L’Ère des non-témoins: la littérature des ‘petits-enfants de la Shoah’. Par Aurélie Barjonet

Abstract

In 2010, writer-survivor Jorge Semprún expressed his joy at the fact that new novelists were writing about the Nazi genocide of Europe’s Jews, even if five years earlier he had implored the same novelists not to neglect the memory of political deportees such as himself. Semprún’s two statements capture the phenomenon that is the subject of Aurélie Barjonet’s study: a recent surge in literary works about the Holocaust by French writers belonging to the generation of the grandchildren of those targeted by wartime antisemitism. The book takes stock of texts written between 2006, when Jonathan Littell’s Les Bienveillantes was published, and 2012, when, as Barjonet notes, the phenomenon was well established in terms of both themes and narrative strategies. Barjonet’s corpus consists of narratives by the ‘descendants’, as she labels those with a familial link to the Holocaust (Ivan Jablonka, Alexandre Jardin), and by the ‘héritiers’, as she calls those without it (Littell, Yannick Haenel, Laurent Binet). The twenty-two texts she studies, which include those affected by — to use Marianne Hirsch’s terminology — ‘vertical’ and ‘horizontal’ postmemory, fall into additional three categories: ‘enquêtes archéologiques’ (historical narratives marked by self-reflexivity), ‘fictions de témoignage’ (historical novels stamped by anachronism), and ‘histoires croisées’, where an enquiry into the life (and death) of a Holocaust victim intersects with other stories (for example, Binet’s HHhH). By focusing on recent French Holocaust novels, Barjonet fills a lacuna in literary criticism. Despite its steady growth, illustrated by the studies by Catherine Coquio, Yannick Malgouzou, and Fransiska Louwagie, scholarship of French Holocaust literature continues to prioritize canonical narratives by first- and second-generation writers. Taxonomically minded and aiming to be comprehensive, Barjonet’s study nevertheless leaves out francophone authors whose writings approach the Shoah from a non-European perspective and invite its reframing within French colonial history (for example, Michèle Maillet, Nathacha Appanah, and Louis-Philippe Dalembert). Barjonet’s book is divided into an Introduction and four chapters. Chapter 1 (‘Distinctions’) tackles the terminology and categories operational in criticism of Holocaust literature, such as ‘1.5 generation’, ‘2.5 generation’, and ‘génération d’après’. Chapter 2 (‘Description’) addresses the thematic and formal characteristics of the corpus, and the representational and ethical difficulties attached to third-generation Holocaust literature. Chapter 3 (‘Opinions’) revisits the heated debates provoked by some of the novels examined here, emblematized by Les Bienveillantes and Haenel’s Jan Karski. Chapter 4 (‘Confusions’) confronts what Barjonet perceives as misconceptions regarding Holocaust literature, which have emerged in the anglophone world and are exemplified by the terms ‘second-generation survivor’ and ‘prosthetic witness’. Barjonet’s mistrust of these labels is a symptom of her wider ambition to demarcate French criticism of Holocaust literature as a field that is less dependent on anglophone theorizations. While the author demonstrates awareness of the writings of Hirsch, Dominick LaCapra, and Michael Rothberg, her study makes only scant references to them, instead relying on French scholarship and elaborating its own categorizations, such as the titular ‘petits-enfants de la Shoah’.