Moral Madness

By Stefan Kanfer

ELIE WIESEL: MESSENGER TO ALL HUMANITY by Robert McAfee Brown Notre Dame; 244 pages; $16.95

In The Possessed, Dostoyevsky offers a characteristic irony: "I have a plan--to go mad." That remark is a motto of one of his literary heirs, Elie Wiesel. A survivor of Auschwitz and Buchenwald, Wiesel has long been recognized as a visionary, reading symbols in the charred remains of the Holocaust. But it is Wiesel the artist who commands the attention of Theologian-Critic Robert McAfee Brown. In Messenger to All Humanity, Brown provides the best introduction to the score of works that have made Wiesel a leading candidate for the Nobel Prize.

On one side of history lies the cratered and extinct universe of the death camps, on the other, the indifferent world. "The connecting link," Brown observes, "is story." Wiesel's fierce tales were born of silence. After his liberation, he refused to speak on the subject of the Jewish agony. With good reason. Wiesel lost his mother and younger sister at the first "selection"; his father died soon afterward. "Children for me," he recalled, "evoke war, thunder and hate, shouts, screams, dogs howling." He was to search for ten years before he found a vocabulary that allowed him to articulate the unspeakable.

In Night (1958), an austere, shattering account of a boy's first days behind barbed wire, babies were thrown into ovens and God was banished from everywhere but memory: "I've got more faith in Hitler than in anyone else. He's the only one who's kept his promises to the Jewish people." If Wiesel's literary career had ended with Night, he would still have earned an international reputation as a founder of Holocaust literature. Once the novel was published, others dared to speak out: Nelly Sachs' laments were carried in O the Chimneys; Andre Schwarz-Bart chronicled The Last of the Just; Jerzy Kosinski described The Painted Bird. Wiesel himself was set free; his other books rushed into print: Dawn, The Accident, The Town Beyond the Wall, The Gates of the Forest, A Beggar in Jerusalem.

Through them all, Brown notes, runs the Dostoyevskian theme of "moral madness." Characters dance around their own souls, burbling luminous insights that no one regards; others believe that nothing good can come of sanity: "If man be the messenger of man, why should a madman not be the messenger of God?" In one play, God himself is put on trial in the 17th century for crimes committed against the Jews. His defense attorney is a mysterious stranger who turns out to be Satan.

Nihilism scratches the surfaces of these works. But Brown acutely perceives the "in spite of that moves below the words: "When anguish is summoned, joy emerges; when mourning is appropriate, celebration intrudes." Wiesel's refusal to despair is not born out of blind faith and certainly not out of innate optimism. It arises, like most prophetic tendencies, from a balance of terror: the riddle of God on one side, the knowledge of man on the other. Brown enlivens his text with quotes, none more pertinent than Wiesel's self-analysis: "When you live on the edge of the mountain, you see the abyss, but you also see very far." Brown sees almost as far, but then he is standing on a monument.

--By Stefan Kanfer This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.