Copyright 2017 Priscilla Charrat
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Copyright 2017 Priscilla Charrat DOCUMENTS ET CHEMINEMENTS: TRACING THE POSTMEMORY OF THE SECOND WORLD WAR AND THE ALGERIAN WAR OF INDEPENDENCE BY PRISCILLA CHARRAT DISSERTATION Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in French in the Graduate College of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2017 Urbana, Illinois Doctoral Committee: Professor Jean-Philippe Mathy, Director of Research, Chair Professor Nancy Blake Associate Professor Marcus Keller Professor Michael Rothberg, University of California Los Angeles ABSTRACT This dissertation proposes ways out of traumatic silence in contemporary French and Francophone North African fiction. While silence has been the focus of trauma-centered texts in recent decades, I bring in the theoretical frameworks of affect theory, cultural translation, and new media as possible ways out of narrative rupture. These ways out of literary silence lead me to propose new mechanisms of empathy between victims, perpetrators, and their descendants in novels, films, and graphic novels depicting the aftermath of the Second World War, the Algerian War of Independence, or migration crises in France and Algeria. Specifically, this project will look at Leïla Sebbar’s novel La Seine était rouge, Zineb Sedira’s Mother Tongue, an art installation that uses video clips, Catherine Lépront’s novel Le Beau visage de l’ennemi, Patrick Modiano’s novel Dora Bruder, Boualem Sansal’s novel Le Village de l’Allemand ou le journal des frères Schiller, Pascal Jardin’s novel Le Nain jaune, Alexandre Jardin’s novel Des gens très bien, Yamina Benguigui’s documentary film Mémoires d’immigrés, Jérôme Ruillier’s graphic novel Les Mohamed, Albert Camus’s novels L’Etranger and La Chute, and Kamel Daoud’s novel Meursault, contre-enquête. This dissertation also focuses on the question of vectors of memory in France and Algeria, as well as intermediality in contemporary French and Algerian narratives. My guiding theoretical framework throughout the dissertation draws on Marianne Hirsch’s discussions of what she calls “postmemory.” However, while postmemory for Hirsch focuses on the transmission of the memories of an event from first to subsequent generations who have not lived the event directly, I use my first chapter to highlight – through the works of Leïla Sebbar – how specifically literary texts express silence, and the multiple implications such an expression ii can have beyond merely signaling trauma in the narrative. Can the various factors and causes of silence help us envision paths to self-understanding and self-authoring beyond the assessment of a crisis of transmission of memory? This chapter will therefore extend the existing discussion of postmemory—which focus on successful, albeit difficult, transmissions—by looking at non-linear heritage of memory despite or due to initial silence. Building on the idea that ruptures in postmemory—represented as literary silence— need not entail the loss of memory altogether, the second chapter suggests that rupture rather calls for postmemory’s recuperation through the use of memory prosthetics. To develop this point, I put Marianne Hirsch’s postmemory framework into dialogue with the “prosthetic memory” framework theorized by Alison Landsberg. Analyzing Catherine Lépront’s novel Le beau visage de l’ennemi on the postmemory of the Algerian War of Independence, this second chapter looks at how objects (photographs, diaries, letters, etc.) may assist the recuperation of postmemory, while also opening up the discussion about the limits of such prosthetic remediation. The third chapter complicates and rounds out the previous one by discussing literary instances where prosthetic remediation needs to be supplemented by an affective sense of belonging to the memorial community. While the second chapter investigated prosthetic memory- objects, the third chapter focuses on prosthetic memory-sites, which can act as affective links between those who participate in historical events and their would-be memorial inheritors born after the events. Patrick Modiano’s novel Dora Bruder offers an interaction with places that enable the narrator of his texts to invest affectively in a historical event. To explicate this, I introduce Michel de Certeau’s distinction between space and place which, I argue, clarifies the role embodied memory plays in the narrator’s walks in the city. iii The fourth chapter proposes a new concept—transcategorical postmemory—to supplement the existing framework of postmemory, by including the underdeveloped field of perpetrator postmemory. The proposed concept of transcategorical postmemory names the mechanism by which descendants of perpetrators can empathize with the victims of their forefathers. Through a reading of Boualem Sansal’s Le Village de l’Allemand ou le journal des frères Schiller, this chapter further distinguishes two modes of the concept: one pathological (melancholic transcategorical postmemory), one future-oriented (productive transcategorical postmemory). The fifth and last chapter analyzes three literary texts in order to illustrate how the concept of transcategorical postmemory coined in the previous chapter constitutes a generative theoretical tool for approaching rewrites of first-generation texts. Looking at three pairs of works involving postmemory (by Pascal and Alexandre Jardin; Yamina Benguigui and Jérôme Ruillier; and Albert Camus and Kamel Daoud), this chapter will not only show the concept of transcategorical postmemory at play, but also illustrate how attention to the dynamic between each pair of texts enables a richer reading of each work individually. The conclusion will summarize and situate this dissertation’s contributions within the field of postmemory studies, as well as show how these contributions can shed new light on familiar first-generation texts. The conclusion also highlights how the concept of transcategorical postmemory lays the foundation for further research on group identities that challenge the victim/perpetrator divide, and whose memory might have consequently fallen out of public discourses. iv DEDICATION À ma famille v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I wish to thank my director of research and advisor, Dr. Jean-Philippe Mathy for his generous guidance through the stages of this dissertation. The completion of this project would not have been possible without the trust, support, and feedback of Dr. Nancy Blake, Dr. Marcus Keller, and Dr. Michael Rothberg. Having you on my dissertation committee has truly been an honor and a pleasure. I would like to extend my thanks to the Department of French and Italian, the School of Literatures, Cultures, and Linguistics, the Jewish Studies Program, and the Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies Initiative at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign for their generous support. The School of Literatures, Cultures, and Linguistics fellowship, and the Gendell Family and Shiner Family fellowship made the completion of this research possible. To Dr. Karen Fresco, Dr. Marcus Keller, Dr. Laurence Mall, and Dr. François Proulx, a most heartfelt thank you for your advice and trust in letting me teach advanced courses in French at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Engaging with students in literature and culture courses has been one of the highlights of my time at the University. To Brett Ashley Kaplan, the work you do for memory studies at the University of Illinois is invaluable. The Future of Memory Studies reading group has been central to my years at the University of Illinois. I look forward to continuing the intellectual engagement, and stimulating friendship with everyone involved. vi I am truly indebted to the Mnemonics network for Memory Studies, and to Stockholm University for inviting me to be a fellow at their summer school. Many thanks to Dr. Stef Craps of Ghent University for his on-point suggestions, and for the intellectual support over the years. I look forward to many more years of exchanges. Northwestern University generously hosted me as a fellow to the Holocaust Educational foundation summer school, and the experience was truly eye-opening. I extend my thanks to Grant Harward, Dr. Lisa Marcus, Dr. David Meola, and Dr. Kira Thurman for the sustained intellectual exchanges, and to Dr. Doris Bergen for her transformative seminar. My experience at Dartmouth College’s Institute of French Cultural Studies was made particularly productive and invigorating thanks to the tremendous work and support provided by Dr. Lawrence Kritzman and Dr. Brian Reilly. I must thank Dr. Marc Crépon of the Ecole Normale Supérieure for his particularly helpful suggestions and recommendations for this dissertation. Many thanks to Dr. Whitney Bevill, Dr. Emmanuel Bruno Jean-Francois, Alexandrine Mailhé, and Darina Pugacheva. I extend my gratitude: To Dr. Anita Alkhas of University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee whose creativity and wisdom cannot be described by words. I remain, forever, your student. To Josephine El Karkafi for teaching me Arabic. To Stephen Bruce, Estibalitz Ezkerra Vegas, Dr. Lauren Hansen, Dr. Brian Hunt, Dr. Benjamin Ireland, Dr. Johnny Laforêt, Xuxa Rodriguez, Jessica Sciubba, Peter Tarjanyi, and vii Maria Zirra. I am moved by your brilliance and kindness. Being your friend is a privilege I cherish. To Dr. Timothy Langille, kindred spirit and friend extraordinaire. To Dr. Okla Elliott who was literature made man. To Yvan Berrebi, a guiding star forever shining. To my parents Philippe and Josselyne Charrat. Les mots