(Beyond) ‘Devoirs de mémoire’ in Nancy Huston's L'Empreinte de l'ange (1998): Music, Trauma and Childhood

Abstract

Nancy Huston's L'Empreinte de l'ange (1998) is part of a large corpus of recently published novels in French dealing with the Second World War, and the Algerian War. The relationship between music and transgenerational trauma is explored in the context of depictions of childhood, and the child in the text, and it is suggested that L'Empreinte de l'ange opens up readings that go beyond the French ‘devoir de mémoire’ framework. More specifically, it is argued that the oscillations between words and silence, trauma (physical and emotional) and healing, movement and stasis, highlight the challenges of writing about personal and collective moments of suffering. Analysis of depictions of cycles of violence and trauma opens up a nuanced picture of diverse post-war reactions and commentaries that goes beyond the specifics of the Second World War and Algeria, and that takes into account recent work by Todorov, Augé and Stora on memory and commemoration. Music is shown to help make sense of traumatic memories; music highlights processes of remembering and forgetting. Sometimes, music just simply accompanies us through the often fraught journeys out of and after trauma.