Journal Article

Authoritative Witnessing and the Control of Memory

Marquart, Sharon

2011

Overview

Jorge Semprun The opening scene of Jorge Semprun's 1994 witnessing narrative L 'écriture ou la vie describes in detail the first instance in which the text's main character, \"Jorge,\" is faced with telling people who did not experience Buchenwald about the horrors of camp life.1 It is the day after the camp's liberation by Allied Forces, and the twenty-one yearold Spaniard and member of the French Resistance encounters three terrified officers in British uniforms while he is standing guard outside one of the camp's former SS barracks. The text won both the 1963 Prix Formentor and the Grand Prize of the French Resistance, and was immediately banned in Francoist Spain.2 The publication of Le grand voyage marked a turning point in Semprun's life from Spanish political militant to one of France's most important Deportation writers.3 Ly écriture ou la vie tells the story of Semprun's comingto-writing, and describes how becoming a writer further signaled a change in the way he coped with his traumatic past. In U écriture ou la vìe, fiction may be, as Carroll argues, a way of overcoming the shortcomings of conventional historical representation, but it does so by restricting people's imaginations rather than stimulating them, and limiting memory rather than expanding it.

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Subject: Fiction / French language / Memory / Narratives / Politics / Rousso, Henry / Spanish / Witnesses / World War II