blind to our human condition

"Appelfeld has taken this group of people spending their summer in a 'city of leisure' as an instance of the way we all of us try to keep ourselves occupied, to amuse ourselves, in order to shut up what might be too painful to acknowledge: our failures, our losses, and the inevitable march of time. It was Eliot, after all anything but a Jew, one might say, who wrote: 'Human kind cannot bear very much reality.' Appelfeld's book merely exposes a common topic of modern philosophy, one that Kierkegaard and Heidegger for example, devoted their lives to exploring and alerting us to. We live 'inauthentic' lives, say these philosophers, evading the facts of our human condition, the chief of which is death. Man needs to recognize this and change himself radically, for only thus will he, in effect, truly be able to live.

Appelfeld's take on this is typically Jewish. 'Dear Doctor Professor Heidegger', writes Saul Bellow's hero, Moses Herzog, in the novel of that name, 'I should like to know what you mean by the expression ''the fall into the quotidian". When did this fall occur? Where were we standing when it occurred?' And he answers these questions himself when later he says: 'No philosopher knows what the ordinary is, has not fallen into it deeply enough'. In other words, man is more varied and complicates than Heidegger imagines. No single act can free him from his 'inauthenticity', from his confusions and contradictions. The hinhabitants of Badenhein, from this perspective, are only human beings, struggling, as all human beings do, with the complexities of their fate. Appelfeld is shocking because he does not take sides. He may be critical of Dr Landsmann for trying to dissociate himself from the fate of his fellow Jews, for insisting that there has been 'some mistake', but what of Samitzky, Dr Pappenheim, even Peter, who tries to hide at the last moment to escape deportation? Far from satirising these people, or being critical of them for not seeing what was coming, the book gives us a sense that history has simply caught them in its trap. By putting them under the microscope Appelfeld reveals how all of us are similarly caught, even if in less tragic and obvious ways, by the traps of history: we struggle to escape, to lead more meaningful lives, but we also struggle to deny that anything is wrong, and we go on living, blind to our human condition.

               Gabriel Josipovici, introduction to Aharom Appelfeld, Badenheim 39, (tr.) Penguin Modern Classics, 2005, pp. xiii-xiv.                   

A queda

"Dear Doktor Professor Heidegger, I should like to know what you mean by the expression "the fall into the quotidian". When did this fall occur? Where were we standing when it happened?"

Saul Bellow, Herzog.

" 'Man liveth not by Self alone but in his brother's face. ... Each shall behold the Eternal Father and love and joy abound.' When the preachers of dread tell tou that others only distract you from metaphysical freedom then you must turn away from them. The real and essencial question is one of our employment by other human beings and their employment by us. Without this true employment you never dread death, you cultivate it. And consciousness when it doesn't clearly understand what to live for, what to die for, can only abuse and ridicule itself." (272-3)

Saul Bellow, Herzog. 

Christopher Hitchens on Bellow

(...) How had Bellow managed to exert such an effect on writers almost half his age, from another tradition and another continent? Putting this question to the speakers later on, I received two particularly memorable responses. Ian McEwan related his impression that Bellow, alone among American writers of his generation, had seemed to assimilate the whole European classical inheritance. And Martin Amis vividly remembered something Bellow had once said to him, which is that if you are born in the ghetto, the very conditions compel you to look skyward, and thus to hunger for the universal."

(...)

"Perhaps the best illustration of nobility that Bellow offers is Augie March’s brief glimpse of Trotsky in Mexico, from which he receives a strong impression of “deepwater greatness” and an ability to steer by the brightest stars. Bellow himself had arrived in Mexico in 1940, just too late to see Trotsky, who had been murdered by a hireling assassin the morning they were meant to meet. Like Henderson, Trotsky was a man upon whom life had “decided to use strong measures.” The founder of the Red Army was also the author of Literature and Revolution and a coauthor of Manifesto for an Independent Revolutionary Art. In his own person he united the Jew, the cosmopolitan, the man of ideas, and the man of action. And the speed with which Bellow learned from the experience of Trotsky’s murder is a theme in several of his fictions."

 

“Ghetto nothing!” Ravelstein said. “Ghetto Jews had highly developed feelings, civilized nerves—thousands of years of training. They had communities and laws. ‘Ghetto’ is an ignorant newspaper term. It’s not a ghetto that they come from, it’s a noisy, pointless, nihilistic turmoil.”

(...)

do ensaio:"Saul Bellow: the great Assimilator", 2007..

"In every community there is a class of people profoundly dangerous to the rest. I don't mean the criminals. For them we have punitive sanctions. I mean the leaders. Invariably the most dangerous people seek the power. While in the parlors of indignation the right-thinking citizen brings his heart to a boil." (p. 51)

Saul Bellow, Herzog.