Concentrationary Art

Jean Cayrol, the Lazarean and the Everyday in Post-war Film, Literature, Music and the Visual Arts

Griselda Pollock, Max Silverman, Griselda Pollock, Max Silverman

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781785339714
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria francesa

Largely forgotten over the years, the seminal work of French poet, novelist and camp survivor Jean Cayrol has experienced a revival in the French-speaking world since his death in 2005. His concept of a concentrationary art—the need for an urgent and constant aesthetic resistance to the continuing effects of the concentrationary universe—proved to be a major influence for Hannah Arendt and other writers and theorists across a number of disciplines. Concentrationary Art presents the first translation into English of Jean Cayrol's key essays on the subject, as well as the first book-length study of how we might situate and elaborate his concept of a Lazarean aesthetic in cultural theory, literature, cinema, music and contemporary art.

PART I

LAZARUS AMONG US

JEAN CAYROL

We thought it would be useful, without wishing to impose what we will call the ‘Lazarean postulate’ on the astonishing frivolity of the modern world, to unite in one volume two studies that have previously been published in journals at different times.

They attempted to explain how, in a universe destined for failure and negation, all of man’s supernatural defences have been birthed, have grown up clandestinely, and have then lived on in multiple repercussions, difficult as these are to trace.

The welcome these documents received, as much as the discomfort that some felt when faced with this new form of ‘human expression’, prompted us to open these texts up to a larger audience. They bear the traces of an event that many have sought to relegate to the ruins of contemporary history.

Today, this secret evil finds fertile ground in the extreme confusion that reigns in our minds, one which can no longer be exorcized by the ‘white words’ that Emmanuel Mounier so rightly feared. The moment has passed for white lilacs on crosses or daisies between the teeth of skulls, for, as T.S. Eliot so masterfully put it, ‘The end is where we start from.’

Readers rest assured: These pages have not been written in the spirit or style of a ‘war veteran’. The battle into which we entered by chance started at the world’s beginning, and we were simply ephemeral witnesses to it.

Lazarean dreams and realities are like the two grimacing faces of the same life in desperate straits, whose human profile fades into nothing, whose eternal contours become so swiftly deformed.

Never before has the destiny of men been preyed upon to this extent – prepared in advance and then ransacked by the manifold experiences that tirelessly continue to penetrate the heart of a world suffering the evils of chaos.

We allow ourselves to live in spiritual magma where our consciences, like flowing lava, harden around the nerve centres of our abjection. We are reduced to mere images, frozen in a state of contraction, into which heat is no longer capable of penetrating. We long to walk a path that no longer caves in under our feet. Manna from heaven falls on us like snow on water: no sooner does it fall than we make it disappear.

What is more, we are in need of some landmarks to help us along the inhuman and frightening path down which we are being led. All that is left of our tomorrows is the stench of the abattoir. We are the corpses, lest we forget. Our desire was therefore to ‘convey’, unequivocally and without cheating, what a still recent past has taught us, blow-by-blow, as the expression goes.

Healers abound, but those who come to rescue others, who must risk their lives, keep their distance from this frozen river that flows through the very heart of our world. They save themselves for the final autopsy, when only a single corpse will remain in their hands, when they will have to conclude.

Without wishing to sound complacent, this attempt to awaken each one of us was an urgent one, for, already, the hunt’s horn is sounding out its bellicose mort. It is time these volunteer defenders of the human spirit are trained in the use of the only real weapons that will never become outdated: truth and love.

In the first part of this book, we wanted to describe the concentrationary or Lazarean proliferation that has occurred in the soft humus of daily life, and we have sketched out the internal battle-like commotion which has allowed man to resist, be it with no resources or reserves.

This incredible defence is one which will endure into the future.

We have provided proof that man never remained unreconciled, even in a universe of prostration. On the contrary, he made sure his soul was impregnable – this was all that remained of his innate breath in the face of the monstrous wind that ushered in an all too fervent catastrophe, a wind that blows impatiently and champs at the bit like Apocalypse’s horses, waiting to break into a gallop.

We testify to the soul’s invulnerability throughout all of its suffering and agony. It is always able to find its way back to its ‘natural element’, despite the enormous hands of a giant and inhuman history. It knows how to slip through its fingers like an eel longing for its river water. It has no fear of leaving its temporary mortal coil, for it will take on an even more wonderful form; it is endlessly reborn, for mass graves for the soul do not exist, as far as we know. Docile executioners, have you ever heard of such a thing?

The miracle takes place in the darkness, for the Lazarean man resides not in the bare and desolate stones of a tomb, and will not allow himself to be eaten away by the insatiable worms of tyranny. He has found a way to confront his suffering, to shoulder his solitude, to face up to it. He has established prodigious contact with the Other Inhabitant of a grave where death has been vanquished by Life.

It is clear that we are entering into humanity’s sleepless night; never will we have enough burning wicks of memory to light our way, to save us from being caught unprepared.

But though man may, in his triumph, and in the repeated wonders of his ‘illuminating’ conscience, repeatedly save himself and simultaneously save the shaken community in which he lives, the stigmata will still not fade from his body. Wounds may disappear, but scars remain; they are fragile; they can open up afresh. The thorns work away carefully at his flesh, they are indelible.

This is why, in the second part of the book, we attempt to study and bring to light the mysterious corruption of our world by this concentrationary or Lazarean element, and we endeavour to trace an outline of the dreadful but all the same true face of a man who seems stricken in the very depths of his soul and spirituality. Caught in this Lazarean grip, he struggles and seeks help and relief. Only in his sickness does he find his temerity, in his infirmity his audacity. He lays himself open only to the sword. This emaciated and suffering hero might tomorrow be you, this paralysed and hardened heart might very soon be yours, if we are not able to learn how to be solitary and patient heroes. Up until now, life has triumphed, but let us watch out for the day when we no longer realize that we are alive, when we consider our hopes unspeakable, on that inoffensive day when we are no longer on our guard against the assaults of a gaze ‘emptied of the power to love’.

LAZAREAN DREAMS

As for me, I have found my black tulip, I have found my blue dahlia!

—Baudelaire

Preamble

For nearly three years now, Concentration camps and their historians have been revealing and making available for one and all the ways and customs of this regime of exception. However, one of its darkest aspects has not yet been brought to light, either due to lack of information (the dead cannot speak), or because it has been forgotten or neglected: I am talking about concentrationary dreams.

Those who have had intense experiences of these cannot avoid or reject them, passing them off as the unconscious and inoffensive residue of those dark years, for, even today, they continue to live through their most unexpected transformations and startling deviations. These images, in the moment incoherent, live on in them with the same level of intensity; they do not become blurred, but, on the contrary, succeed in explaining them and give meaning to their dénouement. They have constituted visions of help extended to a world now only audible in the very echoes of night, and in the ecstasy of forbidden landscapes: forbidden yet faithful to those who possessed the keys.

Concentration camps revealed themselves as much during the prisoner’s days as during his nights; dreams became a way of safeguarding oneself, a sort of ‘maquis’, a retreat from the real world, in which man was forever faithful even to the strangest reflections of his destiny and continuity.

This state of unreality, along with his nocturnal no man’s land, became the best form of defence against the human reality he was experiencing in its purest form.

The prisoner would lock up all his powers of love, freedom and happiness in the closed deposit box of his dreams; he would emerge so haunted that he would often brave the potential difficulties and spend a few moments of his morning ‘harvesting’ dreams with his fellow inmates.

For him, this was not only an urgent need to escape, to flee his own now unacceptable existence, but also a way of acknowledging and drawing closer to his old life. He lived in the shadow of a dream that he felt guaranteed his future; he would testify to the fact that he could overcome that which was killing him; the prisoner would feel the earth firm beneath his feet even in the most peculiar of dreams.

These iridescent night time perspectives were superimposed on his everyday existence and gave him the possibility of being ‘elsewhere’, to be with others without being like others; they helped him to refuse totally daytime’s horrible grip, and provided him with different ‘intonations’ (do not forget that the gaze of a deportee was one of a man who had seen too much; a gaze that looks past obstacles and contemplates that which blinds him).

The prisoner would constantly assume a fictional life which doubled his other life; as such, talking about recipes, which we so often did without understanding why, meant he was able to eat the repugnant soup and transformed the taste of the mouldy bread; for each one of us, the table was laid at lunchtime.

Every minute of every day that had to be lived through thus had its double version, something that gave us all the impression of living in a ‘waking dream’ in this Dantesque noviciate, the impression of stupor or even of fascination when faced with both the smallest of a day’s details and the lurking executioners – something that allowed us to suppress the notion of time. After all, from 1943 camp inmates referred to themselves as the ‘living-dead’, did they not?

Each moment possessed another side that could only be decoded by those who had been initiated, which we had been, and for some this ability came from the internal radiance their nocturnal dreams could sometimes leave behind indefinitely within them.

In passing, let us note the disparity between the notion of everyday time, which quite escaped the prisoner because of the appalling nature of what he had to endure, and that sudden revelation of a ‘timeless’ time, preserved and fossilized in his dreams, which eternalized his being, so to speak; he was tossed between the secrecy of his true human existence and the hellish replication of the concentration camp.

The prisoner was the master of his sleep; the SS had no power or authority over those few hours when everything that had been lived through was re-imagined in a paroxysm of supernatural visions. This sleep was very often not very restful; it became like a shrine to a past that, although on the verge of extinction, was transfigured when but a few flashing images managed to make up an accurate sketch of returning home. For each one of us this sleep was proof of his not giving in, the positive to the negative of his daytime life.

In this fiat nox. a dream was like an almond that no one was to crack. Inside, immaculate and intact, hid the secret that allowed some to survive, along with a strange explanation of their salvation. This helped to stem the evil; the prisoner had had everything taken away from him, but he kept the essentials: dreams made flesh. His exile only came to an end at night.

I was so familiar with the powers possessed by this double existence that characterized both prison and concentration camp inmates alike, that I am able to give you the following example:

Every book that we had read quickly became unbearable for us, frail readers that we were; for sometimes we believed we could trace our own failing existences in the merest of the hero’s actions, in the most trifling of his words, as though there was a correspondence between the dangers that the characters had to face and our own. Not only did we subject ourselves to reading a story whose final chapter we feared we would never be able to read, but also everything in the book would become a premonitory sign or a foreshadowing symbol for tomorrow; here our futures were told. So, in this way, for a few days in my cell in Fresnes, I thought that my life would only last the two months that Julien Sorel had to live after he was condemned to death. Any reading of Malraux would leave our nerves on edge, with no defence, like sacrificial lambs.

I have never since experienced this trembling, this iridescence when reading. A book was immediately and definitively accepted or disowned. Travesties of style, parodies, fake embellishments, in a word all novelistic bric-a-brac fell away; one judged a book like one judges a man; we went straight to the heart of the matter, passionately, urgently.

There was, therefore, a continual flow of material for dreams, a kind of fermentation, perhaps entirely retrospective, which prevented the prisoner from accepting his condition; for, at all times, he was living against something, either against his torturers, or against himself or against fear and all its substitutes. He was permanently on the lookout, lying in wait at a door that could open onto the image of his own death or a blow from which he could not get up, seeming always to be naked, helpless and familiar only with solitude diluted by the presence of his guardians, a tangible solitude, a solitude that could turn on him. But the dreams kept watch over him.

Night and day, the prisoner would either be in a dream state or would be prone to passing into a forbidden and supernatural world. What must not be forgotten is the first and unforgettable vision of the concentration camp upon arrival. I can only bring myself to recall that of Mauthausen, at night, looming up from a hill under the glare of its searchlights. The profile of its Great Wall of China came into view, its low, squat citadel, Mongolian in appearance. The scene was a ‘striking’ one, set off by the very ‘expressionist’ setting, and even more so, one noticed the cataleptic demeanour that this absent and remote world suddenly took on. In our encounters with the camps, all things seemed to be more imagined than real; one died without knowing from where the blow came (I think back to a fellow inmate to whom I had to signal that he had been shot in the leg). In this way, he created a kind of concentrationary hypnosis for himself, a vague and tenacious obsession. Though we were left our lives, we were made to live in a state of hallucination, of disorientation cleverly maintained by roll calls, or expiatory ceremonies, or disinfection scenes where the grotesque, the atrocious and the absurd all mingled together. We had entered into a dark pantomime and within us shone the only reality: the reality of our dreams.

Moreover, in this astonishingly transfigured and disembodied climate where the body was denied (this was a world beyond torture; in the camps, just one blow and the body was sacrificed, ready only for the scrap heap), this sensation of waking dreams became stronger and stronger, as the prisoner became more and more ‘refined’ in his dreaming, more enthusiastic, more purified. In the commotion of our dreams, we had found a new kind of spiritual food; this was the bread of dreams, dreams capable of ‘containing our long-cherished hopes’.

More often than not, what strengthened the prisoner was this unique capacity to alienate himself from his current situation; his strength and resistance became extraordinary because at the moment when he was being beaten or taunted, suddenly before his eyes would appear the image of the old apple tree in his garden, or his skittish dog; he had been cornered by a poor image, a prayer, a secret, and he stood fast.

In this way, he constructed a defence system for his subconscious, set off by the smallest of everyday events (oh! How beautiful the clouds were at sunset during the hateful roll call!). The prisoner was never there when he was being beaten, when he ate, when he worked. One winter morning, I remember watching the incessant comings and goings of some prisoners who were working in the camp’s small factory, and the way that suddenly, before their very eyes appeared the regal splendour of the Austrian mountains, golden and white, serene and lofty in their purity. There was nothing to be done, the factory was deserted, the kapos no longer had any power over their victims who, in a state of unconscious drunkenness and ecstasy, came to feed on this perishable vision, on this dream-like beauty; perhaps, they had managed to find themselves ‘anywhere but on this earth’.

This searching for lost horizons where life took on the naive and simple forms of caricatures was all that we longed for – with all our wavering might. Our imagination, initially in a state of alert, little by little came to rest on great compositions à la Claude Lorrain, with glorious sunshine and legendary extravagance; thus, the only poem that became my replacement universe, inviolable but reliable, was Edgard [sic] Poe’s Annabel Lee.

At night, in our dreams, we would go out. We were the ones who made the walls of our prison. How many times I visited the ‘land by the sea’ described by the poet. A kind of halo formed around us which protected us and separated us from the rest of the concentrationary world; what we saw with our eyes was no longer of any use to us; we had to live with our eyes shut, and it was inside us that life was played out; ‘Dreams, even despairing ones, gave us a place in the sun’ as Paul Éluard said.

Our whole existence just served to amplify this kind of spiritual inebriety which spared us from falling into the abyss. Indeed, we were only familiar with the strangest, maddest and most bizarre manifestations of concentrationary society: a thousand caricatures of death where agony went unnoticed, strange military costumes from the Balkan Europe of 1914, the impressive and unchanging formalism of roll calls, spells of dizziness from lack of food, bloodthirsty and public rites of punishment, the petty court intrigues of block leaders, the extraordinary quest for soup in the complex and tight network of relationships, the banishment from concentrationary society of those with lice, and overall this, the close yet distant reign of the SS.

The merest of daily activities were out of place, and took on a sacred, absurd, false aspect, whose background was only experienced by certain privileged ones. Everything was now in rupture with the real, true world – the world that we had left a few months or a few thousand years ago, we could no longer tell which. We attempted to exist in two universes that contradicted and deformed one another: the savage and incoherent universe of the Camp was seen in a certain light because we still had one foot in the real world, thanks to the subterfuge of our memory and our dreams; and the real world to which we aspired, when in contact with concentrationary reality, took on a mysterious and confused ardour and flung us back into the extreme scenes of our reveries.

A taboo universe: this is what we carried within us, along with its whole system of nocturnal worship, like how some Catholics dream about life after death, about the world’s hereafter with all its paradisiacal visions and final rewards.

The Camp’s hereafter replaced terrestrial life’s hereafter. Little by little, the image of the rea...