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Representation and the Auschwitz Experience in Charlotte Delbo's Auschwitz Et Apres

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Representation and the Auschwitz Experience in Charlotte Delbo's Auschwitz Et Apres University of Cape Town Department of French Language and Literature Tracing Memory: Representation and the Auschwitz Experience in Charlotte Delbo's Auschwitz et Apres A Dissertation submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts Heidi Grunebaum-Ralph April 1997 The copyright of this thesis vests in the author. No quotation from it or information derived from it is to be published without full acknowledgement of the source. The thesis is to be used for private study or non- commercial research purposes only. Published by the University of Cape Town (UCT) in terms of the non-exclusive license granted to UCT by the author. ABSTRACT Tracing Memory: Representation and the Auschwitz Experience in Charlotte Delbo's Auschwitz et Apres by Heidi Grunebaum-Ralph This study aims to examine the ways in which memory is represented in Auschwitz survivor, Charlotte Delbo's literary trilogy, Auschwitz et Apres, (Auschwitz and After) (1970a;1970b;1971). Its examination of memory is premised on the understanding of survivor narrative as testimonial narrative and testimony as the telling of the memory of historical events which strain or exceed conventional frameworks of representation. As such, the aim of this study is to demonstrate the way that representations of memory of a limit-experience problematise the certainty of its own testimonial transmission. By attempting to theorise the dynamics of narrating personal memory and then by analysing key extracts in each volume of the trilogy, this examination attempts to demonstrate how the event of the Holocaust, the difficulty of being a survivor and an unwilling reception of the survivor's story are collectively implicated in the way that memory contests its own representation. By examining the discontinuities of memory, this study intends to show how, in very different ways, the silences and ruptures of memory which are produced in these readings are a remembering of a different form. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This study would not have been realisable if it were not for the generous assistance received from a number of institutions. The financial assistance of the Centre for Science Development (HSRC, South Africa) towards this research is hereby acknowledged. Opinions expressed and conclusions arrived at, are those of the author and are not necessarily to be attributed to the Centre for Science Development. I would also like to acknowledge, gratefully, the financial assistance received from the Kaplan Centre for Jewish Studies and Research at the University of Cape Town as well from the University of Cape Town Research Committee. No work can be written without the energy, help and encouragement from others. I am eternally grateful to my supervisor Dr Rolf Wolfswinkel whose encouragement and wise counsel has consistently sustained this project since its inception. His support for my work helped me to renew this study at a time when everything seemed to have disappeared under a black cloud of despair. Without that unflagging support, this project would not have come to completion. From those long conversations emerged a shared enthusiasm and respect for Charlotte Delbo's work. I am indebted to my supervisor Professor Jean-Louis Cornille whose ideas and insights have, over the past years, offered me hopeful glimpses of an intellectual journey nourished by a deep love of the literary text which has inspired me, in turn, to try and embark on that path. A warm thanks to Professor Milton Shain for his kind words and constructive advice. For their time, energy and eager helpfulness, I am grateful to Madame Halperyn and the staff at the Centre de Documentation Juive Contemporaine in Paris; Yvonne Verblun at the Jacob Gitlin Library in Cape Town and Veronica Belling of the Jewish Studies Library at the University of Cape Town. I owe a great debt of gratitude to Vije Franchi for her generous hospitality in Paris. Her unflagging love, friendship, support and critical observations helped me through a particularly anguished period in the course of this study. To Claudia Braude, whose encouragement, valuable criticism, intellectual and emotional nurturing have provided me with an invaluable resource and whose intellectual honesty and courage continues to serve as an inspiration, I am indebted. Debbie Sheward, Jon Stratton, Steven Robins and Oren Stier have contributed, in the course of thought-provoking and stimulating conversations, to the final text. I am grateful to my family, Brian, Leonie, Mark and Sylvia for their encouragement, unflagging belief and unconditional love and to Derek and Lilly for their warmth, deep friendship and perennial hospitality. It is finally Michael, to whom I am indebted in ways I will never be able to express. His friendship, love, support, soothing words, critical comments and unfailing wisdom are present in every page of this work. In loving memory of Adelaide Mhkurnbuzi For.Michael / CONTENTS: Foreword 1 Chapter One: Charlotte Delbo and Holocaust Memory I. From Resistance to Survival 9 II. Auschwitz et Apres: Survival as Resistance Truth/Truthfulness/Authenticity: Approaches to Meaning 15 III. Auschwitz Memory: Bodies/borders/boundaries 20 Tortured Memory: The Survivor and the True Witness 27 Remembering the Body's Effacement 30 Dismembered Bodies, Displaced Memories 33 Collapsing Memories, Narrating Memories 35 Common memory, Historical Consciousness and 39 Narrating Rupture Chapter Two: Aucun de nous ne reviendra I. Shattered Memory: a Programme for Representation 45 The Double-Bind of Representation 47 Silence: Deep Memory on the Threshold of Testimony 49 II. Crisis of naming: Dying effaces Death 52 Dysfunctional Throats:Story of an Untold Story 56 Burning Thirst and the Need to Bear Witness 59 Representing Powerlessness: Paralysed Bodies, Silent Testimonies 64 Numeration: Transacting Power 68 Chapter Three: Une Connaissance Inutile I. The Book becomes Witness 77 Representations of the Double Bind: Citation 80 Apollinaire, Poetry, Common Memory: An Intertextual Dialogue 84 Politics of Language: Duplicity and Survival 90 II. Moliere read through Auschwitz 96 Tombstones and Texts: Memory as Resistance, as Survival 102 Chapter Four: Mesure de nos jours I. The Survivor's Last Word 107 Survivor Memory: The Train Back and the Burial 109 Burnt Books, Defunct Words: Return as Forgetting 111 II. Discontinuities of Survival A. Deep Memory and Dreams of Return to Auschwitz 118 B. Dreams of Return as the Unlistened to Story 120 c. Return Disrupted by Deep Memory's Temporalities 124 D. The Ghost/Writer Returns 127 III. Ending with Return 130 Afterwords 137 Bibliography 138 Ce livre n'est pas un document historique. Si la notion de hasard (comme la plupart des notions) ne paraissait pas absurde a ]'auteur, il dirait volontiers que toute reference a une epoque, un territoire OU une ethnie determines est fortuite. Les evenements relates pourraient surgir en tout lieu et en tout temps d~n-: l 'rune de n, importe quel homme, planete, mineral ... (Piotr Rawicz Le Sang de Ciel) Pas de mot, pas de terme, le langage cesse, je ne me suis pas retourne, derobe soudain a ma vue, soudain si pleinement absent, toi, si totalement dissipes, eux, evapores, Lui, Elle, annihile, moi, de la rarefaction de vide, de la quintessence de neant, m'avanqant vers le fond sans fond du non-etre, rien, plus rien, plus rien de rien, frappe brutalement, brusquement, a hurler, par ce silence (Serge Doubrovsky La Dispersion, p.333) Textes qui nous apprennent (sans que cela fasse l'objet d'un enseignement) a nous souvenir de ce qui desormais doit faire le fond de notre memoire, a tOUS 1 jeunes OU Vieux, juifs OU non­ juifs [sic] , si cette cassure insensee de 1 'espece humaine en deux peu t, apres Auschwitz, encore faire sens. Cassure voulue par les antisemites et les nazis pour qui le juif signifie la repulsion, l'Autre dans toute son horreur, [ ... ], expulse, exile, extermine. (Sarah Kofman, Paroles Suffoquees, p.14 J 1 FOREWORD La fragmentation, marque d'une coherence d'autant plus ferme qu'il lui faudrait se defaire pour s'atteindre, non par un systeme disperse, ni la dispersion comme systeme; mais la mise en pieces (le dechirement) de ce qui n'a jamais preexiste (reellement ou idealementl comme ensemble, ni davanta~e ne pourra se rassembler dans quelque presence d'avenir que ce soit. L'espacement d'une temporalisation qui ne se saisit - fallacieusement - que comme absence de temps. (Maurice Blancbot L'Ecriture du Desastre, p.99) In an essay entitled "The Holocaust as Literary inspiration", well-known writer Eli Wiesel, Auschwitz survivor, makes the observation that memory's intervention in contemporary public discourse is in the form of the testimonial utterance. Implicit in his formulation is the idea that if memory gestures to the past, its articulation is in service of a particular vision of the future. Thus, he comments that, [ ••• J the Greeks invented tragedy, the Romans the epistle, and the Renaissance the sonnet, our generation invented a new literature, that of testimony. We have all been witnesses and we all feel we have to bear testimony for the future. {Felman & Laub,1992:5-6) Clearly then, Wiesel implies that after the Holocaust the discursive gesture becomes the testimonial. At the centre of this proposition is a break with traditional generic categorisations, precisely as testimonial response to that event, the Holocaust, which has precipated the rupture. Taking up Wiesel's formulation of testimony as innovative literary form, literary critic Shoshana Felman outlines what is at stake in such a formulation: As a relation to events, testimony seems to be composed of bits and pieces of a memory that has been overwhelmed by occurrences that have 2 not settled into understanding or remembrance, acts that cannot be constructed as knowledge nor assimilated into full cognition, events in excess of our frames of reference. (1992:5) Thus, as a discursive form, testimony comes to narrate memory's "bits and pieces", that is, its truth emerges in its representation of the shards of memory of an experience-at-the-limits.
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