Quelle voix/voie pour raconter des expériences-limite? Quelques réflexions autour de Jorge Semprún, Elie Wiesel, Michel del Castillo et Agota Kristof

Authors

  • Emanuela CAVICCHI

Keywords:

identity, exile, concentration camp, limit-experience, bilingual writers / bilingualism, francophone literature

Abstract

This article relates to four contemporary authors writing mostly or only in French, even if this language is not their mother-tongue: Jorge Semprun, Elie Wiesel, Michel del Castillo, Agota Kristof.
The essay points out the problem of choosing another language for writing: this choice seems referred, in these authors, to the difficulty in telling a limit-experience: Semprun, Wiesel and del Castillo were interned in a concentration camp, and Agota Kristof escaped the Soviet repression in Hungary, leaving for a permanent and painful exile.
For these authors writing is itself a limit-experience, on the edge between salvation and desperation of facing again the awful ghosts of the past. If writing is not a therapy nor a damnation, but it presents both these aspects, it becomes a necessary condition, something concerning life and death at the same time.
These authors couldn't avoid writing about their limit-experiences, but after a period of silence they decided to choose another language to tell, trying to control the burning thread of their memories.

"I swallowed a secret burning thread, it cuts me inside, and often I've bled" (Suzanne Vega)

Published

2020-06-10