The Man From Auschwitz
In Pictures at an Exhibition, D. M. Thomas returns to the world of The White Hotel, his third and most celebrated novel. In that earlier book, as in Pictures at an Exhibition, Freudian analysis figures significantly. In each, unhappy sexuality drives the dreams of patients, and in each the novel feels like a dream (or nightmare). In each, death oppresses doctors and patients (and readers) alike. And, in each, we relive a horrible slaughter of Jews—in The White Hotel, it is the mass killing at Babi Yar; in Pictures at an Exhibition, it is Auschwitz and other killing camps of the Holocaust, and the murder of 90 Jewish children in the Ukraine.
The novel opens in the 1940's, apparently in Europe. A doctor is summoned—one thinks of Kafka's story “A Country Doctor” as one reads the first pages—and he is asked to treat another doctor, who complains of headaches and nightmares and general malaise. Only gradually does Mr. Thomas let us see that Dr. Lorenz, the patient, is a physician at Auschwitz, and that Dr. Galewski, who treats him, is a Czechoslovakian Jew who is a prisoner in the camp.
This first-person section, narrated in Galewski's voice, is very skillful. Humane aspects of the Nazi are revealed, as are cruel and anti-Semitic aspects of the Jew. We learn, too, that the Jewish doctor's child has survived long enough to be adopted by a Nazi couple at the camp, and that he has saved an adolescent Jewish girl from death by coaching her through a Nazi torture—her forced incestuous coupling with her father; she survives but is used as both a whore and a partner in experiments studying prisoners having sex under duress.
This material, witnessing Nazi inhumanities and Jewish suffering, is difficult to read. It seems daring in its subtly harsh assessment of the Jewish Galewski. And Mr. Thomas's construction of a narrative puzzle that we become eager to unlock is masterly. In the prison doctor's genteel quarters, as Furtwängler's recording of Tristan und Isolde is played, while they eat good food before a fireplace, two intelligent men conduct witty, urgent conversation. Around them, bestiality presses at the margins of these pages and between the lines of type.
The lure of story and the cunning of the narrative drive us through the horror of the first section; we search for shape, for reason. Mr. Thomas insists that we get there, as in The White Hotel, by way of dream. In subsequent sections, set in the present, in England, we overhear the patients of a brilliant, beloved psychoanalyst, Oscar Jacobson, who is dying of multiple sclerosis. We almost never hear Jacobson's responses to the words of his patients; what we know comes from their repetition of what he says, and their summaries of his history and theirs.
So a patient must say this: “I've been thinking quite a lot about that dream, Dr. Jacobson. The one I had a couple of weeks ago. You know, where my sister and I were sitting with Ruth when she was dying, and Sarah admitted to me that Ruth was my child not hers.” Mr. Thomas's insistence on Oscar's silence seems a comment by the author on our ability to use language truthfully. Is this the terrain of Paul de Man, a proponent of literary reasoning based upon the unreliability of language—and a quisling during the Nazi occupation of Belgium? The effect of this clumsy management of information is that one seems to be overhearing soap opera. The tension...
(This entire section contains 1215 words.)
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of the first section evaporates and the reader, losing dramatic involvement, declines to merely ferreting through facts.
It becomes evident from internal clues—comments by his patients, Jacobson's own letters—that he is one of the two men we met in the opening pages. It takes some good while for us to learn which, and to understand that while he seems to have become a good man, he remains a cunning malefactor. Is the Nazi a Jew? Is the Jewish turncoat reformed? We search for that truth amid the lies and dreams and clues. And we see that Mr. Thomas is drawing together the strands of the novel—the baby of the camps, the victimized girl, the two doctors—and seems to be offering a truth about human nature.
But, finally, he doesn't. He offers dreaminess, dislocated sections of narrative and the duplicity and vile cunning of Jacobson and minor characters. It's as if the story he tells is secondary to him. It's as if his paramount concern is to demonstrate to us that consciously used language, not unlike that with which we speak unconsciously to our deepest selves, will usually lie.
By itself, this is a tired truth. Poststructuralist literary theory and the book chat it has engendered have wearied us of it, and many readers seek literary art because they believe that it offers more about our humanness than that weary sophistication. Mr. Thomas has a character say to Jacobson of the complaints of his patients that it “was as if, amidst the cosmic tragedy of ‘Lear,’ we saw Cordelia trotting along to marriage guidance with her hubby, and complaining that he spent no time on foreplay. You said life isn't really here, and only survivors … knew where it really was.” The rejection of the quotidian is by a Nazi doctor from Auschwitz. Does Mr. Thomas therefore seek to establish or invalidate the horror of the Holocaust as a higher order of truth about humanity? Does Cordelia have a right to simple happiness? Is everyone Cordelia? Should we care?
Linked to the historical documents at the novel's core, this relativism seems feeble. One section is a quotation of actual Nazi documents—from commanders and military clergy—about a house in which 90 small children of murdered Jews were locked for 24 hours without food or water. Order, secrecy, the unwillingness of any leader to be responsible for the children, and of course the war against the Jews, led to their being shot by a Ukrainian execution squad and buried in a mass grave. As the squad leader reports, “Many children were hit four or five times before they died.”
Clever theories about what is written or said cannot survive juxtaposition with that sentence. Whether that is Mr. Thomas's point, or whether his novel's comment on uncertainty matters more to him, the book proves alternately horrifying and annoying, powerful as its ironic last lines, by a clergyman, may be.
While there are interesting characters and moving scenes in Pictures at an Exhibition, its plot is tied together in an unconvincing Freudian bundle. A second-rate detective story written by one of Jacobson's patients, a failed analyst, melodramatically mistells the truth of who the Nazi was: words lie, you see; so the unspeakable remains unspoken. Yet it is the job of the fiction writer to make art by managing to say what seems unsayable.
And there are those victims of torture and murder: their sacrifice to the plotting of a novel of middling achievement lingers disturbingly. Pictures at an Exhibition may be most important, then, for the questions it provokes. What shall we allow ourselves to build on the scourged soil of the killing grounds?
