Exploring the Canon: Jorge Semprún and the Legacy of Primo Levi

Abstract

Within a field loosely termed as ‘trauma studies’, the question of closure for the ‘revenant’ or survivor of the camps has become a favoured trope of the academy. In an exploration of this area, this paper shall ask whether through the act of imitiation, cultural convention can be restored, and the potentially cathartic benefits of writing and testifying can be actively facilitated. This question shall be posed through a consideration of the influence that Primo Levi would have on Buchenwald deportee, Jorge Semprún, and in particular their shared sensation that life after the camps was but a dream. Though originally first penned by Levi, Semprún makes reference to this idea, explicitly and implicitly, time and again in works stretching from 1967 through to 1994. This paper examines the relationship between the quasi-canonical Levi and the lesser known Semprún and explores the influence, and the implications there-of, of the former on the latter, via the following questions: is Semprún's imitation of Levi an example of ‘mere’ empathetic identification with another deportee, or is it an altogether more aggressive assumption of identity? What are the implications of imitation within testimony for the possibility of ‘working-through’ and ‘acting out’? Is it possible for an uninfluenced, original and subjective voice to testify to the concentrationnary experience, when a writer such as Levi has, albeit against his wishes, come to be recognized as the authoritative voice of the univers concentrationnaire?

Keywords:

• Jorge Semprún
• Primo Levi
• testimony
• Holocaust
• Buchenwald
• literary imitation

ORCID

Greg Herman http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2288-0323

Notes

1 Nb this and all subsequent page references refer to the original French texts.

2 Amongst others, see Semprún (1980: 110–1, 131, 157, 193–4, 221, 415). Semprún (1986: 110, 199, 223). Semprún (1987: 37). Semprún (1994: 21, 24).

3 This is not intended to dispute that Semprún himself had the sensation that life was but a dream after Buchenwald. Rather it is to question why his vocabulary and style of writing mimic so closely the words of Primo Levi.

4 To name but a few: Gérard or Manuel of Le grand Voyage; Manuel of L'Evanouissement; Juan Larrea of La Montagne blanche; Federico Sanchez of Autobiographie of Federico Sanchez. All these characters, partly fictionalised, partly located in the reality of underground missions undertaken for the Communist Party, contain fragments of Semprún himself.

5 ‘Until the First World War, everybody made the same journeys. It was the same Europe for everyone’. (1986: 68–9). As such, Semprún's writing is built into and within European culture, containing references to, amongst others, Proust, Goethe, Kafka, Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, Wittgenstein, Bizet, Heidegger, Levinas, Husserl, Camus, Aragon, Brasillach, Drieu La Rochelle, Shakespeare, Baudelaire, and Beethoven. See http://francoise-kroichvili.perso.neuf.fr/auteurs%20cites%20par%20J%20Semprun.htm [accessed 03/06/15] for a comprehensive list of more than 650 authors, artists and other notables referenced, however obliquely, by Semprún.

6 ‘What are the ways and means employed by one generation in order to hand on its mental states to the next one?’ (Freud 1990: 158).

7 Cf. Lipstadt (2004) for a detailed account of the phenomenon of Holocaust denial.

8 Cf. Sartre 1947: 11–4. Although it falls outside the scope of this essay it is perhaps also interesting to consider the correlation between community, fraternity and resistance to torture that is also evident in both Semprún, Sartre and of course Robert Antelme: Sartre (1947: 13), Semprún (1967: 44–5), Antelme (1947).

9 Though one may wish to question the possibility of being ‘heard’; Robert Antelme recalls the woefully inadequate reactions of the first American soldiers to reach Dachau: ‘Frightful, yes frightful’ (1947: 301).

10 ‘It's me who's writing this story and I'll do as I want (Semprún 1963: 26); ‘I am the cunning God the Father of all these threads' (Semprún 1980: 11). In this last citation, it is also worth noting the play on words in the original French, whereby ‘fils', here translated as threads in relation to the interwoven stories of Semprún's récit, could equally mean ‘sons' in a reference to the variety of personas adopted by Semprún in the ‘story’ of his life.

11 Semprún (1994: 318). In this citation, it is also possible to isolate a potential further echoing of Levi, whose poem of 1945, Buna concludes: ‘If we were to meet again / In that world sweet beneath the sun / With what kind of face would we confront each other?’ (1988: 5).