A Transnational Witness to “Other” Stories of Suffering: Encountering Czech Memory in Selected Works by the French Novelist Sylvie Germain

Clare Frances Horackova

doi:10.1007/s40647-015-0117-4

Abstract

The French novelist Sylvie Germain spent 6 years in Czechoslovakia before, during, and after the Velvet Revolution of 1989 that ended four decades of oppressive totalitarian rule in that country. As a result of her stay, Germain produced four texts that are imbued with painful Czech stories and memories of both the Holocaust and the Communist era. This study examines the inscription of Germain’s encounter with the (Czech) other into her writing through tropes of exile and dispossession, of the suffering or wounded body, and of illness. Although Germain did not experience either the Holocaust or totalitarianism at first hand, and has moreover no claim to a Czech heritage, I posit that her work can nonetheless be interpreted as a transnational witness to the suffering of the (Czech) other. Using theories of the self and other, as well as theories of exile and of the narration of illness, I discuss how Germain’s work negotiates the fine line between an appropriation of the stories of the other and an ethical responsibility to respond to other stories of pain.

Highlights

The French novelist Sylvie Germain spent 6 years in Czechoslovakia before, during, and after the Velvet Revolution of 1989 that ended four decades of oppressive totalitarian rule in that country
This study uses a body of critical work relating to the relationship between the self and other and to the narration of painful experience in order to analyse these texts as a form of transnational witness to Central European stories and memories of the troubled events of the latter half of the twentieth century
As a French writer with no claim to a Czech heritage, Germain is writing from an external viewpoint about the traumatic stories of an ‘‘other’’ nation, a perspective which raises the important question as to whether Germain’s representation of Czech stories of pain constitutes an appropriation of someone else’s story

Summary

A Transnational Witness to ‘‘Other’’ Stories of Suffering

Encountering Czech Memory in Selected Works by the French Novelist Sylvie Germain. Received: October 2015 / Accepted: December 2015 / Published online: 13 January 2016 Ó The Author(s) 2016. This article is published with open access at Springerlink.com

Writing from an ‘‘Other’’ Perspective

Writing out Solidarity with the Suffering Czech Body

A Levinassian Encounter with the Other

A Journey from Sickness to Health