One of the most interesting things about proof copies is that you don’t own them.  Most have printed on the cover that they cannot be sold.  Some publishers also say: ‘This is the property of the publisher and not for sale.’  Yet I have never heard of a publisher who asked for a proof to be returned.  The ones that I have, which represent some of my happiest years, working as the purchaser for a library supplier, will probably stay on my shelves until I die.  Then they will be my son’s problem: will he ‘own’ them, or not?  I suppose that he will take them on and become their guardian, just as I have been their châtelaine since they were young and untried.

I remember how I acquired some of them.  Publishers’ reps get to know their customers’ tastes in literature, of course, and often they would produce two or three proofs from their bags and give them to me; or I would be sent one by post in advance of a launch.  The biggest haul always came from Cape, Chatto and Bodley Head.  These three companies (which were later swallowed up by Random House) jointly used the same sales team.  For a number of years, the representative whom I saw, David Moore, used to drive across the Pennines from his home in Lytham St Annes, spend the night at a hotel in Wakefield and ‘travel’ the Leeds bookshops the next day.  As my office was close to the hotel, he would call on me towards the end of the afternoon, just after he’d completed his journey (and in time for a cup of tea).  When I’d given him his order, I’d ask if I could have a look in the boot of his car, which always contained two or three boxes of the next season’s titles in proof.  I would come away with a rich haul; I was never disappointed.

I keep the proofs on the bookshelves in my study, not downstairs with the finished books.  They are actually more precious to me than their suaver counterparts – I have finished copies of some of the titles as well.  I have just lifted some of them down.  Strange to think that, when they were printed, some of them were obscure titles from young unknown authors who have since become very famous.  Of course, some of the authors were famous then: my collection includes The Dwarfs, by Harold Pinter, Mantissa, by John Fowles, Black Dogs, by Ian McEwan and The Temptation of Eileen Hughes, by Brian Moore.   I think that all of these writers were well-established at the time.  However, I also have 1982, Janine by Alasdair Gray and The White Hotel, by D M Thomas; each of these books catapulted its author into acclaim. Curious to think that I read and liked these brilliant but then unknown works and myself made a small contribution towards launching them upon the world.

I still have a couple of proof copies of In the Family.  I don’t flatter myself that in years to come they will be sought after in the way in which some of the titles in my collection are.  Nevertheless, it amuses me to allow them to rub shoulders with the great and famous, in some cases in the augenblick before fame came.  It is almost like putting In the Family into a time machine.

I came across this translation of an Anna Akhmatova poem via the web a few days ago, it’s apparently by D.M. Thomas, author of ‘The White Hotel,’ which is a fantastic book. His translation for this poem is very fine, too. I was working on this accompanying image at the time and so just adapted the lines of the poem to intersect with the image I was working on.

I’ll eventually use the image for my own work, which has nothing to do with the poem, so this is just a working exercise. I thought it worthy of posting here in the meantime, however…  I’m assuming the relevant copyright info for the poem is © Estate of Anna Akhmatova/D.M. Thomas.

-GHR.

Two important points. Apart from the bit about vaginal fisting, obviously.

1) This post will feature spoilers. Major, major spoilers that may wreck whatever enjoyment you get from this book.

2) I don’t think I really got what the fuck was going on here.

The White Hotel is the story of Elisabeth (or Lisa) Erdman – or Anna, as Freud calls her in his case history. A young woman with a somewhat troubled childhood, Lisa comes to Freud for treatment of what are believed to be psychological issues that manifest physically. She shares with him her delusional version of what happened to her during a visit to a health spa – the “white hotel” – and from here Freud works towards helping her through her difficulties. Years later, as an opera singer, she befriends two fellow performers from behind the Iron Curtain, and later decides to contact Freud and admit some of her dishonesty during their psychotherapy sessions.

And then… and then…

Andthenandthenandthenandthenandthen…?

Up until page 192 of my edition of The White Hotel I thought I was reading a beautifully written, impressively constructed examination of female sexuality. I’m no psychologist but I’ve read a little, and from what I know Freud got a hell of a lot wrong but he got quite a bit right, too. This novel illustrates both of those things, though not necessarily the way Thomas might’ve wanted. Even if you’re a sceptic the writing is so good you can ignore that nagging sense that the fictional Freud’s interpretations of Lisa’s problems is sometimes farcical. It’s done so convincingly that, even if you’re not convinced, it remains convincing (I don’t think that’s contradictory, but no doubt there are those who will not be convinced). Letters, poetry, case study; formal, minimally emotive narrative – Thomas does it all so well. He does it brilliantly.

And then… you’ve finished page 192.

And she’s living in a slum in eastern Europe during World War II and she and her adopted son are murdered by the Nazis and as she dies she fantasises about going to Palestine.

WHAT. THE. FUCK.

Apparently Lisa’s sexual fantasies are a premonition of the Holocaust. Because she has some kind of paranormal gift to see glimpses of the future, and foresaw, apparently, a death in Freud’s family. So yes. Burning hotels and landslides and communal breastfeeding sessions and schools of whales and threesomes, yes, these kinds of fantasies correspond with the Holocaust. And because yeah look, you know, every time I think about six million Jews dying in ovens and gas chambers I want a fist up my vagina too. Or at least I would, if I had one. A vagina that is. Not a fist. I’ve got a fist. Two, actually.

I think it is very, very reasonable to say I did not get what the fuck was going on here.

I knew nothing about The White Hotel, other than it was pretty grubby, before I started reading it. (Grubby it is.) And I twigged, long before I got to the pages that follow page 192, that it probably had something to do with the Holocaust. After all, it’s set in continental Europe in the years after the First World War and the final section is titled The Camp, although ironically this is the section in which a dying Elisabeth fantasises about living in Palestine; the truly horrific section of the novel – and I won’t say it’s mercifully short because while it is short it sure as fuck is not remotely merciful – the truly horrific section of the novel is called The Sleeping Carriage. Spoiler: There’s no sleeping carriage. Although if memory serves the section called The Health Resort doesn’t have a health resort in it either, although it does include sections in which Lisa, in letters to Freud, is more honest about what happened at said health resort years earlier. The simple reality is that when you get to the bottom of page 192 and you keep reading this novel becomes something it wasn’t. The White Hotel has huge numbers of fans and Netty’s among them and they – and Netty – will disagree with me. But the narrative and emotional and thematic disconnect that occurs at the end of Part IV is too jarring for me. Thomas’s writing remains as impressive, in fact perhaps becomes even better. Lisa and her adopted son Konya’s walk to the train station and its aftermath may be some of the most powerful writing I have ever encountered. It’s just that it feels like it should be in another book. And after that trauma, a dying Lisa’s utopian Zionist delusions seem like they should be from another book. By another writer. Possibly from another planet.

The White Hotel, allegedly, is a novel you have to read twice to understand. That’s probably its primary failing, because if you have to read a novel twice to understand it it’s a failure. Works of art need to be comprehensible upon first encounter. Sure, revisiting later can and no doubt will reveal layers you had no idea existed first time round. But it has to hang together first time round. And despite the writing – and the writing, seriously, the writing is magnificent – despite that magnificent writing The White Hotel does not hang together first time round.

So no. No. I did not get what the fuck was going on here.

PS: The other book I’ve read recently that featured vaginal fisting was Imperial Bedrooms, Bret Easton Ellis’s most recent novel and the sequel to his first, Less Than Zero. I might have something to say about that in the next week or two because I suspect it will be a while before you hear from Netty and me about American Gods… So you’ll be wanting something to be getting on with. Yes? … No? … Oh fuck off then.

Classics

Winesburg, Ohio-Sherwood Anderson
Persuasion-Jane Austen
Pride and Prejudice-Jane Austen
The Canterbury Tales-Geoffrey Chaucer
As I Lay Dying-William Faulkner
The Great Gatsby-F. Scott Fitzgerald
For Whom the Bell Tolls-Ernest Hemingway
Brave New World-Aldous Huxley
The Unbearable Lightness of Being-Milan Kundera
Le Morte D’Arthur-Sir Thomas Malory
Lolita-Vladimir Nabokov
Catcher in the Rye-J. D. Salinger
The White Hotel-D. M. Thomas
Cane-Jean Toomer
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn-Mark Twain

Literary Fiction

Room-Emma Donoghue
Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close-Jonathan Safran Foer
Dear Everybody-Michael Kimball
In the Lake of the Woods-Tim O’Brien
A Void-Georges Perec

Memoir

Kafka was the Rage-Anatole Broyard
Glass Castle-Jeannette Wall

Genre

Fall of a Kingdom-Hilari Bell
Kindred-Octavia Butler
Sir Stalwart-Dave Duncan
Carmilla-Sheridan le Fanu
A Wrinkle in Time-Madeleine L’Engle
Shade’s Children-Garth Nix
The Vampyre-John Polidori
Harry Potter series-J.K. Rowling
The Dark Glory War-Michael A. Stackpole
Dracula-Bram Stoker
Lord of the Rings-J.R.R. Tolkien
Dealing with Dragons-Patricia C. Wrede

Young Adult

Catalyst-Laurie Halse Anderson
The Perks of Being a Wallflower-Stephen Chbosky
If I Stay-Gayle Forman
Sold-Patricia McCormick
Echo-Kate Morgenroth

Writing

On Writing-Stephen King
The Write Type-Karen E. Peterson

Short Fiction

Birds of America-Lorrie Moore
Nine Stories-J.D. Salinger
Bear and his Daughter-Robert Stone

Other

The Tao of Pooh-Benjamin Hoff
Tartuffe-Moliere
Persepolis-Marjane Satrapi
Much Ado About Nothing-Shakespeare

http://theletterproject.wordpress.com/2012/01/14/special-delivery-169/

January 10, 2012

Dear Theresa,

In class yesterday you said you believed that if one book could change the world, it would be “The White Hotel” by D. M. Thomas. Like we said later, one book can start a change in the reader. I wrote this poem in response.

 One book can’t change the world.

 One book can start a conversation

with questions. The answers

 One book can show lessons,

 One book can be a friend

in times of trouble, be stained

 One book can tell a story

 One book can lead to leaders

 One book can lead a thirsty

 One book can travel across

 One book can love the reader’s

 One book can start an avalanche

 One book can make a difference,

writer’s dreams in stories. 

One book can be the vehicle

 One book can change the world.

I’m not sure if you’ve read “Room” by Emma Donoghue, but of the books I’ve read so far, I think the world should read this one. After I read “The White Hotel,” then we’ll see if I still think the same of “Room.” 

Love,

Suzy

Getting the British to speak other languages is about as hard as persuading pigs to fly. Getting some five thousand of us airborne in Russian during our National Service was a spectacular feat of mass levitation. This book is the story of how it was done…

One could hardly read that much and not wish to know more… Michael Leapman, by way of his original review of Secret Classrooms for the Independent, takes up the story:

As tension in Europe rose in the late 1940s, the authorities came to realise that hardly anyone in Britain could speak the language of our potential enemies. How could we engage in sophisticated spy missions if we had nobody who could read the names of the stations on the Moscow Metro? And if it did come to war, how could we interrogate those prisoners unsporting enough not to speak English? The answer lay in National Service… Why not cream off the brainiest [conscripts], especially those with an aptitude for languages, and subject them to an intensive programme aimed at making them fluent in Russian in little more than a year? A joint services school for linguists (JSSL) was established in Coulsdon, in Surrey. It moved to Bodmin, in Cornwall, and finally to Crail, in East Fife. When word of the scheme reached students, they were quick to recognise that this would be a “cushy number” compared with confronting the Queen’s enemies in Malaya, Cyprus, Kenya or Suez…

The JSSL kursanty was a remarkable cohort, and JSSL alumni – among them Sir Peter Hall, Alan Bennett, Sir Martin Gilbert, D. M. Thomas, and the aforementioned Michael Frayn, who edited the school magazine Samovar - seem to look back on the experience with considerable affection. Geoffrey Elliot and Harold Shukman have their own tales to tell, of course, and when I asked them both to reflect on what the JSSL experience had meant to them in their subsequent lives and careers, they were kind enough to provide me with the following reminiscences:

HAROLD SHUKMAN: “In 1954, having recently graduated as an interpreter from the RAF Russian Course, I was a first-year student at Nottingham University and, for reasons never revealed to me, I was elected by the student body to join a delegation – the first since the war – to visit the Soviet Union. All 20 British universities – minus Oxford and Cambridge which were not affiliated to the NUS at the time – sent a delegate, and as the sole Russian speaker I was made the interpreter. Our hosts were the Anti-Fascist Committee for Soviet Youth and our purpose was to learn about Soviet higher education. We still had rationing in the UK, but it seemed to us that the Russians had too little in their food shops even to ration. Yet we were feasted three times a day, with chilled caviar even at breakfast and huge suppers after the nightly opera, ballet, concert or (perhaps for me alone) Chekhov play at the Arts Theatre. Stalin had been dead only a year and Westerners, apart from diplomats, were hardly ever seen in Russia. Wherever we went, as soon as I was heard to utter a word in Russian, a crowd would surround me and gawk. Thanks to JSSL.”

GEOFFREY ELLIOT: “‘Old men forget’ – names, car keys, shopping lists. But much of the Russian drummed into me in those Secret Classrooms is still hard-wired in my memory. I used the language for a while as a translator and Reuters radio monitor, my dial set to Radio Moscow, from which in 1962 I snatched the first news that Khrushchev had ordered his missile-laden ships to turn back from Cuba. Later on, as a banker, I found numbers more important than languages, and yet visiting Siberia in 2004 I surprised myself (and the journalist in question) by giving a long interview in Russian to a Yakutsk newspaper about life in Bermuda. At The Wallace Collection last year I got talking to a trio of Russian football commentators, over to report a Chelsea match. (Hard to imagine a visiting Sky Sports contingent touring the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow with the same informed enthusiasm). ‘You speak good Russian’, one of them told me, ‘but your vocabulary and accent are like an émigré who has been out of the country for 30 years.’ I took it as a compliment, not to me but to the discipline and passion of those who taught us half a century ago.”

Secret Classrooms, quite rightly hailed by the Spectator as ‘vivacious’ and ‘highly entertaining’ is available for order here.

It is worse.
Somewhere you have flooded a zoo,
or released an aquarium.
My years without you
are wreathed with pythons, running with invisible tarantulas.
Look, there is black powder on the stair.
Somewhere you are making up your face.
A bottle breaks leering across my throat.
Somewhere your scent is putting on evening.
Look, there is a lithe black garter-
snake sidling across the floor.
Somewhere your thighs are fascinating, held.
I cut off its head; it does not bleed.
A leopard roars.
Somewhere your voice caresses, claws.
My neck and back are eaten with army ants.
Somewhere you are kissing another’s nape.
Feel, I am burning with fever.
Somewhere your tears are falling coldly.

There is no amulet for this spell
you have not put upon me.
Everything in this room you have touched.

D. M. Thomas

But I still bought the book from them.

I’m familiar with New Worlds not because of Ballard, which would seem the most natural route for me, but because of Moorcock. Though I’m much more a fan of the former than the latter, I came upon a recent New Worlds anthology while looking through a shelf devoted to the latter, and now it sits on my shelves at home. I remember absolutely nothing about it.

These things happen.

I haven’t the depth of knowledge or the inclination to talk about New Worlds in general, here, so let’s just say “it was kind of important in its fashion”, and move along to the beast itself: Moorcock furnishes an introduction, both to the anthology as a whole and the individual stories therein. It’s the nature of these things to be a bit hyperbolic; a bit, you might say, too hopeful.

It is not old fiction with a bit of new subject matter injected into it to give it a semblance of life, or a bit of fancy icing coated over it for the same purpose; it is not new fiction dealing with old subject matter. It is what science fiction has been trying to be for some years; it is the fiction of the future.

The techniques being developed by New Worlds writers will become the conventions of a form of fiction that will have had its antecedents in Sterne rather than Swift; that has looked to Mervyn Peake, Ronald Firbank, Boris Vlan, Thomas Pynchon, Donald Barthelme, Harry Matthews and a few others as its immediate antecedents; a way of telling stories in print that cannot yet be told in any other medium. It is fiction for the future, for the McLuhan Age, and it is developing an aesthetic quite as strong as that of the novel or the traditional short story.

It is fresh territory and it excites its authors and their excitement is conveyed to their readers. It is fresh territory being discovered and conquered and seems at this stage, to be infinitely exploitable. Look at these stories with care. Some are strange jewels mined from the virgin rocks of a new world. Some look familiar, but contain unfamiliar facets when held up to the light. Some may even be slightly flawed in the cutting. But all of them will make you richer.

Already it’s expanded my semicolon horizons so at least there’s that.

The intro is interesting, but a bit unfortunate, since it sets me up these fourty years later to HAVE MY MIND BLOWN. There are ten stories, one poem. I’ll step through them one-by-one, as is the common protocol with these things.

b.j. bayley’s the ship of disaster - Interesting ideas, but heavy-handed in its exploration of them. What Moorcok tells me the story is about in his introduction pushes my buttons (“the idea of altering consciousness in an altering environment”), but I found the execution lacking. Possibly, I just couldn’t get past Bayley’s style:

The great Ship of Disaster rolled tirelessly over the deep and endless ocean. Long she was, strong and golden, and the sombre waters washed like oil beneath her prow. Yet a ship of disaster she truly was: vapours obscured the air about her, and nowhere could a horizon be seen. Her crew knew not where to find land, and already her hasty provisions ran low.

Maybe this affectation of an archaic, labored style (at one point he uses the phrase “and Lo”) is meant to be appropriate to the story of a race of bitter elves being eclipsed by man as the earth itself rejects them, but it didn’t work for me.

fritz leiber’s the square root of brain- After fighting through the previous story it was nice to see a familiar name, a name I could trust, a name I could count on. I sort of love Leiber, though my experience of him is limited to the Fafhrd and Grey Mouser stories, plus a scattering of his standalone novels.

In this case, he did not disappoint me.

Moorcock’s intro calls “The Square Root of Brain” “light”, and it is. Light, and readable despite certain experimental elements rather than the turgid attempt at heavy import I had just worked through. It was a quick, refreshing read. Briefly: The near future; there is a Hollywood party. People with Identifiers like Modest Young Man rove between “starlet-looking girls with intelligent, beautiful, blank, faintly worried expressions, as if they had just begun to wonder whether they were still also flesh and blood as well as decor.” Coversations are had about war, politics, religion, media. In less than ten rapid-fire pages these conversations give a broad sense of this future America, leading up to a final-page reveal that’s nothing groundbreaking, but it is clever, natural, fun.

The narrative is regularly broken by selections from The Universal American Encyclopedia. Usually, these come in the middle of a sentence being spoken, and it’s a tribute to Leiber’s skill that this gimmick doesn’t really break the flow of the story. The entries seem to serve as vague commentary on subtext and, sometimes, as a way of fleshing out the world, or at least providing context for the attitudes of the characters in an elliptical way. In addition, the first and final excerpts suggest a sort of self-reflexivity, which implies a thing or two in light of the end of the story that I’m probably not smart enough to articulate.

I’m confident that if I wasn’t so lazy I could mine “The Square Root of Brain” for all sorts of subtext, but the surface pleasures are there, and more than enough for me.

harvey jacobs’ in seclusion- For straight-up cheap thrills this story cannot be beat (at least not in this collection). The story of a famous couple du jour’s much-publicized retreat into seclusion and the lonely. hungry monster from the deep who interrupts them is, Moorcock says, “Jacobs in a minor key,” but he goes on to inform me that I will “find it very funny,” which I certainly did. Have an excerpt:

‘Darling,’ Monica said, ‘forgive me. There’s always room for improvement. And its not easy for me either with every erectable male person in the whole wide world wanting to have sexual congress with me. Sometimes at night I can feel my fans dreaming so hard I practically drown in seminal fluid.’

‘Don’t I have that too? Jay said. ‘The women plus the queers.’

‘Cheer up,’ Monica said. ‘It’s so clammy and dismal out. We’ve got hours to kill and I’m not sleepy. I’m not the least bit sleepy. Tell me a story. Tell me how it was when you first saw me.’

‘No.’

‘Please.’

‘Stop tonguing your upper lip.’

‘I will.’

‘I first saw you in your first flic, Beloved Runt, and my breathing clamped. I thought at last the Lord hath made a broad sufficient unto me.’

‘Fabulous.’

‘And I thought I’ve got to have her. So I met you and had you.’

‘What a way to tell it,’ Monica said. ‘How you hate me. You left out the entire love play sequence.’

‘You came at me so quickly I had no time for love play.’

‘I came at you? Jay, I was a star while you were doing improvisations in the Village.’

‘I did not say that you had no distance on you when we met.’

‘I was discovered at fifteen.’

‘I’ll be you were.’

‘It was never like that. Never.’

‘Baby, you saw more ceiling before twenty than Michelangelo in a life of decorating.’

‘You are a filthy mouth. A sore loser. And don’t ask me to calm you down when the going gets rough. Whisper never talked like you talk.’

‘Whisper Jones weighed fifty pounds when you married him and thirty-four ounces at the divorce.’

‘Annulment.’

‘All he wanted was custody of the oatmeal. You broke that boy’s spirit.’

‘And Sherril? Didn’t her pubic hair fall out from nerves?’

‘How do you know that?’

‘Never mind. It was all over town. Her follicles shrivelled from mental cruelty. Hell it must have been mental.’

And that’s just the dialogue.

It’s light, goofy fun with no redeeming social value told with constant, clever abuse of the language. I sort of loved it.

langdon jones’ transient- I wonder what Mr. Moorcock has to say about “Transient”?

This story reflects Jones’s dawning understanding of the potential of his own vision and indeed, of mankind’s…

Oh.

Well. “Transient” opens strong, both narratively and stylistically. The prose is robust (yeah, I said it), and it delivers a strong opening hook: the narrator is dying, his brain in its final electric gasps. Over the next few pages, he recalls a sort of birth into conciousness and the too-short life that follows. The unusual nature of this life and eventual “death” is finally revealed in the most painfully explicit, clunky way ever.

But a good effort until then.

d.m. thomas’ the head rape- I was all set to make fun of this tiny slice of science fiction poetry, but when I read the damn thing found it surprisingly effective. Not great, but effective. Moorcock says

He is best known as an sf poet and this one is pure sf — it could not have been anthing like as good if attempted as prose.

…and I believe he is right. In Twenty-six lines (plus a brief epigraph) Thomas evokes a strong image of an event and the imaginary social framework necessary for that event to occur. He gives the action, he frames the action; he tells a nice, unpleasant little story and then gets the hell out. At the same time, his metaphors and images are a bit obvious. It’s a triumph of storytelling but not of aesthetics.

brian aldiss’ the source- Also Sprach Moorcock:

This strange story is much more conventionl in structure and because Aldiss felt that ‘if people can write stories strictly according to Einstein or Korzybski, I thought I’d have a shot at doing a Jung…’

In some Far Future a handful of humans return to earth on the hunch of one, who is searching for “the peak of man’s greatness”. They find “the cradle of mankind” succumbed to entropy: crumbling, abandoned cities; People living in small settlements still clinging to this ridiculous thing called “religion.” Our spacefarers have “treatments that could make them purely rational creatures, or extend their lifespan for thousands of years, or transfer their inelligences into other minds.” Most of the party have little use for a place where “political and governmental organizations, without which great civilizations cannot survive, were entirely lacking.”

The earthmen also do crazy things like make music “with punctured wooden pipes”, keep pets, and let their children “run free and play.” Philistines.

So everyone wants to take off but the leader, who develops an unhealthy fixation with this religion nonsense. He goes in search of the settlement’s major religious site, where he takes a dive through the archetypal swamp and comes out the other end resolved to stay there on earth with these backwards people. The others leave him. It ends on a note of romantic primitivism, I think.

It’s well written, technically strong, and did nothing for me, aside from causing me to compare it to Ballard, unfavorably. Still, one of the better stories so far. Just not my cup of tea.

-to be continued or so i claim-

This is the fourth in my series of posts of philosophical journal entries I wrote last fall concerning Robert J. Lifton’s The Nazi Doctors.  As was true for the journal entry in my immediately previous post, the first entry below begins with a remark about Alain Badiou, before shifting to Lifton.  The two entries below were written at the Benedictine Monastery of Christ in the Desert, near Abiquiu, New Mexico, where I have been making personal retreats for years.

Thursday, October 28, 2008–at Christ in the Desert

During Vespers here yesterday, it struck me that the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ could  be taken in the sense I’ve been exploring a bit in recent entries on the “reality” of what is experienced–or, better, on “reality,” period.  That is, the resurrection could be taken to be the revelation to the apostles and then generations of the faithful that suffering, destitution, and pain are not “ultimate reality,” any more than, for Badiou [see my immediately preceding post], “the sad passions” such as “death and depression” are “loyal feelings,” or “licit passion” (so they are il-licit!).  The resurrection–which, for Badiou’s own account, is the sole truth [which Badiou, however, insists did not "really" happen] that makes of the human animal Saul, the subject Paul, with claim to universality–would then be the event of just that truth, at the very heart of the crucifixion itself, dispelling the later as “a dream one wakes from,” to borrow [again] from the Psalms.

Lifton, The Nazi Doctors, on Dr. Ernst B., the Auschwitz doctor who was able to help and rescue many, to become, in the words of one survivor, used as the title for this chapter in Lifton’s book, “a human being in an SS uniform”–p. 333: 

An important part of B.’s post-Auschwitz self and worldview is his unfinished business with Auschwitz.  His conflicting needs are both to continue to explore his Auschwitz experience and to avoid coming to grips with its moral significance.  His insistence that Auschwitz was not understandable serves the psychological function of rejecting any coherent explanation or narrative for the events in which he was involved.  He thus remains stuck in an odd post-traumatic pattern:  unable either to absorb (by finding narrative and meaning) or to free himself from Auschwitz images.

But isn’t that, indeed, how it is with all trauma, finally?  One cannot get past it!  One cannot “free” oneself from its “images” (and note how the ability of “finding narrative and meaning” for any trauma is just a way to “free”oneself from it–or, more accurately, to bury and avoid it).  (Lifton himself knows this, as his comments on p. 13, which I site in an [earlier] entry, shows, to give one good example.)  Isn’t that what [Eric] Santner [in his Psychotheology of Everyday Life], for example, distilled from his reading of Freud with Rosenzweig?  And doesn’t Santner’s analysis point to a “recovery” from trauma which respects it, so to speak, by neither explaining nor otherwise avoiding it, in its very inexplicibility and one’s own “stuckness” on it?

Related:  Lifton’s book came out before, a few years later, [Claude] Lantzman’s [film] Shoah, and Lantzman’s argument that any attempt to make Auschwitz “understandable” is a blasphemy, tantamount to compounding the brutality of the camps and the “Final Solution.”  That would complicate Lifton’s picture here,  and I’m curious what he thought of  Lantzman’s film and assertion.

There may be some advantage in distinguishing two different places from and in which one can get traumatically “stuck.”  One such place would be that of the perpetrators, to which in some sense Ernst B. continues to belong despite his attempts at (relative) “humanity” in his role there (as Lifton correctly insists).  From that place, as Lifton suggests in the quote I began with, there is a definite self-serving (by way of self-exculpating) dimension of “payoff” that comes from denying the explicability of Auschwitz.  But precisely for that reason, the specific nature of the stuckness at/from this locus is basically an exploitation of the very inexplicability at issue. 

In contrast, there is the place of the victim, where no such  exploitation occurs in the acknowledgement–here, genuine; when exploitative, disingenuous–of the inexplicability.  And it is here, in this place, if anywhere, that any “resurrection” must occur. (As, perhaps, it does in D. M. Thomas’s The White Hotel?  I’m not sure:  Need to look at that novel again, maybe.)

Wednesday, October 29, 2008–at Christ in the Desert

Yesterday, a propos Lifton, I forgot to note this thought that came to me when reading the passage I cited yesterday:

It is as if Auschwitz mirrors an event of truth, most especially in its “excessiveness,” its irreducibility to any explanation.  Because it (Auschwitz–and other [pseudo-?]events like it) mimics truth in that way, the illusion of it–specifically, it’s being “how things really are“–can only be dispelled by the event of a genuine truth, one that dismisses the illusion as a phantom.

There is also, perhaps, a sense in which such points of the mocking mimicry of a truth-event opens, despite its mimicking intentions, a site for the striking of truth.