Earlier in this introduction, I mentioned that it was my texts’ emphasis on space, both narrative and physical, that combined with their focus on memory to create a monument. In his book Spatiality and the Novel, Joseph Kestner calls space in text a “secondary illusion” . In the otherwise timebound narrative, in which events happen one after another and the reader starts at the beginning and reads in a straight line to the end, an author may employ a number of techniques to create the illusion of space, that is, the illusion of timelessness. The difference between Vladimir Propp’s terms fabula and syuzhet is one example of a way an author might create a “secondary illusion” of space. Each time the text veers from the strict chronological path, we have left the realm of time; the author hascreated the illusion of space. In “Spatial Form in Modern Literature,” Joseph Frank makes a similar observation, noting that the tendency towards spatiality in modern poetry and novels create a “simultaneity of perception . . . by breaking up temporal sequence” . For Frank, this chopping up of chronology demands a different kind of reading. The spatialized text “asks its readers to suspend the process of individual reference temporarily until the entire pattern of internal references can be apprehended as a unity” . In the works I study, the authors manipulate chronology in this way, creating dense networks of intertextual reference , rolling grow trays internal reference and symbols to spatialize their texts. Kofman, Perec and Rodoreda do not create space in their texts for its own sake.
Because they deal with wartime, with the enclosed space of a city during that time and with experiences that cannot be easily assimilated into a chronological narrative, the space of these texts—enclosed like buildings—is the space of a monument. As I have said above, a monument exists at the intersection of space and memory. My three authors each use the interplay of space and time differently, to create different kinds of textual monuments. Kofman creates an intersubjective space that allows the reader to encounter the other, breaking apart the text-asbuilding metaphor to concentrate on the street space between buildings, thus expressing a kind of psychological homelessness. Perec’s text is a layered space that both explores and represents the layered, hole-filled nature of memory. He constantly reminds the reader that a memory is something created in the moment, not an unchanging object to be visited. A given memory is only the top layer of a composite made of many layers of memories, some invented or re-remembered differently. Rodoreda builds a network, a garden, of polyvalent monuments. Such monuments can grow, change and multiply, and the reader or rememberer along with them. A traditional monument, such as a headstone, affixes a particular name to a particular patch of ground, foreclosing growth and forcing one to concentrate solely on the past, to the exclusion of the future. Creating space in text is simultaneously a way of pausing narrative time, or creating that illusion. The psychoanalytic idea of trauma also involves a peculiar kind of timelessness. When a person undergoes a traumatic experience, they cannot assimilate it in the moment. The subject cannot translate the experience into a narrative in time, leaving the traumatic experience to surface later as a flashback that, for the subject, is not in the past, but rather an event outside of time, eternally happening.
Because my texts treat experiences that could be traumatic, and because the authors use literary techniques to create a sense of timelessness, it is tempting to say that I am dealing with literary expressions of trauma. I would like to tread lightly on the applicability of trauma theory to these texts, however, because I think it is important to carefully differentiate between the trauma of a person and the translation of that trauma into text. Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub’s Testimony, a beautiful and compelling book about witnessing and trauma, draws on the experience of psychoanalytic patients and engendered an entire school of criticism that attempts to translate those findings into the textual realm. While this is a fascinating project, there can be problematic slippage between the psychological condition of trauma and a text detailing traumatic events. Traumatic analysis can sometimes lead to the psychoanalyzing of a “traumatized” author, positioning the text as either merely an expression of that trauma or a healing tool, a document of mourning, of “working through.” Such analyses, while truly compelling from a psychological standpoint, neglect the complicated nature of textuality and sidestep some important questions we need to ask, such as whether, or under what circumstances, can texts be expressions of trauma? What are the ethics of psychoanalyzing an author? Does it diminish the text they have written, rendering it only an expression of a symptom? In addition, if we follow post structuralists in pointing out the slipperiness of text , it becomes more difficult to assume an unproblematic relationship between an author’s trauma and the text he or she creates. This problematic relationship between psychoanalysis and text is a topic that Perec and Kofman have treated themselves. In Autobiogriffures, Sarah Kofman makes the point that language destabilizes the subject, throwing into question the very possibility of writing about oneself at all. In Rue Ordener rue Labat she makes knowing references to Freud and other psychoanalysts. Perec wrote W during his analysis with Pontalis. It is a self-conscious text, aware not only of the possibility of trauma, but also aware of the ways in which a text can evade the reader’s armchair psychoanalysis and an analysand can evade the psychoanalyst.
None of this is to say I do not think a text has the potential to express trauma, or that the authors I treat might not be traumatized, only that I try to treat such an analysis with a great deal of care. At any event, I certainly would argue that the experiences the authors convey are unlikely to have been shared by the majority of readers. As time passes, this becomes more and more the case. Thus the “otherness” of the traumatic experience, in that it was in some sense never even fully experienced by the traumatized subject, still applies at least in attenuated form to the texts in question. The task of one who would relate a traumatic experience to another, to put that experience into the temporal form of the narrative while at the same time being true to the aspects of the experience that stand outside of time, is shared by authors of textual monuments, traumatic or otherwise.Memory of an occupation is the memory of internal struggle between groups who all have very different memories of the war. As Olivier Wieviorka and Sarah Farmer point out, unlike the First World War, which provided a unifying, Manichean memory of a fight with clear sides and a common symbol , the French experience of the Second World War was not primarily military. Apart from the short-lived military campaign against Germany in 1940 and the Liberation in 1944, France was not officially “at war” during the war. The collaborators, resisters and deportees of occupied France may almost be said to have experienced different occupations. After the Liberation, in an attempt to paper over these diverse French experiences with a military narrative, De Gaulle’s postwar provisional government depicted the war as the final chapter in a “30 years war” with Germany. This enabled them to position Germany as a stable enemy against which France had fought. Of course, horticulture trays this official position ignored the ambiguities and subtleties of people’s actual experience. After De Gaulle’s departure, the Fourth Republic took a piecemeal approach to memorializing the war experience. The state organized no memorial in its name, leaving associations of different classes of deportees and individual towns and regions to erect memorial plaques. The reasons for this were twofold. First, the state lacked the funds to erect monuments, limiting itself instead to supervising local efforts and encouraging municipalities to erect temporary plaques instead of massive monuments. The second reason was political: they were reluctant to support monuments and other commemorations of De Gaulle and, on the other hand, also sought to distance themselves from commemoration of the political elements of the Resistance. The Fourth Republic’s approach to recognizing and supporting former deportees was similarly piecemeal. They drew a distinction between those who were deported because they were actively fighting the Nazis and the collaborationist government, and those who were deported because of their origin or their political affiliations. While at the time this distinction was an expedient and a way to provide financial assistance to deportees, the deportee hierarchy created by the Fourth Republic would shape how deportees both thought of themselves and were memorialized for years to come. One significant effect of this policy was to ignore the specificity of the Jewish deportee experience. Jewish deportees were seldom honored, first, because they were at the bottom of the hierarchy of deportees, and second because of an idea that to specifically recognize Jewish detainees would prevent them from reentering the French community. Former detainees themselves also felt this way.
In keeping with a long French tradition of laicité, it would be destructive to the national fabric to honor detainees of a particular religion, even if large numbers of French Jewswere entirely secular and hence Jewish only by ethnicity. In addition, memorials that did not differentiate between deportees could help to smooth over the Balkanized memorial and political scene under the Fourth Republic. With De Gaulle’s return to power in 1958 came a renewed effort on the part of the state to centralize memorial efforts and to use memorials to unify French memory. In the late 60s, just as Perec began W, the public began to clamor for more information about the Vichy period and France’s role in the Shoah. While commemoration began earlier—in 1956 Isaac Schneerson oversaw the construction of Le Tombeau du martyr juif inconnu, the world’s first monument to the genocide—by the end of the 1970s there had been “une formidable explosion de mémoire du génocide” as those who were children during the war reached adulthood and new books, notably Robert Paxton’s Vichy France, challenged accounts of Vichy as a “shield” over France that protected it from the Nazis . At the forefront of this movement was Serge Klarsfeld, a schoolmate of Perec’s, who rallied the French state to acknowledge the responsibility of Vichy for the genocide and compiled tomes with the names of deportees and the details of their transport to the east. This growing desire for recognition of the genocide on the part of private citizens conflicted with the Pompidou administration’s marked disinclination to exorcise the ghosts of Vichy. Despite pressure from the public, Pompidou denied scholars access to Vichy archives and toned down public acknowledgment of resistance fighters. He went so far as to prevent Le chagrin et la pitié—the 1969 documentary directed by Marcel Ophüls that explores French citizens’ memories of the occupation—from being aired, even though it had been commissioned by French television. Thus, in 1971 when Perec began W ou le souvenir d’enfance, the country at large was pulling in two directions: toward recognition of the genocide in general and the role of Vichy in it, yet also away from that recognition as the state sought not to, in Pompidou’s words, “lift the veil” over this period. As I will discuss in more depth in Chapter Two, Perec’s text reflects this moment, grappling with these issues as he both embraces and distances himself from his Jewish identity and considers the nature of identity and inheritance in general. Though people like Isaac Schneersohn, , Robert Paxton and Serge Klarsfeld had been active for years in the struggle for information and state acknowledgement, it was not until 1995 that the French state officially acknowledged its role in the genocide. Sarah Kofman published Rue Ordener rue Labat in 1994, roughly 20 years after Perec’s W, in a France that at once both copiously acknowledged the Jewish experience through monuments and, at the same time, was still unwilling to look its own complicity squarely in the face.