Le Grand Voyage Research Articles

Bilingual Author-Translator Nedim Gürsel’s Translation of Jorge Semprun’s Büyük Yolculuk as An Example of the Interaction Between Author and Translator Identities

“Bilingualism” can be defined as a person’s ability to speak and be proficient in two languages. Being bilingual also entails having a dual identity. Bilingualism is a prerequisite for “translation”, which is defined as the act of transferring a text from one language to another. When we examine bilingualism in terms of bilingual writers who stand out with their writing activities, it is possible to say that there is an interaction between authorship and translation activity. Nedim Gürsel, who has been living in Paris since 1971 and taught Turkish literature courses at Sorbonne University and Inalco until 2019 and worked as the head of research on Turkish literature at CNRS, writes works in various literary genres such as novels, biographies, travel articles, poetry, translation, and academic articles. Gürsel, who publishes his fictional works in Turkish, defines himself as a writer who writes in Turkish rather than a Francophone, thus revealing his linguistic identity. Gürsel, whose works have been translated into many languages, states that in the French translations of his works, he communicates with his translator and makes necessary warnings and suggestions in order to avoid confusion in the meaning. In this study, the interaction between literary work and literary translation will be revealed with reference to French-Turkish bilingual writer-translator Nedim Gürsel’s 1977 translation of Spanish-French bilingual writer Jorge Semprun’s Le Grand voyage under the title Büyük Yolculuk. This study aims to reveal the interactions between the phenomenon of bilingualism and translation activity with reference to bilingual writer-translator Nedim Gürsel and to discuss this connection in a theoretical dimension. In addition, the stylistic interactions between the works written and translated by Nedim Gürsel, who is a writer-translator, will be examined and the effects of bilingualism on authorship will be revealed.

Holocaust denial, Le Vicaire, and the absent presence of Nadine Fresco and Paul Rassinier in Jorge Semprún's La Montagne blanche

The importance to Jorge Semprún of confronting Holocaust denial in Vichy Syndrome France is not central to analyses that have been done of La Montagne blanche. To detect it, we must do what Semprún never stops asking readers to do: visit the external worlds to which his text directs us and reread his corpus so as to return with new insights and questions to pose to the text at hand. This essay examines La Montagne blanche in light of Semprún's presentation of Jewish characters in Le grand voyage; his adaptation of Rolf Hochhuth's Le Vicaire; his critique of the Communist party's belated acknowledgment of the gulag; his relationships to the Holocaust denier and severe critic of the Communists at Buchenwald, Paul Rassinier, and to Nadine Fresco, the most penetrating analyst of Rassinier; and his attention to Holocaust denial when he wrote fiction rooted in historical situations. Holocaust denial is an erasure. La Montagne blanche draws our attention to that erasure in a novel in which the subject is hardly mentioned.

Figurations of Suffering in Concentration Camp Testimony

Abstract This article offers a close reading of the figurative language used to represent suffering in literary testimonies of the Nazi concentration camps. It begins with an overview of the debate over the legitimacy of figurative language in representations of the Holocaust and considers the arguments against metaphor by scholars in the field of pain research and Holocaust studies. Bringing into dialogue the disciplines of pain studies and Holocaust studies, the article advances the claim that figurative language is an effective means of expressing suffering and that an analysis of this language is valuable for understanding the experiences of the victims of Nazism. The article subsequently presents a comparative analysis of Se questo è un uomo (1947) by Primo Levi, Le grand voyage (1963) by Jorge Semprún, and K.L. Reich (1963) by Joaquim Amat-Piniella. It identifies two patterns in the representation of suffering by these author-survivors: first, the use of zoomorphic metaphors to describe bodily pain and, second, the depiction of anthropomorphized landscapes to portray psychological anguish.

Disenfranchised narratives. Slavoj Žižek reads Jorge Semprún

ABSTRACT Taking a critical approach to Slavoj Žižek’s reading of Jorge Semprún’s novel Le Grand Voyage, the paper treats Žižek’s observations as being exemplary of a historically inexact usage of the term Holocaust (Literature) that strives to underpin the claims made by a normative poetics of Modernism by implying the existence of a more or less unquestionable interrelationship between Modernism and the Holocaust (experience) that hinges upon the idea of ‘trauma.’ Reconstructing the political experience behind – and the political ethics prevalent in – Semprún’s novel, the paper sets out to question this particular line of reasoning.

La polifonía del universo concentracionario en “El largo viaje” de Jorge Semprún

En este trabajo de investigación abordamos los mecanismos narrativos de la novela El largo viaje (1963), escrita por Jorge Semprún a modo de cierre vital de su experiencia en el campo de concentración nazi de Buchenwald. De esta manera, identificamos dos elementos fundamentales en la estructuración de la novela y que tienen una dimensión funcional insoslayable: las trampas de la memoria y la clandestinidad en el exilio. Cada uno de ellos, además, orientados hacia desvirtuar continuamente cualquier sentido único o cualquier certeza irrevocable. Por así decirlo, todas las categorías de las escrituras del yo se cumplen en esta magnífica novela, pero Semprún consigue dar un paso más allá. Su potencia literaria radica en la construcción de una narración memorialística, autobiográfica y en diferentes grados ficcional, pero convirtiendo dicha experiencia literaria en una realidad compartida y polifónica en el marco de la experiencia concentracionaria. En definitiva: el uso de la fragmentariedad desde el polo de la emisión del discurso, así como el empleo de la técnica del collage narrativo, no son estrictamente semprunianos, como es natural. Pero sí destacan en esta obra por tener una configuración todavía moderna y marcada por las vicisitudes históricas de toda una generación europea. In this research we tackle the narrative mechanisms of the novel Le Grand Voyage (1963), written by Jorge Semprún as a vital closure of his experience in the Nazi’s concentration camp of Buchenwald. In this way, we identify two fundamental elements in the novel’s structure and which have an unavoidable functional dimension: the traps of memory and the secrecy in exile. Each of them, moreover, oriented towards continually distorting any single meaning or any irrevocable certainty. In other words, all the categories of the scriptures of the self correspond in this magnificent novel, but Semprún manages to go a step further. Its literary power lies in the construction of a memorial, autobiographical and different fictional storytelling, but turning said literary experience into a shared and polyphonic reality within the framework of the concentration experience. In short: the use of fragmentarity from the pole of speech issuance, as well as the use of the narrative collage technique, are not strictly Semprunian, as is natural. But they do stand out in this work for having a still modern configuration, marked by the historical vicissitudes of an entire European generation.

Long Live Cinema! Long Live FESPACO. <em>A luta continua</em>

Long Live Cinema!Long Live FESPACO. A luta continua Claire Diao (bio) February 2005. In the open air auditorium of the Georges Méliès Cultural Center in Ouagadougou (renamed the French Institute of Ouagadougou), is being screened Ismaël Ferroukhi's Le grand voyage (2004, Morocco), opening on a star-studded night with a voice over by ARTE. "This film was born under a lucky star." In the stands, hundreds of spectators are religiously following this competing fiction feature film that traces the story of a boy, born in France, and his father, born abroad, going together to Mecca despite strong cultural misunderstandings. What about the first time I attended FESPACO! I was certain I would meet the film family (composed of directors, actors, technicians, faculty, and programmers from all over the world)! The screening of Diaspora films was sometimes done in French and anglophones had trouble finding their way around. Discussions on movies were held at Hôtel Indépendance, by the pool, although Ousmane Sembène can no longer attend, as he passed away the year before. Some dared to approach filmmakers they did not know, others stayed in their corners. And always, at the entrance of cinema rooms, those interminable queues, those crowded stairs, and those screenings where the magic of cinema transpires. A feeling of union and collectivity… For me who was born in Africa and raised abroad, there was a feeling of homecoming, added to my passion for cinema which, unintentionally created a perfect link between my father's country—my dear and beautiful Faso, cradle of FESPACO, INAFEC, CIPROFILMS, and CIDC—and that of my mother—cradle of the Lumières brothers, the cinematograph, the Cannes Film Festival, and the CNC. What to say about this feeling that I had then, watching dozens of films, rubbing shoulders with hundreds of moviegoers, meeting late Samba Félix N'Diaye, then president of the FESPACO Documentary jury backed by Écrans Association, of which I had the honor of being a member? This is where I met Teboho Edkins who was vilified in the Petit Méliès room for shooting a documentary about men spreading the AIDS virus in South [End Page 260] Africa. There, I met many journalists who later became my colleagues. There, I confirmed my love for cinemas from Africa which later guided my university and professional choices. During my internship at the Centre Culturel Georges Méliès, I had the pleasure of organizing two screenings for four hundred students from Ouagadougou around the Second World War. These high school students came in large numbers and above all, actively participated in the ensuing debate with their History teachers. It was a personal revelation—that of transmitting cinema–but also a cultural revelation. There was (and still is) in Burkina, an unprecedented thirst for learning, far from the overconsumption and overcrowded cultural offer available to French high school students, overwhelmed by TV screens, cultural outings, discounted rates and video recorders in class to illustrate courses delivered by their teachers. In my discussions with Ouaga high school teachers, two remarks held my attention: the first one was related to language. Savvy moviegoers like to see movies in VO. One teacher hailed me "Why screen a film in English when even French is not the mother tongue of our students?" Then the remark from this other lady: "This movie screening idea is very good. But why bring high school students to you while cinema could come to the students? You could reach a lot more people." Here are two remarks I have never forgotten and which helped forge my career. While studying cinema in France and then in England, I discovered many filmmakers and scholars, many of whom wrote great papers for the magazine Écrans d'Afrique edited by the Italian association COE. I realized that the cinema of a whole continent was often shrinking due to lack of knowledge, of interest and especially of means. We talk about "African cinema" as if there were only ten productions per year on the continent, whereas in reality, each country has built its cinematography since (or well before) the independences! The fight is on all fronts...

Le Grand Voyage: A Great Journey to Liberate Islamic Accounting Education from Utilitarianism and Secularism

The aim of this study is to release students of Islamic accounting course from secularism and capitalism. This research uses dialogic approach to raise the awareness of criticalmuslim students. The philosophical values of the French movie entitled “Le Grand Voyage” were taken as method of analysis. The reality of Islamic accounting students who are secularist and capitalist was then metaphorized into this film. The results of this study showed that the students could find not only material values, but also emotional values and spiritual values in accounting. There are several values that can be seen from the students’ story telling: material value , altruism value, love value, and spiritual value. It is hoped that this article could give an overview to Islamic accounting educators to provide accounting course accompanied by Islamic substance of tawheed.

Islam in the Digital Films Expose the Good Sides of Muslims

Film studies mostly show Islam in negative representation. From streaming film website, we can easily find many films that show Muslims stories. For example, Children of Heaven, Le Grand Voyage, My Name is Khan, etc. Those films do not seem to show Muslims as terrorist. They show Muslims life in various cultures and stories. The problem is what good sides of Muslims in the films can counter the negative stereotypes of Muslims in Hollywood images. Using Critical Discourse Analysis, this research exposes the good sides of Muslims in films. There is an Islamic world view in Children of Heaven. Some things may seem bad but then turn out to be good in the long run. My Name is Khan has a very important message about Islam. That is Islam is a peace and love religion. Le Grand Voyage shows a signification generation gap of Muslims. They are secular and devout Muslims. But they can communicate moderately.

Revisiting Molloy, Malone meurt/Malone Dies and L’innommable/The Unnamable ed. by David Tucker, et al

European ethics. The book addresses the quasi totality of Semprún’s oeuvre. The chapters,“Exile and Identity,”“Politics and the Encounter with History,”“Representing Buchenwald,” “Writing the Other,” and “Europe,” explore elements of Semprún’s “testimonial idiolect”(92): multilingualism (his use of German at Buchenwald to help him survive and his choice of French as second maternal language); literary citations/ allusions as means of deepening ethical commitment (Baudelaire, Claude-Edmonde Magny, Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald); painterly references (Patinir,Vermeer,Velásquez, Picasso) to depict “liminal” (84) self-positioning between freedom and hell; and philosophical critique of “radical evil” (75), via Kant, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Levi, and Levinas. Semprún’s witnessing of the dying of others at Buchenwald, such as sociologist Maurice Halbwachs, is given special attention. Tidd shows how“proximity” (121) with death and horror, but also a desire to restore“intimacy”(131) to the other’s dying, often led Semprún to associate fiction and fact. A character in his novel Le grand voyage (1963), “le gars de Semur” who dies in Gérard’s arms as they arrive at Buchenwald, is an early fictional“homage”(131) to real-life model François L., moribund prisoner whose identity Semprún must adopt to evade his own death in Le mort qu’il faut (2001). The gendering of “self-other” relations (34) is carefully examined, with reference to Beauvoir’s Le deuxième sexe. Semprún“rarely recognizes the situation of women in Europe or the role played by women philosophers, politicians and writers” (161). Women in his trauma writing play the role of Baudelairian “passante” (136), “supporting and stabilizing the identitarian quest of the male subject in his experience of exile and/or his return from Buchenwald” (42). Tidd gives special developmental emphasis to one passante, however, whom Gérard of Le grand voyage encounters before and after her deportation. Her gaze conjures the “utter loneliness and abandonment” (136) of the Jews, spurring Semprún toward an “infinitely open and polyphonic discourse which pays homage to the annihilated Other” (141). Tidd describes Semprún’s work as “a space of historical coincidence and clandestine encounter” with others, as he struggles for “self-transcendence” (166). His writing leads him to espouse a Europe intent on avoiding a repetition of the mortal legacy of Nazi and Soviet totalitarianisms. The book is a convincing articulation of Semprún’s development as European writer of trauma and alterity. University of Kansas Van Kelly Tucker, David, Mark Nixon, and Dirk van Hulle, eds. Revisiting Molloy, Malone meurt/Malone Dies and L’innommable/The Unnamable. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2014. ISBN 978-90-420-3880-6. Pp. 316. 72 a. Given the status of Beckett’s mid-century trilogy of novels, Molloy, Malone meurt, and L’innommable, as landmarks of twentieth-century fiction, and as a central achievement within Beckett’s own storied oeuvre, it is certainly a great lack in recent Beckett 272 FRENCH REVIEW 90.3 Reviews 273 scholarship that there are so few collections of critical essays available on these monumental works, of the kind published by Harold Bloom’s famed series in the 1980s. This lack is acknowledged by Tucker in his introduction to the newest edition of Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui, as he reflects on the fact that the current methodologies dominant in Beckett studies today—such as the archival interest in Beckett’s notes and letters, historical and political approaches, and an interest in overlapping media—have often neglected these novels from Beckett’s middle period. They were read with great closeness, perhaps even seemingly exhausted, by critics in the past few decades, when largely philosophical interests reigned, but critics today have mainly moved on to other of Beckett’s works, whether the early novels, or later productions for stage, radio, and television.And so, Tucker asks,“can any of the current ways of mapping other works in Beckett’s oeuvre also make new paths through these novels? What, in summary, might contemporary criticism have to say about the trilogy?”(19). The answers are to these questions, as evidenced by the essays collected here, are overwhelmingly positive and suggest that there is still much new light to be...

Jorge Semprún: Writing the European Other by Ursula Tidd

Reviews 271 conceptions of their history (ch. 1), their geography (ch. 2) or their culture (ch. 3). He thus argues that within these works“est ainsi remis en question tout discours dont la fonction principale est d’inscrire le moi dans un même social et culturel en lui fournissant des repères fixes, dans le temps et l’espace”(261). In his final (and longest) chapter, Thibeault examines how individual protagonists reconstruct (or fail to reconstruct ) ties with the various collectivities that those analyzed in his first three chapters rejected (historical, geographical, and cultural), while managing to avoid falling into traditional reductive self-definitions based on those collectivities. Thibeault demonstrates how the individual comes to define himself or herself in relation to others by a multiplicity of connections within the social space:“À l’individu prisonnier d’un même identitaire d’autrefois succède désormais ‘l’individu social’, c’est-à-dire l’individu qui,par ses multiples connexions,constitue à lui seul un espace de sociabilité” (357).Although he deconstructs the traditional cadres in which identity is constructed, Thibeault does not argue that these cadres are no longer important. Throughout his analyses, he points to ways in which individuals define themselves within and against these cadres through their interactions with others, but always (when they are successful) by living those interactions in the here and now. He thus argues convincingly that “l’identité collective devient elle-même plus dynamique et, avec le mouvement identitaire de ses membres, est à même de se (re)contextualiser selon les réalités mondiales auxquelles, par les voies de communication planétaires, elle ne peut échapper” (373). His overarching argument refutes alarmist discourse related to the loss or dilution of communal identities in a globalized world. Instead, Thibeault proclaims that identities constructed in the here and now of human social relationships allow for an enriched sense of personal identity that carries historical, geographical, and cultural influences while emphasizing, above all, individuals’ shared humanity. Elon University (NC) Olivia Jones Choplin Tidd, Ursula. Jorge Semprún: Writing the European Other. Oxford: Legenda, 2014. ISBN 978-1-907747-00-7. Pp. 198. £55. Tidd explores how Semprún—in exile after the Spanish Republic’s fall, resister in France, Buchenwald deportee—crafted an innovative“Holocaust poetics”(166) where he “engages creatively with autobiographical form by mobilizing strategies of intertextuality , bilingualism, multiple aliases and complex narrative structures” (8). His upbringing predisposed him to a “supranational” Europe “respectful of diversity” (161). Solidarity with others at Buchenwald reinforced his transcultural commitment. Expelled from the Spanish Communist Party in 1964, his politics evolved toward “a vision of democratic socialism [...] in the post-Holocaust and post-Stalinist era” (149). Tidd elaborates the influence which Husserl and Levinas exercised on Semprún’s European ethics. The book addresses the quasi totality of Semprún’s oeuvre. The chapters,“Exile and Identity,”“Politics and the Encounter with History,”“Representing Buchenwald,” “Writing the Other,” and “Europe,” explore elements of Semprún’s “testimonial idiolect”(92): multilingualism (his use of German at Buchenwald to help him survive and his choice of French as second maternal language); literary citations/ allusions as means of deepening ethical commitment (Baudelaire, Claude-Edmonde Magny, Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald); painterly references (Patinir,Vermeer,Velásquez, Picasso) to depict “liminal” (84) self-positioning between freedom and hell; and philosophical critique of “radical evil” (75), via Kant, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Levi, and Levinas. Semprún’s witnessing of the dying of others at Buchenwald, such as sociologist Maurice Halbwachs, is given special attention. Tidd shows how“proximity” (121) with death and horror, but also a desire to restore“intimacy”(131) to the other’s dying, often led Semprún to associate fiction and fact. A character in his novel Le grand voyage (1963), “le gars de Semur” who dies in Gérard’s arms as they arrive at Buchenwald, is an early fictional“homage”(131) to real-life model François L., moribund prisoner whose identity Semprún must adopt to evade his own death in Le mort qu’il faut (2001). The gendering of “self-other” relations (34) is carefully examined, with reference to Beauvoir’s Le deuxième sexe. Semprún...

From Marseille to Mecca: Reconciling the Secular and the Religious in Le grand voyage (The Big Trip) (2004)

From Marseille to Mecca: Reconciling the Secular and the Religious in Le grand voyage (The Big Trip) (2004)

The sacrificial sheep in three French-North African films: Displacements and reappropriations

Abstract In this article I will examine three films featuring Maghrebi migrant families between the 1960s and the present day, Le Gone du Chaâba (1997) by Christophe Ruggia, Inch’Allah Dimanche (2001) by Yamina Benguigui and Le Grand Voyage (2004) by Ismaël Ferroukhi. Each film portrays tensions between generations, between sexes, between societies and between beliefs and values. The tradition of the sacrifice of a sheep in Islam features in all three films and I use this theme to highlight how different members of the families sacrifice themselves or are sacrificed in the process of accommodating to a new way of life. I also deconstruct other subtextual references to Islamic culture and belief as representations of dilemmas and forms of reconciliation and belonging.

Negotiating Space in Literary Representations of Holocaust Trauma: Jorge Semprún’s Le grand voyage and Antonio Muñoz Molina’s Sefarad

This article examines the representation of travel in two Holocaust narratives: Jorge Semprun’s Le grand voyage (1963) and Antonio Munoz Molina’s Sefarad (2001). It argues that train journeys in these two texts function as a metaphor for the therapeutic process by which witnesses of a catastrophic event undertake a psychic journey back to the root of their trauma through the construction of a narrative. The centrality of trains and movement in these texts points to the necessity of negotiating space in order to work through trauma. While focusing specifically on the texts by Semprun and Munoz Molina, this article seeks, more generally, to put the mobility turn of cultural studies in dialogue with trauma studies by establishing a link between trauma and space in representations of the Holocaust.

Space and Being in Contemporary French Cinema by James S. Williams

readers with a general interest in French culture and film studies, either in a program of studies or who harbor an individual interest. Each film“can be used to introduce a facet of French culture, such as education, history, representation of French society in film, representation of stereotypes, national and personal identity and immigration” (20). The chapters cover films by the following directors in this order: François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol, Agnès Varda, Louis Malle, Claude Miller, Nicolas Philibert, Francis Veber, Christophe Gans, and Ismaël Ferroukhi. The déroulement is more or less historical moving from 1959 (Les 400 coups) to 2004 (Le grand voyage). Vanderschelden titles the chapters, however, to capture a broader context, for example, “François Truffaut:AnAuteur’s Representation of Childhood.”After identifying Truffaut as “a ring-leader of the New Wave,” auteur, and prolific critic, she notes how his personal history led to cinema consuming his life (23). Truffaut’s role in film history is followed by synopses of two films, Les 400 coups and L’argent de poche, and then their production contexts. The childhood theme gets thorough discussion, as do filmic concerns (style,use of space,camerawork,sound and music,narrative and time,editing). The conclusion charts Truffaut’s evolution as it moves from an auteurist perspective to a more independent and accessible cinema. The remaining nine chapters follow similar trajectories,each crafted for the specific director and social issue.Studying French Film takes us on an easy-to-follow trip from the New Wave to today’s transnational and postmodern visions. It is indexed and offers chapter notes and extensive bibliographies. The general bibliography appears orphaned: better to have an all-inclusive bibliography, separated into general works as well as the chapter-specific ones. The glossary of film terms seems superfluous: they should simply have been footnoted. The entire volume would have benefited from better copyediting. I found the font choices off-putting. What distinguishes this work from many others, however and more importantly, is the breadth of genres (New Wave, documentary, historical drama, comedy, etc.), the types of production (artistic, mass market, multicultural), and the mix of French close textual analysis and cultural and gender studies favored by Anglo-Saxon approaches . With only ten chapters showcasing ten cinéastes and fifteen films, the depth of the analyses makes it useful, and Vanderschelden’s analyses and discussions are provocative. Virginia Commonwealth University Kathryn Murphy-Judy Williams, James S. Space and Being in Contemporary French Cinema. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2013. ISBN 978-0-7190-8432-4. Pp. 257. $95. In dialogue with contemporary studies on place, space, region, cityscape, and postcolonial landscapes, this book makes both theory and application accessible to all. Williams seamlessly weaves description, theory, and analysis in a way that is exciting 210 FRENCH REVIEW 88.1 Reviews 211 to those specialized and those unfamiliar with the films of focus. His clearly-defined distinction between“place”and“space”incorporates outlines of influential theories by Foucault, Lefebvre, Certeau, Deleuze, and Augé, which aid the reader in capturing both the evolution and complexities of the field. The first forty pages, concentrating on notions of cinematic space “from the practice and theory of screenspace to the place of space in modern French thought”(xv), allow for the six following chapters to concentrate on rigorous analysis of films by Dumont, Guédiguian, Cantet, Kechiche, and Denis. This range of contemporary filmmakers from different perspectives and traditions is the volume’s strength. It complements publications such as Archer’s The French Road Movie: Space, Mobility, Identity (2012) and Block’s World Film Locations: Paris (2012), which includes Guha’s “Remaking the Cinematic City: Claire Denis’s Paris.” Understanding film as a site of relations, Williams delves into encounters of spectator and film, character and sites of identity construction, time and space. Stepping away from the “legendary” Paris, the volume explores the North, Marseille, sites of the Republic, school settings, work space/classroom, the non-space of work, and post-colonial landscapes. Chapters draw from the uniqueness of each filmmaker’s approach,including the dynamic of Dumont and the audience,Cantet’s“always already codified,apportioned,distributed, even segregated [space]”(147...

LA SONNETTE DU JARDIN DE COMBRAY DANS SEMPRUN, LE GRAND VOYAGE

In Semprun’s novel Le grand voyage Proust is present in several ways. Like the Recherche, it is a novel about the working of memory, where present, past and future are constantly intermingled, resulting in a complex temporal structure. Moreover, there is an intertextual playing around with elements and episodes from Du côté de chez Swann, and with involuntary memory. The article is investigating these analogies, showing how they are twisted into a new meaning.

French Republican secularism and Islam in North African diasporic cultural production

Abstract Centuries of anti-Arab stigma continue to haunt Franco-Maghrebians, the descendants of ex-colonial French North African migrants born and brought up in France. Franco-Maghrebians’ anti-colonial civic resistances (riots) against decades of segregation are dismissed as evidence of their alleged Islamicization and communitarianism. Focussing on Azouz Begag’s novel Béni ou le paradis privé (1989), this article explores how Franco-Maghrebians’ investment in and reproduction of the Republican secular world-view in fact leads to the denigration, suppression and corporeal annihilation of their Arabo-Muslim heritages. Drawing upon the theories of Jacques Derrida (1996) and Mikhail Bakhtin (1981), western philosophical obsession with origins, centres and margins returns diasporic citizens to colonial dualistic binaries, trapping them in the mirrors of negation and affirmation. Such a predicament is contrasted with the presentation of alternative philosophical perspectives of the other in Ismaël Ferroukhi’s film Le grand voyage (2004). Making references to Seyyed Hossein Nasr (2002), Ali Shariati (1979) and Karen Armstrong (2012), this research examines how Islamic ethical imperatives captured in motion across lands, cultures and time envision coexistence, contesting much of the existing discourse surrounding French Muslims and Islam.

Jorge Semprun's Broken Mirror: The Broader Text of Resistance, the Shoah, and Camps in L'�criture ou la vie and Le Retour de Carola Neher

Jorge Semprun's Broken Mirror:The Broader Text of Resistance, the Shoah, and Camps in L'Écriture ou la vie and Le Retour de Carola Neher Van Kelly In January 1944, the resister Jorge Semprun was deported from France to Buchenwald. He survived to see the camp liberated on 11 April 1945, but did not publish his experience until his first novel, or more precisely his first "autofiction," Le Grand Voyage of 1963, which tells of the deportation of "Gérard," member of a Special Operations Executive (Buckmaster) maquis in Burgundy, though the narration includes segments devoted to the Holocaust per se, notably the S.S.'s brutal execution of a group of Jewish children on their arrival at Buchenwald.1 The resister's perspective remains primary in L'Évanouissement (1967), with some reference as well to experiences as a clandestine Communist agent in postwar Spain (1978). Subsequently, Semprun published several works on his captivity: Quel beau dimanche (1980), L'Écriture ou la vie (1994), Le Retour de Carola Neher (1998), and Le Mort qu'il faut (2002). These works broaden to embrace many topics including racial deportations, Auschwitz, his family's involvement in the Spanish Republic, his experience of Buchenwald as "Red Spaniard" protégé of the camp's German Communist shadow hierarchy, after the liberation his role in the Spanish Communist Party, disillusionment with Marxism, expulsion from the Party in 1964,2 and critiques of Stalinism and the Gulag, which were vectors for his own sense of complicity.3 Semprun's work echoes Henry Rousso's chronology of the Vichy Syndrome, but only in part. In L'Écriture ou la vie, Semprun recounts the "unfinished mourning" that kept him from writing about Buchenwald more than a decade after his liberation. Moreover, the return of the memory of racial deportations, "la mémoire juive" or beginning of "Obsession" in the Vichy Syndrome, indelibly marks L'Écriture ou la vie, overcoming the limited view afforded of the Nazi machine by Buchenwald, deadly but without gas chambers and dominated by political prisoners.4 By contrast, Semprun's denunciation of the Gulag, "[l]'horizon du communisme, incontournable,"5 is his version of Rousso's third stage, the "broken mirror," and this orientation transcends Vichy and the Syndrome, though as Rousso himself insists, "Seule une perspective qui transcende les frontières peut rendre sa véritable dimension au souvenir de la dernière guerre" (22). [End Page 20] Semprun's broad reach right and left relates directly to his narrative technique. From Le Grand Voyage onward, he develops an interlocking-ring narration, based on successive flashbacks and flashforwards, where multiple strands of his ethical remembering touch and intertwine. I will first discuss Part One, Chapters Two and Four of L'Écriture ou la vie, because of allusions to Kant, Goethe, Blum, Heidegger, Brecht, and the sociologist Maurice Halbwachs. These writerly memory loops with their tangents define Semprun's ethical crux, which he revisits in Le Retour de Carola Neher, performed in 1995 at Weimar. The play expands to include genocides in ex-Yugoslavia via coincidence with the term "Muslim" or "musulman," referring to exhausted prisoners on the verge of extinction in the Nazi camps. By revisiting his memory sites, Semprun works through to the camps' wider dimensions. His "repetition of the same," says Ursula Tidd, is a "bearing witness [that] carries the instant outside itself, projecting it into the future, addressing it to the Other" ("Infinity" 407). Rather than compulsive repetition, this is a truer register of his multi-voiced score or palimpsest: "plus j'écris, plus la mémoire me revient," says Semprun, "De là ma théorie que c'est une écriture inépuisable, à la fois impossible et inépuisable. On ne peut pas tout dire, mais on n'aura jamais tout dit. On peut dire à chaque fois davantage."6 Semprun's ethical foundation Part One, Chapter Two of L'Écriture ou la vie condenses Semprun's ethical loop. This crux manifests itself in the aftermath of Auschwitz, as recounted to Buchenwald detainees by a survivor of the Sonderkommando that emptied gas chambers of their corpses: Il m'a semblé alors, dans le silence qui a suivi le récit du...

"The Bitter Residue of Death": Jorge Semprun and the Aesthetics of Holocaust Memory

IN HIS FASCINATING HOLOCAUST NOVEL Le grand voyage (1963), Jorge Semprun juxtaposes the pleasure of reading the childhood memories offered in Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu with the painful and deferred memory of his arrival at the Buchenwald concentration camp. By turning to Proust's layered representations of childhood desires and fears, Semprun illustrates how both his memory of Proust's peaceful (if neurotic) novel and his postwar consciousness have been colored by his experience of the camps. Semprun's treatment of Proust -both through the voice of his narrator, Gerard, in the scene of incarceration itself, and through the literary and stylistic appropriations of Proust that pepper his text-prompts us to examine how aesthetic pleasure can offer an important survival mechanism. Indeed, by analyzing how Semprun's use of Proust helps him survive Buchenwald, the first section of this article demonstrates how aesthetic pleasure affords a mode of coping with traumatic memory. In the second section I focus on Semprun's rewriting of the past through his use of Ilse Koch, the infamous Nazi commandant suspected of perpetrating sexual crimes against the inmates of Buchenwald, and Sigrid, the young woman who acts as Koch's counterbalance in the narrative. By redrawing Koch in the much more palatable form of Sigrid, Semprun manipulates aesthetic pleasure notjust to survive but to transform a painful past into a more tolerable present. Taken together, these two sections demonstrate how Semprun seeks comfort in aesthetic pleasure in order 1) to survive the Holocaust; 2) to come to terms with his painful memories of it, and 3) to rewrite his experiences of the Holocaust as a literary reflection on the brutality of history. Semprun, a Spaniard from a Catholic family, was born in 1923 and emigrated to France in 1938 after Franco became dictator. Adopting the pseudonym Gerard Sorel, he joined the French Resistance in 1941 and in 1943 was arrested, tortured, and deported to Buchenwald. Semprun's bourgeois family, deeply rooted in Spanish politics and culture, prepared him well for the appreciation of the shimmering density of Proust's prose. His grandfather, Antonio Maura, whom Semprun describes as an authoritarian but reformist man' was the Prime Minis-

Shakespeare on the German stage: the twentieth century

Hortmann, Wilhelm. Shakespeare on the German Stage: The Twentieth Century (with a section on Shakespeare in the GDR by Maik Hamburger). Cambridge: Cambridge UP 1998. 497 pp. $69.95. This book is designed to take up where Simon William's volume, Shakespeare on the German Stage, 1586-1914 (1989), leaves off. The period up to the outbreak of World War I is, however, basically covered in both William's and Hortmann's volumes. Not surprisingly, given the enormous number of performances of Shakespeare in German-speaking countries in the 20th century (Hortmann estimates there to have been circa 9000 of these), Hortmann chooses to sample key developments rather than attempting to cover every production. The choices made by Hortmann (and Maik Hamburger who covers the GDR) are generally judicious, covering not only the stages of the largest cities and best endowed theaters, but often looking in detail at signal contributions of smaller venues, places as diverse as Bochum and Greifswald. Backing up the verbal analysis of specific productions are 125 well chosen and well reproduced black and white photographs. At times the description pulses with a real sense of German history and we are taken in time to how a particular production struck viewers in a particular time and place. Very compelling is Hortmann's meticulous historical reconstruction of Gustav Grundgens in the title role of Hamlet in Berlin in 1936, (159-61). Grundgens, himself is shown as intensely vulnerable in the Third Reich not only because of his homosexuality, but because of the efforts he was making to protect Jewish members of his theater staff: Similarly skilled is Maik Hamburger's description of the interaction of play and of historical circumstances with the mounting of Hamlet in Greifswald in 1964. Hamburger (388-90) traces how Adolf Dresen remembers doing the play in an atmosphere where SED party restrictions seemed to rule out anything but a stiff presentation of a recognized classic. This Dresen was unwilling to do even if his new position of artistic director in Greifswald was on the line. Dresen used as a kind of mantra for the production both Heinrich Mann's brilliant description of the Third Reich: Die Macht war geistlos and der Geist war machtlos, and Holderlin's description of a world that he saw as tatenarm and gedankenreich. Dresen's meditations on the play itself and on German history up to his own time became compressed for him into the slogan is near Weimar. The thought is stunningly similar to Jorge Semprun's meditations (he was himself a prisoner at Buchenwald from 1943-45) in his 1964 novel Le Grand Voyage. Superbly rendered by Jurgen Holtz in the title role, Shakespeare/Hamlet became a contemporary and by so doing deeply disturbed the omnipresent SED watchdogs. Because of its huge success with audiences, this all too apt production was quickly taken ofF and the director was warned in a review that artists who wished to keep their jobs, needed to be cleverly and prudently guided. Though in the two instances given above, the authors of this volume manage simultaneously to illuminate both Shakespeare and the historical era, sometimes (and this is more frequent in Hortmann, who tackles the larger task, than in Hamburger), descriptions seem rather routine and lack sparkle. …

Planting the Lord's Garden in New France: Gabriel Sagard's "Le Grand Voyage" and "Histoire du Canada"

Gabriel Sagard, a Recollect brother, traveled as a missionary in New France from 1623 to 1629 when the Recollects were forced to leave Canada after the English temporarily occupied Quebec. For him, Canada represented le jardin de Dieu (Histoire 170) where the souls of Amerindians could be reaped for the Christian God.' Both the Grand Voyage du Pays des Hurons,2 published in 1632 after Sagard's forced return to France, and the expanded version called the Histoire du Canada published in 1636 tell the story of the Recollects' efforts in establishing this garden. But they also represent a plea for the return of the rightful gardeners to their property. For when the 1632 Treaty of Saint-Germain-en-Laye returned Quebec to the French, the Recollects were not allowed to board the ships that carried three Jesuit missionaries to the New World.3 The metaphoric use of gardening for conversion and salvation is made more explicit in the Histoire du Canada than it was in the Grand Voyage. Sagard's story is framed there by both a vision of what the Lord's garden in New Canada could be with the support of powerful religious and merchant patrons in France and the frustration of the missionary effort without this support. The references to conversion as gardening structure the new telling of the story. In the first volume of the Histoire Sagard quotes the 1620 letter which Father Denis Jamet addressed to the Grand Vicaire of Pontoise in order to encourage his participation in this new venture of civilization and to demonstrate the goals of the Recollect mission: