Soul at the White Heat

by Joyce Carol Oates

  And mind you, disposing of the young and the elderly requires strengths and virtues—fanaticism, radicalism, severity, implacability, hardness, iciness, mercilessness, Und so weiter. After all . . . somebody’s got to do it—the Jews’d give us the same treatment if they had ½ a chance, as everybody knows.

  The fatuous Doll is an ideal repository for Amis’s considerable historical research into the horrific absurdities of what Amis calls, in his afterword, “the exceptionalism of the Third Reich”:

  [A Nazi colleague] Mobius was originally a penpusher at the HQ of the Secret State Police, the Gestapa—not to be confused with the Gestapo (the actual Secret State Police), or the Sipo (the Security Police), or the Cripo (the Criminal Police), or the Orpo (the Order Police), or the Schupo (the Protection Police), or the Teno (the Auxiliary Police), or the Geheime Feldpolizei (the Secret Field Police), or the Gemeindepolizei (the Municipal Police), or the Abwehrpolizei (the Counter-Espionage Police), or the Bereitschaftpolizei (the Party Police), or the Kasernierte Polizei (the Barracks Police), or the Grenzpolizei (the Border Police), or the Ortspolizei (the local Police), or the Gendarmerie (the Rural Police).

  As in a stage comedy routine, at times the buffoon-Nazi mask falls away and we here another, startled voice break through, as in this reverie of Doll’s:

  She is a personable and knowing young female, albeit too Flachbrustig (though her Arsch is perfectly all right, if you hoiked up that tight skirt you’d. . . . Don’t quite see why I write like this. It isn’t my style at all.)

  There is little irony, still less humor, in the figure of Amis’s third narrator, Sonderkommandofuhrer Szmul, head of a team of “Sonders” (Jewish prisoners who assist the Nazis in killing and disposing of their fellow Jews—“vultures of the crematory”) who appear to “go about their ghastly tasks with the dumbest indifference.” Szmul perceives himself in very different terms as a “martyr/witness” to the horror: “I feel that we are dealing with propositions and alternatives that have never been discussed before. . . . I feel that if you knew every minute, every hour, every day of human history, you would find no exemplum, no model, no precedent.” Like all those conscripted for such work among the doomed and their cadavers (from whose teeth gold must be carefully extracted) Szmul understands that he too is doomed, even as he hopes that in some way his testimony will prevail.

  Somebody will one day come to the ghetto or the Lager and account for the near-farcical assiduity of the German hatred. And I would start by asking—why were we conscripted, why were we impressed, in the drive towards our own destruction? . . . There it is, you see. The Jews can only prolong their lives by helping the enemy to victory—a victory that for the Jews means what?

  Far from being a “vulture of the crematory,” Szmul is a kind of saint of Auschwitz, ascetic and selfless; if he is not an altogether convincing character, it is surely not Martin Amis’s fault that to give a convincing voice to such a person, who very likely did, in some way, exist at Auschwitz as at other of the thousands of Nazi camps scattered through Europe, is a virtually impossible task. Szmul leaves all that he has written as a witness to Auschwitz in a Thermos flask beneath a gooseberry bush: “And by reason of that, not all of me will die.”

  It is the opportunistic Thomsen who survives the defeat of the German Army. Reconstituted in September 1948, at the novel’s end, as a “reformed character”—a “de-Nazified” German—Thomsen has a job working with Americans on the Bundesentschadigungsgesetz, or the guidelines on reparations: “victims’ justice.” He notes how, in a humbled (and hypocritical) Germany, the new national anthem is “Ich Wusste Nichts Uber Es” (“I Didn’t Know Anything About It”). Yet, Thomsen can’t construct for himself a “self-sufficient inner life; and this was perhaps the great national failure.”

  In the Kat Zet [Zone of Interest], like every perpetrator, I felt doubled (this is me but it is also not me; there is a further me); after the war, I felt halved.

  Under National Socialism you looked in the mirror and saw your soul. You found yourself out. . . . Who somebody really was. That was the zone of interest.

  Martin Amis is at his most compelling as a satiric vivisectionist with a cool eye and an unwavering scalpel, and there is much to admire in this ambitious work of fiction that seems, at perhaps its most inspired moments, to be a sort of compendium of epiphanies, appalled asides, anecdotes and radically condensed history; a novel constructed as a means of “bearing witness” to countless atrocities, ironies, and absurdities, whose narrators report to us not only the crude, cruel, unspeakable horrors of, for instance, the “stacking” of corpses (“Sardinenpackung, only vertical . . . With toddlers and babies slotted in at shoulder height”) but also the commercial interest in Nazi doctors’ experiments of “designers, engineers, administrators from IG Farben plants . . . daintily picking their way past the bodies of the wounded, the unconscious, and the dead.” With virtually every page of the novel reporting some horror, including reactions to the awful, pervasive smells of death en masse, it is a stretch of the reader’s imagination to credit the “love interest” of Thomsen for Hannah Doll as much more than an expedient MacGuffin eclipsed by its terrible surroundings.

  Martin Amis’s great gift has been a corrosively savage voice, often very funny, as it has been zestfully profane, obscene, and scatological as well as mordant; one thinks of Jonathan Swift’s “savage indignation,” matched with Swift’s passionate morality, infusing Amis’s most characteristic work. There are high-voltage passages in Money, The Information, London Fields that are (as it’s said) laugh-out-loud funny. But squeezing “black humor” out of Auschwitz would be a challenge for the Marquis de Sade, and Amis is too humane finally to do more than attempt a few swipes at such humor, through the idiot cruelties of Commandant Doll, a species of Nabokovian puppet. The effect of the Holocaust isn’t singular but accumulative; one time, it is perhaps (perhaps!) funny that at a poorly executed Selektion (“selection of prisoners”: some to live as forced laborers, others to be gassed) the commandant has to rely upon a small group of violinists to play music masking screams of terror (“the first strains of the violins could do no more than duplicate and reinforce that helpless, quavering cry. But then the melody took hold”) but when such cruelties are repeated, and repeated, even the satirist is apt to lose heart and concur with the Nazi opportunist Thomsen: “I used to be numb; now I’m raw.” It’s a further anomaly that isolated passages of prose in the text are rendered in German, as if all of the dialogue and introspective material of the novel isn’t “in German”; in an exchange between the Dolls one speaks in English and the other in German, which is hardly likely, and in one of Szmul’s reveries the Sonderkommandofuhrer thinks, “The Sonders have suffered Seelenmord—death of the soul.” But why would a German-speaking individual translate his thoughts, and for whom? The point would seem to be that the author of the novel, not the narrator of the chapter, wants to highlight certain phrases for the benefit of the reader who can’t be relied upon to know German, a mannerism distracting as a nudge in the ribs.

  Indeed it seems a relief to the author, as to the reader, when the strained fiction of “fiction” is set aside and Amis turns to his own unmediated (and very engaging) voice in the afterword “That Which Happened.” Here Amis acknowledges the impressively many works of history and memoir he has read in preparation for writing The Zone of Interest and also, perhaps unsurprisingly, his fascination with the Führer of all Führers: “He has so far gone unnamed in this book; but now I am obliged to type out the words ‘Adolf Hitler.’” Amis concurs in a general bewilderment among historians about “understanding” Hitler: “We know a great deal about the how—about how he did what he did; but we seem to know nothing about the why.” Given this fascination it’s curious that The Zone of Interest is set at so far a distance from Hitler, who has virtually no presence in it except as a quasi-mythic figure revered and feared by more ordinary Nazis. unflincAmis acknowledges his longtime obsession with the phenomenon of the Ho
locaust:

  My own inner narrative is one of chronic stasis, followed by a kind of reprieve. . . . I first read Martin Gilbert’s classic The Holocaust: The Jewish Tragedy in 1987, and I read it with incredulity; in 2011 I read it again, and my incredulity was intact and entire. . . . Between those dates I had worked my way through scores of books on the subject; and while I might have gained in knowledge, I had gained nothing at all in penetration. The facts, set down in a historiography of tens of thousands of volumes, are not in the slightest doubt; but they remain in some sense unbelievable, or beyond belief, and cannot quite be assimilated. Very cautiously I submit that part of the exceptionalism of the Third Reich lies in its unyieldingness, the electric severity with which it repels our contact and our grip.

  Yet it is just as plausible to argue that Hitler and his henchmen were not at all “exceptional” in a human history that has always included warfare, unspeakable cruelty, and attempted genocide; what set the Nazis apart from less efficient predecessors was their twentieth-century access to industrialized warfare and annihilation and a propaganda machine that excluded all other avenues of information for an essentially captive German population.

  The Zone of Interest, like Time’s Arrow, focuses rather upon the vicissitudes of personality and situation, and does not undertake such larger questions except fleetingly. The author’s rage at Holocaust horrors is portioned into scenes, and sentences; it does not gather in a powerful swell, to overwhelm or terrify. Is it inherent in postmodernism, that such powerful emotions are not likely to be evoked no matter the subject? “To write a mighty book you must choose a mighty theme”—as Melville declares in Moby-Dick; but the mode of writing may preclude “mightiness” if its ground-bass is irony rather than empathy.

  In the afterword Amis cites the famous passage in Primo Levi’s memoir Survival in Auschwitz in which Levi asks a German guard, “Warum?” and is told by the guard, “Hier is kein warum”—“Here there is no why.” (This remark Amis has also alluded to in Time’s Arrow.) Perhaps that terse reply is the only adequate response to all questions of Why? relating to the Holocaust.

  LONDON NW:

  ZADIE SMITH

  Our pre-eminence: we live in the age of comparison.

  Friedrich Nietzsche (quoted in NW)

  How to present, in language, the shimmering, ever-shifting life of a place? The most obvious means, the documentary film, has its limitations: the filmmaker can record hours of visual imagery, he can interview subjects, and we can overhear subjects speaking, but we cannot hear their inner voices, and we cannot see the world inside their heads. A kaleidoscope of fascinating and “authentic” images can pass before our eyes as viewers, but we can’t interpret these images through the prism of consciousness, with its myriad histories, which is the soul of a place. We are forever viewers, voyeurs. We “haven’t a clue.” Only an assiduously calibrated work of art, of the ambition and artistry of James Joyce’s Ulysses, for instance, can take us beyond the dazzling and distracting surface, into the mysterious region in which place and personality bond; that region in which those born to a place are irremediably defined by it, and might be said to be its offspring. In Ulysses, inside Leopold Bloom’s ferociously buzzing head, we experience the “Hibernian Metropolis” of midday Dublin in a way no mere tourist could:

  In the Heart of the Hibernian Metropolis

  Before Nelson’s pillar trams slowed, shunted, changed trolley, started for Blackrock, Kingstown and Dalkey, Clonskea, Rathgar and Terenure, Palmerston park and Upper Rathmines, Sandymount Green, Rathmines, Ringsend and Sandymount Tower, Harold’s Cross. The hoarse Dublin United Tramway Company’s timekeeper bawled them off.

  —Rathgar and Terenure!

  —Come on, Sandymount Green!

  Right and left parallel clanging ringing a double-decker and a single-decker moved from their railheads, swerve to the down line, glided parallel.

  —Start, Palmerston park!

  In its assiduously detailed evocation of the multicultural neighborhood of Willesden, in northwestern London, where in 1975 Zadie Smith was born and where she now lives for part of the year, Zadie Smith’s NW is a boldly Joycean appropriation, fortunately not so difficult of entry as its great model. In NW you will find what is called “stream-of-consciousness” prose—(in which the reader is privy to the meandering thoughts of a white resident of Willesden, Leah Hanwell, who’d grown up there)—snatches of overheard conversation (represented in reduced type)—as well as prose-poems (“Sweet stink of the hookah, couscous, kebab, exhaust fumes of a bus deadlock . . . Polish paper, Turkish paper, Arabic, Irish, French, Russian, Spanish, News of the World . . . Here is the school where they stabbed the headmaster. Here is the Islamic Center of England opposite the Queen’s Arms”) and fragmentary, disjointed passages that read like notes for a novel as well as the lengthy section “Host,” consisting of 185 numbered vignettes seemingly modeled after the “Aeolus” chapter of Ulysses, which is the novel’s heart, and involves its most engaging characters. There are pleats in time, rearrangements of chronology, views of characters whom we’d believed we knew from sharply different perspectives; an aphorism shifts its tone from positive to sinister across hundreds of pages—the initial, seemingly visionary “I am the sole author of the dictionary that defines me” becomes, in the cool summary of a young black girl’s “decline and fall” the terse “I am the sole author”—that is, the sole author of one’s decline and fall. The novel’s sketchily poetic opening, which seems to presage both hope and disaster, will be clarified, to a degree, near the end of the novel; the second chapter, taking us into the thoughts of Leah Hanwell, must be understood as preceding the opening chapter by several weeks, which isn’t evident at a first reading. Many of the novel’s passages don’t yield their meanings readily but contribute to its polyphonic density.

  Like Zadie Smith’s much-acclaimed predecessor White Teeth (2000), NW is an urban epic from the perspective of “endangered species,” as one of Smith’s characters, the son of a Caribbean-born train guard and a well-to-do Italian woman, calls himself and others who, in England, are perceived as persons of color: the objects of well-intentioned social planning that has its goal, however inadvertently, the extinction of racial identity. (“‘We have a very effective diversity scheme here,’ said Dr. Singh primly and turned to speak to the blonde girl on her left.” ) Unlike White Teeth, however, NW is not an exuberant comedy in the mode of Salman Rushdie and Martin Amis, nor does it contain the racy ebullience of The Autograph Man (2002) and On Beauty (2005); in place of farcical/sexual escapades, there are, in NW, joyless couplings between individuals who scarcely know one another; sudden, paralyzing epiphanies (“I just don’t understand why I have this life”) and darkly Nietzschean aphorisms (“What a difficult thing a gift is for a woman! She’ll punish herself for it”). A beloved dog dies of a thug’s random kick, precipitating its owner into depression; a man who’d once lived in NW returns to the neighborhood and is mugged and murdered over a trifle, winding up as breaking news on local TV. Where Ulysses ends with the famously triumphant yes I said yes I will Yes, NW ends on a clandestine call to the police—“I got something to tell you.”)

  Despite its postmodernist features, NW is essentially a Bildungsroman with two protagonists who become friends as four-year-olds in a council estate called Caldwell in northwestern London—the “white” (Anglo-Irish) Leah Hanwell and the “black” (Caribbean-background) Keisha Blake (“Natalie” when she leaves Willesden for university). As in Smith’s fiction generally, individuals don’t come undefined by their families, and so, in NW, there are two primary families—the Hanwells, who prosper just enough to leave the Caldwell council estate when Leah is still in school, and the Blakes, who are trapped in Caldwell, in perpetual economic distress. (The Hanwells have a working father, the Blakes have an absentee father. The Hanwells are upwardly mobile, or wish to think so; the Blakes are encumbered by Keisha’s sister, who can’t seem to prevent becoming pregnant and her brother who is un
employable.) In addition to Leah and Keisha/Natalie there are two Caldwell boys whom we follow into dubious manhood: the black Felix Cooper, a self-styled filmmaker/drug dealer and the white Nathan Bogle, whom both girls have a crush on in middle school (“the very definition of desire”), who has become a homeless drug-addled pimp by the novel’s end. Neither male character is portrayed with anything like the minute and loving detail Smith lavishes upon the girls, whom we come to know intimately in the novel’s most fully realized section (“Host”), itself a novel in miniature, following the girls from early childhood when, acting instinctively when Leah Hanwell is drowning in an outdoor pool, Keisha saves her life by grabbing “those red pigtails” and pulling her to safety. As a consequence of this “dramatic event” the girls become “best friends bonded for life . . . and everyone in Caldwell best know about it.”

  The novel’s few transcendent moments are shared by the women, who are clearly “sisters” in the deepest sense of the word. On an excursion together with Natalie’s young children, Natalie and Leah discover, in an urban roundabout, an extraordinary “little country church, a medieval country church, stranded on this half-acre”; inside the church is the shrine of “Our Lady of Willesden, the Black Madonna,” whose histrionic voice is imagined as the voice of a pre-Christian, animist power: