L'Espèce humaine

L'Espèce humaine [The Human Race]
First edition, of which there was no grand papier (deluxe copies) printed, copy in a resale cover from Robert Marin, with the label of the new publisher pasted at the foot of the title page.
Slight foxing on the first board.

Moving and very rare inscription signed by Robert Antelme to Gaston Riby, companion in misfortune, to whom he dedicates a long chapter of his book: “Pour Gaston Riby pour le souvenir de notre même expérience, en souvenir de l'action jamais désespérée qu'il a menée parmi nous, en toute fraternité, affectueusement. Robert Antelme.” (“For Gaston Riby for the memory of our same experience, in memory of the never desperate act that he led among us, in full fraternity, affectionately. Robert Antelme.”)

Gaston Riby is indeed one of the important characters in Robert Antelme's testimony-account. He is one of the only prisoners whose full name is revealed, the others being referred by their first names, nicknames or simple initials (Marguerite Duras, his wife, is only known by the letter “M...") The chapter that he devotes to him, two-thirds of the way through the book, no longer concerns the denunciation of the horror of the camps, but the possibility of an intellectual resistance, a survival of the mind against the destruction of the body and the attempt at dehumanisation. Antelme pays a superb tribute to the “recreational sessions” invented by Riby at Gandersheim:

“Gaston Riby was nearing thirty. He was a teacher. He had a big face and a broad jaw. He too had gone through the Zaunkommando and then the factory. At that point he was working with a few others in what they called the mine. It was a combined shelter and tunnel that the SS were having dug in the hill behind their barracks. Every evening, the guys from the mine came back exhausted and covered with dirt. Even with the blows we might get in the Transportkolonne, we didn't look the way they did. We could try to fend off the blows, try to sneak off for an hour or two of rest somewhere in the factory. They were inside the tunnel, and had to haul out earth from morning till night, with just the morning's bread in their stomachs.
When Gaston would come back to the block he often had hardly enough strength left to drink his soup, and he'd lie down on his pallet and close his eyes right away.

And yet they hadn't been able to keep this beast of burden that they'd made of him from thinking while he dug away at the hill, nor from speaking powerfully, speaking words that rang in your ears for a long time.
He wasn't alone in the tunnel; others were swinging picks alongside him and carrying dirt, and like him they had a little more strength in the morning than they had in the evening. The civilian foreman could strut about in the tunnel wearing his future Volkssturm greatcoat and his little black mustache and could yell and demand more effort, but he couldn't prevent words from passing from one man to another.

Only a few words: it wasn't conversations these men held, since work in the mine wasn't done by fixed groups, and one guy couldn't stay beside another for several hours at a stretch. Sentences were broken by the rhythm of the picking and shoveling and the coming and going of the wheelbarrow. And it was too tiring to hold a real conversation; you had to say what you wanted to in just a few words. This is what Gaston had to say: “We've got to do something on Sunday. We can't remain like this. We've got to get out from under this hunger. We've got to talk to the guys. Some of them are falling apart, letting go, letting themselves die. Some have forgotten why they're here. We've got to talk."

This was going on in the tunnel, was being said by one beast of burden to another. And from that a language was taking shape that wasn't one of belches and foulnesss anymore, nor one of dogs yapping around the bucket of seconds. And this language was creating a distance between the men and the muddy, yellow dirt, rendering them distinct from it and no longer buried within it, rendering them masters of it and able also to tear themselves away from the grinding emptiness of their stomachs. In the depths of the mine, in their bent bodies and disfigured faces, the world was opening up.” (Antelme, L'Espèce humaine, p. 287)
Gaston Riby appears once more in the chapter “La route” narrating the long flight from the allied advance. He is however caught up in the chaos of deaths from exhaustion, murders and escape attempts, gradually reducing the 450 deportees to a mere 150 survivors, during the 10 days of walking and cattle cars that led them from Gandersheim to Dachau: “It's going to be dark, I am walking next to Jo and Gaston who has stomach cramps. Since this morning he has been talking only in short, unshaped sentences, as though he were speaking from within a coma.
He hands his bag to me and he stops by the side of the road. We walk for a long time. Gaston doesn't come back.” Gaston giving away the precious bag, abandoning his friends and condemning himself, losing his speech – his last and only means of resistance – can be seen as one of the last stages in the dehumanisation process before the tragedy of the Spanish father and his son.
This significant historical dedication reveals the “resurrection” of Gaston Riby and celebrates the victory of human resilience beyond the temporality of the narrative. By addressing his story to the one who shared its horrendous experience, Antelme transforms his attempt to share an “unimaginable” ordeal ("That's the most convenient word. […], the word of emptiness"), into a true “testimony of recognition".

“There are not human races, there is one human race. It is because we are men like them that the S.S. will ultimately be helpless before us.”

This fundamental work on the experience of the Nazi camps was the third and final publication of the ephemeral publishing house founded by Marguerite Duras and Robert Antelme, her husband from 1940 to 1946.
Going unnoticed during this first confidential publication, only a few copies were sold, it was resold the following year under new covers by Robert Marin. The work suffered from competition from the many writings on the subject published immediately after the war. Yet, as F. Lebelley recounts, “at a time when narratives abound, the particular power of this book, of a frist-rate sobriety, wreaks havoc like a founding text. A book by a writer who, as Duras acknowledges, has taken 'the open sea of literature'. Robert Antelme will never write another. Despite the praise and honours, L'Espèce humaine will remain the unique work of a lifetime” (in Duras, ou le Poids d'une plume).

Thanks to the intervention of Albert Camus, the book reappears ten years later, in 1957, at Gallimard and is then more widely distributed.

Since then, this book has become a part of literary history as one of the most important writings confronting the painful but necessary reflections on concentration camps and the human condition. It is after him that writers such as Jorge Semprun will be able to start a new approach to the impossible writing of the camps.

As early as 1947, Antelme announced in his foreword, “we were just coming back, we were bringing with us our memory, our still living experience and we felt an intense desire to tell it as it is. And, from the first days, however, it seemed to us impossible to fill the distance that we discovered between the language we had at our disposal and this experience. [...] How can we resign ourselves to not trying to explain how we got there? We were still there. And yet it was impossible. No sooner did we begin to tell, than we suffocated. Even to ourselves, what we had to say began to seem unimaginable.”

A unique copy of this early and fundamental work on the specificity of the concentration camps, offered by Antelme to one of his deportation companions, a central figure of intellectual resistance inside the camp and to which Antelme pays tribute.

It is this experience of dehumanisation and the capacity for resilience shown in particular by Gaston Riby that will bring Maurice Blanchot to write: “I think Robert Antelme's book helps us progress in this knowledge.

But we must understand what such knowledge carries with it. That man can be destroyed is certainly not reassuring; but that, despite this and because of this, and in this very impulse, man remains indestructible—thisis what is truly crushing, because no longer do we have any chance of ever seeing ourselves unburdened of ourselves or of our responsibility”