« L’artifice » comme voie d’expression du trauma autobiographique dans L’Écriture ou la vie de Jorge Semprún
“Artifice” as a means of expressing autobiographical trauma in Jorge Semprún’s L’Écriture ou la vie

Summary/Abstract: One of the most remarkable aspects of Jorge Semprún’s oeuvre, a Spanish writer who wrote most of his work in French, is his propensity to explore various forms of “writing the self”. All his novels, to a greater or lesser extent, are rooted in his autobiographical memory. However, Semprún himself has often stressed that recourse to fiction is the only way to make this memory more comprehensible, or even to preserve it from the unspeakable. Taking as our starting point the novel L’Écriture ou la vie (the only novel in which the narrator bears the name “Jorge Semprún”), our focus will be on the traumatic memories of his internment in the Buchenwald concentration camp, particularly on those inscribed within the chapter entitled “Le kaddish”. We will examinate how Semprún treats these memories artistically, how he blends them with fictional elements, and how he reflects on language as an essential vehicle for assimilating and verbalising these traumas, while at the same time transmitting the mnemonic truth.

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