A few years ago, an American journalist, John Hersey, had a novel published: The Wall, whose subject was the Warsaw ghetto. Those who have read this book, and in particular the survivors of the ghetto, can testify to its authenticity. Now, John Hersey is not Jewish, did not experience racial persecution in Poland, was not shut up in the Warsaw ghetto. As a good journalist, he simply went to the places, studied them, scrutinized the ruins, questioned the survivors, consulted all the documents to which he could have access. Then he wrote The Wall, a faithful reflection of a reality the author had not known. Is that a strange thing? Doubtless no more so than the astonishingly truthful descriptions made by writers of countries where they have never set foot. But The Wall refers to a reality otherwise sensitive, to facts branded with a red-hot iron in the memory of men, which it would be indecent to travesty for literary or other ends. An author may arbitrarily choose his heroes, make them act according to a psychology that will have no other constraint than that of being plausible, give them, as he pleases, this trait of character rather than that one, but he is forbidden to alter events that are the causes of the death of six million men. He is free to treat his personal dramas as he sees fit, but he cannot dispose of a collective tragedy, of which he could speak — once he has decided to speak of it — only with the greatest scruple and an unfailing rigor, that is to say with the very qualities that make the value of John Hersey’s book.
However, the respect that the American journalist shows toward a certain historical truth does not explain, in my view, the presence of that truth in his narrative, still less the admirable precision with which he renders it.
The sincerity of his intentions does not account for his success. It is not enough to be sincere in order to be true. Hersey, for want of having been a direct witness — which he makes up for through meticulous documentation and a great receptivity — finds himself thereby placed at a sufficient distance from the events he describes for them to appear in their most exact perspective, free from the deformations due to a lack of remove. In truth, Hersey naturally enjoys a position of remove.
I believe that the more horrible a reality is, the more abnormal a situation is, the greater must be the distance that allows it to be understood in its truth. Otherwise, only raw documents, whatever they may be, the diary, such as that of Anne Frank, which keep the imprint of the most immediate reality, can reach us.
But the novel? It is fitting not to forget that a novel is a literary work, and that literature is the plane of intersection between the outer world and the writer. If this world is that of the suffering and distress of an entire people, it remains for the writer, in order to attain his goal, to make himself forgotten.
Here, it is important to be modest. The only ambition that the novelist can have is to restore a small part of a reality that exceeds him. He has not to amplify the facts he reports but to make room for them, humbly, between the words, so that they may live.
He must rein in his feelings, his indignation, his anger — horror has its own language — and the voice of a man will always be too feeble to render it.
Often the cry can be rendered only by silence. There must be much silence in such books; then the laments of the victims, their revolt, their fear will be heard. One will be grateful to the novelist for not setting himself, like a screen, before what he describes. Let him understand that he is negligible. Let his passion be contained, his sincerity objective.
To the highest degree he needs that quality attributed to the French classics: measure. What he speaks of is so far from human comprehension, is so excessive, that at every instant, if he is not careful, he risks falling into excess. Now excess, here, is already in the facts. He has not to overbid. The reader does not forgive in fiction what he admits in reality. Reality has a right to bad taste. Fiction, no. The novelist’s rhetoric will have to confine itself to the use of euphemism, of reticence, and of ellipsis. He will say all the more for adding all the less.
Those who have not crossed the lands of pain and despair, all the way to their ultimate frontiers, to the point of losing themselves there, tend to believe that one lives in a permanent state of paroxysm.
Nothing is more false. One tires of it quickly. The voice cracks from so much screaming. That is, doubtless, the most difficult thing to make understood, this numbness, this insensibility that seizes the being beyond a certain limit. One then plunges into a stupor close to indifference, one that strangely resembles a flight out of reality.
The contact has been cut. Henceforth, one lives in a crepuscular country, where others pass like shadows, where nothing happens anymore — where, above all, nothing can happen to you anymore, can reach you. One is out of the game. That is the beyond of suffering. Words can scarcely render it.
Finally, one of the worst temptations that lie in wait for the novelist, when it is a question of the Jewish tragedy, is Manichaeism: the good, the persecuted on one side, the wicked on the other. Such an attitude unfailingly provokes the reader’s incredulity. A man who suffers is not, necessarily, a saint. He is a man who suffers, that is all. His suffering is not justified, but one need not idealize the victims for them to be pitiable. The Jews were not persecuted because they were wicked or good, but because they were Jews.
They were meant to be erased from humanity — one cannot render the tragic nature of their condition by depriving them of their share of human imperfection.
Text published in Information Juive, no. 127, February 1961.