Semprun and Lukács: For a Marxist Reading of Le grand voyage

Abstract

Since its publication in 1963, Le grand voyage has primarily been read as a compelling personal account of the experience of deportation to the Buchenwald concentration camp, characterized by “strategies of narrative breakdown and traumatic memory” (Ferran, “‘Cuanto mas escribo’” 290). The author’s 20 years of involvement with the Spanish Communist Party (PCE), as both a leading activist and an intellectual figure, have not generally been considered relevant to his literary aesthetics. Indeed, some of the most notorious commentators of his work explicitly rejected any direct connection between Semprun’s political activity and his literary writing: Barbara Foley, in 1982, characterized Le grand voyage as an “irrealistic Holocaust novel,” in direct opposition to “the realistic social novel” (348), and Ofelia Ferran, in 2001, has made the case that “Le grand voyage is not a social realist novel at all” (“‘Cuanto mas escribo’” 290).