- “Narrative Versions, Narrative Theories,” W.J.T. Mitchell, ed., On Narrative (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1981).
- In all quoted English passages, italics are mine unless otherwise indicated.
- G.W.F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History, J. Sibree trans., (New York: Colonial Press, 1956), p. 60.
- Louis O. Mink, “The Autonomy of Historical Understanding,” 5 History and Theory 24 (1966), p. 24. The following three references to this article shall be provided parenthetically in the text.
- Elie Wiesel, in Alvin H. Rosenfeld and Irving Greenberg, eds., Confronting the Holocaust: The Impact of Elie Wiesel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), p. 4.
- For another attempt to link Camus' writing to the Holocaust, see Richard H. Weisberg, The Failure of the Word: The Protagonist as Lawyer in Modern Fiction (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984), pp. 114–29.
- Albert Camus, The Fall, Justin O'Brien trans. (New York: Vintage Books, 1956). Subsequent parenthetical page numbers will refer to this edition. References to the original French will be to Camus, La Chute (published Paris: Gallimard, 1956; reprint, Collection Folio, 1978). The abbreviation “F” and “P” will be used, where necessary, to differentiate The Fall (F) from The Plague (P). The abbreviation “at” (altered translation) will signal my alterations of the official translation.
- Albert Camus, The Plague, Stuart Gilbert trans. (New York: Vintage Books, 1972), p. 35. Subsequent page numbers from The Plague will refer to this edition.
- The word is mistranslated in the official English version as “connections,” thus missing altogether the political connotations of the French word alliés, connotations underscored by the parenthetical that follows (“quelle expression”/; Folio, p. 35). The crucial importance of the concept of the “allies” in this text will be gradually clarified in what follows.
- Herbert R. Lottmann, Albert Camus: A Biography (Garden City: Doubleday, 1979), p. 591.
- Id. at 262.
- Id. at 593.
- Id.
- Albert Camus, “Lettre au directeur des Temps modernes,” Les Temps modernes 317 (August 1952), p. 323. This issue of Les Temps modernes is designated subsequently by the abbreviation “TM,” followed by the page number. Quotations from this issue are my translation.
- Francis Jeanson, “Albert Camus ou l'âme révoltée,” Les Temps modernes 207 (May 1952); my translation.
- Jean-Paul Sartre, “Réponse à Albert Camus,” Les Temps modernes 334 (August 1952), pp. 345–46; my translation.
- Id. at 349–51.
- It is doubtless no coincidence if The Plague, in its heroic effort toward—and perception of—the war struggle as primarily a rescue operation, was conceived and published in its first version (the Resistance publication of 1942) in Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, the French farming village that effectively conspired to resist the Vichy government and succeeded in sheltering 5,000 Jews from the Nazi deportations.
- “In Le Chambon,” says Pierre Sauvage, author of the 1988 French film documenting and dramatizing Le Chambon's wartime “conspiracy of goodness,” “the situation was easier than it was in parts of Poland and Germany. [Generally] those who hid Jews lived in fear of their neighbors. Sometimes their own children turned them in to the Gestapo. In Le Chambon there was none of that fear, since everyone was doing the same thing.”
- On Le Chambon's rescue of Jews, see also Philip Hallie, Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed (New York: Harper & Row, 1979).
- I am borrowing, of course, the power and the resonance of these suggestive terms from Primo Levi's title, The Drowned and the Saved, Raymond Rosenthal trans. (New York: Summit Books, 1988).
- There is a terrible irony in the fact that Primo Levi also later, like Celan, took his own life by jumping to his death. Behind the cry of the woman drowning, it is possible to hear the lonesome cry, now silent, of all these former witnesses and historical belated suicides of concentration camp survivors: Celan, Levi, Amry, Borowski.
- Of course, the history of Jesus cannot fail to encompass here—in its resonances of the massacre of the children of Judea—the atrocities of World War II.
- Walter Zeev Laqueur, The Terrible Secret: Suppression of the Truth about Hitler's “Final Solution “ (New York: Penguin Books, 1980), p. 201.
- Id. at 204.
- Id. at 204, footnote.
- Id. at 204.
- Camus, indeed, is one of the rare writers who at least inscribed the silence. Cf. The Plague, p. 226: “There were other camps of much the same kind in the town, but the narrator, for lack of first hand information and in deference to veracity, has nothing to add about them.”
- As for the silence of American intellectuals, cf. Robert Westbrook's remarkable essay, “The Responsibility of Peoples: Dwight Macdonald and the Holocaust,” Sanford Pinsker and Jack Fischel, eds., 5 America and the Holocaust: Holocaust Studies Annual (1984), pp. 35–36:
- On the basis of retrospective accounts…one would expect to find an outpouring of critical reflection by American intellectuals on the implications of the Holocaust…. Moreover, one would expect such reflection to be a particularly prominent feature of the work of the community that has come to be known as “the New York intellectuals”…a group of intellectuals, most of them Jewish, who had by the late forties begun to move to the forefront of American cultural life….
- [But] the response of the New York intellectuals to the Holocaust was, with a few notable exceptions, slow to come, and, when it did come, it was “limited and oblique.” During the war and immediate postwar years, Partisan Review, which had been accurately described as “the very voice and soul of the New York intelligentsia,” was virtually silent about the destruction of the Jews. The other principal journal of these intellectuals in the 1940s, Commentary, did provide its readers with valuable documents and accounts of the Holocaust…. Nonetheless, although the shadow of Nazi terror hung over everything published in this magazine in its early years, few of its contributors ventured beyond a description of the horrors of the “war against the Jews” toward a direct effort to understand the meaning and implications of this war. Ten years after the end of World War II, Commentary reviewer, Solomon Bloom, commented on this continuing silence, noting that “the facts are incontrovertible, yet it is easier to believe that these things have happened than that they could have happened. The senses cry truth, but the mind hesitates, for it can see only through understanding.” Not until the explosive controversy over Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1963 would many New York intellectuals directly and openly confront this problem of understanding.
- See also Irving Howe's profound retrospective explanation of this situation in Margin of Hope: An Intellectual Biography (New York: Harcourt Brace, Jovanovich, 1982), pp. 248–50:
- People don't react to great cataclysms with clear thought and eloquent emotions: they blink and stumble, they retreat to old opinions, they turn away with fear…. To be human meant to be unequipped to grapple with the Holocaust. We had no precedent in thought or experience…. We had no metaphors that could release the work of the imagination…. All efforts to understand what happened in Europe required as their premise a wrenching away from received categories of thought—but that cannot happen overnight, it isn't easy to check in your modest quantity of mental stock…. The beginning of moral wisdom was to acknowledge one's intellectual bewilderment, to acknowledge we were witnessing a sharp break in the line of history. And that readiness could not come easily: our minds had been formed in the pre-Holocaust era and, strong or weak, they were the only minds we had…. The Holocaust had extended the nature and meaning of Western history, we therefore had to reconsider man's nature, possibilities, and limits within that history.
- Maurice Blanchot, Après-Coup (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1983), p. 96; my translation.
- See, again, Irving Howe, Margin of Hope, supra note 26, pp. 248–50.
- “The Responsibility of Peoples,” 2 Politics (1945), pp. 203–04. See also Robert B. Westbrook, “The Responsibility of Peoples: Dwight Macdonald and the Holocaust,” supra note 26.
- The marking of vacancies, of empty space, is part of the novel's use of “negative landscapes:” “Isn't it the most beautiful negative landscape? Just see on the left that pile of ashes they call a dune here…. Is it not universal obliteration, everlasting nothingness made visible?” (72)
- See The Fall, p. 81:
- From this point of view, we are all like that little Frenchman at Buchenwald who insisted on registering a complaint with the clerk, himself a prisoner, who was recording his arrival. A complaint? The clerk and his comrades laughed: “Useless, old man. You don't lodge a complaint here.” “But you see, sir,” said the little Frenchman, “My case is exceptional. I am innocent.”
- Could the little Frenchman possibly also signify Rieux?
- 2 Actuelles: 1948–1953 (Paris: Gallimard), pp. 172–73; my translation.
- Albert Camus, Neither Victims Nor Executioners, Dwight Macdonald trans. (World Without War Publications, 1972), p. 20.
- Maurice Blanchot, Après-Coup, supra note 27. In his essay “Blanchot et Combat: Of Literature and Terror,” Legacies of Anti-Semitism in France (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), pp. 6–22, Jeffrey Mehlman insists on the pro-rightist, pro-terrorist, pro-Fascist sympathies of Blanchot in his political essays in Combat in the 1930s, and suggests that, as of 1942, Blanchot's stance as a literary theorist and the particular characterizations of his view of literature in fact evolve from an abdication of his political views and from “Blanchot's own liquidation of an anti-Semitic past.” Although I do not subscribe to Mehlman's analysis, which I And exaggerated and distorting, the possibility of its correctness would not undercut, for me, Blanchot's authority as one of the preeminent literary theorists of our time, since the crucial insight of contemporary literature—insofar as it reflects on contemporary history—seems to me to be in any case inherently tied up (as in The Fall) with this second-stage perception of the self- subversive story of a radical—and inescapable—complicity.
- Robert Faurisson, in Le Monde, Jan. 16, 1979, cited in Pierre Vidal-Naquet, “A Paper Eichmann,” Maria Jolas trans., 1 Democracy 70 (1981), p. 81 n.23.
- Jean-François Lyotard, “The Différend,” Georges Van Den Abbeele trans., 14 Diacritics 4(1984), p. 14.
- “From the evening that I was called—for I was really called—I had to answer or at least seek an answer.” (84) Cf. p. 108:
- Then I realized, calmly as when you resign yourself to an idea the truth of which you have long since known, that that cry which had sounded over the Seine behind me years beforehand never ceased, carried by the river to the waters of the Channel, to travel through the world, across the limitless expanse of the ocean, and that it had waited for me there until the day I had encountered it.
Law & Literature
Volume 3, 1991 - Issue 2