The Portage to San Cristobal of A. H.
Ziff, Larzer
Hitler's trick-and Steiner's THE PORTAGE TO SAN CRISTOBAL OF A.N. George Steiner Simon and Schuster $13.50, 128 pp. Larzer Ziff A PARTY of Israelis finally tracks Hitler to his hiding place on...
...Now, at the shattering point, he speaks both with intelligence and yet with his old stridency, and speaks, moreover, to the central point of the novel, his relationship to Judaism...
...There is no great need of any of the characters who appear in them, but like Lud-lum or Forsythe, Steiner delights in abrupt switches from the pain and sweat of the central figures to intimate details of the lives of those in Paris or Oxford who move murmuringly at some remove from physical action...
...George Steiner is among the most prominent of those who have attempted to assist our generation to comprehend an incomprehensible that must be comprehended...
...His tactic is to accept the rules, almost rigidly so, and to attempt to turn them against themselves...
...When he finishes his oration the novel stops abruptly in a cinematic frozen frame...
...Larzer Ziff A PARTY of Israelis finally tracks Hitler to his hiding place on the only tuft of dry ground in the innermost core of the unmapped Amazonian swamp...
...Through the journey, however, he remained all but mute, his only utterances fragments that a baby might speak, as, indeed, he somewhat resembled a blanketed baby in his litter...
...This speech, not San Cristobal, is the goal toward which everything had been driving...
...and, in a wealth of literary allusions, words that call up countless other words...
...In his speech, Hitler offers himself as the Doppleganger of the Jewish his-toricization of existence...
...And then the portage to San Cristobal commences, the return of Hitler from slime to the world of the bureaucrats in London, Moscow, Paris, Washington, and Bonn...
...He knows that also...
...because formulas of plot have been exhausted by what they could not carry...
...Yes, he is using words, and to underscore the fact that he will not attempt to escape them a great many of the words he uses are about words: the living word of God that lost some infinitesimal fraction of its life once it was transcribed, even under direct inspiration, into the written words of the Bible, a notion that is cabalistically symbolized by the belief that somewhere in the Bible there is one, just one, wrong word, maybe simply an "and...
...He is a spokesman who has warned against the betrayal of the dead that is inherent in the reduction of their agony to verbal formulas...
...To offer a fiction is to abide by the formulas of fiction...
...the too many words the Jews have spilled across the ages from their sedentary position in history...
...The fascination of his work, then, lies in the manner in which he validates his speaking more than in what he has to say...
...There is no resolution of the plot line - will they make it back to civilization...
...How will the world deal with their prisoner...
...it becomes a lie...
...the words of Hitler's speeches transfixing thousands...
...The unspeakable when spoken does not become speakable...
...But while this world, thanks to intercepted short wave messages, waits and dithers and schemes against the moment that the monstrous improbability of the living Hitler's reentry into history becomes reality, the five Israelis who are literally bearing him through the teeming muck conduct their own monologues on the meaning and absurdity of the event...
...What is the point of all this in a thriller...
...Nor can he avoid convention...
...To underscore the fact the portage through the swamp is rendered in acute, naturalistic detail...
...If he is to engage in an enterprise whose very rules appear to prohibit success-a "good" novel will be reductive and inadequate to the magnitude of the historical reality...
...And that, of course, is precisely where Steiner wants to leave his reader, burdened with the task of constructing the response...
...Thus stated, their problem is also the problem of the author of the fiction in which they appear...
...Steiner cannot avoid either the use of words or the transparency of the illusion that what is rendered in words is independent of them...
...He has not offered new ideas about the Holocaust, but he has with wit trapped us into having ideas about it...
...He knows that...
...Or are they engaged in a massive betrayal of the martyrs, because no treatment of this man can relate to the actuality of the Holocaust except to mock it through trivializing its anguish in a manifestly inadequate symbol...
...He has performed a verbal feat, a trick of ideas designed to awaken us to a knowing beyond the mere perceiving of the dreadful, dreadful violence of history...
...The Israelis' greatest fear had been that Hitler would begin talking to them and that under his word-spell they would become his will's agents...
...Are the horrors of the Holocaust in any degree at all revenged or purged by what they are doing...
...It also converts to its opposite and become edenic: for all the fever of the swamp primal life flourishes there-in the closingpages it even brings forth an aborigine who knows meaning without words-so that the Jew and Hitler seem twins preparing to leave myth for history...
...It is a marvelous speech, quite the best thing in the book, and with its arrival the conventions collapse...
...All of which is to say, of course, that the deliberate display of novelistic formulas and the copious use of words (brief novels can be wordy) are designed to break ultimately under their own weight and to point to what is released when the shell is shattered, as it is, in the last few pages...
...Moreover, the scene of the waiting world to which Steiner continually cuts cinematically are presented in accordance with the formula of the spy thriller...
...As they rush toward his hut to make the capture his guard dies, most probably of fright...
...And beneath both patterns lies the unexpressed one of conveying the ark through the wilderness...
...Quite simply, by delaying further development of the plot while bribing our forbearance with nice bits of out-of-the-way lore about the habits of the rich or the artifices of the international criminal, the author is able to prolong suspense...
...But such patterns never qualify the feel of the many, perhaps too many, naturalistic details...
...Pretty much the same, except that it is so manifestly overdone that he stresses he is using the conventions against themselves the better to release his meaning...
...As the journey progresses the imagery without obstruction becomes cloacal: the Jews in bearing Hitler to the nearest jungle settlement are bearing him to a village characterized as the "anus of the world," they are delivering excrement to the light...
...What is the point of all this in Steiner's novel...
...There is no "ending" because for completion there must be a response to Hitler's outrageously sensible points...
...a novel that defies the conventions of the novel will be a bad novel-how is he to proceed...
...Yet now Steiner himself has produced a fiction of the unspeakable...
...The Passage to San Cristobal steps forth as a meditation on the theme of the Holocaust...
...And yes he is writing a novel...
...He is aged but in surprisingly good health...
Vol. 109 • May 1982 • No. 10
