Writing and Ethics: Representations of the Holocaust and the Occupation in the 'New Autobiographical' Texts of Alain Robbe-Grillet and Marguerite Duras

Abstract

This study of the stories of the Occupation in Marguerite Duras' La Douleur and Alain Robbe-Grillet's Le Miroir qui revient seeks to throw light on the relation between the work of these two writers and the roles they themselves have played in history. Their textual 'coming out', at once a confession and a self-justification, coincides with the recovery in France of the buried memory of this period. The writing of the encounter between individual and collective memory in the desire for disclosure and closure does not, however, tell the whole story. Rather, these autobiographical texts reveal the limitations of an ethics of writing, of the deconstruction of any totalizing truth, and the recognition that we are at once of the race of those who were burned in the crematoria and of the race of Nazis.