Le Paris De La Memoire: Traces of the Holocaust and the Algerian War in the City of Light

LE PARIS DE LA MEMOIRE: TRACES OF THE HOLOCAUST AND THE ALGERIAN WAR IN THE CITY OF LIGHT by Claire Isla MacLeod Peters A thesis submitted to the University of Birmingham for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Department of French School of Languages, Cultures, Art History and Music College of Arts and Law Graduate School University of Birmingham July University of Birmingham Research Archive e-theses repository This unpublished thesis/dissertation is copyright of the author and/or third parties. The intellectual property rights of the author or third parties in respect of this work are as defined by The Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988 or as modified by any successor legislation. Any use made of information contained in this thesis/dissertation must be in accordance with that legislation and must be properly acknowledged. Further distribution or reproduction in any format is prohibited without the permission of the copyright holder. ABSTRACT This thesis examines contemporary literary and cinematic representations of Paris in relation to the dynamics of collective memory, arguing that the city emerges as a privileged site in which to explore critical questions of identity, memory and citizenship in France. In this comparative approach to representations of memories of the Holocaust and the Algerian War in France, I identify a shared lexicon of urban space simultaneously hiding and revealing traces of the past in the contemporary city. This study of memories and their urban and palimpsestic representations challenges the tendency to separate the disciplines of postcolonial and post-Holocaust studies, and in so doing contests the conceptual separation of metropolitan, European and colonial histories. As such, it contributes to a growing interdisciplinary field of French and Francophone studies that extends the object of study beyond the purely metropolitan. I draw on and engage with theoretical work in the fields of memory studies, postcolonial studies and post-Holocaust studies to consider how urban space opens up a legitimate new way of engaging with the overlaps and intersections between different memories without undermining the crucial element of difference. Underpinned by poststructuralist concerns, memory emerges here as an inherently constructed concept. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank everybody who has helped me in the preparation and completion of this thesis. I would especially like to thank my supervisors, Dr Berny Sèbe and Dr Kate Ince, for their insightful, encouraging, supportive and thorough supervision: I have learned so much from you both. The seed for this thesis was sown years ago (before I knew it) under the tutelage of Professor Max Silverman and the inspiring French department at the University of Leeds: many thanks for those early but crucial moments of inspiration in this field. I would also like to thank Professor Bill Schwarz for reading through an early draft of the introduction with brutal but invaluable advice. I am incredibly grateful to my partner, family and friends for always being there and lighting the way. ! CONTENTS Introduction 1 Connections: Temporal, Narrative, Disciplinary 5 The Question of Memory 16 Representations of Paris: City as Palimpsest 29 Chapter One Excavating Daeninckx’s Palimpsestic Urban Mysteries: Urban Space as Vital Clue 36 The Scene of the Crime? 42 City Streets: ‘Sites’ of Memory as Contested Space 55 Fragmented Space 61 Drancy: le fil conducteur 69 Chapter Two Memory Under Erasure: Learning to Look for Connections on the Roissy-Express 84 Visibility: Looking for Signs of the Past in the banlieue 89 Histoire-Géographie: Interconnections between Time, Space and Disciplines 97 Continuity: Between (Holocaust) Past and (Postcolonial) Present in Suburban Space 107 Chapter Three Archival City: The Search for Traces of Dora Bruder in Modiano’s Parises 125 Traces: The City as an Archive 130 Authenticity: Visibility, Twilight and Reconstruction in the City 142 ! Superimpositions: Paris as Collage 154 Institutional Spaces: City as State 160 Chapter Four République as an Empty Signifier: Performing Intergenerational, Intermedial and Intercultural Memories in Sebbar’s Paris 171 Documentary Paris: Film, Testimony and Ekphrasis 178 Retracing the Protest: City as Witness 202 Chapter Five Hiding and Revealing in Caché: City as Setting, Memory as Representation, Film as Theory 211 Paris and the banlieue as Setting: Specific Place, Universal Implications 217 “There is no Present”: Uncanny Street Space 228 Street Scenes: Maps, Dreams, Memory and Representation 240 Conclusion 250 Bibliography 260 ! ! INTRODUCTION There is a moment in the landmark film Nuit et brouillard (Resnais and Cayrol 1955) when a panning shot films some indentations on a concrete ceiling. We are in the gas chambers at Auschwitz ten years after the liberation of the camps, and Cayrol’s words, read without sentimentality by Michel Bouquet, tell us that ‘le seul signe, mais il faut le savoir, c’est le plafond labouré par les ongles; même le béton se déchirait’. These scratch marks are the only sign or material trace that this space was once a gas chamber. They poignantly capture, and indeed mark, a person’s final struggle. They are the only sign that distinguishes the space filmed in Resnais’s present from ‘un bloc ordinaire’. However, even if these traces are visible, ‘il faut le savoir’ – you would have to know that they were scratch marks: you would have to know, at least in part, the narrative which they themselves do not offer up freely. The scratch marks are visible traces of the past, then, which do not transparently or directly reflect the story of which they are a part. This powerful cinematic moment provides a starting point for my exploration of how traces of the past are written into, and yet simultaneously erased from, representations of Paris in contemporary French film and fiction. As Resnais and Cayrol suggest in the film, a search for traces of the Holocaust in the calm and idyllic countryside of Poland in 1955 will not necessarily yield ‘des cadavres qui s’écroulaient dès l’ouverture des portes’. Rather, a more complex interrogation of our engagement with traces, these material signs of the past, emerges in the image of the scratch marks. The scratch marks function metonymically and referentially, as a sign that stands in, inadequately yet necessarily in Derridean terms, for a history subject to erasure, and as such their relationship to the referent is far from clear or direct. As ! "! Emma Wilson has argued (2005), throughout the film Resnais problematises the relationship between the image and its referentiality:1 Resnais seeks to know or understand a relation between the unimaginable (the invisible, the unsayable) and the very matter that remains – the material remains, the relics and traces of past experience. His films work at the difficult junction between events that cannot be known, seen or felt (in their occurrence or in retrospect) and the matter, the images and objects, which seem conversely to offer material proof and evidence. (Wilson 2005: 93) Wilson’s analysis brings into play the paradox at the heart of the film; its self- consciousness about the ‘truth value’ of the images, which are themselves subject to the very processes of manipulation and editing that makes the film so powerful. Furthermore, the process of seeing, and the visibility of the traces, do not function in clear-cut ways. As Wilson suggests, rather than screening the reality for us, the film might more accurately be said to be screening it from us (Wilson 2005: 95).2 Here, attention is drawn to the fluidity and insecurity of the categories of seeing and not seeing, visibility and invisibility. This apparent contradiction, produced by Resnais’s film about the traces, is one that underpins my analysis of the five texts examined in this thesis. Each author or filmmaker engages in different ways with a remarkably similar set of considerations about the relationship between the past and the present as it emerges in the city of Paris, at the forefront of which lies a consistent concern with representation, referentiality and memory. My approach takes inspiration from this rich and complex trope of scratch marks, addressing Paris as a representational space in which the traces of not one but !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 1 In ‘Material Remains: Night and Fog’ (Wilson 2005) Wilson examines the film in the context of Resnais’s wider oeuvre to explore the debates about the film’s use of archival images and the self- referential nature of the film’s attempt to show the unimaginable. She argues that there is a constant disjuncture set up between the visuals and the words that suggest the ungraspable nature of the reality, paradoxically pointing to the impossibility of the project. 2 Such an observation would appear to be supported by Barbie Zelizer in her study of images of the liberation of camps and the formation of collective memory (2000). Referring precisely to the types of images used by Resnais, she comments that ‘the mounds of corpses, gaping pits of bodies, and figures angled like matchsticks across the camera’s field of vision have paralysed many to the point of critical inattention…they have provided only a thin veneer of knowledge about the camps and the atrocities that took place inside’ (Zelizer 2000: 1). ! #! two traumatic moments from France’s past are both visible and invisible, ‘mais il faut le savoir’. I examine how four contemporary authors and one film director

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