Language:
English
Year of publication:
1991
Titel der Quelle:
Poetics Today
Angaben zur Quelle:
12,3 (1991) 495-516
Keywords:
Lanzmann, Claude.
;
Modiano, Patrick,
;
Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945), in motion pictures
;
Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945), in literature
;
French literature History and criticism
Abstract:
Analyzes the nature and value of historical testimony, that is first-hand accounts which owe their truth-value to the author's direct knowledge of the facts and whose historiographical force coincides with their autobiographical force. The drama of the film "Shoah" is the conflict between personal story and history, between the legitimate detours and evasions of narrative and subject, and the tenacity of historical imperative. But the viewer knows that the subjects of "Shoah" will return to a life of compromises with their memory. Patrick Modiano's novel "La Place de l'Étoile" (1968) presents such a saturation and exacerbation of the conflict that a universe other than the hell from which Schlemilovitch (the protagonist, torn between his Jewish identity in fascist France, and his cultural French identity) speaks is no longer imaginable. The novel pushes the conflict to the point of explosion, to the death of the subject and the narrative. Concludes that the novel lends a voice to the testimonies absent from "Shoah".
URL:
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