39 Books: 2003

This year I read Robert Antelme's The Human Race for the first time. I was nonplussed. The strange title, closer to popular sociology than memoir, should have been a warning. This was not quite the horror story one imagines of memoirs from those who survived Nazi concentration camps, which are no doubt read with a certain kind of pleasure – not quite Schadenfreude but the least amount of pleasure given by any kind of leisure reading. In fact, it was rather tedious. This is why I put it on the shelf and didn't return to it for another nine years, by which time my copy had been affected by damp.

"I went outside to take a piss" is the very first line and, I would argue, outstanding, if we judge first lines not by whether it grabs our attention but whether it embodies the entire book. "A steam floated above the urinals at all hours", it continues. The basic human need and its presence as floating steam is a sign of the human race and how, as Antelme's narrative testifies, weakness and fragility is the foundation of community. The inmates are joined together by their fraternal incapacity; a help that doesn't help, to adapt Kafka's line.

Antelme was deported to Buchenwald as a French Resistance fighter and then transferred to Gandersheim work camp where there was no gas chamber and no crematorium. Tedium is therefore experienced as the moments of recognisable horror, or moments of reprieve from horror, are enfolded into the routine of everyday camp life, except the very last moment of horror, which the reader will not forget. I now think it's one of the most especial and valuable reading experience of these 39 years. Sarah Kofman called the book sublime.

There is a rich secondary literature on The Human Race, notably essays from Maurice Blanchot and Georges Perec, both collected in On Robert Antelme's The Human Race, and from Marguerite Duras in La Douleur, which includes a memoir of her husband's extraordinary repatriation and recovery. But digressions into other books is outside of the constraint of this series, so I want instead to think about the first lines of Antelme's Foreword:

During the first days after our return, I think we were all prey to a genuine delirium. We wanted at last to speak, to be heard. We were told that by itself our physical appearance was eloquent enough; but we had only just returned, with us we brought back our memory of our experience, an experience that was still very much alive, and we felt a frantic desire to describe it such as it had been.

Our return. Our experience. He speaks as one of many from within a harrowing solitude. But what if one has a need to speak, a wish to be heard, and yet nothing to say, no volume above zero, or that there is only one person to whom one feels the need to speak, but who is not there to hear? Might that be the beginning of literature, or rather its end?