Raising Their Voices: Memory, Justice, and Genre in Second-Generation French Literature

Abstract

In Raising Their Voices: Memory, Justice, and Genre in Second-Generation French Literature, I examine how Patrick Modiano’s Dora Bruder (1997), Lydie Salvayre’s Pas pleurer (2014), and Zahia Rahmani’s Moze (2003) employ genre tropes and intertextual references to reframe traumatic family memories of the Nazi Occupation of France, the Spanish Civil War, and the Algerian War. I consider these texts “second-generational” insofar as they have a close relationship to Marianne Hirsch’s concept of postmemory and they are preoccupied with questions of familial, national, and literary heritage. Each text grapples with the burden of an inherited story of trauma that reflects the author’s own families’ experiences as groups marginalized in France during the twentieth century. As family members mediated between the authors and past trauma, the authors, in turn, use references to other literary texts to mediate their own retelling of that trauma. Accordingly, the authors function as curators of the representation of both the past and literary heritage. These writers break with traditional genre structures to express the multigenerational effects of violence, and their writing forms a new informal movement of littérature engagée in the tradition of Émile Zola or Jean-Paul Sartre. I suggest that these texts by Modiano, Salvayre, and Rahmani 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 the German countermonuments studied by James E. Young. The ethical drive in countermonumental texts urges the duty to remember the past for the sake of honoring victims, exposing wrongdoing, urging accountability, and generating debate about current social or political circumstances that may perpetuate discriminatory practices or historical lacunae. Among the many elements at hand, particularly important are the foregrounding of memory and testimony, the tension between fact and fiction, and the aesthetic qualities that underscore fragmentation. While the authors of textual countermonuments may engage with experimental styles, they also readily appropriate other texts—even their own prior texts (in the case of Modiano and Salvayre). Throughout their texts, they adapt styles and themes from other writers, and these acts of appropriation situate these texts as joint artifacts of historical trauma and of literary heritage. Indeed, the authors reject a passive reception of the past (both literary and familial); instead, they assert their agency and become curators as they select which aspects of the family narrative to highlight and which authors and literary works to reference. While literary forefathers may inspire what Harold Bloom called the “anxiety of influence,” the posterity of those same writers depends on a continued network of references to them. While it is of course quite common for authors to recycle other literary works, in the cases of Modiano, Salvayre, and Rahmani, the authors’ selections bear an additional layer of meaning since the constellation of literary references serve to recontextualize or reinterpret the violence of their own family history. It is especially the obligation to recount the family’s past that leads to an act of artistic creation, which embodies both a conversation with the dead and a testimony to pass on to others.