The Last of the Just: Between Borges and García Márquez

Abstract

By SEYMOUR MENTON Andre Schwarz-Bart's Le dernier des Justes (The Last of the Just), an outstanding novel of the Holocaust and recipient of the 1959 French Prix Goncourt, is not only a prime example of magic realism but also provides a link between two of the tendency's most famous Latin American practitioners, Jorge Luis Borges and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Hailed by critics upon its publication, Last of the Just as late as 1963 was called by Pierre de Boisdeffre one of the most significant novels of the preceding twenty years, along with Plague by Albert Camus. However, in the ensuing twenty years, Schwarz-Bart's novel seems to have fallen victim to the same plight as its main characters. Levy family is persecuted by the Germans for being Jews while the French government will not admit them because they are Germans. French critics and literary historians of the past two decades have tended to ignore the novel almost completely, possibly because it is not in the mainstream of French literature,1 whereas Holocaust critics and literary historians have tended to deprecate it on religious and historical grounds. Perhaps the clearest explanation of why Last of the Just has not been appreciated as a great work of art by Holocaust critics is given by Edward Alexander in the introduction to his 1979 book Resonance of Dust: Essays on Holocaust Literature and Jewish Fate: the aftermath of the Holocaust the historical situation of the Jewish people is so desperate that an evaluation of Holocaust literature in merely literary terms is an unaffordable luxury. 2 Be that as it may, if the Schwartz-Bart novel is to be rediscovered and appreciated in the 1980s and beyond, it must be on the basis of its literary qualities. By establishing its debt to the short stories of Jorge Luis Borges and by analyzing its similarities to Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, I hope to demonstrate that the artistry of Last of the Just may best be understood within the context of magic realism, a term that originated with the German art critic Franz Roh in 1925, and a tendency whose international character is traced in my own study, Magic Realism Rediscovered, 1918-81. 3 Schwarz-Bart (b. 1928), a voracious and self-educated reader, undoubtedly discovered Borges in the 1950s before or during the four years that he worked on his novel. French translation of Borges's Ficciones was first published in 1952 by the prestigious firm of Gallimard and was enthusiastically acclaimed by French intellectuals.4 Moreover, the fact that two of Borges's stories, The Secret Miracle and Deutsches Requiem, deal directly with the Holocaust whereas others such as The Aleph, Death and the Compass, and Emma Zunz reveal a general fascination with Jewish culture could hardly have escaped Schwarz-Bart's attention. Coincidentally, Gabriel Garcia Marquez (b. 1927) lived in Paris between 1955 and 1957 as a struggling young writer. Although there is no proof that Garcia Marquez met Schwarz-Bart during that period, or even that he read Last of the Just before completing One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), the two novels share an impressive series of magic-realist traits. Furthermore, one unique stylistic detail in the Colombian novel may well have been inspired by its French predecessor, which was published in Spanish in 1959 by Seix Barral in Barcelona. As the banana workers' corpses are being hauled by train to the sea, Jose Arcadio Segundo sees muertos hombres, los muertos mujeres, los muertos ninos. 5 In Last of the Just, as Ernie Levy travels in the overcrowded train to Auschwitz, he gently picks up the body of a child who has just died and places it au dessus du monceau grandissant d'hommes juifs, de femmes juives, d'enfants juifs.6 Of course, the juxtaposition of the masculine noun muertos with the feminine noun mujeres used as an adjective makes the Garcia Marquez phrase even more outstanding.