Artifice and Autobiographical Pact In Semprun’s L’écriture ou la vie

Abstract

Is Semprun’s L’Ecriture ou la vie his first purely autobiographical work? Or does the artifice that the first-person narrator repeatedly claims is necessary to relate his experience of a Nazi concentration camp signal that he has altered not only the form of the narrative but also the content? This article examines closely two episodes in which the narrator uses a well-known narrative technique in an original way that allows the narrator to convey the full density of the experiences, with all their uncertainty and oscillations. The striking “artifice” of these episodes is potentially in tension with the numerous textual signs pointing clearly to the work’s status as autobiography.