Cultural Amnesia (18 page)

The “Death Fugue” (strictly, the death’s-fugue, because
Todes
is
possessive) is, if you like, the last love song. In that sense, Adorno’s remark about the impossibility of poetry after Auschwitz is all too dreadfully true: after such knowledge, there
might be forgiveness, but no more innocence. There could be no return to the joyful. But Adorno’s remark was also false, in the sense that no such return had ever been possible at any time
in the historical world. There had been Holocausts throughout history, which probably featured slaughter as its first multicultural activity. The Holocaust, “our” Holocaust, seemed to
be unique for having emerged from culture itself. But that was a misreading: a misreading from professional readers, from whom emerge the
misreadings of the most tenacious
kind. Culture and the Holocaust were separate things, both of which emerged from history. In the long view—admittedly easier for us who had the privilege of growing to our intellectual
maturity after the event—the two things are so separate that they define each other. George Steiner echoed Adorno’s opinion, but didn’t act on it. Emotionally, Steiner might,
had he wished, have embodied the silence into which he suggested (in his early book
Language and Silence
) that language ought to beat a retreat. With a
highly developed awareness of the richness of European culture, he had a sensitive knowledge of how extensive the damage was. But none of that stopped him becoming a student of Celan; a course
which, logically, ought not to have been available to him; if there could be no poetry after Auschwitz, why look for it? Steiner’s answer possibly lay in his seeming conviction that
Celan’s real poetry was in the encryptions, the meta-language that proclaimed, by its obscurity, the impossibility of dealing directly with the event. Leaving aside the consideration that
academics might always favour poetic difficulty—it makes them indispensable—Celan’s difficulty, and Steiner’s endorsement of it, amount to a double endorsement for
Adorno.

But “
Todesfuge
” undoes the whole thesis. The idea that
lyric poetry might be rendered nugatory by an enforced awareness of evil will always have its validity as an emotional response. As the world goes, it would be a damned soul who did not feel the
idea to be true every few hours: how can we write of love when women are being tortured? But to
think
it true is to defy reason. Even within the one man,
there can be the capacity to see the world at its most destructive and still create. Celan proved it with “
Todesfuge
.” Though we are bound to
say, and say in a hurry, that a beautiful poem is not the only thing it is, the poem would not be there at all if the tradition of courtly love had not at least been remembered—so the
remembering of poetry is still possible, even in the light of the oven. Compounded with the echo of a biblical psalm, a new kind of courtly poem, embracing a more tragic concept of beauty, arises
from the memory. Steiner was right about the death of tragedy as a form, but only to the extent that tragedy became formless by getting into everything, in the same way that the ash from the
chimneys got into the landscape.

With “
Todesfuge
” the tragic ash got into the lyric poem. It always had
done, by implication—there was never a poem about the idea of love that didn’t get its force from the fact of death. (Anthony Burgess, in
Nothing Like the Sun
—one of the few books about Shakespeare that a young student should read while he is first reading Shakespeare—paints a convincing
picture of Shakespeare being inspired to lyric composition while watching an execution at Tyburn.) But no poem ever got quite so much force, from quite so much death, as “
Todesfuge
.” There are no points to be scored by calling it a great poem: of course it is. What is harder is to risk opprobrium by saying that Celan might have
written more poems of its stature if he had not written so many poems about himself. His hermetic poetry no doubt reflected, and possibly controlled, his mental distress. Judging from his
biography, it was a sufficient miracle that he could concentrate at all. But “
Todesfuge
,” by reflecting the physical destruction of its
beautiful girls, got him out of himself. It got him away from the condition that Mario Vargas Llosa usefully calls
ensimismamiento
(being wrapped up in
yourself), and Hannah Arendt defined as the tendency to identify one’s own mind with the battlefields of history. Paul Celan had a perfect right to inhabit that condition, but it worked
against his best talent, and might even have have helped to convince him, in the long run, that his best talent was not the best part of his mind, thus leaving his conscience free to condemn his
own survival. There are no simplistic rules for poets: if there were, any duffer could write poetry. There are, however, rules of thumb, and one of the best is that getting the focus off yourself
gives you the best chance of tapping your personal experience. For anyone with a personal experience like Celan’s, of course, detachment from the self would be an impertinent
recommendation. But it remains fascinating that in this one instance he achieved it, and wrote the poem by which most of us define him: the man who came out of the flames with a love song that
redeems mankind in the only way possible, by admitting that there is no redemption.

CHAMFORT

Known, to his contemporaries and to posterity, always and only by his
pseudonymous single name, Chamfort was born Sébastien-Roch Nicolas in 1741 and forecast the modern age by the reason for his death. He committed suicide in 1794 because the
Revolutionary authorities had made it clear that they planned to reward his irreverent wit with a visit to the guillotine. In the rich tradition of French aphorists, Chamfort was the one who
paid with his life for the knack of getting reality into a nutshell. It was because he lived at the wrong time. The Revolution had given birth to ideological malice in a form we can now
recognize, but it was not recognizable then. It was still discovering itself. Chamfort, by the time that he ran out of luck, had already defined some of its characteristics, but not even he
had guessed that it couldn’t take a joke. In the twentieth century both of the main forms of totalitarianism were united in promoting the jokers to the head of the death list.

If it wasn’t for me, I would do brilliantly.

—CHAMFORT, QUOTED IN
JEAN-FRANÇOIS REVEL’S
Fin du siècle des ombres
(AT THE END OF THE CENTURY OF
SHADOWS)

S
ans moi,
je me porterais à merveille
. Chamfort said this after a bungled attempt to kill himself. His
real name was Sébastien-Roch Nicolas, but he lived, and lives on, as Chamfort the wit. He had other ambitions, some of which brought him worldly success. His theatrical works were well
enough thought of to gain him admission into high society. Tall, handsome, and a mighty lover of women, he said that he would never get married, “for fear of having a son like me.” He
was admitted to the Academy in 1781. In today’s textbooks, however, Chamfort’s sentimental plays are remembered for the thoroughness with which they have been forgotten, and he is
classed with Rivarol as one of those pre-revolutionary minor philosophers who haunted the salons, made a night of it, and put too much of their effort into clever talk. But Chamfort’s
posthumously published
Maximes
took their place in literature for those connoisseurs of the aphorism who positively liked the idea that there was a wasted
lifetime behind the wisdom. Though initially all in favour of the Revolution, Chamfort would probably have had the same chance as Camille Desmoulins of surviving the Terror, and for the same
reason: he was a known critic and parodist of the hypocrisy prevalent among humanitarians, and the humanitarians were in charge. Desmoulins was executed because he had made a joke about
Saint-Just. (In the tumbril, Desmoulins was heard to say “My joke has killed me,” and his last witticism was already spreading by word of mouth even as his clever head fell into the
basket.) Unlike Desmoulins, however, Chamfort tried to anticipate the guillotine. In a piquant forecast of Egon Friedell’s flight from a window in Vienna 144 years later, Chamfort chose
himself as an executioner. He made a frightful mess of it, but luckily died of his wounds, leaving the memory of his deliciously sardonic intelligence free to do its work. Chamfort was the one
who supplied the lasting definition of
fraternité
: “Be my brother or I will kill you.” That, in fact, was the joke that killed him: he
was arrested soon after making it.

Jean-François Revel is only one of the many subsequent students of politics to
admire Chamfort. Mirabeau borrowed from him freely, and Talleyrand more than freely, because Talleyrand didn’t even acknowledge the debt. In London, Chateaubriand read Chamfort’s
complete works. Pushkin, the Goncourt brothers and Schopenhauer all thought Chamfort exemplary. From Ernst Jünger’s Caucasus notebooks we can tell that he was reading Chamfort
attentively in November 1942, with American bombers already over Germany in broad daylight and the Stalingrad disaster in the final stages of preparation. In de Gaulle’s memoirs, Chamfort
is quoted to fascinating effect: “Those who were reasonable have survived. Those who were passionate have lived.” Evidently Chamfort helped de Gaulle to believe himself a bit of a
devil. It is possibly the secret of the attractive wastrel, as a type, that reasonable men see in him the road not taken: his seemingly effortless charm allays momentarily the consideration that
for them the road might never have been open. Some of the admiration heaped on the talented goof-off is gratitude to the sacrificial goat. Writers in general are happier if one of their number
wastes his gifts, especially if the gifts are conspicuous: the way is left open for his tone to be borrowed, not to say plagiarized. But Chamfort might not have needed his overdeveloped taste for
social life in order to marginalize himself. Purporting to find the whole business of securing a reputation sufficiently off-putting to justify a career of cynicism, he seems to have suffered few
agonies of shame in writing his romantic entertainments. It was the serious literature that he found, or claimed to find, repellent. “Most books of the present have the air of being made in
a day from the books of the past.” It will do as well as anybody else’s aphorism as a warning against making books out of books, although—as I have tried to argue elsewhere in
this book made out of books—there is something to be said for the practice, as long as what is said is something true.

Chamfort had a way of getting something true said memorably without making it look laboriously chiselled. “I am
leaving a world,” he said, “in which the heart that does not break must turn to bronze.” Few wits bow out with a throwaway line, and if they try to, the line is seldom as good
as that. Even from such masters of elision as La Rochefoucauld, La Bruyère and Vauvenargues, too many French aphorisms come equipped with a marble slab. Chamfort favoured the paper
dart. There is an easy, wristy flourish to his phrasing, which an artist-journalist like Revel is qualified to appreciate, because he can do it himself. “Systems of literary
criticism,” Revel wrote in his little book
Sur Proust
, “are made to satisfy the devouring lack of interest in literary works that calls itself a
thirst for culture.” If that sentence turned on “calls itself a thirst for culture” it would just be a Wildean paradox. But
dévorante
gives it savour, because the consuming energy of the deafness to art that goes into a critical system is always one of its distinguishing
features—distinguishing it, that is, from the decently reticent poise of a sensitive response.