Jorge Semprún and the Pain of Memory

Jorge Semprún and the Pain of Memory


Before offering a reading of this work, I’d like to detail the quite extraordinary life of Jorge Semprún, a huge figure in European culture and literature, but one who remains relatively unknown in Anglophone academia. He was born in Spain into a very important family in 1923 – his grandfather was prime minister during the reign of Alphonse XIII, and his father was a hugely influential lawyer and poet. Semprún would live in Spain for fifteen years before emigrating to France after Franco came to power. He joined the French resistance in 1941, and, fluent in both French and German, he studied philosophy at the Ecole Normale Superieure, before being arrested by the Gestapo and deported to Buchenwald in 1943. After the war he became heavily involved with the Spanish communist party, albeit from his place in exile in Paris, however, like so many other intellectuals he was expelled from the party in the mid-60s due to his criticisms of the Stalinist purges, and other excesses of post-war communism. Following this rupture he began working on films, working alongside figures such as Costa-Gavras, and Alain Resnais. He has received numerous literary prizes, as well as an Oscar for his screen play in the film ‘Z’. He has also served on the jury at Cannes film festival and between 1988 and 1991 he was the Spanish Minister of Culture.
From grandson of a prime minister to Buchenwald deportee, from Franco, to Hitler, to Stalin, Semprún’s personal experience and knowledge of the 20th century remain unrivalled. The text which I selected for this session, offers us not only an insight into the experience of Semprún as an intellectual and deportee and the means by which he was able to survive this experience, but also portrays a fascinating relationship between the functioning of the aesthetic and the power of memory.
Before properly analysing the theme of memory within the selected passage, I’d like to pursue two small digressions. The first concerns the only English translation that I was able to find and from which the extract that you have is taken: this edition, published by Serif does offer on the whole a very good translation of the original French text. The translation of the title however as ‘The Cattle Truck’, is a complete, and I don’t use the word lightly, bastardisation of the title of the original ‘Le grand Voyage’ – The long voyage, as it was first published by Gallimard in 1963. This (mis)translation, invokes one of the most evocative images of the twentieth century, in what I can only imagine to be an extremely misguided attempt to increase sales. Moreover with the title translated thus, the original sense and indeed purpose of the novel is lost: Le grand voyage is not only about the five seemingly endless days endured by Semprún and 119 other men on a cattle truck destined for Buchenwald: it is a journey, albeit an incredibly fragmented journey through memories past, present and future.
My second digression is an attempt to tie in some of the material that we discussed last term into this work, and concerns the role of the intellectual. As has already been mentioned, Semprún was highly intelligent and conversant in both French and German philosophy. This comes to the fore in The Long Voyage, between pages 21 and 22, in a passage that is incredibly evocative of the writing of French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre whose outspoken views on human freedom as published in Being and Nothingness attracted and still attract heavy criticism. I haven’t been able to discover what exactly Semprún knew of Sartre– Being and Nothingness was published in the same year, 1943, as Semprún was deported, so it seems unlikely, but not impossible that Semprún would have been familiar with Sartrian philosophy at this point. However The Long Voyage was written some 15 years after the end of the war. By this time it seems highly unlikely that Semprún would not have read Sartre’s treatise.
Moreover this allusion occurs not once but twice, the second occurring between pages 44 and 46, from which I read:
“The historical essence common to all of us in this year 1943 is freedom. I’m in prison because I’m a free man, because I found it necessary to exercise my freedom, because I accepted this necessity.”
I don’t want to say too much more about this now, it’s perhaps something that we can return to later, but this similarity in thought between a concentration camp deportee, and one of the most controversial philosophers of the 20th C, is what makes this work such an intriguing and indeed incredible account of the pain and privations of the Second World War.
Turning then to the text, the narrative of Le grand voyage unfolds in many time frames. The most recurrent temporal period is the present (which of course, from the standpoint of the narrator, is his past), which details that journey in a cramped and fetid box car. However the narrative remains only fleetingly with this moment. Via sudden and unannounced temporal lurches, the first person narration details times both pre and post war. Some memories are narrated as daydreams, including dreams of Proust, which carry him through that interminable period.
Other memories are conveyed between Semprún’s narrator, Gerard, and ‘the guy from Semur’. At this point, some comment on the characters is perhaps required.
Gérard is the name of the main protagonist and narrator. However as a member of the French resistance, this name was also an alias adopted by Semprún. Gerard then both is and is not Semprún and vice versa: importantly however, this doubling of identity in real life, also allows for a doubling of subjectivities within the narrative: a doubling which both obscures and clarifies the origins of the memories recounted therein. However the narrative becomes even more complicated with the introduction of ‘the guy from Semur’. Semprún, in an interview many years after the initial publication of The Long Voyage, would reveal that this character, whose name we never learn, is in fact a literary construction, a means of reconstructing the memory of that voyage, which would have been impossible without an interlocutor. However in an interpretation of this work with which I completely agree, Joe Friedmann suggests that ‘the guy from Semur’ is not merely a facilitator of dialogue and memory. Indeed he argues that this character represents a third dimension of Semprún himself, since the guy from Semur, takes on a quasi physical embodiment of the memories of the narrator/author. And yet ten pages into the novel we are aware that this figure will not survive the journey. Thus a triadic link is established between a man who dies – the guy from Semur, an alter-ego of the author/narrator - Gérard, and the author himself. Via this link, Semprún reproduces a sensation voiced by many survivors of the Holocaust: namely that a part of them is dead whilst another part, the rememberer or witness, is still alive. Accordingly, when toward the end of the text, and just before he enters the camp, Gerard lays down the body of the guy from Semur, he comments “it’s as though I were laying down my own past, all the memories linking me to the world of the past” (216) On a side note, this splitting of the self and partial survival is also noted by Charlotte Delbo, herself a survivor of Auschwitz and Ravensbruck who states: “I died in Auschwitz and no one knows it.”
The implication of this is that memory must stop at the door of the camps: for upon arrival, the pleasure which we may take from memory is no longer valid. In this way, Semprún heartily echoes the argument of Robert Antelme in L’Espèce Humaine (another testimony to the ‘univers concentrationnaire’), that because the loss of name and identity were so central to the functioning of the camps, memory itself had to be called into question. Moreover memory itself could only provide a hellish articulation of the difference between the past and the present, and I cite: “the hell of memory was operating full blast. There was hardly a guy who wasn’t trying to recall some woman, who wasn’t ringing at his door, and who at the same time wasn’t hearing that other ringing at the door, the one that had precipitated everything”. Thus with the confusion between the pleasurable memory of the arrival of a lover, and the violent memory of the arrival of the Gestapo, the act of remembering itself becomes contaminated in a post-deportation, post-Holocaust age.
This is the meaning of the sentence at the bottom of page 23, “maybe you never take this voyage back in the opposite direction”. Life, once affected by such an experience will never be able to move beyond that experience.
This radical break between past and future is more than a little reminiscent of the dialectic suggested by Adorno in 1951: namely that to write poetry after Auschwitz was barbaric. This condemnation, which has since been widely and often incorrectly cited, nevertheless contains at its heart the truth of a severing of time, of historical rupture. As Hans Jonas explains, the single name of Auschwitz, serves as a “blindingly concentrating lens” under which the whole of the widely dispersed reality of the Holocaust is subsumed. Indeed, “Auschwitz marks a divide between a “before” and “after”, where the latter will be forever different from the former.” [Concept of God after Auschwitz, 292]
It is from this rupture that the ineffability of the Holocaust stems: for Semprún, like so many other survivors, realised that it was beyond communication. This realisation leads him and or Gérard, to claim 16 years after the liberation of the camps that “This evening I no longer know whether I dreamed all that, or whether I’ve been dreaming since the whole thing has ceased to exist.”
The Holocaust then is an experience which corrupts all memory, and denies respite to the survivor. And yet Semprún alleges that he had “forgot[ten][that] journey while realising full well that [he] would one day have to take it again”. This curious claim about having forgotten what he so clearly remembers indicate that perhaps the memories of his journey to Buchenwald are in fact more involuntary than he would perhaps like to admit. Indeed memories “rise to the throat, they choke you, they weaken the will, I expel memory. I’m twenty, I don’t give a damn about memory” (29). Once again there is a striking similarity here between the terminology employed by Semprún and that used by Robert Antelme, from whom I read: “No sooner had we begun to tell our story than we would be choking over it.” However there is a subtle difference between these two citations. For Antelme, memory results in a suffocation of speech, a result of what has already been described as the ineffability of the Holocaust. For Semprún however, memories suffocate the very act of living as they overcome both his protagonist Gérard as he makes the journey to Buchenwald, and the author of the text himself as he struggles to come to terms with his experience.
And yet this analysis risks over simplifying Semprún’s text, for in the last citation there is a word play which is not apparent in the English translation: still on page 29, the three words “I expel memory”, are translated from the French, “je chasse les souvenirs”. On the one hand, and in the context of this particular passage, ‘I expel memory’, certainly seems correct: in search of peace, Semprún is ridding himself of either the memories of deportation or of the pleasant memories of a life unfamiliar with the death camps, or indeed both. However there is also an alternative translation, namely: ‘I hunt memories’, or ‘I chase them down’.
At this point it is perhaps necessary to consider the direct power that memory bestowed on the prisoner and deportee. Whilst we have already spoken of the contamination of the past by the knowledge of the horrors and extreme limits of the present, there nevertheless does remain an aesthetic pleasure which may be taken from the past, in particular from literature. Within Le grand voyage, there is a distinct similarity between Semprún’s style of writing and Marcel Proust’s ‘A la recherche du temps perdu’. I don’t feel able to develop this similarity too much further today – my own knowledge of Proust is hazy at best, but suffice it to say that the temporal leaps employed by Semprún are clearly reminiscent of Proust, and there are a number of direct references throughout the text to Swanns way. Semprún moreover is not the only survivor of the camps to stress the connection between literature and the pleasure or respite which may be sought in it. Primo Levi and Robert Antelme both make reference to Dante’s Divine Comedy and the intellectual escape from the hardship of the camps that this permitted them. The refuge sought in this particular piece of literature is not as strange as it may first seem: as Alain Badiou argues, “the Nazi extermination is radical evil in that it provides for our time the unique, unrivalled – and in this sense transcendent or unsayable measure of Evil pure and simple [...] without conceivable precedent or posterity.” As a result it was perhaps relatively logical for the inmate of the camps to invoke the inferno of Dante: both as a means of escape, and as a means of seeking comprehension and creating a point of reference and familiarity in the unthinkable unsayable world of the Nazi dream.
Charlotte Delbo, exchanged a whole days ration of bread for a copy of Molière’s Misanthrope, and having mesmorised it, “she kept it in her throat” until the day of her liberation. Last but not least, in a hugely inspiring book by Nick Rost, entitled Goethe in Dachau, we discover that in the camps, more than ever, it was imperative to “Read still more, study still more, and more intensively. In every free moment! Classical literature [w]as a substitute for Red Cross packages!”
Thus we are faced once more with a paradox: whilst memory is indeed hell, a power which can provoke untold misery as one remembers happier days, it also simultaneously permits an escape from the hellish world which can be reality. Importantly however it must be noted that, even for the survivor of the camps, it remains possible to take some form of comfort in the memories of that traumatic experience: from Primo Levi’s The Periodic Table I read: “If it is true that there is no greater sorrow than to remember a happy time in a state of misery, it is just as true that calling up a moment of anguish in a tranquil mood, seated quietly at one’s desk, is a source of profound satisfaction.” (59)
Not dissimilar to this paradoxical position is the stance taken by Semprún/Gerard with regards to the power of his own memory. Within all testimony to have emerged from the Holocaust, there is undoubtedly a cathartic element: a need to tell of and to describe the horrors endured, both to come to terms with the past, and also to seize those memories for oneself and to gain control over them. Thus we find Semprún/Gerard boasting of his power in the telling his tale: “I’m the one writing this story, I’ll do as I like.”(22) And yet on the next page, and this is my translation, we read “I can’t hold onto that particular moment”. Who then, or rather what is in control here? Does Semprún control his memories, or do his memories direct him? And is the answer to these questions the same for both the detainee at the moment of his incarceration and the survivor, distanced from the event by the passage of time? These quandaries, as demonstrated by Freud in his analysis of traumatic repetition compulsion are extremely significant. Gerard, the narrator and alter-ego of the author, is, at this particular point, unable to control memory, suggesting it would seem, that this therapeutic journey into the past in search of mastery and resolution, is perhaps not as voluntary as he would like to have us believe, or even as voluntary as he himself would like to believe.
Moreover, the survivor’s journey into the past is not a journey exclusively for his own benefit as he seeks to exorcize his demons. There is an equal, possibly greater need for the survivor to remember and to bear witness on behalf of the friends and family who perished within the camps. This compulsion inevitably denies a voluntary peace to the survivor-witness. And yet with the seeming failure of the world to take notice of the testimonies of the witnesses, and indeed because of the Agambian lacuna which lies at the heart of their testimonies, (I’m thinking here once more of Primo Levi, and his revelation – “we the survivors are not the true witnesses”), the survivors themselves experience what can only be described as a doomed sense of impotence.
Nevertheless, as necessary and desperate as the act of testifying is, Semprún has also remarked that integral to this act is the act of forgetting. Samuel Beckett, when speaking of Proust, remarks: “The man with a good memory does not remember anything because he does not forget anything.” The same may be said of the work in question here. For the narrator intersperses the whole narrative of the present journey with memories and memories of memories. This style of writing conjures up a mode of remembrance in which the past suddenly takes control, and the gap between that which is past and the present moment evaporates. Bearing a remarkable similarity to this evaporation of the present are Maurice Blanchot’s comments, once again with reference to Proust: “time is abolished, not a past and a present, but one single presence that causes incompatible moments, separated by the entire cause of lived life, to coincide in palpable simultaneity.”
Semprún then struggles with memory, as he moves between the different modes of voluntary and involuntary remembering, while always seeking to maintain control of his past. In this sense he is caught in an ever-revolving circle, where memories are conquered by forgettings which in their turn succumb once more to memory: dubious victories which never shed their ambiguity. What however it is perhaps important for us to remember is that Jean Améry, Paul Celan and Primo Levi, amongst others, are but three survivors of the Holocaust who were ultimately unable to live with the pain of their own memories. (Erich Fried poem to finish?)


...........





Against forgetting:

I want to remember
That I want not to forget
For I want to be I,
And I want to remember
That I want to forget
For I want not to suffer so much

I want to remember
That I want not to forget
That I want to forget
For I want to know myself

For I cannot think without remembering
For I cannot want without remembering
For I cannot love
For I cannot hope
For I cannot forget
Without remembering

I want to remember
All that one forgets
For I cannot save
Without remembering
myself or my children

I want to remember the past and the future
And I want to remember
How soon I must forget
And I want to remember
How soon I shall be forgotten.

In praise of bad translations

Chris sent me a message that included the following extract from an interview with Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño. In my view it encompasses some of the ideas we have already discussed as a group willing to exchange and read literary works that 'can can resist mutilation, the loss of numerous pages and even a shit storm.' Here are the words that push this boat into water...

Interviewer: Is it disturbing to think we have read many of our gods (Joyce, Stendhal, Proust) in translation, in second-hand versions? Is that literature? If we spin the matter around, it's possible we might end up concluding that words don't have an equivalent.

Roberto Bolaño: I think they do. Furthermore, literature is not made from words alone. Borges says that there are untranslatable writers. I think he uses Quevedo as an example. We could add García Lorca and others. Notwithstanding that, a work like Don Quijote can resist even the worst translator. As a matter of fact, it can resist mutilation, the loss of numerous pages and even a shit storm. Thus, with everything against it - bad translation, incomplete and ruined - any version of Quijote would still have very much to say to a Chinese or an African reader. And that is literature. We may lose a lot along the way. Without a doubt. But perhaps that was its destiny. Come what may.