Life Stories

Paul Ricoeur, who was undoubtedly France’s most important hermeneutic thinker of the last century, spoke only sparingly of his experiences as a POW in his published works. His brief support for Pétain and the policy of collaboration nevertheless echoes, perhaps, across his mature thinking about the conflict of interpretations, and his consistent attempt to find ways of reconciling apparently warring approaches.

Camus’s War

Camus’s great novel L’Etranger was published in 1942. Although it contains no explicit reference to the war, the chapter argues that it bears the marks of a trauma text. It is compared to his more polemical essays, Lettres à un ami allemand, which acknowledge the need for armed resistance to the German Occupation.

Sartre and Beauvoir

Sartre and Beauvoir have been accused of having a rather easy Occupation, cementing their literary and intellectual careers and pursuing their sexual conquests. They certainly wrote a great deal. This chapter discusses their works written during and about the war, and considers the curious absence of a sense of danger or trauma which these texts suggest. There are nevertheless signs of a more traumatized, problematic experience underlying their deceptively calm texts.

Levinas the Novelist

Some of Levinas’s published work suggests hostility towards literature. Nevertheless, since his death it has been discovered that he nurtured literary projects of his own. His posthumous archive contains material towards two novels, both of which deal with the experience of the Second World War. This chapter discusses this material in the context of his philosophical work.

Sarah Kofman and the Time Bomb of Memory

As a young Jewish girl in occupied France, Kofman remained hidden during much of the war and thereby escaped deportation. Her memoir Rue Ordener, rue Labat describes what happened to her, and its publication was followed shortly afterwards by her suicide. Her memoir raises questions which are key to this study about repressed memory, the interpretation of the unsaid, and the continuing devastating consequences of trauma, spoken or unspoken.

Introduction

The Second World War still poses problems of understanding, representation and narration. This book proposes to examine how the war influenced the work of some of the glittering generation of writers and intellectuals who witnessed it at first hand. The book will argue that the war is often present even when it is not overtly mentioned.

Elie Wiesel

Wiesel is perhaps the exemplary witness, insisting on the ethical urgency of testimony; but his books also revolve around the difficulty of speaking about the unspeakable, and even entertain – even if finally rejecting – the temptation of remaining silent. The chapter discusses some of the problems of witnessing and literary representation in Wiesel’s testimonial and fictional works.

Traumatic Hermeneutics

The chapter develops the notion of ‘traumatic hermeneutics’, which focusses on the problems of interpretation raised by trauma and traumatized writing, when the signs of pain may be far removed from the manifest material available to the interpreter. The chapter considers work in psychoanalysis and neuroscience, and also texts by survivors Semprun and Delbo, to demonstrate the inevitable risks and potential gains of interpretation when faced with texts which reveal or conceal trauma.

Trauma and Ethics

Trauma studies raises, but does not always give satisfactory answers, to ethical issues concerning, for example, secondary trauma and the academic discussion of testimonial texts. The first chapter in the section discusses work by Felman and Agamben, especially the latter’s highly problematic appropriation of the figure of the Muselmann; and it looks at the work of Charlotte Delbo, the deportee and survivor who takes the risk of speaking for the other despite the ethical pitfalls that this involves.

Whose War, Which War?

The conclusion returns to the theoretical issues which crystallize around traumatic hermeneutics. The path to finding what is unspoken in an utterance may be hazardous, presumptuous, and beset by the possibility of overreading and error. This does not make it avoidable or redundant, or any less important.