The Age of Atrocity: Death in Modern Literature by Lawrence L. Langer, and: A Double Dying: Reflections on Holocaust Literature by Alvin H. Rosenfeld (review)

170ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW Lawrence L. Langer. The Age of Atrocity: Death in Modern Literature. Boston: Beacon Press, 1978. 260p. Alvin H. Rosenfeld. A Double Dying: Reflections on Holocaust Literature. Bloomington , Ind. & London, 1980. 210p. These are significantly different books that explore essentially the same consideration : how our concept of "atrocity" or "holocaust" (inappropriate death occurring en masse rather than individually) affects our thinking and, consequently, our literature — and conversely. Each makes clear, in its own way, that any writer who wishes to confront death as theme and/or subject matter must change some patterns of thought that have become conventional. After two thousand years of attempting to understand death through tragic literature, humankind suddenly finds tragedy inadequate. The writer who intends to confront atrocity, as Langer points out, "must accept inappropriate death as a condition of existence, and portray humiliated man dying in ways he would never choose for himself, had he the option." Although the reader interested in literary criticism will probably find Rosenfeld 's book more enjoyable, in any larger sense Lange's is the more important work. After a prefatory statement of intentions, Langer uses two chapters to construct the background necessary to his examination of individual writers. The first of these two, "The Examined Death," relies on diverse writers on the subject of death to set forth the terms and bases on which one might respond to the phenomenon of "atrocity." Freud, Camus, Avery Weisman, Robert Jay Lifton, Elisabeth KublerRoss , John Günther, Lael Wertenbaker, and Simone de Beauvior are referred to extensively on this subject and on the differences between humankind's efforts to cope with death and its newly necessary attempts to cope with "atrocity." Chapter 2, "Dying Voices," examines first-person responses to "the holocaust" from some anonymous sources, then from Jean Améry's Beyond Guilt and Atonement.Langer contrasts Améry's views of death and atrocity with those of Ernest Becker (The Denial of Death), then returns to Camus and Lifton in an attempt to resolve literary and historical differences on the concept of "inappropriate death" and to establish some approaches that one might take in order to understand the ways in which "atrocity" affects the writings of Mann, Camus, Solzhenitsyn, and Charlotte Delbo. These writers are then discussed individually in the book's final four chapters. Theoretical is better than applied criticism in Langer. Actually, the work on Delbo sems more successful than that on the others — perhaps because her work has been previously submitted to less analysis than theirs. Rosenfeld's title comes from Elie Wiesel (Legends of Our Time): "at Auschwitz, not only one man died but also the idea of man." There is a somewhat narrower ambition here than in Langer's book. Here the question which underlies the methodology is not so much "How shall we fit the concept of 'atrocity' into our theory (or theories) of literature?" as "How shall we deal with literature on the subject of 'atrocity'?" As a result of his having thus restricted himself, Rosenfeld treats lesser-known writers. Some of his most incisive judgments,however (albeit negative judgments), are made upon more famous writers, in the chapter on "Exploiting Atrocity," a review of works which have in common an "imaginative misappropriation of atrocity ." Representative of those works harshly judged — with good cause, in this case — is William Styron's Sophie's Choice. Styron has written, Rosenfeld contends, not so much a novel of the Holocaust as an unwitting spoof of the same. By reducing the war against the Jews to sexual combat, he has misappropriated Auschwitz and used '* as, "little more than the erotic centerpiece of a new Southern Gothic Novel." Similarly, Sylvia Plath is made typical of those contemporary "confessional poets" BOOK REVIEWS171 who tend to "find images for individual suffering in the extremity of the concentration camp experiences, a tendency that can introduce an undeniable power into poetry but at the same time one that may introduce a high degree of pathology as well." A useful addendum to Double Dying is eleven pages of Bibliography, divided by genre. KEN PELLOW, University of Colorado Anna K. Nardo. Milton's Sonnets and the Ideal Community. Lincoln: University of Nebraska...