Geographical Imaginaries in Delbo, Camus, and Duras
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The Place of Atrocity: Geographical Imaginaries in Delbo, Camus, and Duras by Vanessa Marie Brutsche A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in French and the Designated Emphasis in Film Studies in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Debarati Sanyal, Chair Professor Michael Lucey Professor Miryam B. Sas Summer 2017 Abstract The Place of Atrocity: Geographical Imaginaries in Delbo, Camus, and Duras by Vanessa Marie Brutsche Doctor of Philosophy in French and Designated Emphasis in Film Studies University of California, Berkeley Professor Debarati Sanyal, Chair This dissertation brings to light a poetics of space in postwar texts and films that represent the aftermath of historical trauma. I show that the spatial poetics of confinement, deportation, and diaspora in works by Charlotte Delbo, Marguerite Duras, and Albert Camus highlight the unsettling but unavoidable continuity between sites of atrocity and the everyday world. Instead of depicting the concentration camp as an enclosed and impenetrable site of extreme violence – one that must be remembered, while sealed away in both time and space – these works insist on the connections between everyday life and catastrophic violence. This focus on space enriches the critical discussion of traumatic memory, which has predominantly evaluated trauma as a temporal disruption of the psyche. By reading works of literature and film through the lens of space, I show that the ongoing political urgency of this traumatic history was envisioned as the proximity between concentration camps and the pacified, quotidian world. Across texts that range from testimony (Delbo) to fiction (Camus) and experimental film (Duras), the concentration camp comes into direct contact with urban and domestic spaces. As a result, these works radically dismantle the perceived boundaries of the camp, emphasizing its capacity – as site, system, and figure – to contaminate even the most familiar spaces of the everyday, such as the city street, the railway station, or the home. 1 In memory of Charles William Dusing Sr. (1922-2009) i CONTENTS ___________________________ List of Figures iii Acknowledgements iv Introduction 1 Chapter 1: “Un endroit d’avant la géographie”: Charlotte Delbo’s Concentrationary Universe 16 Chapter 2: Totalitarianism and States of Exception: The Plague in Camus's Etat de siège 47 Chapter 3: Les travellings sont affaire de mémoire: Circulating Memory in Duras’s Aurélia Steiner 74 Conclusion 109 Bibliography 112 ii LIST OF FIGURES ___________________________ Figure 1: Aurélia Steiner Vancouver p. 71 Figure 2: Aurélia Steiner Vancouver p. 72 Figure 3: Aurélia Steiner Vancouver p. 78 Figure 4: Aurélia Steiner Melbourne p. 85 Figure 5: Aurélia Steiner Melbourne p. 87 Figure 6: Aurélia Steiner Melbourne p. 90 iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS So many friends, colleagues, and family members have been essential to the writing of this dissertation that it is impossible to do justice to everyone who has helped sustain my work during this process, whether by aid, support, dialogue, or sheer presence. I especially benefitted from the endless patience and insight of my advisor, Debarati Sanyal, as well as that of Miryam Sas and Michael Lucey. Aubrey Gabel and Margot Szarke were my dissertation writing group, offering both academic and emotional support throughout years of drafts and job applications. Jessie Singer has been by my side as a friend and fellow student since our first day of graduate school, and I am proud to have graduated with all three of these brilliant women. I would also like to thank my family, particularly my parents, who have endured my obsessions with both French and literature for decades, beginning at an age when I was much too young to understand either one. My final expression of gratitude goes to Matt, my tireless partner, accomplice, and confidant, whose contributions I cannot begin to enumerate. This dissertation is dedicated to the memory of my maternal grandfather, who saw things in Europe in the spring of 1945 that he could not forget. iv INTRODUCTION This dissertation is animated by a central inquiry: what does it mean when the logic of the concentration camp begins to structure spaces of everyday life? How can the postwar city be part of the concentration-camp universe? In response to such questions, The Place of Atrocity: Geographical Imaginaries in Delbo, Camus, and Duras excavates a literary and cinematic corpus that links geography, architecture, and urban space to mass destruction. Examining texts and films from the end of the end of the war to the 1970s, I argue that the catastrophic revelation of the concentration camp system brought about different ways of thinking about geography and urban space. Instead of depicting the concentration camp as an enclosed and impenetrable site of extreme violence – one that must be remembered, while sealed away in both time and space – these works refuse to separate everyday life from traumatic historical violence. The “place of atrocity” refers not only to the geographical location of extreme violence – a proposition that is not as self-evident as it may seem – but also, the conceptual place accorded to historical violence in the cultural and geographical imaginaries. By reading works of literature and film through the lens of space, I show that the ongoing political urgency of this traumatic history was envisioned as the spatial proximity between concentration camps and spaces of everyday life. Across texts that range from testimony to fiction, theater, and experimental films, the concentration camp comes into direct contact with the urban and domestic spaces of everyday life. As a result, these works radically dismantle the perceived boundaries of the concentration camp, emphasizing its capacity – as site, system, and figure – to contaminate even the most familiar spaces of the everyday, such as the city street, the subway station, or the home. The Place of Atrocity engages with works by Charlotte Delbo, Albert Camus, and Marguerite Duras that negotiate the geographical dimensions of representing and transmitting the memory of historical violence. While this combination of authors may at first seem unusual, reading them alongside each other, through the lens of space and place, brings to light a shared reflection on the space of the concentration camp in its unsettling proximity with the here and now. More generally, the three authors also share a common interest in the aftermath of historical trauma. Belonging to the generation of writers who were young adults during World War II (in fact, all three were born within months of each other), Camus, Duras, and Delbo used literature as a means of reflecting, often provocatively, on the ethical, political, and aesthetic stakes of representing the atrocities of the war. This mutual inclination can be traced through the respective major works at the center of each author-based chapter of this dissertation. Delbo’s Auschwitz et après, Camus’s L’État de siège, and Duras’s Aurélia Steiner all share the particular trait of thinking across space in the context of traumatic memory. The spatial tropes that shape the depiction of the camps in these texts reflect formal and conceptual resonances in how their authors 1 respond to the problems of memory, representation, and trauma. Using these resonances to map a critical engagement with spatiality and historical violence, I argue that these works are invested in not only traversing the borders of sites of trauma, but in demonstrating the connections between everyday life and catastrophic violence. This focus on space in The Place of Atrocity enriches the critical discussion of traumatic memory, which has predominantly evaluated trauma as a temporal disruption of the psyche. As this dissertation frames trauma from the point of view of cultural memory, I do not adhere to the strictly psychoanalytic definition of trauma as missed experience, and tend to use the term “trauma” in the broader (and perhaps less precise) sense of historical trauma. Dominick LaCapra’s useful distinction between structural trauma (a sense of “transhistorical absence” experienced as a lack of pure origins or the impossibility of totalizing meaning) and historical trauma (which entails specific instances of traumatic violence) allows us to avoid conflating a pervasive sense of trauma or victimhood with actual historical loss (77-8).1 This distinction renders crucial the specificity of subject positions such as victim and perpetrator, and considers the political and social legacies of the traumatizing events. While it is impossible to divorce the concept of trauma from its psychoanalytic origins, this project is oriented towards the means by which cultural memory of the Holocaust and other atrocities is produced and passed on. In the context of memory studies, this project addresses the production and transmission of cultural or collective memory, as opposed to the structure of individual memory. The term “collective memory” was coined by Maurice Halbwachs to describe the fundamentally social process of how groups maintain memories, by means of a cadre of shared communicative practices. The discipline of memory studies is indebted to Halbwachs for the insight that all memory, including personal memory, is formed through the social framework of collective memory. Cultural memory also necessarily operates at the collective level, but the distinction between