls "the guy from
Semur" (a village in France), and during the voyage they exchange rem–
iniscences about their earlier lives and speculations about their desti–
nation. They appear to be bonded in life, whatever the future holds for
them, but as they arrive at Buchenwald death anticipates them, as the
exhausted guy from Semur slumps against the narrator's shoulder and
dies. Earlier the guy from Semur had complained that he felt as though
his heart were dead, and when the narrator asks him what that means,
he replies: "I wouldn't know how to tell you ....You don't feel any–
thing in your heart, like a hole, or else like a very heavy stone." It is a
workable definition of the condition I call "deathlife," although it will
