The Ritual of New Creation (34 page)

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structure to the social arena, seeking to ascribe one or another position to the author. This is not to say that by writing fiction Steiner is freed of responsibility for the ideas in the work. On the contrary, these ideas bear upon our political decisions and moral judgments with great forcebut in a unique, highly mediated fashion which we must try to understand in each of our encounters with a work of literature. The conditions which
The Portage
imposes upon us, its mediating formalisms, are taxing in the extreme:


It was only a step, gentlemen, a small, inevitable step, from Sinai to Nazareth, from Nazareth to the covenant of Marxism.

Three times the Jew has pressed on us the blackmail of transcendence. Three times he has infected our blood and brains with the bacillus of perfection. Go to your rest and the voice of the Jew cries out in the night: "Wake up! God's eye is upon you. Has He not made you in His image? Lose your life so that you may gain it. Sacrifice yourself to the truth, to justice, to the good of mankind." That cry had been in our ears too long, gentlemen, far too long. Men had grown sick of it, sick to death.
⁴⁵

This, of course, is Steiner's Hitler, offering a parody of Steiner's own ideasa parody produced less by twisting the original ideas (though Hitler does that too) than by situating them in a speech in which he explains and defends his actions. Yet this cannot be called self-parody in the conventional sense of the term. As Boyers understands, when studying Steiner's ideas in the novel, context counts for as much as content:

Hitler's grammar of hell, as brought before us in a living language, should be able to appropriate and invert any sacred terminology, including one originally inventedby Steiner himself, in previous essays and booksto express a combination of horror, guilt, inadequacy, and sheer driven disquietude in the face of a historical event that remains "indivisible" from his own identity. The final speech demonstrates that a Hitler can appropriate a Steiner for his purposes by willfully ignoring, and thus violating, the spirit and intent of Steiner's original utterances and turning them to totally alien purposes.
⁴⁶

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This interpretation may not satisfy those readers who expect a definitive moral statement to present itself upon the conclusion of a given novel, especially one as morally fraught as
The Portage to San Cristobal of A. H.
Moral judgments are manifest throughout the book in both form and content, and lead us to moral judgments of our own: but they are not to be found in
The Portage
as they are in
Language and Silence
or
In Bluebeard's Castle
. Steiner has too much respect for the power of the aesthetic, too much intimate knowledge of its dangers, and far too much novelistic skill, not to allow his work its full charge of ethical vexation. If we are truly to comprehend the depravity of Hitler's anti-Semitism, then, like the Israeli team in the Amazon (or like Marlow, their great precursor in
Heart of Darkness
), we must experience what Boyers calls Hitler's "power of transvaluation"knowing full well how perilously akin this ideological power is to that of fiction itself. As Terry Eagleton explains,

Ideology signifies the imaginary ways in which men experience the real world, which is, of course, the kind of experience literature gives us toowhat it feels like to live in particular conditions, rather than a conceptual analysis of those conditions. However, art does more than just passively reflect that experience. It is held within ideology, but also manages to distance itself from it, to the point where it permits us to 'feel' and 'perceive' the ideology from which it springs.
⁴⁷

It is especially important to keep this modus operandi in mind when interpreting a work like
The Portage,
which ambiguously represents an extreme and repugnant ideology, and one which is itself capable of distorting historical and psychological insights.

The notorious conclusion of
The Portage
is thus even less conclusive than it first appears, in accord with the messianic tenor of Steiner's thought. The entire novel is shot through with messianic references, especially Lieber's and Elie Barach's considerations of Hitler as an anti-messiah, one who has mastered the grammar of hell, God's counterlanguage of evil and negation. Speaking of the Holocaust and the birth of Israel, A. H. too mockingly says "Perhaps I
am
the Messiah, the true Messiah, the new Sabbatai whose infamous deeds were allowed by God in order to bring His people home."
⁴⁸These remarks help to establish the position of individual speakers and convey Steiner's conviction that only a highly charged theological

Page 115

discourse, an apocalyptic language, can do justice to his themes. Yet Steiner's messianism runs deepest not in any allusion or reference but in the way the novel unblinkingly poses questions of ultimate evil and justice. As the work unfolds, with chapters focusing on the Israelis interspersed with chapters revealing the thoughts and responses of the various national types confronting the growing possibility of A. H.'s reality, we are gradually prepared for the apocalyptic moment of Hitler's speech, a moment when finally we are able to hear this language of negation, whatever the risk. As is the case with
In Bluebeard's Castle,
we face a terrible reversal of transcendental justice and the most excruciating of human failures. But in
The Portage
we do not simply understand this disaster as we do in Steiner's criticism; we experience its representation.

Nevertheless, even this disastrous moment, which some have read as an ironic triumph for Nazism in Steiner's work, remains radically open. Saul Friedlander, in what is perhaps the most subtle critique of the novel, implicates Steiner in "the new discourse about Nazism," what he calls "a kitsch of the apocalypse."
⁴⁹According to Friedlander,
The Portage,
like the other recent books and films which he examines (and unlike
Language and Silence
), is a dangerous work because it aestheticizes and thereby neutralizes some of the worst aspects of Nazism. "Eloquence,'' says Friedlander, "the real eloquence of the pseudo-Hitlermay reach deeply into those murky labyrinths of present day fantasies about Nazism or the Jews."
⁵⁰

Compelling and important as Friedlander's general argument is, I still believe that Steiner is justified in the risks taken by his novel. As we have seen, Steiner has long been aware of the dangers involved in dealing with Holocaust material, yet believes that no responsible artist or critic can avoid them. Furthermore, Steiner's apocalyptic sensibility is, arguably, free of the element of kitsch which Friedlander accurately locates in work such as Michel Tournier's
The Ogre
or the memoirs of Albert Speer. Jewish messianism, including Steiner's, is never merely a matter of apocalyptic destruction, which in itself can certainly be perverted into a kitsch of death. Apocalyptic but still lacking the debased romanticism of annihilation, messianic works, including
The Portage,
partake equally in the openness of utopian thought.

The Portage
does not end with Hitler's speech. As Joseph Lowin has pointed out, the monologue is followed by the appearance of the helicopters. We do not know who has sent them nor what they will do: "The answer one gives to the question raised by

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