Adorno thought that to write poetry after Auschwitz would be a
barbaric act: the lyric spirit had been slaughtered once and for
all in the concentration camp. Yet Professor Langer, in his
thoroughgoing study, demonstrates "that art's transfiguration of
moral chaos into aesthetic form" is neither as presumptuous nor as
callous as one might suspect. In fact, if one is to humanize the
world again, to salvage culture, then an attempt at understanding
the "incomprehensible," at paying homage to the Jewish victims of
the ovens and the torture chambers, is a dire necessity. The
examples of "the literature of atrocity" that Langer analyzes here
range from the nightmarish romances of Kosinski to the black humor
of Jakov Lind, from the coolly diagrammatic irony of Boll to the
existential anguish of Wiesel. Of course these men, and the other
writers studied, are not of equal artistic merit, yet each knows
that in "the literature of atrocity, no fiction can ever be
completely that - a fiction," for the surviving artist "can never
totally conceal the relationship between the naked body and the
covering costume, the actual scars of the Holocaust and the
creative salves that often only intensify pain." And what
surprising jolts such pain can give. Hear this chilling bit of
dialogue between two inmates who now "work for" the camp in a short
story by Tadeusz Borowski: "So, you're still alive, Abbie? And
what's new with you?" "Not much. Just gassed up a Czech transport."
"That I know. I mean personally?" Langer often has a ponderous
academic style. Nevertheless his book is extremely moving,
principally because he is an apt quoter and knows how to extract
the apposite passage which best illustrates his dreadful subject.
It is not a subject, certainly, from which, as he says, the reader
"can ever return the same." (Kirkus Reviews)
The immense service that Langer's careful, thoughtful, immensely
intelligent and restrained study renders is that the esthetics of
atrocity cease to be an exclusive domain of the victims. Many of
his writers are not Jewish and several were not imprisoned or
interned, and yet all of them have been driven by the death-camp
universe. The atrocity of that time and the atrocities that have
succeeded Auschwitz represent a continuity that may almost be
called a new tradition, one in which the phantasmagoric and
horrific is real and the gentle and generous a prodigy to be
remarked with amazement. "The Holocaust and the Literary
Imagination is a pioneering work of criticism for it impels us,
readers and writers alike, to inquire after the basic paradox: how
can literature delight and transfix or warn and modify a humanity
from whom nothing is hidden, nothing prohibited, for whom nothing
is shocking or unreal." -Arthur A. Cohen, New York Times Book
Review "A stimulating, perceptive study of the literature of the
Holocaust.... Langer's examination of possible stylistic approaches
to the subject, from the delicate whimsy of Aichinger to the
graphic bestiality of Kosinski's The Painted Bird is in each case
detailed and subtle." -The New Republic
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