Traces of War Interpreting Ethics and Trauma in Twentieth-Century French Writing Contemporary French and Francophone Cultures, 49 Contemporary French and Francophone Cultures Series Editor CHARLES FORSDICK University of Liverpool Editorial Board TOM CONLEY JACQUELINE DUTTON LYNN A. HIGGINS Harvard University University of Melbourne Dartmouth College MIREILLE ROSELLO DAVID WALKER University of Amsterdam University of Sheffield This series aims to provide a forum for new research on modern and contem- porary French and francophone cultures and writing. The books published in Contemporary French and Francophone Cultures reflect a wide variety of critical practices and theoretical approaches, in harmony with the intellectual, cultural and social developments which have taken place over the past few decades. All manifestations of contemporary French and francophone culture and expression are considered, including literature, cinema, popular culture, theory. The volumes in the series will participate in the wider debate on key aspects of contemporary culture. Recent titles in the series: 35 Martin Munro, Writing on the Fault 42 Katelyn E. Knox, Race on Display Line: Haitian Literature and the in 20th- and 21st Century France Earthquake of 2010 43 Bruno Chaouat, Is Theory Good for 36 Kathryn A. Kleppinger, Branding the the Jews?: French Thought and the ‘Beur’ Author: Minority Writing and Challenge of the New Antisemitism the Media in France 44 Denis M. Provencher, Queer Maghrebi 37 Ruth Bush, Publishing Africa in French: Language, Temporalities, French: Literary Institutions and Transfiliations Decolonization 1945–1967 45 Nicholas Hewitt, Montmartre: A 38 Nicki Hitchcott, Rwanda Genocide Cultural History Stories: Fiction After 1994 46 Oana Panaïté, The Colonial Fortune in 39 Sara Kippur and Lia Brozgal, Being Contemporary Fiction in French Contemporary: French Literature, 47 Jason Herbeck, Architextual Culture and Politics Today Authenticity: Constructing Literature 40 Lucille Cairns, Francophone Jewish and Literary Identity in the French Writers: Imagining Israel Caribbean 41 Leslie Kealhofer-Kemp, Muslim 48 Yasser Elhariry, Pacifist Invasions: Women in French Cinema: Voices Arabic, Translation and the of Maghrebi Migrants in France Postfrancophone Lyric Colin Davis Traces of War Interpreting Ethics and Trauma in Twentieth-Century French Writing Traces of War LIVERPOOL UNIVERSITY PRESS First published 2018 by Liverpool University Press 4 Cambridge Street Liverpool L69 7ZU Copyright © 2018 Colin Davis The right of Colin Davis to be identified as the author of this book has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication data A British Library CIP record is available print ISBN 978-1-78694-042-1 cased epdf ISBN 978-1-78694-824-3 Typeset by Carnegie Book Production, Lancaster Contents Contents Acknowledgements vii Introduction: Don’t Mention the War 1 Section A: Ethics, Trauma and Interpretation 1 Trauma and Ethics: Telling the Other’s Story 11 2 Traumatic Hermeneutics: Reading and Overreading the Pain of Others 29 Section B: Writing the War: Sartre, Beauvoir, Camus 3 Sartre and Beauvoir: A Very Gentle Occupation? 49 4 Camus’s War: L’E trange r and Lettres à un ami allemand 65 5 Interpreting, Ethics and Witnessing in La Peste and La Chute 80 Section C: Prisoners of War Give Philosophy Lessons 6 Life Stories: Ricœur 119 7 Afterlives: Althusser and Levinas 134 8 Levinas the Novelist 148 vi Traces of War Section D: Surviving, Witnessing and Telling Tales 9 Testimony/Literature/Fiction: Jorge Semprun 165 10 Elie Wiesel: Witnessing, Telling and Knowing 193 11 Sarah Kofman and the Time Bomb of Memory 218 Conclusion: Whose War, Which War? 234 Bibliography 239 Index 250 Acknowledgements Acknowledgements Earlier versions of some of the material used here appeared in the following books and journals: material in Chapter 1 appeared in ‘Trauma and Ethics: Telling the Other’s Story’, in Other People’s Pain: Narratives of Trauma and the Question of Ethics, edited by Martin Modlinger and Philipp Sonntag (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2011), pp. 19–42; a shorter version of Chapter 2 appeared as ‘Traumatic Hermeneutics: Reading and Overreading the Pain of Others’, StoryWorlds, 8:1, pp. 31–49; a shorter version of Chapter 3 appeared as ‘Seeing Clearly into the Past: Sartre and Beauvoir at War’, in Lucidity: Essays in Honour of Alison Finch, edited by Ian James and Emma Wilson (Oxford: Legenda, 2016), pp. 132–44; some of the material in Chapter 4 appeared as ‘La Guerre de Camus: L’É trange r et Lettres à un ami allemand’, in Camus et l’éthique, edited by Ève Morisi (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2014), pp. 83–99; material in Chapter 5 was used in ‘Camus’s La Peste: Sanitation, Rats, and Messy Ethics’, Modern Language Review, 102:3 (2007), pp. 1008–20, and in ‘What Happened? Camus’s La Chute, Shoshana Felman and the Witnessing of Trauma’, French Forum, 36:1 (2011), pp. 37–53; material in Chapter 8 was used in ‘Levinas the Novelist’, French Studies, 69:3 (2015), pp. 333–44; earlier versions of material in Chapter 9 appeared in ‘What Can Literature Do?: Semprun, Militancy and the Scandal of Art’, in Values of Literature, edited by Hanna Meretoja, Pirjo Lyytikäinen, Saija Isomaa and Kristina Malmio (Leiden and Boston: Brill Rodopi, 2015), pp. 78–91, and in ‘What Fiction Doesn’t Say: Reticence in Semprun’s Novels’, Yale French Studies, 129 (2016), pp. 41–55; and part of Chapter 10 appeared in ‘Psychoanalysis, Trauma, and the “Little Secret”: The Resistance of Elie Wiesel and Anne-Lise Stern’, Dalhousie French Studies, 81 (2007), pp. 185–93. I am grateful to the following for support, advice and encour- agement during the preparation of this book: Jens Brockmeier, Ruth viii Traces of War Cruickshank, Robert Eaglestone, Patrick Hayes, Christina Howells, Ian James, Sharon Marquart, Ève Morisi, Esther Peeren, Liran Razinsky, Andreea Deciu Ritivoi, Max Silverman, Sonya Stephens, Avril Tynan, and Emma Wilson. I would particularly like to thank Hanna Meretoja, from whose friendship and professional expertise I have benefited hugely. I am also deeply grateful to colleagues in the School of Modern Languages, Literatures and Cultures at Royal Holloway, University of London, for helping to create an environment which is still conducive for research despite so many other pressures. My greatest debt is to Jane Hiddleston and Natasha Davis. Introduction Don’t Mention the War Introduction Between September 1939 and March 1941, the friends, lovers, fellow writers and intellectuals Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir saw little of each other. Sartre was mobilized at the beginning of the Second World War, and then held for ten months as a prisoner of war. During this period of painful separation they wrote to each other prolifically, sometimes more than once a day, as Sartre’s Lettres au Castor and Beauvoir’s Lettres à Sartre testify. Their posthumously published correspondence during the long, anguished months of their separation covers more than 500 pages of printed text. This is striking in part for its sheer length. It is not as if they had nothing else to do, and their correspondence was by no means their only written output for the period. Sartre assiduously wrote in what would be published as his Carnets de la drôle de guerre whilst working on his novel Le Sursis and his philosophical magnum opus L’Etre et le néant; and Beauvoir also kept a substantial journal, published as her Journal de guerre, and she worked on her first novel L’ In vit ée. If nothing else, war was very good for their productivity as writers, even if not everything they wrote at the time was initially intended for publication. Another striking feature of the correspondence between Sartre and Beauvoir is how little it has to say about the war. It is not that they had forgotten about it. Of course they hadn’t. It was the cause of their separation, and it affected every aspect of their lives. But it was as if it was too big to be seen, so totally present that it did not need to be mentioned. It is (relatively) unspoken and (absolutely) ubiquitous, ubiquitous because unspoken. The war was, according to Sartre at one 2 Traces of War point in his Carnets de la drôle de guerre, ‘insaisissable’.1 It is both there and not there. As their contemporary and sometime friend Albert Camus put it in his Carnets from the same period, ‘La guerre a éclaté. Où est la guerre?’ (Œuvres complètes II, p. 884). A central concern for the writers discussed in this book is how to perceive, experience and recount the war, how to integrate it into an intellectual and aesthetic project, when it is simultaneously elusive, intangible and all-pervasive. In his celebrated essay ‘The Storyteller’, Walter Benjamin touches on some of the key issues here when he discusses the imminent end of the art of storytelling, precipitated in part by the First World War. Benjamin describes how ‘men returned from the battlefield grown silent – not richer, but poorer in communicable experience’ (p. 362). Individual experience had been overwhelmed by huge economic and mechanical forces, leaving the ‘tiny, fragile human body’ (p. 362) with no story of its own to pass on to others. It is nevertheless noticeable that this loss of experience is still to a meaningful extent collective: it is shared even if it cannot be communicated through stories. Although it was doubtless premature to announce the end of storytelling, the particular problems associated with telling about experience were exacerbated by the Second World War. The historian Olivier Wieviorka contrasts the two world wars in this respect.