In a Naked World ‘Death’, ‘Life’ and Politics in J.H. Brenner’s From Aleph to Mem

Abstract

From Aleph to Mem (1906) is considered an alleged memoir that reports what happened during a few days of staying with a prisoner convoy and in Russian prisons. The story’s interpretation presented hereby seeks to pull out the deeper meaning of the story from under the superficial. This thought stretches between two poles: certainty of death and the irrational will to live.

The narrating hero decides to commit suicide but pulls back. Life, as he learns, does not need to be justified. Life is simply all that is not death. The hero will keep on living, even though his life has no meaning and one cannot put a finger on its flavor.

In prison, values and human emotions lose their validity. The narrative presents life in prison as a true model of human life in general – a model that reveals the true essence of human existence, dictated by blind existence. This essence, which religious, moral and philosophical doctrines wish to daze, is eternal. Changes and political revolutions may alter the outer shell, but they are none but other manifestations of the same essence which they try to change.

This derives the principal criticism over the ideologies which are allegedly based on reason and rationality, but are not up to changing a reality that in nature is sensual and irrational. The will to live, according to the story, does not let those who withstand the monstrosity of living end their lives; furthermore, it leads some of them to the path of trying to give meaning to a meaningless world.