Between distance and proximity: Contemporary French and Francophone Holocaust literature

This thesis examines a corpus of texts by French and Francophone writers published from 1997 to 2018 that deal with questions of memorialisation of the Holocaust for those who come after this traumatic event. It argues that contemporary French writing about the Holocaust can be characterised by a complex interplay between distance and proximity. Thought of in terms of a dialectical relationship rather than as binary opposites, postmemorial writers simultaneously mobilise notions of distance and proximity to convey the ambivalence of their positions towards an event which, despite lacking direct memories of it, haunts them.
The thesis is divided into four chapters. After an introduction that sketches out the theoretical stakes of Holocaust memory as it transitions from living to cultural memory, each chapter, through the pairing of two texts, examines one aspect of the ambivalent memory produced by postmemorial texts – its temporality, its entanglements with other histories and stories, its engagement with the archive, and its mobilisation of a spectral imaginary – and how it relates to a complex dialectic between distance and proximity. In Chapter 1, I look at Laurent Binet’s HHhH (2009) and Pierre Bayard’s Aurais-je été résistant ou bourrreau? (2013) and demonstrate how, by disrupting a linear and homogeneous temporality, they perform a simultaneous gesture of distance and proximity that conveys the otherness and plurality of the past. In Chapter 2, I focus on Marie Bardet’s À la droite du père (2018) and Anouar Benmalek’s Fils du Shéol (2015) and deconstruct the binary opposition between vertical and horizontal memory dynamics, developing a model of rhizomatic memory in which disparate elements are brought into proximity. In Chapter 3, I argue that Marianne Rubinstein’s C'est maintenant du passé (2009) and Ivan Jablonka’s Histoire des grands-parents que je n'ai pas eus (2012) elaborate a poetics of the archive that holds in productive tension affective proximity to and critical distance from the archive. In the final chapter, I interpret the proliferation of spectral figures, at once distant and near, in Lydie Salvayre’s La Compagnie des spectres (1997) and Jean-Claude Grumberg’s Rêver peut-être (1998) as closely tied to an interrogation on the possibility of justice. Both texts underline the ethical responsibility of the postmemorial subject to the spectral Others, regardless of temporal distance.
What emerges from my reading of these texts is a memory that attempts, through a complex, and at times ambivalent, dialectic of distance and proximity, to come to terms with a world profoundly transformed by the atrocities of the twentieth century.