Chasing ... Cutting

[Paul Mackin]

On Mon, 28 Aug 2000, Otto Sell wrote:

> The margin in my *Die Enden der Parabel* has a note from 1982:  "Auschwitz
> ?" - I see the first mentioning of the Holocaust on p. 3-4 in Pirate's
> dream, dreamily disguised as London-evacuation. The images that come up are
> of deported Jews. Remember Pirate's special talent explained in Episode Two.
> This is what millions of Jews encountered at "die Rampe," at the real "oven"
> at Auschwitz, where the final selection, the final judgment without appeal
> took place:
> 
> "(...) places whose *names he has never heard* . . . (...)" (3. italics by
> TRP)
> "(...) they are under the final arch: brakes grab and spring terribly. It is
> a judgment from which there is no appeal.
> The caravan has halted. It is the end of the line. All the evacuees are
> ordered out. They move slowly, but without resistance. Those marshaling them
> wear cockades the color of lead, and do not speak. It is some vast, very old
> and dark hotel, an iron extension of the track and switchery by which they
> have come here. (...) . . .  the evacuees are taken in lots, by elevator--a
> moving wood scaffold open on all sides (...)." (4)
> 
> The double-meaning of *scaffold" should alarm every reader at once.


Otto points out interesting possibilies and of course who can deny
anyone the right to read SPECIFICALLY the Holocaust into these passages if
one chooses--though to me the Holocaust is but a distant echo in this
part of the book--COMPARED to the GENERAL evocation of the tragic
fact of MORTALITY itself. That is to say, beyond the London evacuation and
the German bombs--the LITERAL events depicted--Death for us all (always
before its time) is the central figurative event, the JUDGEMENT FROM WHICH
THERE IS NO APPEAL. For me, this is the initial announcement that the
first and foremost theme of GR is Death.

Please excuse the repitition but at this point in the discussion I
always like to recall that Proust used almost the identical phrase--une
realite . . . contre laquelle il n'y avait pas de recours . . . (p. 171,
vol 1 in Tadie/Pleiade edition)--to express M's fear that he might die
without ever having achieved his ambition to became a writer (his hope for
IMmortality).

In the English translation, the word "judgement" is explicit.

" . . . a larger reality which had not been created for my benefit, from
whose judgements there was no appeal . . . "
		 
				P.