Entre aspiration documentaire et nécessité littéraire : la mise en récit de l’expérience des camps dans des témoignages français et italiens de l’immédiat après-guerre (1945-1947)

Upon their return, Nazi camp survivors who resolved to put the testimony of their experience into writing were faced with the incommensurable difficulty of the task – what is also referred to as the “unspeakable,” not in its narrower sense associated with the “impossibility of saying,” but rather in its meaning related to the double barrier existing between writer and language, as well as between the witness and the capacity of his interlocutor to understand. This thesis looks at testimonies – canonical as well as lesser known – published in French and in Italian during the immediate post-war years (1945-1947). It explores the linguistic and literary devices used by author-survivors in their attempt to convey their experience to their reader, despite its unspeakability. Suspended in a precarious balance between History and literature, witnesses give greater emphasis to the veracity of their words than to the literary nature of their account; in fact, author-survivors generally tend, in their foreword, to immediately dissociate themselves from literature, as it is often associated with fiction. The extreme experience of the Nazi camps, and subsequently the process of putting it into writing, necessarily forces survivors to rethink their relationship with language: accordingly, testimonies contain many “non-coincidences” in their words that show how aware the authors are of the “non-transparency” of language, as well as metalinguistic considerations that reflect their will to remake the meaning of words and to convey something of their real-life experience in spite of the inadequacies of language. In fact, author-survivors have to translate the world of the camps for their reader, a world where the language was a mixture of jargon, slang and sabir: the Lagerszpracha. Highly dialogic, testimonies reuse certain Lagerszpracha mechanisms – to show violence – and reverse them through discursive techniques that Bakhtin calls hybridization. In order to accurately convey their experience, the author-survivors must resort to their reader’s imagination by using literary techniques such as intertextuality and intermediality, even though most of them have prefaced their testimony with a denial of literary intent. Resorting to works of fiction enables them to evoke a universe that would otherwise be inconceivable to any “civilized” mind – though such parallels might result in the reader misunderstanding the reality of the camps. By including photographs and referring to theater, the authors draw on other media in their written testimonies, deeming that a single medium cannot suffice to express the concentration camp experience. This thesis reflects on the ethical and literary choices made by the author-survivors who, despite their desire to write an “accurate documentary” in a neutral and straightforward style, are confronted with the insufficient nature of language and must resort to literary techniques to impart to their reader an otherwise unimaginable reality.

Keyphrases: Primo Levi, Robert Antelme, David Rousset, Liana Millu, concentrationary literature, testimonies, Holocaust literature, literature and linguistics, intertextuality, intermediality