Jacques Chirac’s 1995 apology for French participation in the deportation of 76,000 Jews during the Second World War helped to usher in a period of renewed reflection on the controversies of France’s past. The proliferation of memorial efforts that followed corresponds to a developing wider cultural interest in national memory, as demonstrated by the publication of the volumes of Pierre Nora’s Lieux de mémoire between 1983 and 1992, as well as by other authors’ increased preoccupation with history and memory as literary subjects. In my dissertation, “Raising Their Voices: Memory, Justice, and Genre in Second-Generation French Literature,” I use a memory-studies framework to conduct a close reading of three texts in which the authors memorialize traumas endured by their parents’ generation.
In my dissertation, I argue that Patrick Modiano’s Dora Bruder (1997), Zahia Rahmani’s Moze (2003), and Lydie Salvayre’s Pas pleurer (2014) defy genre tropes and employ intertextual references in order to reframe traumatic family memories (of the Nazi Occupation of France, the Algerian War, and the Spanish Civil War, respectively) while simultaneously curating a literary heritage. Furthermore, their texts function as postmemorial countermonuments to the dead—that is, rather than employing the didactic or elegiac function typical of neo-classical monuments (such as the Arc de Triomphe), these texts commemorate victims, while also constructing an unsettling and ambiguous view of dark moments in history, in a manner similar to recent German countermonuments (for example, Gunter Demnig’s Stolpersteine project). In my first chapter, I examine Modiano’s use of geographic and intertextual palimpsests to transform Paris into a textual landscape in his book commemorating a young Holocaust victim—and, indirectly, his estranged father, as well. The second chapter looks at how Salvayre engages playfully with questions of voice—her mother’s accent, her own literary voice, and a call for justice—as she retells two stories about the Spanish Civil War: her mother’s testimony about experiences as a young Spaniard who would flee to France as a refugee, and the French author George Bernanos’s eye-witness account of the war. The third chapter in this study examines Rahmani’s Moze, which defies clear generic classification with its incorporation of poetic passages, long dialogues, and copies of official documents, all arranged within a five-part framework in a gesture toward the five acts typical of classical theater. The structural experimentation and spoken-word rhythm of the text confront the tragic aftermath of the narrator’s father’s role as a harki in the Algerian War, as well as France’s failure to honor its promises.
As a scholar of memory studies, I situate my work within a developing interdisciplinary field that investigates topics such as how the past is remembered (i.e., not the researched history of textbooks, but history as retold by art, monuments, popular culture, and other forms of human expression.). My project shows that, in the context of literature, the concept of postmemory (traumatic inherited “memories” which deeply impact identity, as experienced, for example, by children of Holocaust survivors) goes beyond testifying for a previous generation or attempting to imagine one’s parents’ lived experiences; in fact, the authors of postmemorial texts also engage in a resolutely literary enterprise. Indeed, as other scholars have shown, intertextuality functions as a means of transmitting literary memoires, in the sense that it serves as a means of indirectly reaffirming or expanding a literary heritage (or canon). I show that the authors of postmemorial literature repurpose intertextual references as a filter through which to reinterpret past trauma, and, through intertextuality, the authors construct monuments to the past that are embedded in a self-referential artistic creation.
Broadly, my research responds both to the ongoing debates in France about national identity in the public sphere and to the need for further theorization within the field of memory studies of approaches to literature. The newly inaugurated Memory Studies Association, of which I am a member, is promoting discussions, both in its online forums and at upcoming conferences, about the nature of the field (for example, is it transdisciplinary, interdisciplinary, or multidisciplinary?) and its methodology, which is currently fluid given the diversity of disciplines involved. I look forward to engaging in these formative debates, particularly as they pertain to the ethical dimensions of aestheticizing or (mis)appropriating the past.