In all these plot-rich incidents, and in scores more, Gass appears to be a straightforward sympathetic psychological storyteller, despite a hovering nimbus of things awry; of flaw and fraud. But soon enough a wilderness intrudes: the tender and aspiring young Joey, immersed in books and music, living with his mother after his sister has gone off to marry a potato farmer, is revealed to be an obsessive, a secret prevaricator who will always be living with his mother. In middle-C Ohio he is a diabolus in musica, a discordant and anomalous note. What seizes Joseph Skizzen (who will become Professor Skizzen, Whittlebauer College’s published and respected professor of music), what claws at his brain, are the pullulations of all the world’s evils. Indefatigably, he collects newspaper clippings of global catastrophes, from tribal animosities to sex crimes and genital deformations, from HIV and Holocaust atrocities and the burning of the Library of Alexandria to mudslides and tornadoes and capsized ferries. Taint and trauma and torment. His scissors is his rake, and he heaps up these jumbles of horror in what he calls his Inhumanity Museum. He sees how pain and wickedness fructify, even as his mother’s increasing skills proliferate into the busy contradictions of a garden teeming with blooms and larval infestation. He is like the man in the fairy tale whose sight is so powerful that he must bind his eyes with a blindfold lest he see too unbearably much: every droplet on every leaf, every particle of foam in every sea, every wound in every heart; only Joseph Skizzen’s eyes are unbound, and every drop is shed blood.
Nor is this the whole of his obsession. Growing parallel with his museum of cuttings, Skizzen’s forgeries, and his misgivings, multiply. His academic credentials, his college degree and his doctorate, and his music studies in Vienna are all fakes and inventions. Like his father before him, he seems to be what he is not. And his unrelenting aim is to crush into a single sentence God’s crucial query over the fate of the cities of the plain—ought humanity, so inhumane, to endure? An elusive sentence, which he works over and over again, shaping and reshaping it, until it can fit, just so, and under the sign of Schönberg, into twelve spare words.
Gass’s sentences are, happily, not so succinct, and they are most exhilaratingly ingenious when they venture into unexpected and dizzying keys, diving from vernacular directness into an atonal Niagaran deluge: so many ironies, so many propositions, so many juxtapositions, so many interleaved passages of youth and maturity, so many ripe monologues and mazy musings, so many catalogues and refrains, so many instances of horrific calamity, so many digressions (they all finally stream into Gass’s oceanic scheme). What are we to make of this world-devouring novel, and of the title that is its warning sentry? Ought we to believe Skizzen when he claims that “his lifelong ruse . . . was the equivalent of Moses’s tablets before they got inscribed: a person pure, clean, undefiled, unspoiled by the terrible history of the earth”? That the leveling of middle-C mediocrity can be an escape from becoming an agent of evil? That middle C offers the quasi-innocence of the bystander?
Or is the concept of the Inhumanity Museum itself defiled, not simply by the filth of its contents, but by its inherent intent? An indiscriminate welter of wrongs and ordeals levels all woe; it lacks the hierarchy of purposefulness. Is there to be no moral calculation applied to the sources of suffering, no asking who ordered it, or why? Is drowning by tsunami equal to suffocation in a gas chamber? Or overgrazing to germ warfare? In Skizzen’s muddled museum, nature and man are equal offenders, unranked evil is everywhere middling, happenstance and massacre stand cheek by jowl in chorus, there can be no worse or worser. Then under the sway of random equivalence, who will presume to indict, and how can one not wonder whether Skizzen’s museum might be Gass’s too?
Love and Levity at Auschwitz: Martin Amis
She was coming back from the Old Town with her two daughters, and they were already well within the Zone of Interest. Up ahead, waiting to receive them stretched an avenue—almost a colonnade—of maples, their branches and lobed leaves interlocking overhead. A late afternoon in midsummer, with minutely glinting midges. . . . Tall, broad, and full, and yet light of foot, in a crenellated white ankle-length dress and a cream-colored straw hat with a black band, and swinging a straw bag (the girls, also in white, had the straw hats and the straw bags), she moved in and out of pockets of fuzzy, fawny, leonine warmth. She laughed—head back, with tautened neck.
So begins “First Sight,” the opening chapter of The Zone of Interest, Martin Amis’s provocatively titled fourteenth novel—but where, then, are we really? The Old Town, after all, might be anywhere in the old world of romantic allusiveness. A late afternoon in midsummer: isn’t that where we first discover Isabel Archer, yet another enchanting figure seen within a verdant vista? Or might this radiant painterly vision—the white dress, the dappled path, the insouciant tread—reflect Leonard Woolf’s rapturous first glimpse of Virginia Stephen, also in white dress and round hat, “as when in a picture gallery you suddenly come face to face with a great Rembrandt or Velasquez”?
As for the Zone of Interest, this too can be found anywhere, including the erotic turf of the psyche—and isn’t instant infatuation frequently fiction’s particular zone of interest? Here, though, the phrase will shock a knowing ear—it is, in its original German, the Interessengebiet of a sprawling Third Reich death camp: an area cleared of its native residents to accommodate workaday camp administration, storage for gas cylinders, barracks for the lesser SS, and housing for the officers and their families. The laughing, light-footed young woman who so quickly captivates the narrator is Frau Hannah Doll, the wife of Kommandant Paul Doll, the man chiefly responsible for the efficient running of the murder factory. And Golo Thomsen, her love-struck observer, is himself an officer charged with slave labor operations at the adjacent I. G. Farben Buna-Werke. It is he who will argue over how much brute hunger a slave worker can endure before he grows useless and is shot or sent to the gas. He also has the distinction of being the nephew of Martin Bormann, Hitler’s private secretary, confidant, and trusted deputy.
The leafy idyll, it turns out, is a sham, the artful novelist’s Potemkin village masking rot. Hence the publisher’s absurdist blast: love in a concentration camp. And love, moreover, not among the sexless doomed, but in the privileged quarters of the masters of death—yet another upstairs-downstairs drama, upstairs as usual plush and advantaged and lavishly expressive of feeling; downstairs a hill of skulls. Anus mundi as viewed not by the broken and the damned, but by their shatterers. A satire, then? A bitter comedy?
By now, seventy years after the closing of the camps, The Zone of Interest, however else it is perceived, must be regarded as a historical novel, a literary convention by its nature inexorably tethered to verifiable events. All the same, it remains a novel, with fiction’s primal freedom to invent its own happenings, both the plausible and the implausible, the sympathetic along with the repellent, the antic embedded in the unspeakable. Imagination is sovereign. Characters are at liberty to contemplate their lives and shape and assess them as they wish. Interior thought is rampant. We are privy to all things hidden: rivalry, vanity, deception, jealousy, lust.
Scripture, which purports to be history, is mainly impatient with interiority. It is God, we are told, who hardens Pharaoh’s heart, and after this no more need be said. Pharaoh’s wickedness is absolute, dyed in the marrow, opaque; no light can be leached from it. We are not permitted to know more than the intractable breadth and depth of this wickedness—nothing of Pharaoh’s psychology, nothing of his inner musings, nothing of his everyday, how he was appareled, whether he was sometimes tipsy, or if he bantered with his courtiers, how often he summoned women of the palace, or of the brickworks, to his bed; or if he ever faltered in remorse. God is a judge, not a novelist; this is the meaning of a God-hardened heart: the deed’s the thing.
Novelists, mini-gods though they may be, do not harden hearts, and inner musings are their métier. A deed, however foul, has an origin, or call it a backstory, and every backstory is a kind of explanation, and
every explanation is on its way to becoming, if not quite an absolution, then certainly a diagnosis. And then the evildoer (if such an absolutist term is admissible), having been palpated for diagnosis, is reduced from zealous criminal to one possessed of a “condition” not of his own making—insanity, perhaps, or the inevitable outcome of an ideological rearing. In literary fiction (here we naturally exclude comic strips and melodrama) there are no outright villains, and even a pharaoh would be interestingly introspective.
In an afterword both bibliographical and discursive—itself an anomaly in a novel—Amis grapples with the monstrous question of such explanatory mitigations: monstrous because it teeters perilously over the filthy chasm of exculpation. In support of the novelist’s right to imagine the inmost workings of evil’s agents, he cites, reverently, a passage from Primo Levi:
Perhaps one cannot, what is more one must not, understand what happened, because to understand is almost to justify. Let me explain: “understanding” a proposal or human behavior means to “contain” it, contain its author, put oneself in his place, identify with him. Now no normal person will ever be able to identify with Hitler, Himmler, Goebbels, Eichmann, and endless others. This dismays us, and at the same time gives us a sense of relief, because perhaps it is desirable that their words (and also, unfortunately, their deeds) cannot be comprehensible to us. They are non-human words and deeds, really counter-human. . . . There is no rationality in Nazi hatred; it is a hate that is not in us; it is outside man.
A hate that is outside man. It would appear on the face of it that Levi’s insight is nothing if not instinctively biblical: hearts so hardened, and deeds so inhumanly wicked, that only God can fathom them. Yet Amis comes away from these seemingly transparent reflections with the sense of having been granted permission, or even a blessing. “Historians,” he begins, “will consider this more an evasion than an argument,” and goes on to remind us that Levi was also a novelist and a poet, placing him “very far from hoisting up the no-entry sign demanded by the sphinxists, the anti-explainers.” Instead, Amis oddly insists (against Levi’s plain language) that it is Levi himself who is “pointing a way in.”
And Amis’s way in to the hate that is outside man is fully and unstintingly the novelist’s way. If the deed’s the thing, it’s not the only thing. Soliloquies that tunnel into minds to expose their folly or their intransigence or their delusions, and sometimes their disillusions. The permutations of plot, the rise and fall of ambition and hope, whether in the rivalrous bureaucracy of death-making or in the chancy living and automated dying of the doomed. And of course the tentative strivings of the well-advertised love in a concentration camp. The camp is, after all, a hierarchical society; a kind of village, a veritable Middlemarch of Nazidom; or better yet, given its dense though highly transient population, a bustling, busy city with recurring traffic bottlenecks, especially at the ramp, where the selections take place. In cinematic mode, there are scenes outdoors and indoors. Outdoors: always the ramp looming over its thickened plaza of human detritus, the Stücke (“pieces,” as one speaks of inanimate cargo) just disgorged from the freight cars; and the tragic Szmul, the most pitiable of the doomed, the grieving overseer of a vast heaving meadow of human ash, a Sonderkommando fated to escort the unsuspecting victims to their end.
And indoors: The SS bigwigs and their wives at the theater (the Interessengebiet is not without Kultur), or enjoying a concert, or a ballet where the young principal dancer is one of the Häftlinge. Ilse Grese, a sadistic and lecherous female guard seen in her private billet—her surname that of a notorious SS Helferin tried after the war and hanged for savagery, her Christian name invoking Ilse Koch of human-skin lampshade infamy. Martin Bormann at home en famille, his wife Gerda perpetually and aspiringly pregnant (each of her nine surviving children named for yet another prominent Nazi), hoping to receive a coveted award for Aryan fertility. The charming villa of Paul and Hannah Doll, with its garden and pet tortoise, its Häftling Polish gardener, a former professor of zoology, and its Häftling housemaid, a compliant Jehovah’s Witness suitably called Humilia. The pampered Doll daughters, cosseted in the routines of a normal childhood (their mother duly accompanies them to school and sees to their proper bedtime), perturbed by their sickly pony, brokenhearted over the killing of their tortoise, yet oblivious to the hourly killing all around. The unfortunate Alisz, widow of a German soldier, herself only recently welcome at the dinner table, now a subhuman confined in a solitary cell, tainted by the discovery of her Sinti (Gypsy) blood. And pervasively, both indoors and out: the relentlessly inescapable smell of burning human flesh.
“My own inner narrative,” Amis notes, “is one of chronic stasis. . . . I first read Martin Gilbert’s The Holocaust: the Jewish Tragedy in 1987; in 2011 I read it again, and my incredulity was intact and entire—it was wholly undiminished.” The phrase “chronic stasis,” even removed from the intent of its context and on its own, is remarkable for what it imparts. The Zone of Interest is not Amis’s first venture into the deadly morass of assembly-line Jew-killing. It was preceded two decades earlier by Time’s Arrow, an Ezekiel-inspired vision of reversed chronology: the bony dead refreshed into bloom. Clearly, Amis is possessed by these smoldering particulars; he is not among those worldly sick-and-tired-of-hearing-about-it casuists for whom the Holocaust has gone stale to the point of insult. In a novel so hotly close to the rind of history, he is scrupulously faithful to the findings of the scholars and committed to a flawless representation of place, time, and event. Most telling is his admission of a single purposeful deviation: “My only conscious liberty with the factual record was in bringing forward the defection to the USSR of Friedrich Paulus (the losing commander at Stalingrad) by about seven months.” The confession attests to the novelist’s aversion to manipulative fakery.
The facts, accordingly, are meticulously attended to; but then, as mockery follows mockery, come the voices with their slyly revealing ironies that turn self-deception into satire, and self-appraisal into stinging disclosure. Kommandant Doll is frequently the butt of these unwitting sallies, as when, contemplating his personal nature, he declares himself “a normal man with normal feelings. When I’m tempted by human weakness, however, I simply think of Germany and of the trust reposed in me by her Deliverer, whose visions, whose ideals and aspirations, I unshakably share.” And here Amis may be lampooning Hannah Arendt’s inflammatory thesis of the “banality” of a murderous SS zealot—as if he were to ask, what could be more commonplace, more normal, than full-bore fanaticism?
But ridicule finds a still ampler berth: Doll, questioning Prufer, his second-in-command and “an unimpeachable Nazi,” is eager to learn how the siege of Stalingrad is proceeding.
“Oh, we’ll carry the day, mein Kommandant,” he said over lunch in the Officers’ Mess. “The German soldier scoffs at the objective conditions.”
“Yes, but what are the objective conditions?”
“Well we’re outnumbered. On paper. Ach, any German is worth 5 Russians. We have the fanaticism and the will. They can’t match us for merciless brutality.”
“. . . Are you sure about that, Prufer?” I asked. “Very stubborn resistance.” . . .
“With our zeal? Victory’s not in doubt. It’ll just take a little longer.”
“I hear we’re undersupplied. There are shortages.”
“True. There’s hardly any fuel. Or food. They’re eating the horses.”
“And the cats, I heard.”
“They finished the cats.”
The absurdity builds: dysentery, lice, frostbite, dwindling ammunition, encirclement; and finally surrender. And still the clownish back-and-forth of illusory confidence: “The German ranks are impregnable.” “Besides, privation presents no problem to the men of the Wehrmacht.” “For a German soldier, these difficulties are nothing.” “How can we go down to a rabble of Jews and peasants? Don’t make me laugh.”
A pair of buffoons. Abbott and Costello in Nazi dress.
Do
ll, meanwhile, is regarded as an incompetent fool even by his confederates. His peroration on the ramp—following the usual reassuring litany of disinfection, showers, hot soup afterward—is a failure, since it introduces what is instantly suspect: “But if there’s anything you especially treasure and can’t afford to be without, then pop it in the barrel at the end of the ramp.” “You don’t deceive them any more,” they chide him. “. . . There are some very unpleasant scenes nearly every time. . . . You sound so insincere. As if you don’t believe it yourself.” To which Doll indignantly responds, “Well, of course I don’t believe it myself. . . . How could I? You think I’m off my head?”
Arendt, so proudly sealed in intellect that nothing could penetrate the armor of her synthesis, ended less in condemnation than in mitigation—her neutered Eichmann is a weak-kneed pharaoh, scarcely worth all those plagues. History as comedy has a parallel effect: it trivializes the unconscionable. The blood the clown spills is always ketchup.
Hannah Doll is not trivialized. She baits her husband, she withholds sex, she listens to subversive enemy radio; and, as we eventually discover, she has privately given the Kommandant a black eye. To hide the shame of it, he pins the blame on the Polish Häftling and his shovel. And to add to the gardener’s fabricated culpability, it is Doll himself who smashes the tortoise so prized by his young daughters. As penalty, his hapless victim is swiftly dispatched to his death. Throughout all this grim chaos, Amis means us to view Hannah as an internal dissident, a melancholy prisoner of circumstance: perhaps even as a highly privileged quasi-Häftling powerless to rebel. Though seeing through Doll’s cowardice and deception, she conforms, however grumblingly, to bourgeois life among the chimneys—the dinners, the playgoing, the children’s indulgences. Her own indulgence: cigarettes, the lesser reek intended to overcome the greater. Her open derision, seen by Doll’s colleagues as a wifely nuisance, is pointless; the fake showerheads continue to spew their poison. Her needling humiliations of Doll affect nothing; the daily business of the ramp prevails.
Critics, Monsters, Fanatics, and Other Literary Essays Page 17