Mind the Ghost: Thinking Memory and the Untimely through Contemporary Fiction in French 1800854889, 9781800854888

Table of contents :
Cover
Contents
Acknowledgments
A Note on Translations
Conjuration: Definition Compulsion
Introduction: Timeshells
I Hauntologies
1 With Cixous after Derrida
2 On Timely Disruptions
II Reading Ghosts
3 Naming Catastrophe (Salvayre, Wajsbrot)
4 Missing Inventory or Inventory of the Missing (Modiano,
Salvayre, Adimi)
5 Uncontainable Containers (Modiano, Alikavazovic)
6 Photographing Absence and Absent Photographs (Ferrari,
Alikavazovic)
7 Indelible Stains (Sebbar, Adimi, Faye)
Epilogue or Reconjuration: Haunting Walls
Works Cited
Index

Citation preview

Mind the Ghost Thinking Memory and the Untimely through Contemporary Fiction in French

Contemporary French and Francophone Cultures, 88

Contemporary French and Francophone Cultures Series Editor CHARLES FORSDICK University of Liverpool

Editorial Board

TOM CONLEY Harvard University

JACQUELINE DUTTON University of Melbourne

MIREILLE ROSELLO University of Amsterdam

LYNN A. HIGGINS Dartmouth College

DEREK SCHILLING Johns Hopkins University

This series aims to provide a forum for new research on modern and contemporary French and francophone cultures and writing. The books published in Contemporary French and Francophone Cultures reflect a wide variety of critical practices and theoretical approaches, in harmony with the intellectual, cultural and social developments which have taken place over the past few decades. All manifestations of contemporary French and francophone culture and expression are considered, including literature, cinema, popular culture, theory. The volumes in the series will participate in the wider debate on key aspects of contemporary culture.

Recent titles in the series: 75 Edward J. Hughes, Egalitarian Strangeness: On Class Disturbance and Levelling in Modern and Contemporary French Narrative 76 Anna Kemp, Life as Creative Constraint: Autobiography and the Oulipo 77 Maria Kathryn Tomlinson, From Menstruation to the Menopause: The Female Fertility Cycle in Contemporary Women’s Writing in French 78 Kaoutar Harchi and Alexis Pernsteiner, I Have Only One Language, and It Is Not Mine: A Struggle for Recognition 79 Alison Rice, Transpositions: Migration, Translation, Music 80 Antonia Wimbush, Autofiction: A Female Francophone Aesthetic of Exile

81 Jacqueline Couti, Sex, Sea, and Self: Sexuality and Nationalism in French Caribbean Discourses, 1924–1948 82 Debra Kelly, Fishes with Funny French Names: The French Restaurant in London from the Nineteenth to the Twenty-First Century 83 Nikolaj Lübecker, Twenty-FirstCentury Symbolism: Verlaine, Baudelaire, Mallarmé 84 Ari J. Blatt, The Topographic Imaginary: Attending to Place in Contemporary French Photography 85 Martin Munro and Eliana Văgălău, Jean-Claude Charles: A Reader’s Guide 86 Jiewon Baek, Fictional Labor: Ethics and Cultural Production in the Digital Economy 87 Oana Panaïté, Necrofiction and The Politics of Literary Memory

SONJA STOJA NOV IC

Mind the Ghost Thinking Memory and the Untimely through Contemporary Fiction in French

Mind the Ghost

LIV ER POOL U NIV ERSIT Y PR ESS

First published 2023 by Liverpool University Press 4 Cambridge Street Liverpool L69 7ZU Copyright © 2023 Sonja Stojanovic Sonja Stojanovic has asserted the right to be identified as the author of this book in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication data A British Library CIP record is available ISBN 978-1-80085-488-8 eISBN 978-1-80085-489-5 Typeset by Carnegie Book Production, Lancaster

Contents Contents

Acknowledgments ix A Note on Translations xii Conjuration: Definition Compulsion Introduction: Timeshells

1 17

I Hauntologies 1 With Cixous after Derrida

45

2 On Timely Disruptions

71

II Reading Ghosts 3 Naming Catastrophe (Salvayre, Wajsbrot) 101 4 Missing Inventory or Inventory of the Missing (Modiano, Salvayre, Adimi) 129 5 Uncontainable Containers (Modiano, Alikavazovic) 157 6 Photographing Absence and Absent Photographs (Ferrari, Alikavazovic) 193 7 Indelible Stains (Sebbar, Adimi, Faye) 217 Epilogue or Reconjuration: Haunting Walls

247

Works Cited 263 Index 285

One need not be a Chamber – to be Haunted – One need not be a House – The Brain has Corridors – surpassing Material Place – Emily Dickinson1

1 Emily Dickinson, “Poem 407,” The Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. R. W. Franklin (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2005), 188.

Acknowledgments Acknowledgments

“Écrire c’est tenter de savoir ce qu’on écrirait si on écrivait – on ne le sait qu’après – avant, c’est la question la plus dangereuse que l’on puisse se poser. Mais c’est la plus courante aussi.”1 Over the years, I have been accompanied by these words by Marguerite Duras, words that encouraged me when I was still trying to figure out what the shape and scope of Mind the Ghost would be. This book started, as many first books do, as a revision of my dissertation undertaken at Brown University in the department of French and Francophone Studies – I could not have asked for a more supportive department and I wish to thank them. While this book may now bear little structural resemblance to the dissertation, little bits remain, scattered throughout, for it was there that I was able to start thinking on paper and to discover what I wanted to say. I would like to express my warmest thanks to my committee: Thangam Ravindranathan, whose generosity and thoughtfulness has been a source of encouragement during and beyond my time at Brown; David Wills and Elissa Marder, whose words inspired me long before I had the honor of being read by them. Their suggestions have continued to guide my work and thinking. I consider myself incredibly fortunate to have witnessed the type of critical work modeled by my committee and grateful to have benefited from their incisiveness, their singular voices, and their way of thinking about literature. At Liverpool University Press, I wish to warmly thank Chloe Johnson for accompanying me throughout this process and for her patience with me and my untimeliness. I would like to thank Sarah Warren and her team for the production of this book, as well as the team at Carnegie Book Production. I am beholden to The Easton Foundation for the permission to use artwork by Louise Bourgeois for the cover, and to 1 Marguerite Duras, Écrire (Paris: Gallimard Folio, 1993), 53.

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Andrea Mihalovic at Artists Rights Society for facilitating this process. I am incredibly grateful to the peer reviewers for their comments and also for their generous embracing of these ghosts, which are not proper ghosts. I wish to thank my colleagues at the University of Notre Dame, in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures and in the Gender Studies Program; I am grateful for the generous support of the Nanovic Institute for European Studies and the Kellogg Institute for International Studies. I would especially like to thank my writing group, whose support has been invaluable and reaches far beyond writing: Tarryn Chun, Korey Garibaldi, Jennifer Huynh, Emily Wang, Xian Wang. I also wish to thank the Cultural Transformations in Modern Europe reading group, who commented on portions of my manuscript, particularly Pedro Aguilera-Mellado, John Deak, Tom Kselman, Alexander Martin, Sarah Shortall, and Emily Wang. I would also like to thank Atticus Doherty and Laurin Williams for the invitation to speak about this project at the Equinoxes Graduate Conference at Brown University. For the many conversations about and beyond work, in person and in the virtual realm, and for our collaborative and creative endeavors, which have sustained me over the course of writing this book, I want to thank Michèle Bacholle, Sonia Badenas, Marie-Claire Barnet, Siham Bouamer, Loïc Bourdeau, Katherine Brown, Pam Butler, Dominique Carlini Versini, Jonathan Crass, Benjamin Dalton, Sandra Daroczi, Barbara Green, Mary Celeste Kearney, Katharina Kraus, Dan Maroun, Monica Moore, Susan Ostermann, Sarah Quesada, Stéphanie Ravillon, Alisha Reaves, Claire Reising, Alison Rice, Adina Stroia, Maria Tomlinson, and Ovunc Yilmaz. Moving to Lubbock in August 2020 in the middle of the pandemic during my leave turned out to be a most wonderful and unexpected development; I have felt so welcomed by many faculty members at Texas Tech University and would like to thank especially Alec Cattell, Lars Christensen, Belinda Kleinhans, Anita McChesney, Carmen Pereira-Muro, Ashley Voeks, and Allison Whitney. For their continued friendship over decades and continents, Abi Doukhan, Yasmina Fawaz, Roberta Graham, Vinciane Granmagnat, Snežana Kordovan, Masahito Nakamine, Sophia Sabapathy, Michael Sevcik, Stefanie Sevcik, Cornelia Weidemann, and Sara Zammataro. I would like to thank my family, both near and scattered far across the world, for always listening and for sustaining me with delicious meals, especially Rahela and Slavko, Saša, Tanya, Madelyn, and Ella; my warmest thanks to my parents Slavi and Dragan, my brother David,

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and my mother-in-law Stella, for believing I could finish this book, for everything and more. I wish to end by thanking Bruno and Gigi, who have completely changed my world over the past decade. Gigi, the most wonderful dog, who sat by my side no matter the hours – late into the night as I was writing the dissertation, in the wee hours of the morning as I was finishing the book. Neither would have been possible without the unwavering support of Bruno Penteado, first, last, and favorite reader. This book is made possible in part by generous financial support from the Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts, College of Arts and Letters, University of Notre Dame.

A Note on Translations A Note on Translations

All translations from the French throughout this book, unless otherwise indicated, are my own. For ease of reading, I have chosen to only cite the original French in the main text for the novels analyzed or when difficulties of translation rendered it necessary – otherwise, quotations are given in translation. For footnotes, quotations are only given in translation for both primary texts and secondary sources (although exact references to the French are also indicated).

Conjuration Definition Compulsion Conjuration: Definition Compulsion What, has this thing appeared again to-night?/[…] What we have two nights seen./[…] look, where it comes again! Shakespeare, Hamlet1

Ghosts. Everybody knows what they are. Or perhaps nobody fully knows. For something that seems to require little explanation, for a figure so readily identifiable and with a widespread appeal, it nevertheless appears: every time one attempts to write about ghosts, the need to define them resurfaces. I could argue that one can simply do away with this exercise and move on to propose that reading ghosts and paying attention to their various reappearances in texts allows us to delve into questions of memory. Nothing surprising here either: everyone and everything seems to be haunted by the past, and memory can arguably be said to possess a certain spectral function. I am not proposing a “new” way to read ghosts – can there ever be when we speak of them? I would rather draw our attention to something that is already there and that can be read “otherwise,” that is, alongside other readings. A most productive connection between memory and ghosts can indeed be found in their respective and eerily similar relationship to time; the “anachronistic quality”2 commonly ascribed to the work of memory 1 William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act I, scene i. The Cambridge Dover Wilson Shakespeare, vol. 7, ed. John Dover Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 4–5. 2 Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), 5.

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echoes the untimely constitution of ghosts that will be discussed in the pages of this book. As considerations about the untimely – that which is out of season3 – would have it, one could certainly start the book with its epilogue, in which I discuss the importance of thinking contemporary events and their literary representations through an attention to the function of ghosts. Indeed, these words making up what would usually be called a prologue reveal little regarding the scope and literary corpus of this book. Pondering what to call these pages at the beginning of Mind the Ghost – pages that some suggested I move to a different chapter or part (or altogether abandon) – I realized that my desire to begin with the ghost’s return, with the obsession with what ghosts are, amounts to what Jacques Derrida has fittingly described as a moment of conjuration; to put it plainly, both an invitation to the ghost and its attempted exorcism.4 In the process of revising these words, I have taken to consulting books whose appeal has always been more than thematic to me; books which refuse to follow so-called conventions,5 books whose singular voice constitutes a call. When I He locates within this “anachronistic quality” the place from which memory draws “its powerful creativity, its ability to build new worlds out of the materials of older ones” (5). Max Silverman, for his part, chooses the figure of the palimpsest to emphasize “the superimposition and productive interaction of different inscriptions and the spatialization of time central to the work of memory.” Max Silverman, Palimpsestic Memory: The Holocaust and Colonialism in French and Francophone Fiction and Film (New York: Berghahn Books, 2013), 4. 3 The Oxford English Dictionary puts it this way: “At an unsuitable or improper time; unseasonably, inopportunely.” See “untimely,” Oxford English Dictionary Online. https://oed.com/. See also “intempestif,” in CNRTL, Le Trésor de la langue française informatisé. https://cnrtl.fr/definition/intempestif. “Borrowed from the Latin intempestivus ‘out of season, unconforming; inopportune, untimely.’” 4 Derrida draws on the fact that the French word “conjuration” brings together multiple meanings that are expressed by two words in English (“conjuration” and “conjurement”), that is, amongst other meanings, both “the magical incantation destined to evoke, to bring forth with the voice, to convoke a charm or a spirit” and “the magical exorcism that, on the contrary, tends to expulse the evil spirit.” Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge Classics, 1994), 50, 58; emphases in the original. Jacques Derrida, Spectres de Marx: L’État de la dette, le travail du deuil et la nouvelle Internationale (Paris: Éditions Galilée, 1993), 74, 84. 5 Peggy Kamuf explains: “An editor once put it to me that whereas a preface presents the book, an introduction presents the book’s argument […] You reminded

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turned to Peggy Kamuf’s “Introduction: Disavowals (A Foreword)” in Book of Addresses (2005), there I found an unconventional beginning, which Kamuf calls “a chance to invent a liminal text that is both and yet neither, neither introduction nor preface.”6 This “both and yet neither” that best encapsulates the terms of a spectral encounter – unsurprising since this Book of Addresses is a deferred conversation with Derrida, an “appropriation” from him7 – confirms my inkling that these pages I am writing are indeed a conjuration. Even though everything has seemingly already been said about what ghosts are, and they perhaps need no further introduction nor elucidation, the moment one mentions the word “ghost,” an image immediately draws itself in. In the abundant accompanying footnotes (functioning as a visual marker), you will find a parallel text of sorts, which speaks not only to the vast literature on the subject, but also to the prevalence of what I would like to term “definition compulsion.” Far from being uniform or unanimous, what is understood as constituting a ghost very much depends on one’s own interests, cultural background, even beliefs; Jack Fennell puts it this way: if feeling haunted “is accepted as a real phenomenon: the bone of contention, of course, is whether this phenomenon is a natural or supernatural one.”8 It follows that there is a long and rich literary tradition of ghost stories or stories about ghosts spanning all periods and cultures; while in this book I discuss contemporary texts published in French, it would be difficult – or rather impossible – to find a culture or era that did not have its own ghost stories or theories.9 Ghosts tend to make us think and react, their me of the expectation that certain books will have introductions or prefaces.” Peggy Kamuf, Book of Addresses (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), 1–2. 6 Kamuf, Book of Addresses, 2. 7 Kamuf, Book of Addresses, 7. 8 Even those who do not believe in the reality of “ghosts,” Fennel explains, do acknowledge that a “haunting” may take place, though they “assert that the cause of ‘haunting’ must be environmental, biological, or psychological.” Jack Fennell, “Ghosts, Narrative, and Noumenal Reality,” in Rough Beasts: The Monstrous in Irish Fiction, 1800–2000 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2019), 100. 9 For an overview of theories of spectrality, see, in particular, María del Pilar Blanco and Esther Peeren, eds., The Spectralities Reader: Ghosts and Haunting in Contemporary Cultural Theory (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013). With technological advancements and our reliance on digital media, we also have to account for updated forms of (global) haunting and one may now be haunted by ghosts made possible by artificial intelligence. See Tok Thomson, “Ghost Stories

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function in texts is to elicit a response: they can thus force us to face certitudes and assumptions we may hold.10 However, to complicate things even more, the ghosts I am analyzing in Mind the Ghost are not figures of the dead, at least not in the manner in which they appear in many stories, as calling out violent histories, as trying to exact revenge or as unable to fully cross over to some place yonder;11 nor do they follow religious or spiritual conceptions that may see ghosts as (ancestral or saintly) envoys from the beyond, there to comfort us, teach us something or lead us somewhere.12 The book’s from the Uncanny Valley: Androids, Souls, and the Future of Being Haunted,” in Posthuman Folklore (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2019). Our vocabulary has also expanded to include the verb “ghosting” or “being ghosted” (“to cease to respond to (a person) on social media, by text message, etc., esp. as a means of ending a relationship suddenly and without explanation.” See “ghost, v.,” Oxford English Dictionary Online. https://oed.com/. For a discussion of “ghosting” with regard to the invisibilization of precarious workers, the homeless, and the unemployed, and also as a mode of becoming, see Dominique Carlini Versini, “Corps précaire, corps spectral: Vernon Subutex de Virginie Despentes,” French Studies 76, no. 2 (2022): 235–47. 10 For a particular attention to this question with regard to gender, see Judith T. Zeitlin, The Phantom Heroine: Ghosts and Gender in Seventeenth-Century Chinese Literature (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2007); Robin Roberts, Subversive Spirits: The Female Ghost in British and American Popular Culture (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2018). 11 See, for instance, the following collections: Martin Munro, ed., The Haunted Tropics: Caribbean Ghost Stories (Kingston, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press, 2015); Michael Newton, ed., The Penguin Book of Ghost Stories: From Elizabeth Gaskell to Ambrose Bierce (London: Penguin Classics, 2010). Although in the (hexagonal) French imagination the appeal of British ghost stories is undeniable, many French short stories feature ghosts, especially those found within the genre of the fantastic [fantastique]. See Daniel Sangsue, Fantômes, esprits et autres morts-vivants: Essai de pneumatologie littéraire (Paris: Librairie José Corti, 2011). For a discussion of earlier time periods in French literature and culture, see Claude Lecouteux, Fantômes et revenants au Moyen Âge (Paris: Éditions Imago, 1986); Timothy Chesters, Ghost Stories in Late Renaissance France: Walking by Night (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 175–204; Kate Griffiths and David Evans, eds., Haunting Presences: Ghosts in French Literature and Culture (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2009); Lisa Kröger and Melanie R. Anderson, eds., The Ghostly and the Ghosted in Literature and Film (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2013). 12 See, for the French Christian context, Chesters, “Part I: Ghosts and Religion,” in Ghost Stories in Late Renaissance France, 21–100. For a study of the figure of the

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title, with its implicit reference to “gaps,” is meant to orient us towards an attention to absence, yet more specifically to how the presence of absence is inscribed in a text. Indeed, I am invested in following the question posed in Hamlet’s opening scene about the reappearing ghost – “What, has this thing appeared again to-night?”13 – to the letter, that is, resolutely against the grain that would focus on the spectral figure itself. I am interested in recurring things, that is, in textual ghosts – and not ghostly characters in texts – indeed (almost) none of the texts studied here have a “proper ghost” in them and when they do, they are not the ones that necessarily interest me. So why call these textual incidences ghosts? In fact, the very desire for a definition, the desire for understanding what ghosts are, leads us to a crucial aporia: one that should allow us, in the end, when we stumble at the point where we realize there is neither passage nor satisfying answer, to accept that understanding their function is more vital than satisfying the desire to determine, to know their nature. The obsession with definition, a warning that we may be limiting our thinking,14 also speaks to a fundamental characteristic of ghosts, namely that we are attempting to understand that which is precisely refusing to be understood. Despite this fact or rather leaning into it, in the following pages, I (as others have done) will offer a non-exhaustive florilège or a brief anthology of various theories of spectrality and approaches to the question of specters (and not necessarily in a chronological fashion) in order to highlight how productive the uncertainty about ghosts can be.15 ghost in different spiritual traditions or religions, see, for instance, Barbara Alice Mann, Spirits of Blood, Spirits of Breath: The Twinned Cosmos of Indigenous America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016); Susan Weissman, Final Judgement and the Dead in Medieval Jewish Thought (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2020); Patrick Bellegarde-Smith and Claudine Michel, eds., Haitian Vodou: Spirit, Myth, and Reality (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006); Alessandra Benedicty-Kokken, Spirit Possession in French, Haitian, and Vodou Thought: An Intellectual History (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2015). 13 The first explicit reference to the ghost in Hamlet is made by Horatio in the first scene of the play. William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act I, scene i. Cambridge Dover Wilson Shakespeare, 7.4–5. 14 For a reading of stupidity as “the wish to define,” see Bruno Penteado, “Rien à dire: Flaubert et la bêtise excrémentielle,” in Flaubert et le scandale, ed. Éric Le Calvez (Paris: Éditions Traverse(s), 2022). 15 Given my corpus, these theories are primarily drawn from Western traditions. For a discussion of Chinese traditions, see Introduction, in Karl S. Y. Kao, ed.,

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When, in the eighteenth century, Denis Diderot, a souffre-douleur of sorts for those writing about spectrality, pens his entry on ghosts for the Encyclopédie, he notes that the word “ghost” [“fantôme”] is falsely applied to almost anything with a negative connotation: “fright,” “fear” [“respect”], “false ideas […] which torment us.”16 He mentions how light, images, noises, or even bodily reactions and functions are able to make us imagine ghosts – anyone who has ever slept alone (in an empty house) knows this to be absolutely true and experiences, much like the young Marcel in the opening pages of À la recherche du temps perdu [In Search of Lost Time] (1913), the disorientation, the hope, the despair that rays of light, noises, or even figments of one’s own imagination (or readings) can bring up.17 For Diderot, both diagnosis and cure are simple, and the entry ends with the following words: “it is a bad education which produces these ghosts, it is experience and philosophy which make them disappear.”18 As we know well, and as has been observed during and in the centuries that followed the Enlightenment19 – all the more during the one directly on the heels of such claims by Diderot (and co.), the nineteenth century, where ghosts are “common currency”20 – banishing Classical Chinese Tales of the Supernatural and the Fantastic: Selections from the Third to the Tenth Century (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985). See also the following volume covering a wide range of traditions (including American, British, Chinese, Haitian, Irish, Russian, and even the haunting of our collective imagination by places like Antarctica) and time periods (medieval to contemporary): Maria Fleischhack and Elmar Schenkel, eds., Ghosts – or the (Nearly) Invisible: Spectral Phenomena in Literature and the Media (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2016); as well as Mary Keller, The Hammer and the Flute: Women, Power, and Spirit Possession (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), cited by Kyrah Malika Daniels in her review of Alessandra BenedictyKokken, Spirit Possession in French, Haitian, and Vodou Thought: An Intellectual History, in Journal of Haitian Studies 22, no. 1 (2016): 208–15. 16 Denis Diderot, “Fantôme,” in Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, etc., ed. Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert, University of Chicago: ARTFL Encyclopédie Project, 2017. https:// artflsrv03.uchicago.edu/philologic4/encyclopedie1117/. “Fantôme” is italicized throughout the entry in the original. 17 Marcel Proust, Du côté de chez Swann (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 2012), 49–52. 18 Diderot, “Fantôme”; emphasis in the original. 19 See Colin Davis, “Ghosts, Hearsay and Lies: The Strange Case(s) of Lord Lyttelton,” in Griffiths and Evans, Haunting Presences, 16. 20 Griffiths and Evans, Haunting Presences, 1. Chesters also reminds us (in a

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them from our vocabulary and from our literary and cultural imaginary has been impossible,21 and, as I will argue here, perhaps even ill-advised. For it is precisely a theoretical or philosophical engagement with ghosts that has proven to be most fruitful. Commenting on the Encyclopedist’s hostility towards the very mention of such spectral figures, Colin Davis notes that it was in Diderot’s job description “to get rid of ghosts definitely.”22 It would not be an exaggeration to suggest that he (and his fellow rationalists) failed rather spectacularly and the attempts at spectral eradication only resulted, as has been argued by Terry Castle, in a certain transposition where “[g]hosts were not exorcized – only internalized,” ensuring that instead of pushing them out, we welcomed them in, and thus “[t]he mind became subject to spectral presences.”23 This development is notably reflected in the prevalence of various metaphorical uses of the lexical field of haunting, especially with regard to violent histories and the legacies of slavery and colonialism.24 One can indeed posit that French context) that the ghost story has a much longer literary tradition: “several of its features were already embryonic by the year 1600.” Chesters, Ghost Stories in Late Renaissance France, 1. 21 María del Pilar Blanco and Esther Peeren have, in fact, noted that, when it comes to ghosts, there is even a “familiar danger of a newly popular academic concept turning into a bandwagon.” Blanco and Peeren, Introduction to The Spectralities Reader, 15. Their Reader offers a glimpse into varied elaborations of “spectralities” in fields ranging from the visual arts, sociology, and architecture to political theory, literary criticism, and theories of sexuality. While the work of Jacques Derrida is crucial for the growing interest in the topic of spectrality, Blanco and Peeren note other earlier engagements with this question, notably in such fields as gender studies and architecture. See Terry Castle, The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993) and Anthony Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992). 22 Davis, “Ghosts, Hearsay and Lies,” 16. 23 Cited by Davis, “Ghosts, Hearsay and Lies,” 16. As Davis further explains, for Castle, this move “sets the stage for Freudian psychoanalysis” (17). 24 See Munro, The Haunted Tropics: Caribbean Ghost Stories; Fiona Barclay, Writing Postcolonial France: Haunting, Literature, and the Maghreb (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2011); Mélanie Joseph-Vilain and Judith Misrahi-Barak, eds., Postcolonial Ghosts / Fantômes Post-Coloniaux (Montpellier: Presses universitaires de la Méditerranée, 2009); Gabriele Schwab, Haunting Legacies: Violent Histories and Transgenerational Trauma (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010); Banu Subramaniam, Ghost Stories for Darwin: The Science of Variation

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everyone and everything is now “haunted by” something or someone, but few mean it literally.25 As Nathacha Appanah puts it, ghosts can be understood in many different and non-mutually exclusive ways as “absences, the unsaid, childhood, dreams, death, treason.”26 The following question perhaps still remains: what are ghosts exactly? Is a specter a phantom? A phantom, a ghost? Thinking about them, writing about them means to be riddled with hesitations – embracing ambivalence and uncertainty comes with the territory. At the start of his colossal (620-page-long) study of (nineteenth-century) “literary pneumatology” [“pneumatologie littéraire”], Daniel Sangsue asks (and answers) this same gnawing question, pointing out that “[a] fuzzy object [objet flou] yields indeterminate definitions …”27 Some scholars, like Victor Hugo before them,28 are still attempting to distinguish between ghosts, spirits, specters, and revenants in order to provide a set of guidelines for recognizing what exactly one is dealing with: does it cause fright, is it looking for revenge? Is it a calming presence, or does it result in a painful encounter?29 Conversely, it bears mentioning that Jacques Derrida, the and the Politics of Diversity (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2014); Grégory Pierrot, “Facing France’s Ghosts: A Conversation with Mame-Fatou Niang,” Los Angeles Review of Books, 19 July 2021. https://lareviewofbooks.org/ article/facing-frances-ghosts-a-conversation-with-mame-fatou-niang/. 25 Analyzing print media in Argentina, Emilio Crenzel notes that “[a] review of the news published in national print media over the last 45 years reveals 2815 allusions to ghosts. That is an average of one allusion per week, lending increasingly greater substance to this spectral figure’s presence.” However, Crenzel also mentions that, included in these allusions, are some reported sightings of actual ghosts haunting places where people were tortured and murdered. Emilio Crenzel, “The Ghostly Presence of the Disappeared in Argentina,” in “Ghosts, Exhumations and Unwieldy Pasts” (special issue), Memory Studies 13, no. 3 (2020): 253–54. 26 Nathacha Appanah, Petit éloge des fantômes (Paris: Gallimard, 2016), préface. 27 Sangsue asks: “How should one define something that does not have an established or recognizable reality [réalité avérée] to it, something that not everyone is able to see, something that remains shrouded in mystery?” Sangsue, Fantômes, esprits et autres morts-vivants, 11. 28 Sangsue, Fantômes, esprits et autres morts-vivants, 19. For a thorough analysis of the various terms used from the Middle Ages up until (at least) the nineteenth century, see Sangsue’s first chapter: “Nomenclature des revenants,” 17–21. 29 See the distinctions proposed by medievalist Claude Lecouteux: “‘ghost,’ [fantôme] […] evokes the idea of illusion and phantasmagoria, ‘specter,’ […] the notion of fright or horror, the one provoked by the sneering skeleton [squelette ricanant] or the decomposing cadaver, ‘shade,’ which is mostly found in poetic

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spectral scholar par excellence, uses the terms “spectre,” “fantôme,” and even the English word ghost interchangeably (sometimes in the same sentence). He notes that they are “more or less equivalent,”30 and that they share a quality related to visibility31 – although an exception is made for “revenant,” which unequivocally points to the return of the dead. For Dominique Rabaté, ghosts [fantômes] and specters function differently at the level of narratology, specifically when it comes to questions of “narrative economy.”32 Unlike ghosts, which appear to signify “the return of the dead” or “of the repressed whose secret needs to be elucidated,” specters are defined by their liminality: “between presence and absence, the specter represents a diminished state of existence, which persists in manifesting itself intermittently.”33 I find it revealing that Rabaté, in classifying these narratological apparitions in such a way (revenants, repressed secrets, and liminal figures), touches, in a sense, upon the “two distinct, related, and to some extent incompatible vocabulary and recalls the dissolution of the body in death, ‘spirit’ [esprit], which remains vague and expresses human perplexity when faced with inexplicable phenomena […] ‘Ectoplasm’ is recent […] ‘Revenant,’ on the contrary, immediately suggests the return of the dead. The term is the expression of a simple statement of fact and does not refer to any illusion.” Lecouteux, Fantômes et revenants au Moyen Âge, 7–8. Sangsue also partially refers to these definitions. Sangsue, Fantômes, esprits et autres morts-vivants, 19–20. 30 Jacques Derrida and Bernard Stiegler, “Spectrographies,” in Echographies of Television: Filmed Interviews, trans. Jennifer Bajorek (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002), 115. Jacques Derrida and Bernard Stiegler, “Spectrographies,” in Échographies de la télévision: Entretiens filmés (Paris: Éditions Galilée/Institut national de l’audiovisuel, 1996), 129. 31 Derrida highlights the importance of their connection to what is visible, what is seen, what is “doing” the seeing: “specter, as distinct from ghost [revenant], speaks of the spectacle. The specter is first and foremost something visible. It is of the visible, but of the invisible visible, it is the visibility of a body which is not present in flesh and blood […] Phantom preserves the same reference to phainesthai, to appearing for vision, to the brightness of day, to phenomenality.” Derrida and Stiegler, Echographies of Television, 115; emphasis in the original; Derrida and Stiegler, Échographies de la télévision, 129; emphasis in the original. This is also Patrick R. Crowley’s wager in The Phantom Image, in which the figure of the ghost is deployed to think about what it means to see. Patrick R. Crowley, The Phantom Image: Seeing the Dead in Ancient Rome (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019). 32 Dominique Rabaté, Désirs de disparaître: Une traversée du roman français contemporain (Trois-Rivières: Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières, 2015), 47. 33 Rabaté, Désirs de disparaître, 47.

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sources” of what has come to be known as “hauntology,”34 and to which I will (re)turn in the first chapter. A rather cursory review of recent critical texts dealing with ghosts further informs us that “[h]aunting can take many forms”;35 that “ghosts and hauntings” can be “metaphysical or psychological, individual or collective”;36 that “their characteristics evoke the idea of the unconscious”;37 that “one cannot say whether ghosts belong inside or outside us or whether they should be considered in the context of mental or bodily life”;38 “that the current fascination with ghosts arises out of a general postmodern suspicion of meta-narratives accentuated by millennial anxiety”;39 that specters stand in for “all technocultural apparatuses”;40 that a ghost can be “a social figure, and investigating it can lead to that dense site where history and subjectivity make social life”;41 that ghosts represent “an image deprived of a body, which explains the difficulty one encounters when attempting to describe it or represent it, and it justifies the more or less ingenious tricks, inventions or codes that are deployed by writers and artists […] to give a form to this figure of the formless”;42 that they are even a marketable commodity like “vampires or self-help”;43 that ghosts “have been consigned to the task of representing what is not to be believed”;44 that “[w]e know there 34 Colin Davis, “État Présent: Hauntology, Specters and Phantoms,” French Studies 59, no. 3 (2005): 373. 35 María del Pilar Blanco, Ghost-Watching American Modernity: Haunting, Landscape, and the Hemispheric Imagination (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012), 1. 36 Barclay, Writing Postcolonial France, xii. 37 Roberts, Subversive Spirits, 7. 38 Sarah Wood, Without Mastery: Reading and Other Forces (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014), 105. 39 Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, “from Introduction: The Spectral Turn,” in Blanco and Peeren, The Spectralities Reader, 63. 40 Serge Margel, La Société du spectral (Paris: Nouvelles Éditions Lignes, 2012), back cover. 41 Avery F. Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 8. 42 Jean-David Jumeau-Lafond, Preface to Naissance du fantôme (Paris: Éditions La Bibliothèque, 2002), 6. 43 Stéphane Audeguy, ed., Introduction to “Des fantômes” (special issue), Nouvelle Revue Française 602 (2012): 7. 44 Peter Buse and Andrew Stott, eds., Introduction to Ghosts: Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis, History (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999), 3.

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is nothing there, but we fear or hope or believe that there might be”;45 that “the ghost is precisely that of which the existence consists in its not quite existing”;46 that ghosts are “the trace of being haunted by death, being afraid of it” [“trace d’une hantise de la mort”];47 or that “[t]he experience of being haunted is one of noticing absences in the present, recognizing fissures, gaps and points of crossover.”48 Still, “the question […] [of] definition […] has no simple answer,”49 and we must, for a number of reasons, be satisfied with its open-endedness. Rather than focusing on whether or not one should call this thing, specter, phantom, or ghost, time is better spent on the significance of the etymological link shared between phantoms and phenomena: both are said to appear, and can thus be read.50 Indeed, I am more interested in Avery Gordon’s proposition that “the ghost is just the sign […] that tells you a haunting is taking place.”51 The fact that you can “see” what is at once there and not there, or that you can, through the reappearing figure of the ghost, aspire to understand what has disappeared – what has been lost – is crucial. For a ghost can, then, be perceived or glimpsed [entrevu] (yet not defined); in reappearing textually as a sign of both presence and absence (or rather the presence of absence), it disjoints teleologically motivated textual chronology, and, in doing so, I would argue, it becomes constitutive of the very texts it purports to disrupt. And it is precisely this resurgence that interests me here: I wish to consider what it means exactly for a text to be haunted, taking into account that not only are the ghosts in the text, but they are also the text themselves. I echo here Thomas Keenan’s observation that textual ghosts are “trouble to read”: “The ghosts may be linguistic, but that does not make them any easier to read. Indeed, precisely to the extent that they are placeholders, markers, catachreses, they become more linguistic 45 Davis, “Ghosts, Hearsay and Lies,” 25. 46 Colin Davis, Haunted Subjects: Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis, and the Return of the Dead (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 19. 47 Sébastien Rongier, Théorie des fantômes (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2016), 9. 48 Katy Shaw, Hauntology: The Presence of the Past in Twenty-First Century English Literature (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 2. 49 Kröger and Anderson, Introduction to The Ghostly and the Ghosted in Literature and Film, xii. 50 See Derrida and Stiegler, Échographies de la télévision, 129. Cited in footnote 31. 51 Gordon, Ghostly Matters, 8.

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and more trouble to read.”52 Ghosts are trouble in the sense that they resist attempts to be pinned down and to be determined once and for all. In other words, they require our acceptance that their spectral nature cannot be fully resolved or even entirely ascertained: textual ghosts function as disruptors and can be seen as a sign of necessary loose ends that demand further reading, further observation, as well as something left in suspense, en souffrance. Ghosts could perhaps be understood as “[p]laceholders for bits of thought and life difficult to think,”53 to borrow the words of Thangam Ravindranathan about animals’ furtive appearances in (contemporary French) fiction. Ravindranathan’s Behold an Animal (2020) takes readers on a melancholy journey of witnessing the elusive yet generative place animals occupy – a place all the more spectral given animals’ accelerated disappearance from our world. This is not a facile comparison; indeed, the ghost [âme] and the animal, Marie Darrieussecq reminds us, share “the same stem, a stem of air: a breath, what animates, what breathes” [“la même racine, une racine d’air: le souffle, ce qui anime, ce qui respire”];54 it is rather an inkling that it is through such subtle rapprochements [bringing together] of what is perpetually out of our grasp, that something of the ghost, as what is trouble to read, can be encountered, if ever so fleetingly. I am nevertheless aware of the (potential or actual) risk of seeing everything as a ghost, which, as is the case of memory – another point of focus in this book – could be “in danger of becoming a ‘catch-all’ category.”55 Yet, if we accept that no one definition can encompass all that can be subsumed under the idea, the concept, the word – even the name56 – “ghost,” we can indeed shift our inquiry to its function. For 52 Thomas Keenan, Fables of Responsibility: Aberrations and Predicaments in Ethics and Politics (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), 133. Keenan’s observation is about the ghosts found in Marx’s theory of capital. 53 Thangam Ravindranathan, Behold an Animal: Four Exorbitant Readings (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2020), 216. 54 Marie Darrieussecq, “Mon mot préféré,” Contemporary French and Francophone Studies 16, no. 5 (2012): 725. 55 Barbie Zelizer, “Reading the Past against the Grain: The Shape of Memory Studies,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 12 (1995): 235, cited by Astrid Erll, Memory in Culture, trans. Sara B. Young (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 6. 56 As Julian Wolfreys suggests, there is an important connection between names and identity: “Yet this ‘strange name’ – spectre – names nothing as such […] it names nothing which is neither nothing nor not nothing.” Julian Wolfreys,

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many scholars, the very act of talking about ghosts means thinking about what it means to interpret, to analyze, and to identify a figure as having spectral properties. If we focus on what a ghost does rather than is in itself (trying to determine its ontology), we will, first, notice its effects on us for we can readily identify, affectively speaking, the feeling of being haunted. The question that should follow is how is it that we are haunted? There is something very specific about the ways that a ghost operates in a text – intimately linked to what could be described as a disruption that lingers. I am interested in how certain images, objects, names or sites function according to a spectral logic expressed in the disruption of linear and teleological conceptions of time and of textual chronology. And when I speak of “logic” it is – one should keep in mind – always meant as a paradoxical statement for the specter resists logic. In the seventh session of Derrida’s 2002–2003 seminar La Bête et le souverain [The Beast and the Sovereign] (2010), this logic is explicitly tied to these “bits of thought and life difficult to think.”57 The session takes place two days after Maurice Blanchot’s funeral, Derrida’s thought companion and friend. For Derrida, Blanchot is someone who “never ceased dwelling in these places that are uninhabitable for thought.”58 Blanchot, in Derrida’s reading, was always invested in questioning “the impossible and […] the possibility of the impossible,” as well as “the fictional, even literary space that accepts the living of death, becoming living dead, and even the phantasm of the one buried alive [l’enterré vif].”59 Accordingly, Derrida continues to think with and through Blanchot’s lifelong philosophical and literary engagement with the question of death. Understandably, the session is haunted by Blanchot’s own words, all quoted at length – as if Blanchot were the invited specter with whom we could commune through reading. The moment that concerns me here is Derrida’s commentary on a long quotation from La Part du feu [The Work of Fire] (1949) (pages 89–91), “Preface: On Textual Haunting,” in Blanco and Peeren, The Spectralities Reader, 71; emphasis in the original. 57 Ravindranathan, Behold an Animal, 216. 58 Jacques Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, vol. 2, trans. Geoffrey Bennington, ed. Michel Lisse, Marie-Louise Mallet, and Ginette Michaud (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 180. Jacques Derrida, Séminaire: La Bête et le souverain, vol. 2 (2002–2003) (Paris: Éditions Galilée, 2010), 257. 59 Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, 2.180. Derrida, La Bête et le souverain, 2.257.

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in which Blanchot (reading Kafka) exposes the logic of “reversal,” advancing an aporetic conception of interpretation as the impossibility of “affixing” one meaning to texts that deal in “negation.”60 Derrida immediately poses the terms of his own study of Blanchot. He begins by reiterating what Blanchot had been hinting at, that if there is a “logic of the phantasm [fantasme],” which encompasses “living death, the ghost or the revenant […] cremation or the posthumous,” it “is not strictly speaking a logic.”61 It can only be one that “resists, defies and dislocates logos and logic in all its figures.”62 Derrida goes even further in positing that “[t]here is therefore no logic or logos of the phantasm or of the ghost or of the spectral”; “unless the logos itself be precisely the phantasm, the very element, the origin and the resource of the phantasm itself, the form and the formation of the phantasm, or even of the revenant.”63 How, then, can we think logos (reason, discourse, speech) in terms of ghosts? How does it haunt – and how is it haunted? This (non)logic of the specter embedded in Derrida’s writings is aporetic indeed and grounds the entire approach to ghosts in this book. It can be said to structure (a thought, a text, an invitation), even as it de-structures it, turns it on its head, reorganizes its reach. The disappearing and reappearing ghost-like figures of this book – whether objects, names, or sites – can be identified, I argue, as a source of haunting: that is, even when there is no “proper” or literal ghost or spectral figure to be found in a given novel, readers still may feel haunted, feel their sense of time disrupted by these non-ghost-like ghosts. Readers can be haunted by memories that are not memories of their own past as they become, in the act of reading, the bearers of the memory of the text. As Kamuf explains, “precisely because it does not begin by posing the ontological existence of ghosts,” hauntology, as Derrida conceives of it, makes it possible “to address the haunting figure without succumbing to the paralyzing fear that the figure really 60 Maurice Blanchot, The Work of Fire, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), 83–84, cited by Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, 2.183. Maurice Blanchot, La Part du feu (Paris: Gallimard, 1949), 89–91, cited by Derrida, La Bête et le souverain, 2.260. 61 Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, 2.184. Derrida, La Bête et le souverain, 2.262. 62 Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, 2.185; emphasis in the original. Derrida, La Bête et le souverain, 2.262. 63 Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, 2.185; emphasis in the original. Derrida, La Bête et le souverain, 2.262.

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exists somewhere.”64 If haunting, etymologically speaking, is understood as something done “habitually,”65 we must ask what, in certain texts, keeps recurring, reminding, reappearing, and disappearing – though out of season – over and over. In focusing on these figures’ disruptive function in given texts, we can better argue, pragmatically, for a certain specificity in determining what can (re)act and (re)appear as a ghost, and we thus avoid ghosts standing in for everything and anything. We can therefore “le[t] ghosts be ghosts”66 – that is, respecting their nonlogic of différance, accepting that they disrupt narratives, temporal and ontological understandings, concepts and certitudes, that they cannot be read only literally or apprehended on the supposed “surface” of texts,67 but that they need to be read, interpreted, analyzed, and not merely described. In other words, our task is not to posit what they are, but to see what they do.

64 Kamuf, Book of Addresses, 221–22. 65 The Oxford English Dictionary indicates that “it is not clear whether the earliest sense in French and English was to practise habitually (an action, etc.) or to frequent habitually (a place). The order here is therefore provisional.” “haunting,” Oxford English Dictionary Online. https://oed.com/. 66 Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus, “Surface Reading: An Introduction,” Representations 108, no. 1 (2009): 13; emphasis in the original. 67 While Best and Marcus argue that surface reading “lets ghosts be ghosts,” they fail to account for the fact that “ghosts being ghosts” entails interpretation rather than description. For a brief discussion of “surface reading,” as it relates to spectrality, see Sonja Stojanovic, “Marie Darrieussecq’s Ghost,” Symposium: A Quarterly Journal in Modern Literatures 69, no. 4 (2015): 190–202.

Introduction Timeshells Introduction: Timeshells

Tu vois, le temps fait son œuvre. On dit que le temps fait son œuvre. Mais parfois l’œuvre du temps, c’est affreux. You see, time does its work. One says that time does its work. But sometimes, the work of time is awful. Sarah Chiche, Saturne1

The untimely death of Georges Perec, a few days shy of his forty-sixth birthday in March 1982, haunts this book in several ways. Born in 1936, Perec could have very conceivably been what we still call, in these early decades of the twenty-first century, a contemporary writer – we are in fact missing what could have been an entirely different body of work from him. Instead, he now firmly belongs to the past and is considered so far back from us, from “now,” that “the time is ripe” to declare him, as Warren Motte does, “the finest French writer of the twentieth century.”2 And I would tend to agree, although, given the circumstances, you certainly understand that I am not exactly an impartial observer. Such authors as Hélène Cixous (b. 1937), Patrick Modiano (b. 1945), Lydie Salvayre (b. 1946), and Leïla Sebbar (b. 1941), studied within these pages under the umbrella term “contemporary fiction in French,” could, in fact, be considered Perec’s contemporaries 1 Sarah Chiche, Saturne (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2020), 146. 2 Warren Motte, “Reading Georges Perec,” Context 11 (n.d.). www. dalkeyarchive.com/reading-georges-perec/.

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(or near-contemporaries), for they were born within a decade of him. Susan Rubin Suleiman, who was born a mere three years after Perec and who reads his work thinking about her own experiences as a Jewish child during World War II, notes that, in Hungarian, the word for “contemporary” can literally be translated into English as “‘age-partner’: contemporaries are people of the same age, who have experienced the same historical events.”3 Other authors of this corpus, “even if they are much […] younger,” such as Jakuta Alikavazovic (b. 1979), Jérôme Ferrari (b. 1968), and Cécile Wajsbrot (b. 1954), can be said to have “for a number of years breathed the same air and participated in at least some aspects of the same material culture,” and perhaps shared “some common bond of experience, interest, curiosity, or allegiance” with Perec, while Kaouther Adimi (b. 1986) and Gaël Faye (b. 1982) were simply born too late to “intersect” with him.4 Yet, as Suleiman advances in Risking Who One Is (1994), her proposal to investigate what it could “mean to ‘be’ contemporary,” thinking solely in terms of coinciding ages is not enough.5 In recent years (or rather already decades), the very notion of the contemporary – what it is, what it does, what it means – has been a matter of (renewed) critical interest, scrutiny, and even “urgency,”6 while also proving to be a slippery notion that, like ghosts, evades definition. One could emphatically say alongside Suleiman that consulting “[t]he dictionary is of limited help: ‘of the time, with the time.’”7 In the incisive essay On Writing a Literary History of the Contemporary, or What is, or Was, “the Contemporary,” and Should We Keep Calling It That? (2018), which interrogates the wide-ranging uses of this term, Margaret-Anne Hutton also reminds us of the ensuing pitfalls of having one word used sometimes as a noun, sometimes as an adjective, and sometimes to refer to either a 3 Susan Rubin Suleiman, Risking Who One Is: Encounters with Contemporary Art and Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 4. 4 Suleiman, Risking Who One Is, 4–5. Faye was born in August 1982 and Perec died a few months earlier. 5 Suleiman, Risking Who One Is, 4. For a discussion of the significance and legacies of Suleiman’s book for contemporary French studies, see Lia Brozgal and Sara Kippur, eds., Introduction to Being Contemporary: French Literature, Culture and Politics Today (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2016), 1–5. 6 Brozgal and Kippur, Being Contemporary, 1. 7 Suleiman, Risking Who One Is, 4.

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concept or a time period, or both.8 As we have seen in the Conjuration concerning the question of the definition of ghosts, despite the fact that they also seem to evade it, the drive to understand exactly what they are haunts much of the criticism dedicated to them. In much the same way, the desire to know “when” or “what” the contemporary is can be said to haunt contemporary criticism or theory concerned with the contemporary. Discussing ghosts, discussing the contemporary always means discussing more than what seems to be at hand in the dictionary. Even when we say contemporary to us, the question remains: but contemporary to us when? Indeed, it makes more sense to think the contemporary, as Theodore Martin suggests, as a “conceptual problem.”9 His goal in Contemporary Drift (2017) is to show that it is not a question of definition, but rather a question of determining what happens when there is no easy definition, and he is not providing us with an answer or suggesting a given framework that could be applied at will. Instead, he proposes “to explore the consequences […] of how difficult the question is to settle.”10 I would like to expand on this by adding ghosts to the mix; I contend that an attention to ghosts and to the spectral function expressed in and through certain fictions lead us to think more pointedly about the contemporary as a haunted time or a haunted (conceptual) space. While trying to determine when the contemporary begins yields more questions than answers,11 when it comes to French literature specifically, “there is a broad consensus” that sees the contemporary as “the period starting in 1980,”12 that is, as Hutton has described, decisively after or 8 Margaret-Anne Hutton, On Writing a Literary History of the Contemporary, or What is, or Was, “the Contemporary,” and Should We Keep Calling It That? (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2018), 35. 9 Theodore Martin, Contemporary Drift: Genre, Historicism, and the Problem of the Present (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017), 2. 10 Martin, Contemporary Drift, 1. Martin focuses on the analysis of “genre” and on how the transformation of something as “easily” identifiable as a Western or a detective novel (among others) mutates in a contemporary context; he shows how this transformation makes it possible to think about what exactly is meant by what we understand as “our” present, as what we consider “contemporary” to us. 11 See Martin, Contemporary Drift, 2; Hutton, On Writing a Literary History of the Contemporary, 36. 12 Margaret-Anne Hutton, ed., Redefining the Real: The Fantastic in Contemporary French and Francophone Women’s Writing (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2009), Introduction, 3.

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“against” the nouveau roman.13 What is of note with this particular vision is that it intersects with or emerges alongside a shift in the “regime of historicity” [“régime d’historicité”] in post-war France;14 that is, a different way to think time. Depending on one’s ideological allegiances, this is a welcome or decried shift. For François Dosse, it follows from “the demise [la forclusion] of the future, the vanishing [l’évanouissement] of collective projects and the withdrawal [le repli] into a present that has become stagnant, marked by the tyranny of memory and the rehashing of the past.”15 While for him this change in the attitude towards the future or the past is viewed in a negative light, especially when it comes to the question of memory (echoing the mistrust of many historians towards it), it is precisely such a “disoriented time” [“temps désorienté”]16 that is so propitious for a thinking about ghosts. Such a shift to a different paradigm in the thinking about time (in the 1980s) goes as far as to mark, for Aleida Assmann, the end of the twentieth century.17 Hence, when, the contemporary is said to begin, it does so at the same time as the move away from what Assmann has termed the “modern time regime” with its “linear and irreversible ‘time’s arrow.’”18 The reason I am spending some moments on 13 Hutton, On Writing a Literary History of the Contemporary, 16. 14 François Dosse, La Saga des intellectuels français 1944–1989, vol. 1 (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 2018), 17. While Dosse does not explicitly mention historian François Hartog, this is a reference to his work on the relationship to time. See François Hartog, Régimes d’historicité: Présentisme et expériences du temps (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2003). 15 Dosse, La Saga des intellectuels français, 1.17. 16 Dosse, La Saga des intellectuels français, 1.17. Dosse writes: “A disoriented time has taken over a linear or teleological time” [“Un temps désorienté s’est substitué à un temps fléché”]. 17 Assmann argues that “not only did the twentieth century end in the 1980s, but so too did the unquestioned importance of the modernization paradigm.” Aleida Assmann, Is Time Out of Joint? On the Rise and Fall of the Modern Time Regime, trans. Sarah Clift (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2020), 8. This view is to be contrasted with recent novels that explicitly recast debates to determine the beginning of the twenty-first century. See, for instance, Jean-Philippe Toussaint’s Les Émotions (2020), in which some characters argue for Brexit as a marker rather than 9/11. Jean-Philippe Toussaint, Les Émotions (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 2020), p. 26. 18 Assmann explains, expanding on Hartog’s “regime of historicity” [“régime d’historicité”]: “With the idea of ‘time regime,’ I mean to suggest a complex of deeply held cultural presuppositions, values, and decisions that guide human desires, action, emotions, and assessments, without individuals’ necessarily being

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this transition or rupture, this incision in the fabric of time, or how we think and experience it, is that it brings to the fore another of these shifty concepts that refuses to be pinned down, namely the third “term” that concerns me in this book: memory. Andreas Huyssen puts it this way: “as soon as we try to define it, it starts slipping and sliding, eluding attempts to grasp it either culturally, sociologically, or scientifically.”19 Such a change in our conceptions of time – or, more precisely, temporality, how we experience time – is, in fact, closely related to how we can approach the study of memory or the very field of memory studies; Huyssen emphasizes that if in this contemporary moment we are particularly obsessed with questions of memory, it “may well be an indication that our ways of thinking and living temporality itself are undergoing a significant shift.”20 My position is that, by focusing on the first figure or “term,” the ghost, we can better attempt to untangle – or perhaps further tangle, albeit productively – both questions of time and memory. Yet let us return for a moment longer to the contemporary. In the last two decades, the question “what is the contemporary?” has been posed with some insistence. Definitive responses are nevertheless lacking, despite (or perhaps as a result of) stemming from different disciplinary attempts at tackling this subject.21 In his inaugural address “What Is the Contemporary?” divided into seven short musings, Giorgio Agamben starts his own questioning under the aegis of Friedrich Nietzsche’s short preface to “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life,”22 the second of the Untimely Meditations (1874). Agamben suggests that, if one follows Nietzsche, being contemporary means to have a “relationship aware of these foundations” (9). Assmann immediately points out that even though at first it seems as if “the concept of time borrowed from physics” can make it seem like “an objective dimension” and thus being “outside of human control and manipulation,” upon further analysis, one notices that, far to the contrary, “this temporal order becomes imbued with specifically modern cultural meanings, values, and imperatives.” Assmann, Is Time Out of Joint? 14. 19 Andreas Huyssen, Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 3. 20 Huyssen, Present Pasts, 4. 21 For a thorough investigation of the various disciplinary and terminological impasses and issues, see Lionel Ruffel, Brouhaha: Les mondes du contemporain (Lagrasse: Verdier éditions, 2016); Lionel Ruffel, ed., Qu’est-ce que le contemporain? (Nantes: Éditions Cécile Defaut, 2010); as well as Hutton, On Writing a Literary History of the Contemporary, 9. 22 Agamben will not actually discuss the meditation itself in this text.

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with time that adheres to it through a disjunction and an anachronism.”23 It means keeping one’s distance from the epoch one lives in without resorting to “nostalgia” or an impossible yearning to have been born in a different era, and, at the same time, it means knowing that one “belongs to” and “cannot escape [one’s] own time.”24 Reading this statement with the subject of ghosts in mind immediately brings up one of the key tenets of what Jacques Derrida has termed “hauntology,” and to which I will return at length in Chapter 1: in order to be able to begin thinking about spectrality and ghosts, one has to start with a radical conception of time, an understanding of time as disorderly as the one that Hamlet memorably decries as “out of joint.”25 Derrida describes it as follows: “The disjointure in the very presence of the present, this sort of non-contemporaneity of present time with itself (this radical untimeliness or this anachrony on the basis of which we are trying here to think the ghost).”26 While Agamben, for his part, mentions neither Hamlet nor Derrida’s thinking about time and the contemporary, he nevertheless calls forth a very similar image of ‘disjointment’ in his second musing, a disjointment that is key for locating how one can be contemporary. If we think of Hamlet’s time as exemplified by the hinges of a door coming undone (as in the French translation “[t]ime is off its hinges”27 [“le temps est hors de ses gonds”]),28 Agamben – glossing on Alain Badiou’s reading of Ossip Mandelstam’s poem “The Century” [“vek”] – calls for understanding time as a beast whose back and vertebrae are broken (“the shattered backbone of time”29). In his reading, the (male)

23 Giorgio Agamben, “What Is the Contemporary?” in Nudities, trans. David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010), 11; emphasis removed. 24 Agamben, “What Is the Contemporary?”11. 25 “The time is out of joint, O cursed spite,/That ever I was born to set it right!” William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act I, scene v. The Cambridge Dover Wilson Shakespeare, vol. 7, ed. John Dover Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 33. 26 Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge Classics, 1994), 29; emphasis in the original; Jacques Derrida, Spectres de Marx: L’État de la dette, le travail du deuil et la nouvelle Internationale (Paris: Éditions Galilée, 1993), 52. 27 Derrida, Specters of Marx, 20. 28 Derrida, Spectres de Marx, 42. 29 Agamben, “What Is the Contemporary?”12.

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poet occupies a privileged and impossible place, insofar as he must both attempt to repair this fracture and be the fracture himself. The poet is someone who can thus be said, like the young Nietzsche earlier, to be “out of joint” [“déphasé”] with his time: “[t]he poet, insofar as he is contemporary, is this fracture, is at once that which impedes time from composing itself and the blood that must suture this break or this wound.”30 Agamben stresses that this is not only a task for stitching together time as experienced in a collective sense, but also the very personal experience of time in the poet’s own life. In this vision of time, we are unsurprisingly haunted by Hamlet’s lament, in which he sees himself – like Mandelstam’s poet – as the one who (cursed as he may be) must “set it right.”31 Literature, it appears, remains a privileged interlocutor for thinking about questions of shifting or shifty temporalities and “time regimes.” Literary texts encourage us to approach, experience, and think time in non-linear terms; it is no coincidence that historians and philosophers repeatedly turn to fiction – Hamlet most famously – to think this relationship. We can also think of Jean-Paul Sartre’s Roquentin in La Nausée [Nausea] (1938) and his own troubled relationship to time, which Dosse links to the stagnation of history at a time when the world in the late 1930s is again on the cusp of war; the ennui felt by the protagonist is expressed in this double movement, this desire to be removed from the present while being completely overwhelmed and eaten up by it.32 Or, we can summarize it with the words of Roland Barthes, who posits that there is indeed a potentially paradoxical relationship, “an unexpected link between the contemporary and the untimely”33 [un rapport insoupçonné entre le contemporain et l’intempestif] – sometimes also rendered as the contradictory (and possibly apocryphal) declaration that “[t]he contemporary is the untimely.”34 This same proposition traverses my thinking 30 Agamben, “What Is the Contemporary?”12; emphasis in the original. 31 William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act I, scene v. Cambridge Dover Wilson Shakespeare, 7.33. 32 Dosse, La Saga des intellectuels français, 25–26. 33 Roland Barthes, How to Live Together: Novelistic Simulations of Some Everyday Spaces, trans. Kate Briggs (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 6; Roland Barthes, Comment vivre ensemble: Simulations romanesques de quelques espaces quotidiens. Notes de cours et de séminaires au Collège de France, 1976–1977, ed. Claude Coste (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2002), 36. 34 As cited by Agamben, “What Is the Contemporary?”10. In the French translation this is rendered as “Le contemporain est l’inactuel.” Giorgio Agamben,

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about ghosts: what is the temporality made possible by ghosts? To a certain extent, it is also the very resistance to a singular definition (much like in the case of ghosts) that interests me here: reading literature makes it possible to think about the contemporary not (only) as an ever-shifting category, but (also) as a conception of time that affords incredible literary possibilities, not the least of which is the potential for spectral communication, as, I argue, the work of Hélène Cixous highlights, and to which I will turn in Part I. And I propose to keep in mind the relentless questionings this notion of “being contemporary” elicits, particularly with regard to the fraught relationship one can entertain with one’s own time: the paradoxical, the anachronistic, the untimely, or the ill-timed temporality that points to a certain spectral anatomy or constitution of “the contemporary.” I am struck here by the suggestion made by Vivian Liska to Margaret-Anne Hutton about a necessary complementary volume to her Literary History of the Contemporary that would trace the “literary history of the untimely” and which would have to entail “an exploration of when and why texts produced across the centuries ‘achieve legibility.’”35 While this is not my focus here, I see in this potential project an emphasis on the task of the reader in making meaning of texts, something with which I am concerned in these pages. As my analysis of the work of Cixous will show, reading makes one become untimely and paradoxically therefore contemporary with certain texts or characters. One could also say – in probing the links between the untimely and the contemporary – that the contemporary is in fact spectral: to think the contemporary is to elaborate own’s own theory of ghosts. Qu’est-ce que le contemporain? trans. Maxime Rovere (Paris: Payot & Rivages, 2008), 8. The sentence in its English translation is also cited as an epigraph by Brozgal and Kippur, Introduction to Being Contemporary, 1, with reference to Agamben’s own quotation of Barthes. At this time, I have not been able to find this exact quotation by Barthes in the notes to his lectures at the Collège de France, where Agamben says he found the sentence, and only found the declaration cited prior about the “unexpected link.” I am sending a message in a footnote using Patrick Modiano’s method of sending signals in books, hoping someone will reach out – see, for instance, his novel Pour que tu ne te perdes pas dans le quartier [So You Don’t Get Lost in the Neighborhood] (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 2014) – and wonder if any of my readers have found Barthes’s quote stating that “le contemporain est l’inactuel/l’intempestif.” 35 Hutton, On Writing a Literary History of the Contemporary, 29–30; emphasis in the original.

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Thinking about time and our relationship to it also means asking how one remembers. Assmann indeed prompts us to be attentive to the generative power of the aforementioned “shift […] in the structure of Western temporality,” particularly given the fact that we live in the aftermath of several wars and genocides and that “the burden of the violent histories of the twentieth century weighs heavily on the present, demanding attention and recognition and forcing us to take responsibility and to develop new forms of remembrance and commemoration.”36 If Pierre Nora’s Lieux de mémoire [Realms of Memory] (1984–1992), which can be said to have “helped stimulate a boom in the study of memory,”37 already posited updated forms of remembrance in the move from “milieux” to “lieux” [sites],38 his project has rightly been criticized for “put[ting] forward a starkly limited conception of the nation,” and this deliberate framing meant that it was “purged of many of its imperial adventures and minoritarian inflections – purged, in short, of phenomena that trouble the linear narrative of historical progress and the stark opposition between history and memory.”39 Nora’s project (inspired by the work of Maurice Halbwachs on collective memory), although in many aspects foundational,40 is also lacking, conceptually speaking, by failing to account for the transmission of memory beyond “hexagonal” or 36 Assmann, Is Time Out of Joint? 5. 37 Michael Rothberg, “Introduction: Between Memory and Memory: From Lieux de mémoire to Noeuds de mémoire,” Yale French Studies 118/119 (2010): 4. 38 Pierre Nora, “Entre mémoire et histoire. La problématique des lieux,” in Les Lieux de mémoire, vol. 1, ed. Pierre Nora (Paris: Éditions Gallimard Quarto, 1997), 23. For Nora, the disappearance of “milieux,” or environments of collective memory [“collectivité-mémoire”] (such as, for instance, peasant culture, in which remembering is lived as and through tradition rather than as a cognitive act of memory) means that there needs to be a deliberate collective transmission happening around certain institutionalized events, sites, traditions, etc. 39 Rothberg, “Introduction: Between Memory and Memory,” 4. See also the critique by Christiane Taubira with regard to the importance of social justice. Christiane Taubira, “Mémoires universelles?” in Rwanda: Pour un dialogue des mémoires, ed. Jean Mouttapa (Paris: Albin Michel, 2007), 147–64, cited by Odile M. Cazenave and Patricia Célérier, “The Practice of Memory,” in Contemporary Francophone African Writers and the Burden of Commitment (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2011), 52–55. 40 For a discussion of Halbwachs’s and Nora’s contributions to memory studies, and their legacies, see Astrid Erll, “The Invention of Cultural Memory: A Short History of Memory Studies,” in Memory in Culture, trans. Sara B. Young (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 13–37.

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national borders and in a globalized and postcolonial world. Responses that explore the “more or less tangible memory traces linked to the colonial,”41 such as the volume Postcolonial Realms of Memory: Sites and Symbols in Modern France (2020), edited by Etienne Achille, Charles Forsdick, and Lydie Moudileno, indeed highlight Nora’s glaring omissions, erasures, and shortcomings;42 they draw our attention to such sites of collective (postcolonial) memory like the massacre of Algerians in Paris on 17 October 1961, which will be discussed in Chapter 7. Another such shift in thinking about the forms that mnemonic projects can take derives from the work of Michael Rothberg, who focuses on how the memory of different events or conflicts can show up in unexpected spaces. Rothberg summarizes the stakes of such a framework in the epilogue to Multidirectional Memory (2009) by bringing forth the image of a tangled knot: “Memories are mobile; histories are implicated in each other. […] The only way forward is through their entanglement.”43 Accordingly, in the French and Francophone context, proposing to shift from “realms or sites of memory” [“lieux de mémoire”] to “knots of memory” [“nœuds de mémoire”], Rothberg, Debarati Sanyal, and Max Silverman highlight the work of “collective or cultural memory beyond the framework of the imagined community of the nation-state.”44 Thinking memory through “rhizomatic networks of temporality”45 and as open to different experiences and frames of reference makes it possible to be attentive to the ways in which memory resonates across generations and traditions. It allows scholars to track how the representation of one event may influence the manner of commemorating another, to consider what “entanglements” might be at hand. In addition, this way of thinking memory invites much-needed collaborative scholarly work (as called for by the editors),46 and, to my mind, it also positions readers 41 Etienne Achille, Charles Forsdick, and Lydie Moudileno, eds., Postcolonial Realms of Memory: Sites and Symbols in Modern France (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2020), 9. 42 See also the forthcoming volume edited by Siham Bouamer, Denis M. Provencher, and Ryan K. Schroth, Queer Realms of Memory: Archiving LGBTQ Sites and Symbols in the French National Narrative (Liverpool University Press, forthcoming). 43 Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), 313. 44 Rothberg, “Introduction: Between Memory and Memory,” 7. 45 Rothberg, “Introduction: Between Memory and Memory,” 7. 46 Rothberg, “Introduction: Between Memory and Memory,” 12.

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(of literary or memory texts) as valuable interlocutors whose own attention to possible echoes across temporalities, events, and traditions inscribes them as key participants in the meaning-making and memory transmission processes. The position of the viewer (or the reader) has also been explored by Alison Landsberg in the context of memory transmission through mass culture. At a time when survivors of wars, massacres, and genocides are disappearing, Landsberg asks, in Prosthetic Memory (2004), this provocative question: “Is it possible for the Holocaust to become a bodily memory for those who did not live through it?”47 Turning to media, events, museums, and technological advancements, she traces the construction of what she calls “transferential spaces,” defined precisely – in an answer to her own question – as spaces “in which people are invited to enter into experiential relationships to events through which they themselves did not live.”48 These relationships are built through empathy elicited by guided sensory experiences, so that “these spaces might actually instill in us ‘symptoms’ or ‘prosthetic memories.’”49 For Landsberg, there is, it follows, a potential for a political and ethical engagement in the present with someone else’s past, for “prosthetic memory creates the conditions for ethical thinking precisely by encouraging people to feel connected to, while recognizing the alterity of, the ‘other.’”50 However, as Nicki Hitchcott has shown in the case of the genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda, certain types of prosthetic memories, as mediated by mass culture, can be harmful when they promote false and revisionist narratives that take over and even erase the presence of survivors’ own testimonies in the public sphere.51 Furthermore, one of the criticisms leveled at Landsberg is her focus on “[b]ig emotional experiences,” on the feeling of being traumatized or wounded by what one sees or 47 Alison Landsberg, Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 112–13. See also Alison Landsberg, Engaging the Past: Mass Culture and the Production of Historical Knowledge (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015). 48 Landsberg, Prosthetic Memory, 113. 49 Landsberg, Prosthetic Memory, 135. 50 Landsberg, Prosthetic Memory, 9. 51 Nicki Hitchcott, “Seeing the Genocide against the Tutsi through Someone Else’s Eyes: Prosthetic Memory and Hotel Rwanda,” Memory Studies 14, no. 5 (2021): 940–42. See also the following poem: Malaika Uwamahoro, “Rwanda Is NOT Hotel Rwanda!!!,” in Rwanda since 1994: Stories of Change, ed. Hannah Grayson and Nicki Hitchcott (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2019), 15–18.

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experiences in order to elicit action,52 although Landsberg concedes that experiencing an event in a film through mediation and imagination can never replicate or even approximate living through it.53 The ethics of representation have long been debated,54 as have the different subject positions from the vantage point of which one represents the Holocaust (but also other violent histories) – be it, victims, witnesses,55 bystanders, perpetrators, or, more recently, “implicated subjects” as Rothberg has argued with regard to those who are not “direct agents of harm,” but who may still benefit from it (whether directly or indirectly).56 Sanyal, in Memory and Complicity (2015), drawing our attention to the etymology of “complicity,” from “[t]he Latin root […] complicare, “to fold together,”57 alerts us to the fact that 52 For Hitchcott, “the suggestion that prosthetic memories foster a sense of obligation in their owners (in this case, white western viewers) comes uncomfortably close to what Teju Cole (2012) calls the ‘white savior industrial complex.’” Hitchcott, “Seeing the Genocide against the Tutsi through Someone Else’s Eyes,” 939. 53 Landsberg writes: “Of course a visit to a movie or a museum does not result in literal dismemberment; but the experience of feeling vulnerable or disempowered or of being put in the position of seeing through someone else’s eyes might change how one sees the world and one’s place in it.” Landsberg, Prosthetic Memory, 101. 54 See Saul Friedlander, ed., Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the “Final Solution” (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992); Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (New York: Routledge, 1992); Dominick LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma, with a new preface (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014); Colin Davis, Traces of War: Interpreting Ethics and Trauma in Twentieth-Century French Writing (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2017); Debarati Sanyal, Memory and Complicity: Migrations of Holocaust Remembrance (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015); Annette Wieviorka, L’ère du témoin (Paris: Fayard/Pluriel, 2013). 55 See, for instance, Robert Harvey’s proposition for “an ethics of universal applicability” (xi). Taking as its starting point the fact that the suffix “-ness” implies a capability of something, Harvey centers his concept on the idea that, since “witness” is not the ability for intelligence (“wit” + “ness”), it points to witnessing as a different type of ability – available to everyone – signified by adding a “ness” to the “witness” to form “witnessness.” Robert Harvey, Witnessness: Beckett, Dante, Levi and the Foundations of Responsibility (New York: Continuum, 2010). For my review of Harvey, see Sonja Stojanovic, “Éthique & imagination,” Acta fabula 17, no. 2 (2016). www.fabula.org/revue/document9678.php. 56 Michael Rothberg, The Implicated Subject: Beyond Victims and Perpetrators (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2019), 1. 57 Sanyal, Memory and Complicity, 1.

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The recognition of complicity – of our place in a historical fold, but also of the folds that bring diverse histories into contact – is a challenging task. It requires us to consider our sometimes contradictory position within the political fabric of a given moment, as victims, perpetrators, accomplices, bystanders, witnesses, or spectators.58

She warns that “these convergences [of subject positions and memorial pathways] remain dangerous intersections in which histories can become blurred, conflated, universalized.”59 Thinking through “complicity” means being attuned to one’s positionality and mindful of how representations, histories, memories are constructed: “[a] complicitous approach,” to the contrary, “positions the reader-viewer not as the passive recipient, but as an uneasy co-creator who is aware that figures, like memory, are on the move, taking us toward several ‘elsewheres.’”60 I adopt a somewhat related approach in this book in terms of arguing for the suspension of identification. I close read select works of contemporary fiction in French and, through the work of Derrida and Cixous in particular, I propose that the space of fiction and the encounter with what I call “ghosts” – despite their not being ghostly characters – make it possible for readers to be haunted by memories that are not their own, taking them not only elsewhere, but also elsewhen. Focusing on the textual mechanisms that show a haunting, that is, provoke a lingering sensation of already-encountered or of reappearance, does not posit a “seeing through someone else’s eyes”;61 it rather identifies how certain objects linked to protagonists’ own traumatic memories are textually deployed to haunt readers. In other words, it focuses on the how-ness of haunting rather than on expected (and thus suspect!) affective responses derived from it, responses often equated to an ethical gesture. One can certainly point towards an ethical understanding of haunting, that is, an ethics that is not based on sameness, but rather on difference, on the responsibility towards all others: It is necessary to speak of the ghost, indeed to the ghost and with it, from the moment that no ethics, no politics, whether revolutionary or not, seems possible and thinkable and just that does not recognize in its principle the respect for those others who are no longer or for those who

58 Sanyal, Memory and Complicity, 1. 59 Sanyal, Memory and Complicity, 12. 60 Sanyal, Memory and Complicity, 16. 61 Landsberg, Prosthetic Memory, 101.

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This responsibility, inseparable from what Derrida calls a hauntology, is, however, not a result, or a pronouncement, on the response itself (one cannot call it an ethical response), but a call, a questioning, une remise en question. Rather than advocating for identification, the ghost elicits the question of ethics (relentlessly so) – it does not presuppose it nor deliver it on a platter, it is always à venir (to come). Being willing to be haunted – being “an uneasy co-creator,” as Sanyal puts it – means slowing down as we read, opening up a space for things to linger, to coexist, to trouble our understanding of time and space. In a sense, my understanding of the temporality of the specter, of its untimely logic that troubles the categories of past, present, future, is very much aligned with Silverman’s Palimpsestic Memory (2013), which, in concordance with Rothberg’s Multidirectional Memory and Sanyal’s Memory and Complicity, encourages scholars to consider the “multiple connections across space and time” when it comes to “histories of extreme violence.”63 Silverman describes the work of memory using the lexical field of haunting to assert that “the present is shown to be shadowed or haunted by a past which is not immediately visible but is progressively brought into view.”64 For him, it is characterized as a “superimposition and interaction of different temporal traces to constitute a sort of composite structure, like a palimpsest, so that one layer of traces can be seen through, and is transformed by, another.”65 Rather than merely putting together past and present, Silverman argues that it combines “a number of different moments, hence producing a chain of signification which draws together disparate spaces and times.”66 Using as examples the juxtaposition of the memory of the Occupation and the massacre of Algerians in 1961 in Didier Daeninckx’s Meurtres pour mémoire [Murder in Memoriam] (1983) and Leïla Sebbar’s La Seine était rouge. Paris, octobre 1961 [The Seine Was Red: Paris, October 1961] (1999), Silverman shows that these interacting moments 62 Derrida, Specters of Marx, xviii; emphasis in the original. Derrida, Spectres de Marx, 15. 63 Max Silverman, Palimpsestic Memory: The Holocaust and Colonialism in French and Francophone Fiction and Film (New York: Berghahn Books, 2013), 4. 64 Silverman, Palimpsestic Memory, 3. 65 Silverman, Palimpsestic Memory, 3. 66 Silverman, Palimpsestic Memory, 3.

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are not exposed through “a linear history but one that condenses different moments,”67 and points to Walter Benjamin’s “constellation” as a comparable figure, for it too “brings together past and present not in a teleological way but through a superimposition of different traces in the same space.”68 Although “haunting” is used metaphorically throughout Palimpsestic Memory to speak of the effect of the past on the present, and Silverman engages with Derrida’s elaboration of the trace as a (non)concept, Derrida’s conception of haunting and hauntology in Spectres de Marx does not explicitly figure in his text.69 However, what Silverman describes as “Derrida’s version of the trace,” that is, “a way of undoing the self, subverting the metaphysics of presence, and incorporating the anxiety of its own disappearance,”70 could in fact be understood as hauntology. In this way, I would argue that to think the untimely and the (re)appearances of ghosts gestures precisely towards a palimpsestic understanding of time and memory. Before concluding this Introduction, I would like to briefly return to Perec, our almost-contemporary author, for his oeuvre intersects and finds a resonance with the work of a number of authors studied in the chapters that follow. Unquestionably a guiding figure, Perec features in this book as a precursor to some of contemporary fiction’s finest undertakings at thinking disappearance, and its spectral companion, (re)appearance. It is certainly not a coincidence that Dominique Rabaté also gives Perec “a kind of tutelary role”71 in his own study of characters in contemporary French fiction who (have an urge to) vanish without a trace. For Rabaté, Perec is a master at writing disappearance, precisely because of his attention to language as a way to represent displacement; that is, he is able to channel literature’s potential for “bringing into play another way to write or compose with disappearance [disparition], both by making it literal and by displacing it [en la déplaçant].”72 67 Silverman, Palimpsestic Memory, 3. 68 Silverman, Palimpsestic Memory, 26. 69 The book is mentioned twice in footnotes with reference to other works. Silverman, Palimpsestic Memory, 9n12, 61n19. 70 Silverman, Palimpsestic Memory, 148. For Silverman, this conception of the trace as well as Derrida’s take on memory (drawing from Freud) is “remarkably close to [Jean] Cayrol’s vision (and that of [Chris] Marker) of the Lazarean hero estranged from his ‘self’ because permanently haunted by his own death” (148–49). 71 Dominique Rabaté, Désirs de disparaître: Une traversée du roman français contemporain (Trois-Rivières: Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières, 2015), 29. 72 Rabaté, Désirs de disparaître, 29.

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Perec’s oeuvre, defined by a number of formal constraints also fundamental to his OuLiPo (Ouvroir de littérature potentielle [Workshop of/for Potential Literature]) affiliation, has been notably read as an “oblique”73 way to write about a very personal loss: in W ou le souvenir d’enfance [W or the Memory of Childhood] (1975), we learn that his father, a soldier, died following a battle injury in 1940,74 and that his mother was on the 11 February 1943 convoy of many French Jews deported to Auschwitz,75 where she was certainly killed; the fact that she “has no grave”76 [“n’a pas de tombe”]77 is at the core of Perec’s relentless mourning. Most poignant perhaps is his dedication – “For E” [“Pour E”], which can be read as a tribute “for them” [“pour eux”] – inscribed on the first page of W ou le souvenir d’enfance in an echo to his tour de force lipogram (written without the letter “e”), La Disparition [A Void] (1969). The latter has also been read as the mark of the unsurmountable grief that leads Perec to continually inscribe his parents – “them” [eux/e] – as noticeably absent: the constant reminder that they are missing and have disappeared is hollowed out in every word of this stylistically ambitious novel. This very personal eux/e can also be said to remember the millions of Jews killed during the Holocaust, a reminder that those buried in unmarked graves or those whose ashes were dispersed to the four winds do not have a proper resting place.78 In this book, I want to examine, in a context of loss and mourning, what it might mean to “mind ghosts,” to pay attention to where 73 For a captivating reading of Perec’s repeated attempts at remembering his past, see Philippe Lejeune, La Mémoire et l’oblique: Georges Perec autobiographe (Paris: P.O.L éditeur, 1991). 74 Georges Perec, W ou le souvenir d’enfance (Paris: Denoël/Gallimard, 1993), 48, 57; Georges Perec, W or the Memory of Childhood, trans. David Bellos (Boston: David R. Godine, 2003), 27, 37. 75 Perec, W ou le souvenir d’enfance, 53. Perec, W or the Memory of Childhood, 33. 76 Perec, W or the memory of childhood, 41. 77 Perec, W ou le souvenir d’enfance, 62. 78 Elie Wiesel, who recounted his own detention in the camps of Auschwitz and Buchenwald in La Nuit [Night] (1955), speaks of writing as that which provides “an invisible tombstone, erected to the memory of the dead unburied.” Elie Wiesel, “My Teachers,” in Legends of Our Time (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 25. Cited in Alan Astro, “Allegory in Georges Perec’s W ou le souvenir d’enfance,” Modern Language Notes 102, no. 4 (1987): 872.

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and how they might (re)appear. For disappearance also contains the potential of spectral reappearance. To borrow Rabaté’s formulation about Perec and disappearance, this return can either be literal (we can think of Perec’s follow up to La Disparition, the novel Les Revenentes [“The Exeter Text: Jewels, Secrets, Sex”] (1972), where the only vowel used is “e”), or it can be displaced (in the texts studied here it can take the form of objects, names, or sites). Furthermore, I would like to reiterate that to read spectrality or to read with an attention to ghosts is what allows us to think about the contemporary not only as a time frame, but also as a mode or a way of reading. I am most interested in how ghosts make it possible to hold things together at the same time; how ghosts change our readings, how in reading them, in minding them, we become attuned to something else, to somewhere else, even to somewhen else.79 There is a tiny typo in a book published in 2009 whose echoes Perec would have surely appreciated; we know how much in his work everything could hinge on a single letter. The small mistake appears in an epigraph to the foreword “Disparitions. Ils n’ont jamais existé” [Disappearances. They never existed],80 found in the book Génocide, disparition, déni [Genocide, Disappearance, Denial] (2009), which discusses the systematic state-sponsored mechanisms of making people disappear. The epigraph in question describes the aftermath of the Death March in Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1995, where Serb-led forces killed thousands of Bosniak men who were attempting to reach Tuzla (a free territory), having set off from the town Srebrenica – the name of another genocide that is now part of our collective memory. Emir Suljagić, a genocide survivor and the director of the Srebrenica Memorial Center, indeed emphasizes that those memories concern us all: “what they [survivors] have to share does not belong only to us, who survived, but also to those who are not yet even born. There is a lesson for humanity in what we survived.”81 In the epigraph that interests 79 This echoes Gilles Deleuze’s reading of the title of Samuel Butler’s novel Erewhon as an anagram of both “nowhere” and “now-here.” Gilles Deleuze, Différence et répétition (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1968), 365. 80 Hélène Piralian-Simonyan, Génocide, disparition, déni: La traversée des deuils (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2009), 7. 81 Foreword by Emir Suljagić to Ann Petrila and Hasan Hasanović, Voices from Srebrenica: Survivor Narratives of the Bosnian Genocide (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2021), 18. For a brief timeline of Bosnian history and events leading up to the genocide, see 15–16, as well as the Introduction (27–34). See also

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me, one man wonders about “les restes,” the remains, the traces of “thousands of Muslims – men and boys – [who were] killed on the ‘Path of Life and Death’ that connects Srebrenica and Tuzla.”82 He is asked the following question: “‘How long do you think that it will take to gather up all the remains on this path?’” His answer is as follows: “‘It could very well be that, a few decades from now, my grandchildren will still be doing this work.’”83 This epigraph is a testimony taken from the book Les tombes: Srebrenica et Vukovar [Graves: Srebrenica and Vukovar] (1998) and is mistakenly attributed to E. Stover and G. Perec in the epigraph, but correctly to E. Stover, G. Peress in the corresponding footnote.84 The beginning of the epigraph situates the events in 1995 – a good decade after Perec’s death – yet the subject, the title “Disparitions” [Disappearance], and the concern with remains or traces seems plausibly fitting, and for a moment one might be tempted to accept Perec’s name under this epigraph (or at least wonder who this homonym might be). the podcast hosted by Remembering Srebrenica, a UK-based charity organization: “Untold Killing.” https://srebrenica.org.uk/podcast. I thank researcher and activist Arnesa Buljušmić-Kustura (@Rrrrnessa) for making me aware of this podcast. Twitter, 12 January 2022, 6:32 a.m. https://twitter.com/Rrrrnessa/ status/1481242806614167555. While in this book I will not be discussing the Bosnian genocide in Srebrenica itself, in Chapter 6 I will turn to two novels which discuss related events: massacres in Vukovar, Croatia, in Jérôme Ferrari’s À son image [In His Own Image] (Arles: Actes Sud, 2018) and the siege of Sarajevo, in Jakuta Alikavazovic, L’avancée de la nuit (Paris: Éditions de l’Olivier, 2017). 82 Piralian-Simonyan, Génocide, disparition, déni, 7. 83 Piralian-Simonyan, Génocide, disparition, déni, 7. The man interviewed in the late 1990s is tragically correct: every year since then victims have been identified and are buried during a yearly ceremony of remembrance on 11 July. For a discussion of “the exhumation turn” in memory studies, see Katherine Hite and Daniela Jara, eds., “Presenting Unwieldy Pasts,” in “Ghosts, Exhumations and Unwieldy Pasts” (special issue), Memory Studies 13, no. 3 (2020). See also recent inquiries into the question of forensic memory. Johanne Helbo Bøndergaard, Forensic Memory: Literature after Testimony (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017); Stephenie Young, “Bodies of Evidence: Memory, the Forensic Imagination and Family Histories about Former Yugoslavia,” in After Memory: World War II in Contemporary Eastern European Literatures, ed. Matthias Schwartz, Nina Weller, and Heike Winkel (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2021), 32–60. 84 The book by Stover and Peress is made up of photographs of mass grave sites taken by Peress with an accompanying text by Stover. Eric Stover and Gilles Peress, Les Tombes: Srebrenica et Vukovar (Zurich: Scalo, 1998).

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Indeed, the first instinct for a reader of French literature is to assume that the G is for our famous Georges, not Gilles. In the pairing of “Disparitions,” “G. Perec,” and perhaps even the fact that this takes place in Bosnia, some mere eighty miles from Sarajevo, a city so beloved by Perec that it appears in both of his very first texts (L’Attentat de Sarajevo [The Attack in Sarajevo] and Le Condottière [Portrait of a Man Known as Il Condottiere]85), it is as if, inadvertently or perhaps rather decisively, a ghost lets itself be seen and known: it immediately brings to mind another disparition en masse [mass disappearance]. And Perec’s name makes great sense in this context, for, as Marie Darrieussecq reminds us, “he was a child survivor as well” [“lui aussi était un enfant rescapé”]86 and has relentlessly attempted to put into words the need to remember and to attend to the traces of those who have disappeared. My discussion here is not meant to equate these two separate acts of genocide, nor to make light of either by focusing on the significance of a small typo, rather it is meant to be a moment to consider the experience of time and the construction of memory, when, in the reader’s mind, one act of violence is made to echo another, becoming linked under one name; when these moments become “interlac[ed], or “entangle[ed],” our minds can be said to embrace what Rothberg has termed a “multidirectional” framework.87 He indeed urges us to consider that the encounters of memories of different conflicts do not have to be in competition (for what he calls “real estate” in the public and civic spaces) – talking about the memory of one event does not mean that the other event is less worthy of consideration. In fact, as Rothberg shows, the prominence of Holocaust memory has allowed for “the articulation of other histories – some of them pre-dating the Nazi genocide, such as slavery, and others taking place later, such as the Algerian War of Independence (1954–62) or

85 Georges Perec, L’Attentat de Sarajevo (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2016); Georges Perec, Le Condottière (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2012). Both texts were published posthumously. 86 Darrieussecq, writing on 7 April 2019, links the need to remember the genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda (“Ibuka” [I remember]) to Perec’s Je me souviens [I Remember] and to his own mnemonic practices: “Ibuka, Ibuka … I have the sad song in mind … ‘I remember, I remember’ … Like Georges Perec, who was a child survivor as well.” Marie Darrieussecq, personal website. 7 April 2019. www.mariedarrieussecq.com/. 87 Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory, 313.

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the genocide in Bosnia during the 1990s.”88 Rather than adopting a “competitive” framework, we should rather adopt a “multidirectional” one in approaching questions of memory, “which is meant to draw attention to the dynamic transfers that take place between diverse places and times during the act of remembrance.”89 Linking multiple instances of violent histories, or even working with “the uncomfortable proximity of memories,” is, for Rothberg, “the cauldron out of which new visions of solidarity and justice must emerge.”90 In this sense, thinking about Perec, about Srebrenica, about Rwanda together (as Darrieussecq does) is reckoning with the “entangled” legacies and memories of violence that define our contemporary era. This is why Suleiman, finishing her book in Budapest, Hungary, “two hundred kilometers from the border of what was once Yugoslavia,” ends her reflections on “being contemporary” with Bosnia and the siege of Sarajevo through an epilogue titled “The Politics of Postmodernism after the Wall; Or, What Do We Do When the ‘Ethnic Cleansing’ Starts?”91 But why give so much weight to a small mistake, a typo, which in French is called a coquille, literally a shell? It is because the coquille destabilizes our reading and we have to do a double take. In this small slip, our certainties are shaken, and we are, even if only for a fraction of time, able to move somewhen else; we experience being untimely. In 1979, Perec published a short story titled “Le Voyage d’hiver” [The Winter Journey],92 which is about “anticipatory plagiarism” [“le plagiat par anticipation”].93 Later, Jacques Roubaud and other Oulipians added their own versions to his story, resulting in a fascinating collection titled Le Voyage d’hiver et ses suites [The Winter Journey and its Sequels] (2012). In the second postscript to the collective work, Roubaud writes of Perec’s foresight, his ability to anticipate what would or could happen – much like in Perec’s description of puzzle making found in the preamble to La Vie mode d’emploi [Life: A User’s Manual] (1978) – itself a gigantic 88 Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory, 6. 89 Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory, 11. 90 Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory, 313. 91 Suleiman, Risking Who One Is, 225. 92 Georges Perec/Oulipo, Le Voyage d’hiver et ses suites (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2013). 93 In his version of the story, Jacques Roubaud defines it clearly in these terms: “this book was actually a gigantic [work of] ‘anticipatory plagiarism’ of all the great poetic works of the late 19th century in France.” Roubaud, “Le Voyage d’hier,” Le Voyage d’hiver et ses suites, 23.

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puzzle. It is a road map of sorts, where the one who completes the puzzle must follow the path of the one who created it, and every single step of the way has been planned carefully.94 But what is also noteworthy is that the creator of the puzzle, the puzzle maker [“faiseur de puzzle”], also happens to follow – yet beforehand – all the possible moves that the puzzle doer [“poseur de puzzle”] might consider, anticipating their steps, following them before they even begin to complete the puzzle. As such, both creating and completing a puzzle are forms of entering into conversation with someone who is not there yet or someone who has already been there. The description of the art of the puzzle not only bears a striking resemblance to the relationship between author and reader, but it also mirrors the relationship one can have to textual ghosts, which seem to appear and disappear at will, though always there before and after. It is as if every bend in the road has been thought through in anticipation of someone who will one day follow in the steps of this ghost. Roubaud based his own reading of “Le Voyage d’hiver” on what he thought was a coquille [typo] made by the publisher, but after giving it some thought he wonders if Perec had not deliberately made this typo and left something en attente, suspended, waiting for it to be read in an indeterminate future: And suddenly I thought: the typo [la coquille] that in one of the printings of GP’s short story put me on the path to Yesterday’s Journey [the typo hinges on hier (yesterday) and hiver (winter)], was it really a printer’s typo [une coquille d’imprimeur]? Was it not rather a clue put there by Perec, “not randomly” [par hasard] [but] waiting? That means, through this Vernier affair, are we not confirming, once again, the famous aphorism often used during the Oulipo meetings: Georges had thought of it [Georges y avait pensé].95

These coquilles offer another way into the text. And I would argue that it does not matter who put them there – whether it was the publisher, or, as Roubaud desires, Perec’s foresight; in their appearance, they allow us to conjure up a different space and a different time. In an essay proposing to elucidate what “the contemporary” is made of, François Noudelmann analyzes Sartre’s desire to be contemporary – that is, to be a man of his time, while also addressing his 94 Georges Perec, Life: A User’s Manual, trans. David Bellos (Boston: David R. Godine, 1987), xvii. Georges Perec, La Vie mode d’emploi (Paris: Fayard, 2010), 20. This explanation is found again at the beginning of Chapter 44. 95 Roubaud, “Le Voyage d’hier,” 427; emphases in the original.

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predilection for (or the untimely company he kept with) nineteenthcentury authors, musicians, and art. Noudelmann suggests that being contemporary can be a matter of choice: it is something that occurs on purpose. This view intersects with Dosse’s reading of Sartre and his stance towards writerly responsibility after the Liberation and the end of the war. Sartre is one to encourage others, writers especially, to be in tune with their time, to reconcile being an author with bearing some responsibility for what is happening in the world: “Without giving up his function, he must remain aware that he is responsible for the time that is his and for its stakes.”96 For Noudelmann, “Sartre was assuredly a man of his century/a man who is the image of his time [“un homme siècle”], deliberately choosing to be synchronous with [his] time.”97 However, this sentence is not actually printed as such; instead, what we actually read is that “Sartre was assuredly un homme siècle deliberately choosing to be synchronous with your [sic] time” [“Sartre fut assurément un homme siècle, choisissant délibérément d’être synchrone avec ton [sic] temps”].98 Because of a typo – son [his] becoming ton [your] – because of a single letter, which now addresses me, the reader, and directly involves me and my time, Sartre, “the most contemporary of all contemporaries”99 [“le plus contemporain de tous les contemporains”], becomes my contemporary. These mistakes, these coquilles, which very poetically are thought to be the mark of a letter printed upside down, turning things on their head,100 force us to backtrack, to read again, to notice (or not) the mistake, and to be taken down the wrong path. These coquilles could be called “timeshells” – moments where then and now become blurred, where it is uncertain whether the author was wrong or whether our understanding is limited. They thus allow us to make connections that we may not have made otherwise. I also find it illuminating that shells (not typos) make 96 François Dosse, La Saga des intellectuels français, 27. 97 François Noudelmann, “Le Contemporain sans époque: une affaire de rythmes,” in Qu’est-ce que le contemporain? 68. 98 Noudelmann, “Le Contemporain sans époque,” 68. 99 Noudelmann, “Le Contemporain sans époque,” 69. 100 See “coquille,” in CNRTL, Le Trésor de la langue française informatisé. https://cnrtl.fr/definition/coquille: “Typo resulting from the substitution of a letter for another” [“Faute résultant de la substitution d’une lettre à une autre”], possibly due to “the form that is taken, for instance, by a letter that is upside down on itself” [“la forme que prend p[ar] ex[emple] une lettre renversée et comme retournée sur elle-même”].

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an appearance in Nora’s elaboration of the lieux de mémoire, which are constituted in a back and forth or a “push and pull” [“ce va-et-vient”]; the lieux are “moments of history” that have been “torn away from the movement of history, and then returned.”101 Shells, to which these moments about to be transformed are compared, are thus conceptualized as relics, remains – even ghosts – given by the sea of memory: “no longer quite life, not yet death, like shells [coquilles] on the shore when the sea of living memory has receded.”102 If we follow this brief slippage in time, we can say that these timeshells, if only for a brief moment, bring Auschwitz and Srebrenica together; they bring Perec back. They show, I contend, the contemporary’s deep-seated reluctance in being, as it were, (only) con-temporary. These timeshells, these textual ghosts, are strange little capsules or vehicles that hint at the fact that the contemporary is, through and through, punctuated by fault lines, by contaminations, by remnants. These textual ghosts announce and cause temporal disturbances and disruptions and herald the possibility for a slipping through time, in a feat not foreign to Modiano’s narrators, who, upon turning a street corner, seamlessly step into the Paris of the Occupation. *** This book centers on what can be said to appear as a textual ghost precisely in narratives that purport to say something about disappearance [disparition] – and one should keep in mind that, in French, this word is generally used as a euphemism for death.103 Even if there is, at times, a 101 Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire,” trans. Marc Roudebush, in “Memory and Counter-Memory” (special issue), Represent­ ations 26 (1989): 12; Nora, “Entre mémoire et histoire, 29. 102 Nora, “Between Memory and History,” 12; Nora, “Entre mémoire et histoire, 29. 103 See “disparition,” in CNRTL, Le Trésor de la langue française informatisé. https://cnrtl.fr/definition/disparition: “The action or the fact of disappearing by ceasing to exist” [“Action ou fait de disparaître en cessant d’exister”]. While in English there is not the immediate sense of disappearance = death, the Oxford English Dictionary records a specific use of “disappearance,” originally in a Latin American context, that gestures towards the French sense: “The abduction or arrest (esp. for political reasons) of a person who is then imprisoned or killed, his or her ultimate fate remaining concealed.” See “disappearance,” Oxford English Dictionary Online. https://oed.com/.

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degree of lived experience informing the texts I analyze (whether one’s own or mediated through postmemory or affiliative postmemory, as has been theorized by Marianne Hirsch),104 they are decisively works of fiction; as Perec brilliantly demonstrates in W ou le souvenir d’enfance, fiction becomes a privileged way into the past, into memories which are often absent or which have been silenced. In addition, while fictions of personal loss and grief (the death of a loved one, for example) can certainly be read through a spectral lens as I conceive of it – I think, for instance, of Darrieussecq’s Tom est mort [Tom is Dead] (2008),105 or, more recently, Sarah Chiche’s Saturne (2020) – in this book, I made the decision to focus on novels that, while focusing on personal memory, also tread “on the collective ground of contemporary history,”106 as Suleiman fittingly puts it. The novels I analyze are hyperaware of the fact that they are written in a world reeling from the atrocities perpetrated during World War II and the Holocaust. They are novels that are written with the knowledge that other wars and genocides have been perpetrated since, novels that, as Darrieussecq puts it about her own, “have been fractured by this, by the simple fact that I was born at the end of a century of massacres.”107 These novels, written in French, make us travel: they take us to Algeria, Bosnia, Croatia, Serbia, Poland, Germany, Burundi, Rwanda, and both hexagonal France and Corsica. They all take as their starting point or their context the memory of one or several genocides, wars, and massacres: the Holocaust, the Algerian War, the genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda and the Bosnian genocide; these events have not only marked French foreign relations and politics – some to a greater extent than others – but also the cultural imagination of the second half of the twentieth century with lasting effects to this day. 104 See Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997); Marianne Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture after the Holocaust (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012). 105 Darrieussecq’s oeuvre, though not examined in this book, has been critical for my thinking about the function of ghosts in fiction. See Sonja Stojanovic, “Marie Darrieussecq’s Ghost,” Symposium: A Quarterly Journal in Modern Literatures 69, no. 4 (2015): 190–202. 106 Suleiman, Risking Who One Is, 3. 107 Nelly Kaprièlian, “Marie Darrieussecq: Entretien avec Nelly Kaprièlian,” in Écrire, écrire, pourquoi? (Paris: Éditions de la Bibliothèque publique d’information/ Centre Pompidou, 2010), 19.

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Part I discusses theories of spectrality and brings Hélène Cixous in conversation with Jacques Derrida. Chapter 1 discusses Derridean hauntology and his call for another way to read ghosts that can be answered by the notion of “telephony” that is put forth by Cixous’s work. Chapter 2 continues with Cixous’s oeuvre, which envisages life-otherwise, life as literature, literature as life, and makes it possible to conceive of spectrality, of ghosts as a coming together and a communicating across temporal boundaries, across species and kinds. With ghosts come not only conceptual considerations about time, about the impact of death on life, but, as Katherine Hite and Daniela Jara have discussed regarding the importance of spectrality for thinking memory, also the possibility of a different way to speak: the “spectral turn […] create[s] languages to imagine the afterlives of violence over the long term, beyond narratives of closure.”108 When we consider the ethics of representing traumatic events and violence, haunting tasks readers to acknowledge that certain representations can affect them deeply through reading. By relentlessly posing the question of ethics, it beckons our engagement, while never identifying with victims or appropriating for ourselves the pain of others. Cixous proposes a double suffering, that is a suffering of the suffering rather than a suffering that proposes to know or to feel the pain of others, to imagine what it must have felt like. Double suffering is a response to suffering that is not appropriative, that remains attuned to the other without claiming to take their place or even seeing through their eyes. Part II considers what it means to be haunted when one reads texts – particularly texts dealing with the disappearance of loved ones – in which haunting does not manifest itself through ghostly characters. Each of these texts engages with the memory of massacres, wars, and genocides, but rather than separating chapters by events or geography, each chapter of the book is organized around a thematic framework to think the return and the reappearance of ghosts. To this end, I read names (Chapter 3), lists (Chapter 4), objects (Chapter 5), photographs 108 Hite and Jara, “Presenting Unwieldy Pasts,” 246. The authors also consider the “exhumation turn” as a companion to the spectral turn and remind us of the close relationship of these two modes of apprehending the world (249). For an exploration of how fear itself manifests as a type of haunting, as an “afterlife of violence,” see also Daniela Jara, “The Culture of Fear and Its Afterlife,” in Children and the Afterlife of State Violence Memories of Dictatorship (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 37–60.

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(Chapter 6), stains (Chapter 7), and sites (Epilogue) that return to argue that these things can be understood as ghosts in their function. I am particularly interested in instances that are remembered, that come in and out and back again in narratives in which the question of loss is central – a type of writing of which Perec is an emblematic figure. In Present Pasts (2003), Huyssen notes with regard to trauma (theory and studies) that it “formed a thick discursive network with those other master-signifiers of the 1990s, the abject and the uncanny, all of which have to do with repression, specters, and a present repetitively haunted by the past.”109 But what exactly does it mean to be haunted by the past? What does this haunting look like within novels – at the level of the text, of the sentence, of the word? Who can be haunted? These are the questions that drive this book in its search for “traces of the invisible,”110 expressed not in the spectral return of a loved one, but in things that inscribe in us an awareness of (someone’s) disappearance. I propose to trace how as readers we can be haunted by memories that are not our own, that is, how we become the bearers of the memory of the text. Textual haunting, it should be noted, has to be actively welcomed or sought, otherwise it does not “work.” If I am not ready to be hospitable to textual ghosts (if I refuse to read carefully), things will wash over me – they will not linger. In this book, the ghosts I examine are expressed as textual figures that return, if their (re)appearance prompts recognition in me the reader, they are not in themselves advocating for anything – a box is a box, a suitcase can be just that – but in the interpreting moment, that is, when I as a reader encounter the text, a thing can function as a ghost by bringing together past, present, future on the same plane.

1 09 Huyssen, Present Pasts, 8. 110 Huyssen remarks that, for instance, the literary texts of Art Spiegelman and W. G. Sebald can be described as haunted, highlighting that, “contrary to the belief of many historians, representations of the visible will always show residues and traces of the invisible.” Huyssen, Present Pasts, 10.

part i

Hauntologies I Hauntologies

Before proceeding with close readings of contemporary fiction in French in Part II, I begin by thinking about what ghosts do. If the nineteenth century was particularly obsessed with ghosts (séances, spirit photography, the ghost story proper, and the fascination with the genre of the fantastic [fantastique] are all testimony to this), and although the motif of ghosts and other types of apparitions can be found in all eras, genres, and across traditions, in the last decade of the twentieth century we witnessed what scholars have termed a “spectral turn.” With the publication of Jacques Derrida’s Spectres de Marx [Specters of Marx] (1993), the ghost opens itself up as both a theoretical subject and an object haunting various texts, even Derrida’s very own; the question of ghosts thus becomes a subject of theorization that is not limited to ghosts’ thematic presence in texts. Ghosts, as figures that are both and at once present and absent, dead and undead, visible and invisible, literal and metaphorical, can indeed be said to pose a number of conceptual challenges. Shifting from an entirely Derridean understanding of spectrality – as that which comes in an untimely fashion or out of season and disrupts concepts of being and time – in my analysis I propose to consider the work of author and theorist Hélène Cixous. For her, literature literally resonates: one can both hear and summon various spectral figures through textual means. An attention to her oeuvre makes it possible to conceive of spectrality as a “beingtogether-at-the-same-time” kind of spectrality, one that urges us to welcome ghosts by becoming untimely ourselves.

chapter one

With Cixous after Derrida With Cixous after Derrida

To begin (writing, living) we must have death […] The one that comes right up to us so suddenly we don’t have time to avoid it, I mean to avoid feeling its breath touching us. Ha! Hélène Cixous, Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing1

In 1993, Jacques Derrida publishes Spectres de Marx [Specters of Marx], the book which heralds the “rehabilitation of ghosts as a respectable subject of enquiry”2 and “spawn[s] a minor academic industry.”3 One can certainly wonder whether this book I am writing now, some three decades after a so-called “spectral turn,” is somewhat too late. Have we not moved on to other theoretical waters, to other more timely turns? Are ghosts, as one says, passé? Maybe – maybe not.4 For we are dealing 1 Hélène Cixous, Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing, trans. Sarah Cornell and Susan Sellers (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 6. This text was originally delivered as a lecture in English by Cixous and subsequently revised for publication. See Susan Sellers, ed., The Hélène Cixous Reader (London: Routledge, 1994), 199. 2 Colin Davis, Haunted Subjects: Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis, and the Return of the Dead (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 8–9. 3 Davis, Haunted Subjects, 10. Spectres de Marx also drew some criticism from Marxist thinkers. See, for example, the volume written as a response (as well as Derrida’s own response to the responses, titled “Marx & Sons”): Michael Sprinker, ed., Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx (London: Verso, 1999). 4 See the footnotes in the Conjuration for a number of recent works that (still) take up the subject of ghosts.

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with untimely figures – that is, etymologically speaking, that which comes out of season, unexpected, too early or too late.5 Writing about ghosts means to embrace untimeliness, even the untimeliness of one’s own project. On Derrida’s conception of ghosts, what remains to be said that has not already been said? Nothing – everything. If, for him, the ghost is tied to endless reappearances – “A question of repetition: a specter is always a revenant. One cannot control its comings and goings because it begins by coming back [revenir]”6 – there is also no simple way around the repetition compulsion of listing, once again, in a book about ghosts, what a ghost, according to Derrida, is supposed to mean, or rather to do. The first part of this chapter will be dedicated to his work, while the second part will discuss how Hélène Cixous’s oeuvre can be seen as a(n) (un)timely response to Derrida’s call to think the specter, the ghost as possibility. If ghosts are impossible to contain in one neat definition, it is because their most powerful characteristic is that they are precisely and resolutely unknowable. In the quotation that follows, drawn from Spectres de Marx, one can notice the use of alliteration in the French text and, if one reads it out loud, one can even hear the haunting fricative sound “s” in every other word, which adds an echo to the repetition of the verb “to know” in the third person singular [“sait”] in its negative form [“ne sait pas”] and its homophone, the verb “to be” in the third person [“c’est”]. This crystallizes the simultaneous obsession and the impossibility to determine, to know what it is: one does not know what it is, what it is presently. It is something that one does not know, precisely, and one does not know if precisely it is, if it exists, if it responds to a name and corresponds to an essence. One does not know: not out of ignorance, but because this non-object, this non-present present, this being-there of an absent or departed one no

5 The Oxford English Dictionary puts it this way: “At an unsuitable or improper time; unseasonably, inopportunely.” See “untimely,” Oxford English Dictionary Online. https://oed.com/. See also “intempestif,” in CNRTL, Le Trésor de la langue française informatisé. https://cnrtl.fr/definition/intempestif. 6 Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge Classics, 1994), 11; emphasis in the original. Jacques Derrida, Spectres de Marx: L’État de la dette, le travail du deuil et la nouvelle Internationale (Paris: Éditions Galilée, 1993), 32.

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longer belongs to knowledge. At least no longer to that which one thinks one knows by the name of knowledge. One does not know if it is living or if it is dead.7 [on ne sait pas ce que c’est, ce que c’est présentement. C’est quelque chose qu’on ne sait pas, justement, et on ne sait pas si précisément cela est, si ça existe, si ça répond à un nom et correspond à une essence. On ne le sait pas: non par ignorance, mais parce que ce non-objet, ce présent non présent, cet être-là d’un absent ou d’un disparu ne relève plus du savoir. Du moins plus de ce qu’on croit savoir sous le nom de savoir. On ne sait pas si c’est vivant ou si c’est mort.]8

Wanting to know, to define, is, then, to make a mistake, to focus on an incorrect category. It is in this seemingly endless cycle of obsession about definition (and here we are talking about definition for the nth time) that we learn that ghosts “no longer belon[g] to knowledge,” but rather make us question our own epistemological operations. We find, or rather we have to accept, as Colin Davis puts it, that we have “to unlearn what we thought we knew for certain in order to learn what we still cannot formulate or imagine.”9 In his attempt to deconstruct the concepts of being and time – and the primacy of presence, a hallmark of Western philosophical thought – Derrida elaborates, through his reading of the haunting of an untimely ghost, what he calls a hauntology: To haunt does not mean to be present, and it is necessary to introduce haunting [la hantise] into the very construction of a concept. Of every concept, beginning with the concepts of being and time. That is what we would be calling here a hauntology. Ontology opposes it only in a movement of exorcism. Ontology is a conjuration.10

Throughout the text, Derrida, relying on Hamlet and returning to the oft-quoted remark by the prince of Denmark – “The time is out of joint”11 – shows how a time that is depicted, or, more precisely, experienced as completely broken, as disjointed, opens us a space for 7 Derrida, Specters of Marx, 5; emphasis in the original. 8 Derrida, Spectres de Marx, 25–26; emphasis in the original. 9 Davis, Haunted Subjects, 19. 10 Derrida, Specters of Marx, 202. Derrida, Spectres de Marx, 255. 11 “The time is out of joint, O cursed spite,/That ever I was born to set it right!” William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act I, scene v. The Cambridge Dover Wilson Shakespeare, vol. 7, ed. John Dover Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 33.

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thinking “otherwise” [autrement] and welcoming the ghost’s haunting (again and again). For what ghosts are able to do, what they make texts do and question is of paramount importance. Ghosts, as figures both present and absent, dead and undead, visible and invisible (and that at the same time), return [re-venir], that is, come again, and again, and again, in an endless list of repetitive (re)appearances that are also always still to come [à venir]. For Katy Shaw, this double movement, given the focus on “legacy” and “promise of something to come, draw[s] attention to the structuring role of absence.”12 This is why Hamlet, with its appearing/disappearing ghost that may and may not be there, is a privileged text for Derrida;13 we will see in Chapter 2 that it is also a vital work for Cixous’s own ghostly conception of temporality. It is thus not surprising that Hamlet is also a key spectral text for another “strand” of hauntology – the first one, chronologically speaking.14 As has been described at length by Davis in his état présent of this field or methodology of (mostly) literary inquiry, this “strand” comes from the work of psychoanalysts Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, published in France in the 1970s.15 Their work, as it pertains to spectrality studies, is often neglected for the benefit of the work of Derrida (and also by him); as scholars have noted, he barely mentions Abraham and Torok (only in a footnote and about his own work16) in his Spectres de Marx. This may come as a surprise, because Derrida was essential in the dissemination of their works in France. His famed

12 Katy Shaw, Hauntology: The Presence of the Past in Twenty-First Century English Literature (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 7. 13 For a fascinating reading of “criticism and deconstruction as two different or even opposed and competing ways of inheriting” (226), of thinking the ghost of Hamlet, see Peggy Kamuf, Book of Addresses (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), 226–37. 14 The term “strand” is used by Davis. Colin Davis, “État Présent: Hauntology, Specters and Phantoms,” French Studies 59, no. 3 (2005): 378. Psychoanalyst Nicolas Abraham in fact writes a fictional Act VI to Shakespeare’s play, where the secret held by the ghost of Hamlet’s father is crucial in showing how his and Maria Torok’s “theory of the transgenerational phantom” works. Nicholas Rand, “Secrets and Posterity: The Theory of the Transgenerational Phantom – Editor’s Note,” in Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, The Shell and the Kernel, ed. and trans. Nicholas Rand (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 165. 15 See Davis, “État Présent,” 373–79. 16 Davis, “État Présent,” 376. See also Nicholas Royle, The Uncanny (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), cited by Davis.

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text “Fors” figures as the preface to Le verbier de l’homme aux loups [The Wolf Man’s Magic Word: A Cryptonymy] (1976), the very work in which readers discover Abraham and Torok’s elaboration of the function of phantoms [fantômes]17 (as secrets that can be elucidated).18 Davis, in fact, suggests that what differentiates one strand from the other can be determined from their understanding of “the status of the secret”19 – whether it should or even needs to be revealed or not – which has consequences for how one approaches texts. While Abraham and Torok have as an aim “to return the ghost to the order of knowledge,” Derrida’s focus is on what the figure of the ghost allows: for him, “the ghost’s secret is not a puzzle to be solved; it is the structural openness or address directed towards the living by the voices of the past or the not-yet formulated possibilities of the future.”20 But there is, in fact, another key point of convergence in both the work of Derrida and that of Abraham and Torok, namely the interrelated questions of loss, disappearance, and grief. In both cases (for Abraham and Torok, and for Derrida), it is mourning or grief that opens up the way for these ghosts to (re)appear.21 It might seem self-evident that ghosts and mourning are linked, yet it merits repeating for it is with regard to this very question that Derrida’s only gesture in Spectres de Marx to (his own contribution to) Abraham 17 “Phantom” is the term used by Nicholas Rand, their translator, for the French “fantôme.” 18 This is also a theory described at length in the collection of essays titled L’Écorce et le noyau [The Shell and the Kernel] (1978). These essays, written between 1959 and 1975, pre-date the verbier, but were only published as a collection in French two years after it. 19 Davis, Haunted Subjects, 13. 20 Davis, Haunted Subjects, 13; emphasis in the original. 21 We indeed find inscribed in the subtitle of Spectres de Marx the importance of mourning: “The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International” [L’État de la dette, le travail du deuil et la nouvelle Internationale]. For Jean-Philippe Mathy, Derrida’s book and his thinking about mourning is in direct response to what he terms “post-sixties melancholy.” Jean-Philippe Mathy, Melancholy Politics: Loss, Mourning, and Memory in Late Modern France (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2011), 38. Using the framework of psychoanalysis, scholars like Mathy have argued that thinking about the work of mourning could be approached with regard to ideals such as the nation, which can be mourned as one would a loved one. Mathy approaches this question in terms of the political, analyzing the reactionary turn of the 1980s and the disillusion that followed the effervescence of May 1968.

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and Torok’s work – which otherwise, as mentioned above, disappears from Derrida’s text – occurs. Derrida footnotes that what he writes in Spectres de Marx is a “more implicit”22 [“plus implicite”]23 continuation of his thinking in previous texts (which he goes on listing), and which revolves “around the work of mourning” [“autour d’un travail du deuil”].24 Here, Derrida points to the shortcomings, in his reading, of Freudian psychoanalysis and its differentiation between “successful” and “pathological” grieving. In Freud’s well-known distinction between “mourning” and “melancholia,” we read that healthy mourning is supposed to come to an end; there is a moment in which the self is able to “work through” the grief and come out of it. When there is a failure to do so, there is the possibility of “prolong[ing] the psychic existence of the object,”25 that is, to allow the creation of a “ghost” of the deceased loved one in order for the subject to keep functioning and delaying the facing of reality; this is what is known as pathological mourning, a grief that knows no end. For Abraham and Torok, who derive their theory from the analysis of one of Freud’s most famous cases – the Wolf Man – failed mourning results in the desire of shielding the loved one from ever (fully) disappearing again, by making them, paradoxically, disappear within an inner crypt through a process of incorporation.26 While we will see that for Cixous this aspect is mobilized as well, her work can be said to resonate deeply with a Derridean conception of spectrality when it comes to her thinking of the temporality of ghosts. 22 Derrida, Specters of Marx, 224n3. 23 Derrida, Spectres de Marx, 24n1. 24 For Derrida, this work “would be coextensive with all work in general (in particular in Glas …), on the problematic border between incorporation and introjection, on the effective but limited pertinence of this conceptual opposition, as well as the one that separates failure from success in the work of mourning, the pathology and the normality of mourning (on these points, cf. “Fors,” Preface to The Wolfman’s Magic Word, by N. Abraham and M. Torok …).” Derrida, Specters of Marx, 224n3; Derrida, Spectres de Marx, 24n1. 25 Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey, vol. 14 (London: The Hogarth Press and The Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1957), 245. 26 For a reading of Abraham and Torok, as well as Derrida’s reading of them, see Elissa Marder, “The Sex of Death and the Maternal Crypt” (19–52) and “Mourning, Magic, and Telepathy” (53–76), in The Mother in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction: Psychoanalysis, Photography, Deconstruction (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012).

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When, in what seems for the first time (for the audience), the ghost of Hamlet’s father appears, it is, in fact, yet “again” for the protagonists: “What, has this thing appeared again to-night?/[…] What we have two nights seen./[…] look, where it comes again!”27 The play’s (re)appearing ghost follows a deeply personal but also political loss in the person of the King. We see the interplay of personal and political loss in Spectres de Marx as well when Derrida begins his reflection by putting en exergue (and by memorializing) a very real loss that occurs both at an individual and a collective level: the assassination of Chris Hani, a South African communist leader who was fighting to end apartheid.28 We therefore have to remember that a death, a disappearance [disparition] – in its sense of “ceasing to exist”29 (a sense that should be kept in mind throughout this book) – explicitly opens, frames, and orients the text; we will recall that Derrida’s discussion of the non-logic of the spectral logic is also introduced in La Bête et le souverain [The Beast and the Sovereign] (2010) in the context of the mourning of and communing with Blanchot through his many texts.30 It is with such an approach to spectrality that I proceed: not in the sense of a haunting expressed as the mark of pathological grief, nor in that of a haunting signifying the restlessness of the dead; rather, it is the very explicit and constitutive ties between theorizing the ghost and questions of mourning, disappearance, and memory that interest me. My purpose here is not to uncover secrets that authors or characters may be trying to hide, as has been done by those basing their spectral readings on the work of Abraham and Torok,31 but rather to posit that reading 27 William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act I, scene i. Cambridge Dover Wilson Shakespeare, 7.4–5. 28 Furthermore, as Christopher Wise puts it, the haunting is double: “[t]he specter of Hani haunts Derrida’s intervention, not least as an absent African voice at this avowedly ‘international’ gathering of Marxists.” Christopher Wise, “Saying ‘Yes’ to Africa: Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx,” Research in African Literatures 33, no. 4 (2002): 126. 29 See Introduction. 30 See Conjuration. 31 Cf. the work of Esther Rashkin, Family Secrets and the Psychoanalysis of Narrative (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992). For a reading of Rashkin by Nicholas Royle and Colin Davis, see Davis, “État Présent,” 375–78. See also Gabriele Schwab, who also draws from Derrida’s reading of Abraham and Torok in “Fors” and his elaboration of “cryptonymy,” and proposes to read “cryptographic writing,” which “accesses experiences that have been unconsciously

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spectrality and ghosts (in whatever form they may appear) opens up the possibility of rethinking our relationship to time, and more specifically of thinking the contemporary alongside the untimely. That ghosts are untimely, or, more precisely, that ghosts are the (spectral and textual) embodiment of an untimely [intempestif] principle at work is by now somewhat of a critical commonplace. “Furtive and untimely, the apparition of the specter does not belong to that time [ce temps-là],” writes Derrida. The time that he is referring to as not hospitable to the specter is time in its linear progression, time that is constituted by “the linking [l’enchaînement] of modalized presents (past present, actual present: ‘now,’ future present)”;32 time understood both as sequential, but also as limited or limiting, as chained [enchaîné]. This is what Aleida Assmann has described, in a different context, as the “now moment”: “When we imagine time as a stream or an arrow that moves uniformly and irreversibly in one direction, the present is reduced to a nonextended now moment that is nothing more than the change of the future into the past.”33 While “that” time is one that appears as both stifled and stifling, this “other” time, the time of the ghost, is a time of possibilities. When Derrida exclaims “‘The time is out of joint’: time is disarticulated, dislocated, dislodged, time is run down, on the run and run down, deranged, both out of order and mad, Time is off its hinges, time is off course, beside itself, disadjusted. Says Hamlet”34 [“‘The time is out of joint!,’ le temps est désarticulé, démis, déboîté, disloqué, le temps est détraqué, traqué et détraqué, dérangé, à la fois déréglé et fou. Le temps est hors de ses gonds, le temps est déporté, hors de lui-même, désajusté. Dit Hamlet”],35 he brings together plenty of possible translations of this lament. Through this long litany of temporal disruptions, he repeats as well as displaces this crucial image of a joint disjointed, he stretches our reading of “out of joint,” he makes readers take time to understand how time (dis)functions. He thus cements, linguistically, the impossibility for registered without ever becoming fully conscious.” Gabriele Schwab, Haunting Legacies: Violent Histories and Transgenerational Trauma (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 4, 7. 32 Derrida, Specters of Marx, xix; Derrida, Spectres de Marx, 17. 33 Aleida Assmann, Is Time Out of Joint? On the Rise and Fall of the Modern Time Regime, trans. Sarah Clift (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2020), 19. 34 Derrida, Specters of Marx, 20; emphasis in the original. 35 Derrida, Spectres de Marx, 42; emphasis in the original.

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time to be coterminous with itself – that is, seemingly, to be contemporary (if we follow the dictionary’s definition) – there is always something left in suspense and this temporal disturbance is where and how ghosts are said to (re)appear. And while I am proposing to think about questions of temporality, of untimeliness, of the contemporary – with all of the issues that this calls up – the integral and interrelated part that the question of place (or space) plays should also be noted.36 I think here of Christina Lee’s moving opening to the edited volume Spectral Spaces and Hauntings: The Affects of Absence (2017), which takes readers to the makeshift memorial at the end of the Parisian street where the attack on Charlie Hebdo took place in January 2015. Visiting the site a month after the events and refusing to return to it again by virtue of already being haunted by the question of what would remain (t)here and what would not – in other words, already haunted by both the past and by the future – Lee observes that this space was “a crossroad of ‘accumulated times,’” which she defines as: “the past (the tragic event), the present (the immediacy of being at the locale), and the future (the memorial’s impending disappearance).”37 She explains imagining her “future-self standing at the street corner, haunted by [her] own memories and the prosthetic memories created by the media” and describes it as a “ghostly encounter” that already encompasses future disappearance of this memorial space: “This landscape would teem with traces that, in that private moment, only I could see.”38 The question of 36 Theoretical physicist Chanda Prescod-Weinstein notes that, while “[t]he prevailing Western wisdom is that we individually and collectively typically experience time as a one-dimensional phenomenon that always moves forward,” it in fact “isn’t universal” and “has cultural and experiential context” (50). For examples of different ways of theorizing “spacetime” see Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, “Spacetime Isn’t Straight,” in The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred (New York: Bold Type Books, 2021), 45–65. In a different context, the interrelation of disrupted time and space can be found in Jack Halberstam’s elaboration of “queer time.” Queer time refers to “specific models of temporality that emerge within postmodernism once one leaves the temporal frames of bourgeois reproduction and family, longevity, risk/safety, and inheritance.” Here, a teleological “temporal frame” is reconceived in a way that recalls the untimely. Jack Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (New York: New York University Press, 2005), 6. 37 Christina Lee, ed., “Introduction: Locating Specters,” in Spectral Spaces and Hauntings: The Affects of Absence (New York: Routledge, 2017), 2. 38 Lee, “Locating Specters,” 2. For a related discussion of makeshift and spontaneous memorials following the November 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris and

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haunting is then not only about the return of ghosts through a disrupted or disruptive time, but it is also the question of one’s own return to a space where a haunting can take place. To further consider this aspect, I would like to turn to Sarah Wood, whose book Without Mastery (2014) mulls over and works with and against Derrida’s writing on the trace. When Wood reads the book Natural History of Selborne by Gilbert White looking for his comments on a significant bird – the “temple-haunting martlet” found in Shakespeare’s Macbeth – she notes White’s “faith in place and territory.”39 For him, it is important to delimit very carefully, in a geographically minded manner, the “study of nature,” and Wood remarks that he “firmly believes in the heuristic value and intrinsic meaningfulness of haunts,” immediately specifying that “haunts” is to be understood “in the sense of localities.”40 Yet, by reading Wood reading White, I am reminded again of the etymology of haunting: “to frequent habitually (a place).”41 Haunting is coming back, over and over, to a place that holds a certain significance – haunting can be said to be localized (even if localities are able to shift textually). The focus then should not simply be on the space that may be haunted, but rather on the frequent return that makes a certain space (or a certain mind) propitious to haunting. White’s emphasis on territory is, Wood seems to imply, destabilized by this “temple-haunting martlet,” because the latter is a bird that migrates, that is not tied to one place (despite White’s refusal to admit it). This bird, only here for a moment, for the summer, comes up in the play, Wood writes, at a moment where “Banquo is engaged in not being aware of death coming,”42 and, in a way, his noticing of the bird and his misreading of the events it presages point towards our own inevitable march towards death; perhaps it also elicits the importance of the trace, that is, what (if anything) is left behind. Wood moves on to argue that, while we can feel “sad” at the impending doom – for we are aware of the question of collective memory of/in certain places, see also Sarah Gensburger, Mémoire vive: Chroniques d’un quartier. Bataclan 2015–2016 (Paris: Anamosa, 2017); Sarah Gensburger, Memory on My Doorstep: Chronicles of the Bataclan Neighborhood, Paris, 2015–2016 (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2019). 39 Sarah Wood, Without Mastery: Reading and Other Forces (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014), 7. 40 Wood, Without Mastery, 7. 41 See “haunting,” Oxford English Dictionary Online. https://oed.com/. See also Conjuration. 42 Wood, Without Mastery, 8.

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what will happen to Banquo – this also signifies that “the thought of the trace is compelling precisely because it has no proper habitat. It belongs with affect no more than it belongs with reason or any other continuity. It migrates between contexts. It refers to a going away that is not a kind of event we know: the departure of a guest, not a migration, not the end of a day, or of a year, or even of an individual life.”43 Wood is indeed concerned with “imagin[ing] an extinction,” our extinction to be precise, and while the temple-haunting martlet temporarily leaves Wood’s text as she reiterates Banquo’s death to us, it comes up again, some pages later, in her discussion of Elizabeth Bowen’s The Little Girls (1964), “a nuclear-age book,”44 written at a time when the very clear possibility of our extinction was on everyone’s minds; the temple-haunting martlet, our textual ghost, thus ends up, not only migrating in the winter or migrating to and from a specific place, but also migrating through time into a different text, and heralding, once again, a fateful future. Thinking about the trace means thinking otherwise, being open to reevaluating our approach, our concepts – it might mean to set the question of the definition and the ontology of the ghost aside and shift our focus to the question of function, of time, of space. I mention this temple-haunting martlet (in Shakespeare, in White, in Bowen, and in Wood’s reading of them) because it shows how a textual ghost (that is not a spectral figure of the dead) moves across texts, temporalities, and spaces. There is a device that best brings these crucial aspects together, namely the telephone. It is thoroughly suited for spectral considerations because of its ability to “disregard distances (it is conceived to go beyond [passer outre]).”45 Combining the ancient Greek “far, afar” [télé] and “sound” [phone],46 the telephone is the material expression of a spectral mechanism that has long been used by writers and poets to communicate and, so to speak, “disregard distances,” by means of words found in books or passed on through stories and tales – we often call it by the name of “intertextuality.” In addition, in reducing (spatial and temporal) distances, it reconfigures – even if in an unusual fashion – what we understand as “being together.” 43 Wood, Without Mastery, 8. 44 Wood, Without Mastery, 8. 45 Frédérique Toudoire-Surlapierre, Téléphonez-moi (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 2016), 12; emphasis in the original. 46 See “téléphone,” in CNRTL, Le Trésor de la langue française informatisé. https://cnrtl.fr/definition/telephone.

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Derrida, reader, critic, prophet, noted the importance of the telephone, this device, this machine for Hélène Cixous in H. C. pour la vie, c’està-dire … (2002) [H. C. for Life, That Is to Say],47 but he was, it seems, unaware of the extent to which this thoroughly spectral literary device may have been the answer to his own call in Spectres de Marx, almost a decade before. After laying out the difficulties of speaking about specters and ghosts, Derrida identifies a group for whom it is supposedly worse: “And the thing seems even more difficult for a reader, an expert, a professor, an interpreter, in short, for what Marcellus calls a ‘scholar.’”48 For Derrida, whose thinking on spectrality bears the indelible trace of différance, traditional scholars are ill-equipped for this endeavor because they “believe that looking is sufficient,”49 while instead they should be trying to communicate with ghosts. Scholars are, for the most part it seems, not interested in this possibility, for they associate ghosts with fiction or fabulation: “there is, for the scholar, only the hypothesis of a school of thought, theatrical fiction, literature, and speculation.”50 However, Derrida ends up suggesting that this is not an accidental utterance, Marcellus has not misspoken; he is rather foreseeing the possibility of someone who, going against their scholarly training, would be able to establish a productive communication with ghosts, someone who could be said to understand the stakes and potentials of hauntology, someone who would understand that there is more to it than the dispelling or attempted exorcism of ghosts (as Diderot would also call for) or a mere observation of phenomena. Derrida continues: Marcellus was perhaps anticipating the coming, one day, one night, several centuries later, of another “scholar.” The latter would finally be capable, beyond the opposition between presence and non-presence, actuality and inactuality, life and non-life, of thinking the possibility of 47 Derrida makes the following remarks and suggestions for potential doctorants interested in the treatment of this device by Cixous: “As I will often have to do, I leave aside here, in passing, what could be the program or title of some ten or twenty academic theses to come, tomorrow, when the university has no choice but to canonize the corpus of H.C. Subject: telephones and the question of the telephone in the work of H.C.” Jacques Derrida, H. C. for Life, That Is to Say…, trans. Laurent Milesi and Stefan Herbrechter (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006), 18; Jacques Derrida, H. C. pour la vie, c’est à dire (Paris: Éditions Galilée, 2002), 22. 48 Derrida, Specters of Marx, 11; Derrida, Spectres de Marx, 32 (“scholar” figures in the French original). 49 Derrida, Specters of Marx, 11; Derrida, Spectres de Marx, 33. 50 Derrida, Specters of Marx, 12; Derrida, Spectres de Marx, 33.

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the specter, the specter as possibility. Better (or worse) he would know how to address himself to spirits. He would know that such an address is not only already possible, but that it will have at all times conditioned, as such, address in general.51

One could argue that Derrida positions himself as this scholar, that he is, in his theorization of the figure of the specter, the ghost, the one answering Marcellus’s call. Peggy Kamuf makes a convincing argument that to see only one scholar behind this call “once again arrests under one figure the plurality of ghosts [Derrida’s plus d’un – more than one] and therefore the plurality of scholars who are speaking to ghosts here and there.”52 Indeed, I would like to suggest that it is also in the work of another scholar, Hélène Cixous, that we encounter the specter as a possibility, as something that productively allows for thinking “otherwise.” As we will see for Cixous, “Literature” (she capitalizes it) allows for communication to be established in a way that does not differentiate between “presence” and “non-presence,” but rather attends to the possibilities afforded by an attention to those who are “otherwisepresent”53 [“présents-autrement”].54 In the Book-Phone When, in Ayaï! Le cri de la littérature [Ayaï! The Cry of Literature] (2013), Hélène Cixous asserts that “Literature is the antideath telephone”55 [“La Littérature c’est le téléphone antimort”],56 she hints at the means of a possible communication with those presumed dead, or perhaps at the possibility that death will be kept at bay. That is not to say that Cixous has been able to eradicate death, but rather to emphasize the ways she has found to make it possible to communicate despite it; intertextual dialogue 51 Derrida, Specters of Marx, 13; Derrida, Spectres de Marx, 34. 52 Kamuf, Book of Addresses, 232. 53 Hélène Cixous, Death Shall Be Dethroned. Los, A Chapter, the Journal, trans. Beverley Bie Brahic (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2016), 7. 54 Hélène Cixous, Le Détrônement de la mort: Journal du Chapitre Los (Paris: Éditions Galilée, 2014), 15. 55 Hélène Cixous, “Conclusion: Ay yay! The Cry of Literature,” in Tom Bishop and Donatien Grau, eds., Ways of Re-Thinking Literature (London: Routledge, 2018), 208. Subsequent page numbers will be given in parentheses. 56 Hélène Cixous, Ayaï! Le cri de la littérature (Paris: Éditions Galilée, 2013), 48. Subsequent page numbers will be given in parentheses.

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is at the center of her preoccupations. Maxime Decout points out that Cixous’s double status as a novelist and a literary theorist is significant in her continual engagement in her oeuvre between the text and the moments during which she writes it; he observes that “strengthened by this double heritage [filiation], she always shows in her works a real critical consciousness towards fiction.”57 Not only does Cixous write, she also writes about the steps she takes in order to write, describing her notebooks, the color of the sheet of paper on which she scribbles a word, and the exact page number and time of the day that she found something significant in someone else’s book; she questions what it means to write, who is addressed, who is forgotten; she takes us along on this journey and shares with her readers the intricate ways in which these communications can happen. Imagined or anticipated readers are key companions in these texts – reflected in her prières d’insérer that are often titled “to my reading readers” [“À mes lisants”]. Susan Rubin Suleiman best summarizes her oeuvre by asking (and answering): “Is this poetry? Critical commentary? Autobiography? Ethical reflection? Feminist theory? Yes.”58 At the age of ten, after Cixous lost her father, she began to write in a notebook, she tells us in Ayaï: “I clutched onto a notebook and literature began its work caulking, plugging up the abyss” (200) [“je me suis accrochée à un cahier et la littérature a commencé son travail de colmatage de l’abîme”] (24). Incorporating her personal losses into texts is something that she has done from her earliest published works: mourning her father in Dedans [Inside] (1969) and Les commencements [Beginnings] (1970), her son in Le jour où je n’étais pas là [The Day I Wasn’t There] (2000), Jacques Derrida in Insister À Jacques Derrida [Insister of Jacques Derrida] (2006), and, more recently, her mother Ève, notably in Homère est morte [Mother Homer is Dead] (2014). We 57 Maxime Decout, “Hélène Cixous: Le récit comme tissage de la vie et de l’écriture,” Itinéraires, no. 1 (2013): 122. 58 Susan Rubin Suleiman, Risking Who One Is: Encounters with Contemporary Art and Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 81. Suleiman writes specifically about the collection of essays, “Coming to Writing,” but this can be applicable to all of Cixous’s texts. See Hélène Cixous, “Coming to Writing” and Other Essays, ed. Deborah Jenson, introd. Susan Rubin Suleiman, trans. Sarah Cornell, Deborah Jenson, Ann Liddle, and Susan Sellers (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992). For a discussion on the many genres under which one could categorize or read Cixous’s oeuvre, see Marta Segarra, “La Liberté éclairant la littérature,” in Hélène Cixous: Corollaires d’une écriture, ed. Marta Segarra (Saint-Denis: Presses universitaires de Vincennes, 2019), 5–18.

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will see in the pages that follow that both reading and writing are ways for Cixous to enter into communication with those who are no longer alive (or have never been, as fictional beings); engaging in a two-way communication makes it possible for her to step into the abyss without actually losing her footing. In her work, Literature is not only the telephone, but it is also that which is spoken – or, more precisely, that which speaks – into it(self): Literature is both receptacle (form) and content, and it allows one to “disregard distances,”59 both spatial and temporal. This is why I would rather speak of “telephony” than of the telephone itself, in order to emphasize the process of bringing together voices from afar instead of focusing on the material device – though it is very important in Cixous’s work, functioning as a reminder of the possibility of (spectral) communication.60 If Jean-Luc Nancy also makes the connection between the work of literature and the telephone in remarking that it (literature) communicates – “literature calls on the phone – Hello! Hello!” [“la littérature téléphone – allo! allo!”]61 – in Ayaï, Cixous most plainly and definitively asserts how and to what extent it works by making Literature not only the subject that is found communicating on the telephone, but also the support through which this dialogue takes place, allowing for a shift in our understanding of spectral communication. When Cixous describes Literature’s effects, its inner workings, its way of writing itself – all of this understood as both happening simultaneously throughout centuries, and here, live, at the moment of writing the text – past, present, and future are brought together on the same page by her keen metafictional voice. Marie-Chantal Killeen notes, with regard to narratives written in a disembodied voice, that “whatever its inflexion, the narration from beyond the grave does not appear in contemporary literature like a simple thematic concern or a purely formal daring gesture [une audace purement formelle].”62 In a sense, 59 Toudoire-Surlapierre, Téléphonez-moi, 12. 60 For more on the telephone as a material device in Cixous’s oeuvre, see Derrida’s comments in footnote 47, as well as Eric Prenowitz, “Crossing Lines: Jacques Derrida and Hélène Cixous on the Phone,” Discourse 30, no. 1–2 (2008): 123–56. 61 Mathilde Girard and Jean-Luc Nancy, Proprement dit: Entretien sur le mythe (Paris: Éditions Ligne, 2015), 62, cited by Toudoire-Surlapierre, Téléphonez-moi, 19. 62 Marie-Chantal Killeen, En souffrance d’un corps: Essais sur la voix désincarnée (Quebec City: Éditions Nota Bene, 2013), 53.

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the same can be said about Cixous’s way of communicating by way of writing with those beyond the grave: such narrations rather function “like a powerful tool that enables a reflection on the stakes of the novel,”63 or in Cixous’s case fiction and writing more broadly. Once the line of communication is opened, once there is willingness to reach out, “magic” does the rest. Citing Marcel Proust and his “Young Ladies of the Telephone”64 [“Demoiselles du téléphone”]65 as incontrovertible proof, Cixous stresses the fact that one only needs to wish for an encounter for it to become possible. It is, in fact, simply, “according to the wish we express” [“sur le souhait qu’on exprime”], writes Proust and subsequently Cixous, that a connection can be established, that is, “the link between us, the orphaned Orpheuses, and our apparently invisible, but present, cherished beings” (208) [“la liaison entre nous, les orphées orphelins et nos êtres chers invisibles, en apparence, mais présents”] (48). Cixous speaks about ghostly beings – absent yet present beings whose structuring principle, we have seen, is their untimely (re)appearance – and proposes a back and forth exchange with them that will radically change our conceptions of being and allow us to engage with them; in Chapter 2, we will see how this communication unfolds and changes how we can think about being contemporary. According to Cixous (still via Proust), in order to communicate with these invisible yet present beings – the specters – there is an easy recipe: “For the miracle of resurrection to happen, we only have to move our fingers towards the magic rectangular parallelepiped we call by the equally magic name of Book” (208; emphasis in the original) [“Nous n’avons, pour que le miracle de la résurrection s’accomplisse, qu’à approcher nos doigts du parallélépipède rectangle magique que nous appelons d’un mot magique aussi, Book”] (48; emphasis in the original). Within books, “[t]here are,” she posits, “chains of words that possess a power of resurrection” (203) [“il y a des chaînes de mots qui possèdent une puissance de résurrection”] (30). These special words, when they brush past our minds or our lips, open up a line of communication: “Words, perhaps names, that have gentle fingers, that touch the eyelids of our soul, with lips closed, and in an instant we awake, just in time 63 Killeen, En souffrance d’un corps, 53. 64 Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time: The Guermantes Way, trans. Mark Treharne, ed. Christopher Prendergast (London: Penguin Classics, 2003), 130. 65 Marcel Proust, Le Côté de Guermantes I, in À la recherche du temps perdu (Paris: Éditions Gallimard Quarto, 1999), 848.

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to answer the telephone and hear my father, my mother, my beloved, feeling abandoned, erased” (203) [“Des mots, des noms peut-être qui ont des doigts légers, qui nous touchent les paupières de l’âme, les lèvres closes, et d’un seul coup nous sommes réveillés, juste à temps pour décrocher le téléphone, au bout duquel mon père, ma mère, my beloved, se sentent abandonnés, maintenus sous effacement”] (30). The words written in books hence allow communication not only with the beings contained in them, but also with others who may have never even written a book, but whose presence is evoked through reading about someone else’s life. Taking her cue from Orpheus descending into Hades to welcome back to the surface (the phantom of) Eurydice, Cixous takes into her hands, one after the other, the books written by (amongst others) Proust, Stendhal, Kafka, Montaigne, Faulkner, Joyce, Sophocles, and Homer, in order to make it possible for them and their characters to cross over into her own life, her own book, and to mingle with her own personal specters, the ones of her loved ones departed too soon. She observes: Once the process of succession has begun there is no end. I am the descendent of dead beings. I am added cut mixed weaved sprung. My dead live inside me. My father has gone from living to being deep within me. And so have my son, my dog, later my grandmother. [Une fois le processus successoral déclenché, il n’y a plus de fin. Je suis une descendante de morts. Je suis additionnée coupée mêlée tissue issue. Mes morts vivent dedans moi. Mon père est passé de vie à mon for intérieur. Et par la suite mon fils, mon chien, plus tard ma grand-mère.]66

It is hence a necessity to allow for such a communication to take place because it is a way to keep the dead ever close, ever ready for textual resurrection. While her loved ones go from being fully alive to being housed in Cixous herself – the for intérieur reminiscent of Abraham and Torok’s crypt – they are not shielded and kept secret, they are a part of the communication and are kept safe for further contact. In Ayaï, Cixous tracks the sounds made from Ajax to Derrida, that is, the sounds of the dead, the sounds of death that resonate through 66 Hélène Cixous, “Le Livre que je n’écris pas,” in Genèses, généalogies, genre: Autour de l’œuvre d’Hélène Cixous, ed. Mireille Calle-Gruber and Marie Odile Germain (Paris: Éditions Galilée/Bibliothèque Nationale de France, 2006), 238. At the time she wrote this address, Cixous’s mother and Jacques Derrida were alive and are therefore not included in the list.

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centuries and centuries of writing. “Ayaï!” Cixous explains, this scream of a man in pain, is actually a wordplay that Sophocles creates with the letters of the name Ajax, Aïas in Greek. “Ayaï” is the complaint “aïe, aïe,” or “alas” in English (210/57). By screaming in pain, Ajax also screams his own name. And these screams resonate, Cixous shows, with Milton, Dostoyevsky, and Proust, who themselves took these sounds in, “heard” them and “reignited” them [“recueillis et rallumés”] (210/58). Cixous is concerned here with the ways that literature itself is thinking, wondering how something so small as a syllable can be said to be breathing or carrying a ghost. Cixous is, in fact, at the moment of writing Ayaï, preparing for her keynote speech for a conference called “Re-thinking Literature.”67 When she intimates that “literature, it only thinks about this, about stirring up ashes, about making with words anew sentences unheard of, about resurrecting, rekindling fires. Scream and fire. Screams of the late king Hamlet gathered and passed on. Mute scream of my father kept under the letter”68 [“Ça ne pense qu’à ça, la littérature, à remuer les cendres, à refaire avec des mots des phrases inouïes, à ressusciter, à ranimer les feux. Cri et feu. Cris du feu roi Hamlet recueillis et perpétués. Cri muet de mon père gardé sous la lettre”] (12), Cixous reiterates the communicative injunction that is understood as Literature by underscoring that it is within the very instance of the shout that a transfer and resurrection are slated to happen; one syllable suffices to call, and when one shouts, one thus calls for another and another to respond (the shouts and the screams hence become a long chain of braided signifiers), adding to a scream resonating throughout centuries. Indeed, ten years before Ayaï!, in L’amour du loup et autres remords [Love of the Wolf and Other Regrets] (2003), she had noted the importance of the scream and its connection to life: “Only children scream in our society. I am for the scream, in every case. Cats also 67 This conference took place in the fall of 2013 at New York University. See Tom Bishop and Donatien Grau, eds., Ways of Re-Thinking Literature (London: Routledge, 2018), 1. 68 This paragraph appears as follows in the published version: “lady Literature archives our suicides and our bereavements, grants asylum to our dark forces, to the violences that cannot be avowed except to her. Literature acquits us. She is mobilized against the death penalty. And for good reason: literature is the scene and the confidante of our assassinations, the patience for our madnesses. The proof that we passionately love the life that we curse and to which we address cries of horror by return mail.” Cixous, “Ay yay,” 211.

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scream, one simply needs to listen to them. Books keep screaming. My mother is life’s scream of victory” [“Seuls les enfants crient dans notre société. Je suis pour le cri, dans tous les cas. Les chats aussi crient, on n’a qu’à les entendre. Les livres n’arrêtent pas de crier. Ma mère est un cri de victoire de la vie”].69 Screams happen throughout the world, and they globally engage us and show us how similar we are, as seen from the vantage point of the scream; these screams are, as Cixous describes, “the first note of our pain […] The universal word, the Call” (200) [“la première note de notre douleur […] Le mot universel, l’Appel”] (24). This call, which evokes the telephone call, is both the scream following our birth and the one that accompanies the burials of our dead. These screams, in addition to being an event which we can hear, are also in and through writing, a textual event: they are transcribed and transcreamed [trans-cri] through a telephone call from and to the beyond. In French, the final syllable of the word “transcribed” [“transcrit”] calls to the word “scream” [“cri”], cementing the idea that the scream is contained within the written word of Literature. Now, before getting to the purpose of Literature’s dealings on the telephone, Cixous reveals a number which has a significant importance and which she describes (with a question mark) as “literature’s secret number” (203) [“le nombre secret de la littérature”] (31). This number is 59. She notes that there are 59 chapters in Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying (1930), that there are 59 moments in Derrida’s Circonfession [Circumfession] (1991), that “in 59 verses all the horror of the world is poured by the Ghost in Hamlet junior’s ear” (203; emphasis in the original) [“en 59 vers toute l’horreur du monde est versée par the Ghost dans l’oreille de Hamlet fils”] (31; emphasis in the original). Cixous notes that she will have to ask Stendhal, Melville, and Celan what this number means to them, reminding us that one can certainly communicate with the dead (provided one knows how). This number 59 reappears a little later in the text when Cixous declares having found in Proust’s fifty-ninth notebook the following injunction: “Find the rhythm of the double suffering” (210) [“trouver le rythme de la double souffrance”] (58). Cixous also finds this double suffering in Sophocles’ Ajax (and she will find it elsewhere again). It follows that these two sufferings, although separated by centuries, resonate and communicate, and Cixous herself feels this double suffering when she is reading. It 69 Hélène Cixous, L’Amour du loup et autres remords (Paris: Éditions Galilée, 2003), 13.

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functions in the following manner: it means suffering from the suffering of another.70 However, it is not in the fifty-ninth notebook of Proust that this sentence can be found. In the conferences (of the same name, “Ay yay: The Cry of literature!” [“Ayaï: le cri de la littérature”]) that Cixous gave during the 2013–2014 academic year, she does say that she finds these words in the notebook fifty-four (it is, indeed, the actual notebook in which Proust writes this sentence), which is the same notebook from which she learns the death of Albertine from Proust’s own hand. One could read this as a simple typo, but, as I have argued in the Introduction, typos, coquilles, what I have called “timeshells,” are a way of seeing something from a different angle, as they serve to reveal something else to the discerning reader. By writing that she finds this injunction in notebook fifty-nine, Cixous is, in a sense, revealing another one of Literature’s secret. To inscribe this double suffering under this secret number, to hide it in an altogether different book (even if by mistake) is to confirm and declare that it is not so much verifiable facts or “reality” that matters, but rather that something is being communicated in Literature even though (or perhaps because) it may take its roots in imagination and in fiction. The notebook 59 that Cixous speaks of (with the very sentence actually found in notebook 54) is not the one that can be found in the Bibliothèque Nationale along with the seventy-four other cahiers housed there; its mistaken identity makes it a thoroughly fictional notebook. That is why its words can powerfully communicate through Cixous’s fiction, even if we don’t learn it directly from Proust (we would have to read notebook fifty-four); through Cixous, we are able to partake in this community. The question is not how to suffer or how to represent suffering, but rather how not to suffer alone: to suffer from the suffering of another in order for them and/or for me not to be alone. These are the ethical stakes of reading literature, of hearing what these ghosts (however they may manifest themselves) have to say: 70 It is quite telling, if one turns to what one could call one of the founding texts of contemporary trauma theory, that we also find the image of a double wound that is inflicted and then heard. For Cathy Caruth, reading Freud, “[t]his listening to the address of another, an address that remains enigmatic yet demands a listening and a response […] constitutes the new mode of reading and of listening that both the language of trauma, and the silence of its mute repetition of suffering, profoundly and imperatively demand.” Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 9.

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suffering is a burden that can be shared in and through fiction, no matter the direction (temporal, spatial or both) it takes. On the next page, which is – coincidently or not – page fifty-nine of Ayaï, Cixous writes, keeping in mind Proust’s magic: “I add that this double suffering makes its way to me by the electric force of writingthat-keeps, by all-powerful literature our mother memory-forgetting, and transmits the music of the cry by architelephony” (211) [“J’ajoute que si cette double douleur m’arrive, c’est par la force électrique de l’écriturequi-garde, par la toute-puissante littérature, notre mère mémoire-oubli, et retransmet la musique du cri par architéléphonie”] (59). If some critics see the telephone as a threat, as a death warrant,71 Cixous makes it a tool that works against death, enabling communication through time, across centuries. We might note here, in contrast to Cixous, the place of the telephone in Roland Barthes’s Fragments d’un discours amoureux [A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments] (1977). For him, rather than abolishing distance, the telephone emphasizes it.72 It is also the source of an anxiety brought on by waiting – and not understanding – something which makes me doubt my own behavior, it is a “cacophony, and that what it transmits is the wrong voice, the false communication […] I’m going to leave you, the voice on the telephone says with each second.”73 Although Barthes reads the same Proustian passage as Cixous, he focuses on the anxiety of knowing that it is an “eternal separation” that the phone call prefigures, and he does not remember the magic, but only the anxiety: “anxiety conferred by the telephone: the true signature of love.”74 However, Proust’s Marcel also sees the telephone as a means of communication; if trepidation is felt, it is nonetheless as much a question of impatience as it 71 See Marder, “Avital Ronell’s Body Politics,” in The Mother in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, 111–29. 72 Barthes, however, would agree with Cixous that the phone cord plays a vital role – though for him it has the opposite effect: “the telephone wire is not a good transitional object, it is not an inert string; it is charged with a meaning, which is not that of junction but that of distance: the loved, exhausted voice heard over the telephone is the fade-out in all its anxiety.” Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill & Wang, 2010), 115; emphasis my own. Roland Barthes, Fragments d’un discours amoureux (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1977), 132. 73 Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, 114–15; emphasis in the original. Barthes, Fragments d’un discours amoureux, 132. 74 Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, 115. Barthes, Fragments d’un discours amoureux, 132.

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is of anxiety: “As soon as our call has rung out, in the darkness peopled with apparitions to which our ears alone are opened, a shred of sound – an abstract sound – the sound of distance suppressed – and the voice of the dear one speaks to us”75 [“aussitôt que notre appel a retenti, dans la nuit pleine d’apparitions sur laquelle nos oreilles s’ouvrent seules, un bruit léger – un bruit abstrait – celui de la distance supprimée – et la voix de l’être cher s’adresse à nous”].76 Even when the person on the other line is not the one expected, as is the case with Marcel and another young man’s grandmother,77 and though lines may become crossed, communication can happen despite its being a case of mistaken identity. For Cixous, if there is an anxiety, it emerges and is expressed differently: it is no longer the anxiety of the telephone, but rather, as mentioned earlier, a suffering that transmits, that comes through the telephone or telephony; it is a suffering that transcends time and space in order to arrive at my house, to allow me to suffer with someone else, or someone else to suffer with me. She writes: “What?! A thought that wounded a soul 2,500 years ago is here, perceptibly, in my office, in my papers, in my little memory? Yes. No. However yes” (211) [“Comment! Une pensée qui blessa une âme il y a 2500 ans serait-elle là, ici, de façon perceptible, dans mon bureau, dans mes papiers, dans ma petite mémoire? Oui. Non. Pourtant oui”] (59). For those of little faith, Cixous provides a very concrete example: she explains that, when Derrida writes États d’âme de la psychanalyse [“Psychoanalysis Searches the States of Its Soul”] (2000), it is without having had the chance to reread Ajax; and yet she points out that it is “by means of some secret telepathy” that “Ajax’s complaints screamed in him all night long” (211) [“par quelque secrète télépathie [que] les râles d’Ajax avaient hurlé en lui toute la nuit”] (59). Such screams, which are the screams of literature, are thus transmitted through telepathy, through an arkhé-telephone, the greatest telephone and the very first, the telephone before the telephone, so finely tuned that it allows screams to be heard 2,500 years into the future, though as if at the same time. There is no sense of chronology here: if Sophocles tells this tragedy to Poe, care of Baudelaire (who is actually Poe’s translator, and communication is therefore already inverted), one cannot be surprised that the letter is actually signed by Blanchot (215/76). 75 Proust, The Guermantes Way, 130 76 Proust, Le Côté de Guermantes I, 848. 77 Proust, Le Côté de Guermantes I, 849.

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Daniel Sangsue remarks that, when one starts thinking about ghosts, one realizes how Literature functions as a ghost as well, everything seems to return, again and again, in texts: When gathering literary texts about ghosts, one keeps finding filiations: one texts refers to another text, the same story or the same subject is found in one author and another through generations, so that, we will see, the true return [revenance] is the one of the texts themselves.78

Yet it is not altogether a mere question of intertextuality; Cixous takes this further, inasmuch as it is not only texts that communicate, but also the characters in the texts, the authors of the texts, who are sending her messages through the telephone. She also writes, for example, that “Gregor writes her supernatural letters. Later she finds them published in a correspondence between Kafka and Milena […] Literature swallowed it. Literature spits it out again. […] The ghost of Kafka appears to her” [“Gregor lui écrit des lettres surnaturelles. Plus tard elle les trouve imprimées dans une correspondance entre Kafka et Milena. […] La littérature l’a avalée. La littérature la recrache. […] Le fantôme de Kafka lui apparaît”].79 The ghost here is meant to be textual: the apparition of Kafka is made possible by literature’s digestion of a series of letters and by their regurgitation. This type of communication can be experienced by others too: in the epilogue to his treatise on the ontology of the mobile phone, Maurizio Ferraris also invokes Kafka writing to Milena by quoting his moving letter about the ghosts that feed on communication (through letters and also the telephone);80 through Ferraris and his words, we now hear Kafka, Milena, Gregor, and Cixous phoning each other and phoning us. When Cixous reads, when she hears screams on literature’s telephone, she asks whether it is Derrida, or Rousseau, or Stendhal, or Proust, or Montaigne, or her mother Ève (or even she herself) who has written, who has screamed; and this is the question we must also be prepared to ask ourselves. 78 Daniel Sangsue, Fantômes, esprits et autres morts-vivants: Essai de pneumatologie littéraire (Paris: Librairie José Corti, 2011), 23; emphasis in the original. 79 Hélène Cixous, Corollaires d’un vœu (Abstracts et brèves chroniques du temps II) (Paris: Éditions Galilée, 2015), 40. 80 Maurizio Ferraris, Where Are You? Ontology of the Cell Phone, trans. Sarah De Sanctis (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014), 183–84.

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These written phone calls are housed within words and syllables read and heard. The process of writing words down shows Cixous that, even when all seems pointless and lost, something very powerful still remains: “all is lost save the word and its polyphoenix polyphony” (200) [“tout est perdu sauf le mot et sa polyphonie polyphénix”] (24). This portmanteau word brings together the two words “polyphonie” and “phénix,” which already, in each of their individual meanings, point to a certain proliferation: “polyphonie” suggests that a multiplicity of voices can be heard through one same word, and “phénix” suggests an endless potential for rebirth. In addition, by eliminating letters and spaces between these two words, Cixous gives the gift of a new space, a radically other space: a new word that – as the phoenix that constitutes it – becomes alive every time it is pronounced and read. Such a portmanteau word is not found in the dictionary, it has not become so common as to lose its power. And by hearing it, it is as if we were finally able to put our ear to the phone and hear a multiplicity of other voices.81 In her book, Insister: À Jacques Derrida [Insister of Jacques Derrida] (2007), Cixous reveals her predilection for long words, because they “give time and space to reflect”82 [“ça donne le temps et l’espace pour réfléchir”].83 This confession is, interestingly, preceded by a portmanteau word, which paradoxically opens up a new space by closing the spaces that usually separate words, so as to allow for a new resonance to be heard. The word is “Commecitationnellement,”84 or “Asifinquotationally”85 (in Peggy Kamuf’s poetic translation). Its conditional inflection “comme si” and its “citation” reveal the secret formula: by bringing in other words, other people’s words as if they themselves were there, one is able to join them in a different time frame. Writing a long word (especially a portmanteau one) and reading it slows down time – even suspends it, as 81 Author Camille Laurens, who chooses “polyphonie polyphénix” as the title of her contribution to the volume edited by Marta Segarra, thus explains the resonance she finds within Cixous’s oeuvre: “Reading Hélène Cixous is indeed this wonderful phone call that one can receive day and night, by opening her books at random, just like a collection of poems.” Camille Laurens, “Polyphonie polyphénix,” in Hélène Cixous: Corollaires d’une écriture, 228. 82 Hélène Cixous, Insister of Jacques Derrida, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), 31. 83 Hélène Cixous, Insister: À Jacques Derrida (Paris: Éditions Galilée, 2006), 28. 84 Cixous, Insister (2006), 28. 85 Cixous, Insister (2007), 31.

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one is forced to pay attention to every detail, to all the possibilities this word reserves.86 Cixous, working as close to the text as possible, down to its very atoms and their possibilities, joins the dead by stepping into their world through their words. When she speaks, for example, of the “ravensquirrels,” in the time allotted by this portmanteau word, it is Poe who appears between the letters, and we will remember that she describes the work of literature in this way: “making with words anew sentences unheard of […] resurrecting […] rekindling fires” [“refaire avec des mots des phrases inouïes […] ressusciter […] ranimer les feux”].87 The same goes for the irruption of foreign languages within the text, whether English, German, or Spanish; Cixous makes them resonate with other voices. When she dreams about Agamemnon’s retelling her of his death, Cixous writes that he spoke “Greek in English” [“grec en anglais”], and gives us a transcription of the sentence: “As I lay dying je cherche à lever les mains [I try to raise my hands], the woman with the dog’s eyes would not close my eyes as I descended into Hades.”88 Cixous, in this way, links Homer and Faulkner, and through the screams and the groans, she also links the death of her father, as well as Hamlet’s and Derrida’s. As she does with the word “los” in Chapitre Los, to which I will (re)turn at length in Chapter 2, Cixous takes an inventory of the English word “done” and its resonances in French – and this becomes a way to think through literature.89 By listening to language, one notices that literature does not cease to scream various declensions of the same scream in various languages and is found from Sophocles to Cixous. Literature is not content with the simple representation of suffering, it prefers, according to Cixous, to communicate actively by hiding within certain syllables and words, from Ajax to Ayaï, through its literary 86 In Corollaires d’un vœu [Corollary of a Wish] (2015), Cixous emphasizes the need for long words by cutting them, even suspending their last syllables – the end of the word is always to come: “In this scene she pronounces the cut words, especially the long ones. It is her idea to keep madness from stealing her tongue: terro-, definiti-, gén-, trahiz-.” Cixous, Corollaires d’un vœu, 41. 87 Cixous, Ayaï, 12. My translation; this paragraph is not translated in English. 88 Cixous, Ayaï, 28. English in the original. The entire quote is in italics in the original. Cixous cites as a footnote: “Homer, Odyssey, canto XI.” 89 “And it occurs to me that the great English symphony must have begun with a blow [un coup de] of done. From Beowulf to John Donne, from Shakespeare to Joyce, the memory of English rings with those claps [éclats] of Glas whose infinite litters [portées] of meaning in French Derrida brought to our ears” (201); emphasis in the original. Cixous, Ayaï, 26.

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telephony, the double suffering that makes me suffer from another’s suffering. And Cixous makes it clear in the closing lines of her book that this communication happens both ways through the delightful ambiguity of the French third person singular pronoun “on,” which can in fact take the place of all singular and plural subject pronouns: “Silence! There is screaming”90 [Silence! On crie] (87). Indeed, Cixous uses telephony in her work as a means to go beyond and speak to those who are dead, to those who could be understood as specters; this takes place across the boundaries of time and space, as we traditionally understand them. Commenting on two sentences – “You phone me. I listen to you”91 [“Tu me téléphones. Je t’écoute”] – found in Cixous’s short text, “Nous en somme” [We all in all] (2006), where she explores many possibilities of being, Eric Prenowitz explains how the telephone itself can be understood as acting as a suspension device: “This parataxis, with no conjunction or logical articulation between the two independent clauses, gives the sense that causality and temporality have been suspended by the telephone.”92 To engage in telephony thus means entering a different space and time that allows someone absent to be (in a sense) present – as well as the present to be absent – to interrupt or disrupt a teleologically oriented understanding of time. In this text, Cixous is already experimenting with what it means to become multiple, to be surrounded by absent beings who are nevertheless slowly welcomed in; in the next chapter, we will see how this can be understood as a powerful type of hauntology.

90 Translation modified. In the published English translation, the order is lost: “We may cry: Aiai! Silence!” Cixous, “Conclusion: Ay yay! The cry of Literature,” 217. 91 Hélène Cixous, “Nous en somme,” Littérature 142 (2006): 102. 92 Prenowitz, “Crossing Lines,” 135.

chapter two

On Timely Disruptions On Timely Disruptions

Thus traces of the storyteller cling to the story the way the handprints of the potter cling to the clay vessel. […] Thus his tracks are frequently evident in his narratives, if not as those of the one who experienced it, then as those of the one who reports it. Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller”1

Keeping in mind how the “double suffering” [“double souffrance”] made possible by Literature allows us, through reading, to be in communication with others, be they alive, dead, fictional or ghosts, in what follows, I would like to examine what a hauntology, a theory or philosophy of ghosts according to Hélène Cixous, could look like. As was discussed in Chapter 1, for both Jacques Derrida and Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok (the two other “strands” of hauntology), what prompts a theorization of ghosts is tied to loss and mourning; we have seen as well the important role that mourning plays for Cixous. It should be noted that the way she proceeds is different from the practice of “literary tombs” [tombeaux littéraires], in which the memory of a loved one is given a resting place and shielded with a textual grave.2 It also does not function entirely like writing for those who do not have a grave so that writing 1 Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov,” in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2007), 92. 2 For a reworking of this notion attentive to contemporary practices of literary commemoration, see Oana Panaïté, “Tombeaux littéraires contemporains,” in Pour un récit transnational: La fiction au défi de l’histoire immédiate (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2015), 101–19. http://books.openedition.org/pur/52560.

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becomes the only tomb;3 by contrast, Cixous invites not only reflection, remembrance, or reverence, but also an engagement and an attempted communication with those who have disappeared in order to welcome their reappearances. Cixous’s series of open-ended texts named, in a nod to Hamlet,4 “Abstracts et brèves chroniques du temps” [Abstracts and Brief Chronicles of the Time] marks an important development in her work and thinking on matters of spectrality. In a book-length “chapter” of this series titled Chapitre Los (the first to be published but, she stresses, not necessarily the first, chronologically speaking – it is the first that manifested itself to her), a series that will eventually compose a greater “ghost book,” which Cixous calls “[the] book-that-I-am-not-writing” [“[le] Livre-queje-n’écris-pas”],5 she shares her thoughts and grief upon learning of the death of writer and friend Carlos Fuentes. His loss is reflected in the Los of Cixous’s title, as an echo, trace, or spectral remnant of Carlos, of the German “Los!” [Let’s go!] or “was ist los?” [what’s happening?], and the English “loss.” As she notes the resonance of this word, wondering if it is Spanish, German, or English, she concludes that it is a ghost, an echo of death returned and to come: “Los is the name of the phantom, ghost, or specter, or Gespenst, or fantasma, which haunts maman almost all day long” [“Los est le nom du fantôme, ghost ou spectre ou Gespenst ou fantasma qui hante maman pendant presque toute la journée”].6 At the time of writing, Cixous’s mother, Ève, who is the subject of many of her texts, is still alive, but the description of her already being haunted by a ghost called Los already calls forward to her death; as Ève is nearing her 100th birthday, Cixous begins an anticipated mourning of her mother, knowing that she may be gone soon. Cixous also remembers that writing, being a writer, and leaving words to be read by others is already an act of becoming-ghost, of leaving behind spectral traces. For her, this is a consolation, given the fact that, the way she sees it, Carlos, by writing became partly fictional and by inserting 3 I think here particularly of Georges Perec. See Introduction. 4 Hélène Cixous, Chapitre Los (Abstracts et brèves chroniques du temps I) (Paris: Éditions Galilée, 2013). Cixous cites as an epigraph the following line: “Let them be well used; for they are the abstracts and brief chronicles of the time.” William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act II, scene ii. The Cambridge Dover Wilson Shakespeare, vol. 7, ed. John Dover Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 55. 5 Cixous, Chapitre Los, “À mes lisants”; emphasis removed. 6 Cixous, Chapitre Los, 20.

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some of himself into Literature, one can say that he was always already part ghost: “So many people have been thrust into world memory by his acts of imagination that, for a while now, he has been amongst the small crowd of beings carved into the mythological fabric. Partly fictional, these people are always already in the process of renewable radiance” [“Tant de personnes ont été lancées dans la mémoire mondiale par ses actes d’imagination qu’il a pris place depuis longtemps parmi la petite foule des êtres taillés dans le tissu mythologique. En partie fictifs, ces gens sont toujours déjà en voie de rayonnement renouvelable”].7 Understood in this sense, Carlos had already joined Homer, Sophocles, Montaigne, Shakespeare, Stendhal, Proust, Kafka, Derrida (privileged interlocutors in Cixous’s imaginary) and others, long before his death, through the power or potentiality of the written word. Cixous describes him, throughout Chapitre Los, as joining his voice to others’ (the telephony so dear to her), and thus ensuring a certain survival of his (always already fictional and ghostly) self. This conception of the author leaving traces behind, surviving through words, and leaving a legacy in order not to be forgotten is neither new nor surprising in itself; it is even something of a literary commonplace. Marie Darrieussecq, for example, links this desire to ambition: “I don’t see the point of writing if one does not have the ambition to be read in a hundred years! […] I write in order to stay, to leave traces, to make literature go further [faire avancer la littérature].”8 Cixous, for her part, proposes that the question is not so much the idea of “staying” or being remembered after one’s own death, but rather that this becoming fictional – or becoming-ghost – happens long before death. What matters then is that there is a potential for communication regardless of one’s state (still alive or already dead); it encompasses more than remembrance, than keeping the trace of a loved one “alive.” By mobilizing literature as telephony, Cixous sees the possibility of a two-way communication. In Cixous’s second published chapter of “Le-Livre-que-je-n’écris-pas” [The-book-that-I-am-not-writing] called Corollaires d’un vœu [The Corollaries of a Wish] (2015),9 the exuberance of Ayaï! (and its antideath 7 Cixous, Chapitre Los, 25. 8 Olivia de Lamberterie, “Marie Darrieussecq: ‘J’ai fait la paix avec mes fantômes.’” Elle, 10 September 2001, 101–2. 9 Which incidentally grew some capital letters since its first chapter, perhaps emphasizing (shouting or screaming?) that she is not the one writing it. Hélène

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telephone seen in Chapter 1) and Chapitre Los has, it seems, subsided. There is a mournful tone in her writing, understandably given her mother’s death in July 2013. In Cixous’s correspondence with Cécile Wajsbrot (taking place between May and November 2012 and later between April 2013 and May 2014),10 her mother’s death is clearly marked as a rupture, indicated textually by Wajsbrot through the use of the em dash. Wajsbrot notes: “the rupture happens between the letter from 16 June [2013] and the one from 10 July. It is Eve – it is her death” [“La coupure advient entre la lettre du 16 juin et celle du 10 juillet. C’est Eve – c’est sa mort”].11 However, this very personal loss develops in Corollaires d’un vœu concurrently to the becoming-specter Cixous already hinted at in other texts. While Carlos was described as part-ghost – as living on in a different arrangement of matter – Cixous, when thinking about her own self as she is writing, sees herself as a repository of sorts: Everyone is dead […] It is as though I were a bit dead, already partly so, and, perhaps, given that state, the wish to write the Book increases and imposes itself on me as though detached from all internal procrastination       Toolate is not far, I say. All those who peopled me rest. [Tout le monde est mort […] C’est comme si j’étais un peu morte, déjà en partie, et l’étant peut-être, la volonté d’écrire le Livre augmente et s’impose à moi comme détachée de toute tergiversation intérieure       Troptard n’est pas loin, dis-je. Tous ceux qui me peuplaient gisent.]12

Yet, because of all of this, because she feels like the only one left behind, the only one who is still able to write while keeping “toolate” at bay, Cixous reiterates that she still believes in Literature: “I believe in the library of the world. I still believe” [“Je crois à la bibliothèque du monde. Je crois encore”].13 For her, through Literature, through writing, there is still a possibility to be together, even if it seems, at times, that she herself has forgotten her own words. Cixous, Corollaires d’un vœu (Abstracts et brèves chroniques du temps II) (Paris: Éditions Galilée, 2015), “Prière d’insérer.” 10 Cécile Wajsbrot and Hélène Cixous, Une autobiographie allemande (Paris: Christian Bourgois Éditeur, 2016), 11. 11 Wajsbrot and Cixous, Une autobiographie allemande, 11. 12 Cixous, Corollaires d’un vœu, 13. There is no punctuation between “intérieure” and “Troptard” and there is a line break. 13 Cixous, Corollaires d’un vœu, 15.

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Even before writing this book she is not writing, before publishing the chapters of a book that is not a book, Cixous was already asking these questions and, in a sense, providing some answers to her future self: “Is this a book? This erect coffin, left ajar, is it the customs ghosts must go through, a backwards entry? This tormented and violent thing and bitten by death?” [“Est-ce que c’est un livre ça? Ce cercueil dressé qui bâille, douane pour les fantômes, entrée d’envers? Cette chose hagarde et violente et mordue de mort?”].14 I turn, here, for a possible answer, to Elissa Marder’s reflection, in The Mother in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (2012), on two scenes of mourning in which Cixous takes with her some piece of death, of her dead, of a possible tomb(stone), and encloses it in a casket-like coffer (like the crypt of Abraham and Torok we briefly saw in Chapter 1). Marder comments that “we come to recognize that those tiny caskets are placeholders for that which has no proper place. […] Their unique mode of reproduction gives new life to inassimilable bits of death.”15 For Marder, these two coffers that are smuggled by the subject are “perform[ing] an uncanny work of mourning,”16 and she links them to other “unruly reproductive containers”17 examined in her book for their work as sites of repetition of a certain reproducible maternal function. However, one container, which is uncannily coffin-like in its dimensions and content, is not exactly named as such in Marder’s list: “freezers, case studies, photographs, labyrinths, miniature portraits, dreams, crypts, and tiny coffins.”18 It is, namely, the word-container “book,” in which all of the prior containers mentioned are themselves contained. Books, to use Marder’s description of the function of caskets, “preserve bits of death and reproduce new forms of life from them.”19 That is what Cixous’s project, in writing or “not writing” books, is: it allows for bits of death, of life, and of ghosts to be preserved and to be reproduced, multiplied, and distributed – that is, to be read. Marder, referring to 14 Hélène Cixous, “Le Livre que je n’écris pas,” in Genèses, généalogies, genre: Autour de l’œuvre d’Hélène Cixous, ed. Mireille Calle-Gruber and Marie Odile Germain (Paris: Éditions Galilée/Bibliothèque Nationale de France, 2006), 238. 15 Elissa Marder, The Mother in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction: Psychoanalysis, Photography, Deconstruction (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012), 248. 16 Marder, The Mother in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, 248. 17 Marder, The Mother in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, 248–49. 18 Marder, The Mother in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, 249. 19 Marder, The Mother in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, 249.

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bits [mors] that have been cast out and cannot be [re]attached to any specific concept due to their spectral unassimilable trace, writes that “[s]ome of the bits of language that cannot be assimilated into concepts get spit out as literature.”20 To the question – is this a book? – that Cixous asks concerning the thing that is “bitten with death” [mordue de mort], I would reply with another one of her own questions. In the Prière d’insérer of Chapitre Los addressed “To my reading readers” [À mes lisants], Cixous asks herself and us: “this life born from death, could it be literature?” [“cette vie née de la mort, ce serait la littérature?”].21 She thus evokes another type of life, in the conditional tense, a life that would come from death to become life otherwise – life as literature. In other words: yes, this “thing, bitten with death” [“cette chose mordue de mort”] is indeed a book, very precisely a book, a container that “preserve[s] bits of death and reproduce[s] new forms of life from them.”22 But for Cixous this is not only something that she says, it is something that she experiences, it is a way to contend with death and disappearance. Despite moments of temporary disillusionment, or rather the realization of the paradoxical weight that comes with dealing with specters, Cixous’s sorrow and worry are, I propose, directly linked to the fact that her conception of spectrality requires an intimate and radical transformation and reorganization of one’s own being, a willingness to carry within oneself some ugliness and inassimilable pain, some “bits of death,” in order to be able to communicate, to commune with others. Hence, when, in Ayaï, she recalls a conversation with her children, she claims that she is part of something that one is yet unable to think. However, Cixous is incorrect in saying that, for, when she incorporates the words of her son, she already sketches out the very possibility for a communion with ghosts. She writes: Ajax is no longer. Nothing more. Today 2014, Jacques Derrida is no longer J.D. 2000. You are no longer H.C. 2000, says my son. There is not a single atom of your body that was part of your body 15 years 20 Marder, The Mother in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, 240; emphasis in the original. One cannot avoid thinking, as Marder does earlier in her text, of the many resonances of the word “bit” in French: “‘mors’: “From its sound, it is indistinguishable from the command mords (bite!), the word for death (mort), and the words for the dead (mort in the masculine singular or morts in the plural)” (229–30). 21 Cixous, Chapitre Los, “À mes lisants.” 22 Marder, The Mother in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, 249.

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ago. And yet there is a you that is you. Memory is stronger than death. Materially inscribed in you there lives a text that was telegraphed to you from Homer c/o Sophocles. Memory outlives the matter in which it is inscribed. Atoms of the genius of Shakespeare and of Freud, musics, you are here, and mixed with Philia’s and Aletheia’s purring, you surround me in an organization that we do not know how to think today …23 [Ajax n’est plus. Plus rien. Aujourd’hui 2014, Jacques Derrida n’est plus J. D. 2000. Tu n’es plus H. C. 2000, dit mon fils. Il n’y a pas un atome commun de ton corps 2014 avec ton corps d’il y a quinze ans. Et pourtant il y a un toi qui est toi. La mémoire est plus forte que la mort. En toi vit un texte matériellement inscrit qui te fut télégraphié par Homère c/o [care of] Sophocle. La mémoire survit à la matière dans laquelle elle est inscrite. Atomes du génie de Shakespeare et de Freud, musiques, vous êtes ici, et mêlés au ronronnement de Philia et Aletheia, vous m’environnez dans une organisation qu’on ne sait pas penser actuellement …]24

This new organization of being that one is not yet able to think – because we are limited by our bodies’ own limits, by our conception of temporality – hinges on an understanding of what it could mean to become text, to become specter. We are told that the body routinely undergoes a complete transformation – for Cixous’s son, on an atomic level, we are different – and yet something remains that makes us us. But this is at the same time something already textual: encompassing not only our traces, but also the traces of others which allow us to survive otherwise. And it would seem that it is possible that such an organization is even able to incorporate Shakespeare, Freud, and two cats. This being here, mingled, together points to a radical hospitality, a welcoming of (outwardly) otherness that becomes undifferentiated at the level of the “atoms.” This type of text is what Megan C. MacDonald calls (writing about Cixous’s “Mon Algériance” [“My Algeriance”]) an “elemental piece – made up of particles and elements.”25 This willingness to accept 23 Hélène Cixous, “Conclusion: Ay yay! The Cry of Literature,” in Tom Bishop and Donatien Grau, eds., Ways of Re-Thinking Literature (London: Routledge, 2018), 211. 24 Hélène Cixous, Ayaï! Le cri de la littérature (Paris: Éditions Galilée, 2013), 59–60. 25 Megan C. MacDonald, “Haunting Correspondences and Elemental Scenes: Weaving Cixous after Derrida,” in Cixous after/depuis 2000, ed. Elizabeth Berglund Hall, Frédérique Chevillot, Eilene Hoft-March, and Maribel Peñalver Vicea (Leiden: Brill, 2017), 46.

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this change in being is a necessary step if we want to refuse the complete disappearance of others. It thus precisely reveals the “possibilities of the specter, the specter as possibility”26 [“la possibilité du spectre, le spectre comme possibilité”],27 which Derrida years before had called for:28 that is, a spectrality that begins long before death and goes beyond death, a spectrality that allows us to be at the same time as ghosts. In fact, in the very aptly titled Le Détrônement de la mort [Death Shall Be Dethroned] (2014), the “journal” to Chapitre Los, written at the same time, on the margins, Cixous describes a scene with at first three people, but then, upon closer examination, with actually seven beings in it. Although long, this quotation will help summarize what a hauntology according to Cixous could look like and how it makes it possible for us readers to perhaps become ghosts ourselves (or at least learn how to engage with them): in the false appearance of reality there are three of us, in truth we are seven of whom three actors are embodied in the summer of 2014 – my daughter, my son, me – and four radiant, tenacious subjects – Carlos, my son, my daughter, me – in peak form in 1969 […] I was, I am. These five are my witnesses. […] We are seated, all three of us hence all seven of us, the present and the archipresent […] But for the four of us who are more than present less than present, for the four otherwise present, there is no word yet. I look for it. We look for it. All is spectral, we are all specters. Specter, that’s not it. The word halo appears, haloes, fans its tail, the wheel fills with images and echoes, but that’s not it. – The past is with us like the present, I say. – You could say that these four other us-es who are here with us are folded in, thickness of the same sheet, says my son. But that’s not it. – We look at each other, we talk to ourselves, we are seven really. Seven equally specters equally present. – You can’t call them “revenants” these beings who stay, who don’t return, who don’t weaken, who remanate. – We are the ones who come back, to ourselves, my daughter muses, where this takes place. – The place is very strong, I say. Every time I go past La Guitoune, Carlos 26 Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge Classics, 1994), 13. 27 Jacques Derrida, Spectres de Marx: L’État de la dette, le travail du deuil et la nouvelle Internationale (Paris: Éditions Galilée, 1993), 34. 28 See Chapter 1.

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opens the window onto the silvery-grey surface of the Bassin, I say. And right away for the thousandth first time we go past La Guitoune. Everything is living: everything is going to die. It all goes. It all stays. One is at the same time. – This time is a quasi-gnomic present. A present bewitched29 [en apparence fausse de réalité, nous sommes trois personnes, en vérité nous sommes sept êtres dont trois acteurs incarnés en été 2014, ma fille, mon fils, moi, et quatre sujets tenaces radieux en pleine forme, Carlos, mon fils, ma fille, moi, en 1969. […] J’ai été, je suis. Ces cinq-là sont mes témoins. […] Nous sommes assis tous les trois donc tous les sept, les présents et les archiprésents […] pour les quatre d’entre nous qui sont plus que présents moins que présents, pour les quatre présentsautrement, il n’y a pas encore de mot. Je le cherche. Nous le cherchons. Tout est spectre, nous sommes tous spectres. Spectres, ce n’est pas ça. Le mot halo apparaît, halote, fait le paon, la roue pleine d’images et d’échos, mais ce n’est pas ça. – Le passé est avec nous comme présent, dis-je. – On pourrait dire que ces quatre autres nous qui sont avec nous-mêmes sont des replis, des épaisseurs de la même feuille, dit mon fils. Mais ce n’est pas ça. – Nous nous regardons, nous nous parlons, nous sommes bien sept. Sept également spectres également présents. – On ne peut pas appeler ‘revenants’ ces êtres qui restent, qui ne reviennent pas, qui ne faiblissent pas, qui rémanent. – C’est nous qui revenons, à nous, songe ma fille, où ça a lieu. – Le lieu est très fort, dis-je. Chaque fois que je passe devant La Guitoune, Carlos ouvre la fenêtre qui donne sur la toile gris argent du Bassin, dis-je. Et aussitôt nous passons pour la millième première fois devant La Guitoune. Tout est vivant: tout va mourir. Tout va. Tout reste. On est en même temps. Ce temps est un présent quasi gnomique. C’est un présent sorcier]30

Cixous, leaving her sorcerous present hanging, reveals a crucial way to understand how communication/communion with specters works. When she writes that, “in truth” [“en vérité”], there are seven beings present, she embraces a 1969 self and a 2014 self: they are all, though in 29 Hélène Cixous, Death Shall Be Dethroned. Los, A Chapter, the Journal, trans. Beverley Bie Brahic (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2016), 6–8; emphases in the original. The final sentence ends without punctuation. 30 Hélène Cixous, Le Détrônement de la mort: Journal du Chapitre Los (Paris: Éditions Galilée, 2014), 14–16; emphases in the original. The final sentence ends without punctuation.

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appearance untimely, able to coexist at the same time with their different incarnations; while she is no longer H.C. 2000 (we will remember from her previous conversation with her son), we could posit that she could also be at the same time H.C. 2000 and 1969 and 2014. As she attempts to find a name to speak about these “otherwise present” others, Cixous rejects many words, because she is looking for something that would best explain what “that” [“ça”] is, how “that” [“ça”] works – and here we find an echo to Hamlet’s “this thing.” In a shift in the conception of spectral temporality, it would seem that, for Cixous, a shared time – a “being contemporary” – is what opens up the communication with ghosts: “One is at the same time”31 – but also, “We are at the same time” – [“On est en même temps”],32 she writes. The (gnomic) present that Cixous is talking about is a present that expresses generally known facts – etymologically speaking, it comes from the same family as the verb “to understand” or “to know”;33 this present of knowledge holds itself, in a way, outside of time, since it can be understood always as if “for the thousandth first time”34 [“pour la millième première fois”].35 The third person pronoun “on” is also significant because of the plurality of the persons that it can stand in for “at the same time” [“en même temps”]. The “on” can also mean that one returns to oneself, that is, that the multiple incarnations of our selves (ca. 1969, 2014, etc.) are returning and existing individually, yet at the same time. Deployed are a number of attempts to try to understand what another way of conceiving the self could be – a plurality of selves at the same time and also outside of time, or a time that does not constitute itself as having a beginning and an end – a time that is not conceived as a “stream or an arrow.”36 The words of Cixous’s daughter hint at the shift that occurs: “we are the ones who come back, to ourselves, my daughter muses, where this takes place”37 [“C’est nous qui revenons, à nous, songe ma fille, où 31 Cixous, Death Shall Be Dethroned, 8; emphasis in the original. 32 Cixous, Le Détrônement de la mort, 16; emphasis in the original. 33 See “gnomique,” in Le Grand Robert de la langue française: “Greek gnômikos ‘sententious,’ from ‘gnômê’ ‘opinion; maxim,’ from the family of gignôskein ‘to understand.’” 34 Cixous, Death Shall Be Dethroned, 8. 35 Cixous, Le Détrônement de la mort, 16. 36 Aleida Assmann, Is Time Out of Joint? On the Rise and Fall of the Modern Time Regime, trans. Sarah Clift (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2020), 19. 37 Cixous, Death Shall Be Dethroned, 7.

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ça a lieu”].38 To return to the previous meditation, when Shakespeare’s atoms join the atoms of Cixous’s cats and of her own body, it is because of her spectrality, that is, her being an ever-changing fiction (the atoms that make up her self today are not the same ones that made up her self fifteen years prior). In order for Shakespeare and Cixous to be at the same time, it is she who needs to change, who needs to become untimely and to bring different iterations of her selves to the table, that is, to herself. In the untimely appearance of the specter of Carlos, Cixous, her daughter, and her son become reacquainted with their 1969 selves, while being at the same time in 2014, or even today as I am writing these words, and another day when you are reading them. There is, indeed, an order of being for Cixous that is not linked to a particular body (which does not mean that the body loses its very important materiality), but rather to a global, collective body, a body of work, a literary corpus, a book made flesh, she writes in Corollaires d’un vœu, the second published chapter of this book-that-she-is-not-writing: Each phrase has its doubles, its shades/shadows, its ghosts. There must be many to receive the letter. Truth is there, in between the lines and their inner vibrations. A period changes everything. The difficulty lies in accepting to be the many who read it. One of my selves will be able to amuse itself by what makes another self tremble. [Chaque phrase a ses doubles, ses ombres, ses fantômes. Il faut être plusieurs à recevoir la lettre. La vérité est là, entre les lignes et leurs vibrations intérieures. Un point change tout. La difficulté est d’accepter d’être plusieurs qui la lise(nt). L’une de mes moi pourra s’amuser de ce qui fait trembler une autre moi.]39

Cixous accepts that there are other selves that can read the same letter and react in his/her/their own ways, as she is inviting others into the fold, into the folds of her very being. This is exactly what Frédéric Regard intuits when he writes that “Cixous reads Derrida as her contemporary, as a guest writer, as if she were inviting herself along to the ‘Circumfession’ ceremony, as if an active participant in this ‘Circonfession.’”40 Later he will call her the text’s “posthumous ghost 38 Cixous, Le Détrônement de la mort, 16. 39 Cixous, Corollaires d’un vœu, 50. 40 Frédéric Regard, “‘Reiterature’, or the Haunting of Style in the Portrait de Jacques Derrida by Hélène Cixous,’ in Haunting Presences: Ghosts in French Literature and Culture, ed. Kate Griffiths and David Evans (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2009), 132.

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writer,”41 although it is not entirely clear whether this posthumous ghost writer could also be Derrida himself. However, the distinction does not really matter if we read this according to a Cixousian spectrality: Cixous, Derrida, the text, all contemporary by way of an untimely embrace. Cixous becomes a ghost – and also a ghost writer – because she is untimely, she goes back as much as other ghosts come forth. Reading ghosts the way that Cixous does means, for readers, to be open to their own radical spectrality in an engagement that holds “past, present, future” on the same plane. Words, memories, and other means of communication are transmitted through atoms to form a new kind of body, expressed in a being while/through writing (for all this is happening in a text and in writing scenes). This is what Marder redefines as “life writing,”42 namely, “[a] form of life that is only possible in writing and that only writing makes possible.”43 It is precisely in this sense that Cixous can declare that, “In 1907, Sophocles’ atoms return to be sprinkled on one of Proust’s notebooks”44 [“En 1907 les atomes de Sophocle reviennent saupoudrer un cahier de Proust”].45 Proust, in his own being-spectral, is thus able to communicate, to enter into a communion with Sophocles, and later with Cixous, and with me, and with you, who, in our becoming-spectral, can engage with them and each other. What Cixous’s vision of the untimely and the contemporary (at-thesame-time-ness) advances is that, rather than being diametrically opposed or even in tension, being untimely and being contemporary become joined in the radical mise en œuvre of literature: it is through an untimely return that being contemporary with ghosts is possible. There is a slight shift here from Agamben’s conception of the contemporary discussed in the Introduction, for he sketches out a poet, an artist who is detached from their time, who does belong by virtue of being on the margins. For him:

41 Regard, “‘Reiterature,’” 134. 42 Life writing is an “umbrella” term that has come to encompass, in academic circles, all sorts of genres and traditions that speak to the “apparent dissolution of life into story,” or also meaning more plainly, “the writing of one’s own or another’s life.” Margaretta Jolly, ed. Encyclopedia of Life Writing: Autobiographical and Biographical Forms (Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers, 2001), ix. 43 Marder, The Mother in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, 220. 44 Cixous, “Ay yay,” 200. 45 Cixous, Ayaï, 23.

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Those who are truly contemporary, who truly belong to their time, are those who neither perfectly coincide with it nor adjust themselves to its demands. They are thus in this sense irrelevant [inattuale]. But precisely because of this condition, precisely through this disconnection and this anachronism, they are more capable than others of perceiving and grasping their own time.46

For Cixous, becoming untimely is not becoming irrelevant or disconnected, rather it is being contemporary with ghosts; it is experienced as communion rather than as a distanced assessment – the interaction is one of an invited guest rather than a sociologist of the contemporary time period. Even for Derrida, untimeliness fuels an attempt to come closer. A “true” contemporary, in Derrida’s sense, would be one who welcomes (who provides hospitality for) the untimely ghost in order to learn to be contemporary with it: “What kind of hospitality would not be ready to offer itself to the dead one, to the revenant?”47 Indeed, what Derrida calls “absolute hospitality” [l’hospitalité absolue] is one which requires me to open “my home” [“mon chez-moi”] not only to the stranger, but also “to the absolute, unknown, anonymous other, and that I give place [donne lieu] to them, that I let them come, that I let them arrive, and take place in the place I offer them, without asking them either reciprocity (entering into a pact) or even their names.”48 For Cixous, grasping or understanding is only possible if there is a connection, a communication, an exchange. Learning to live with ghosts, as Cixous urges us to do, necessitates welcoming them into the most intimate spheres of our lives; it necessitates an absolute openness to what can appear to be radically other, but which, all the more, reveals the otherness in our own selves. Rather than attempting to make the ghost contemporary, it makes us untimely, allowing us to live in several temporalities, and yet at the same

46 Giorgio Agamben, “What Is the Contemporary?” in Nudities, trans. David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010), 40. 47 Jacques Derrida, Of Hospitality: Anne Dufourmantelle Invites Jacques Derrida to Respond, trans. Rachel Bowlby (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 144; emphasis removed. Derrida’s remarks are here cited back to him by Anne Dufourmantelle. Jacques Derrida, De l’hospitalité (Anne Dufourmantelle invite Jacques Derrida à répondre) (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1997), 25. 48 Derrida, Of Hospitality, 25; emphasis in the original. Derrida, De l’hospitalité, 34.

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time: “This text takes place in 1995, just as in 1965 in 1976, in 2014, in 96–97, at the same time. It introduces itself as it wishes, at all times, like eternity, which has no age” [“Ce texte se passe en 1995 comme en 1965 en 1976, en 2014, en 96–97, en même temps. Il se présente à sa tête, à tout moment, comme l’éternité, qui n’a pas d’âge”].49 In her explanation of the temporality of the book-that-she-is-not-writing, Cixous reminds us that being at the same time is not only something that can be done when communicating with ghosts from the past, but it is also something that encompasses the future, what comes after death, for she speaks of an event in the future (and of a ghost that is yet to come): It is dated from the future, that is, from my death – an event that determines all my choices and acts […] my death is here, in all my life, now that the words “my mother is dead” have entered my back, my neck, the palms of my hands, they violently strike my right hand. [Il est daté de l’avenir, c’est-à-dire de ma mort – un événement qui détermine désormais tous mes choix et mes actes […] ma mort est là, dans toute ma vie, maintenant que les mots “ma mère est morte” me sont entrés dans le dos, dans le cou, les paumes des mains, me frappent violemment la main droite.]50

Her mother Ève was the last link to life; now Cixous is conscious in her very body that she is already a ghost, that she too has already gone beyond. This realization is linked to writing, or more specifically to the hand (the right one) that is writing. She explains that it is this hand, her writing hand, that still allows her to remain in the here and now; through writing she anchors herself in the present. By contrast, when she was unable to use her hand for several weeks, she understood that ceasing to produce Literature, that ceasing to communicate is to accept her death sentence. However, Cixous recovered and thus enacted her own ghostly return: “I was rehearsing death for many weeks. I was doomed. I was posthumous, I am back, I take it as read. This accident is nothing but a small example among the messages that the end addresses to me” [“J’ai été en répétition de mort pendant plusieurs semaines. J’ai été condamnée. J’ai été posthume, je suis revenue, je me le tiens pour dit. Cet accident n’est qu’un petit exemple parmi les messages que la fin m’adresse”].51 For, after the death of her 49 Cixous, Corollaires d’un vœu, 19; emphasis my own. 50 Cixous, Corollaires d’un vœu, 19. 51 Cixous, Corollaires d’un vœu, 20.

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mother, Cixous is now all the more conscious of what will happen to her, given her own advancement in age: “Death bites me in the hand. It is perhaps this summer that my hands will kill me” [“La mort me mord les mains. C’est peut-être cet été que mes mains me tueront”],52 she writes again in Défions l’augure [We Defy Augury] (2018), another Shakespeare-inspired work. While the death of her father and the inconsolable grief and mourning prompted the writing of her very first books starting in 1967,53 the death of her mother brings death very clearly into Cixous’s own self, into her own writing hand: It is because I went over the limit twice in a year that I have the absolute visa. Now I am as free as the dead. This passage took place six months ago: on the one hand, mom is dead, the same day she settled in me, I am with the dead one, this has changed my nature, I am in a state of which we never speak, I was ready to carry death or the dead. [C’est parce que j’ai passé la ligne de la limite deux fois en une année que j’ai le visa absolu. Maintenant je suis libre comme les morts. Ce passage a eu lieu il y a six mois: d’une part maman est morte, le jour même elle s’est installée en moi, je suis avec morte, cela a changé ma nature, je suis dans l’état dont on ne parle jamais, j’étais prête à porter la mort ou le mort.]54

In the event of the mother’s death, the carrying of her within is the most radical gesture of this contemporary untimeliness – it is a haunting that is welcomed, a possession that is sought, something made possible by a passage – both a journey and a fragment of text. It is perhaps why Cixous makes the following statement: “I don’t know how to live without making Eve return on the airplane of literature” [“Je ne sais pas vivre sans faire revenir Ève par l’avion de la littérature”].55 Here, literature has moved from a telephone call to a plane, pointing perhaps to the fact that the mother’s return is not enough in a disincarnated voice; Cixous rather longs for the mother’s body and soul, so as to incorporate her into herself (in a gesture again reminiscent of Abraham and Torok’s crypt). However, rather than remaining completely hidden, 52 Hélène Cixous, Défions l’augure (Paris: Éditions Galilée, 2018), 17. 53 This is the year she publishes Le Prénom de Dieu (Paris: Grasset, 1967). The following year, she publishes Dedans. 54 Cixous, Corollaires d’un vœu, 27. 55 Cixous, Corollaires d’un vœu, 60.

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Ève, through literature, is always present, always in the open, always here and now: “It is my mother, past future in the present” [“C’est ma mère, passé avenir au présent”].56 When, in 2003, Cixous donates her manuscripts to the Bibliothèque Nationale,57 she refers to herself in these terms: “you, who receive me – my specter in the abundant person of my manuscripts” [“vous qui me recevez moi – mon spectre en la personne fourmilleuse de mes manuscrits”].58 She also calls her books or the process by which her books come to her (notice the echo) “this haunting […] this inner supplanting” [“ce hantement […] ce supplantement interne”].59 To name her preparations in integrating the library, Cixous finds the following description: “this Odyssean passage between life and the dead” [“ce passage odysséen entre la vie et les morts”].60 She puts the journey that she is preparing under the banner of the Odyssey, and thus declares that she is going home: into the library, into the world of books. When Cixous started writing, it was in order to mourn the loss of her father, and she explains that this other world became a new way of being in this world: At last I remade a paper world in 1968. This second world was always repairable. Whole pages of the book can be torn. One is ablaze, a self burns to ashes, we can remake ink with ashes. There is no hiatus. And then, the mental family grows. We have parents and friends through literature, brothers, sisters, dogs. We open a volume, we enter. Make yourself at home, literature says. In these pages you will find all the joys and all the mournings you need. [Finalement, j’avais refait un monde en papier en 1968. Ce deuxième monde fut toujours réparable. Des pages entières du livre peuvent être arrachées. On flambe, un moi est calciné, on refait de l’encre avec la cendre. Il n’y a pas de hiatus. Et puis la famille mentale s’accroît. On a des parents et amis par littérature, des frères, des sœurs, des chiens. On ouvre un volume, on entre. Fais comme chez toi, dit la littérature. 56 Cixous, Défions l’augure, 139. 57 Using the figure of the “navette” [shuttle] to read Cixous’s and Derrida’s works around the Mediterranean, MacDonald advocates for an attention to what can be said to “defamiliarize sites and archives thought to be familiar, and making them new spaces.” MacDonald, “Haunting Correspondences and Elemental Scenes,” 39. For a reading of the significance of Cixous’s gift [don] and regarding its political significance, see, in particular, pages 40–43, 51. 58 Cixous, “Le Livre que je n’écris pas,” 231. 59 Cixous, “Le Livre que je n’écris pas,” 236. 60 Cixous, “Le Livre que je n’écris pas,” 232.

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Dans ces pages tu trouveras toutes les joies et tous les deuils dont tu as besoin.]61

Cixous thus starts interacting with certain figures in order to understand what she once did not and what they perhaps did not either. Hence, speaking with the ghost of Stendhal’s Fabrice, Cixous reads his encounter with an anonymous cadaver, this figure of death, as an event which prefigures her own transformation: “I am the one you were. You are the one I will be. You change my subject, my kind, my type/my gender” [“Je suis celui que tu étais. Tu es celui que je serai. Tu me changes de sujet, d’espèce, de genre”].62 We could even say: “you make me a ghost.” It is becoming-ghost that allows the reader to become untimely in communication, that is, through the following of another ghost: je suis (I follow/I am).63 This following occasions, as a consequence, a change in being, a change in subject position, in species, in gender: it is a thoroughly far-reaching move that reorganizes what being means – it is what hauntology as a possibility could be. Anachronisms The joyous reunion that a spectral experience of time makes possible also holds, within itself, a rather painful obverse side: it is when traumatic historical events irrupt in the lives of one’s beloved. In 1938, nuits [1938, nights] (2019), Cixous discovers a typed manuscript sent to her mother by Fred K., a man who grew up in the same city in Germany (Osnabrück) – someone who already appears in Gare d’Osnabrück à Jérusalem [Osnabrück Station to Jerusalem: A Memoir] (2016).64 On those handwritten pages, he retells his experience during Kristall­nacht and in the Buchenwald concentration camp, “[f]irst version of 61 Cixous, Corollaires d’un vœu, 17–18. 62 Cixous, “Le Livre que je n’écris pas,” 238. 63 This is an echo to Derrida’s own musings on the animal. Jacques Derrida, L’animal que donc je suis (Paris: Éditions Galilée, 2006). 64 Hélène Cixous, Gare d’Osnabrück à Jérusalem (Paris: Éditions Galilée, 2016), 27. This book was written following the visit to Osnabrück that Cixous experienced at the invitation of Cécile Wajsbrot. Wajsbrot and Cixous, Une autobiographie allemande, 18. Cixous explains: “Though I was born in Algeria [j’y suis née], I was born from Germany [j’en suis née], I have been surrounded by it since my birth” (19).

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Auschwitz. Hell is getting its hand in. The Camp before the Camp” [“Première Version d’Auschwitz. L’enfer se fait la main. Le Camp d’avant le Camp”].65 As Cixous immerses herself in the reading of this text, she experiences a peculiarly familiar sensation of having already been there or having read about it: While I follow them by taking the streets giving unto the [Heger Tor] Wall and taking notes, I have the feeling of having already read, readlived, this abnormal race, between the curtains of the night, an impression that I am reading, living, everything that is happening to me from happening to them,     as I am running the book has already begun I take note, let’s not lose the rhythm, it is already night and already the other day the terrible one, the one which later will come out of the line of the neighboring days, dated and swollen, in order to take its place amongst the chosen ones murdered by History [Tandis que je les suis en prenant les rues qui se jettent dans le [Heger Tor] Wall en prenant des notes, j’ai la sensation d’avoir déjà lu, luvécu, cette course anormale, entre les rideaux de la nuit, impression que je lis, vis, tout ce qui m’arrive de leur arriver à eux,     tandis que je suis en train de courir le livre a déjà commencé j’en prends acte, ne perdons pas le rythme, c’est la nuit et déjà l’autre jour le terrible, celui qui plus tard sortira daté et tuméfié du rang des autres jours voisins, pour prendre sa place parmi les élus assassinés de l’Histoire]66

As she is following these two men (Fred and his father) – but also as she is becoming them “je les suis” – knowing already what they are about to go through, for they are running towards the burning synagogue – on the night that will be known as Kristallnacht – Cixous has the feeling of having “readlived” [“luvécu”] this flight. At the moment of reading, she begins to live what is happening to them as it meets what is happening to her through reading. In following she becomes part of this other time, a time broken by the violence of what happened – time unhinged. Being at the same time means readliving traumatic events all the while being conscious that one is never able to approximate or to understand the pain others lived through. She is experiencing double suffering expressed by the preposition “de” [from], as something that happens to her by virtue of happening to them: “tout ce qui m’arrive de leur arriver à eux.” 65 Hélène Cixous, 1938, nuits (Paris: Éditions Galilée), 73. 66 Cixous, 1938, nuits, 28. The sentence/paragraph end without punctuation.

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In the earlier Gare d’Osnabrück à Jérusalem, Cixous recounts her mother’s and her aunt’s return to their birthplace following the city’s desire to invite the survivors (“all the Jews from Osnabrück still living anywhere in the Universe”67 [“tous les Juifs d’Osnabrück encore vivants de par l’Univers]”)68 to come back to the city. Cixous is already thinking of this same night and also about what will follow it: the rounding up of the Jewish inhabitants of Osnabrück, which includes her family members who will be sent to Auschwitz and Theresienstadt to be murdered (ermordet is the German word that returns again and again in this text). Indeed, she reflects on this invitation by wondering what the correct word is for those whom the city has called: “here it’s necessary to add the capital discussion about the choice of the right least wrong word to send to the addressees throughout the world, would it be to: come, come back, return, go, sojourn, visit”69 [“ici il faudrait ajouter la discussion capitale sur le choix du mot juste le moins injuste à adresser aux destinataires de par le monde, serait-ce à: venir, revenir, se rendre, retourner, aller, séjourner, visiter”].70 We are, once again, confronted with the collision of personal and collective history, for what exactly does it mean to “come (back),” to “go,” to “return” to a place where people wanted you dead;71 Cixous, in thinking about this request, uses “revenant” the present participle of the verb revenir (to come back, to return): “Coming from the world, coming back, revenant”72 [“Venant de par le monde, revenant”];73 as we read revenant, of course the ghost, the specter, the revenant, the returned from the dead draws itself in. What, then, does it mean for ghosts to come back, to be asked back, to be conjured to Osnabrück? Cécile Wajsbrot, at whose invitation Cixous 67 Hélène Cixous, Osnabrück Station to Jerusalem: A Memoir, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Fordham University Press, 2020), 15. 68 Cixous, Gare d’Osnabrück à Jérusalem, 27. 69 Cixous, Osnabrück Station to Jerusalem, 15. 70 Cixous, Gare d’Osnabrück à Jérusalem, 27. 71 This is what Susan Suleiman also asks in her discussion of who are one’s contemporaries: “What about people my age who view the world completely differently from me – who may even, in some circumstances, want my death and the death of others like me? Are they my contemporaries in any but the most narrow, most literal, least interesting sense?” Susan Rubin Suleiman, Risking Who One Is: Encounters with Contemporary Art and Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 4. 72 Cixous, Osnabrück Station to Jerusalem, 15. 73 Cixous, Gare d’Osnabrück à Jérusalem, 27.

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finds herself traveling to Osnabrück (and later writing this book), puts it this way (and we see another familiar specter drawing himself in): “Osnabrück is the very place of literature, where due to a presence, due to an absence, due to the very fact of a narrative, reality is as elusive as the specter of Banquo seated at Macbeth’s table in Banquo’s empty seat” [“Osnabrück est le lieu même de la littérature, où du fait d’une présence, du fait d’une absence, du fait même d’un récit, le réel est aussi insaisissable que le spectre de Banco assis à la table de Macbeth à la place vide de Banco”].74 For Cixous, thinking about this very personal, yet also collective history, this place from which literature springs means thinking about time: noting what happened, when it happened, what may have led to it, wondering whether or not her family knew what would have happened, what had happened, or what was happening to them. We find here again a reflection on how time can be experienced differently, or how a chronological understanding of time can belie its experience, one’s experiencing it, one’s experience of it. In a subsequent return to the city of Osnabrück in Ruines bien rangées [Dutiful Ruins] (2020), Cixous puts it this way: “from the vantage point of the book, time has no hours no time” [“vu du livre le temps n’a pas d’heure pas de temps”].75 She indeed warns us against getting caught up in dates, in thinking that something has a clear beginning, or that it is a sequence of events that can be apprehended in its totality; she reminds us that, “[b]y force of putting dates everywhere, History ends up no longer knowing when the truth will have begun, the truth begins before the truth, the event before the event”76 [“À force de mettre des dates partout, l’Histoire finit par ne plus savoir quand la vérité aura commencé, la vérité commence avant la vérité, l’événement avant l’événement”].77 Time is folded upon itself, the beginning is already a return – the ghost of Hamlet’s father begins by reappearing again. Tracing various incidents taking place in 1923, 1924, 1928, 1929, 1930, 1933, and retold in books or recalled by her 74 Cécile Wajsbrot, “Aux abords du mythe,” in Hélène Cixous: Corollaires d’une écriture, ed. Marta Segarra (Saint-Denis: Presses universitaires de Vincennes, 2019), 40. 75 Hélène Cixous, Ruines bien rangées (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 2020), 11. There is no period at the end of the sentence after temps, showing its openendedness. 76 Cixous, Osnabrück Station to Jerusalem, 21–22. 77 Cixous, Gare d’Osnabrück à Jérusalem, 36.

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mother Ève, which have now become her own memories, Cixous brings them all together to remind us that what could be seen as isolated events are in fact not only what led to Kristallnacht, but also to its untimely return: “it was like that in 1924 it was already 1933 that is to say in 1938 that Kristallnacht fire was lit beneath the synagogue”78 [“c’était en 1924 c’était déjà 1933 c’est-à-dire en 1938 que l’on avait allumé le feu de la Kristallnacht sous la synagogue”].79 Cixous even emphasizes the lack of chronology by not including any punctuation; these days are not in succession they are rather to be apprehended both at the same time and out of order. Indeed, later, in 1938, nuits, Fred’s manuscript will point out that time loses its expected values: “there is no more time as usual, no past, no future, the entire duration of time is gathered in the narrow cave where the nameless and excessively brief hours are endless, because one has changed brain and kind” [“il n’y a plus de temps habituel, ni passé, ni futur, toute la durée du temps est amassée dans la cave étroite où les heures sans nom et excessivement brèves sont interminables, car on a changé de cerveau et d’espèce”].80 This is certainly reminiscent of Cixous’s présent gnomique [gnomic present], which allows us to be at the same time (as ghosts); however, in this context, it is a present of horror: Cixous calls it “this mass of inert time” [“cette masse de temps inerte”],81 time that does not do its job, time that does not move and has to be disrupted by a certain etwas, a certain thing – perhaps a ghost. In these texts that look at what happened to the Jews living in Osnabrück in the 1930s, we are given a very real reminder that, even though spectrality gives us the potential to “dethrone death,” it is also undeniably linked to it: death is a prerequisite – a horrendous state of affairs. In the context of 1938, nuits and Gare d’Osnabrück à Jérusalem, it is indeed chilling to read this disruption of time, for it is an experience of time that is due to a change in people, the consequence of a dehumanizing process brought on by the perpetration of violence by other people. A change that could once be approached as a joyous moment in which we become open to dealing with specters, leaves here a bitter taste and is a bearer of the memory of atrocities. While we may have the ability to communicate with certain ghosts, there is also the inability to do so with a multitude 78 Cixous, Osnabrück Station to Jerusalem, 22. 79 Cixous, Gare d’Osnabrück à Jérusalem, 37. 80 Cixous, 1938, nuits, 41. 81 Cixous, 1938, nuits, 41.

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of other ones, those who have been taken, their names often forgotten – and thus unable to be called back, but whose collective silencing nevertheless screams. My aim in this chapter was to use Cixous’s pointed treatment of modes of being to propose that an attention to the reading of literature as telephony, as a telecommunication with ghosts, is perhaps a way to understand what it could mean to be contemporary. She explains: “When I write everything is in the present. Time follows me” [“Quand j’écris tout est au présent. Le temps me suit”].82 In order to communicate, to commune with these others, we ourselves have to finally understand that we have always already been untimely revenants to ourselves, containing our own ghosts within our thoughts, our voices, our names, our many iterations. Nicholas Royle puts it this way: “Literature, for Cixous, is a place of ghosts. It is not so much where the dead come back in some ghoulish or macabre fashion, as where they go on living, listening and speaking.”83 We can thus keep engaging with other temporalities, other communities that are not bound by presence, space, or even by life; we are rather connected through actions, through the willingness to read, to write, to lend an ear, to hear, and to respond: through Literature. When, in Défions l’augure – written under the auspices of Hamlet’s assertion “we defy augury,” we defy what has been predicted, which can, in a sense, mean that we defy the end – Cixous asks and answers, “Where/When are we today? In 2001, and immediately in 1791” [“Où sommes nous aujourd’hui? En 2001, et aussitôt en 1791”],84 she points to the absolute joy – but oftentimes also the absolute horror, or the sense of utter loss, of too-late-ness, of contretemps that we experience. That is, the experience of being able to transcend the boundaries of time as a way to contend with what was lost, with “those who disappeared” [“les disparus”]85 and are able, in some shape or form, to come back from beyond. For Literature makes it possible to circumvent the end and be at the same time – as well as to exclaim at the moment we are reading: “What a pleasure it is to simultane!” [“Quel plaisir de simultaner!”].86 82 Cixous, Défions l’augure, 18. 83 Nicholas Royle, Hélène Cixous: Dreamer, Realist, Analyst, Writing (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020), 11. 84 Cixous, Défions l’augure, “Prière d’insérer.” 85 Cixous, Défions l’augure, “Prière d’insérer.” 86 Cixous, Défions l’augure, “Prière d’insérer.”

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At the end of 1938, nuits, Cixous comes upon the name Gottschalk, the name of a man who was sent away free from a camp and whose departure gives hope to the other prisoners. Siegfried/Fred (in Cixous’s retold words) writes: “to think that I have lost despair even faster than hope, and it is […] thanks to a guy from Osnabrück about whom I barely know a thing save his Name” [“dire que j’ai perdu le désespoir encore plus vite que l’espoir, et c’est […] grâce à un type d’Osnabrück dont je ne sais presque rien sauf son Nom”].87 It takes Cixous a while to understand what Gottschalk (Gott = god, Schalk = mischievous) literally means in German, although her mother understands it right away, “It’s God’s mischief, says my mother” [“C’est une espièglerie de Dieu, dit ma mère”].88 And Cixous immediately finds herself “updated,” the word has been “refreshed” [“actualisé”], and she quips, in a way that reminds me of Jacques Roubaud’s characterization of Perec:89 Mischievous God! What a joke! And like God, it remains unnoticed by the speakers. It is, however, precisely through disguises that “God,” who is no one else but the sound of life’s laughter, manifests itself, I mean, slips away and signs, signs and slips away, by leaving behind a little trace of phosphorescent spit in the darkness.           One does not think about it. Language thinks it. [Espiègle Dieu! Quelle plaisanterie! Et comme Dieu, elle passe inaperçue des locuteurs. C’est pourtant bien sous des déguisements que “Dieu” qui n’est personne d’autre que le bruit du rire de la vie se manifeste, c’està-dire se défile et signe, signe et se défile, en laissant une petite trace de bave phosphorescente dans la ténèbre.           On n’y pense pas. La langue y pense.]90

Within each name, there is the possibility of the trace – something that, through language, opens up the possibility to call up ghosts, to make connections, to be together, albeit differently. One way to understand how this connection functions is to look at how resurrection is possible through the calling by name – an echo of 87 Cixous, 1938, nuits, 144. 88 Cixous, 1938, nuits, 145. 89 See “Georges y avait pensé” [Georges had thought of it] at the end of the Introduction. 90 Cixous, 1938, nuits, 146. There is a blank line between the two paragraphs. Emphasis in the original.

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the telephony seen in Chapter 1 – that is, at a moment of deep intimacy and acknowledgment of loss, which Marder describes (in the context of Cixous’s oeuvre) as follows: “the name almost always calls from and to the name of an irrevocably lost, but intimately familiar, place or person.”91 In Cixous’s universe, a name that is spoken or written becomes a way to bring someone back from the nothingness of death: “I hold you firmly above the abyss by your name, I pull you out of the deep by the name-braid” [“je te tiens solidement au-dessus du néant par ton nom, je te tire de la fosse par la tresse de nom”].92 This braid of hair, of names, which links caller and called, acts, Cixous says, as a living phone cord; in other words, it provides a type of communication that drags one out of the void, back to life, back to the possibility of speech. Trying to describe scientifically what happens is not possible, yet she assures us that something nonetheless takes place: “[t]heir skeletons feel called, I do not know how to scientifically describe the spiritual transmission, I only know that through each reading of their names a dust breathes” [“Leurs ossements se sentent invoqués, je ne sais pas comment décrire par science la transmission spirituelle je sais seulement qu’à chaque lecture de leurs noms une poussière respire”].93 And Marder offers here a promising way to understand what is at stake when name-braids and phone cords are understood as sharing more than their shape: “[f]or Cixous,” she writes, “names that call from the other in me to the other who is not me are the infinite source from which writing springs.”94 Elaborating on this aspect, Marder emphasizes all the possibilities that this type of writing entails, enjoining us to understand the far reaches of this communication: 91 Elissa Marder, The Mother in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction: Psychoanalysis, Photography, Deconstruction (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012), 217. 92 Hélène Cixous, OR, les lettres de mon père (Paris: Des femmes, 1997), 21. Also cited and commented on by Derrida. See Jacques Derrida, H. C. pour la vie, c’est à dire (Paris: Éditions Galilée, 2002), 72–76. 93 Cixous, Corollaires d’un vœu, 15. Furthermore, for Cixous, without knowledge of the name there is no possible return, no chance of contact. See the story of the nameless cat who left and could not return, as retold in Cixous, OR, les lettres de mon père [Gold, My Father’s Letters] (1997), 22–23. Also cited and commented on by Marder, The Mother in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, 217. 94 Marder, The Mother in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, 217; emphasis my own. For a discussion of Cixous’s own “foreign” name(s), see also Alison Rice, Time Signatures: Contextualizing Contemporary Francophone Autobiographical Writing from the Maghreb (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2006), 38–74.

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Writing the name is the way she discovers a secret door – a hidden passage and passageway – that leads to other worlds, and other lives. These other worlds and other lives do not belong to us, but they are “ours” in the deepest sense. They are all of the lives – the infinite potential lives – that we live unbeknownst to ourselves. […] Through them, we might invent other ways of living together and could imagine communities not restricted by the laws of nationality, identity, citizenship, gender, or proper names.95

For Cixous, what happens when a name comes up is magical: “No one can dispute the powers of the given name” [“Nul ne peut contester les pouvoirs du nom donné”].96 It is even reflected in the way that she typesets her page. In 1938, nuits, after noting how important names are, she leaves a blank space, as if something is meant to happen or reveal itself in between: And the names of people, it’s incredible what happens to names,     suddenly they contain a mysterious force, all these ordinary, habitual names […] they turn out to be a secret gold, a magic formula, they each have a resounding psychic charge […] names are immortal [Et les noms des gens, c’est incroyable ce qui arrive aux noms,     tout d’un coup ils contiennent une force mystérieuse, tous ces noms ordinaires, habituels […] ils s’avèrent être un or secret, une formule magique, ils ont chacun une charge psychique retentissante […] les noms sont immortels]97

As she elaborates on her literary encounter with a Bericht, a report or retelling (in 1938, nuits), Cixous’s voice repeatedly trails off before the end of sentences. David Wills has argued with regard to Cixous’s very liberal approach to punctuation – often refusing full and definitive stops, playing with the placement of comma, dashes, and semi-colons – that “the practice clearly demonstrates a desire here and there to impose or maintain a formal suspension of the sentence.”98 This desire to leave things hanging through a particular use of punctuation marks is also 95 Marder, The Mother in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, 218. 96 Cixous, 1938, nuits, 49. 97 Cixous, 1938, nuits, 40. 98 David Wills, “Living Punctuations: Cixous and Celan,” in Inanimation: Theories of Inorganic Life (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), 120. For a brief list of these punctual/punctuational anomalies in Cixous’s oeuvre,

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mirrored in Cixous’s mise en page [page layout]: her repeated use of one or more lines of blank space has a related function of suspension, of the opening of a space. We could say that this conscientious approach to aspects of writing that go beyond words makes up – to borrow Alison Rice’s words – Cixous’s “time signature.”99 These misleadingly empty lines, which are found throughout her oeuvre, have a pointed function that contributes to the experience of reading. Let us try it out                here. Each blank                space allows us to think, to await, to mourn, to reflect, to grieve,                but also to ponder what comes                next, to be jolted out of our                reading,                to not be tempted to go too           see pages 119–20. For a discussion of Derrida’s comments on Cixous’s unrivaled use of punctuation, see pages 121–22. 99 Drawing from music terminology, Rice points to the “temporal dimension of the text” that orients readers’ encounters with the written word, punctuation, spaces, and silences. Rice, Time Signatures, 25.

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     fast and not                pay attention.                In each of the blank spaces, we are waiting to know what happens to the text, to these names, and suddenly, in the next line, we may find out that they are magical, that they contain more than themselves, they have a “psychic charge” (Freud, whose atoms have been welcomed in by Cixous, slowly draws himself in). Cixous, in the passage mentioned above, notes how ordinary names like “Falk, Cantor, Stein […] van Pels, Engers, Meyer, Stern […] Gossels, Nussbaum […] Flatauer”100 become immortalized by the circumstances in which they are recorded. Theirs is not simply a name that can be detached from its utterance in a specific time and place, it is not an empty sign, it becomes a ghost hiding in simple language. As we have seen throughout this chapter, this different way of being together – otherwise present and not limited by boundaries of our bodies or time – opens up the possibility for a “being-at-the-same-time” kind of spectrality. The unrestricted aspect of these communities (to go back to Marder) is especially important, if we pause to think that Cixous’s writing urges a reaching out beyond the traditional boundaries that separate the living from the dead, the “real” from the “fictional.” If, for Cixous, the ability to transcend the boundaries of time and space through writing or reading is often experienced as pleasure, as a possibility to be together despite the various states of one’s body or one’s “otherwisepresence” (alive, dead, fragmented, or fictional), it also entails, as we have seen, exposing oneself to remembering, or in some cases living with the repetition of loved ones’ memories of traumatic events, opening wounds anew each time, realizing how much one has missed, how much is, nevertheless, still left unsaid, and how many questions will remain ever unanswered. Cixous’s writing allows us, to borrow Marder’s words, to “imagine communities not restricted by”101 chronological time. 1 00 Cixous, 1938, nuits, 40. 101 Marder, The Mother in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, 218.

part ii

Reading Ghosts

In this part and throughout each of its five chapters, I will bring into our conversation with Hélène Cixous select texts by contemporary authors who write in French – here, in alphabetical order: Kaouther Adimi, Jakuta Alikavazovic, Gaël Faye, Jérôme Ferrari, Patrick Modiano, Lydie Salvayre, Leïla Sebbar, and Cécile Wajsbrot. Each chapter is organized around a thematic framework to think the return and the (re)appearance of ghosts expressed respectively through names, lists, objects, photographs, and stains. These texts engage with the memory of several wars and genocides that have marked the twentieth century (as related through punctual events): the Holocaust, the Algerian War, the genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda and the Bosnian genocide. I want to underscore how this part of the book, which proposes to read ghosts through these different frameworks, draws from my reading of Cixous developed in Part I and her conception of the possibilities of reading and experiencing a type of communication with ghosts (whatever their form). Through the notion of “double suffering,” readers can empathize without appropriating the pain of others; Cixous shows us how we can manage to be together otherwise, how, through Literature, we can communicate. Each of the texts that I analyze in this part have, expectedly, a lack of communication at their heart as is common for works of “postmemory” (whether “familial” or “affiliative”) as theorized by Marianne Hirsch. In the novels I discuss, there is an inability to talk about the past, a refusal to know about family memories or an impossibility to track down traces of loved ones. Given the fraught nature of transgenerational communication, certain names, objects, or sites, in their function as ghosts, open up spaces where memory is transmitted and where, in reading these traces, readers can become haunted as well.

chapter three

Naming Catastrophe Salvayre, Wajsbrot Naming Catastrophe À qui? À quoi revient un nom? Mais revenir présent, faire revenir au présent, à la revenance quelle qu’elle soit, n’est-ce pas déjà la loi du nom? To whom? To what does a name go back? But a present going back, a going back in the present, a bringing back to the present, to whatever kind of haunting return or unheimlich homecoming – isn’t all that already the law of the name? Jacques Derrida, “Fors”1

There is no question that contemporary literature in French is haunted – haunted by World War II, haunted by the Shoah. Even authors who do not have a personal or familial connection to this time period are haunted. The very fact that the Nazi-orchestrated genocide against Jews2 was put further into motion, enabled, and even at times 1 Jacques Derrida, “Fors: Les mots anglés de Nicolas Abraham et Maria Torok,” in Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, Cryptonymie: Le verbier de l’homme aux loups (Paris: Flammarion, 1976), 72; emphasis in the original. Jacques Derrida, “Fors: The Anglish Words of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok,” trans. Barbara Johnson, in Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, The Wolf Man’s Magic Word: A Cryptonymy, trans. Nicholas Rand (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), xlviii; emphasis in the original. The translation adds an interesting echo to Freud’s uncanny. 2 Although this is not the subject of this chapter, with regard to the genocide against Roma and Sinti populations, the persecution of disabled people, LGBTQ+ people, Soviets and communists, and those deemed deviant by the state, see Anton Weiss-Wendt, ed., The Nazi Genocide of the Roma: Reassessment and

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carried out in France, by the French state and by French citizens, has consequences:3 historical, political – certainly – but also literary, as the many discussions (over, now, nearly a century) about the representability of the Holocaust and the Holocaust as a paradigm for thinking histories of violence testify.4 Scholars of post-war fiction in French have oft noted how haunted these texts that come “after” are. The proliferation of ghosts in narratives of contemporary French authors is described by Colin Nettelbeck as an “epidemic of ghosts” [“l’épidémie des fantômes”]; even if we cannot trace back every spectral reference to wartime events – what he calls “this anxiety-producing period [cette période angoissante] of French history” – it is indeed “too important, too present to be overlooked.”5 Whether or not authors know it – and this is true of all those whose works are examined in this part – they are haunted by this collective historical baggage, by what Pierre Bayard qualifies as “the ghosts of those killed in mass exterminations, the Commemoration (New York: Berghahn Books, 2013); John Connelly, “Gypsies, Homosexuals, and Slavs,” in The Oxford Handbook of Holocaust Studies, ed. Peter Hayes and John K. Roth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010): 274–90; Susanne C. Knittel, The Historical Uncanny: Disability, Ethnicity, and the Politics of Holocaust Memory (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015). For an intersectional approach to queer Holocaust history, see Anna Hájková, Menschen ohne Geschichte sind Staub: Homophobie und Holocaust (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2021); Anna Hájková, “Queer History and the Holocaust,” NOTCHES: (re)marks on the history of sexuality, 22 January 2019. https://notchesblog.com/2019/01/22/ queer-history-and-the-holocaust/. 3 See Alex J. Kay, Empire of Destruction: A History of Nazi Mass Killing (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2021); Jean-Pierre Azéma and Olivier Wieviorka, Vichy, 1940–1944 (Paris: Éditions Perrin, 2006), particularly: 84–86, 104–6; Henry Rousso, Le syndrome de Vichy. De 1944 à nos jours (Paris: Éditions Points, 1990). 4 See Saul Friedlander, ed., Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the “Final Solution” (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992); Debarati Sanyal, Memory and Complicity: Migrations of Holocaust Remembrance (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015); Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009); Pascale Bos, “Positionality and Postmemory in Scholarship on the Holocaust,” Women in German Yearbook 19 (2003): 50–74. 5 Colin Nettelbeck, “Le Grand Désarroi des (sur)vivants: La spectralité dans l’imaginaire narrationnel de la France contemporaine,” in L’imaginaire spectral de la littérature narrative française contemporaine, ed. Jutta Fortin and Jean-Bernard Vray (Saint-Étienne: Publications de l’Université de Saint-Étienne, 2012), 29–30.

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Holocaust not precluding other instances.”6 We are in fact living “still in some sense post-war,” as Colin Davis suggests, “in that the war remains a problematic, traumatic reference point which will not yet be silenced.”7 Undeniably, the authors discussed in this chapter are all too aware of this fact, especially given their own family history: while Lydie Salvayre’s parents came to France as refugees fleeing the Franco dictatorship in Spain,8 Cécile Wajsbrot’s grandfather was deported from a camp in France to Auschwitz where he was killed.9 When one speaks of haunting in these terms, it is generally to refer to violent pasts and histories.10 While few, when they employ the term “haunted,” mean it literally (that is, to be visited by the specter of someone who has died), one can then wonder how exactly this feeling of being haunted manifests in a text. If one is not haunted by spectral figures, how exactly can texts and their readers be haunted? Positing that there is an identifiable “spectral imaginary in literature” [“imaginaire spectral de la littérature”],11 Jutta Fortin and Jean-Bernard Vray distinguish three different generations in twentieth- and twentyfirst-century French fiction; the generation closest to us timewise is the third, which refers to authors who do not necessarily make direct references to the Holocaust when it comes to their discussion of or 6 Pierre Bayard, “Les Éléphants sont-ils allégoriques? À propos des Racines du ciel de Romain Gary,” Europe: Écrire l’extrême. La littérature et l’art face aux crimes de masse (June/July 2006): 40, cited by Fortin and Vray, L’imaginaire spectral de la littérature, 10. 7 Colin Davis, Traces of War: Interpreting Ethics and Trauma in TwentiethCentury French Writing (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2017), 234. 8 Regarding the place of Salvayre’s own family trajectory as it is weaved within her oeuvre, see Dominique Viart, “‘Aviver les cendres d’une histoire blessée’: Pas pleurer, le récit de filiation dans l’énergie de la langue,” in Stéphane Bikialo, ed., Lydie Salvayre (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2021), 95–119. 9 For a discussion of Wajsbrot’s portrayal by literary critics as the “granddaughter of a man who died in Auschwitz,” see Katja Schubert, “Les Temps qui tremblent ou un passé possible de ce présent? À propos de l’œuvre de Cécile Wajsbrot,” in Témoignages de l’après-Auschwitz dans la littérature juive-française d’aujourd’hui: Enfants de survivants et survivants-enfants, ed. Annelies Schulte Nordholt (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008), 232. 10 See Conjuration. 11 Jutta Fortin and Jean-Bernard Vray, “Avant-propos,” in L’imaginaire spectral de la littérature narrative française contemporaine, ed. Jutta Fortin and Jean-Bernard Vray (Saint-Étienne: Publications de l’université de Saint-Étienne, 2012), 7.

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engagement with spectrality.12 At the opposite end of the spectrum, the first generation encompasses those who have survived the concentration and death camps and whose “Lazarean or concentrationary condition,”13 that is, a return from almost certain death, informs everything they write.14 And while the first generation experiences the trauma of the camps, the writers of the second generation are children – often sons15 – who return through a fictional engagement, to a family history marked by the Holocaust and the Occupation.16 Theirs are the types of mnemonic projects that have been qualified by Marianne Hirsch as works of “postmemory,” which situates the experiences and the imaginative investments of generations marked by a trauma they did not personally experience, but a trauma transmitted to them by their parents or grandparents often through the latter’s inability to talk about it.17 It is about this context of familial silence – and even at times attempted silencing – that the authors analyzed in this chapter write. One can advance that their texts are understandably haunted, that is, that there are “literal” (within the diegesis) ghosts roaming in their pages, but, as I have repeatedly emphasized, I am not interested here in ghosts that are 12 Fortin and Vray, “Avant-propos,” 12. Marie NDiaye and Tanguy Viel are cited as examples. 13 Fortin and Vray, “Avant-propos,” 7. 14 Fortin and Vray derive this primarily from the work of Jean Cayrol. For more on this notion, see Max Silverman and Griselda Pollock, eds., Concentrationary Art: Jean Cayrol, the Lazarean and the Everyday in Post-war Film, Literature, Music and the Visual Arts (New York: Berghahn Books, 2019); Max Silverman, Palimpsestic Memory: The Holocaust and Colonialism in French and Francophone Fiction and Film (New York: Berghahn Books, 2013), 39–69. 15 Marianne Hirsch, for instance, comments on the gendered aspect of the transmission of postmemory (often narrated as happening between father and son) in Marianne Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture after the Holocaust (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 98. In the texts of my corpus, however, it is the relationship to the mother that is front and center. 16 Fortin and Vray, “Avant-propos,” 10. While Fortin and Vray include Georges Perec in the second generation (the ones who did not personally experience the camps), he would more accurately be considered part of what Susan Rubin Suleiman has termed “the 1.5 generation.” Susan Rubin Suleiman, “The 1.5 Generation: Thinking about Child Survivors and the Holocaust,” American Imago 59, no. 3 (2002): 277–95. 17 See Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997); Marianne Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture after the Holocaust (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012).

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revenants – or “proper ghosts,” as one could call them – even though these may also be present. While it is accurate that in Wajsbrot’s Mémorial (2005), the narrator enters into a conversation with a spectral apparition that could be the ghost of her dead uncle and that we see a “theory of ghosts” as manifestations of immortal souls elaborated by one character in Salvayre’s La Compagnie des spectres [The Company of Ghosts] (1997), I am rather concerned with “spectral function,” that is, disruptive presences in a text, especially of the non-human, non-supernatural kind. In this chapter, I focus specifically on the temporal disruption provoked by pronouncing consequential proper names: these are the ghosts for which we should be on the lookout. When as readers we may feel haunted – visited by a presence – it can be through the repetition of a certain name or its deliberate silencing. It is certainly not a coincidence that both texts studied reference and return to the same time period in French history, one marked and remembered through now tragic proper names. As Wajsbrot writes, the twentieth century is “a century of catastrophes […] that have names” [“Un siècle de catastrophes […] qui portent des noms”], and these names reverberate loudly: “Hiroshima. Auschwitz”18 – we could add, in the French geopolitical context, the one of “Vichy.” Indeed, these names, whether pronounced together or on their own, can be said to readily evoke and often condense in one word the atrocities of this period; we can say that they haunt our collective memory. In Part I, we have seen, with Hélène Cixous’s telephonic prototype (the book of fiction through which one can establish contact with those otherwise-present), that the proper name is of particular importance. The simple mention of a name, like that of Ajax/Aïas,19 resonates and echoes through the centuries to let reader and writer hear the screams, the painful suffering of others, what Cixous calls the message of “double suffering” [“la double souffrance”]. Here I want to explore how reading or hearing someone’s name or the name of a significant place impacts our experience of time (as well as conditions our responses to mourning and memory) by making past, present, and sometimes future converge or collide. Salvayre and Wajsbrot alert us to the impact that certain names have in the construction of traumatic memories and their transmission to the second generation; the disruption that such names have wrought opens up a space to think the relationship between past and present; in other words, to become untimely. 18 Cécile Wajsbrot, Mémorial (Paris: Éditions Zulma, 2005), 97. 19 See Chapter 1.

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Improper Names (Salvayre) In order to begin thinking about how names can disrupt, all the while organizing, the temporality of novels, to function, as it were, as ghosts, I turn to the irruption of perpetrators’ names in Lydie Salvayre’s La Compagnie des spectres. Awarded the Prix Goncourt for Pas pleurer [Cry Mother Spain] (2014), an exploration of a mother– daughter relationship, with a narration that moves across time from the contemporary world of Montse to her mother’s childhood under the Franco regime in Spain, Salvayre actually begins her “strangely anachronistic”20 deliberations in La Médaille [The Award] (1993), her third novel. Echoing the sinister concentrationary world of the island W in Perec’s W ou le souvenir d’enfance [W or the Memory of Childhood] (1975), the novel, set in contemporary France, recalls the time of the Vichy regime and the Occupation. It features overworked and machine-like factory workers who live by the terrifying mottos: “work, work, work” [“travail, travail, travail”]21 and “progress, progress, progress” [“progrès, progrès, progrès”],22 uncannily recalling both Pétain’s Travail, Famille, Patrie [Work, Family, Homeland] and the inscription Arbeit macht frei, figuring notably on the gates of Auschwitz-Birkenau. Returning more explicitly to the lasting effects of the antisemitic policies and undertakings of the Vichy regime in La Compagnie des spectres, which was awarded the Prix Novembre (now Prix Décembre), Salvayre casts Rose Mélie and Louisiane, a haunted and haunting mother–daughter duo facing eviction and attempting to stave off the near-inevitable loss of their belongings and home. Published in 1997, the same year as several other novels that also take as their subject the Vichy regime and the Occupation,23 Salvayre’s book can indeed be categorized as, what Richard J. Golsan calls, “an occupied novel” 20 Joshua Armstrong, Maps and Territories: Global Positioning in the Contemporary French Novel (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2019), 70. 21 Lydie Salvayre, La Médaille (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1993), 16. 22 Salvayre, La Médaille, 33. 23 Patrick Modiano, Dora Bruder (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1997); Marc Lambron, 1941 (Paris: Éditions Grasset, 1997). For an analysis of all three texts, see Sjef Houppermans, “L’Héritage de Vichy,” in Histoire, jeu, science dans l’aire de la littérature: Mélanges offerts à Evert van der Starre, ed. Sjef Houppermans, P. J. Smith, Madeleine van Strien-Chardonneau, and Evert van der Starre (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000), 92–110.

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[“roman occupé”]24 – one could even add, a preoccupied novel, for La Compagnie des spectres not only appeared at a time when the highly anticipated trial of Maurice Papon was mere weeks away,25 but it was also written following a period (1992–1993) in which “the expression duty to remember is mobilized” [“La formule devoir de mémoire est mobilisée”].26 Sébastien Ledoux, who tracks the history and development of this expression, notes that, in 1992–1993, it is employed primarily “in a rhetoric of denunciation of the covering up [l’occultation] of a historical truth regarding the antisemitic crimes perpetrated by the Vichy regime.”27 Salvayre pens her novel during a time marked by a desire to see a reckoning for former Vichy officials (of the likes of Klaus Barbie, Paul Touvier, René Bousquet, and Papon);28 furthermore, both the murder of Bousquet mere days before his trial in 1993 and the “ineptly handled in legal terms”29 trial of Touvier in 1994 made Papon’s trial all the more crucial, for he “became for many the remaining living symbol of a French functionary who had been complicit in crimes against humanity.”30 It is also, as I have mentioned, at this crucial moment in French public consciousness (the mid-1990s) 24 Richard J. Golsan, “Vers une définition du ‘roman occupé’ depuis 1990: Dora Bruder de Patrick Modiano, La Compagnie des spectres de Lydie Salvayre, et La Cliente de Pierre Assouline,” in Le Roman français au tournant du XXIe siècle (Paris: Presses Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2004), para. 3. Available online: http://books. openedition.org/psn/1642. 25 It would begin in October 1997 and would not conclude until April 1998. For a concise timeline of the events leading up to and following Papon’s trial, see “Les Grandes Dates de l’affaire Papon,” Libération, 18 February 2007. www.liberation. fr/societe/2007/02/18/les-grandes-dates-de-l-affaire-papon_12853. 26 Sébastien Ledoux, Le Devoir de mémoire: Une formule et son histoire (Paris: CNRS Éditions, 2016), 151. 27 Ledoux, Le Devoir de mémoire, 151. 28 Richard J. Golsan, The Vichy Past in France Today: Corruptions of Memory (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2017), 3–12. 29 Nancy Wood, “Memory on Trial in Contemporary France: The Case of Maurice Papon,” History & Memory 11, no. 1 (1999): 57. 30 Wood, “Memory on Trial in Contemporary France,” 50. For further discussions of the significance of the Papon and Touvier trials (for questions of French mnemonic practices as well as the role of historians as witnesses), see also Richard J. Golsan, “Papon: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly,” SubStance 29, no. 1 (2000): 139–52; Béatrice Fleury and Jacques Walter, “Le Procès Papon: Médias, témoin-expert et contre-expertise historiographique,” Vingtième Siècle. Revue d’histoire 88 (2005): 63–76.

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that the term devoir de mémoire becomes widespread and is used as a call for or a justification for political action.31 Undoubtedly a novel of its time,32 La Compagnie des spectres pulls no punches. It was described in a glowing September 1997 review by Patrick Kéchichian for Le Monde as the type of novel that “from the very first lines, shakes you up, warning you that the ordeal is going to be brutal […] [like] repeated blows to the solar plexus.”33 From the opening lines to the ousting, at the end of the narration, of the huissier [bailiff] who shows up to take an inventory of Rose Mélie and Louisiane’s belongings, the novel deals with the violent legacies of traumatic familial memories. Susan A. Bainbrigge succinctly summarizes it as follows: Readers are “plunged” into the “claustrophobic worlds” of these two women, “in which paranoia, repetition, incoherence, disordered speech, delusion, hallucination, excess and aggression loom large.”34 The very title of the novel invites an attention to specters (or ghosts) and to a potential haunting in line with the context in which this novel is penned, but readers have to wait until Chapter 17 (of 23) to get a detailed explanation of what that means exactly for the protagonists themselves. Rose Mélie’s account of what ghosts are and do, her “theory of ghosts”35 [“théorie des spectres”],36 is described in relation to those murdered, like her brother Jean, during the regime led by the Maréchal Pétain. She in 31 See Ledoux, Le Devoir de mémoire, 146–78. 32 For Audrey Lasserre, “History – Memory – Identity such is the triptych of contemporary French consciousness.” Audrey Lasserre, “Le Roman français contemporain aux prises avec l’Histoire: Dora Bruder de Patrick Modiano et La compagnie des spectres de Lydie Salvayre,” Sites: The Journal of TwentiethCentury/Contemporary French Studies revue d’études français [sic] 6, no. 2 (2002): 334. We can also think here of Paul Ricœur’s own triptych: La mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2000). 33 Patrick Kéchichian, “‘La Compagnie des spectres,’ de Lydie Salvayre: Les fantômes grimaçants de Vichy,” Le Monde, 12 September 1997. www.lemonde.fr/ archives/article/1997/09/12/les-fantomes-grimacants-de-vichy_3781650_1819218.html. 34 Susan A. Bainbrigge, “Haunting Histories of Transgenerational Trauma in Lydie Salvayre’s La Compagnie des spectres (1997): A Taking Stock of ‘Madness’ and ‘Transmission’” Modern Languages Open, 23 February 2017. www.modernlanguagesopen.org/articles/10.3828/mlo.v0i0.142/#, para. 3. 35 Lydie Salvayre, The Company of Ghosts, trans. Christopher Woodall (Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 2006), 132. Subsequent page numbers will be given in parentheses. 36 Lydie Salvayre, La Compagnie des spectres (Paris: Éditions Points, 1998), 137. Subsequent page numbers will be given in parentheses.

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fact describes them as being revenants “who rise again and come watch us live” (133) [“qui ressuscitent et viennent nous regarder vivre”] (137). Her understanding of ghosts is based on the belief that the souls of those who have been murdered have not vanished or entered a different realm. In her view, the dead cannot be buried and forgotten, “for their immortal souls always return to us under one guise or another” (133) [“car leurs âmes immortelles nous reviennent toujours sous une espèce ou sous une autre”] (138). Rose Mélie is quite perceptive when it comes to questions of traumatic memories, echoing scholarly debates in both trauma studies and memory studies. She explains the weight of the past – both the familial but also the collective – as something that “infinitely contaminate[s the present], our memories are crushed beneath a weight of filth” (133) [“infecte infiniment le présent, un poids immonde écrase nos mémoires”] (138). Rose Mélie’s remarks, Audrey Lasserre argues, answer head on the question “who haunts me?” [“Qui me hante?”].37 These particular ghosts who haunt Rose Mélie are then the embodiment of a wrongdoing that transcends the realm of personal tragedy and speaks to a collective wrongdoing (at the hands of French collaborators): ghosts are the souls of victims who remind France of its past.38 Following Rose Mélie’s theory, ghosts are bound to come back because of their unjust death; unlike Hamlet’s ghost, they themselves may not be seeking to exact revenge, but they appear to watch over what we do, perhaps silently judging our (in)actions. In any case, for her, they cannot simply be buried away and they demand not to be forgotten. This is in line with a reading of ghosts that understands them symbolically or allegorically, as means to warn of a guilty past or to alert to a decision to skirt responsibility for wrongdoings. While there is no doubt that these figures can be read, as Rose Mélie herself suggests, as ghosts calling out – or symptomatic of – France’s collaborationist past, I wish to argue that they are not the only ghosts of the story. Évelyne Ledoux-Beaugrand, in her positing of “Louisiane’s erased body” as precisely constituting “the location of the spectral,”39 37 Lasserre, “Le roman français contemporain aux prises avec l’Histoire,” 331. 38 As Lasserre further notes, Patrick Modiano’s “Dora [Bruder], like Jean, the brother who was murdered […] [they] are the ghosts of this past who have come to haunt France.” Lasserre, “Le roman français contemporain aux prises avec l’Histoire,” 333. 39 Évelyne Ledoux-Beaugrand, “‘Dit ta grand-mère, dit ma mère’. Spectralité et filiation dans La Compagnie des spectres de Lydie Salvayre,” in Un certain genre malgré tout: Pour une difference sexuelle à l’œuvre dans l’écriture, ed. Catherine Mavrikakis and Patrick Poirier (Quebec City: Nota Bene, 2007), 144.

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fittingly suggests that “the ghosts of the title may perhaps not be those one would suppose.”40 The ghosts that I would like to draw our attention to can indeed be apprehended otherwise: they can manifest themselves through the invocation of certain proper names. While the name of loved ones like Jean are important in this text, perpetrators’ names equally serve to rupture the text, to disrupt chronology, and to point to loss and disappearance. The name, as Cixous reminds us over and over, has the power of bringing us somewhen else. If the double souffrance [double suffering] allows readers to be empathetic, to grieve alongside others when reading their names, Salvayre shows us that reading perpetrators’ names can also bring us to the scene of the crime. Significantly, though, these names are not the “phone-braid” that Cixous describes (because they are not the names of loved ones whom one would like to, if not “bring back,” then at least communicate with), they rather irrupt with a certain violence and cannot be circumvented, avoided, or exorcized. For instance, the irruption of the huissier [bailiff] in the world of Rose Mélie and Louisiane at the start of the novel not only triggers once again the memories of the mother’s past, but it also gives way to an alternate textual temporality – it opens up another way of experiencing the unfolding of time and events. The bailiff, named Maître Échinard – possibly a reference to the character trait of someone who would readily (even happily) “bow down” [courber l’échine] (we could call him “spineless”) – is immediately called out by Rose Mélie and associated with Joseph Darnand (chief of the Vichy militia): “Is it Darnand who’s sent you?” (7) [“C’est Darnand qui t’envoie?”] (11), she asks him – a sentence that will be repeated en boucle throughout the novel, for “[o]nto the bailiff is projected all that Rose remembers and suffers in connection with her family’s wartime experiences.”41 Never mind the fact that Darnand, unlike Papon and others who were brought before 40 Ledoux-Beaugrand, “Spectralité et filiation,” 143. Ledoux-Beaugrand proposes to consider how Louisiane is haunted by a number of voices and discourses that can be said to speak through her (143–44). She further notes how even things seem to have more weight than Lousiane’s own body (151). For Ledoux-Beaugrand, drawing on Didier Dumas’s L’Ange et le fantôme, one of the signs of the spectral presence in this text is found in the concealing of a secret – we’ll remember from Chapter 1 that this has been theorized by Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok (their theory informs Dumas’s own work on the “genealogical unthought” [“impensé généalogique”]) – that is revealed to be an “incestuous female filiation” (156). 41 Bainbrigge, “Haunting Histories of Transgenerational Trauma,” 3.

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the courts in the 1980s and 1990s, has long been dead: he was executed in 1945 shortly after the end of the war.42 For Rose Mélie, Darnand’s name crystallizes everything that is wrong and has been wrong for a long time. It is useless to tell her that the event in question (the death of her brother) is “old news” or that everything has already happened more than fifty years prior. As Louisiane makes clear, “nothing could stop my mother when she reentered the past and plunged back into her disastrous childhood” (16) [“rien ne pouvait arrêter ma mère lorsqu’elle effectuait sa marche arrière qui la catapultait dans son enfance de désastre”] (21). Time, for Rose Mélie, has not so much stopped as it seems, at first, to keep repeating like a tragic cycle of déjà vu during which she is forced to relive the aftermath of the death of her brother, the day she found out about it: “It was March 13, 1943. It was yesterday” (17) [“C’était le 13 mars 1943. C’était hier”] (22). The time between the death of her brother and the present becomes condensed into “yesterday,” each day compressing it further so that each new day is then experienced as the immediate aftermath of the traumatic event. Rose Mélie thus spends her life compiling the proofs of her accusations, even sleeping “amid the books that cluttered the bedsheets” [“au milieu des livres qui encombraient les draps”] and keeping “[n]ext to her pillow the folder containing the Bousquet indictment, the Darnand file and her writings on Marshal Pétain whom she called quite simply Putain, the Whore” (20) [“près de son oreiller le porte-document qui enfermait le réquisitoire Bousquet, le dossier Darnand et ses écrits sur le Maréchal Putain”] (24). Time, for Rose Mélie, is indeed out of joint. Yet the very fact that Rose Mélie is able to incorporate to her theory of specters the news from the contemporary era (watching television, she makes comments pertaining to news coming from Algeria and Rwanda, integrating the reports of these massacres into her theory – identifying the ghosts of victims of conflicts and genocides) means that she is not so much unaware of or stuck in time as perhaps she is refusing its teleological drive, refusing to “submi[t] [her]self to the dictates of a time that continually, steadily, and irreversibly flows through all events and makes them chronologically measurable.”43 She 42 Serge Klarsfeld, French Children of the Holocaust: A Memorial (New York: New York University Press, 1996), 1825. 43 Aleida Assmann, Is Time Out of Joint? On the Rise and Fall of the Modern Time Regime, trans. Sarah Clift (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2020), 14. For more on Assmann’s exploration of the “modern time regime,” see Introduction.

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only seems “stuck”44 because her connections do not make chronological sense. If we accept to see time (or rather our experience of it) otherwise, Rose Mélie’s attitude and her condemnation of perpetrators and their ideological successors is a given; she wants to make sure that she resists the systems put in place by the likes of Pétain/Putain. Whether we are indeed in 1943, or in 1994, for Rose Mélie, as long as there are innocent victims, her indictment stands. She therefore underscores how the “non-voidable and non-evictable” (132) [“irrésiliables et inexpulsables”] (137) specters are said to follow disaster, haunting the places where they were unjustly killed: “Today they’re in Algiers, as the report makes clear” (132) [“Aujourd’hui ils sont à Alger, comme le montre le reportage”] (137). Rose Mélie, in fact, begins her investigations by zeroing in on Bousquet, who is cited as the sole instigator of roundups in a 1978 interview for L’Express which appeared “precisely thirty-five years after the death of her brother” (138) [“trente-cinq ans exactement après la mort de son frère”] (142). Even after Bousquet’s murder, she does not relent, much to the chagrin of Louisiane, and instead she keeps being on the lookout for the reincarnation of Putain (who died in prison in 1951 – his death sentence commuted due to his old age).45 Armed with the certainty that he must be stopped anew, “she thought she had caught a glimpse of Putain, whom the latest TV techniques […] rendered unrecognizable to any but the most practiced eye” (163) [“elle croyait y [à la télévision] reconnaître Putain que les dernières techniques télévisuelles […] rendaient méconnaissable à un œil non exercé”] (167–68). Rose Mélie sees her mission and duty as the responsibility to continue tracking perpetrators of evil and hold them accountable. Her reasoning, or the explanation of her reasoning that Louisiane gives us, is that fighting to bring to light “the paralipomena of the dying century” (36) [“les paralipomènes du siècle qui s’achève”] (42), fighting what has been hidden, covered up, or repressed, means, in a certain way, to fight against death: “She had a confused and in some sense instinctive 44 Such a reading is, for instance, proposed by Bainbrigge, who draws from both psychoanalytic concepts and trauma theory: “The trauma has become psychically stuck, and is endlessly repeated and revisited. The grief process has been arrested. What Freud calls the process of ‘working through’ is stalled, with the result that the mother lives as if she were still in 1943.” Bainbrigge, “Haunting Histories of Transgenerational Trauma,” 6. 45 Azéma and Wieviorka, Vichy, 1940–1944, 334–37.

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premonition that to lay down arms in the face of evil would be to accept death. […] And her war against evil became her war against death” (163) [“Elle pressentait confusément et par une sorte d’instinct que rendre les armes devant le mal revenait, en quelque sorte, à accepter la mort. […] Et sa guerre contre le mal devint sa guerre contre la mort”] (168). Therefore, no matter the outcome of her investigation into one man, it cannot stop until everything else is brought to light. For Rose Mélie, the time of reckoning does not function chronologically; she is described as someone whose suffering makes her untimely or attuned to the untimely, as she “simultaneously inhabits the past and the present, for grief possesses this strange power […] that it either destroys time altogether or it throws it completely out of sync, depending. Mama’s timeless mind is thus constantly shuttling between the year 1943 and our own, without any regard for official chronology” (23) [“habite synchroniquement le passé et le présent, car la douleur a cette étrange vertu […] qu’elle abolit le temps ou qu’elle le désordonne, cela dépend des cas. Son esprit intemporel opère d’incessantes navettes entre l’année 1943 et la nôtre, sans nul égard pour la chronologie officielle”] (29). Her untimeliness allows her to see a connection between events and attitudes – she has a global vision, so to speak, and “the non-applicability of statutory limitation to war crimes and crimes against humanity”46 would give her right. Unlike Cixous’s untimely contemporariness that makes it possible for her to commune with loved ones who have disappeared, Rose Mélie lives in the aftermath of disaster, and her experience of double souffrance [double suffering] is expressed in the temporality of her own trauma: she is suffering from her own 1943 pain in the present. As Rose Mélie screams, for the third time, the same haunting refrain at the bailiff – “Is it Darnand who’s sent you?” – Louisiane attempts to mitigate the effects that her mother may have on the future of their belongings and explains to him that what ails Rose Mélie is her understanding of time. While Louisiane declares that Rose Mélie still believes it is 1943 and that she is therefore not all there – “my mother is constantly disoriented, constantly off-center and literally anachronistic” (24) [“Ma mère est de ce fait constamment déphasée, constamment décentrée et littéralement anachronique”] (29–30) – she fails to understand the constructive potential of such a positioning. Even 46 The “Convention on the Non-Applicability of Statutory Limitation to War Crimes and Crimes against Humanity” was adopted in New York on 26 November 1968. https://legal.un.org/avl/ha/cnslwcch/cnslwcch.html.

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though Louisiane attempts to explain the seemingly unexplainable by simply calling her mother mad or crazy – “[p]ut plainly, Monsieur, my mother is mad” (25) [“En clair, monsieur, ma mère est folle”] (30) – she still wants to know if the bailiff knows who she is talking about: “Do you know, Monsieur, who this Darnand was?” (25) [“Savez-vous, monsieur, qui était ce Darnand?”] (31). This, in a sense, contributes to validating her mother’s determined focus on this name. While Rose Mélie keeps asking the bailiff if he is sent by Darnand and is ignored by him, the legitimacy of her question resurfaces through Louisiane, who seeks to provide some information and, in so doing, strengthens the possible parallels between the two men; the repetition of the name Darnand and the possible link to the bailiff repeatedly bring the past to bear on the present. This is where some communication can happen, in the space opened by the untimely irruption of the ghost-name “Darnand,” which prompts Louisiane to take up her mother’s relentless questioning. While the mother and daughter seem unable to communicate, in this moment, Louisiane is linked to this same past. The invocation of this name also provides a potential space for the bailiff to respond with his own memories: “If you would like to put the finishing touches to this portrait of your leader, my mother said to the process-server, now is the moment” (37) [“Si tu veux compléter le portrait de ton chef, dit ma mère à l’huissier, c’est le moment”] (43). Even though he is unable or unwilling to respond or voice his opinions in the novel (and it is true that he is assailed by a torrent of words pouring out from the mother–daughter duo), in the textual supplement, things are the other way around. Published the same year, Quelques conseils utiles aux élèves huissiers [“Some Useful Advice for Apprentice ProcessServers”] (1997) is a short text that catches up with Maître Échinard as he is giving a seminar lecture to future bailiffs.47 In charge of the narration and in a position of authority, he is able to partake in his own mnemonic practice, providing an alternate – if despicable – point of view. Because of his relative silence in La Compagnie des spectres, the reader can almost feel sorry for him, as someone who seems to be just doing his job (it should nonetheless not be lost on us that this represents exactly the line of defense used by Vichy functionaries and other Nazi 47 Lydie Salvayre, “Quelques conseils utiles aux élèves huissiers” was later expanded on and included in the collection Et que les vers mangent le bœuf mort (Paris: Éditions Verticales/Éditions du Seuil, 2002). In the English translation, the text is included, at the end, as a supplement to The Company of Ghosts.

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officials or sympathizers as a defense in their trials). Maître Échinard is in fact described by Louisiane as “a man of the law”48 [“l’homme de loi”] (11), who figures both as the embodiment of the state, of the people who make the law, but also as an allusion to those who follow the law to a tee even in light of ethical or moral violations and – at the time legal and encouraged – crimes and persecutions against Jews, both French and foreign or stateless refugees.49 In the companion text, Maître Échinard himself incorporates the question posed to him by Louisiane in La Compagnie des spectres and educates his students, all the while revealing his own allegiances. If we had any sympathy for the bailiff’s treatment by Rose Mélie and Louisiane in La Compagnie des spectres, as Bainbrigge remarks, the bailiff “is revealed in the companion text to be a less than admirable character, and the apparently arbitrary conflation of him by Rose with supporters of Nazi ideology becomes less far-fetched.”50 He indeed explains how Rose Mélie was trying to link him to Darnand and “sought to establish a parallel between my professional activities and the much-disparaged actions of the Militia”51 [“établir un parallèle entre mes activités et celles si décriées, de la Milice”].52 But before one can argue that this allegation is uncalled for, the bailiff continues and opens up about his own political views. In the 1997 Verticales version, Échinard moves on to bemoan the “most appalling insults”53 [“épouvantables infamies”]54 spewed by Rose Mélie, particularly regarding the Maréchal Pétain/Putain, whom the bailiff describes as “the man who governed our country with dignity from 1940 to 1944”55 [“celui qui dignement gouverna notre pays de 1940–1944”].56 The haunting name of Darnand – a name that, in public discourse, one hears far less than the ones of Pétain or Bousquet – takes on a different weight in this text, especially when added to the one of 48 The English translation keeps “process-server.” Salvayre, The Company of Ghosts, 7. 49 Azéma and Wieviorka, Vichy, 1940–1944, 104–6. 50 Bainbrigge, “Haunting Histories of Transgenerational Trauma,” 12. 51 Salvayre, The Company of Ghosts, 178. 52 Lydie Salvayre, Quelques conseils utiles aux élèves huissiers (Paris: Éditions Verticales, 1997), 27. In the reworked version, instead of “décriées,” the word “dénigrées” is used. Salvayre, Et que les vers mangent le bœuf mort, 106. 53 Salvayre, The Company of Ghosts, 178. 54 Salvayre, Quelques conseils utiles aux élèves huissiers, 27. 55 Salvayre, The Company of Ghosts, 178–79. 56 Salvayre, Quelques conseils utiles aux élèves huissiers, 28.

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Pétain. When we turn to yet another relocation of the bailiff’s story in the version included in the collection Et que les vers mangent le bœuf mort [And May the Worms Eat the Dead Ox] (2002), this particular description of Pétain is missing, but, instead, another few paragraphs are added. What comes out of the bailiff’s expanded description is meant to be even more disturbing. Rather than solely blaming Pétain for the Vichy policies, Salvayre, by means of an ironic narrative strategy, through the arrogant, self-assured, callous, and unreliable bailiff, condemns French society as a whole: There were very decent people in the Militia. There were great ladies with a big heart who are catholic apostolic, young women from good families, and with a great virtue, inconsolable widows, distinguished actresses, well-known athletes, famed writers, lawmen, influential men, Statemen and Clergymen, who, in the names of both Christ and Pétain – two fellows of sorts – practiced with fervor their love of humankind. [Il y eut dans la Milice des gens très convenables. Il y eut de grandes dames au grand cœur, catholiques et apostoliques, des jeunes filles de bonne famille, et de haute vertu, des veuves inconsolables, des actrices distinguées, des sportifs de renom, des écrivains fameux, des hommes de loi, des hommes de poids, des hommes d’État et des hommes d’Église, lesquels au nom du Christ et de Pétain réunis, deux confrères en somme, pratiquèrent avec ferveur l’amour du genre humain].57

Writing about Camus’s La Chute [The Fall] (1956) and Jonathan Littell’s Les Bienveillantes [The Kindly Ones] (2006), Debarati Sanyal proposes to approach such texts through what she calls “ironic complicity.” For her, this narrative strategy “coerces the reader into solidarity with the narrator, yet simultaneously sabotages this identification through irony.”58 As readers we are called to pay attention to the construction of these pronouncements and to read them with the knowledge of what is being deconstructed. We are forced to take a stand against identification with the narrator whose views are abhorrent. In the case of Salvayre, in each text, the mention of the name Darnand prompts a rewriting (and calls to others like Pétain/Putain). The name infects those who hear it – Rose Mélie’s concern is passed 57 Salvayre, Et que les vers mangent le bœuf mort, 106. 58 Debarati Sanyal, Memory and Complicity: Migrations of Holocaust Remembrance (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015), 91; emphasis in the original.

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on to Louisiane, who passes it on to the bailiff, who, in passing it on to his students, finally reveals his allegiances and prompts the reader to reject his views. While the mother and daughter are unable to have a true dialogue (they are each moving in what appear to be different times and (mental) spaces), through the irruption of this untimely name, in the space created by and in the readings of these multiple works, a confirmation of Rose Mélie’s intuition is finally won. At the end of La Compagnie des spectres, Rose Mélie attempts to physically throw the bailiff out – “as if the suppressed rage, fear, and torments of an entire lifetime had coalesced to form an immeasurable, savage, and devastating force” (166) [“comme si la rage, la peur et les tourments contenus de sa vie s’étaient assemblés en elle en une force démesurée, sauvage et ravageuse”] (171) – and asks her daughter to help. While Louisiane has spent the entire novel trying to remain in the bailiff’s good graces, she answers her mother’s call; it is telling that she describes her change of heart and the faint possibility of a renewed dialogue with her mother with the following expression, herself calling back to Salvayre’s previous novel, La Puissance des mouches [The Power of Flies] (1995), and its interrogatoire: “I don’t know what came over me, what fly stung me, I hurled myself upon him, without a moment’s hesitation, without stopping to think” (166) [“je ne sais quelle mouche me piqua, je me précipitai sur lui, sans hésiter, sans réfléchir”] (171). In addition, the reader can be said to be equally haunted by names such as Darnand and Pétain, names that encompass more than their individual wrongdoings, tracking their reappearances in different texts and bringing together their different iterations. Building on the temporal disruption occasioned by the irruptions of proper names, in the following section names are linked to sites of destruction. Names of Catastrophes (Wajsbrot) In Cécile Wajsbrot’s oeuvre, names are often employed to bring to our attention sites of catastrophe significant for her. For instance, Beaune la Rolande, the name of a French internment camp where the author’s grandfather was imprisoned before being deported, figures as the title of one of her texts;59 Katja Schubert has proposed that the very silencing 59 Cécile Wajsbrot, Beaune la Rolande (Paris: Éditions Zulma, 2004). For a discussion of this text, see Schubert, “Les Temps qui tremblent,” 231–36.

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of this name within the narrative is what gives it its powerful aura.60 Indeed, one could say that because of its deliberate absence this name becomes a ghost of sorts: present otherwise, it figures as a rem(a)inder of the past that is so powerful that it cannot be pronounced in the present without causing harm and disruption. For Wajsbrot, suffering and catastrophe are often signified through the names of places of destruction and desolation, “names that are full and empty at the same time” [“noms pleins et vides à la fois”].61 Throughout Mémorial, the presence of disturbing names that have to be dealt with is a way to understand the narrator’s family history despite the many gaps and silences: the only thing that seems to have been transmitted is the knowledge of catastrophe. It is explained as something that can be passed on in terms that are reminiscent of Cixousian telephony: “catastrophe was inscribed in me through automatic transmission, through a penetration of History” [“la catastrophe était inscrite en moi par transmission automatique, par imprégnation de l’Histoire”] (147–48). The narrator has become immersed in the catastrophe in spite of its near-erasure in family discourse: rather than a shared oral transmission, it is automatically passed down. History, as Georges Perec so devastatingly put it, is the one responsible for transmission: there is no need to ponder the question of childhood and memory since “a different history, History with a capital H [with its big axe], had answered the question in my stead: the war, the camps”62 [“une autre histoire, la Grande, l’Histoire avec sa grande hache, avait déjà répondu à ma place: la guerre, les camps”].63 As it is often the case for children (the second generation), Wajsbrot’s narrator is raised by a father and his sister who almost never talk about their past, and their silence ends up fueling her desire for answers. Even when they share something, the narrator repeatedly describes these rare moments of transmission of their story as a tale that keeps getting away from them, a story that is fragmented and barely comprehensible at once, and she 60 Schubert, “Les Temps qui tremblent,” 234. 61 Wajsbrot, Mémorial, 147–48. Subsequent page numbers will be given in parentheses. 62 Georges Perec, W or the Memory of Childhood, trans. David Bellos (Boston: David R. Godine, 2003), 6. Bellos does not translate the play on words that hinges on the letter h, pronounced phonetically “ache” [aʃ ], and la hache, pronounced the same way, meaning “an axe.” 63 Georges Perec, W ou le souvenir d’enfance (Paris: Denoël/Gallimard, 1993), 17.

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uses verbs that thus show their powerlessness: “they were caught in their story, tangled in, hemmed in by the threads of a tale that they did not master” [“ils étaient pris dans leur histoire, enlacés, enserrés dans les fils d’un récit qu’ils ne maîtrisaient pas”] (166). Both her father and her aunt survived having moved to France as children while the rest of the family who stayed in Poland died in the camps, save a brother who died before their departure – a death that haunts them both. Having a hard time seeing themselves as survivors, they remain silent about their past and the narrator is therefore left to fend for herself and to make sense of this family history on her own. In her elaboration of postmemory, Hirsch notes that what has been transmitted (silently, fragmentally, traumatically) by the generation that has lived through trauma is so powerful that it becomes more than a mere tale or a piece of family history: “these experiences were transmitted to them [the generation after] so deeply and affectively as to seem to constitute memories in their own right.”64 The refusal to speak about one’s traumatic past, as it has been suggested by Hirsch, does not prevent transmission – far to the contrary. The narrator indeed attempts to fill the gaps by imagining dialogues with family members and other spectral voices in order to create some sort of sense out of the jumbled narrative that she hears from time to time from her parental unit: she creates memories of events which never took place anywhere but in this ghostly narrative space. In a passage that is textbook trauma theory (the hearing of “a voice that is paradoxically released through the wound”),65 the narrator declares: “But the wound that they wanted to ignore, this scar they gladly forget, this name they never uttered, we heard it at the heart of their silence, reverberating against the walls of our rooms, surrounding us with echoes that had come from another world, from another time” [“Mais la blessure qu’ils voulaient ignorer, cette cicatrice qu’ils oublient volontiers, ce nom qu’il ne prononçaient jamais, nous l’entendions au cœur de leur silence se répercuter contre les murs de nos chambres, nous encerclant d’échos venus d’un autre monde, d’un autre temps”] (15–16). I would like to draw our attention to the fact that not only is the scar constructed here in parallel to the name, tied to it – cette cicatrice, ce nom – but also keeping it silent does not prevent transmission. This name is so powerful that, despite its never 64 Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory, 5; emphasis in the original. 65 Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 2.

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being pronounced, it is heard and brings with it echoes, we could say memories, from elsewhere and elsewhen. In this case, it is the name of the narrator’s uncle, but it is not the only name that is significant in this text – and one could posit that these other names are these reverberating echoes. This (non)speaking of a name is linked in this passage to a particular experience of time: it interrupts and disrupts time unfolding in a linear sense, since this name comes from another time (we also hear here echoes of Derrida’s description of the time of the specter, not “that time” [“ce temps-là”],66 that is, a time that does not coincide with itself, a time understood paradoxically as an expression of the untimely. The disrupted experience of time in fact conditions the narrator’s entire journey to Poland, which begins at a train station with a train that keeps refusing to arrive. While waiting for a train is not an experience out of the ordinary, the narrator rightfully remarks that as soon as something deviates from the plan “the unforeseen creeps into a tiny crack” [“l’imprévu se glisse dans un minuscule interstice”] (10) and people’s sense of place or even of being can be shaken up. The delay is announced in fifteen-minute increments to give those who wait a semblance of hope. [Allow me a short digression here. As I was reading over these pages again, I found a typo – instead of “hope” I wrote “home.” A timeshell slipped in as I was writing about the untimely, about the ever-shifting delay of the train, about time not doing its job; this timeshell productively gestures towards the hospitable space of the spectral, the semblance of both hope and home that it can give.]67 What is also notable is that we do not find out as readers where the narrator is going until the train crosses the border into Poland; we are kept in the dark, but we already know that nothing good awaits us once we get there – wherever that may be. When the narrator crosses the border, arriving in the country where her family is from, we have reached what for many became the point of no return, and it is only then that the reader is told where the narrator is actually traveling to; the revelation of the country’s name cements our inkling. 66 Derrida writes: “Furtive and untimely, the apparition of the specter does not belong to that time [ce temps-là].” Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge Classics, 1994), xix; Jacques Derrida, Spectres de Marx: L’État de la dette, le travail du deuil et la nouvelle Internationale (Paris: Éditions Galilée, 1993), 17. 67 For a discussion of “timeshells,” see Introduction.

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What we see in Mémorial is the linking of multiple names that resonate in different ways. First, there is Kielce, the city in Poland where the narrator’s father and his family are from, which she describes as something that is neither clear nor fully formed: “a few letters making up a name that I had often heard and that was now scaring me because I would be able to, I would have to fill it with content” [“quelques lettres composant un nom que j’avais souvent entendu et qui, maintenant me faisait peur parce que j’allais pouvoir, j’allais devoir lui donner un contenu”] (27). On the train journey to Kielce, there is another name that is of significance: she meets a woman sitting in the same compartment who figures, in the narration, as her sort of double or mirror opposite. When asked where she is going, the woman responds with the name “Oswiecim” [Oświęcim] – the Polish name for Auschwitz. The narrator notes how powerful this name is, whether one understands the language or not; she echoes here what Alison Rice has described as a musicality with meaning: “[p]roper names […] carry meaning that is not only rational, but musical as well.”68 Indeed, the narrator immediately knows, through this particular sound, that “she had chosen the truth, and the word resounded, even those who did not understand the language we were speaking heard it explode like a bomb, rise like a monster” [“elle avait choisi la vérité, et le mot résonnait, même ceux qui ne comprenaient pas la langue que nous parlions l’avaient entendu exploser comme une bombe, surgir comme un monstre”] (71). Even though Wajsbrot’s narrator recognizes that there is a destructive potential in speaking this name, almost prescient with the choice of the word “bomb” of another significant name that will be shared by this woman, it is her knowledge of what the name means that moves the conversation forward – “Looking at me, she saw that I knew” [“En me regardant, elle vit que je savais”] (71). While the narrator is unsure about how to proceed, and she is herself incapable of pronouncing this fateful name back to the woman, she notes how hearing it spoken operates a disruption in time: I had to speak in order to not remain in a silence more painful than the name of Oswiecim, than its echo, but it was difficult to find [the words] because the name petrified us, transporting us to other times, other 68 Alison Rice, “NameStakes: Putting the Proper Name into Textual Play,” in Time Signatures: Contextualizing Contemporary Francophone Autobiographical Writing from the Maghreb (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2006), 35; emphasis in the original.

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places, all those members of my family who had not come to France and who had not died before the war had perished there […] I was ignorant of both their names and their faces but they were chasing me, a silent cohort. [il fallait que je parle pour ne pas rester sur un silence plus pénible que le nom d’Oswiecim, que son écho, mais c’était difficile à trouver car le nom nous pétrifiait, nous transportant en d’autres temps, d’autres lieux, tous ceux de ma famille qui n’étaient pas venus en France et qui n’étaient pas morts avant la guerre avaient péri là-bas […] j’ignorais leurs noms et leurs visages mais ils me poursuivaient, cohorte silencieuse]. (71)

It is the name of disaster that in turning us to stone can carry us elsewhen. The name that is exchanged between these two women is a terrifying name, one that has the powers of Medusa: turning people into stone. But, more significantly for our purposes here, the name is seen as something that can transport one to a different time – this is how it can be said to function as a ghost, by creating ruptures in the present that allow the narrator to think and engage with her past and that of her family; this name opens up a different plane of time in the narration. The narrator thus encounters haunting traces of her family’s past in the mention of the place of their death, before looking for material traces in the city of their birth. The speaking of this name makes it possible for her to enter into a sort of deferred dialogue with them, to imagine what could have been, despite their being dead for a long time. The almost petrifying power of the name of catastrophe has its silver lining, if ever so slight, for it opens a line of communication if one is willing to continue the conversation and let oneself be transported to that “other time,” to be at the same time as ghosts. The woman who prompts these considerations is described as an elusive figure who seems to have been put on the narrator’s path just to allow her to think more about the power of names, for she appears out of nowhere, “like an apparition, an emanation of the spirit of this place” [“comme une apparition, une émanation de l’esprit des lieux”] (69), echoing a formula oft found in Patrick Modiano’s fiction. And perhaps because she swiftly comes in and then out of the narrator’s journey on the train, she allows the narrator to have someone to talk to who understands, who can help her put things into perspective, something her parental unit could not do for her. This woman is a convenient figure that embodies all the questions the narrator has been asking; she is her double of sorts – the child of bystanders, while Wajsbrot’s narrator is the relative of victims. The woman explains that she was a young child

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when the camp was built; she has lived in the silence of her parents, in the stories and lies they told themselves and each other about being “victims” of the place where they lived. She confides that she too had to leave or flee – like the narrator, who became a reporter readily traveling the globe, as far away as possible from her family – because the weight of the silence was becoming unbearable (although for exact opposite reasons). The woman, who is, fittingly perhaps, a professor of Polish literature, explains that she finally decided to come back and teach students, who are “more and more distant from these dates, but marked by this place without knowing it, [marked] by this name” [“de plus en plus éloignés de ces dates mais marqués par ce lieu sans le savoir, par ce nom”] (76). She explains that, contrary to the decision of her parents and her parents’ generation, she decided to do things differently, and in the same way that she told the truth to the narrator about where she lives and is from, she would talk to her students and explain what the silence and weight they were dealing with meant. She fully embraces her position as what Rothberg has described as an “implicated subject.”69 For this woman, one of the ways to engage with the past is to look elsewhere at another city whose name has powerful echoes: Hiroshima. She explains needing to be in conversation with “people who had gone through these events, people who were born after […] There was the common experience of a name attached to a catastrophe, and the same question, how to escape or how to live with it – to live after” [“des gens qui avaient traversé ces événements, des gens qui étaient nés après […] Il y avait l’expérience commune d’un nom accolé à une catastrophe, et la même question, comment échapper ou comment vivre avec – vivre après”] (86). For this woman, the necessity of productively exploring the “imaginative links between different histories and social groups,” which for Rothberg “are the substance of multidirectional memory,”70 is particularly important when one is the children of either perpetrators or silent bystanders, especially if one recognizes one’s “implication.” 69 Rothberg draws this theorization from Hannah Arendt’s discussion of “‘this vicarious responsibility for things we have not done.’” Hannah Arendt, “Collective Responsibility,” in Responsibility and Judgment, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2003), 157. Cited by Michael Rothberg, The Implicated Subject: Beyond Victims and Perpetrators (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2019), 1. 70 Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory, 18. However, Rothberg notes in the same breath that this sometimes means needing “a certain bracketing of empirical history and an openness to the possiblity of strange political bedfellows.”

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While the woman had wanted to establish a partnership between the two cities, this is refused by the city of Oswiecim and the reason given highlights once again how names can be understood in their function as ghosts. Saying a name not only reaffirms its power to evoke in one single word catastrophe or disaster [le désastre], but it also means disrupting time, keeping the past in the present, not allowing memory to fade: [The city] had to be given a chance to exist outside of catastrophe. When the century will have passed, they said, tragedies and their memory will gradually disappear, or, rather, they will merge into History, the asperities will become smoother like those of old mountains, the erosion of memory is a slow but continuous work that must be allowed to happen and recalling these names would be like a barrier that we put up against time. [il fallait lui laisser [la ville] une chance d’exister en dehors de la catastrophe. Quand le siècle aura passé, disaient-ils, les tragédies et leur souvenir disparaîtront peu à peu ou plutôt, se fondront dans l’Histoire, les reliefs s’adouciront comme ceux des vieilles montagnes, l’érosion de la mémoire est un travail lent mais continu qu’il faut laisser se faire et le rappel des noms serait comme un barrage qu’on opposerait au temps]. (103; emphasis my own)

Time is seen, as it often is, as something that could help erode memories, make the pain duller. By contrast, the repetition of a significant name – or in this case the linking of two powerful names – would not allow time to do its work; names are described as a barrage, as something that makes time stand still and disrupts its regular or expected course. We once again see names as “petrification,” as stones of a wall erected to hold against the work of time. Names open up a different relationship to time, one in which the erosion of certain events is slowed, in which the memory of the past can have a concrete and continued effect on the present. The text itself follows a logic of disruption: from the inclusion throughout the narration of pages detailing, in italics, the habitat and habits of the harfang des neiges, the snowy owl (pages that seem to be taken straight out of an encyclopedia),71 to the interludes of dialogues 71 Schubert argues that the snowy owl is the narrator’s silent and determined double whose own relationship to time and space enters into contrast with hers. Schubert, “Les Temps qui tremblent,” 239–42.

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with spectral voices, sometimes the voices of the narrator’s family, sometimes inner voices that she does not recognize. In one instance, she is described as “surrounded by unknown, foreign voices, coming from other times and other countries” [“entourée de voix inconnues, étrangères, venues d’autre temps et d’autres pays”] (97); she sees herself as a repository for their musings and as a participant in meaningmaking: “I was like the prey of time, of immaterial incarnations that had chosen me as a victim or a spokesperson, that wished me to be their witness – but can one be the witness of time?]” [“j’étais comme la proie du temps, d’incarnations immatérielles qui m’auraient choisie pour victime ou porte-parole, qui auraient souhaité que je sois leur témoin – mais peut-on être le témoin du temps?”] (97). While she is assailed by all these voices with different opinions about memory and time, she does not claim identification or claim to speak for these voices; she does not understand herself as a witness, but rather as a prey (given her own fraught relationship to the past). Jennifer Bowering Delisle, commenting on a family memoir written by the second generation, proposes the term “genealogical nostalgia,” which she describes as “the second-generation’s longing for the times and places of their ancestors’ stories, a nostalgia drawn not out of direct experience, but out of the very gaps between personal memory and genealogical legacies.”72 Wajsbrot’s narrator is captive of this “genealogical nostalgia” and it is the spectral voices that alert her as to its effect on the present. The process of transmission has been interrupted or remains incomplete “as if there is a bond between the generations so that […] the things those before have left hanging, those who come after take them up – are trying to take them up” [“comme s’il existait un lien entre les générations faisant que […] les choses que ceux d’avant avaient laissées en suspens, ceux d’après les reprenaient – tentaient de les reprendre”] (79). Over and over, we are faced with the question of transmission of memory, the burden that is left on the generations that come after. The narrator, in a way, speaks for all the children of parents who keep silent, but whose silence speaks volumes. She addresses these voices and tells them that their survival strategy was nevertheless harmful: “you […] refused to pronounce the same words, common names or proper names, you made certain places disappear in order to 72 Jennifer Bowering Delisle, “‘Genealogical Nostalgia’: Second-Generation Memory and Return in Caterina Edwards’ Finding Rosa,” Memory Studies 5, no. 2 (2011): 138.

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make certain events disappear, and from our earliest age, we understood that something was wrong” [“vous […] refusiez de prononcer les mêmes mots, des noms communs ou des noms propres, vous faisiez disparaître certains lieux pour faire disparaître certains événements, et dès notre plus jeune âge, nous avons compris que quelque chose n’allait pas”] (24–25). Wajsbrot’s novel reminds us that in the silencing of names the possibility for communication is interrupted; there is no way to build something new or transformative: each one is bound to suffer on their own, and sometimes it proves to be too late. One of the particularities of this novel is that there is a double movement of forgetting, for the father and his sister’s reluctance to speak is later compounded by their diagnosis with Alzheimer’s disease – another name that often signifies catastrophe. As Wajsbrot’s narrator describes, this former refusal to speak becomes an impossibility to do so: “those who could have told me something could no longer do so, [they were] walled in by a strange disease that attacked speech, memory, walled in in that disease before disappearing” [“ceux qui auraient pu me dire quelque chose ne le pouvaient plus, murés dans une étrange maladie qui s’attaquait à la parole, à la mémoire, murés dans cette maladie avant de disparaître”] (17). This vision corresponds to a generalized understanding of Alzheimer’s disease as progressively losing oneself, especially if one “keep[s] with the contemporary understanding of identity as intricately linked to the ability to narrate.”73 Yet, when it comes to people whose memories are traumatic memories, Martina Zimmermann explains that, “towards the end of the century,” one witnesses a shift to “more redemptive notions of forgetting” that tend to cast it as a positive side-effect: “Forgetting has turned into a diseaseinflicted kindness,” which “would become a version of the narrative of loss that could appeal to a mass readership for whom Alzheimer’s disease had come to embody the death of the self.”74 Since the narrator is 73 Martina Zimmermann, “The Narrative of Loss in a Growing Biomedical and Literary Marketplace of Alzheimer’s Disease,” in The Diseased Brain and the Failing Mind: Dementia in Science, Medicine and Literature of the Long Twentieth Century (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020), 101. 74 Zimmermann, “The Narrative of Loss,” 104, citing Annie Ernaux as one example. Ernaux wrote a journal following her mother’s diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease, published as Je ne suis pas sortie de ma nuit [I Remain in Darkness] (1997). Zimmermann further notes that “[d]uring the period of biomedicalization the number of caregiver memoirs rose quickly, serving a readership increasingly aware of the condition but also in need of readable plots and redemptive endings”

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concerned with learning more about their past, this disease is seen as yet another barrage in her quest – she centers herself not only as a caregiver, but also as a “memory seeker.” Writing about Olivia Rosenthal’s On n’est pas là pour disparaître [One Is Not Here to Disappear] (2007), Marie-Odile André notes that the “maladie d’A.” that is transmitted in the novel, is just as much Alzheimer’s disease as the “disease of Germany” [“maladie d’Allemagne”]; it becomes a way for the author to speak more generally about a disease of memory transmission or a diseased memory transmission.75 As Wajsbrot’s narrator accompanies first her father and then her aunt to their medical appointments, she realizes how they forgot first their first name, then other names, and she thus becomes the last repository of a collection of names that signify catastrophe, the latest one being the one of their disease: “They didn’t know anything, I was the only one to carry this name of Alzheimer’s” [“Eux ne savaient rien, j’étais la seule à porter ce nom d’Alzheimer”] (80). We see here outlined a reflection on the collision between personal and collective history as seen by Wajsbrot: the impossibility of remembering, the “strange disease” that prevents them from speaking, is, in a way, a physiological symptom that catches up to them and cements, once and for all, their inability to speak, to communicate, and it “constitutes a kind of gaping openness within the family story.”76 Furthermore, as Fabien Gris remarks (also reading Rosenthal’s text), “[i]t is the familial structure, based on the principles of recognition, identity, and memory, that disappears.”77 It is interesting to note that, in the case of Mémorial, there was never a “traditional” familial structure (heterosexual, based on marriage and reproduction) to begin with, since the narrator is raised by father and aunt as parental figures; in this way, the disturbance occasioned by the disease simply cements a different familial constellation. Indeed, Gris’s proposition that (100). This is not the case for Ernaux’s text, which refuses a re-narration, but rather gives the entries as they were written. 75 Marie-Odile André, “Hériter la mémoire? Olivia Rosenthal et la maladie de A.,” in Un retour des normes romanesques dans la littérature française contemporaine, ed. Marc Dambre and Wolfgang Asholt (Paris: Presses de la Sorbonne nouvelle, 2010), 169–80. 76 Fabien Gris, “La Maladie d’Alzheimer et l’oubli de la famille: On n’est pas là pour disparaître d’Olivia Rosenthal,” in Le Roman contemporain de la famille, ed. Sylviane Coyault, Christine Jérusalem, Gaspard Turin (special issue), Journal of Modern Literature 12 (2016): 82. 77 Gris, “La Maladie d’Alzheimer et l’oubli de la famille,” 84.

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the disease, despite its negative effects on the question of transmission, “nevertheless […] brings to light what can be said to define the very notion of family,” is quite accurate in the case of Mémorial. For “family” in fact can be described through “the question of the tie, the bond [lien], in all its elaborations: affective bonds, bonds of recognitions, temporal ties (filiation, inheritance) and memorial ties.”78 At the end of Mémorial, the narrator, returning from her trip, will indeed tell her parental unit everything she learned: she will speak of her journey and her encounters, and, even if they are not able to have a proper dialogue, something nevertheless is shared in this other shared temporality in which past and present coexist. What Wajsbrot’s novel contributes to our thinking on names and names as ghosts lies in the varied responses one can have toward haunting or haunted names from the past irrupting in our daily lives, perhaps in our history books or in the fragmented tales of family members, disrupting temporality, opening up a difference space, making fraught communication possible if one is willing, and even if only through fiction – the one we read or the one we tell ourselves.

78 Gris, “La Maladie d’Alzheimer et l’oubli de la famille,” 92.

chapter four

Missing Inventory or Inventory of the Missing Modiano, Salvayre, Adimi Missing Inventory or Inventory of the Missing

We are, collectively speaking, surrounded by “things,” many billions if not trillions of material objects of every kind. The number of these things is so great, in fact, that it is difficult to gain a conceptual hold on the almost infinite multiplicity of objects that constitute our world. One way to begin mentally ordering what we encounter, though, is to establish a rough taxonomy. David Gross, “Objects from the Past,”1

At a time when we have to question our impact on our world, when the increasingly bleak perspective of what we leave behind as legacy comes into focus, when our massive littering has scientists, scholars, and activists deploring our deadly influence on this planet we call Earth, how should we think about objects and their relative permanence in light of our own finitude? Should we be keeping track of them, categorizing them, as David Gross suggests, to better understand our relationships to them? Gross, focusing on “human-made” objects rather than “natural things,” examines how items from the past acquire or lose value. Drawing from Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project, Gross reflects on “the positive evaluation of waste,” that is often lost in our contemporary 1 David Gross, “Objects from the Past,” in Waste-Site Stories: The Recycling of Memory, ed. Brian Neville and Johanne Villeneuve (Albany: SUNY Press, 2002), 29.

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world because most things have lost their “hidden dimension.”2 In the texts studied in this chapter, when it comes to objects, this hidden dimension is brought to the fore. Is an inventory, then, a record of a life lived? A reminder of every thing one has possessed and thus perhaps a hint of who one has been? A tangible entry point to all the stories one could tell? But why speak of the inventory in a consideration about ghosts? How can the inventory figure as a way to think temporality? An answer could come, once again, by way of Hélène Cixous, who describes the inventory – or lists (with a potential for incompletion or open-endedness) – as a way to rethink our relationship to time. For her, finding a list means the possibility that, as she is reading it, it will become more than a simple list; it will morph into a list of moments or things and those can then reignite memory and allow her to enter into communication with loved ones. Even if it is a “list of grievances” [“Fiches de doléances”],3 it is another way to transcend temporal boundaries or states; it provides, for instance, a thrilling way to enter into a deferred dialogue with her late mother. Lists are by definition meant to be read at another time, to testify to items deemed to be important for safekeeping or as a record. As she reports in 1938, nuits [1938, nights] (2019), in 2018, Cixous comes across a list written in 2005. This litany of “advice/criticism” [“conseils-reproches”]4 allows Cixous, who finds it five years after her mother’s death, to bring her back again, albeit in a different form. She equates these “events” [“événements”] to “seeds” [“graines”] that can be revived through the emotions to which they give rise thanks to something that she equates to a kind of resurrection/conception made possible through reading: “my tears and my laughter, both together, like some kind of medically assisted procreation manage to revive them” [“mes larmes et mes rires, les deux ensemble, comme une sorte de PMA parvient à les ranimer”].5 For Cixous, these seeds-of-moments are a way to keep herself fed with her mother’s presence, to give rise again to something other than her mother, but something that is also something of her mother nonetheless. She recounts how she wanted to find this list again in order to, she writes, “nourish myself” [“me nourrir”]6 with it

2 Gross, “Objects from the Past,” 36. 3 Hélène Cixous, 1938, nuits (Paris: Éditions Galilée), 11. 4 Cixous, 1938, nuits, 11. 5 Cixous, 1938, nuits, 11. 6 Cixous, 1938, nuits, 12.

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once more. When she is unable to find it, it is experienced as yet another loss, as if this piece of paper and the words scribbled on it signified the mother’s presence in a different form: it was a way of resurrecting a fragment of her that is now no longer available. Because we read about the presence/absence, the loss, and the disappearance of this list in the context of the rest of Cixous’s book, it is striking to notice the parallels that she establishes between this loss and the loss of freedom experienced by her family in Osnabrück, Germany. In 1938, nuits Cixous tries to understand something that she never understood about her grandmother, Omi, who refused to leave Osnabrück, even though life at the time was getting exponentially worse for German Jews. It can be shocking to read that Cixous posits her own experience of losing a simple list written on a piece of paper in the same terms as losing one’s documents, one’s rights (but also eventually one’s life) in Nazi Germany – but this list is more than a list, it is a link to her family history, it is perhaps also the memory of losing her own French citizenship in Algeria during the Vichy regime7; this list is the possibility to counter death (we’ll remember the “anti-death telephone” that is Literature): It is as if I have lost my mother, her voice, my blood, my memory. As if someone had stolen my documents, my portrait. As if, from one hour to the next, the police had emptied my pockets, my identity card was taken, my permit to enter the cemetery [was taken], my mother’s last advice. [C’est comme si j’avais perdu ma mère, sa voix, mon sang, ma mémoire. Comme si on m’avait volé mes papiers, mon portrait. Comme si d’une heure à l’autre la police m’avait vidé les poches, on m’a pris ma carte d’identité, mon permis d’entrer dans le cimetière, les derniers conseils de ma mère.]8

When the list is lost, Cixous not only loses this specific point of access to her mother, but it is as if she had lost part of her own identity (and, in a 7 For a reading of Cixous’s story “Pieds nus” [“Bare Feet”] (1997), in which she discusses her childhood during the Vichy regime in Algeria in the context of the loss of French citizenship of Algerian Jews (following the abrogation of the Crémieux decree), see Silverman, “Memory Traces,” in Palimpsestic Memory: The Holocaust and Colonialism in French and Francophone Fiction and Film (New York: Berghahn Books, 2013), 149–55. For a discussion of Algeria during the Vichy period, see Sophie B. Roberts, “Rupture: Vichy, State Antisemitism, and the Crémieux Decree,” in Citizenship and Antisemitism in French Colonial Algeria, 1870–1962 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 250–96. 8 Cixous, 1938, nuits, 12–13.

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way, one remaining tangible link to her family’s history). It is significant to note that all of the possessive pronouns – save one – refer back to Cixous (ma mère, mon sang, ma mémoire, mes papiers, mon portrait, ma carte, mon permis …), and it is all coming from the loss of “sa voix” – the only possessive pronoun referring to someone else – the mother’s voice that is embodied in this list: the mother’s presence, her untimely return, would have been made possible by a few scribbles on a piece of paper; and the loss of this potential is experienced as utter dispossession. It might seem incongruous to link a simple “list of grievances” with Literature with a capital letter, yet words are seeds from which Literature can grow where the past and present coincide to become contemporary in an untimely embrace. As has been noted in Part 1, the encounter with a ghost – a figure that seems to belong neither here nor there, to be neither dead nor alive, neither present nor absent – is made possible through a disruption of time and opens up various avenues of communication with others or saves one from being found. Turning to texts by Patrick Modiano, Lydie Salvayre, and Kaouther Adimi, I suggest that in reading lists of unknown names or seemingly useless and disparate things, readers who are willing to understand their significance within the narration can themselves become haunted by their disappearance or destruction, or be on the lookout for their possible reappearance. In paying attention to the function of lists, of inventories, we also come to understand what a missed opportunity it can be when someone refuses to read and interpret them, to see them as more than a useless list of things. Record Keeping (Modiano) Readers of Patrick Modiano know how much he loves lists. Seemingly devoid of noteworthy plot points, long lists of names or things might make certain readers want to quickly turn the page; however, a careful attention to these details reveals something at work in the text, a gnawing sensation that something or someone has returned even if under a different name or face. Undoubtedly more forcefully following the turning point that critics identify as taking place in his fourth novel, Villa triste (1975),9 it is understood that, for Modiano, memory is 9 Maryline Heck and Raphaëlle Guidée, eds, Cahier Modiano (Paris: Éditions de L’Herne, 2012), 10.

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closely linked to a topographical anchoring: specific places and streets are carefully written down and revisited, and as such give a strange sensation of familiarity, even of an eerie déjà vu.10 This approach to world-building is what Akane Kawakami has termed, in reference to Roland Barthes, the “effet d’irréel,” that is, “an unreal or surreal atmosphere resulting from the proliferation of detail.”11 Modiano is renowned for conceiving of time as a palimpsest, time understood not as a succession of moments in a linear timeline, which would thus “li[e] outside of human control and manipulation,”12 but rather as an onion that needs to be peeled off, layer by layer, to reveal its different, yet coexisting states; this is what Max Silverman theorizes as “palimpsestic memory.” We in fact find throughout Modiano’s oeuvre several characters and narrators who not only share this perception, but also act it out – so to speak; most emblematically perhaps is the photographer Francis Jansen in Chien de printemps [“Afterimage”] (1993), who strips away layers of posters on walls and photographs them to bring to light different times in the Parisian landscape.13 One of the examples used by Silverman is the novel Meurtres pour mémoire [Murder in Memoriam] (1983) by Didier Daeninckx, which juxtaposes the memory of the Occupation with the massacre of Algerians on 17 October 1961.14 In scenes that stand in parallel to Modiano’s characters, “Daeninckx uses these images of superimposed adverts and slogans as a metaphor for the interconnections between the two major events at the heart of 10 See, for example, Régine Robin, “Le Paris toujours déjà perdu de Patrick Modiano,” in Heck and Guidée, Cahier Modiano, 93–100; Luc Mary-Rabine, “Les Lieux de Modiano,” in Heck and Guidée, Cahier Modiano, 101–4. 11 Akane Kawakami, “Unreal Stories: The ‘Effet d’Irréel,’” in Patrick Modiano (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2015), 52. 12 Aleida Assmann, Is Time Out of Joint? On the Rise and Fall of the Modern Time Regime, trans. Sarah Clift (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2020), 14. 13 “He had told me that he shredded street posters himself to uncover the ones hidden beneath the newer strata. He pulled the strips down layer by layer and photographed them meticulously.” Patrick Modiano, “Afterimage,” in Suspended Sentences: Three Novellas, trans. Mark Polizzotti (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014), 15; Patrick Modiano, Chien de printemps (Paris: Gallimard, 1993), 36. See also Modiano’s earlier book, Livret de famille [Family Record] (1977), where the narrator engages in the same behavior: “I peel away the bills posted in successive layers for the past fifty years until I reach the earliest scraps.” Patrick Modiano, Family Record, trans. Mark Polizzotti (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019), 145; Patrick Modiano, Livret de famille (Paris: Gallimard, 1977), 179. 14 See Chapter 7.

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the book.”15 The same certainly holds true of Modiano himself, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2014 precisely, as the press release states, “for the art of memory with which he has evoked the most ungraspable human destinies and uncovered the life-world of the [O]ccupation.”16 In fact, it is the case in just about every novel that the Paris of the Occupation (or its mysterious avatars) is juxtaposed with, or superimposed on, a contemporary cityscape, and protagonists can easily find themselves in an in-between space where two different time periods seem to coexist: it happens simply through what appears to be a small breach in the time/space continuum, where, upon turning a street corner, protagonists are suddenly transported by a familiar street name or site. Modiano’s careful attention to such elements is shared by his narrators and is expressed through recurring faces, names, places, and even sentences that make up a meticulously orchestrated style known as “Modiano’s little music.”17 It is through the practice of keeping track of names and addresses that protagonists often come face to face with the past – whether their own, someone else’s, or even the one that they claim for themselves. In fact, Modiano’s projects are all pieces of a loftier goal, that is, in his own words: “to create for myself a past and a memory with the past and the memory of others” [me créer un passé et une mémoire avec le passé et la mémoire des autres].18 This claiming of someone else’s past could be seen as appropriative, but Modiano makes this past appear by way of fiction because his own memory is paradoxically at once lacking and overdetermined. As we will see in more detail in Chapter 5, the Occupation and his father’s past feature as important anchoring points for thinking Modiano’s self-fashioned identity and the creation of an imagined past that is, nevertheless, fully his own. In turn, in all 15 Max Silverman, Palimpsestic Memory: The Holocaust and Colonialism in French and Francophone Fiction and Film (New York: Berghahn Books, 2013), 2. 16 “The Nobel Prize in Literature 2014.” The Nobel Prize. Press Release, 9 October 2014. www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2014/press.html; emphasis my own. 17 “‘Modiano’s little music’ […] Here is the same-old story [la ritournelle convenue] regarding Modiano’s well-tempered writing.” Marie Darrieussecq, “Du plus loin de l’oubli,” in Maryline Heck and Raphaëlle Guidée, eds, Cahier Modiano (Paris: Éditions de L’Herne, 2012), 195. 18 Emmanuel Berl, Interrogatoire par Patrick Modiano suivi d’Il fait beau, allons au cimetière (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 2003), 9.

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of his works, Modiano endeavors to retrace the steps of mysterious and elusive figures in order to unearth documents and stories that make for troubling accounts. Lists of names scribbled on notebooks, pieces of papers, margins of books and phonebooks alike are thus crucial ingredients to every single one of Modiano’s novels.19 Gerald Prince, for instance, reports that “there are about one hundred names of persons, two hundred place names, and forty names of other entities in Rue des boutiques obscures”20 [Missing Person] (1978), Modiano’s Prix Goncourt-winning novel. Faithful readers of Modiano know that for his narrators, phonebooks are perhaps the most important tool that they have at their disposal, they are absolutely vital, as the detective of Rue des boutiques obscures recalls. They are “the essential tools of the trade and […] he would never part with them”21 [“des outils de travail irremplaçables dont il ne se séparait jamais”].22 Not only are these records tools that are necessary to move the search forward, they also serve as witnesses since “these directories and year-books constituted the most valuable and moving library you could imagine, as their pages listed people, things, vanished worlds, to which they alone bore witness”23 [“ces Bottins et ces annuaires constituaient la plus précieuse et la plus émouvante bibliothèque qu’on pût avoir, car sur leurs pages étaient répertoriés bien des êtres, des choses, des mondes disparus, et dont eux seuls portaient témoignage”].24 These lists of names and addresses are given the same status as books: books of life stories contained in or rather hinted at through a brief word or two in the phonebook, which works like a giant inventory of memories and moments. Many of Modiano’s narrators indeed speak of their obsession with phone numbers and old phonebooks precisely because the information found in them reveals a person’s whereabouts (or at least a place that they chose as an anchor point) at a given – even if transient – moment in time, functioning almost like a picture and showing who lived where and when. 19 For a list of scholarly works discussing proper names in the oeuvre of Patrick Modiano, see Gerald Prince, “Improper Nouns: Patrick Modiano’s ‘Rue des boutiques obscures,’” Yale French Studies 133 (2018): 71n1. 20 Prince, “Improper Nouns,” 72. 21 Patrick Modiano, Missing Person, trans. Daniel Weissbort (Boston: David R. Godine, 2004), 1–2. 22 Patrick Modiano, Rue des boutiques obscures (Paris: Gallimard, 2011), 12. 23 Modiano, Missing Person, 1–2. 24 Modiano, Rue des boutiques obscures, 12.

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One can certainly read Modiano’s oeuvre by tracking the spectral recurrence of various names or figures, as has already been done for several of his texts; were one to tabulate all the names that appear in Modiano’s oeuvre, one would more than likely have enough material to fill a small phonebook. Narrators themselves often wonder if it matters that their own name or phone number figures on other peoples’ Rolodexes,25 and one can assume that it thus means that they could potentially become the subject of someone else’s search. Modiano figures indeed as a blueprint of sorts for a thinking about the spectral function of lists. These inventories of names and places are so ubiquitous in his texts that I long debated whether it was even worth including Modiano in this chapter, for what else could I suggest regarding his lists that has not already been suggested before? My interest with Modiano in this section is not so much linked to the spectral function of his lists, but rather a reminder that there is also a more sinister purpose in the very constitution of such an inventory and an emphasis that the ghostly trace, the disruptive, untimely search for the past also allows one to not be found. As is outlined throughout Modiano’s oeuvre, a simple petite fiche [small (police) file] constitutes the possibility of being found and then perhaps killed. In this case the inventory would rather be, as Georges Perec has warned, the hallmark of an ominous well-oiled machine meant to accelerate and optimize destruction: if every item in the inventory is accounted for, then “order reigns,”26 he writes in Penser/Classer [Think/Classify] (1985). We can readily think of another one of Perec’s books that haunts these pages with its perfectly organized society on the island of W, slowly revealing itself to be a concentrationary universe.27 This explains why Perec prefaces his statement about the inventory by remarking that “[a]ll utopias are depressing because they leave no room for chance, for difference, for the ‘miscellaneous’. Everything has been set in order and order reigns. Behind every utopia, there is always some great taxonomic design: a place for each thing and each thing in its place.”28 From reading Perec, it is apparent that the inventory is a cornerstone of 25 Modiano, Rue des boutiques obscures, 102. 26 Georges Perec, Think/Classify, trans. John Sturrock (London: Penguin, 1999), 191; Georges Perec, Penser/Classer (Paris: Hachette, 1985), 156. 27 For a discussion of how the island is conceived “as a colonial settlement by Westerners,” see Silverman, Palimpsestic Memory, 102. 28 Perec, Think/Classify, 191; Perec, Penser/Classer, 156.

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his literary oeuvre; as Morgane Cadieu puts it, “the author of course did not invent the list, but he has employed this technique in such an exemplary and obsessional way that it now seems to act as a catalyst in his artistic endeavors,”29 and it is exactly because of this practice that Perec is at once obsessed but also weary of this figure. Many of his attempts at “exhausting the real” [épuiser le réel] are left unfinished, and even La Vie mode d’emploi [Life: A User’s Manual] (1978) ends on a puzzle piece that does not fit; it powerfully allows for an escape from an otherwise totalitarian system. While it would be reductive to only read Modiano through his obsession with the Occupation, that is, to read him only thematically,30 it is interesting to note that although the texts do not always explicitly refer to events taking place during the time of the Occupation, they always echo or incorporate its atmosphere. We may find ourselves in 1960 or in 2017, but the overall impression is that we are in fact in a time that is not our own. This is, for instance, experienced by the narrator of Souvenirs dormants [Sleep of Memory] (2017), who remarks, using the precise vocabulary generally reserved to speak of France’s collaboration with the Nazis and the numerous roundups that would occur as a result of it: “The discomfort I felt every time I walked by La Source became sharper: I felt as if everyone in the place was under threat of a police raid”31 [Le malaise que j’éprouvais chaque fois en passant devant La Source s’est précisé: j’ai eu l’impression que dans cet établissement on était sous la menace d’une rafle].32 This feeling, which he calls “‘the spirit of the place’” [‘l’esprit des lieux’] convinces him to keep track of these places “by listing in my notebooks the exact places and addresses where I’d decided not to linger”33 [en faisant une liste, dans mes cahiers, 29 Morgane Cadieu, “Énumérer jusqu’à épuisement: Esthétique de la liste et de l’intrus dans les espaces littéraires,” in Marcher au hasard: Clinamen et création dans la prose du xxe siècle (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2019), 129. 30 For an evolution in the approach to Modiano, who was long lumped in with writers of the so-called mode rétro writing “justificatory” narratives that engaged with their family’s past during the Occupation, and for a call to consider Modiano’s innovative formal aspects, see Kawakami, “Being Serious: Modiano’s Use of History,” in Patrick Modiano (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2015), 69–71. 31 Patrick Modiano, Sleep of Memory, trans. Mark Polizzotti (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018), 54. 32 Patrick Modiano, Souvenirs dormants (Paris: Gallimard, 2017), 51. 33 Modiano, Sleep of Memory, 107.

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de tous ces lieux et de ces adresses précises où j’avais décidé de ne pas m’attarder].34 Much more than a simple anxiety or paranoia, this is described as a gift, an intuition, “a sixth sense” [un sixième sens] that turns out, more times than not, to be the right one: “I learned why they gave off a bad aura, often twenty or thirty years after the fact, from random comments, coincidences, old newspaper clippings”35 [je les apprenais [les raisons] par des témoignages de hasard, des recoupements, d’anciens faits divers, souvent vingt ou trente ans plus tard].36 One can also think of all the buildings with double exits that allow narrators to flee, if need be: “He knew a great many buildings in Paris that had two entrances, and thanks to them he was able to shake people off.”37 [“Il connaissait un grand nombre d’immeubles à double issue dans Paris grâce auxquels il semait les gens.”]38 The narrator’s meticulously organized file of places to avoid subverts the usual focus on file-keeping as a potentially threatening endeavor that echoes the police files kept by both Nazi officials and by French collaborators – those who, we read in Dora Bruder (1997), “compil[e] dossiers, the better to ensure that, once found, you will disappear again – this time for good”39 [établissent des fiches pour mieux vous faire disparaître ensuite – définitivement].40 When it comes to Modiano’s own system of searching for elusive figures, this spectral function is expressed at once as the need to consign names, places, people to an inventory, and simultaneously, through the use of fake names or changing identities, using it in order to escape detection, becoming a ghost oneself.

34 Modiano, Souvenirs dormants, 93. 35 Modiano, Sleep of Memory, 107–8. 36 Modiano, Souvenirs dormants, 93. 37 Patrick Modiano, So You Don’t Get Lost in the Neighborhood, trans. Euan Cameron (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), 64. 38 Patrick Modiano, Pour que tu ne te perdes pas dans le quartier (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 2014), 63; see also Patrick Modiano, “Flowers of Ruin,” in Suspended Sentences: Three Novellas, trans. Mark Polizzotti (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014), 190; Patrick Modiano, Fleurs de ruine (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1991), 104. 39 Patrick Modiano, Dora Bruder, trans. Joanna Kilmartin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 68. 40 Patrick Modiano, Dora Bruder (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1999), 82.

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Dilapidated Precious Things (Salvayre) As we have seen in Chapter 3, Lydie Salvayre’s La Compagnie des spectres [The Company of Ghosts] (1997) begins with the irruption of a bailiff. Faced with the prospect of eviction, mother Rose Mélie and daughter Louisiane will have to fight off this envoy and emblem of the French state sent to take an inventory of their belongings in order to repay their debt, to pay their rent, and other outstanding bills. Already in the preface, we are made aware of the importance of the inventory for our understanding of the novel. Salvayre includes the following advice, lifted from Italian writer Carlo Emilio Gadda’s anti-fascist pamphlet: “be good, calm down, for the transition from madness to a life of reason can be effected only by drawing up an inventory of the dark deliberations that unleashed the dark urges”41 [“sois sage, calme-toi, car le passage de la folie à la vie raisonnable ne pourra se faire qu’en dressant l’inventaire des arrêts obscurs qui ont déchaîné les pulsions obscures”].42 It is by placing an emphasis on the figure of the inventory that Salvayre proposes to make sense of things. Drawing up an inventory – “a very typical motif in Salvayre’s works” [“motif ô combien salvayrien”]43 – makes it possible to identify by process of elimination what is wrong and what has prompted the descent into madness, and thus perhaps enables one to get rid of ghosts in a move from madness to rationality – Enlightenment philosophers would tend to agree with this method. In any case, the inventory is the way forward, Gadda and Salvayre tell us; as Susan Bainbrigge has discussed, the inventory in question refers to specific traumatic memories that are also enmeshed in a literal inventory of things conducted by the bailiff throughout the novel.44 Even the 41 Lydie Salvayre, The Company of Ghosts, trans. Christopher Woodall (Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 2006), epigraph. Subsequent page numbers will be given in parentheses. 42 Salvayre, La Compagnie des spectres, epigraph. Subsequent page numbers will be given in parentheses. 43 Audrey Lasserre, “Le Roman français contemporain aux prises avec l’Histoire: Dora Bruder de Patrick Modiano et La compagnie des spectres de Lydie Salvayre,” Sites: The Journal of Twentieth-Century/Contemporary French Studies revue d’études français [sic] 6, no. 2 (2002): 332. 44 Susan A. Bainbrigge, “Haunting Histories of Transgenerational Trauma in Lydie Salvayre’s La Compagnie des spectres (1997): A Taking Stock of ‘Madness’ and ‘Transmission,’” Modern Languages Open, 23 February 2017. www.modernlanguagesopen.org/articles/10.3828/mlo.v0i0.142/#, para. 3.

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narration of Rose Mélie and Louisiane’s story begins, so to speak, in medias res, with an “And so there I was” (7) [“Et alors même que je”] (11) that implies the continuation of a previous sentence or thought; in the pages that follow, there is an accumulation of this word “et” [and], a coordinating conjunction, an operating word used when making a list. We are, from the onset of the text, already in the middle of an inventory of sorts. The inventory that this bailiff is writing down is, however, at the opposite end of an inventory drawn up, for instance, in the pages of Modiano’s novels. We have seen, in Modiano’s universe, that the inventory is helpful in the search for missing persons and allows narrators to follow the traces of people’s pasts, although one should always keep its potentially nefarious consequences in mind. To the contrary, in La Compagnie des spectres, the purpose is to rescue what could be taken away as soon as it is listed in the state official’s documents. What links them both, however, is that, in reading these lists, we become subjects who can be haunted by these recurring figures and be on the lookout for the traces they leave. The inventory, as it is presented in the novel, is truly a sign of disaster: it is qualified as “this damned inventory” (9) [“ce maudit inventaire”] (13). The daughter Louisiane immediately attempts to salvage their belongings and hones in on the television, her most prized possession, which in this huis-clos of a novel symbolizes a potential escape or door and connection to the outside world, as well as an important part of their routine and a key item for Rose Mélie’s theorization of ghosts, as we have seen in the previous chapter (that is how she incorporates current news into her depiction of specters). All in all, the inventory is characterized as a negative event: we have the verb “saving” (9) [“soustraire”] (13) describing the actions of Rose Mélie and Louisiane, the two dominant voices of La Compagnie des spectres, while “launched” (9) [“s’attaquer”] (13) is mentioned on the side of Maître Échinard, the bailiff. It is a conflict that takes on the aspect of a battlefield upon which these two parties will wage war – a war that simultaneously takes place in the past and the present, between this family and various figures of the law. While he is all but silent in La Compagnie des spectres, in the companion book Quelques conseils utiles aux élèves huissiers [“Some Useful Advice for Apprentice Process-Servers”] (1997), Maître Échinard gives a lecture to those pursuing this same career and is finally able to speak his mind and reveal his fondness for the Vichy regime and for Pétain. Offering plenty of anecdotes and mocking the reaction

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of tenants facing repossession or eviction, he even takes offense at their tears and accuses them of being too attached to material things: “Losing two rickety chairs has them weeping buckets and when they see their beloved TV being carted off, their despair is boundless. It’s pathetic”45 [“La perte de deux chaises branlantes leur arrache des torrents de larmes et leur désespoir atteint le paroxysme lorsqu’ils se voient privés de leur télévision. C’est lamentable”].46 While it is not explicitly stated that the bailiff is referring to Rose Mélie and Louisiane, as readers of La Compagnie des spectres, we have become memory keepers and know of the importance of certain items in their possession. It is perhaps then not a coincidence that the cover of the Points edition of La Compagnie des spectres features two old wooden chairs, one leaning against the other – could these two also be understood as types of reappearing ghosts? We can also infer from the mention of the television in the same breath – very prominently featured, as we have seen – that it is indeed their apartment of which he is speaking. In addition, the previous paragraph ends with an assertion as to their living situation: “In the case of Rose Mélie and her daughter’s apartment, which I was mentioning to you just now, the only term to describe it is devastation. Devastation pure and simple”47 [“Chez Rose Mélie et sa fille que je vous décrivais à l’instant, c’est de dévastation dont nous devrions parler. De dévastation pure et simple”].48 While the bailiff is intent on making a point about the “[d]irt, disorder, decay, and terrible smells”49 [“Saleté, désordre, mauvaises odeurs et déprédations multiples”]50 that, according to him, “are typical”51 [“sont la règle absolue”]52 in the houses of people he encounters in his work, we can also read his words as reflecting Rose Mélie’s and Louisiane’s mental and physical state. Yet what he misses is that objects are part of their personal history, and that some of them even retain the marks of the absence of Jean, Rose Mélie’s brother who was murdered by members of the Vichy militia. 45 Salvayre, The Company of Ghosts, 181. 46 Salvayre, Quelques conseils utiles aux élèves huissiers (Paris: Éditions Verticales, 1997), 37. 47 Salvayre, The Company of Ghosts, 181; emphasis in the original. 48 Salvayre, Quelques conseils utiles aux élèves huissiers, 36. 49 Salvayre, The Company of Ghosts, 181. 50 Salvayre, Quelques conseils utiles aux élèves huissiers, 36. 51 Salvayre, The Company of Ghosts, 181. 52 Salvayre, Quelques conseils utiles aux élèves huissiers, 36.

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It is also insightful to turn, as I have done in the previous chapter, to the reworked version of this supplement included in Et que les vers mangent le bœuf mort [And May the Worms Eat the Dead Ox] (2002), which lets Salvayre revisit this scene; I have already suggested that the inventory is about the accumulation of traces – that may eventually haunt readers – and the reworking of this text allows for more items to be added in; the previously cited inventory is thus enriched: “The loss of two rickety chairs, six mustard glasses or a plastic bread box has them weeping buckets and when they see their beloved TV being carted off, their desperation is boundless. It’s pathetic.”53 [“La perte de deux chaises branlantes, de six verres à moutarde ou d’une huche à pain en matière plastique leur arrache des torrents de larmes, et leur désespérance atteint le paroxysme lorsqu’ils se voient privés de leur télévision. C’est lamentable”]. In addition to these chairs and the TV, this inventory adds glasses and a bread box; but, even more significantly, the désespoir in this passage becomes désespérance, which, as the Trésor de la langue française attests, despite being a “quasi-synonym,” is in fact a sign of a worsening: “[it] seems to describe a deeper malaise, a more general pessimism.”54 While the bailiff is intent on mocking Rose Mélie and Louisiane’s attachment to seemingly useless and frivolous things, what comes out of this rewriting of the inventory is the bailiff’s misreading of the cause of the désespérance showing that he does not actually understand the significance that objects may have for those to whom they belong. For instance, for Rose Mélie, the television is one way of keeping track of Pétain/Putain’s reincarnations (163/168).55 What for the bailiff is something not worth crying over is in fact the material trace of someone’s history; Rose Mélie’s and Louisiane’s memories can be activated through all of the objects that are carefully kept in their apartment – the hoarding of things seems to be trying to fill a void that was created by Jean’s absence. One finds things, often books, in the most random places (the kitchen, the bathroom, in cupboards that serve the opposite purpose of what they should serve); each item the bailiff touches has a potential memory attached to it. Louisiane indeed laments the fact that there is an intangible aspect to 53 Salvayre, “Quelques conseils utiles aux élèves huissiers,” in Et que les vers mangent le bœuf mort (Paris: Éditions Verticales/Éditions du Seuil, 2002), 113. 54 See “désespérance,” in CNRTL, Le Trésor de la langue française informatisé. https://cnrtl.fr/definition/désesperance. 55 See Chapter 3.

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these various objects that the bailiff is neither able to understand nor accurately record: “the process-server inexorably pursued his inventory without realizing that what he was thus making was an inventory of our memories, our disappointments, our bitter regrets and our remorse, an entire history, the objects of which bore marks that only we could read” (121) [“l’huissier poursuivait inexorablement son inventaire sans s’apercevoir que ce qu’il inventoriait de la sorte, c’étaient nos souvenirs, nos déceptions, nos amertumes et nos remords, toute une histoire dont les objets portaient les marques seulement lisibles de nous”] (124–25). Susan Stewart, in On Longing (1984), citing the work of Jean Baudrillard, explains that “it is necessary to distinguish between the concept of collection and that of accumulation.”56 While accumulation is seen by Baudrillard as lesser, and even linked to “insanity” through the work of William James in asylums, collection “tends toward culture,” toward the deliberate and principled organizing of things to create a new whole.57 What I find of particular interest is Stewart’s proposition (following Baudrillard) that, since for William James “hoarders have an uncontrollable impulse to take and keep,” one can describe this impulse (using psychoanalytic language) as “an urge toward incorporation for its own sake, an attempt to erase the limits of the body that is at the same time an attempt, marked by desperation, to ‘keep body and soul together.’”58 Leaving aside the question of psychoanalytic stages of development, I believe the description of incorporation stands in parallel with a desire to safeguard within (here, a crypt of sorts makes an appearance) not only the memory of Jean, but all the things that testify to his presence: every item can be a memory, even something as quotidian as a bread box, or perhaps even a proof that has been compiled by Rose Mélie in her fight against “evil” (163/168). The inventory performed by the bailiff can thus be seen as a type of forced exorcism, in which the ghosts of the past are compiled by him so as to be taken away. Rose Mélie and Louisiane thus risk losing the anchors to many moments as well as potentially losing out on what could spark more memories. Although sometimes it takes a while 56 Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), 153. 57 Stewart, On Longing, 153–54. 58 Stewart, On Longing, 154.

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for memories to resurface, if one removes the material support that gives rise to them, one cuts off potential communication. Furthermore, Louisiane highlights that this inventory is only legible for those in the know – that is, her mother and herself – for those like the bailiff, the inventory is at first unreadable – as useful as reading off random names in a phonebook. However, readers, in discovering Rose Mélie and Louisiane’s stories and past, become more apt in reading these signs: we are asked to follow along and try to identify these traces of the past, that is, these revenants. Readers can thus equally be haunted by these ghosts which manifest themselves as ordinary objects. It is telling that the first visible textual sign of disappearance in Salvayre’s novel (found in its second chapter) is made manifest in the inventorying of a photograph, which is not immediately described, and in which the absence of the person pictured is signified in two ways. First, in the bailiff’s inventory, the absence is made manifest (in the original French text) by the lack of article (it’s not the or a photo, while it is one frame – un cadre – a countable item), and it figures rather as an indiscriminate – and one could thus assume worthless – picture, worthless at least to the bailiff, who is only interested in the frame. Second, Salvayre leaves a blank space in the textual line, as well as omits a punctuation mark (in the original) before jumping to the next line to signify the interruption of the bailiff’s musings. This is where the absence of Jean is included visually – as a blank space: an oval frame, made of gilded wood, containing a photo…     And at the precise instant when the process server, planted in front of the photograph of Uncle Jean, was punctiliously noting down these various particulars, my mother burst in again, in her dirty nightdress, girdled by the hideous fanny pack that never left her and that contained her jewels, some small change, the portrait of Uncle Jean and the one of me, and, with her crazed face, crazed look and crazed voice, screamed at the process-server, Is it Darnand who’s sent you? (9–10)59 [un cadre ovale en bois doré contenant photo     Et à l’instant précis où l’huissier, campé devant la photographie d’oncle Jean, notait pointilleusement ces divers éléments, je vis ma mère faire irruption une nouvelle fois dans sa chemise de nuit, ceinturée de l’affreuse banane qui ne la quittait pas et qui contenait ses bijoux, de la menue monnaie, le portrait d’oncle Jean et le mien, et hurler en direction 59 The ellipsis after “photo” is added in the translation and there is no new line before the final question.

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de l’huissier avec son visage de folle, son regard de folle et sa voix de folle C’est Darnand qui t’envoie?] (14)60

At the beginning of the paragraph, we are in fact reading alongside the bailiff’s inventory, and it is him (using the “nous” [we/us] of authority) who determines the monetary value of each item. The previous items in the list are also deemed valueless: “seem to us of no value” (9) [“nous paraît sans valeur”] (13) or “we deem of little worth” (9) [“nous estimons à peu de chose”] (14). However, at the very moment – and this temporal marker is crucial – when he is about to deem the frame as worthless to him as the photograph, the irruption of Rose Mélie (and the return of the question repeatedly posed)61 alerts us to the stakes of this item and points to her own preparedness in the face of a potential arrest; her banane has been described in the first chapter as accompanying her everywhere “just in case, she said, she were to be led manu militari to an internment camp” (7) [“pour le cas, disait-elle, où elle serait conduite manu militari en camp d’internement”] (11), and contains her most valuable items, which also include another photograph of Jean. The mention of these two photographs of Jean and the interruption led by Rose Mélie that draws attention to them confirm to the reader that Jean is undeniably of particular significance for the story. This chapter ends with the beginning of Rose Mélie’s tale as she explains it to Louisiane: “Have I told you, my dear, my mother began as soon as she had lain down on her bed, that it was seven in the evening when (I knew what came next by heart) …” (11) [“T’ai-je dit, ma chérie, commença ma mère lorsqu’elle se fut allongée sur son lit, qu’il était sept heures du soir lorsque (j’en savais la suite par cœur)”] (16). The ellipsis [points de suspension] added in the English translation at the end of the sentence (when in the original it simply ends without any punctuation), intensifies, visually, Rose Mélie’s way of being in time – her bringing together of past and present, her repeated suspensions and interruptions of a linear “time’s arrow” (Louisiane indeed notes that the start of a story oft retold has been triggered). By the time the next chapter begins, continuing the previous sentence with another added ellipsis – “… when your Uncle Jean opened the door of the Café des Platanes” (12) [“lorsque ton oncle Jean ouvrit la porte du café de la Gare?”] (17) – readers should already have an inkling that not only 60 Lack of punctuation in the original. 61 See Chapter 3.

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does this entire story have to do with Jean, but also that Rose Mélie’s fear of possibly being taken to an internment camp in 1997 points to a temporal disjunction. Furthermore, it is also interesting to note that in the French Folio edition of the novel the café changes its name from “Plane Trees” [Platanes] and brings the train station [la Gare] and its images of deportation, into view. As I have explored in the previous chapter, Rose Mélie’s conception of temporality does not follow a chronological unfolding. We do not need to finish reading the scene to feel a sense of dread or to know that something is amiss; that is how we know, as readers, that we may be haunted. To go back to the objects that Rose Mélie attempts to salvage from being consigned to an inventory, it is not (only) that objects spark memory, but rather that they (also) bear certain marks, certain signs that are there to be read. As Marianne Hirsch recounts in her discussion of family pictures through which she elaborates the notion of postmemory, the difference between pictures in a domestic setting and pictures of atrocities (mass graves, emaciated and tortured bodies) is the work of the reader or the viewer, who brings in context and knowledge. In Hirsch’s reading, “it is precisely the displacement of the bodies depicted in the pictures of horror from their domestic settings, along with their disfigurement, that brings home the enormity of Holocaust destruction.”62 If at first one may be tempted to see such pictures as the polar opposite of family portraits, Hirsch explains that, given our knowledge of the context, these pictures are to be read simultaneously. The domestic picture harkens to what we know will happen to its subject, and thus, “[i]n both cases, the viewer fills in what the picture leaves out: the horror of looking is not necessarily in the image but in the story the viewer provides to fill in what has been omitted. For each image we provide the other complementary one.”63 To return to Salvayre’s text, the bailiff is utterly unaware of the subject of the picture; for him it is a simple portrait (it is perhaps the exact double of the one that Rose also keeps in her banane alongside the picture of her daughter), and he lacks the knowledge and the capacity (willingness?) for analysis that would make it possible for him to see in this portrait its horrendous counterpart. By contrast, what Rose Mélie sees in it exceeds its visible traces; since she has the story in mind, she 62 Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 21. 63 Hirsch, Family Frames, 21.

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is able to read this picture and immediately juxtaposes to it the image of her murdered brother. As readers, when we follow the scene in which Rose Mélie describes Jean’s “minuscule act of resistance” (12) [“mouvement d’infime résistance”] (17), sliding his foot in the door of the Café to which two militiamen barred him entry, we already hold in our minds the knowledge of the existence of this photograph (and its double or companion in the banane); while Rose Mélie speaks in euphemisms, saying that Jean “was condemned” (12) [“fut condamné”] (17) or mentioning that it was a “barbarous act” (12) [“acte barbare”] (17), because of Jean’s photograph (and Rose Mélie’s reaction to it) we already know for certain that the end of Jean’s story is death. We are also able to juxtapose to the domestic picture the picture of horror. We are, as such, already haunted by this knowledge discovered in the interruption of the inventory. When we, as readers, first encounter an inventory in a novel, we may behave like the bailiff, who actively refuses to understand the significance of certain objects or certain memories that can only be read by those to whom they belong; we may oft be tempted to gloss over long lists of items. However, we have also been given the potential to know the significance of certain objects so that we can make a choice to be on the lookout for these traces, for these ghosts – that is, to be open to hear the stories that are evoked by them, to be mindful of what temporal disruption they can cause. As we will see in the next section, the refusal to pay attention to these potential memories – in a way, to refuse being haunted by them – means missing important histories. Cleaning House (Adimi) Kaouther Adimi, who published her first novel, Des ballerines de papicha [Rebel Shoes] (2010), with the famed Barzakh Editions,64 is part of a “young generation” of Algerian authors.65 She was particularly noticed, in French literary circles, with the publication of her third novel, Nos richesses [Our Riches] (2017), awarded the Prix Renaudot 64 The book was republished in France by Actes Sud under the title, L’Envers des autres [The Wrong Side of Others] in 2011. 65 Charlotte Bozonnet and Joan Tilouine, “En Algérie, Barzakh est une bulle d’air littéraire,” Le Monde, 6 November 2017. www.lemonde.fr/m-actu/article/ 2017/11/06/en-algerie-barzakh-est-une-bulle-d-air-litteraire_5210637_4497186.html.

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des Lycéens. The novel opens with an almost ghost-like chorus that recalls the interspersed dialogues of ghostly voices in Cécile Wajsbrot’s Mémorial (2005), discussed in the previous chapter. In Nos richesses, the all-knowing inhabitants of a small neighborhood in Algiers deplore the upcoming destruction of “Les Vraies Richesses,”66 once a bookstore/ art gallery (now a library’s annex) founded by Edmond Charlot, perhaps best known for his printing of Albert Camus’s early texts. The novel is divided into three intertwined narratives: the one following Ryad, tasked with emptying Les Vraies Richesses, and his dealings with Abdallah the last keeper of the place; imagined journal entries written by Edmond Charlot; and short incisive chapters on key moments in the history of Algeria. As we will see in Chapter 7, with the memory of the massacre in Sétif in 1945 and the 17 October 1961 massacre in Paris, the story of the bookstore cannot be told without a consideration of History, particularly the history of colonialism. Indeed, throughout this novel, one has to consider both “History, with a capital H, which changed this world utterly, but also the small-h history of a man, Edmond Charlot” (4) [“l’Histoire, la grande, celle qui a bouleversé ce monde mais aussi la petite, celle d’un homme, Edmond Charlot”] (11). While through the journal entries we find out that Charlot lives through World War II and publishes pamphlets and short writings from the French Resistance, the brief historical chapters, for their part, discuss Algerian resistance to French occupation. The three men whose perspective we follow in the novel, Charlot, Abdallah, and Ryad, three generations that are assembled around Les Vraies Richesses, have different relationships to the bookstore and the history of Algeria. For Charlot, it is literature itself – and its transmission – that was the most important aspect of his life and he thus establishes a circle of intellectuals and friends who would get together during the war in the 1940s. For Ryad, who is ignorant of the bookstore’s history, working to empty the bookstore is, at first, simply 66 Kaouther Adimi, Nos richesses (Paris: Les Éditions du Seuil, 2017), 11. Subsequent page numbers will be given in parentheses. Kaouther Adimi, Our Riches, trans. Chris Andrews (New York: New Directions Books, 2020), 4. Subsequent page numbers will be given in parentheses. The English translation keeps the French name for this bookstore and does not translate it, but it could be translated as “The True Riches.” The British edition of this same translation changes the book’s title: Kaouther Adimi, A Bookshop in Algiers, trans. Chris Andrews (London: Serpent’s Tail, 2022).

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an easy way to get an internship. For Abdallah, the guardian whose task is one of inventorying and checking out books, even though he does not read them, the bookstore represents a place of potentiality. He states: “These books kept me company every day for years. At first, I spent the evenings sorting them, putting on the call numbers, entering all the information in a register […] It’s hard to explain what this place means to me” (80) [“Ces livres m’ont accompagnés tous les jours pendant des années. Au début je passais mes soirées à les classer, à mettre des cotes, à entrer des données dans un registre […] c’est difficile de t’expliquer ce que ce lieu signifie pour moi”] (124). Growing up during the colonization of Algeria, Abdallah was not allowed to attend school, which was reserved for the French settlers, and only learned to read as an adult after the Independence; working in a bookstore means being the keeper of memories and the guardian of a place from which, for a long time, he was kept out, both literally and symbolically. The first two chapters that open the novel and the one that closes it feature indistinct voices that, like the ghosts mentioned above, are the repository of the city’s memory: “We are the people of this city and our memory is the sum of all out stories” (5) [“Nous sommes les habitants de cette ville et notre mémoire est la somme de nos histoires”] (13). Both their knowledge and their desire to communicate the city’s and this bookstore’s memories stand in stark contrast to the attitude of a young journalist, a “[l]ittle careerist, [one] can smell […] a mile off” (6) [“ce garçon qui sent l’arriviste à plein nez”] (13), sent on the scene to report on the library’s closure, who only got the position because of his father’s donations. Pondering what to say about the closing of Les Vraies Richesses, the young man is seen scribbling the beginning of his column, describing what he sees and trying to come up with an angle for his article. He zeroes in on a small step that he links to Camus (the most famous connection) in an overly sentimental, almost laughable way: “A plant has been left outside, on the little step where the young Albert Camus used to sit and edit manuscripts. No one is going to take it away. Last survivor (or last witness?)” (6) [“Dehors, sur la petite marche où s’installait le jeune Albert Camus pour corriger des manuscrits, une plante est posée. Personne ne pense à l’emporter. Ultime survivante (ou ultime témoin?)”] (14). He is, it appears throughout his draft, more concerned with pontificating on the State’s defunding of cultural institutions because of the economic crisis than to really engage with the history of the Vraies Richesses. The bookstore is about to become a doughnut shop and – tragic irony – because of its proximity to the

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university, “the potential’s huge” (10) [“il y a un gros potentiel”] (20). While the fate of this bookstore, Claude Collin suggests, certainly allows Adimi to comment on “the decline of cultural activities in favor of profitable commercial priorities in present-day Algeria,”67 it also speaks to the stakes of literary legacy. Noticing the pictures (of important Algerian, French, and FrancoAlgerian poets, writers, and artists) inside the bookstore, the young journalist simply makes a note for himself to go back and do some research, because he does not know who they are. The reader is given a list of names in a parenthetical comment written in italics to signify the young man’s draft of an article: “(There was Camus, but who are the others in the photos pinned up inside the store? Edmond Charlot, Jean Sénac, Jules Roy, Jean Amrouche, Himoud Brahimi, Max-Pol Fouchet, Sauveur Galliéro, Emmanuel Roblès … No idea. Look them up)” (6). [“(Il y avait Camus mais qui sont les autres dont les photos son punaisées à l’intérieur de la librairie? […] … Aucune idée. Faire des recherches)”] (13–14). One can assume that this research conducted by the “journalist” will probably consist of typing a few words, if that, in a certain seemingly all-knowing web search engine to save time – if readers feel compelled to know more, it is also up to them to investigate (although fortunately, by reading Charlot’s journal entries, readers will have the chance to encounter these figures again).68 Instead of actually talking to someone who could point him in the right direction, this young man relies on clichés and platitudes for his article; he is described as taking his leave and thinking that the small plant may be a witness, yet “without even a glance at Abdallah, who used to check out books at Les Vraies Richesses” (6–7) [“sans un regard pour Abdallah, le préposé au prêt des Vraies Richesses”] (15), an actual living witness. As the narrating voices let us know, things could have gone differently “if the journalist had taken the time to interview him, the old man might have explained […] what the store means to him” (7) [“si le journaliste avait pris le temps de l’interroger, le vieil homme lui aurait peut-être 67 Claude Collin, “Guerre d’Algérie: Des mémoires apaisées?” Guerres mondiales et conflits contemporains 276, no. 4 (2019): 143. 68 For a discussion of this literary circle, see Alice Kaplan, “Above Ground,” in Looking for The Stranger: Albert Camus and the Life of a Literary Classic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 172–76; Guy Dugas, “Camus, Sénac, Roblès: les écrivains de l’École d’Alger face au terrorisme,” in Albert Camus in the 21st Century (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 189–205.

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raconté […] ce que représente ce lieu pour lui”] (15). What a narrator in Modiano’s works would have done is to speak to Abdallah, to try to track down what happened, but this is not something that is of interest to the journalist, nor to the young lawyers who had been eating their pizzas next door to the bookstore and who are described, following the announcement of the closing of Les Vraies Richesses, as having to find someplace else to have lunch “so they won’t have to face Abdallah and his endless questions, questions they don’t feel like answering” (12, translation modified) [“par peur de tomber sur lui [Abdallah] et sur ses nombreuses questions auxquelles ils n’ont pas envie de chercher des réponses”] (23–24). What Adimi alerts us to is that the work of memory and the work of transmission are dependent on the willingness to listen, to inquire, to be open to receiving fragments of the past. The arrival, emptying, and repainting of the bookstore by Ryad, the son of the friend of a friend of the new owner, who travels from Paris for a last-minute internship, sets everything in motion. His task is simple: “I empty the place, I repaint it, and I’m gone” (38) [“Je vide le lieu, je repeins, je pars. Sans réfléchir”] (63). And this is what makes all the difference: the refusal to think, to read the traces that have been left behind is why we will need supplementary information – Ryad is not our way into the meaning making of the bookstore’s past. He is given an inventory of things to get rid of and to destroy. But, as is the case for Salvayre’s novel, the inventory is more than a to-do list, the destruction it heralds is truly the erasure of the past, of the history of the place. We might be tempted to skip over a long list of things in a novel, but – as Ryad does – we might miss an important item: List of things to get rid of: 1,009 novels in French by French and foreign authors. 132 novels in French by Algerian authors. 222 novels in Arabic. 17 works on religious themes. Hide these in a black rubbish bag when you’re throwing them out to avoid any problems. 42 volumes of poetry. If you have a girlfriend, you can keep one or two of these for her. The rest, in the trash. 18 scientific works. 9 works of psychology. 26 works of history. 171 children’s books. 38 books about theater. 19 books about cinema.

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Various black-and-white photographs. A large color photo portrait. An oak desk with a jammed drawer and a narrow gap at the top. An old lamp. A rusty sign: “The young, by the young, for the young.” A mattress on the mezzanine. You can sleep on it while you’re working there, then throw it out. Papers. A broom. A bucket. (30–31) [Liste des objets dont il faut se débarrasser: 1009 romans d’auteurs français et étrangers en langue française. 132 romans d’auteurs algériens en langue française. 222 romans en langue arabe. 17 ouvrages de thème religieux. Cache-les dans un sac-poubelle noir avant de les jeter pour ne pas avoir de problèmes. 42 ouvrages de poésie. Si tu as une copine, tu peux en garder un ou deux pour les lui offrir. Le reste: poubelle. 18 ouvrages scientifiques. 9 ouvrages de psychologie. 26 ouvrages d’Histoire. 171 ouvrages pour enfants. 38 ouvrages sur le théâtre. 19 ouvrages sur le cinéma. Des photos en noir et blanc. Un grand portrait en couleur. Un bureau en bois de chêne avec un tiroir bloqué et une simple fente apparente. Une vieille lampe. Une pancarte rouillée avec l’inscription « Des jeunes, par des jeunes, pour des jeunes ». Un matelas dans la mezzanine. Tu peux dormir dessus le temps des travaux et après jette-le. Des papiers. Un balai. Un seau.] (52–53)

One cannot help but think, as Ryad begins his task, of the many narrators in Modiano’s works who rely on such objects to search for those who have left almost no trace. For Akane Kawakami, writing about Modiano’s use of lists, particularly those listing names and places verifiable in phonebooks or administrative records, “[t]he facts exist as points of reference, but their effectiveness is dictated by the organising

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principle that is the narrative.”69 That is, while items on a list may seem disconnected from and “an alternative to narrative,”70 pointing to something outside the text, to some reality that is referenced by narrators, “these lists, and the facts of which they are constituted, ultimately derive their meaning from the narrative in which they are embedded.”71 The importance of the list within the narration is precisely, I would argue, its spectral function: its record within the narration of something that should be paid attention to. As Ryad simply shoves things in a trash bag, what exactly goes missing? One object could perhaps answer this question: “He sweeps everything off the desk into a big rubbish bag: the mail, the invitations, the dirty old cup, the scissors, the felt-tip pens, the staplers, the tube of glue, even the red telephone with its severed cable” (54) [“il prend un grand sac-poubelle et y déverse tout ce qu’il trouve sur le bureau: le courrier, les invitations, la vieille tasse sale, la paire de ciseaux, les feutres, l’agrafeuse, le tube de colle, et même un téléphone rouge à la ligne coupée”] (85). We can also wonder, as we continue reading the novel, if there is an object listed that may reappear and be significant. And indeed there is, in the last journal entry given,72 on 19 October 1961, Charlot shares his “recipe” for writing a book: Buy a desk, the plainest one you can find, as long as it has a drawer that locks. Lock the drawer and throw away the key. Every day, write whatever you like, enough to cover three pages. Slip the pages in through the gap at the top of the drawer. Without rereading them, obviously. At the end of the year, you’ll have about 900 handwritten pages. Then the ball’s in your court. (133) [“Achetez une table, la plus ordinaire possible, avec un tiroir et une serrure. Fermez le tiroir et jetez la clé. Chaque jour écrivez ce que vous voulez, remplissez trois feuilles de papier. Glissez-les par la fente du tiroir. Évidemment sans vous relire. À la fin de l’année vous aurez à peu près 900 pages manuscrites. À vous de jouer”]. (201)

This is also the moment we come to realize that Ryad may have missed some treasures in the locked desk that he threw out without a second 69 Kawakami, “Being Serious,” 74. 70 Kawakami, “Being Serious,” 74. 71 Kawakami, “Being Serious,” 73. 72 The imagined journal ends a few months after the second bombing and destruction of Charlot’s bookstore in September 1961; Charlot died in 2004.

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thought – the desk is listed in the inventory of things to throw away. Although he tries to open the drawer, he gives up because it is stuck [bloqué] or rather locked: this might mean that pages and pages could have been slipped in there, and that a manuscript waiting to be published could be there. Charlot’s call at the end of the recipe – “the ball’s in your court” [“À vous de jouer”] – goes unanswered here. We can thus as readers become the repository of someone’s memories – haunted, as it were, by these potential ghosts. The discarding of the telephone, a telephone whose line of communication has already been severed, is emblematic of the breakdown in the transmission of the memories of the place. Objects, when removed from those who could read their marks and traces (as we have seen with Salvayre), remain useless. By contrast, Abdallah is the repository of a memory that can be transmitted; while the journalist does not pay attention to him, Ryad notices him and strikes up a conversation which will help him understand what he is doing. Abdallah is attached to the place, to the books that Ryad has been sent to throw away: “He looks like a magus, a strange apparition. This is his place: he scans the room, searching for memories” (80) [“On dirait un étrange mage, une apparition. Il est ici chez lui, son regard embrasse la pièce, cherche à retrouver les souvenirs”] (122). What is significant for our thinking about ghosts and the inventory – here we are getting rid of things rather than trying to keep them – is that the inventory here can be seen as standing in for a lost opportunity for a search. If Ryad had been more interested in digging, rather than throwing away, we might have had a different picture. The few things that he has learned from Abdallah, he does not know what to do with: “His head is full of Abdallah’s stories: those heavy stories that go to make up History with a capital H, but he doesn’t want to know what to make of them” (139) [“Il a la tête remplie des histoires racontées par Abdallah, ces histoires trop lourdes qui font la grande Histoire et dont il ne sait que penser”] (208). While at times he expresses the desire to know more and dialogues with Abdallah, he is also in a hurry and not really invested, the brief moments of interest are fleeting, his thoughts are in Paris with his own life: as such, he figures as a double of sorts of the journalist at the beginning of the novel who was also failing to capture the memory of the place. When Ryad “feels that somehow he has failed to carry out his task” (139) [“a l’impression d’avoir failli à sa mission”] (208), to some extent, he is quite correct. Nevertheless, by taking us on his journey of destruction, Adimi makes certain we are privy to some things that may resonate with us.

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By deftly moving across different eras and angles of focus, Adimi manages to bring both individual and collective memory to bear. While the inhabitants of the city are invested in trying to preserve its memories, the one who actually manages to do it, who discusses the importance of the past, of the interplay of H/history, is Adimi herself, who, at the end of the narration, puts herself back in: “You will find yourself in front of the former bookstore Les Vraies Richesses; I imagined its closure but it’s still there” (141) [“Vous vous retrouverez devant l’ancienne librairie des Vraies Richesses dont j’ai imaginé la fermeture mais qui est toujours là”] (210). And, indeed, the book is not simply an exercise in imagination, it also closes with almost four pages of scholarly sources, documentaries, newspaper articles, and various archival materials, which testify to Adimi’s desire to delve into the past: “A year of sifting through archives. Meeting Charlot’s friends. Devouring books, interviews, documentaries. Most of all, revisiting the little yellow volumes published by Domens, which are like talismans, dipping into Charlot’s memories, borrowing a few words here, a sentence there, embroidering, imagining” (143) [“Un an à écumer les fonds d’archives. À rencontrer les copains de Charlot. À dévorer bouquins, interviews et documentaires. Surtout, il fallait rouvrir les petits livres jaunes de Domens qui sont comme des talismans, piocher dans les souvenirs d’Edmond Charlot, prendre quelques mots ici, des phrases à, broder, imaginer”] (213). Through the shortcomings of some of her characters, Adimi emphasizes what happens when the search for the past is not undertaken, or undertaken in a superficial manner. There are many possible guides into the past: one can miss the transmission of oral memory if one does not ask (the right) questions, one can miss the significance of certain objects or places if one only thinks about profit margins. Yet perhaps, most strikingly of all, this novel reiterates the potential for communication through something as banal as an inventory – with the caveat that it can only fulfill its purpose if there is a reader, one who is open to and invested in making meaning out a few scribbles on a list.

chapter five

Uncontainable Containers Modiano, Alikavazovic Uncontainable Containers

En somme, c’était la première fois, au cours de ma recherche, qu’on ne me donnait pas de boîte. Cette pensée me fit rire. Indeed, it was the first time in the course of my investigations that I had not been given a box. This thought made me laugh. Patrick Modiano, Rue des boutiques obscures [Missing Person]1

Address books, birth certificates, books, business cards, (cookie) boxes, dresses, files, handkerchiefs, hats, letters, lists of grievances, manuscripts, maps, notebooks, paintings, passports, pens, pieces of paper, phonebooks, photographs, shirts, suitcases, sunglasses, trophies, umbrellas: these are a few items (in alphabetical order) that one can often find in an inventory of sorts. These are also objects that have been lost or reported missing in the pages of the contemporary novels analyzed in this book. Although at first glance these objects perhaps have more of a sentimental or possibly legal rather than monetary value, their sheer number nonetheless points to their importance in the narrative economy. While we already saw the significance of making lists, of keeping an inventory in order to facilitate the process of transmission, in this chapter I focus more specifically on two objects that 1 Patrick Modiano, Rue des boutiques obscures (Paris: Gallimard, 2011), 117; Patrick Modiano, Missing Person, trans. Daniel Weissbort (Boston: David R. Godine, 2004), 78.

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are oft included in such inventories; they distinguish themselves by their capacity to contain within them other things. They are, by design, meant to keep things safe: suitcases and boxes. However, in the case of select novels by Patrick Modiano and Jakuta Alikavazovic these objects have themselves disappeared and their potential reappearance is what drives the narrative – for reappearing objects are known to cause a disruption and bring us elsewhere/elsewhen. Ghosts and objects have a particular relationship given the former’s supposed invisibility – sometimes the only sign that a ghost is around may be the fact that an object seems to have moved on its own; but what if the object itself, in a text, could be understood as a ghost, as having spectral properties? Discussing the linking of disparate temporalities on screen through the figure of the ghost, Alison Landsberg reads the opening scene of the silent film Joan the Woman (1916), noting the discovery (in the present of the film, that is, World War I) of an artifact (a sword) in a trench in France that is followed by the spectral apparition of Joan of Arc, who, it seems, has been “summoned” by this sword. Landsberg is entirely correct that the appearing of the ghost “has linked the present with the past”2 and has inaugurated a different way to think the temporality of the film. And while it is Joan of Arc’s ghost that is meant here – her reappearance is announced before the sword is ever found3 – I would argue that another crucial ghost in this film is in fact the sword itself, this object which carries memory from the past. Before one of the soldiers is shown finding the hidden sword and then seeing Joan of Arc appear, the intertitle had already announced, in all-caps: “MEMORY.”4 It is this object that solicits further thinking and decision-making on the part of 2 Alison Landsberg, “Ghosts on Screen: The Politics of Intertemporality,” in Spectral Spaces and Hauntings: The Affects of Absence, ed. Christina Lee (New York: Routledge, 2017), 150. Landsberg notes that this is something that the director himself found to be a “flaw” precisely because it jolts the audience and makes one aware of the distance between our present and the past. Alison Landsberg, “Theorizing Affective Engagement in the Historical Film,” in Engaging the Past: Mass Culture and the Production of Historical Knowledge (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), 26. 3 After a brief description of Joan’s life and her martyrdom, the film intertitle states: “Joan of Arc is not dead. She can never die – and in the war-torn land she loved so well, her Spirit fights today.” Cecil B. DeMille, Joan the Woman, in The Cecil B. DeMille Classics Collection. DVD. Passport Video, 2007, intertitle (00.03.46). 4 DeMille, Joan the Woman, intertitle (00.07.00).

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protagonists (and perhaps viewers), it is this object which summons a fellow ghost, namely Joan of Arc. Ghosts, as Landsberg notes, in their unexpected reappearances, “compe[l] both the character and the viewer to perform intellectual work, which is ultimately crucial to the ghost’s mission to motivate action.”5 I contend that they do not actually have to be a “proper ghost” to elicit this type of intellectual work (although my reading of ghosts is not one that subscribes to the notion that ghosts have a mission).6 Objects, when thought of as ghosts, as having a spectral function in a text, alert us to the mechanisms of transmission (what is passed on, what has been lost). For Hélène Cixous, as we have seen, objects such as pens, notebooks, and even the telephone itself are means into her own memories, they are the things that make it possible to establish communication with loved ones, just like the calling of their names or the finding of a few of their scribbles on a piece of paper. In texts by Modiano and Alikavazovic, there are several objects that can prompt a rethinking of how to engage with memories of past events. What interests me in their work is the fact that the material loss of an object not only mirrors or stands in for either a personal loss or, in other cases, a mental block – a refusal to deal with the past, but also haunts protagonists (and by extensions readers), for the disappearance of such objects should not be understood as merely symbolic. Readers can be on the lookout for the reappearance of such objects and thus be haunted as well. What transpires through their texts is the fact that, despite attempts to silence or erase traces from the past, it does not stay buried – much like the sword summoning Joan of Arc – and it appears to come back in different forms. By tracking lost suitcases in Modiano’s oeuvre, I discuss how they allow narrators to keep the search going while remaining relatively safe – one of the concerns for the narrators is indeed the potential of being arrested, found, and likely deported and murdered. Much to the contrary, Alikavazovic’s novel demonstrates that trying to get rid of an object of traumatic knowledge, which cannot be erased or destroyed, is bound to make it come back with a vengeance: the contents of the box in question cannot be contained and their reach at times transcends logic – they are thus thoroughly spectral. Readers, in turn, search for the objects throughout the novels, espousing the role of protagonists, themselves haunted by memories that are not their own, but rather the text’s. 5 Landsberg, “Ghosts on Screen,” 160. 6 See Conjuration.

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Lost in the Quartier (Modiano) Known for seemingly always writing the same book – someone disappears and the narrator launches himself (more rarely herself) into a search that will become a gateway to a somber and uncertain past7 – Patrick Modiano weaves throughout his oeuvre his own fraught relationship to what he calls his “prehistory,”8 that is, the time of the Nazi Occupation of France and the collaboration of the Vichy regime.9 Modiano’s singular relationship to time is exacerbated by the fact that although he is a post-war writer – he was born in July 1945, mere months after the end of World War II (in the European theater) – his affective links to the period leading up to his birth are strong, and he also grows up living in the shadows of his father’s shady wartime dealings. It should thus not come as a surprise that in Livret de famille [Family Record] (1977) – an “auto-bio-fiction,”10 to use Johnnie Gratton’s formulation – Modiano also reveals a conception of memory that precedes rather than follows his experiences, and he positions himself as the repository of detailed memories that should not be his: “I was only twenty years old, but my memory stretched back before my birth. I was certain, for instance, that I’d lived in the Paris under the Occupation because I recalled certain individuals from that time, as well as small, disturbing details that weren’t in any history book”11 [“Je n’avais 7 Modiano even admits in his acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize that, in each book, “often the same faces, the same names, the same places, the same sentences come back from one to the next.” Patrick Modiano, Discours à l’Académie suédoise (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 2015), 13. For a discussion of the question of “sameness” with regard to time, see Akane Kawakami, “Being Eternal: The Endless Recurrence of Time and Writing,” in Patrick Modiano (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2015), 155–74. 8 He writes: “[M]y prehistory is the shady and shameful period of the Occupation: I have always had the feeling, due to obscure family reasons, that I was born from this nightmare.” Patrick Modiano, cited in Joseph Jurt, “La Mémoire de la Shoah: Dora Bruder,” in Patrick Modiano, ed. John E. Flower (Amsterdam: Éditions Rodopi, 2007), 93. 9 See Chapter 3 for more on this historical period. 10 Johnnie Gratton, “Postmemory, Prememory, Paramemory: The Writing of Patrick Modiano,” French Studies: A Quarterly Review 59, no. 1 (2005): 41. According to Gratton, who coins this term, Modiano’s Livret de famille makes use of several distinct genres: “[it] combin[es] the features of a novel, a book of short stories, an autobiography and a family biography” (40). 11 Patrick Modiano, Family Record, trans. Mark Polizzotti (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019), 75.

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que vingt ans, mais ma mémoire précédait ma naissance. J’étais sûr, par exemple, d’avoir vécu dans le Paris de l’Occupation puisque je me souvenais de certains personnages de cette époque et de détails infimes et troublants, de ceux qu’aucun livre d’histoire ne mentionne”].12 These memories are only his by what Gratton calls a certain “paranormal form of mediation.”13 In other words, these memories, which cannot be corroborated by historical facts or personal lived experiences, rather show a deeply affective engagement and concern with this time period. Gratton distinguishes “paramemory” from Marianne Hirsch’s “postmemory” by explaining that “paramemory” represents “that which comes to memory allogenically, with no firm underpinning, no prior language, no referential passport,”14 borrowing the term “allogenically” from its use in geology, where it describes “a mineral or sediment transported to its present position from elsewhere.”15 Yet, in his description, rather than being completely detached from the graspable realm (no “firm underpinning,” “no referential passport”), memories also are metaphorized as tangible sediments that need to be smuggled, carried over, transported into a different time: their immateriality thus slowly wanes and they progressively gain a hint of substance. In this way, memories become apprehensible as objects, as archeological finds that are smuggled out after being excavated. Modiano himself spoke in geological terms in an interview to underscore his work as an archeologist of memory: “I write precisely in order to fight against this erosion, to find a foothold within this quicksand” [“j’écris justement pour lutter contre cette érosion, pour trouver dans ce sable mouvant un ancrage”].16 Pierre Assouline, writing about Pour que tu ne te perdes pas dans le quartier [So You Don’t Get Lost in the Neighborhood] (2014), astutely notes the importance that things or objects can have in the repeated searches that take place in each novel and takes as an example the loss of a notebook. He suggests that it makes no difference what the loss refers to – “It does not matter in the end, whether it is an object or a person” – and instead underlines the importance of the feeling that accompanies 12 Patrick Modiano, Livret de famille (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1977), 96. 13 Gratton, “Postmemory, Prememory, Paramemory,” 42. 14 Gratton, “Postmemory, Prememory, Paramemory,” 45. 15 Gratton, “Postmemory, Prememory, Paramemory,” 42. 16 Patrick Modiano, cited by Maryline Heck: “La Trace et le fantôme: Mélancolie de l’écriture chez Patrick Modiano,” in Lectures de Modiano, ed. Roger-Yves Roche (Nantes: Éditions Cécile Defaut, 2009), 344.

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such a loss and the possibilities that it simultaneously affords, for it is able to “open up a breach in time.”17 Assouline summarizes Modiano’s project in the following way: “the only thing that counts is the missing piece [le manque] that revives memory.”18 This statement is certainly not meant to equate people with things, but to point to the fact that the search is sometimes prompted by a material loss (or the recovery of an unknown or lost item). Maryline Heck very perceptively points out that the melancholy atmosphere in Modiano’s works could be linked to the question of lost objects and argues that writing does not follow traces, but rather precedes them; while Heck hints at the role that objects take on in Modiano’s narratives, she stops short of including them in what she calls the “‘spectral’ trace” [“[t]race ‘fantôme’”].19 Yet these lost objects function as remainders and reminders, as things that are begging to be found in order to allow memories to be revived or even created. To understand these objects and how they function, we must find them in the pages of his books; we must collect them and list them, and it is through the inventory as a (literary) device that this function is best made explicit.20 The tangible, solid aspect of objects in Modiano’s works is often meant to act as a stable counterpart to the ephemeral nature of identity. In a world where people’s identities fluctuate, where one is unsure about the people encountered, objects provide a way of bringing together these disparate pieces. In Modiano’s imaginary, objects last much longer than the fleeting world around them; people change identities because they are often, as has been widely noted, vagabonds, runaways, people engaging in illicit activities, people running for their lives, always hiding. The focus on lost objects also stems from their understated but powerful contrast with the blurred and fragmented memories that protagonists bring up in their searches for an elusive past; things can 17 Pierre Assouline, “Géographies de la mémoire,” Le Magazine Littéraire 548, no. 10/14 (October 2014), 11. 18 Assouline, “Géographies de la mémoire,” 11. 19 Heck, “La Trace et le fantôme,” 329, 334. 20 See Chapter 4. This is also Sjef Houppermans’s conclusion in reading Modiano’s Dora Bruder (1997): “Making an inventory is also in a sense the main goal […] making an inventory of the traces that appear as signs of absence, but also as resistance to forgetting.” Sjef Houppermans, “L’Héritage de Vichy,” in Histoire, jeu, science dans l’aire de la littérature: Mélanges offerts à Evert van der Starre, ed. Sjef Houppermans, P. J. Smith, Madeleine van Strien-Chardonneau, and Evert van der Starre (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000), 105–6.

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ground characters or at least give them a sense of continuity. In what follows, I examine the function of suitcases [valises] to show how, within the narrative, by disrupting linear chronology, these objects can bring together past and present (and potentially the future) on the same plane and at the same time. The suitcase itself is not an innocuous object, especially in the context of the Holocaust and its memory; suitcases are, Michael Rothberg notes, often “displayed at various camps and museums and used in pedagogical projects such as What We Carry, which combines videotaped survivor testimony and the presentation of authentic artifacts carried in suitcases.”21 We can posit that, given these historical and mnemonic dimensions, suitcases function doubly as ghosts and could be said to haunt the reader of Modiano’s oeuvre.22 To orient our reading, we will proceed through a non-exhaustive inventory of certain pieces of luggage in Modiano’s works. In Livret de famille, a briefcase is left behind: Patrick’s mother (an actress) loses a case containing a screenplay that she was given by the film’s producers when they learned that the Wehrmacht had invaded Belgium.23 What happened to these objects? Who got a hold of the screenplay? Even if the narrator in this specific book has not found them, it does not mean that someone else cannot begin the search anew one day. The reader, knowing that some object may turn up years later, cannot help but be on the lookout, in subsequent novels, for a screenplay – or a finished film – with an unknown and unclear origin found in a briefcase. This is in fact what happened to Georges Perec’s first novel, published posthumously in 2012 as Le Condottière [Portrait of a Man Known as Il Condottiere], which had been rejected a few times in the 1960s and was 21 Michael Rothberg, The Implicated Subject: Beyond Victims and Perpetrators (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2019), 238n56. 22 After writing this chapter (drawn partly from my dissertation), I discovered the article by France Grenaudier-Klijn, “L’objet-valise chez Patrick Modiano: Une réticente nostalgie – Villa Triste, Chien de printemps et Pour que tu ne te perdes pas dans le quartier,” Literatūra 59, no. 4 (2017): 50–63. The article examines suitcases in the same texts as embodying a reticent approach to the past, always between remembering and forgetting, thus forging an “ethics of reticence” (56); although there are many convergences between our approaches, in GrenaudierKlijn’s reading the spectral dimension of these suitcases is not named as such. 23 We read that “[s]he suddenly realized she’d lost her overnight bag, which contained the Elizabeth Arden cosmetics and the film script […] What she still held in her hand, without noticing it until then, was Openfeld Senior’s black fedora.” Modiano, Family Record, 34; Modiano, Livret de famille, 48.

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deemed a failure. At the time, Perec even wrote, in a letter to his friend Jacques Lederer, the following: “Leave it where it is, for now at least. Will pick it up in ten years, when it will end up being a masterpiece or I will wait in my grave for a faithful interpreter to find it in an old trunk that once belonged to you and publish it” [“Le laisse où il est, pour l’instant du moins. Le reprendrai dans dix ans, époque où ça donnera un chef-d’œuvre ou bien attendrai dans ma tombe qu’un exégète fidèle le retrouve dans une vieille malle t’ayant appartenue et le publie”].24 And, we must concur with Claude Burgelin’s words – echoing what Jacques Roubaud described as Perec’s prescience (see Introduction): “Once again, Perec hit the bullseye” [“Une fois de plus, Perec a mis dans le mille”], for the manuscript of this novel, after being lost, was found again decades after its inception “in a very ‘old trunk’ kind of way” [“très genre ‘vieille malle’”].25 In Chien de printemps, the narrator begins working as an archivist for the photographer named Jansen (the one who took pictures of the palimpsest of posters discussed in Chapter 4). He, the narrator, decides to draw an inventory of all the pictures taken, which Jansen keeps in three leather suitcases.26 Writing them down in his notebook, the narrator wants to keep a record of these visual traces, and out of extreme worry for their safekeeping actually starts keeping a duplicate copy in another notebook – in case the first one were destroyed – (that is a double of the double). One day, when Jansen disappears without notice leaving an empty apartment behind, the narrator wonders: Today it makes me feel odd when I leaf through the pages: it’s like reading a very detailed catalogue of images that don’t exist. What became of them, when we’re not even sure what became of their maker? Did Jansen bring the three suitcases with him, or did he destroy it all before 24 Claude Burgelin, “Préface,” in Le Condottière (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2012), 7. Burgelin cites from “Lettre à Jacques Lederer, 4/12/1960,” in “Cher, très cher, admirable et charmant ami …,” Correspondance Georges Perec–Jacques Lederer (1956–1961) (Paris: Flammarion, 1997), 570. 25 Burgelin, “Préface,” 7. See also David Bellos, Georges Perec: A Life in Words (London: Harvill, 1993), 229. 26 France Grenaudier-Klijn notes the link between “Francis Jansen” and “‘Francis Jeanson’, founding ‘father’ of the suitcase carrier network of the FLN! [Algerian National Liberation Front],” mentioned notably in Leïla Sebbar’s novel La Seine était rouge: Paris, octobre 1961 [The Seine Was Red: Paris, October 1961] (1999); see Chapter 7. Grenaudier-Klijn, “L’objet-valise chez Patrick Modiano,” 57n20.

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leaving? I had asked him what he was planning to do with those suitcases and he’d said that they were weighing him down, and that he especially didn’t want any “excess baggage.” But he didn’t offer to leave them with me in Paris. At best, they’ve now more or less rotted away in some suburb of Mexico City.27 [Aujourd’hui, il me cause une drôle de sensation lorsque j’en feuillette les pages: celle de consulter un catalogue très détaillé de photos imaginaires. Quel a été leur sort, si l’on n’est même pas certain de celui de leur auteur? Jansen a-t-il emmené avec lui les trois valises, ou bien a-t-il tout détruit avant son départ? Je lui avais demandé ce qu’il comptait faire de ces trois valises et il m’avait dit qu’elles l’encombraient et qu’il ne voulait surtout pas avoir ‘un excédent de bagages.’ Mais il ne m’a pas proposé de les garder avec moi à Paris. Au mieux, elles achèvent de pourrir maintenant dans quelque faubourg de Mexico.]28

It is interesting to note that the photographer refers to the record of his life’s work (for these three bags hold all of his photographs) as excess luggage. Excess is thus understood as that which goes over the bare necessities but, in this instance, it also refers to that which exceeds its rightful place in the narrative; in other words, what is the use of these pictures if they have already been recorded (twice) in the narrator’s notebooks? With them gone what is left is a simple catalog of imaginary pictures in the narrator’s own account. It is enough, however, for someone else to take up this search, and maybe even find the missing luggage. This unknown person could even publish a book about Jansen – this is something the narrator predicted using the future tense at the very beginning of his narration – that is, a book “illustrated with the pictures he’ll find.”29 [“illustré par les photos qu’il retrouvera”].30 However, because our only access to the original photographs has been through the narrator, who is to say that, should they turn up, they will actually be the correct ones? A margin of error thus remains: a vague trace that can’t ever be reconstituted without some imaginative creative investment. We can also think of the narrator of Un cirque passe [After the Circus] (1992), worried about being left behind by an enigmatic woman he just 27 Patrick Modiano, “Afterimage,” in Suspended Sentences: Three Novellas, trans. Mark Polizzotti (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014), 14. 28 Patrick Modiano, Chien de printemps (Paris: Gallimard, 1993), 33–34. 29 Modiano, “Afterimage,” 6. 30 Modiano, Chien de printemps, 18.

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met. He thus tries to find a point of reference by remembering specific locations, but is also comforted by the knowledge that she left something behind, namely her suitcases: “Even if she did give me the slip, I had several reference points: the café on Rue Washington where Jacques was a regular, Ansart’s apartment, and especially the suitcases.”31 [“Au cas où elle me fausserait compagnie, j’avais quelques points de repère: le café de la rue Washington dont Jacques était un habitué, l’appartement d’Ansart et surtout les valises”].32 Even though Gisèle repeatedly tells him that they contain nothing of value, it is mentioned that they are locked and she needs to keep them safe. We see the importance of the first suitcase emphasized on the back cover of the French book, as it invites us to find out its mystery: “I was carrying the suitcase, which was rather heavy. It occurred to me that it contained something other than just clothes” [“Je portais la valise qui pesait assez lourd. Je me suis dit qu’elle contenait autre chose que des vêtements”].33 At the end of the novel, Gisèle has a fatal car accident and the two suitcases that she left in her hotel room could perhaps finally be opened. Even though the narrator and readers want to know throughout the novel what is hiding inside, and he now holds the key to the room, we never find out what is kept in them. Are all these various suitcases, then, the same as the ones in Fleurs de ruine [“Flowers of Ruin”] (1991) that the narrator is given for safekeeping by an equally enigmatic man? “Why had he left me his suitcase? Did he want to teach me a lesson, show me that reality was more elusive than I thought? Unless he had simply abandoned these remains, certain of finding a new life in Casablanca or elsewhere”34 [“Pourquoi m’avait-il laissé sa valise? Voulait-il me donner une leçon en me montrant que la réalité était plus fuyante que je ne le pensais? Ou bien, tout simplement, il avait abandonné ces dépouilles, sûr de faire peau neuve, à Casablanca ou ailleurs”].35 And what about the suitcases 31 Patrick Modiano, After the Circus, trans. Mark Polizzotti (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015), 54–55; emphasis my own. 32 Patrick Modiano, Un cirque passe (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1994), 54; emphasis my own. 33 Modiano, Un cirque passe, back cover. This is not included in the English translation. 34 Patrick Modiano, “Flowers of Ruin,” in Suspended Sentences: Three Novellas, trans. Mark Polizzotti (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014), 178. 35 Patrick Modiano, Fleurs de ruine (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1991), 83.

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in Villa triste (1975)? In this novel, the narrator forgets his luggage after climbing aboard a train. Granted, upon his arrival at the station, he had considered leaving everything behind (his hundreds of pounds of books and phonebooks), and thus he was not the least bit worried about the luggage’s fate – forgotten is perhaps too strong a word: I gazed at my baggage again. Three or four hundred kilos I was still hauling around with me. Why? At the thought, an acid laugh shook my sides. […] I walked out of the station, leaving my bags on the platform. Their contents could be of interest to no one. Besides, they were much too heavy to move very far.36 [J’ai contemplé de nouveau mes bagages. Trois ou quatre cents kilos que je traînais toujours avec moi. Pourquoi? A cette pensée, j’ai été secoué d’un rire acide. […] [J]e suis sorti de la gare en laissant mes bagages sur le quai. Leur contenu n’intéresserait personne. D’ailleurs, ils étaient bien trop lourds à déplacer].37

It is interesting that the narrator finds these suitcases difficult to move [déplacer], for within Modiano’s oeuvre this displacement (to echo Dominique Rabaté writing about Perec’s narrative traces of disappearance)38 indeed occurs at the level of the oeuvre itself. Suitcases are difficult to move within the diegesis; they are heavy, they are excessive, they are red herrings – it only makes sense for them to swiftly move between texts, it does not matter if narrators abandon them in all sorts of places, the suitcases (the same ones, their avatars) will reappear somewhere, somewhen else. When he finally climbs onto the train, the narrator notices the employee running on the platform with a single piece of luggage before giving up. Very ominously, the narrator notes: “Then he stood very straight, still holding the suitcase, under the lights of the platform. He looked like a sentinel, getting smaller and smaller. A toy soldier”39 [“Il gardait la valise à la main et se tenait très droit sous les lumières du quai. On aurait dit une sentinelle qui rapetissait, rapetissait. Un soldat de plomb”].40 Even though the narrator has told us that his belongings would not interest

36 Patrick Modiano, Villa Triste, trans. John Cullen (New York: Other Press, 2016), 162. 37 Patrick Modiano, Villa triste (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1977), 202. 38 See Introduction. 39 Modiano, Villa Triste, 167 [English]. 40 Modiano, Villa triste, 209 [French].

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anyone, the fact is that it is a sentinel, a soldier, who is the figure that closes the book and leaves us hanging as to what may happen with the missing suitcase. Will this man become “a sentinel of forgetting” [“une sentinelle de l’oubli”] preventing anyone from ever finding it out? This is an expression Modiano will use in Dora Bruder (1997) to speak about those whose purpose it is to keep the past from resurfacing, those whom he dreaded encountering in his search for the missing girl. We read in Dora Bruder: “At first, I took him for one of those sentinels of oblivion whose role is to guard a shameful secret and deny access to anybody seeking to uncover the least trace of a person’s existence”41 [“Un moment, j’ai pensé qu’il était l’une de ces sentinelles de l’oubli chargées de garder un secret honteux, et d’interdire à ceux qui le voulaient de retrouver la moindre trace de l’existence de quelqu’un”].42 Or will the suitcase left on the train platform nevertheless reappear somewhere else, disrupting our narration with some crucial information? Dora Bruder begins with the devastating missing person notice that prompts the search for the young runaway Dora. This announcement, as is generally the case, relies on material proofs of existence: various items of clothing and accessories are the only things added to the description of physical characteristics. Modiano, who is interested in understanding who Dora was, her personality, what she was like, must infer certain things by extrapolating from any information he can find or by searching for points of convergence between his life and hers, by imagining where she could have gone. The narrator, early on, wonders if, having walked the same streets for years, he has not already been following in her footsteps; perhaps his walks down memory lane are ways to find clues about Dora and her parents’ presence. Yet what comes next is quite peculiar and perhaps unexpected: he mentions going with his mother around the age of twelve to the flea market and seeing a luggage seller: “a young Polish Jew who sold suitcases … Luxurious suitcases, in leather or crocodile skin, cardboard suitcases, traveling bags, cabin trunks labeled with the names of transatlantic companies – all heaped one on top of the other”43 [“un juif polonais vendait des valises … Des valises luxueuses, en cuir, en crocodile, d’autres en carton bouilli, des sacs de voyages, des malles-cabines portant des étiquettes de compagnies transatlantiques 41 Modiano, Dora Bruder, trans. Joanna Kilmartin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999),11. 42 Modiano, Dora Bruder (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1999), 16. 43 Modiano, Dora Bruder [English], 6. Ellipsis in the original.

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– toutes empilées les unes sur les autres”].44 The narrator upon spending a few lines describing the different types of suitcases does not give them any significant purpose – only the fact that this man one day offered him a cigarette – and he moves on in the next paragraph to another memory about going to the cinema. So why mention and describe these suitcases? Are these markers of reality, Barthes’s effet de réel or Kawakami’s effet d’irréel? Are they meant as a symbolic memorial for the deported? A way to “cal[l] up one of the icons of concentrationary memory,”45 as Rothberg suggests in a different context? Marceline Loridan-Ivens, who survived the Nazi extermination camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau, thus testifies: “I live under the sign of suitcases” [“Je vis sous le signe des valises”], recalling the piles of luggage that had to be relinquished, “with their labels and their names,” upon one’s arrival.46 Undoubtedly, Modiano, by referencing a “young Polish Jew,” is linking the past (Auschwitz, the memory of Dora Bruder) and the present of his childhood (post-war France, but also, as Max Silverman suggests, the Algerian War),47 yet one can read these pieces of luggage both symbolically and narratologically, that is, by interrogating their place in the narration. Could perhaps these piles of luggage also be the closest thing we have to an actual narratological trace of disappearance? In other words, since they are the indication of a possible vanishing (wanted or unwanted) of the original owner – they are, after all, a flea market, thus second-hand, find – are among these suitcases those lost or forgotten by disappearing protagonists in other novels by Modiano? 44 Modiano, Dora Bruder [French], 11. Ellipsis in the original. 45 Rothberg, The Implicated Subject, 169. Furthermore, for Rothberg, “‘the sign of suitcases’ is also a suggestive figure for implication,” as it both enables the carrying of items and can be used as a figure for “a weight that must be borne,” calling attention to the multidirectionality of memory (169). 46 Marceline Loridan-Ivens, Ma vie balagan, written in collaboration with Elisabeth D. Inandiak (Paris: Robert Laffont, 2008), 173. Cited and translated by Rothberg, The Implicated Subject, 169. Loridan-Ivens, whose close friendship to Simone Veil was forged in the camp, later met Georges Perec, whose mother died in Birkenau, and who was drawn to her because of this connection. Florent Georgesco, “Marceline Loridan-Ivens: ‘Le rapport à mon corps a été totalement ravagé par les camps,’” Le Monde, 20 January 2018. www.lemonde.fr/livres/article/2018/01/20/ marceline-loridan-ivens-le-rapport-a-mon-corps-a-ete-totalement-ravage-parles-camps_5244478_3260.html. 47 Max Silverman, Palimpsestic Memory: The Holocaust and Colonialism in French and Francophone Fiction and Film (New York: Berghahn Books, 2013), 112–13.

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Modiano’s Pour que tu ne te perdes pas dans le quartier [So You Don’t Get Lost in the Neighborhood] (2014), which prominently centers on the fear of both being lost and being found, may hold a possible answer to our query. The narrator Jean Daragane retells a recurring dream (significantly, he argues it is a result of reading too much fiction), in which one can perhaps locate the missing suitcase from Villa triste or the ones from Livret de famille, Fleurs de ruine, and others: And it is probably on account of this that he will be haunted throughout his life by a dream: suitcases that are lost on a train, or else the train leaves with your suitcases and you are left on the platform. If he could remember all his dreams, today, he would now be counting hundreds and hundreds of lost suitcases.48 [Et c’est sans doute à cause de cela qu’un rêve le poursuivra toute sa vie: des valises que l’on égare dans un train, ou bien le train part avec vos valises et vous restez sur le quai. S’il pouvait se souvenir de tous ses rêves, aujourd’hui, il compterait des centaines et des centaines de valises perdues].49

Daragane in his dreams thus seems to collect the missing suitcases of all his fellow narrators and protagonists; the English translation rightfully calls it a haunting. He is, in a way, a stand-in for the reader, who is followed or haunted by the missing objects, the hundreds of loose ends that we find in Modiano’s texts. It is through their untimely reappearance, that is, their loss and their resurgence in different texts, that they propel the search forward by lending possible clues; even when they may not lend any, the potential for future discovery always remains. As such, the search is never fulfilled, it is just deferred to another time and another place. It is in this sense that the object functions as a ghost, ever deferring its reappearance, its graspability; staying always a little further ahead until it hits us that it had been there all along (this is what Jacques Derrida terms “the visor effect”50 [“l’effet de visière”], realizing that 48 Modiano, So You Don’t Get Lost in the Neighborhood, trans. Euan Cameron (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), 151; emphasis my own. 49 Patrick Modiano, Pour que tu ne te perdes pas dans le quartier (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 2014), 143; emphasis my own. 50 Derrida describes it as follows: “To feel ourselves seen by a look which it will always be impossible to cross, that is the visor effect.” Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International,

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the ghost has been seeing us without our being able to see it looking). Indeed, even a failed search in Modiano constantly needs to be picked up again and continued. The haunting is thus transferred to the reader, who needs to know, who invents possible outcomes, who thus creates more fiction; who will perhaps pick up the next novel and the next, hoping for answers. It is also a way of communication across time and space within the oeuvre itself, making each novel one chapter of a giant inventory. The loose end is also key in Modiano’s texts for it allows the search to not be completely fulfilled, just in case being found would be harmful. One of the anxieties in Modiano is indeed at once the necessity to complete a search and the fear of being found, given that the shadow of the Occupation always looms large. By leaving suitcases behind, protagonists leave some traces, but at the same time it could also mean reserving the possibility to escape, and leading people – those who may want to harm them – on the wrong path, that is covering one’s tracks [brouiller les pistes]. The Return of Pandora’s Box (Alikavazovic) While the Holocaust and the Occupation are central for French collective memory, and the Algerian War has finally come to the fore both in the public sphere and official discourse in recent years, one may wonder about the impact of the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s and the genocide in Bosnia on the French imagination. France was involved in the conflicts that took place over the course of the last decade of the twentieth century (1991–1999),51 sending soldiers through the United Nations peacekeeping forces and the French Foreign Legion,52 and facilitating humanitarian trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge Classics, 1994), 7; emphasis in the original. Jacques Derrida, Spectres de Marx: L’État de la dette, le travail du deuil et la nouvelle Internationale (Paris: Éditions Galilée, 1993), 27. 51 For a good overview, see Catherine Baker, The Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). See also a short summary of the war in light of current events: Aline Cateux, “Trente ans après, la guerre de Bosnie-Herzégovine,” Analyse Opinion Critique, 1 April 2022. https://aoc.media/analyse/2022/03/31/ trente-ans-apres-la-guerre-de-bosnie-herzegovine/. 52 See, for instance, the war diary [carnet de guerre] of former French lieutenantcolonel Guillaume Ancel, who was in Sarajevo with the French Foreign Legion. Guillaume Ancel, Vent glacial sur Sarajevo (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2017). Ancel has also written about his experiences in Rwanda (see Chapter 7).

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aid, as well as welcoming refugees.53 Nevertheless, the importance of countries of the former Yugoslavia for French literary production draws just as much from a cultural imaginary of the “Balkans,” Eastern Europe (or even Mitteleuropa, Central Europe) as on close historical or political ties (for instance, both World Wars). Maria Todorova, whose Imagining the Balkans (1997) begins (in an echo of Marx) with “the specter of the Balkans” that is “haunting Western culture,”54 emphasizes the construction of this identity in the Western imaginary as opposed to a homogeneous self-identification from respective countries.55 Europe has long “identified itself as Christianity, then ‘civilization’ or ‘the West’”; in the wake of World War II, and particularly since the 1950s and the creation of the European Coal and Steel Community – a forerunner of what is today the European Union – it has “define[d] itself as an area of peace, democracy and economic prosperity.”56 Hence, as Fabrice Jesné notes, the Balkans, in the Western European imaginary, “are not yet Europe.”57 Indeed, “[t]he homo balkanicus,” Jacques Le Rider writes, “is a caricature originally conceived of by Westerners to denote a primitive European, merely picturesque within his folklore tradition but barbaric when he takes up arms.”58 Analyzing the work of Maurice Dantec and Vladan Radoman, two authors of polars [detective novels] writing in French very shortly after (and about) the Yugoslav wars, Andréa Goulet remarks that “[t]here is 53 For a discussion of the change in foreign policy between French presidents François Mitterrand and his successor Jacques Chirac, see Brian C. Rathbun, “The French Exception? Presidential Prerogatives and the Public and Private Politics of Intervention,” in Partisan Interventions: European Party Politics and Peace Enforcement in the Balkans (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004), 122–52. 54 Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). 55 In light of the Yugoslav wars, Todorova points out that while one has come in the West to equate the Balkans with the former Yugoslavia – even when Yugoslavs did not (always) consider themselves Balkans – “the Bulgarians [….] are the only ones who seriously consider their Balkanness, probably because of the fact that the Balkan range lies entirely on their territory.” Todorova, Imagining the Balkans, 54. 56 Fabrice Jesné, “Les Frontières balkaniques: Frontières européennes ou frontière de l’Europe?” in Gilles Pécout, ed., Penser les frontières de l’Europe du XIXe au XXIe siècle (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2004), 177. 57 Jesné, “Les Frontières balkaniques,” 159. 58 Jacques Le Rider, “Mitteleuropa as a lieu de mémoire,” in Cultural Memory Studies: An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook, ed. Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning in collaboration with Sara B. Young (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2008), 38.

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no doubt that through Western European eyes, the Balkans have persistently stood for the threat of fragmentation” and that the wars have only exacerbated this notion that has “haunted (and perhaps still haunts) the cultural imaginary.”59 There is no better example of “the exceptional intensity of France’s culture-psychic investment in the region,” Goulet argues, than the fictional Poldévie, France’s “very own Balkan nation” – first a 1920s “political hoax,” the fictional country, replete with stereotypes, shows up time and again in fiction in French (in Tintin as well as in several Oulipo novels).60 In recent years there has been a growing set of texts published in France that show a literary engagement with the Yugoslav wars and the genocide in Bosnia: from Mathias Enard’s contemporary epic poem Zone (2008) to Emmanuel Carrère’s Prix Renaudot-winning book Limonov (2011), which retells the life of the eponymous controversial figure who joined the war to fight on the side of the Serbs. More recently, Ingrid Thobois’s Miss Sarajevo (2018) discusses war photography, while Thierry Beinstingel’s Yougoslave (2020) turns to his family’s history. Known for his engagement (both literary and critical) with the question of work and the “workplace novel,”61 in this book, Beinstingel covers his family’s migrations (first east, then west), starting in the late eighteenth century all the way to the present.62 Two more authors can be added to the list: Jérôme Ferrari (whose novel À son image [In His Own Image] (2018) will be discussed in Chapter 6) and Jakuta Alikavazovic. A prolific writer and translator, awarded the Prix Goncourt du premier roman for Corps volatils [Volatile Bodies] (2007), Alikavazovic was born in Paris in 1979. After Le Londres-Louxor (2010), which centers on the experiences of Bosnian refugees of war and genocide in 59 Andrea Goulet, “‘Zéropa-land’: The Balkans as Shadow-Space in French Polars of the 1990s (Danted, Radoman),” Contemporary French Civilization 33, no. 2 (2009): 59. 60 Goulet, “‘Zéropa-land,’” 46–47. See also Bertrand Westphal, “La Poldévie ou les Balkans près de chez vous: Un stereotype français,” Neohelicon 32, no. 1 (2005): 7–16, cited by Goulet. 61 Thierry Beinstingel, “Écrire sur le travail: être dedans et dehors – œuvres emblématiques et histoires singulières,” Modern & Contemporary France 26, no. 3 (2018): 323–33. 62 Thierry Beinstingel, Yougoslave (Paris: Fayard, 2020). In a book that is 559 pages long, the period of time (Book 6) that covers the French Fifth Republic (since 1958) begins on page 487, and the wars in the 1990s are addressed right at the end (543–51).

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Paris,63 L’avancée de la nuit [Night As It Falls] (2017), the focus of this section, marks another return to her “origins,” as the French like to say.64 For her, this was not self-evident; far to the contrary, she explains feeling “for a long time […] a certain reluctance to talk about the former Yugoslavia. When your name is Jakuta Alikavazovic and you write books, that is the first thing one expects [from you].”65 L’avancée de la nuit has as a backdrop the memory of the siege of Sarajevo.66 The character Anton in Le Londres-Louxor (who, significantly, is Swiss and is the one who wants to know about the war, perhaps because, Swiss “neutrality” oblige, he is so removed from it) believes that, in order to understand what makes Europe Europe, one has to look east: The war in the former Yugoslavia represented [Europe’s] secret life. He would have wanted to be told about the siege of Sarajevo (5 April 1992–29 February 1996), the longest in modern Europe, on average three hundred and twenty-nine shell impacts per day, three thousand seven hundred and seventy-seven on 22 July 1993 alone – but nobody, strangely, seemed to remember this. [La guerre d’ex-Yougoslavie en représentait, pensait-il, la vie secrète. Il aurait voulu qu’on lui parle du siège de Sarajevo (5 avril 1992–29 février 1996), le plus long de l’Europe moderne, trois cent vingt-neuf impacts d’obus par jour en moyenne, trois mille sept cent soixante-dix-sept pour le seul 22 juillet 1993 – mais personne, étrangement, ne semblait s’en souvenir.]67

Few people, save, hopefully, the reader, since Anton’s musings are a repetition almost word for word of the novel’s prologue, in which this same description is found, along with a similar pronouncement: 63 For an engagingly rich reading of spectrality in this novel, see Pauline Armenoult, “Disparitions/Apparitions: Le réel à l’épreuve des spectres chez Jakuta Alikavazovic,” TRANS-21 (2017). http://journals.openedition.org/trans/1624. 64 See also the following short story: Jakuta Alikavazovic, “Chaque vampire est un groupe,” in Bienvenue en Transylvanie (Paris: Éditions Points, 2013). 65 Jérôme Goude, “Le Londres-Louxor,” Le Matricule des Anges 109 (January 2010), cited by Armenoult, “Disparitions/Apparitions.” 66 See the FAMA projects, “the world’s largest independent Collection of multi-media projects pertaining to the Siege of Sarajevo (1992–1996) and related events in reference to the Fall of Yugoslavia (1991–1999).” Suada Kapić, ed., The Siege of Sarajevo 1992–1996 (Sarajevo: FAMA, 2000). www.famacollection.org/ eng/fama-collection/fama-original-projects/20/. 67 Jakuta Alikavazovic, Le Londres-Louxor (Paris: Éditions Points, 2010), 101.

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“Surprisingly, few people still remember it” [“Étonnamment, peu de gens s’en souviennent encore”].68 If no one wants to talk about the war, if protagonists are always trying to escape thinking about the past, it is up to the reader to take up the work of memory. At the heart of Alikavazovic’s fiction there is a recurring struggle between those who search for an always-elusive past and attempt to make sense of fragmented memories and those who want to destroy any remaining traces. L’avancée de la nuit opens with the news of the impending death of Amélia announced to Paul in one of those dreaded phone calls, before resetting in the first chapter to the moment when their lives intersected on the university benches in professor Anton Albers’s course on urbanism. Our reading is haunted, as one says, by the knowledge of Amélia’s death by suicide and by the perpetual feeling that one is being watched.69 Frédéric Martin-Achard rightly categorizes it as a novel of “surveillance”70 and summarizes the various protagonists’ personal endeavors in the following way: “Paul gets rich in the security business, Amélia captures war zone images with a drone, while their mentor, the university professor Anton Albers, paints in her classes an image of cities torn between fantasies of law and order [fantasmes sécuritaires] and panicked fears.”71 Eventually in the novel the reader finds out that Amélia’s mother Nadia Dehr had an ambitious project of her own that explains her disappearance: “Some ten years earlier, at the end of the twentieth century, her mother had tried to stave off a war, and then to stop it, and it had been the death of her”72 [“Une dizaine d’années plus tôt, à la fin du 20e siècle, sa mère avait essayé d’empêcher une guerre, puis de l’arrêter, et elle en était morte”].73 While Amélia is first tempted to end 68 Alikavazovic, Le Londres-Louxor, 17. 69 This is literally the case for Amélia and Paul’s daughter Louise, who has a tracking chip implanted by her father so that he can follow her (a dot) on a screen. For a discussion of the mechanisms through which characters are surveilled/surveilling in the novel, see Frédéric Martin-Achard, “L’invisibilité et la marginalité comme formes de résistance paradoxale au pouvoir (Alikavazovic, Damasio, Despentes, Rosenthal, Vasset),” Fixxion 21 (December 2020): 76–77. 70 Martin-Achard, “L’invisibilité et la marginalité,” 76. 71 Martin-Achard, “L’invisibilité et la marginalité,” 76. 72 Jakuta Alikavazovic, Night as It Falls, trans. Jeffery Zuckerman (London: Faber & Faber, 2021), 47. Subsequent page numbers will be given in parentheses. 73 Jakuta Alikavazovic, L’avancée de la nuit (Paris: Éditions de l’Olivier, 2017), 55. Subsequent page numbers will be given in parentheses.

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her sentence right there, because it is correct both “grammatically and factually” (47) [“grammaticalement et factuellement”] (55), there is still something missing, “but even though the sentence said it all, it also said nothing, it wasn’t the language that she spoke” (47) [“mais en même temps qu’elle disait tout, elle ne disait rien, ce n’était pas la langue qu’elle parlait”] (55). This brief summary does not render the totality of what truly transpired through Nadia’s project; Amélia is trying to explain to Paul what happened to her mother, and as she attempts to show that this project of stopping a war – it is later made clear that it is the war in what was once Yugoslavia – words are inadequate to render the depth of her attempt, because it was expressed in a different language – and not the one we may think of. This admission by Amélia of the story of her mother prompts Paul to wonder if one can be “contaminated by a story […]. Are there tales that kill? But slowly, gnawing away” (47) [“contaminé par une histoire […]. Par des mots. Existe-t-il des récits qui tuent? Mais qui tuent lentement, à petit feu”] (55). We know the answer to this question, for, as we have seen thus far in the chapters of this book, children are particularly susceptible to stories that are hidden from them and that are deemed too painful by their parents to be discussed openly. Stressing in an interview that it is not a novel about the war, Alikavazovic describes it as a way to think about traces and the transmission of memory, in which one event can be said to keep affecting “in a very strange manner the generations that come after, whether or not they are concerned by it at first glance, because I do not think that an injustice can happen without leaving a trace.”74 In the novel, a work of postmemory in more ways than one, we will see that the traces left behind by Amélia’s mother, who reflected on injustices of war and genocide, will become the traces that she, Amélia, leaves behind for her own daughter Louise; transmission whether wanted or not will take place. I am interested in particular in the appearance and disappearance of a box, a box that has all the documents that Nadia Dehr compiled in the context of her project. As first-time readers, when we encounter this box, we may not immediately realize its significance, but upon its subsequent reappearance, we might remember that we actually already saw this box and have missed its importance. Before Paul becomes 74 Librairie Mollat, “Jakuta Alikavazovic – L’avancée de la nuit,” 19 December 2017. YouTube video. www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJ54w-zoRh8. 00:05:18– 00:05:35.

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friends with Amélia and their professor Albers (as she is called), he is already intrigued by them. At university, Amélia is known for living in an “Elisse” hotel, a fictional American hotel chain of which she is the heiress. By contrast, Paul is a young man from the banlieue, he is the son of an immigrant, and he is also described as being from a different social class than Amélia and has to work a string of low-paying jobs in order to make ends meet. One of these entails working as a security guard and at the hotel desk in the Elisse hotel where Amélia lives. From the very beginning of the novel, the references to war and to a city under siege, coupled with the lectures by Albers, all point towards an atmosphere of expectation for what is to come. Paul realizes throughout Albers’s seminar that there is something that links him to others and that resonates with the century in which he was born – this is what we could readily qualify as “being haunted by the past”: Fear of the dark, fear of others, as well as the murky, abstract memories of widespread plagues, widespread purges retained in his bones and marrow – memories of things his body hadn’t experienced but which all the same had shaped him. People huddled in the dark, a communal terror circulating amongst them […] a huge, collective body of fear. (27) [La peur du noir. La peur de l’autre. Le souvenir obscur, impensé, dans sa moelle, de grandes pestes, de grandes purges, le souvenir de choses qu’il n’avaient pas connues mais d’où il venait. Des corps blottis dans l’obscurité, une terreur commune circulant entre eux […] un grand corps collectif de peur]. (34)

Fear is, for Alikavazovic, a means to also initiate something positive, or at least trigger something that is more than what one is afraid of; she reveals in her Prix Médicis-winning essay, Comme un ciel en nous [Like a Sky Within Us] (2021), that she herself learned, watching the wars in Yugoslavia from afar, that “[a] type of art can be activated in my heart, in my mind, just like Abstraction was activated by fear after the Second World War. This intense fear that I both felt and was not aware of feeling at the time” [“Un art peut être activé dans mon cœur, dans mon cerveau, comme l’abstraction a pu l’être après la Seconde Guerre mondiale, par la peur. Cette peur intense qu’à la fois j’éprouvais et n’avais pas conscience d’éprouver alors”].75 Even when one is removed from the location of war, it has a reach, especially if one’s family is affected. This collective fear that is felt by Paul is the weight of the many 75 Jakuta Alikavazovic, Comme un ciel en nous (Paris: Éditions Stock, 2021), 104.

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wars and conflicts that have punctuated human history, and as such, war and fear are always near, circulating and linking people who, at first glance, do not have anything in common. Even the fact that Paul’s job is one of surveillance puts us on the track of war. He is described as someone whose uniform is “a failed attempt at semantics, at a language of sorts” [“un effort de sémantique, un langage”], meant to make an impression, “exuding something almost military but coming up short. Every part was designed to evoke municipal troops, but not quite” (26–27) [“ils dégageaient quelque chose de militaire, de paramilitaire; mais devaient pourtant s’en distinguer. Tout devait évoquer l’armée – une armée privée, rendue à la ville – et s’en démarquer à la fois”] (33). As readers, who follow Paul’s every move, we are meant to feel like we are participating in the surveillance with him and it should make us uneasy. One day, as he watches Amélia and Albers walking towards him in the parking garage, Paul notices a box, one that is usually used for storing printing paper, that is carried by Amélia. He muses that sometimes these types of boxes are used by faculty members to keep their various papers, notes, and other things that they might need for class. All in all, a professor and a student walking side-by-side with one of them carrying a box is not a surprising or even noteworthy sight, but something comes over Paul so suddenly that he has to know what this box contains, “as if digging through its contents could offer him some hint of the future that might otherwise remain painfully out of reach” (28) [“comme si l’analyse de son contenu, de ses entrailles, pourrait livrer sur l’avenir des indices qui sans cela lui feraient cruellement défaut”] (34–35). At this point of the novel, this interest seems perhaps a bit exaggerated – Paul has been described as shy and awkward, not comfortable in his skin; following this brief outburst of curiosity (he does not act on this impulse), we see him hiding in his small work enclave in order for Amélia and Albers not to see him. But, at the same time, we already know from the first page of the novel, with the phone call announcing to Paul that Amélia is about to die, that they will have a relationship. What is interesting in Paul’s desire to see the box is that it is paired with an almost prescient knowledge of its potential for divination; Paul is confident in his ability to read the inside of the box like one would the entrails of a bird (which disappear in the English translation) – and in this description of the box we see a “bit” of bird slowly taking shape – not entirely a bird, not even a literal bird, but entrails that beg to be read. These appearing and disappearing “bits” are what Thangam Ravindranathan explores

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in Behold An Animal (2020), thinking about how animals haunt contemporary (French) fiction, how “[o]ccasionally, from one novel to the next, a ‘bit’ of this material reappears in slightly modified form, as if to confirm the sense of a submerged archive that the text can at any time ‘dip’ into.”76 This bit of bird that Paul foresees will be returning (with a vengeance). If Paul is correct in his urge to see what is inside the box, readers can perhaps also think that there is something of value that would help them understand the whole story, perhaps even shed light on the events that led Amélia to plunge to her death. Although we know what (a slice of) the future holds for these characters, we also gather that this box is crucial and reveals something that could satisfy the desire for knowledge we share with Paul. But even more so in terms of reading ghosts, what happens when a box travels through the pages of this novel? If, as readers, on the first appearance of this box, we gloss over it, the second time it appears we may remember the same description – and in Alikavazovic’s text sentences appear and reappear in a different context, constantly reminding us that we have been there before, that we know the words to this song of despair, and that they probably will return again, even if only slightly altered. Our curiosity is finally satisfied when we learn that Nadia, who had as an ambition the desire to stop the war, abandons her project because she realizes the issue is not one of knowledge or lack thereof: “everything she wanted to show the world, the world already knew. Had known from the start. And didn’t care about. It wasn’t the fault of words, or of those who used them; it was the fault of human nature, of those who refused to listen” (53) [“ce qu’elle voulait révéler au monde, le monde le savait déjà. Le savait depuis le début. Et s’en moquait. Ce n’était ni la faute des mots, ni de ceux qui s’en servaient: c’était la faute de la nature humaine, de ceux qui refusaient d’entendre”] (61). As we will see in the next chapter with regard to war photography, it is not enough to know; even when there is a demonstrated need to stop atrocities from happening, knowledge alone does not spur action. The age-old “I did not know” is rather in fact “I knew but I was indifferent.” Barbie Zelizer proposes that “our response to pictures of 76 Thangam Ravindranathan, Behold an Animal: Four Exorbitant Readings (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2020), 205. Ravindranathan writes here about the various “bits” of animals that appear and disappear (in a spectral fashion) throughout Marie Darrieussecq’s oeuvre.

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horror often produces instead helplessness and indifference, by which we do little more than contextualize each instance of horror against those which come before and after.”77 Nadia’s project, what she called “documentary poetry” (50) [“poésie documentaire”] (58) – inspired by Alikavazovic’s mother78 – seeks to be the remedy to such a response, to the passivity of human beings even when brought face to face with the knowledge of atrocities. For Nadia, documentary poetry would allow readers to move out of a stunting situation that recasts Plato’s allegory of the cave; this type of poetry “was meant to be, or was, or should have been, an alternative to the journalistic language that had ground down our way of thinking and living to the point that we’d been hollowed out, in the face of reality […] to being starved outlines in a cave” (50) [“se voulait, ou était, ou aurait dû être une alternative à la langue journalistique qui a rongé notre façon de penser et de vivre jusqu’à ce que nous ne soyons plus, face au réel […] que des silhouettes affamées dans une cave”] (58). Unlike the so-called empty words of journalists, which in turn hollow out the reader, Amélia explains that, for her mother, documentary poetry was conceived with the potential to affect readers – even physically so; this is what Alison Landsberg has termed the experience of “prosthetic memory.”79 When it comes to the details of Nadia’s project on documentary poetry, one could be tempted to quote several pages of the novel in a row, but the likening of it to the performance of eye surgery on one’s own self and without anesthesia captures well the stakes of her writing: The book read like a report, or an essay, everything in it was true, but unlike reports or essays it wasn’t situated outside the surgical operation, on the contrary, it pulled you into it, you felt the knife in your hand and at the same time on your eye […] and gradually this became unbearable to read, physically unbearable because you could feel it from both viewpoints – that of the one operating and that of the one operated upon. 77 Barbie Zelizer draws from Tony Kushner, The Holocaust and the Liberal Imagination (1994). Barbie Zelizer, “Remembering to Forget: Contemporary Scrapbooks of Atrocity,” in Remembering to Forget: Holocaust Memory through the Camera’s Eye (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 203. 78 See, at the end of the novel, the acknowledgments: “Documentary poetry owes a great deal to my own mother and her work, and its continuation by other means.” See also, Alikavazovic, Comme un ciel en nous, 105. 79 Alison Landsberg, Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004). See Introduction.

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It was drenched in blood, it was a nightmare, spoke to a primal fear. The theory of information, according to my mother. (51) [Le livre est comme un reportage, ou un essai, tout y est vrai, mais à la différence du reportage ou de l’essai, il ne laisse pas en dehors de l’opération, au contraire il vous y intègre, on sent la lame dans sa main et en même temps sur son œil […] et à mesure la lecture devient insupportable, physiquement insupportable, car elle baigne dans le sang, c’est un cauchemar et on le vit des deux côtés, de celui qui l’exerce et de celui qui le subit: un bain de sang, une peur primale. La théorie de l’information, selon ma mère.] (59)

It was with this poetry in mind that the mother went to Sarajevo. She was convinced that if only she were to find the right words to testify to what was happening she would be able to change the course of history, for “she thought that was her task. The task of poetry. To find a way to transport this reality somewhere else” (52) [“elle pensait que c’était sa tâche à elle. La tâche de la poésie. Trouver la forme qui transporte cette réalité-ci ailleurs”] (60). She is described as going there, alongside intellectuals such as Susan Sontag and Juan Goytisolo, in order to say something about what was happening, but seemingly in vain: “[they] were digging themselves deeper into the hell of a besieged city, into the hell of words that nobody wanted to hear” (54) [“[ils] s’enfonçaient sur place dans l’enfer de la ville assiégée, dans l’enfer d’une parole que personne ne souhaitait entendre”] (62–63). Sarajevo is described as a stage towards which one rushes, the verbs emphasizing movement (braquer, ruer, passer): “Cameras from all over the globe were trained on the city, journalists rushed there, activist intellectuals came for a stint there; they were framed in the cross hairs of cameras rather than snipers’ rifles” (136) [“les caméras internationales étaient braquées sur la ville, les journalistes s’y ruaient, les intellectuels engagés passaient y faire un tour, passaient dans le champ des objectifs plutôt que celui des snipers”] (145). “Through the power of the press, Bosnia quickly became ‘the icon of contemporary atrocity,’”80 while little changed for its inhabitants, except for the worst. To the contrary of intellectuals such as Sontag, who, “intentionally or not,” Dragana Obradović writes, take their artistic engagement in Sarajevo as “an opportunity to position [themselves] within a moral 80 Dragana Obradović, Writing the Yugoslav Wars: Literature, Postmodernism, and the Ethics of Representation (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016), 38. See also the chapter, “The Spectacle of the Siege,” 37–65.

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corner” in their respective “intellectual field[s],”81 Nadia takes her failure or her documentary poetry’s failure to stop the war as a personal failure. Rather than return safely to France, she sees her duty on the ground, no longer as an intellectual removed from the conflict itself, an observer, but as a participant, which results in her own disappearance. And because “[n]obody knows what happened to her. Nobody ever found her body” (53) [“Personne ne sait ce qu’il s’est passé. On n’a jamais retrouvé son corps”] (61), all Amélia is left with is a box of fragments and a traumatic legacy left en souffrance; “A cardboard box, like for printer paper. It was full of her fragments, full of all her attempts at documentary poetry, all her failures. That’s all I have of my mother, said Amelia, All I had, to be exact (53) [“Une boîte en carton, comme celles qui contiennent du papier d’imprimante. Elle était pleine de ses fragments, pleine de toutes les tentatives de la poésie documentaire, de tous ses échecs. C’est tout ce que j’ai de ma mère, dit Amélia. Tout ce que j’en avais, pour être exacte”] (61). We know by now that this is likely the same box of printer paper that Paul saw Amélia carrying (walking alongside Albers) in the parking garage; and even if it were not the same box, it already figures as its ghostly double. Any mention of a box will immediately bring to mind the haunting possibility that it is Nadia’s. The mystery or the haunting of this box is exacerbated by the fact that we learn of Amélia’s decision never to open this box again after opening it for the first time. She explains having found a poem describing the graphic torture of a man who is forced to hold a live pigeon in his mouth – this is where Paul’s “bits” of bird start fully taking shape. This description is accompanied by someone’s laughter, although it is unclear who is laughing, “if it was one person, or two, or the whole world” (53) [“si c’était une personne ou deux, ou le monde entier”] (61–62), and this laughter becomes contagious, whether one wants it or not. Amélia explains that she too found herself laughing and, when she tells the story to Paul, the latter, after being horrified, he is also contaminated. Throughout the novel, Nadia’s box will be referred to as a box of nightmares that has the potential for contagion: “It was uncontrollable, sharp, like a cough: a bodily revolt. He couldn’t stop. A nightmare” (54) [“C’était incontrôlable, sec, comme une quinte de toux: une révolte du corps. Il n’arrivait plus à s’arrêter. Un cauchemar”] (62). This is exactly 81 Obradović, Writing the Yugoslav Wars, 144. For a discussion of the activism of Sontag (and other intellectuals) in Sarajevo during the siege and their (unwitting) positioning of Sarajevans as “helpless victims,” see 138–58.

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the point, Amélia continues, and this contagious, viral nightmare is passed on through those words that not only describe, but also make one a participant in the story, in the construction of this reality. For Amélia, this legacy is too much to bear, and she gets rid of the box by selling it “to the highest bidder” (54) [“au plus offrant”] (62). She gives as a reason that it is the necessity to keep this past at bay and to keep herself safe from “the naked truth” (54) [“la vérité nue, plus que nue”] (62), although it is also a type of revenge given as retribution for abandonment. And while this means that Amélia will not be able to read all of her mother’s words, she makes this choice knowingly: “She was convinced that abstaining – her form of revenge – was the wise thing to do. She was convinced that would be how she’d save her own skin. She was starting to doubt it” (54) [“Elle croyait faire preuve de sagesse dans son abstention, qui était aussi une revanche et un dépit. Elle croyait ainsi avoir sauvé sa peau. Elle commençait à en douter”] (62). The reader already knows that this attempt at distancing herself from the past is futile. We know already that there is no way out for Amélia – we have known since the beginning. While Amélia refuses for a long time to deal with this past, she will eventually go into her mother’s footsteps the same way that her daughter will later go into hers. Yet what is significant here is that this box is not destroyed, even though it is sold. Far to the contrary, its traumatic content and context seem to reappear and take on slightly different forms. Nadia’s failure to prevent the war – “her personal failure amongst the hundreds of thousands who died or disappeared. A city shelled for nearly four years, snipers on the roofs, blood in the streets” (47) [“son échec personnel, un échec au carré, un échec au cube, des centaines de milliers de morts, de disparus, une ville pilonnée durant près de quatre ans, des snipers sur les toits, du sang dans les rues”] (55) – is only matched by her failure to keep the transmission of what she has seen and experienced in the streets of Sarajevo from happening: [A]nd, ten years later […] children who would become adults unable to sleep with windows open, or with windows shut. And the children of those children, who would inherit strange rituals despite not having lived through the war, the siege, so many perilous street crossings; who would sometimes keep their shoulders pressed close to walls, would sometimes raise their eyes, unsure what they were looking for – their eyes flicking up, checking for snipers lying in wait whose salvos they wouldn’t have actually endured. (47–48)

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[et dix ans plus tard […] des enfants devenus adultes qui ne peuvent pas dormir la fenêtre ouverte, ou qui ne peuvent pas dormir la fenêtre fermée, et les enfants de ces enfants qui auront des rituels étranges, qui sans avoir vécu la guerre, le siège, les traversées périlleuses de la rue, raseront parfois les murs, lèveront parfois le nez sans savoir ce qu’ils cherchent – ce qu’ils cherchent, ce sont les tireurs embusqués qu’ils n’ont pas connu]. (55–56)

This same seemingly inexplicable transmission – by now a lieu commun of both trauma studies and memory studies – is also experienced by the two sisters of Le Londres-Louxor, Ariana and Esme, eight and six respectively, who were on the last plane out of Sarajevo, before the beginning of the siege. Years later, in their reactions to the trembling ground in the métro or to fireworks, we find signs of their trauma (both familial and collective). Esme puts it this way: “She was not thinking about the war, but the war was thinking about her. This attention manifested itself through small things, almost insignificant details” [“Elle ne pensait pas à la guerre mais la guerre pensait à elle. Cette attention se manifestait par de petites choses, des détails presque insignifiants”].82 Over and over, we find ourselves reading descriptions of how traumatic memories are transmitted from generation to generation whether they want it or not. No one is immune: neither “the 1.5 generation” (as theorized by Susan Rubin Suleiman), who has experienced war and what she calls “premature bewilderment and helplessness,”83 nor the second generation and its difficult legacy of “postmemory” (as elaborated by Marianne Hirsch). Because, for Amélia, for the children of those who have survived wars and genocides, it is a question of the transmission that goes beyond mere words: “that’s a matter of language. A matter of stories – inoculated, as with viruses, by what people say, and also by what they don’t say” (48) [“c’est une question de langage, une question d’histoires, inoculées comme des virus, comme des anticorps, par ce qu’on dit; et aussi par ce qu’on ne dit pas”] (56). The apparent failure of documentary poetry to change the outcome of the war or to prevent it was Nadia’s biggest regret, but she was unable to see, unlike Amélia, its power of transmission. In addition to this box of poems, there is a small volume by Nadia Dehr titled “Life L” [“Vie V”] (in French, an echo of the second person imperative “vivez!” [live!]) that 82 Alikavazovic, Le Londres-Louxor, 58. 83 Susan Rubin Suleiman, “The 1.5 Generation: Thinking about Child Survivors and the Holocaust,” American Imago 59, no. 3 (2002): 277.

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appears and disappears; it is a collection of documentary poetry. The first time Paul reads it at Albers’s house, he is struck by a poem in which a boy’s heart needs to be broken in order for him “to be perfect for us.” He qualifies it as “the smoking gun” [“l’arme du crime”] whose lines are “more horrific than anything” [“plus horribles que tout”] (121/130). Decades later, his teenage daughter will leave behind this same small volume and Paul is convinced that he will be able to find the poem again, alas to no avail. Yet, to him, this shows that Nadia Dehr was wrong, for he is convinced that it is this poem – “The poem that had caused her to break his heart” (210) [“le poème en raison duquel […] elle lui avait brisé le cœur”] (219) – that made Amélia leave him. He deduces that Nadia was incorrect in her pronouncement: “If literature could change the world, we’d know it by now” [“Si la littérature pouvait changer le monde, cela se saurait”]. For Paul, it is clear that “literature would indeed be capable of changing the world, since it had broken Paul’s heart, which is to say, Paul’s world, and had made him the man he would now be” (210) [“la littérature en était capable, puisqu’elle avait brisé le cœur de Paul, c’està-dire le monde de Paul, et qu’elle avait fait de lui l’homme qu’il était désormais”] (219). Another instance of the impact of documentary poetry involves Amélia’s husband (we are, once again, looking a bit ahead in the novel in an untimely fashion). She meets him in Sarajevo and we find out that he was a child during the war and that he might have encountered Nadia there. For him, the sniper bullets and the mortar shells that litter the city are vivid reminders of the past. He thinks of them as still “on their fatal trajectory” (141) [“leur course mortelle”] (150), ready to hit someone (this will happen to him, he dies by suicide of a gunshot wound). While some people are talking about reconstructing the city, for him to erase traces of violence is unconscionable. He is described, in the novel, as the creator of what are known as the “Sarajevo Roses,” mortar holes filled with a red resin (141/150–51). Discussing the links between memory and architecture, Sabina Tanović describes how for Nedžad Kurto, who actually designed these roses, “this simple design gesture was intended as a silent reminder for those who remembered the explosions and their victims. Indeed, there are no plaques, or any other kind of explanation attached to the Sarajevo Roses.”84 As years 84 Sabina Tanović, “The Dual Role of Memorial Architecture,” in Designing Memory: The Architecture of Commemoration in Europe, 1914 to the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 91.

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have passed and the roses have progressively disappeared, paved over, or faded, “Kurto explained that the Sarajevo Roses are memorials of documentary significance.” That is, they in themselves are only a marker, “a discreet signifier for the loci of commemoration” rather than a monument; this means that “they do not need to be looked after and might disappear anytime.”85 It is interesting to note the expression “documentary significance” as an echo to our documentary poetry, which, to the contrary, is meant as contamination, as something that moves out of bounds, that does not remain in the locus of its enunciation. As the city’s streets are progressively being replaced, and the city reconstructed, Amélia’s husband realizes there needs to be another way to remember that is not linked to a specific locus, but rather a transmission that transcends spatial boundaries. Amélia has the perfect solution and is described as using her husband to continue her own work, her mother’s work. As we read the description of his art, this call for experiential memory, readers are told that it is Amélia who is speaking through him, appropriating his status as an actual survivor of the war to legitimate her own ideas about memory, though always remaining in the background. They turn out, unsurprisingly, to sound a lot like documentary poetry: “an appeal for memory to becomes an arena and an experience, freed from the limited spaces to which it had been confined” (143–44) [“une autre mémoire, devenue espace, devenue expérience, délivrée des lieux restreints auxquels on la confinait”] (153). While Nadia had hoped to stop the war before it ever began, Amélia shifts her attempted impact on post-war memory. To go back to our box and to what perhaps prompts Amélia’s actions in Sarajevo: its loss does not prevent its effects; far to the contrary, its absence gives it more weight. As we have seen in Modiano’s oeuvre, lost objects seem to return at the most unexpected moment – sometimes even in subsequent narratives. Knowing about the history of this box, Paul will be on the lookout for it for the rest of the novel, while Amélia will be haunted by its contents. By refusing to read these fragments, to think of them, they become embedded in her: She was living in the rubble of her rejected legacy, of documentary poetry, of the pathetic fragments trembling in the darkness of a decades-old 85 Nedžad Kurto, “Memory of the Dying City,” in Azra Junuzović, Sarajevo Roses: Towards Politics of Remembering (Sarajevo: Armis Print, 2006), 147–50, cited by Sabina Tanović, “The Dual Role of Memorial Architecture,” 91; emphasis in the original.

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box, of abjectly powerless words and lines, as only words and lines that have never existed to be read […] and yet they were all-powerful, secret prime directives; they bore dark, hidden truths, and because she refused to engage with them, Amelia had to submit to them. Because she knew nothing of Nadia Dehr, she had become Nadia Dehr, and this was the irony of her flight. (245) [Elle vit dans les rebuts de son héritage refusé, de la poésie documentaire, de pauvres fragments qui gisent dans la pénombre d’une boîte vieille de plusieurs décennies, des mots et des vers d’une puissance abjecte, comme seuls peuvent l’être les mots et les vers qui n’existent pas pour la lecture […] porteurs d’une vérité sombre et secrète, et Amélia ayant refusé de la connaître doit désormais la subir. N’ayant pas connu Nadia Dehr, elle est devenue Nadia Dehr, voilà l’ironie de sa fuite.] (254)

Time and again, while Amélia tries to run away from her past, from her mother’s box, from Pandora’s box, which Elissa Marder shows us is “a mechanical reproduction of the womb rather than […] a representation of it,”86 she is simply delaying the inevitable. Despite the fact that she does not open the box again (after having taken that one poem), its horrors spill out and contaminate the whole world: “since she hadn’t opened her mother’s box, everything seemed to be coming out of it; every horror, every injustice. It was the origin of the modern world – the world according to Amelia Dehr. She thought she had rid herself of that box, but instead it had engulfed all she knew” (80) [“à présent qu’elle n’avait pas ouvert la boîte de sa mère, tout paraissait en sortir, toutes les horreurs, toutes les injustices. Elle était l’origine du monde moderne – du monde selon Amélia Dehr – et elle l’englobait. Elle croyait s’être débarrassée de la boîte: celle-ci avait pris les dimensions du monde”] (89). Indeed, what Marder’s exploration of “Pandora’s jar” and of “the many other unruly reproductive containers”87 hints at is the fact that the maternal function (with its link to life and death) can keep multiplying in unexpected places. In this case, the maternal function is intimately tied to the mothers of the story themselves as unruly reproductive containers contaminated by documentary poetry and contagious as well: while Amélia becomes Nadia, repeating her flight by going to Sarajevo to look 86 Elissa Marder, The Mother in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction: Psychoanalysis, Photography, Deconstruction (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012), 16; emphasis in the original. 87 Marder, The Mother in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, 89.

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for her mother’s traces, by in turn disappearing, she also orients her own daughter Louise’s search of her. As Amélia walks in her mother’s footsteps, trying to find her trace, in the two planes she takes to get there, she reads a special issue of a magazine dedicated to memory describing how specific memories are unstable; rather than becoming stronger over time if events are recalled, the opposite takes place and memories become shifty and less reliable: “Forgetting, in fact, is the brain’s lifelong operation. Forgetting is not a defeat but an enzyme” (130) [“En fait, l’oubli est le processus permanent du cerveau. L’oubli n’est pas une défaite mais une enzyme”] (139). Reading this prompts her to reflect on the fictional aspect of our lives, on how the memories on which we construct our sense of direction and identity is a fictional construction: “Each remembrance is a countereffort. In conclusion: our lives are invented. The more time passes, the more our lives are invented” (130) [“Chaque remémoration est un effort contraire. En conclusion: nos vies sont inventées. Plus le temps passe, plus nos vies sont inventées”] (139). This description of memory and of the work of forgetting puts an emphasis on fiction: our lives are made up, we create them by remembering and remembering differently each time anew. For Amélia, reading this theory is disheartening, although she realizes that what she is doing could perhaps constitute “a particularly elaborate mourning ritual, a barbaric exercise she would re-enact without realizing it” (131) [“un exercice de deuil particulièrement élaboré, un rituel barbare qu’elle allait rejouer sans le savoir”] (140). Even though she is resistant to what she is learning, what is telling is that, after reading this magazine and arriving at her destination, Amélia decides to throw it away rather than leaving it to be found by someone else: “She didn’t want this shtick about invented memories to contaminate anyone else” (131) [“elle ne voulait pas contaminer autrui avec cette histoire de souvenirs inventés”] (140). The magazine – a container of traumatic knowledge – an avatar of the box of fragments, is discarded, in its own turn, for “safety” reasons. Yet, as we have seen, it is not enough to stop transmission, or, as Amélia puts it, contamination, from happening. Her own daughter Louise does not need to find this same magazine in order to be contaminated: she already is, by virtue of having been born and then abandoned by her mother, who transmitted something of the memory of her family’s traumatic history. What happens is that Louise, when she is old enough, will take a similar trip East after discovering a letter Amélia wrote to Paul, realizing

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that the mother she thought was dead was simply gone.88 She also takes two planes and reads a special issue on memory – with an updated theory: She read it attentively, page by page, as if performing a ritual of sorts. […] It transpired that our memories are not unique. They live in several places, in the part of the brain that is here (and) now, but also in the part that is both the past and the future, which is the past for the future, and so each memory is twofold. At least. (232–33) [Elle la lut avec application, page à page, comme si elle accomplissait une sorte de rite. […] Il en ressortait que les souvenirs ne sont pas uniques. Ils vivent en plusieurs endroits, dans cette zone du cerveau qui est ici, maintenant, mais aussi dans celle qui est à la fois le passé et l’avenir, qui est le passé pour l’avenir, et ainsi chaque souvenir est double. Au moins double.] (241–42)

Memories are described in spectral terms as living in an untimely manner within our brains – that is perhaps why it is impossible to get rid of them, to exorcise them. As Louise reads on, she repeats her mother’s own steps of looking for her mother Nadia, and Louise thinks the same thoughts as her mother before her: “Why would she come here, why would she inflict that upon herself? A particularly elaborate mourning ritual, a barbaric exercise she would re-enact without realizing it” (233) “[Pourquoi venir, elle, pourquoi s’infliger cela? Un exercice de deuil particulièrement élaboré, un rituel barbare qu’elle allait rejouer sans le savoir”] (242). Family history is inevitably repeating itself – unbeknownst to the subjects affected by it – and Louise is described as “[a] very young woman in a war-torn country. A very young woman in a ghost town, looking for the mother she had always been told was dead” (234) [“Une très jeune femme, dans un pays en guerre. Une très jeune femme dans une ville fantôme, cherchant la mère dont on lui a toujours dit qu’elle était morte”] (243). This could very well have been a description of Amélia, and the intergenerational cycle of haunting is set further in motion. When Louise finally finds Amélia, who has become a drone photographer (and we will return to them both in the next chapter), she tells her that she always felt that she was not alone, that there was a ghost 88 Amélia made the decision that it would be better for her to leave, explaining: “I know what it’s like to have known and lost one’s mother” (182) [“je sais ce que cela veut dire d’avoir connu sa mère et de la perdre”] (190).

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in her childhood that was conjured up by loss and by grief: “A strange presence that wasn’t continuous but dissociated, alternative […]. Now I know it was my father. That he wanted you so much, that he thought about you so much, that he conjured you. […] It’s possible to be contaminated by someone else’s pain. Even when they never mention it” (256) [“Une présence étrange, non pas continue mais dissociée, alternative […]. Je sais maintenant que c’est mon père. Qu’il te voulait tant, qu’il pensait tant à toi, qu’il t’a fait apparaître. […] On peut être contaminé par la douleur d’autrui. Même lorsqu’elle est tue”] (265). Hirsch has noted the “[v]irulent critiques of the work on the second generation, including [her] own,” and explains that these accusations stem from “an assumption that children of survivors want to equate their suffering with that of their parents, appropriating it for their own identity purposes.”89 However, we see through Alikavazovic’s novel that it is not so much that the suffering is equated, but that the pain of the parents is so great that it contaminates following generations. We will recall Cixous’s double souffrance, which is transmitted by screams heard in the books of literature; what we see emphasized here is a deferred communication through silence/silencing. Unlike the (literary) screams that alert Cixous to this double suffering, silence(d) suffering is here powerful enough on its own and is transmitted as a different type of pain, one that may even kill – in the original French in the quotation above, “tue” (the verb taire, to silence, in the passive voice) is pronounced the same way as the verb “tue” in the third person singular (it kills), adding an ominous echo. For Amélia, the perspective of finding her mother, or at least a trace of her, can be related back to the power of documentary poetry. She is convinced that finding out that her mother had died in the very war that she tried to prevent through her documentary poetry would prove its validity: “But if my mother’s there, in one of those anonymous mass graves, it would be the acme of documentary poetry, its greatest triumph: proof not only that one can suffer from someone else’s suffering, but also that one can die from someone else’s death” (140) [“Mais si elle y est, ma mère, dans l’une de ces tombes anonymes et communes, ce serait alors l’apogée de la poésie documentaire, son triomphe, la preuve que l’on peut non seulement souffrir de la souffrance de l’autre, mais aussi mourir de la mort de l’autre”] (149). Nadia Dehr’s poetry goes 89 Marianne Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture after the Holocaust (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 20.

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here beyond Cixousian communication. It is the communication of suffering entirely made flesh. The double suffering – suffering from the suffering of another – is here taken to its ultimate end, dying the death of another. However, it would mean not just dying for someone else and thus preventing their death, it rather means dying of the death that is or was theirs, dying alongside or after them, dying because the other died – becoming ghost with them. Yet, as Nadia’s body is nowhere to be found, these questions are left ever unanswered – at least in this novel. Like Modiano, Alikavazovic has returned in some of her works to the same characters,90 and it is thus possible that Amélia, Paul, Nadia, and Louise will appear again. In any case, the uncontainable Pandora’s box housing Nadia’s poetry cannot be easily exorcised; it is meant to haunt us, to show up in (un)expected places, and it will thus reappear (spoiler alert: in the next chapter).

90 In La blonde et le bunker [The Blond and the Bunker] (2012), we encounter again some of the characters – or their eerie doubles – found in Corps volatils [Volatile Bodies] (2007).

chapter six

Photographing Absence and Absent Photographs Ferrari, Alikavazovic Photographing Absence and Absent Photographs

Des fantômes occupent le cadre, comme si ce vol avait libéré les personnages, leur avait permis de quitter cette représentation figée tout en demeurant dans les lieux. Ghosts are occupying the frame, as if this theft had freed the subjects, allowing them to leave this fixed representation all the while remaining around. Sophie Calle, Fantômes1

Sophie Calle’s project, first retold in Fantômes [Ghosts] and Disparitions [Disappearances] (2000), consists of the description of paintings once housed in a museum and missing from public view: either for being restored or on loan or because of theft. Calle recalls asking people familiar with a given “missing” painting (curators, museum guards) to describe and attempt to draw it, summarizing her endeavor with these words: “I replaced the missing painting with these memories” [“J’ai remplacé le tableau manquant par ces souvenirs”].2 In Jakuta Alikavazovic’s recent essay Comme un ciel en nous [Like a Sky Within Us] (2021), recounting the author’s night spent locked in the Louvre, we 1 Sophie Calle, Fantômes (Arles: Actes Sud, 2013), 167. Calle is quoting Maud Kristen, a psychic [voyante]. 2 Calle, Fantômes, 7. Calle’s text also inspires a plot point in Jakuta Alikavazovic’s Le Londres-Louxor (Paris: Éditions Points, 2010).

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are told of the 1911 theft of a now-famous painting and of “the crowd […] flock[ing] to the Louvre, not to see the Mona Lisa, but to see its absence. Not to see the painting, but to see the crime” [“la foule […] afflu[ant] au Louvre, non pour voir la Joconde, mais pour voir son absence. Non pour voir le tableau, mais pour voir le crime”].3 What is perhaps even more remarkable in this affair are the five long weeks that it takes “to find a photograph of the Mona Lisa that can be published in newspapers” [“pour trouver un cliché de la Joconde publiable dans la presse”] and the “two additional weeks of patience” [“les deux semaines supplémentaires de patience”] one newspaper asks of its audience in order to make this reproduction available.4 This prompts Alikavazovic to ask the following questions: “during this time, who knows how she moved about in people’s memories? What kind of adventures did she have in them?” [“qui sait comment, durant ce temps, elle a évolué dans les mémoires? Qui sait quelles aventures elle y a vécues?”].5 We could add, what life-otherwise does the memory of a missing work of art allow? We have seen in Chapter 5 the importance of missing objects and their untimely reappearance; in this chapter, I will be discussing absent photographs of the likes of Calle’s “paintings,” that is the description of them – the way that, in Fantômes, a missing painting is produced through memory and becomes a different work of art, which Calle in turn (re)produces on the walls of the museum where its companion work, its counterpart, once was. The photographs that interest me here are textual photographs: some of them are entirely fictional and no outside referent exists for them, while others are existing photographs that are described but not included within the narrative. I will be discussing photographs that have been lost or destroyed, but also photographs that do not seem to do their job – perhaps it is for this reason that they in fact can be said to fulfill their purpose. Existing photographs can certainly be understood as traces that can be followed and serve as a way for the memory of those who have been lost to be revived. We can think of the central role of the three existing photographs included in the graphic novel Maus (1991) by Art Spiegelman, which Marianne Hirsch analyzes in Family Frames (1997), and which allow her to tease out the function of postmemory 3 Jakuta Alikavazovic, Comme un ciel en nous (Paris: Éditions Stock, 2021), 71. 4 Alikavazovic, Comme un ciel en nous, 71. 5 Alikavazovic, Comme un ciel en nous, 71.

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in narratives of the second generation.6 We can also think of the photographs of Georges Perec’s mother (not included in the text, but they exist), which play an important role in W ou le souvenir d’enfance [W or the Memory of Childhood] (1975), as a sign of what once was – Roland Barthes’s “‘That-has-been’”7 [“‘Ça a été’”]8 – that is, a visual proof of their occupying the same space for a moment in time (and the possibility to be touched by the light emanating from the picture).9 Yet, for Perec, they also function to underscore the lack of certain memories, significantly the memory of Perec’s mother’s touch: her fixing his hair for the photograph is an imagined and desired memory that he does not have and that is expressed in the conditional (given her death, this memory can never be made).10 In the preface to Family Frames, Hirsch notes that postmemory often relies on transmitted artifacts, “images, stories, and documents passed down from one generation to the next.”11 She writes that her book had a specific impetus, namely the discovery that some photographs of her grandmother had been found by a family member only to be lost again. Her book is an answer of sorts to this loss and a realization that it is the beholder who gives meaning to the photographs, something she would not have been able to think had the pictures not been lost. She writes, “[i]n some strange way […] I needed to explain why, images that to my cousin were anonymous, meaningless, and even funny, because she could not identify them, to me would have been integral 6 Marianne Hirsch, “Mourning and Postmemory,” Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 17–40. 7 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill & Wang, 1981), 80. 8 Roland Barthes, La Chambre claire: Note sur la photographie (Paris: Gallimard, Seuil, 1980), 126. 9 Quoted entirely in n. 22, below. For an illuminating discussion of Barthes’s “magical thinking” in this scene (155), see Elissa Marder, “Nothing to Say: Fragments on the Mother in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in The Mother in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction: Psychoanalysis, Photography, Deconstruction (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012), 149–59. 10 Perec writes: “(of all my missing memories, that is perhaps the one I most dearly wish I had: my mother doing my hair, and making that cunning curl).” Georges Perec, W or the Memory of Childhood, trans. David Bellos (Boston: David R. Godine, 2003), 49. Georges Perec, W ou le souvenir d’enfance (Paris: Denoël/ Gallimard, 1993), 74. 11 Hirsch, Family Frames, 12.

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pieces of a life story, full of meaning and resonance.”12 Hirsch differentiates between the object itself and the meaning that is ascribed to it by its reader: “[f]amily pictures depend on such a narrative act of adoption that transforms rectangular pieces of cardboard into telling details connecting lives and stories across continents and generations.”13 The narrative act that turns pictures into texts is particularly relevant because it opens up the possibility that textual photographs, which can only be read, are not necessarily lacking a visual pendant to work since both types of photographs rely on a narrative act, that is, an interpretation, in order to be meaningful – although we will also see that there is something singular about the visual aspect that needs to be considered. The imaginative investment of the reader of textual photographs is also mobilized since these photographs need to be adopted into a (family) narrative. The photographs I analyze here in novels by Jérôme Ferrari and Jakuta Alikavazovic share the fact that they disrupt or trouble the narrative: they point to other histories, they do not show what we want to see or show us what we would rather not see. A Reluctant Photographer (Ferrari) Jérôme Ferrari’s À son image [In His Own Image] (2018) opens with the memory of a striking scene. The memory of watching a man leaning in silence against the guardrail of a bridge that will soon be destroyed by bombs. The memory of his worn-out military attire – the man is a sergeant,14 was a sergeant, in the JNA, the Yugoslav People’s Army, disbanded in 1992 (that same year); this is the Serb-led army responsible for brutal massacres in Croatia.15 The memory of his bag sitting at his feet, “containing only a Hungarian edition of Imre Kertész’s Kaddish for an Unborn Child, the first volume of a Serbo-Croatian translation 12 Hirsch, Family Frames, xii. 13 Hirsch, Family Frames, xii; emphasis my own. 14 This memory of a soldier echoes the opening line of Ferrari’s Où j’ai laissé mon âme ([Where I Left My Soul], an exploration of the question of torture: “I remember you, my captain” [Je me souviens de vous, mon capitaine]. Jérôme Ferrari, Où j’ai laissé mon âme (Arles: Actes Sud, 2010), 11. 15 As Jelena Subotić describes: “The more memorable atrocities in the war [in Croatia] were committed by the Serbs during the three-months-long brutal siege of Vukovar.” Jelena Subotić, Hijacked Justice: Dealing with the Past in the Balkans (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009), 84.

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of the complete works of Bukowski, and a few cassettes of R.E.M and Nirvana”16 [“ne contenant rien d’autre qu’une édition hongroise du Kaddish pour l’enfant qui ne naîtra pas d’Imre Kertész, le premier volume d’une traduction des œuvres complètes de Bukowski et quelques cassettes, de R.E.M et Nirvana”].17 The memory of some adolescents walking by and starting to laugh with “an incomprehensible laugh, blatantly looking him up and down” (13) [“d’un rire incompréhensible en le toisant ostensiblement”] (12). The memory of taking a picture, perhaps their picture, perhaps only his picture – the only indication we have is the caption at the beginning of the chapter – the first caption of twelve, one for each chapter, one for each invisible, absent photograph:18 “(On the Way Home, Vojvodina, 1992)” (12) [“(Sur le chemin du retour, Voïvodine, 1992)”] (9) and Antonia’s memory of noticing, after taking the picture, that the man is crying. Before she can say anything or join him, he takes his leave, slowly walking down this same bridge – she will not see him for another decade. We find out that she has just taken “the shot, the last of the feature she was devoting to him, that would never be published” (13) [“la photo, la dernière du reportage qu’elle lui avait consacré et qui ne serait jamais publié”] (12). At the start of the novel, we are in 2003; Antonia is now a wedding photographer on a job in Calvi, Corsica, and those are the memories that come to her immediately as she recognizes Dragan walking in the harbor, now in a different uniform: he’s a non-commissioned officer in the French Foreign Legion. After catching up over dinner and talking all night – that is all we are privy to at this point in the novel – she decides to drive home and, as the sun is rising, “[s]he let herself be dazzled for a moment, and closed her eyes” (16) [“Elle se laissa éblouir un instant et ferma les yeux”] (14). We then find ourselves, two days later, at her funeral. Through the memories of her uncle and godfather, the priest 16 Jérôme Ferrari, In His Own Image, trans. Alison Anderson (New York: Europa Editions, 2022), 13. Subsequent page numbers will be given in parentheses. 17 Jérôme Ferrari, À son image (Arles: Actes Sud, 2018), 11. Subsequent page numbers will be given in parentheses. 18 While many photographs mentioned are fictional, some of the existing photographs are referenced in the acknowledgments at the end of the novel. The only picture that is actually reproduced is the one from a young girl sitting on a beach and which figures as the cover of the book. For a discussion of these existing photographs, see Cornelia Ruhe, “La lâcheté, l’obscène et le sacré: Représenter et transmettre la violence chez Jérôme Ferrari,” in La Mémoire des conflits dans la fiction française contemporaine (Leiden: Brill, 2020), 128–30.

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who is conducting her funeral service, we learn more of Antonia’s trajectory and of the circumstances that led her to meet Dragan during the Yugoslav wars.19 After Antonia’s death, at the request of the bride whose pictures she was taking in Calvi, her parents will develop the last roll of film, and – at the end of the novel – we find out that the last picture she took was also his: “the portrait of a legionnaire whom they do not know and about whom they will never know anything” (186) [“le portrait d’un légionnaire qu’ils ne connaissaient pas et dont ils ne sauront jamais rien”] (216–17). Unlike her parents, readers know exactly that this picture echoes the first one mentioned in the novel: the loop is thus closed. When Antonia’s mother is looking through her daughter’s apartment to find a picture of hers to put on her grave (realizing that she has no recent ones), she only finds, “at the bottom of a cupboard, a shoe box full of old, undeveloped rolls of film, so that now she is weeping by a stone that is completely gray and almost bare” (187) [“au fond d’un placard, une boîte à chaussures remplie de vieilles pellicules non développées si bien qu’elle pleure maintenant en face d’une pierre toute grise et presque nue”] (218). We are haunted once again, it seems, by an uncontainable container of sorts: from the first memory retold in the opening of the book to its final chapter, the question of unpublished and undeveloped pictures will haunt the text. The reader who knows a little about the history of (Eastern) Europe in the early 1990s will have an inkling of the circumstances of Antonia’s and Dragan’s first encounter, and we can certainly wonder why Antonia, apparently a war reporter, ends up a wedding photographer. What I want to focus on are the narratological consequences of reluctance or reticence, as well as the choice of subject for Antonia’s reportage. We are dealing with textual photographs or with textual almost-photographs, that is, with descriptions. Even though Antonia chooses not to take or develop these pictures, we still get to read them or read the scene of their (non)-taking. As such, while we may not feel the same incomprehension that her family does, we are perhaps haunted by the knowledge that there is a spread of pictures documenting the war that never appeared and that there are also plenty of pictures of whose existence we are not even aware. For instance, we have to wait for the end of the novel to find out that Antonia took a final picture of Dragan on the beach in Calvi, and we may be curious to find out if 19 For a discussion of the significance of the wars for the French literary imaginary, see Chapter 5.

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someone will develop the pictures in the box found by the mother (as she cries in front of an almost-bare tombstone we can assume that they remain undeveloped for the time being). We also only find out the topic of Antonia’s and Dragan’s discussion in Calvi in the final chapter of the novel; many things are left suspended throughout. This lack of knowledge and communication is what drives the narrative, prompting questions from Antonia’s uncle, who asks himself what exactly led her to the decision to go to take pictures of war and never talk about what she has seen: “he wondered what she might have seen during her sojourns in the bloody collapse of Yugoslavia whence, in the end, she had not brought back a single photograph, despite the time and money invested in that dream trip of hers, but she refused to say a thing, he could see she was in pain” (92–93) [“il se demandait ce qu’elle pouvait bien avoir vu pendant ses séjours dans l’effondrement sanglant de la Yougoslavie d’où elle n’avait finalement rapporté aucune photo, malgré le temps et l’argent investis dans ce voyage dont elle rêvait, mais elle refusait de dire quoi que ce soit, il la voyait souffrir”] (107–8). Her uncle has all these questions in part because he feels somewhat responsible for her interest in photography, and since there has been a clear lack of communication, it is only in the space after Antonia’s death, in the context of her funeral, that the (non)-existence of these photographs allows for a different dialogue between the uncle and his niece. Through his questioning, we get to experience earlier (textual) photographs, while the narrator’s comments provide an important (spectral) voice that enables us to read what Antonia would have rather kept hidden. Antonia’s uncle is the one who gifted her her first camera when she was fourteen, and it was because she had started to be obsessed with family photos. However, we are told, in the uncle’s opinion, that because they are like so many other family pictures – the same events, the same mise en scène – they have no worth (21/19). What we are in fact missing is a “narrative act of adoption,”20 that could inscribe these banal scenes into a family history. Yet a desire to know where she is from and to learn her family history are not the reasons that Antonia is interested in these photographs. It is rather the question of photography itself, its mechanisms, what it reveals and does that interests her. She is fascinated by “the existence of the trace itself: the light reflected by bodies now grown old or long turned to dust had been captured and 20 Hirsch, Family Frames, xii.

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preserved through a process whose miraculous aspect could not be exhausted by simple technical explanations” (22) [“l’existence de la trace elle-même: la lumière réfléchie par des corps désormais vieillis ou depuis longtemps tombés en poussière avait été captée et conservée au cours d’un processus dont l’aspect miraculeux ne pouvait être épuisé par de simples explications techniques”] (20); we hear an echo of Barthes’s discussion of the photograph/s that contain/s traces of his mother,21 the “Winter Garden photograph,” in particular, the one not included in La Chambre claire [Camera Lucida] (1980), kept for Barthes’s eyes only.22 The crucial space that photographs occupy in this book is only matched by the repeated reluctance on Antonia’s part to take pictures, as well as to develop them when she takes them. From her earliest attempts at capturing what she sees, Antonia struggles to take pictures that she deems worthy to be taken. When she finally does, it is because she catches a moment before chaos and violence ensue. Rather than picturing violence itself, Antonia usually captures its aftermath, or, when “lucky” – being at the right place at the right time – its prelude. From the very beginning, we learn that, when she takes this first worthy picture, “Antonia had not yet encountered the gaze of the Gorgon, but she had sensed its presence for the first time and heard the hissing of the snakes in its hair” (26) [“Antonia n’avait pas encore croisé le regard de la Gorgone mais, pour la première fois, elle avait senti sa présence et entendu siffler les serpents de sa chevelure”] (25). Here, the evocation of

21 Ruhe (also citing Barthes) adds Marguerite Duras’s L’Amant [The Lover] (1984) as another echo. Ruhe, “Représenter et transmettre la violence chez Jérôme Ferrari,” 129. We can also think of Modiano’s discussion in Dora Bruder of what happens during the watching of a film; here it is past viewers’ gazes which are impressed upon the film – and something is transmitted to present viewers: “Suddenly, I realized that this film was impregnated with the gaze of moviegoers from the time of the Occupation […] And, by some kind of chemical process, this combined gaze had materially altered the actual film [la pellicule], the lighting, the voices of the actors.” Patrick Modiano, Dora Bruder, trans. Joanna Kilmartin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 66; Patrick Modiano, Dora Bruder (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, Folio, 1999), 79. 22 Barthes writes, “The photograph is literally an emanation of the referent. From a real body, which was there, proceed radiations which ultimately touch me, who am here [moi qui suis].” Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill & Wang, 1981), 80; Roland Barthes, La Chambre claire: Note sur la photographie (Paris: Gallimard, Seuil, 1980), 126.

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the Gorgon harkens back to the last of the three epigraphs to the novel, which describes photographs as affixing time rather than suspending it (as paintings do).23 The Gorgon is the one who turns those who meet her gaze into stone, and, for Cornelia Ruhe, when Antonia finally meets this gaze, she becomes “petrified by the fascination with a violence that repels her, but which she believes she cannot remedy” [“pétrifiée dans la fascination pour une violence qui la rebute, mais à laquelle elle croit ne pas pouvoir remédier”].24 We will recall how in Cécile Wajsbrot’s Mémorial (2005), names are imagined as having the power of Medusa (one of the Gorgons), petrifying and taking slivers of time into a different time.25 Furthermore, the fact that these photographs (the imagined ones taken by Antonia and the existing ones that are described) are almost all about scenes of violence points, according to Ruhe, to Ferrari’s engagement with Susan Sontag’s thinking on photography and to her suggestion that “a narrative seems likely to be more effective than an image”;26 since we do not see the pictures themselves, we have to rely on Ferrari’s ekphrastic representation. At the beginning of Antonia’s journey, we find ourselves in Belgrade, Serbia, as she is looking for a way into the war. After befriending a translator, Antonia moves towards Vukovar, a city that has since become a prominent site of Croatian memory. Branka Magaš’s The Destruction of Yugoslavia (1993), a collection of essays published as the conflict was still raging (many of its later ones written during the year 1991), is dedicated to the cities of Vukovar and Sarajevo and on the cover we find a picture of a building in ruins taken by Ron Haviv, an American photojournalist specializing in the documentation of conflicts.27 One of Haviv’s chilling photographs of a soldier that is about his age, Ferrari explains, causes him to “experience[e] for the first time the power of photographs and the way in which they upset our relationship to time.”28 The city of Vukovar, a site 23 The third epigraph reads: “Death has shown up. The photo comes after and, unlike painting, it does not suspend time, but rather affixes it. Mathieu Riboulet, The Works of Mercy,” Epigraph 3. 24 Ruhe, “Représenter et transmettre la violence chez Jérôme Ferrari,” 140. 25 See Chapter 3. 26 Ruhe, “Représenter et transmettre la violence chez Jérôme Ferrari,” 130. Ruhe cites Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Picador, 2003), 122. 27 Branka Magaš, The Destruction of Yugoslavia: Tracking the Break-up, 1980–92 (London: Verso, 1993), dedication, cover. 28 This short explanation by Ferrari is included on the publisher’s site for his novel: “In the 1990s, I came across Ron Haviv’s photograph of a paramilitary

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of massacres and atrocities, following the war, became “a place where the people of Croatia could go and bring back to memory the experience of the war, where younger generations could not just understand, but also feel, the suffering of the Croatian people”;29 the city is situated near the Croatian border with the Autonomous Province of Vojvodina (northern part of Serbia), where Ferrari’s protagonist Dragan is from. For months in fall 1991, “during the period of the fiercest fighting,” this Croatian city is “under constant siege and […] pounded with as many as seven thousand shells and rockets a day”;30 its fall represents, for Magaš, “a stark monument to the inadequacy (or cynical complicity) of the outside world’s response […] blindly refusing to face reality.”31 At first, when Antonia witnesses scenes of atrocities perpetrated by the JNA (of which Dragan is an officer), she is confident that, if someone were to show these images, surely public outrage would stop the massacres. She indeed embodies the type of thinking that Sontag thus describes in Regarding the Pain of Others (2003): “[f]or a long time some people believed that if the horror could be made vivid enough, most people would finally take in the outrageousness, the insanity of war.”32 soldier from the unit called Arkan’s Tigers lifting his leg in order to strike the dead bodies of three civilians he had just shot, somewhere in Bosnia. He wears whiterimmed sunglasses and, between the fingers of his left hand, he holds a cigarette in a gesture of absolute casualness. This young man [garçon] was obviously my contemporary, he was barely older than me and our obvious closeness was something intolerable. The war was out of the history books.” Jérôme Ferrari, “À son image.” Actes Sud. www.actes-sud.fr/node/65018. See also the following interview (in French) of Haviv, in which the photo Ferrari discusses is included: Ron Haviv, “Souvenirs de la guerre de Bosnie,” Vice, 3 January 2016. www.vice.com/fr/article/ nn953m/photos-of-the-bosnia-war. In Aline Cateux’s recent article, these same photographs by Haviv are mentioned as well: Aline Cateux, “Trente ans après, la guerre de Bosnie-Herzégovine,” Analyse Opinion Critique, 1 April 2022. https:// aoc.media/analyse/2022/03/31/trente-ans-apres-la-guerre-de-bosnie-herzegovine/. 29 Kruno Kardov, “Remember Vukovar: Memory, Sense of Place, and the National Tradition in Croatia,” in Democratic Transition in Croatia: Value Transformation, Education and Media, ed. Sabrina P. Ramet and Davorka Matić (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2007), 67. Chapter cited by Subotić, Hijacked Justice, 110n122. 30 Kardov, “Remember Vukovar,” 64. 31 Magaš, The Destruction of Yugoslavia, 356. The last chapter of the book, “To be Against the War in Yugoslavia Means Opposing the Aggressor,” opens with the fall of Vukovar. 32 Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, 14.

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Nonetheless, Antonia is rapidly told by a more experienced journalist that nothing could be further from the truth: “[p]eople don’t want to see this, and if they do see it, they would rather forget” [“Les gens ne veulent pas voir ça et s’ils le voient, ils préfèrent l’oublier”] (153/177). This learning experience cements her decision that some photographs should simply not exist, yet she does not stop taking them and, as Ruhe notes, she is herself “fascinated by the representation of the obscene in her colleagues’ works” [“fascinée par la représentation de l’obscénité chez ses collègues”].33 However, I want to think through another one of Sontag’s suggestions, one that posits that, while narratives may be more effective, photographs have another type of power: “Narratives can make us understand. Photographs do something else: they haunt us.”34 Sontag uses as an example “the unforgettable images of the war in Bosnia”35 – in this case, she comments on the same picture by Haviv (as published in the New York Times) that struck Ferrari.36 Even though we may not learn any information from seeing the picture itself – who is there, why they are there, what the context is – we are nevertheless touched by something, even haunted by it, by what we see, even if we do not understand it in the same way that we could in a description and an explanation. She later enjoins readers to “[l]et the atrocious images haunt us,”37 to not forget.38 While I mentioned earlier that the actual presence of photographs may not be necessary for interpretation (as long as someone can give a description), we see here that what haunts, in Sontag’s account, is precisely something of the visual. However, as Michèle Bacholle, in a review of Ferrari’s novel, remarks, “we come out of this novel horrified by the photos that Ferrari does not give us to see, but [forces us] to imagine.”39 Indeed, the descriptions that Ferrari gives, both on the website and within the novel, as well as the description of the picture in Sontag’s text, can be said to haunt us not only because we can imagine it, but also because these same images keep reappearing. 33 Ruhe, “Représenter et transmettre la violence chez Jérôme Ferrari,” 136. 34 Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, 89. 35 Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, 89. 36 See n. 28, above. 37 Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, 115. 38 Sontag contrasts “not forgetting” with “remembering,” which can be fraught. 39 Michèle Bacholle, Review of À son image, by Jérôme Ferrari, French Review 93, no. 2 (2019): 216.

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Barbie Zelizer cautioned that “the ongoing display of visual evidence of atrocity is undoing the popular premise that depiction promotes response.”40 Indeed, not only is it not enough to see, but – paradoxically perhaps – we have also already seen too much. As Zelizer explains, because our vision and imagination have already become accustomed to certain types of photographs, it becomes more difficult to elicit an adequate response as “has been the case with the atrocity photos of World War II. Their recycled appearances in the discussion of contemporary atrocities constitute a backdrop for depiction that neutralizes much of the potential response to other ravages against humanity.”41 When it comes to the function of photographs in texts, what haunts the reader who does not have the visual support is a certain knowledge – even if it is a fragmentary knowledge of the photograph’s existence and of the photographs of other conflicts that precede it – that is then supplemented by imagination. Discussions of significant moments in Antonia’s life are paired with reflections on the history of photography – war photography, to be more precise. As we have seen in Chapter 5 regarding texts by Modiano and Alikavazovic, the untimely encounter with certain containers opens up a productive space for dialogue across time. It is telling that, in the discussion of war photography, it is the discovery of a box that best exemplifies how photographs can at once haunt and explain: “Decades later, someone will come upon Gaston C.’s photographs, all jumbled together in a cardboard box. He will see […] fourteen hanged men photographed so close up that their faces can be clearly distinguished, but he will not know where, or when, or why they died” (56) [“Des dizaines d’années plus tard, quelqu’un découvrira les photos de Gaston C. entassées pêle-mêle dans un carton. Il verra […] quatorze pendus photographiés de si près qu’on distingue parfaitement leurs visages mais il ne saura ni où, ni quand, ni pourquoi ils sont morts”] (62). Even if this nameless person – this someone – has, at the time of discovery, no clue of the historical context (echoing Sontag’s argument), the entirety of Chapter 4 of Ferrari’s novel, whose matter-offact caption is all the more harrowing, reading “(Hanged Arabs on the Bread Market Square, Tripoli, 1911)” (45) [“(Arabes pendus sur la place du Marché-au-Pain, Tripoli, 1911)”] (49), actually provides a contextualization and a discussion of the life and work of Gaston Chérau; he is 40 Barbie Zelizer, “Remembering to Forget: Contemporary Scrapbooks of Atrocity,” in Remembering to Forget: Holocaust Memory through the Camera’s Eye (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 206. 41 Zelizer, “Remembering to Forget,” 220.

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named while they remain unidentified, compounding the violence of the photographic gaze.42 As such, through a “narrative act of adoption,”43 these haunting photographs – haunting because of their shock value or their depiction of horror, because of their affective consequences, because we have, it appears, seen them before – in their becoming-text, have opened up a space of communication between readers and photographer. When photographs become textual – and interpretation is a prerequisite of description – the haunting of the photograph does not need to be (only) visual: it can stem from our knowledge of its subject or the conditions of its taking; it can be mentally superimposed on other similar photographs we have seen – forming a palimpsest of sorts. The visual depiction of pain or atrocities becomes something that lingers with us as an image, which means that we can also recall it as a mental image. As the narrator describes it, photography “slices into the flow of time like implacable Fate, and that is something it alone has the power to do” (109) [“tranche le cours du temps comme la Moire implacable et cela, elle seule a le pouvoir de le faire”] (125). Because the photograph affixes bits of time, in its untimely (re)appearance in our minds, it functions as a ghost, it is a slice of time coming from somewhen else and experienced in the present. Its haunting is expressed in its ability to make us revisit a small (visual) unit of meaning, or an experience of time, yet at a different time. In fixing a moment in time, even a millisecond, this “furtive” moment becomes a time capsule that does not remain in that initial time (“that time” [“ce temps-là”], as Derrida would say),44 but makes it possible to take this slice of time elsewhere, so that I too (in seeing it, in reading it) can experience it. The retelling of Antonia’s journey to Vukovar happens quite late in the narration – page 160 of 21945 – but because the novel starts with 42 For a discussion of Ferrari’s interest in and study of the work of Gaston Chérau in his book co-authored with Olivier Rohe – Jérôme Ferrari and Olivier Rohe, À fendre le coeur le plus dur (Arles: Actes Sud, 2017) – see Ruhe, “Représenter et transmettre la violence chez Jérôme Ferrari,” 128–29. 43 Hirsch, Family Frames, xii. 44 Derrida writes: “Furtive and untimely, the apparition of the specter does not belong to that time” [Furtive et intempestive, l’apparition du spectre n’appartient pas à ce temps-là]. Jacques Derrida, Spectres de Marx: L’État de la dette, le travail du deuil et la nouvelle Internationale (Paris: Éditions Galilée, 1993), 17; Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge Classics, 1994), xix. 45 In the English translation, 143 of 188.

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her memory of Dragan and the mention of absent photographs of war, we can be said to be already haunted by them, waiting for them to be taken (if not developed). We have a few references in the novel to the trip undertaken: the uncle will mention in his funeral mass Antonia’s noticeable suffering experienced after her return from the region (96); and the narrator will mention that, “[i]n August 1990, as […] Yugoslavia had already begun its slow, bloody disintegration, Antonia went to the site of an attack thirty miles south of Ajaccio” (129) [“En août 1990, alors que […] la Yougoslavie entamait déjà son processus de dissolution sanglante, Antonia se rendit sur les lieux d’un attentat à une cinquantaine de kilomètres au sud d’Ajaccio”] (149). Drawing a link between these different scenes of violence, Ruhe reads it as Antonia’s failure to see that she is already living in the midst of a war zone through her friendship with members of the “National Liberation Front of Corsica” and her documenting of their actions in her work as a photojournalist.46 And it is true that, to the contrary of several scenes of violence taking place in Corsica, we only find one full chapter (Chapter 10) dedicated to Antonia’s time first in Belgrade, Serbia, and then at the border of Vukovar and Osijek (northwest of Vukovar in Croatia); this is the chapter in which we find the descriptions of obscene violence.47 It is also the chapter in which there is a discussion of a palimpsestic temporality: the same geopolitical space has been the site of several other wars and conflicts, and it seems as if, in the repetition of atrocities, time folds upon itself: But it is clear that things are going badly, very badly indeed, the pace is accelerating, and it’s all mixed up, 1912, 1934, 1943, the past that had remained stuck in people’s throats for so long contaminating the present – the Ustaše from Jasenovac, knives and saws, partisans, the Chetniks with long hair and beards. (147) [Mais il est clair que ça tourne mal, très mal, de plus en plus vite, et tout se mélange, 1912, 1934, 1943, le passé resté si longtemps coincé dans la gorge remonte et contamine le présent, les Oustachis de Jasenovac, les couteaux et les scies, les partisans, les longs cheveux et les barbes des Tchetniks]. (169–70)

46 Ruhe, “Représenter et transmettre la violence chez Jérôme Ferrari,” 141. 47 For a detailed reading of the capturing of obscene photographs, see Ruhe, “Représenter et transmettre la violence chez Jérôme Ferrari,” 135–43.

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While we can argue that this is perhaps a sign of haunting, of an untimely ghost showing its head, this recall of past moments of violence, however, can also serve as a screen-memory of sorts and a deflection of responsibility. As Jelena Subotić has shown in Yellow Star, Red Star (2019), where she explores the cooptation of Holocaust memory in Eastern Europe, and addressing specifically the memorialization in Serbia of the Srebrenica genocide (Bosnia, 1995), she notes that there is a strategy that aims to “plac[e] Srebrenica not within the context of the wars of Yugoslav succession (1991–1995) and Serbian territorial expansionism, but in the context of the long Serbian history of suffering in the twentieth century that began in 1914 with the onset of World War I, and then continued through World War II, the communist era, and the most recent wars.”48 What we see and hear through Dragan – which is echoed in Antonia’s discussions with people she encounters on the ground – is this same type of deflection that inscribes these massacres in Vukovar within a larger history of violence naming the collaboration of the Ustaše regime with Nazis (the reference is to the Jasenovac concentration camp) and the resistance of the partisans, the massacres by the Chetniks.49 Antonia herself recalls hearing stories that are, it appears, told in each of these wars and conflicts and which, recycled, then seem to take on a life of their own: “All of these stories are false, of course, each in its own way. Some of them have been traveling through time since 1912, 1934, or 1943, transformed and enriched along the way to acquire an abominable precision. Others are completely made up” (150) [“Toutes ces histoires sont fausses, bien sûr, chacune à sa manière. Certaines ont traversé le temps depuis 1912, 1934 ou 1943, se transformant et s’enrichissant au cours de leur voyage pour atteindre une abominable précision. D’autres sont complètement inventées”] (174). These same dates that the narrator – or Dragan – speaks about are those Antonia is also told. The fact that Dragan is from Vojvodina, that he is part of this autonomous province, makes him even more ambivalent as a character. Even though Antonia herself witnesses 48 Jelena Subotić, Yellow Star, Red Star: Holocaust Remembrance after Communism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2019), 69. For more on this history, see the chapter, “At the Belgrade Fairgrounds,” 45–96. 49 For the history of these groups during World War II, see Marko Attila Hoare, Genocide and Resistance in Hitler’s Bosnia: The Partisans and the Chetniks, 1941–1943 (Oxford: Published for the British Academy by Oxford University Press, 2006).

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horrific scenes of violence which he perpetrates, she finds herself drawn to him; we could argue that her decision not to develop and publish the pictures is a refusal to contribute to these stories. Antonia regularly writes to her uncle and repeatedly explains that, concerning what is really happening – what she herself is a witness of – no one knows anything or no one seems to be talking about it. While she is aware that, by taking pictures, she is contributing to the aestheticization of violence, it seems that she is less troubled by the fact that, by following Dragan, she is following a perpetrator of atrocities, and she nevertheless grows attached to him. After she returns home for a few months, she goes back to complete her project of following Dragan as he is demobilized at the end of his military service. Even though “[s]he wonders what he has seen. She wonders what he has done” (155) [“Elle se demande ce qu’il a vu. Elle se demande ce qu’il a fait”] (180), she does not inquire further. As she accompanies him on his way home, sees the group of adolescents laugh at him and the police on the checkpoint mocking his choice of books, she feels, it seems, protective of him. She decides that she will not publish these pictures because “she doesn’t want a stranger’s eyes to look with curiosity or indifference on the complete disaster she witnessed today. She does not want to duplicate that disaster. There are so many ways to appear obscene, she once wrote to her godfather” (157) [“elle ne voudrait pas que des yeux étrangers puissent se poser avec curiosité ou indifférence sur le désastre complet dont elle a aujourd’hui été témoin. Ce désastre, elle ne veut pas le dupliquer. Il y a tant de façons de se montrer obscène, a-t-elle un jour écrit à son parrain”] (182; emphasis in the original). For what is more obscene, one could posit, than to make us feel for perpetrators? The novel, indeed, seems to attempt repeatedly to make Dragan more sympathetic, painting him as someone who is just in the wrong place at the wrong time, who did not know what he was getting into (there is a recurring question that has Dragan wondering, like Stendhal’s Fabrice, at what point one joins the war – something Antonia asks herself as well). It is not a coincidence, if we recall Subotić’s analysis of the misuses of World War II memory, that he has Kertész’s Kaddish for an Unborn Child in his backpack, for it inscribes him in a longer history of suffering; the fact that he is from Vojvodina, the autonomous province with a significant Hungarian population (we know that he reads Hungarian), might make him more of a “victim” of circumstances, not someone who is ideologically invested in the outcome of the war – but is that not just as obscene? So why end the novel with Dragan’s recounting being sent to Sarajevo through the French Foreign Legion – this same Dragan who partook

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in Vukovar in “some of the worst anti-Croat atrocities by Serb forces in 1991”?50 This is the revelation that ends the novel: “after that they both sit in silence for a moment until Antonia gets up because now it is time to go” (188) [“Après quoi ils demeurent un instant tous les deux silencieux jusqu’à ce qu’Antonia se lève parce qu’il est maintenant temps de partir”] (219). The “now” of Antonia’s departure follows the linking of Vukovar and Sarajevo – two sites of violence. Because of Antonia’s reluctance and refusal to show or publish her photographs, we come full circle with this disturbing (obscene!) and certainly complicit relationship (to perpetrators, to photography). While unlike in Jonathan Littel’s novel, Les Bienveillantes [The Kindly Ones] (2006), analyzed by Debarati Sanyal in terms of “ironic complicity” with a perpetrator, which forces us to take a stand,51 we do not see through Dragan’s perspective but through Antonia’s, we are nevertheless led to espouse her sympathetic views towards him, which leads her perhaps not to publish the feature. For the work of memory to begin, Antonia has to die so that her story can be told – perhaps the rising sun on her way home which blinds her is the symbolic flash of photography. Distant Photography (Alikavazovic) As I have discussed in Chapter 5, there is always a double movement in Jakuta Alikavazovic’s novels, simultaneously one of erasure and one of making traces. For instance, in her novel Corps volatils [Volatile Bodies] (2007), Alikavazovic recounts the story of a mother and daughter who deal very differently with loss. Following the death by suicide of her husband, Anna Marlowe, a photographer famous for her portraits, turns to the photography of deserted urban spaces meant to hit you head on like a wave of grief: “In reality she photographed walls, at various distances so that no one would know that she was photographing walls, but in each image there was one, straight on, in your face” [“En réalité elle prenait des murs, à distances variables pour qu’on ne sache pas qu’elle prenait des murs, mais dans chaque cliché il y en avait un, pris de face, de plein fouet”].52 As titles for these photographs, Anna uses 50 Subotić, Yellow Star, Red Star, 136. 51 Debarati Sanyal, Memory and Complicity: Migrations of Holocaust Remembrance (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015), 91. 52 Jakuta Alikavazovic, Corps volatils (Paris: Éditions de l’Olivier, 2007), 110.

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the same titles that she had previously given to her portraits. While one could see it as an attempt to give an added depth to these portraits by providing them with a double of sorts, or an empty pendant, Anna attempts to get these portraits back in exchange for her “updated” work – a “marketing” strategy that seems to be working: “Therefore, someone traded a photograph of John with his arm in a cast in exchange for some awful industrial wasteland” [“Ainsi, quelqu’un a échangé une photo de John, le bras dans le plâtre, contre une saleté de friche industrielle”]. For her daughter Estella, this is a sign of erasure that gradually effaces the traces of her father: “Every time there was less of my father in the world” [“Chaque fois, il y avait moins de mon père dans le monde”].53 To counteract her mother’s destructive project, Estella, in her attempts to preserve something of her father, makes it her mission to “ruin” these new photographs by furtively appearing in them; as his daughter she becomes his last remainder and a trace of him, her mother only noticing when developing the film. In L’avancée de la nuit [Night as It Falls] (2017), we also find this same paradoxical double movement in the way that photography is handled. When Amélia was eleven years old, upon her return with her mother Nadia from Sarajevo just as the siege was beginning, she was placed in Switzerland in a boarding school. When she later comes across pictures of that time, she decides to destroy them, “unaware that she was, in her own way, helping to erase her biographical materials”54 [“sans conscience de conspirer à l’épuisement de ses ressources biographiques”].55 While there might be the possibility that someone somewhere has a copy of the negative strip – perhaps the last remainder – Amélia links this lack of photographic evidence to the possibility of complete disappearance: “No other photos of herself as a child would ever come to light. She had taken part in this extinction; it would soon become difficult to convince others of her existence” (66)56 [“Pourtant jamais des photos d’elle enfant ne seraient reprises. Cette extinction, elle y avait en personne contribué. 53 Alikavazovic, Corps volatils, 111. 54 Jakuta Alikavazovic, Night as It Falls, trans. Jeffery Zuckerman (London: Faber & Faber, 2021), 66. Subsequent page numbers will be given in parentheses. 55 Jakuta Alikavazovic, L’avancée de la nuit (Paris: Éditions de l’Olivier, 2017), 74. Subsequent page numbers will be given in parentheses. 56 The English translation omits the following part of the sentence: “Si le règne de l’image se maintenait, et elle ne voyait pas de signes ni de raisons du contraire” [“if the reign of the visual image kept going strong, and she saw no signs or reasons to the contrary”].

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Si le règne de l’image se maintenait, et elle ne voyait pas de signes ni de raisons du contraire, il serait bientôt difficile de convaincre quiconque de son existence”] (74). However, if we take as a possible angle of approach the fact that photographs are not always reliable proofs, what it repeatedly emphasized here is that, when it comes to traces, to remainders, to ghosts, they may appear from places we least expect. In this way, the photographs that defy traditional logic or even traditional photography function according to a spectral (non-)logic.57 While ghosts are often tied to photography, in Amélia’s case, it is the written word, a different type of textual photograph (which is not a coincidence, since we find ourselves reading a novel) that appears to be the most propitious for the return of ghosts. What actually remains from Amélia’s time in Switzerland is “a school notebook” (69) [“un cahier d’école”] (78) – it can seem quite banal, and, at first, when analyzing the handwriting, Amélia thinks it does not look like hers, although it actually is. This piece of writing that appears so foreign to her is nevertheless described as better than or at least equivalent to a photograph: “this final paragraph had been like a triangular self-portrait that, she felt, was worth just as much as a photograph” (70) [“ce dernier paragraphe était comme un autoportrait triangulaire qui valait bien, trouvait-elle, une photographie”] (78). The cahier found by Amélia gives her a slice of time; as such it functions as a photograph – we are reminded here of Perec’s own reading of the back of photographs in W ou le souvenir d’enfance – the trace of the mother’s handwriting is quite important here because it shows that she was present.58 Even if the handwriting can be falsified, or if the person is impersonating someone else, as Hélène Cixous reminds us, we are all fictional the moment we start writing.59 Photography, like memory, is very much constructed and is not always reliable; it is not proof of anything stable. This much can be gathered from Amélia’s presentation on facsimiles of retouched Soviet-era photographs, in which disgraced individuals are not so much removed as covered up. People’s erasures in photographs are a way to change the historical record, to even change history: “disappearances that had been wilfully planned out and executed. A history that erased people. A history that itself was erased” (39) [“un 57 See Conjuration. 58 Perec, W ou le souvenir d’enfance, 78. 59 See Chapter 1.

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oubli énergiquement planifié et construit. On disparaît de l’histoire. On fait disparaître l’histoire”] (46). However, in the case of one particular photograph of astronauts, the censor, unlike his predecessor who turned a man into a staircase, chooses to turn this same man into a rosebush. Amélia imagines this as a small act of resistance: “in disappearing the astronaut […] he added his own twist by choosing to incarnate one of the saddest, stubbornest lines of Ronsard: that in death as in life thy body may be roses” (40; emphasis in the original) [“en vaporisant l’astronaute, il s’insurge et se venge en choisissant d’incarner à la place l’un des vers les plus tristes et les plus opiniâtres […] de Ronsard: afin que vif et mort ton corps ne soit que roses”] (47; emphasis in the original). This same haunting line of poetry will be repeated like a litany by Paul after Amélia leaves him. He had tried, as had the Soviet censors with the photographs, to make her vanish from his mind, from his lips, yet to no avail: “But the past wouldn’t let itself be forgotten, war wouldn’t let itself be forgotten. The two crept in – how is that possible?” (183–84) [“Mais le passé ne se laissait pas oublier, la guerre ne se laissait pas oublier. Tous deux couvaient, s’infiltraient, comment est-ce possible?”] (192). While, for the majority of the text, photography is seen as something with the potential to lie, to mislead, or to reveal something that could be compromising, Amélia, on a short vacation trip in Italy with Paul, comes face to face with another type of possibility for photography when they encounter a drone on the beach. While the first reaction is one of fear – “her body had reacted as if it were staring down a weapon. The machine had felt obscene to them, and they, Amelia especially, needed to sweep it away from their perception” (161) [“son corps à elle avait réagi comme devant une arme. La machine leur avait paru obscène, et c’est cette obscénité qu’ils s’attachèrent à éradiquer de leur perception, Amélia surtout”] (170) – drone photography will become the answer to the next phase of her life. Drone photography embodies both the rejection and implementation [mise en œuvre] of documentary poetry (Nadia’s project of making one feel obscene violence through poetry, encountered in Chapter 5). Towards the end of the novel, when, remembering their vacation episode, Albers (Amélia’s and Paul’s former professor) gifts them a drone, their reaction towards this device has changed: “They weren’t unaware of its uses and had grown inured to them; these new weapons had, at that point, become little more than words, ideas, an abstraction, and they found the gift less shocking than they would have

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if Albers had offered them, say, a toy gun” (168) [“ils n’en ignoraient pas les usages mais n’arrivaient plus à les sentir; ces armes nouvelles étaient désormais pour eux des mots, des idées, une abstraction, et ils trouvaient le cadeau moins choquant que si Albers, par exemple, leur avait offert un pistolet en plastique”] (177). Despite the fact that drones have begun to be used for the purposes of war – actualizing the relationship between death and photography60 – Amélia and Paul have already become desensitized to it. After the birth of their daughter Louise, Amélia will decide to leave, and the drone that she has learned to pilot will offer her a career: to serve as an archivist of sorts by photographing archaeologically significant sites in danger of being destroyed by war (242/252). After, first, refusing to engage with her mother’s legacy, then, attempting to locate her in vain, Amélia herself disappears. Although she rejects documentary poetry, Amélia will take on drone photography also in war zones. This choice of drone photography is explained through the disjunction of time and perspective that it provides and through the distance it affords – “[t]he device was wholly freed from all human perspective” (242) [“L’appareil est entièrement affranchi du point de vue humain”] (251). For someone who has felt completely disjointed throughout her life because of her mother’s absence and legacy, this is both painfully familiar, yet possibly the only way to proceed: Amelia’s eye was autonomous, airborne, wholly separate from her […] and from any sight she might ever physically possess. […] She only existed in states of extreme division, and this dislocation, this disseverance from herself, was both the symptom of what was wearing her down and the only thing keeping her alive. (242) [L’œil d’Amélia est, lui, autonome, volant, il n’a plus aucun contact ni avec elle […] ni avec aucune vision qu’elle pourrait jamais physiquement atteindre. […] Elle n’existe plus que dans des états de division extrême, 60 For a discussion of the temporality of death through what he calls “drone penalty,” see David Wills, “Drone Penalty,” in Killing Times: The Temporal Technology of the Death Penalty (New York: Fordham University Press, 2019), 150–84. See also Debarati Sanyal, who describes the relationship between death and photography, in a different context, as “the “point and shoot” of a camera.” Sanyal, Memory and Complicity, 139. Sanyal’s analysis of the image stills taken by Ousmane Sembène from Alain Resnais’s Nuit et Brouillard [Night and Fog] (1956) is in line with my understanding of photographs as ghosts that return in a different time, though this is not Sanyal’s angle of approach.

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et cette dislocation, ce contretemps d’elle à elle-même, est à la fois le symptôme de ce qui la ronge et la seule chose qui la maintienne en vie.] (251)

Amélia is described as a ghost of sorts: untimely and disjointed. Unlike her mother, who, through documentary poetry, aimed to come as close as possible to the scene of violence or of torture in order to make the reader experience it, for Amélia, putting as much distance as possible – from her mother, from her perspective, from human perspective – is the goal. If, as has been mentioned in Chapter 5, documentary poetry is likened to the performance of eye surgery on one’s own self and without anesthesia, drone photography is its inevitable end: an eye wholly removed from the body. She is undeniably “living in the rubble of her rejected legacy, of documentary poetry, of the pathetic fragments trembling in the darkness of decades-old box, of abjectly powerless words and lines, as only words and lines that have never existed to be read, never existed for the eyes” (245) [“Elle vit dans les rebuts de son héritage refusé, de la poésie documentaire, de pauvres fragments qui gisent dans la pénombre d’une boîte vieille de plusieurs décennies, des mots et des vers d’une puissance abjecte, comme seuls peuvent l’être les mots et les vers qui n’existent pas pour la lecture”] (254). As we have already seen, by rejecting her legacy or her past and her mother’s past, she will only shift her preoccupations rather than exorcising these so-called ghosts. This is why Louise, her own daughter, will have to go to look for her, retracing her steps, replaying her rituals without realizing it: in disappearing from the lives of her family, Amélia “had become Nadia Dehr, and this was the irony of her flight” (245) [“elle est devenue Nadia Dehr, voilà l’ironie de sa fuite”] (254). While documentary poetry professed to be a solution aimed at stopping the war, through its mechanism of closeness and complicity, it becomes a weapon of sorts towards those who read it. Even if Amélia tries to get rid of the box in order to get rid of her memories, the fact is that upon receiving it she read a single poem, and it was enough. Amélia told Paul about this poem, and we will remember (from Chapter 5) that he too begins to laugh uncontrollably upon hearing the description in the poem of a man being tortured: he has been contaminated as well. When Albers presents Amélia and Paul with the gift of the drone, it sits in a box – “She brandished a huge box that seemed to be even bigger than the bag it had come out of” (167) [“Elle brandit une boîte immense, qui paraissait plus grande que le sac qui la contenait”]

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(176) – and Paul’s first reaction is the fear that it is Nadia’s box which has returned – and as we know from Chapter 5 – this box does not even need to be present in order to infect whoever thinks of it. By merely looking like it might be the box, Paul is once again put face to face with its contents – it is even described as impossibly exceeding the bag which contains it. It is truly a haunting ghost: It’s Nadia Dehr’s box, he thought, those are Nadia Dehr’s fragments, she can’t do that to me, not now. […] [H]e remembered the man who had a pigeon set in his mouth, a live pigeon, and who didn’t mean to, but had ground his teeth during the torture. He felt like he was on the brink of spitting out feathers himself. (167; emphasis my own)61 [Seigneur, pensa Paul, c’est la boîte de Nadia Dehr, ce sont les fragments de Nadia Dehr, elle ne peut pas me faire ça, pas maintenant. Il se souvint de l’homme auquel on avait mis un pigeon dans la bouche, un pigeon vivant, et qui serrait les dents sous la torture. Il fut sur le point de cracher des plumes]. (176; emphasis my own)

The box that was posited as a bird of divination through which Paul could foretell the future ends up, through contamination by documentary poetry, to be the bird of the poem now in his mouth. This is the power of the truly uncontainable container that I discussed in Chapter 5. I am deliberately inscribing the migration of this box in this chapter to honor its unruliness. The ghostly resurgence of this box, which is not this box, is documentary poetry’s final word: it was meant as something that, through reading, would make one feel things and live things. Documentary poetry is drone photography’s opposite: rather than removing depth, it elicits it. The power of the poem (heard by Paul in Chapter 5) is that, once it is read (not even by him but retold to him), even if it is carted away in some old box, it now exceeds its container and makes any box suggest its presence. While the drone reminds us of its use as a weapon that delivers death from afar, the box in which it arrived is even more haunting because of its status as this uncontainable ghostly container that causes Paul to almost spit out feathers and Amélia to disappear and become, in her turn, Nadia Dehr, away in a distant country on a mission (until she eventually returns and disappears for good).

61 The English translation adds two sentences for effect, which I have removed.

chapter seven

Indelible Stains Sebbar, Adimi, Faye Indelible Stains

Oubliez que les chemins sont imbibés de rouge, que ce rouge n’a pas été lavé et que chaque jour, nos pas s’y enfoncent un peu plus. Forget that the roads are drenched with red, a red that has not been washed away, and every day our steps sink into it a little deeper. Kaouther Adimi, Nos richesses [Our Riches]1

One way to think about the memory of violence is through material traces. We have looked at how objects and photographs testify to someone’s presence, to the possibility of transmission of family memory; yet there is another type of materiality that can be examined, one that pertains directly to the body – the “matter” in question here is blood (although this sense is now obsolete, the word “matter” is still used to refer to “other bodily fluids”).2 We can readily think of the double wound signified by the “blood [that] streams from the cut” inflicted for the second time by Tancred to his beloved Clorinda, whose voice “addresses him and, in this address, bears witness to the past that he has unwittingly repeated,”3 a scene through which Cathy Caruth teases 1 Kaouther Adimi, Nos richesses (Paris: Les Éditions du Seuil, 2017), 10. Subsequent page numbers will be given in parentheses. Kaouther Adimi, Our Riches, trans. Chris Andrews (New York: New Directions Books, 2020), 4. Subsequent page numbers will be given in parentheses. 2 See “matter” (19a), Oxford English Dictionary Online. https://oed.com/. 3 Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 2.

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out the belatedness characteristic of the theory of trauma. While Caruth focuses on the voice that Tancred finally hears as he wounds Clorinda for the second time, explaining that a feature of trauma is that it “returns to haunt the survivor later on,”4 we can also think of the recurrence of blood as a ghost of sorts. We can further note that the presence of blood points, as David Wills reminds us (following Jacques Derrida’s own series of questioning pertaining to the death penalty), to cruelty. Wills writes, “For blood is itself cruel: the Latin cruor refers primarily to blood that ‘flows from a wound, a stream of blood.’”5 Yet beyond a simple etymological link, he proposes that it is in its relationship to time that this cruelty is made apparent. If blood can be said to “mar[k] the time of the human,” its flowing and spilling force us to (re)think matters of temporality.6 As we will see through an analysis of spilled blood and blood stains, there is a certain untimeliness at work. The color red, the color of blood, the color of stains that have not or cannot be washed away is often evoked – as in the epigraph above – in a figurative sense to signify that something violent has happened and that its effects continue to impact the present. While certain stains can be “washed” clean, others persist in staying put, as Lady Macbeth can testify. It follows that when we speak about those types of stains we frequently end up speaking about questions of responsibility, of guilt, but also questions of shame. Yet the red blood stain itself can also be said to stand in for the absent body from which it came: it is a silent testimony, a proof that someone was there, yet no longer is – perhaps injured, perhaps dead. Stains are marks, traces of something left behind. They are unexpected, unplanned, and usually 4 Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 4. 5 David Wills, Killing Times: The Temporal Technology of the Death Penalty (New York: Fordham University Press, 2019), 90; emphasis in the original. Wills also cites Jacques Derrida, The Death Penalty, vol. 1, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 96; Jacques Derrida, The Death Penalty, vol. 2, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 220. 6 Wills, Killing Times, 91; emphasis in the original. Through intricate readings of the death of Socrates, Heidegger’s Dasein and Hegelian dialectics, Wills imagines “blood, as uncannily internal and external flow of both life and time” (102). In his conception, time is hauntingly “understood as blood circulating on the outside,” and interrupting the flow of time by means of the death penalty constitutes the spilling of blood, even in so-called “bloodless” forms of death like lethal injection: “vis-à-vis the time of blood, both are equally bloody, and, one might argue, equally cruel” (118).

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unwanted. They are the material presence of absence, and in this sense they could be said to function like ghosts – they are both a remainder and a reminder. I find a fortuitous echo of my chosen title for this chapter in Nancy K. Miller’s analysis of Annie Ernaux’s text La Honte [Shame] (1997), in which she discusses – amongst other memories – the long-lasting impact of being a witness to an instance of violence: in Ernaux’s case, the memory of the day her father almost killed her mother haunts her forty-three years on and has inaugurated her thinking in and of time. Ernaux explains: “It was June 15, 1952. The first date I remember with unerring accuracy from my childhood. Before that, the days and dates inscribed on the blackboard and in my copybooks seemed just to drift by”7 [“C’était le 15 juin 52. La première date précise et sûre de mon enfance. Avant, il n’y a qu’un glissement des jours et des dates inscrites au tableau et sur les cahiers”].8 “Such is the afterlife of certain memories,” Miller comments, “memories that function as indelible stains in the brain.”9 Miller here joins two meanings of stains, for she not only speaks of the symbolic stain that is imprinted in Ernaux’s memory, she also refers to research in neuroscience that demonstrates that traumatic memories can be shown on brain scans. For her, this stain is a visible manifestation of Ernaux’s titular shame, and the event itself is understood as a “scene of shame” (one of several others in the text).10 In Miller’s reading, shame “derives from an act of witness – seeing or being seen.”11 It is also a moment in which the reader is forced to accept or refuse identification with Ernaux, for shame always involves someone else (whether real or imagined). 7 Annie Ernaux, Shame, trans. Tanya Leslie (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2020), 15. 8 Annie Ernaux, La Honte (Paris: Gallimard, 1997), 15. 9 Nancy K. Miller, “Memory Stains: Annie Ernaux’s Shame,” a/b: Auto/ Biography Studies 14, no. 1 (1999): 41. 10 Miller, “Memory Stains,” 43. Miller repeats this pronouncement that thus becomes a haunting refrain: “The scene remains an inexplicable, indelible stain.” She, however, also remarks that stains can have a positive connotation, marking an event that should be remembered: “What I’ve called memory stains are permanent traces of what we might hopelessly wish to forget: the screens of the primal scene, the abject forms of the maternal body, but also what we wish to preserve: the erotic performance of fluids (in a weird echo of maternal excretions), traced in the place of words on a sheet of paper” (49); emphasis in the original. 11 Miller, “Memory Stains,” 43.

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To the contrary, an argument against identification is proposed by Debarati Sanyal through a reflection on the workings of Holocaust memory. Noting that “[a]ffects such as trauma and shame have come to dominate our thinking about memory, history, and violence,”12 Sanyal cautions against a reading that would advocate for an identification of the reader with the shame felt by survivors. Sanyal, reading Agamben reading Primo Levi, reminds us that such descriptions of identification “also erod[e] the very real differences between those who inhabited” the gray zone, “as well as the multiple gaps separating us, as readers of testimonies […] and the survivor-witnesses.”13 Rather than dwelling in the realm of shame (or even “traumatic complicity,” a better word for what is usually subsumed under the word “shame”), Sanyal proposes to instead focus on “complicity.” That is, a reading in which an awareness of how different subject positions are constructed and shifted around takes precedence. Such a reading is attentive to the different narrative figures employed and “has the potential to uproot our accepted ways of inhabiting the past and present, to disrupt established patterns of memory, and to light up alternate pathways of collective remembrance.”14 The disruptive nature of complicity and the reader’s involvement in meaning-making is a powerful way to think the stains, both figurative and literal, that appear in texts by Leïla Sebbar, Kaouther Adimi, and Gaël Faye. Both Sebbar’s and Adimi’s novels discuss the massacre of Algerians by French police forces in Paris on 17 October 1961, a repression of the peaceful protest against the curfew imposed on them by the then Prefect of Police Maurice Papon (whom we already encountered through the work of Lydie Salvayre in Chapter 3).15 The relationship of Algeria 12 Debarati Sanyal, Memory and Complicity: Migrations of Holocaust Remembrance (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015), 27. 13 Sanyal, Memory and Complicity, 35. With the expression “gray zone,” Sanyal refers to Primo Levi’s coining of the term in The Drowned and the Saved (1986), a term that describes “the intricate chain of complicities that bound victims, perpetrators, accomplices, and bystanders under the concentration camps’ conditions of extreme deprivation.” Sanyal, Memory and Complicity, 11. 14 Sanyal, Memory and Complicity, 54. 15 For a discussion of this repression, see, in particular, Chadia Chambers-Samadi, Répression des manifestants algériens: La nuit meurtrière du 17 Octobre 1961 (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2015) and Lia Brozgal, Absent the Archive: Cultural Traces of a Massacre in Paris, 17 October 1961 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2020). Alison Rice, writing about Sebbar’s novel, published after Papon’s trial,

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and France is marked by a long colonial history and a violent decolonization process that has for a long time been erased and denied, the Algerian War only becoming a war in official memory very recently.16 The appearance of stains is, in these texts, intertwined with questions of knowledge (or the lack thereof) and the refusal to acknowledge responsibility. Disrupting textual chronology by at once forecasting the imminent irruption of violence and by highlighting its effects, these stains force us to think both forwards and backwards, to always hold in our minds echoes and traces of other events. This is something that is found in Faye’s novel in the textual anticipation of the murder of the narrator’s family during the genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda in 1994.17 There is no need for spectral characters to haunt the texts, as the traumatic memory can be expressed differently. We are haunted, as are the characters, by recurring stains that are the only narratological traces of those who have disappeared. Seeing Red (Sebbar) Leïla Sebbar’s novel La Seine était rouge: Paris, octobre 1961 [The Seine Was Red: Paris, October 1961] (1999) has been, from the moment of its publication, one of the key literary texts taking up the memory of the 17 October 1961 massacre, although this was not the first time

also highlights “the importance of Papon’s trial not only in bringing the October 17 massacre to public attention, but also in refreshing the memories of those who were in the thick of things that very day.” Alison Rice, “Rehearsing October 17, 1961: The Role of Fiction in Remembering the Battle of Paris,” L’Esprit Créateur 54, no. 4 (2014): 95. 16 For a discussion of the Algerian War as “the war without a name” [la guerre sans nom], see the new edition of Benjamin Stora, La gangrène et l’oubli: La mémoire de la guerre d’Algérie (Paris: La Découverte, 2005), first published in 1991. The war was officially recognized as a war in 1999. 17 For a brief summary of the events leading up to the genocide, see Nicki Hitchcott, Rwanda Genocide Stories: Fiction after 1994 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2015), 1–7. It should be noted, as Hitchcott points out, that while there is a “master narrative of the genocide,” it is often “a monolithic, simplified version of the story” that is espoused by Rwandan officials; however, most fiction writers who engage with the memory of the genocide “present individual subject positions as anything but straightforward” (2) – this is also the case in Faye’s novel (published after Hitchcott’s book).

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that Sebbar wrote about it.18 The novel centers on three protagonists who each have a different relationship with this massacre: Amel is the daughter of Noria, who, as a child, participated in the march with her own parents; Omer is an Algerian journalist who has recently arrived in Paris and who is in the process of applying for political asylum;19 Louis is the son of “French [people] living in France who supported militant Algerians in their struggle for Algerian independence” [“des Français qui ont soutenu des militants algériens dans leur lutte pour l’indépendance de l’Algérie, en France”], known as “suitcase couriers” (112n2, 11–12) [“porteurs de valises”] (103n1, 17). For Lia Brozgal, who provides a thorough account of the scholarship around representations of this day in Absent the Archive (2020), the novel, “by virtue of its title alone […] is a frontal attack on the ‘invisibility’ of October 17.”20 Indeed, the emphasis on the color red with its expected links to the color of blood, can be read as an “accusatory statement,”21 and can be said to constitute a symbolic stain (although there are many other “stains” on French history addressed in this novel, from colonization to Vichy policies of deportation). Discussing the many commemorative plaques of the massacre that have appeared in the Parisian landscape in recent decades, Michel Laronde explains that “[p]olitically and spatially, 17 October 1961 is part of the extension of the war in Algeria to the Hexagon”;22 “[h]istorically and spatially, the event is a postcolonial geo-historical relocation of yet another instance of colonial violence, perpetrated this time on metropolitan soil.”23 In the novel, it is the character of Omer 18 Chambers-Samadi highlights the influence of Sebbar’s correspondence with Canadian author Nancy Huston, published in 1986, which prompts Houston to write her own literary response to these events. Chambers-Samadi, Répression des manifestants algériens, 146. Brozgal points out that Sebbar wrote a shorter piece by the same title “for the 25th-anniversary special issue of Actualité de l’émigration.” Brozgal, Absent the Archive, 52n55. 19 Leïla Sebbar, The Seine Was Red. Paris, October 1961, trans. Mildred Mortimer (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), 40. Subsequent page numbers will be given in parentheses. Leïla Sebbar, La Seine était rouge: Paris, octobre 1961 (Arles: Actes Sud, 2009), 72. Subsequent page numbers will be given in parentheses. 20 Brozgal, Absent the Archive, 52. 21 Brozgal, Absent the Archive, 52. 22 Michel Laronde, “17 October 1961,” in Postcolonial Realms of Memory: Sites and Symbols in Modern France, ed. Etienne Achille, Charles Forsdick, and Lydie Moudileno (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2020), 116. 23 Laronde, “17 October 1961,” 117.

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who best embodies this calling out of France, with his many quips of “you, you French” (15) [“vous, vous les Français”] (21), something that angers Louis, who does not want to be lumped in with his compatriots and sees himself differently, his legacy closer to that of his parents. In the novel, Louis undertakes a documentary project, interviewing people with a link to the events, trying to understand what happened and what has been silenced, while Amel and Omer visit sites in Paris where memory of Algerian resistance to French occupation has been erased. The significance of the juxtaposition or coexistence of memorial sites in the novel has been highlighted in its critical reception, but it bears repeating to orient us towards the question of the color red. The first site that we see is the prison La Santé (in the 14th arrondissement of Paris); Omer, upon reading a plaque commemorating French resistance to the Occupation, points out that there is something to rectify. While his first thought is to write his correction or the missing information on a piece of paper, he finds a more effective way for his message to be told: “we can spray bomb graffiti on the wall […] It won’t come off, etched in the stone … Do you have red paint?” (14) [“on peut bomber sur le mur […] ça partira pas, incrusté dans la pierre … Tu as une bombe rouge?”] (21). There are two key terms to note in this change of heart: first is the term “bomb,” which reminds us of its violent counterpart (and tells us about the effects that this restored memory will have), then the color red, which recalls both blood and correction in the scholarly sense. Omer explains that something needs to be said, because what is missing is the memory of another war: “I just want to acknowledge what happened inside these walls. That was another war. Even if you talked about the ‘Events’ …” (15)24 [“Je veux juste rappeler ce qui s’est passé dans ces murs. C’était une autre guerre … Même si vous parliez des ‘Événements’”] (21). Omer’s addition is included in Louis’s film and described as being placed next to the memorial: “and on the right of it, red graffiti letters” (15) [“et à droite, les lettres rouges bombées”] (21). This side by side placement has been highlighted by Michael Rothberg for whom it shows that the novel “does not engage in competitive memory […] Omer’s messages never cover over other sites, but rather take their place alongside them.”25 This marking is not seen as a competition of memorial practices, but 24 In the translation, the ellipsis appears at the end of the sentence, unlike in the French. 25 Michael Rothberg, “Hidden Children: The Ethics of Multigenerational Memory after 1961,” in Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust

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rather as a correction of an omission and a linking of two instances of resistance. Laila Amine, however, notes the specific medium of the correction and argues that “[b]y deploying graffiti, Sebbar calls attention to forms of representation deemed illicit and illegitimate. […] [G]raffiti represents unequal access to the public sphere and a tenacious collective desire to publicize conflicting stories of the past.”26 While the first plaque shows the French as the ones who resist, they are identified by Omer as the occupier: “In addition to drawing attention to French national amnesia surrounding the Algerian War,” Kathryn Jones writes, “these red counter-memorials maintain that French history is indeed a colonial history.”27 Omer will keep going around the city appending these necessary reminders – always in red. The color red keeps appearing in the text not only as a new memorial but also to “remin[d] the Parisian passersby of where Algerians’ blood covered cobblestones and where the police hurled the unconscious bodies of peaceful Algerian demonstrators into the Seine.”28 What I would like to draw our attention to is that the question of these “stains” is linked to that of knowledge – to something that needs to be known but is not, or something that is known, but from which one looks away. As a text of postmemory, of impossible transgenerational communication, the novel famously opens with Amel’s lack of knowledge, with the statement that there is something that has not been said: “Her mother said nothing to her, nor did her mother’s mother” (1) [“Sa mère ne lui a rien dit ni la mère de sa mère”] (9). In order to remedy this lack of transmission – or what Chadia Chambers-Samadi calls “a confiscated memory” [“la mémoire confisquée”]29 – Amel will find her answers elsewhere, particularly through her friendship with Omer and Louis: watching Louis’s documentary about these events and walking through Paris retracing sites of memory with Omer. During one of their stops on the walking tour, Amel, watching Omer read an Algerian newspaper, explains to him that, while she has yet to go to Algeria, she knows the names of many cities that are sites in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), 299; emphasis in the original. 26 Laila Amine, Postcolonial Paris: Fictions of Intimacy in the City of Light (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2018), 160. 27 Kathryn Jones, “Sites of Memory: Leïla Sebbar’s Journeys of Remembrance,” Dalhousie French Studies 93 (2010): 46. 28 Amine, Postcolonial Paris, 147. 29 Chambers-Samadi, Répression des manifestants algériens, 147.

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of massacre. In a short dialogue between them, we see the link being established between what could be called red “stains” and knowledge: “I have a map of Algeria in my room. I stick in red pins to mark the massacres …” “Why?” “To know about them.” “And what else do you learn from the pins?” “I’m learning terrorist geography.” “And you believe you understand more that way, that you understand who is doing the killing, and the reason why? Just by placing a needle on the names?” (25) [“Dans ma chambre, j’ai une carte de l’Algérie. Je mets une épingle rouge pour marquer les massacres…” “Pour quoi faire?” “Pour savoir.” Et qu’est-ce que tu sais de plus avec tes épingles?” “Je sais la géographie terroriste.” “Et tu crois que tu comprends mieux comme ça. Qui tue, pourquoi. Ça suffit de planter une aiguille sur des noms?”] (30)

Of course, these pins are not literal stains, but they are also more than just pins: their red color, which is specifically noted, draws our attention back to the title of the novel. The fact that Amel marks massacres in Algeria is clearly stated as a desire for knowledge. She could even be said to (over)compensate – through her knowledge of terrorist geography in contemporary Algeria (something that Omer experienced personally) and her lack of knowledge about her family’s history around 17 October 1961. The red-pinned map of known and reported massacres in Algeria calls the reader’s attention to the sites of massacre in Paris that have long been silenced – the sites Amel will visit with Omer. Readers can wonder whether these red pins should not rather – or also – adorn the mental map of Paris we all have, with the (red) Seine cutting through it. The reoccurrence – or perhaps the slow buildup of the haunting – of the color red continues with the recollection of Noria, Amel’s mother, who has not discussed anything with her daughter directly. She decides to participate in Louis’s documentary and recounts her childhood memories around the events – she is part of what Susan Rubin Suleiman calls the “1.5 generation,”30 too young at the time to fully grasp the events she was living through. One day in October, before the peaceful protest against the curfew, the mother’s uncle, who was a member of a political organization fighting for the independence of Algeria, is killed by a rival group. The mother thus recalls seeing her uncle’s body: “I 30 Susan Rubin Suleiman, “The 1.5 Generation: Thinking about Child Survivors and the Holocaust,” American Imago 59, no. 3 (2002): 277–95.

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recognized his red fez. He never took it off. […] Blood had spilled into a muddy hollow; it was brown and red. I stared at it so I wouldn’t have to look at the cadaver riddled with bullets” (28) [“Je l’ai reconnu à sa calotte rouge. Il ne l’enlevait jamais […] Du sang s’était répandu dans un creux boueux, brun et rouge, je l’ai regardé, fixement, pour ne pas voir le cadavre criblé de balles”] (33). Looking at the small pool of blood – a stain of sorts – becomes a way not to focus on the dead body: a way not to see, a way to refuse a traumatic knowledge. However, not only is this refusal impossible, it is also already a prefiguration, an anticipation of events to come. While the calotte rouge signifies recognition, familiarity, memories of being together as a family, the creux boueux, brun et rouge already calls to the muddy bloodied waters of the Seine.31 In the oblique look (I would even venture to say the untimely look) of Noria, who stares at the puddle in order not to see her uncle’s dead body, as readers we see and are already haunted by the murders we know are still to come. We also find in Noria’s recollections the importance of knowledge and the role of reading maps as a way to supplement what is not understood or explained. As Amel marks the geography of massacres onto her own map, she echoes her mother, who tried to understand the word “pacifique” [“peaceful”] by looking at the blue of the Pacific ocean: “several times he repeated ‘peaceful.’ I didn’t know why he used that word, and said it three times. On the blue part of the world map I had read PACIFIC. I didn’t ask any questions” (42) [“il a répété plusieurs fois ‘pacifique’. Je savais pas pourquoi il employait ce mot-là, et à trois reprises. Sur la carte du monde, j’avais lu sur le bleu: PACIFIQUE. J’ai pas posé de question”] (45). Once again the lack of knowledge, this time from Amel’s mother, is associated with a color – a blue that, to the mother, indicates the ocean and, as such, makes absolutely no sense in the context of the planning of a march. This color blue also recurs in the novel: the memories of the uncle’s red hat are later juxtaposed to the reality of the existence of “‘blue caps,’ collaborators … they’re worse than the French police” (29) [“‘les calots bleus’, des collaborateurs … pires que la police française’”] (35). Later in the novel, observing with Amel a carousel close to the Place de la République featuring a blue donkey, Omer will associate these calots bleus with the stupidity of 31 See also the chapter, “Octobre 1961. La patronne du café La Goutte d’or. Barbès” (56–57). [October 1961. The Owner of the Goutte d’Or Café. Barbès] (52–53).

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donkeys: “‘It’s a donkey from home’ […] ‘Yeah, our donkeys are blue’” (50) [“‘C’est un âne de chez nous’ […] ‘Oui, les ânes de chez nous sont bleus’”] (54). The red enters into tension with the blue of collaboration – the blue often associated with France, the blue found on the famous Concorde metro station tiles, another of these sites of erased memory.32 Indeed, as Chambers-Samadi reminds us, in response to protests in the colonies, “the repression of civilians” by the French state is also called “Pacifications,”33 pointing to the threat embedded in the word “pacifique” when used as a euphemism: the state of “peace” reached through violent repression.34 I would like to draw our attention further to a few moments during which the very possibility of the color red comes into question. I am interested here in how one color – the color red – prefigures and comes back to haunt stories as the sign of something that is not certain and at the same time not possible to ignore or forget. The question of whether one can tell the color of the Seine points to a larger concern about the concealed nature of an event that has certainly happened. There are three instances – four, in fact, if one counts the title of the novel – in which we find a version of the sentence “the Seine was red” [“la Seine était rouge”]. However, even though each time the sentence is pronounced the words “sure” [“sûr”] or “surely” [“sûrement”] are attached, it turns out that no one has actually seen the color – it is assumed. From the moment that Noria watches the brown and red stain in order not to see the corpse of her uncle, we are already seeing what will happen in the Seine, as well as in all the other instances of seeing and not seeing. In the short chapter “October 1961. The Algerian Rescued from the Water” (45) [“Octobre 1961. L’Algérien sauvé des eaux”] (48), we can see at once this man’s hesitation and his certainty about the color of the water: “Surely, the Seine was red that day; at night you couldn’t tell. […] I don’t understand. They were dragged away, tied up, and after several blows to the head, tossed into the Seine? Or were there three bullets?” 32 See page 67. For a detailed analysis of the significance of this site for French history, as well as of the photographs taken by Elie Kagan at Concorde, which are referenced in Sebbar’s novel, see Rothberg, “Hidden Children,” 300–07; Kagan is one of the people to whom Sebbar dedicates the novel. 33 Chambers-Samadi, Répression des manifestants algériens, 7. 34 “In later use sometimes euphemistic: the action or process of securing the cooperation or surrender of a population through military force or other forms of coercion.” See “pacification” (1), Oxford English Dictionary Online. https://oed. com/.

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(45) [“Sûrement la Seine était rouge ce jour-là, de nuit on ne voyait pas. On a repêché des Algériens […] Je comprends pas. On les a enlevés, on les a ligotés et après des coups à la tête on les a jetés dans la Seine? Ou avec trois balles?”] (48). This uncertain certainty about the color of the Seine parallels his inability to understand how it all even took place. Twice more will we have this back and forth. In the chapter “October 17, 1961. The Bookseller of Rue Saint-Séverin” [“17 October 1961. Le libraire de la rue Saint-Séverin”], we read the following testimony: “Surely at the Saint-Michel Bridge, the Seine was red. I didn’t see the color” (96) [“Sûrement au pont Saint-Michel, la Seine était rouge. J’ai pas vu sa couleur”] (93). In the final appearance of this doubtless uncertainty, in the chapter “October 1961. The Cop at Clichy” [“Octobre 1961. Le flic de Clichy”], we read: I saw cops shoot Algerians and toss them over the bridge into the Seine. I saw this; there were several of them. I couldn’t intervene. I was too far away, and it happened too quickly. Some cops have blood on their hands, that’s for sure, and it’s Algerian blood. I’m clear about that. I saw blood on the bridge parapet … It wasn’t pig’s blood … It was Arab’s blood. At that spot the Seine was red, I’m sure. Even though the visibility was poor and it was dark and rainy. I’m going to testify. (108) [j’ai vu des policiers tirer sur des Algériens et les jeter par-dessus le pont dans la Seine, je les ai vus, ils étaient à plusieurs. Je pouvais pas intervenir, j’étais trop loin, ça s’est passé très vite. Des policiers ont du sang sur les mains, c’est sûr, du sang algérien, je suis formel. J’ai vu du sang sur le parapet du pont … c’était pas du sang de poulet … c’était du sang d’Arabe. La Seine, à cet endroit était rouge, je suis sûr, même si on voyait mal, il faisait nuit, il pleuvait. Je témoigne.] (100)

This man repeats several times that he saw violence, that he is certain, that he is convinced of it. Yet at the end he also admits that it was hard to see. We have here three different testimonies encompassing three different perspectives: an Algerian who is targeted by violence, a French bystander, and a French policeman. Yet all three employ the same haunting sentence that inscribes both certainty and doubt as to the color of the river; in addition, all point to the lack of visibility, to the weather, to the darkness. Yet, as victims or witnesses, they have knowledge of the event, they have seen or experienced the massacre firsthand. But, despite this lack of certainty of the color of the Seine at night, the brown and red puddle that Noria looked at gives us the certainty that we may be lacking – we are already haunted by the creux boueux, brun et rouge, the undeniable bloodshed that the massacre confirms.

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Shifting Positions (Adimi) By the time Kaouther Adimi’s novel Nos richesses [Our Riches] is published in 2017 (almost two decades after Sebbar’s), the memory of 17 October 1961 has been the subject of many books, films, and scholarly studies.35 While Adimi’s novel is concerned with the life and legacy of Edmond Charlot (as we have seen in Chapter 4), interspersed throughout its pages are short reflections on Algerian history during the time of French colonization. The events of that fateful October day only occupy two and a half pages of about 200, but, given the more robust awareness of the massacre, following the relative paucity of information (even into the early 1990s), the assumption is that readers will already have some knowledge or that there will be information to find if they look it up. Of note: in the imagined entries of Charlot’s journal, who is in Algiers at the time and perhaps not yet aware of the events, there are no entries between 12 October and 19 October (the latter date is also the last journal entry given) – it can also signify a blank space symbolizing the silence around the events. While short, this chapter echoes the other five historical chapters,36 and together they form a productive nexus of meaning. Even if the “stains” in this text are not always literal, from the onset of the novel we are reminded (even if it is through an injunction to forget) that “the roads are drenched with red, a red that has not been washed away, and every day our steps sink into it a little deeper” (4) [“les chemins sont imbibés de rouge, que ce rouge n’a pas été lavé et que chaque jour, nos pas s’y enfoncent un peu plus”] (10). Everything we read – but especially the historical chapters – is stained. In the very first, short chapter, “Algeria, 1930,” a group of men are looking at the front page of the Petit Journal celebrating the centenary of French colonization (a cover that reinscribes the lies told about the benefits of the colonial 35 Brozgal notes that “the amount of information available about October 17 on the internet has multiplied exponentially in the last 15 years: When I first attempted to Google the event in 2005, it had almost no web presence at all. Today, for what it is worth, a search for ‘17 octobre 1961’ yields about 1,730,000 results. However imperfect it may be to invoke internet search results as ‘evidence,’ the obvious change over time cannot be summarily dismissed.” Brozgal, Absent the Archive, 312. 36 The chapters are titled as follows: “Algeria, 1930” [“Algérie, 1930”]; “Algiers, 1939” [“Alger, 1939”]; “Germany, 1940” [“Allemagne, 1940”]; “Sétif, May 1945” [“Sétif, mai 1945”]; “Algeria, 1954” [“Algérie, 1954”]; “Paris, 1961.”

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enterprise): “Algeria: French For a Hundred Years” (13; capitalization removed) [“Depuis Cent Ans L’Algérie Est Française”] (25; capitalization removed). The men share their views with each other, and the pronoun “we” [“nous”] sets the rhythm for their conversation: “This is our home, our land” (14) [“Ici, c’est chez nous!”] (26); “We are the natives, the Muslims, the Arabs” (14) [“Nous sommes les indigènes, les musulmans, les Arabes”] (26). Over the remaining historical chapters, the alternation between the “nous” of the Algerians and the “on” of the French (although lost in the English passive voice) will keep underlining the power relations between the colonizer and those whom they colonized and who are fighting for their independence: “Most of us are infantry, cannon fodder. We are obliged to fight for a country that we don’t really belong to” (58) [“Nous sommes surtout des tirailleurs, de la chair à canon. On nous impose de combattre pour une nation dont nous ne faisons pas vraiment partie”] (90). While by no means literal stains, the shifting of pronouns and the use of the ambiguous pronoun “on,” highlight, in my reading, the denial by the French of a violent history of colonization and colonialism, and its calling out by the Algerians; in this way, the pronoun “on,” in particular, could be seen as a symbolic stain as well as a literal haunting in its shifting of subject positions. During the celebration of the Liberation in May 1945 in the Algerian towns of Sétif and Guelma, we see that the demands for equality and for independence prefigure the peaceful protest of October 1961 (and its repression). Discussing the eight novels published in France in 2017 that speak of the relationship between France and Algeria (from colonization to the war and beyond), Claude Collin explains that the events of Sétif are mentioned “in practically all the books.” For Collin, they represent “for the history of Algeria, a rupture, a break, a wound which will not heal again and which almost constitutes, before November 1, 1954, the beginning of what will eventually be called the Algerian War.”37 In Adimi’s novel, the celebration is thus described: “For the first time, in the middle of the crowd, the green-and-white flag with its red symbols appears. We raise banners demanding equality with the French, the release of our political prisoners, and the independence of Algeria” (84) [“Au milieu de la foule apparaît pour la première fois le drapeau vert et blanc aux symboles rouges. Nous soulevons des banderoles où nous réclamons l’égalité avec les Français, la libération de nos prisonniers 37 Claude Collin, “Guerre d’Algérie: Des mémoires apaisées?” Guerres mondiales et conflits contemporains 276, no. 4 (2019): 133–34.

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politiques et l’indépendance de l’Algérie”] (128). It is notable that the red star and crescent on the flag are not explicitly named, but rather lumped together as red symbols, perhaps a reminder of this red blood that is said to cover the streets at the beginning of the novel. Chadia Chambers-Samadi actually begins her book on 17 October 1961, with the reminder of “the pacifications” that happened in these towns (and in countries such as Tunisia and Morocco) in 1945.38 Adimi’s novel uses the pronouns “on” [they] and the passive voice to signify the actions of the French or the actions that they force Algerians to take: “they shoot at us […] The army arrests and executes thousands of Arabs. Arms are distributed to French civilians, who search and destroy whole villages. Pavements run with blood. Corpses are dumped in wells. At Heliopolis, they fire up the lime kilns to dispose of the troublesome bodies” (84) [“on nous tire dessus. […] L’armée arrête et fusille des milliers d’indigènes. On arme des colons qui ratissent et détruisent des villages entiers. Les trottoirs sont rouges de sang. Des cadavres sont jetés dans des puits. À Héliopolis, on allume les fours à chaux pour brûler les morts encombrants”] (128–29). Once again, the responsibility for the massacre and the repression from the French army are left indistinct or ambiguous linguistically; yet the streets are red with blood. As we will see in the chapter of the novel that focuses specifically on that October night in 1961, the violence against the protesters will be matched by their violent ejection from the subject position “nous” [we]. Unlike the rest of the novel, this short chapter retelling the events of 17 October is made up of fragmented short sentences meant to mirror the rapidly increasing violence of the day. In my view, this chapter constitutes, in its formal brutality, the most striking passage of the book. It starts as other chapters do, with the narrating “nous,” this time marching: “Together, we march to protest against the curfew arbitrarily imposed on Algerians in France” (125) [“Ensemble, nous marchons pour protester contre le couvre-feu arbitraire imposé aux Algériens de France”] (191). However, in the next paragraph, the Algerians are forcefully ejected from the subject position “we” [“nous”] – which becomes occupied by the nous and possessive “our” [“nos”] of the police and of the French – turning the Algerians into “Those Arabs” (125) [“Ces Arabes”] (191) and reducing them to the direct object pronoun “them” [“les”]: “Beat them. Slaughter them. Rub them out. Send them flying. […] Slaughter these people who have no right to be here in Paris, by the Seine, among our monuments, our 38 Chambers-Samadi, Répression des manifestants algériens, 7.

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trees, our women. Slaughter them. Beat them. Throw them in the river” (125) [“Les tabasser. Les massacrer. Les réduire à néant. […] Massacrer ces gens qui n’ont rien à faire à Paris, devant la Seine, devant nos monuments, devant nos arbres, devant nos femmes. Les massacrer. Les tabasser. Les jeter dans l’eau”] (191). The next two pages are filled with short fragments that make this violence visible textually. The narrative becomes wrought, dislocated, the verbs are in the infinitive, time stands still, anchored on a specific date. As the violence escalates, the possessive nous of the French that we saw earlier morphs into the indistinct on again (something that disappears in the English translation): “We hit, we unleash the dogs. […] We pack them into police vans. […] We throw stones. We drown them. For a whole month after, bodies will be pulled from the water […] Hands raised. Arrested. Beaten” (126) [“On cogne, on lâche les chiens. […] On les embarque dans des cars de police. […] On jette des pierres. On noie. Tout au long du mois, on repêchera des corps […] Mains levées. On les arrête. On les frappe”] (192). The on, because of both its generality and impersonality, figures here as a textual and symbolic marker of French refusal to take ownership and responsibility. As Robert Harvey has noted, the pronoun “on” (seen in the use of l’on), derives from a noun: “It’s the ancient form of l’homme, meaning the species or […] Everyman.”39 Here the French are hiding behind a “universality” of this pronoun – even more striking when one thinks of what French universalist ideology has stood for, condoned, enabled, perpetrated.40 The diffuse pronoun lets individuals off the hook, facilitating forgetting, denial, and even claims of lack of agency. This “insidious pronoun on”41 is one of the stains that has not and cannot be washed clean, its red color staining the streets of Paris and the Seine, and echoing the red roads of Algiers, of Sétif, of Guelma (and countless other cities). The hammering repetition of this “on” could be qualified as haunting, it should make readers uneasy because we have a certain knowledge that asks for our involvement in translating or parsing this “on,” in recognizing that what 39 Robert Harvey, Witnessness: Beckett, Dante, Levi and the Foundations of Responsibility (New York: Continuum, 2010), 5. 40 For a discussion of the history of universalism, its legacies, and the possibilities of creating a postcolonial universalism, see Julien Suaudeau and Mame-Fatou Niang, Universalisme (Paris: Anamosa, 2022), particularly pages 15–44, 76–84. 41 To use Debarati Sanyal’s description of Renais’s Night and Fog. Sanyal, Memory and Complicity, 191.

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French officials have long denied, that is French responsibility for this massacre and its subsequent attempted erasure. Yet, at the end of the day, “[n]ight has fallen. Windows open. With heads full of rage and bodies spent, we let out heartrending ululations. A last salute to our dead” (126) [“la nuit est tombée. Des fenêtres s’ouvrent. La tête pleine de colère, le corps épuisé, nous poussons des youyous déchirants. Ultime salut à nos morts”]; the subject position “nous” [we] returns to the Algerians at the moment of mourning – and it perhaps calls forth to the end of the war, as well as the independence that will be gained.42 By linking the events of 1930 and 1945 to 1961 (and 1940 and 1954) through the adoption of shifting pronouns, Adimi highlights the French legacy of denial of violence. While, for Sebbar, the emphasis placed on the color red shows the difficulties of transmitting memory and knowledge all the while anticipating the violence to come, in Adimi’s novel, the (ghostly) ambiguity of the pronoun “on” forces readers to move across time, to experience the violence within the text, and to actively correct the passive voice and the impersonal “on.” Shifting back to a more literal understanding of stains in the next section, it is important to keep in mind how readers’ active participation in the parsing of memories can lead to a type of haunting. Stained Memories (Faye) While testimonies of survivors were published in the years following the genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda,43 which occurred between April and July 1994, they are few and far between. Writing in 2018, Catherine Gilbert notes that “only seventeen Rwandan women – and far fewer men – have published testimonies to date”; and, with a few exceptions, “almost all the Rwandan women to have published testimonies were living in exile in the West, and their testimonies 42 The chapter nevertheless ends with yet another failure of transmission when the younger generation leaves Algeria to go to France and is shown as having, in turn, forgotten these memories: “Many years later, our grandparents will see us leaving the country to cross the sea, and they will tell us to be careful: ‘The French are hard.’ And we will not understand because we will have forgotten.” Adimi, Our Riches, 127; Adimi, Nos richesses, 194. 43 For archives and testimonies, see also Genocide Archive of Rwanda, last modified 15 March 2016. https://genocidearchiverwanda.org.rw/.

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have been published in their countries of residence (France, Belgium, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States) and seem to be targeting a predominantly Western audience.”44 By contrast, quite a few novels and texts were written by authors who did not have a personal connection to the events. One commemorative project in particular stands out for its impact on contemporary literature in French: “Rwanda: Écrire par devoir de mémoire” [Rwanda: Writing by Duty of Memory].45 Invited for a residency in Rwanda in 1998, a group of writers coming from various African countries (both Englishand French-speaking) published individual works with their respective publishing houses, rather than a collective anthology;46 well-known authors such as Véronique Tadjo (Ivory Coast) and Boubacar Boris Diop (Senegal) were amongst them.47 Despite the criticism leveled at some aspects of the project, as Odile M. Cazenave and Patricia Célérier remark, it certainly “expand[ed] the representational system and the textual strategies hitherto essentially defined by Holocaust literature.”48 Discussing the book culture in post-1994 Rwanda, Nicki Hitchcott notes: “[t]he dominance of the ‘Ecrire par devoir de mémoire’ texts in genocide fiction,”49 available at various bookstore in Rwanda twenty years after the genocide when texts by Rwandan authors are often not stocked, save for a few exceptions, like Scholastique Mukasonga, published by French powerhouse Gallimard. Following the “surprise” announcement that her novel Notre-Dame du Nil [Our Lady of the Nile] (2012) had won the Prix Renaudot, Mukasonga finally became a recognizable name in French literary circles;50 in the autobiographical Inyenzi ou les Cafards 44 Catherine Gilbert, From Surviving to Living: Voice, Trauma and Witness in Rwandan Women’s Writing (Montpellier: Presses universitaires de la Méditerranée, 2018), 26, 28. 45 For a detailed account of the project, as well as comparative readings, see Anna-Marie de Beer, Sharing the Burden of Stories from the Tutsi Genocide. Rwanda: écrire par devoir de mémoire (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020). For an overview, see Odile M. Cazenave and Patricia Célérier, “The Practice of Memory,” in Contemporary Francophone African Writers and the Burden of Commitment (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2011), 82–96; Hitchcott, Rwanda Genocide Stories, 55–79. 46 Cazenave and Célérier, “The Practice of Memory,” 84. 47 Beer, Sharing the Burden of Stories from the Tutsi Genocide, 5. 48 Cazenave and Célérier, “The Practice of Memory,” 95–96. 49 Hitchcott, Rwanda Genocide Stories, 33. 50 Hitchcott writes of the “‘surprise générale’ [widespread surprise]” at the

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[Cockroaches] (2006), Mukasonga had related her return to Rwanda after the genocide – she was living in France at the time – during which thirty-seven members of her family were killed.51 In 2016, another “surprise” of the French rentrée littéraire came from Gaël Faye’s debut novel, Petit Pays [Small Country], published to great acclaim and notably winning the Prix Goncourt des Lycéens.52 The novel, which recounts the childhood of Gabriel, a young boy who grows up in a small impasse in Bujumbura, Burundi, in the early 1990s, was adapted into a film in 2020 by Éric Barbier. Faye was already known in France for his music career; a part of his album Pili Pili sur un croissant au beurre [Pili Pili on a butter croissant] (2013), the track titled “Petit Pays” evokes some of the themes explored in the novel.53 Given the place and time frame of the story, as well as his own background (growing up in Burundi; Rwandan mother; French father), it seems as if Faye almost has to start his book by acknowledging where he writes from, what is at stake – perhaps even by playing up to readers’ expectations.54 Recalling in an interview with Céline Gahungu the genesis of the novel, announcement that Mukasonga had won the Prix Renaudot. Hitchcott, Rwanda Genocide Stories, 29; see also 52. 51 “Biographie de Scholastique Mukasonga, écrivaine rwandaise,” Scholastique Mukasonga official site. https://scholastiquemukasonga.net/fr/bio/. For a discussion of Mukasonga as “a witness presented as a survivor” in the media, by her publisher, see also Hitchcott, Rwanda Genocide Stories, 91, 121–22. Gilbert remarks that “She is in fact a ‘survivor’ of previous episodes of violence, which forced her into exile, and also in the sense that she ‘survived’ her numerous family members who were killed. Yet she bears witness to the genocide itself as an outside observer or secondary witness.” Gilbert, From Surviving to Living, 64. 52 Faye’s novel was one of four finalists for the Prix Goncourt, losing out to Leïla Slimani’s Chanson douce, another bestseller and critical darling of the 2016 rentrée littéraire. Both novels are labeled as “surprises” in the media. 53 For more on the links between the novel and the album, see Florian Alix, “Gaël Faye: Petit Pays,” Afrique contemporaine 257, no. 1 (2016): 147. The song was written in the context of the yearly commemorations of the genocide taking place in Paris, as is pointed out in Céline Gahungu, “Les Tempos de l’écriture – Gaël Faye,” Continents manuscrits (15 March 2018): 3. http://journals.openedition. org/coma/1145. For a discussion of Faye’s music career and activism in the context of the commemorations of the genocide, see Chapter 3 of Anne Goullaud Mueller, “Memorializing the Genocide of the Tutsi through Literature, Song, and Performance,” PhD dissertation, University of California Los Angeles, 2016. 54 Faye indeed recalls readers’ eagerness to find out which parts of his book were autobiographical. See Gahungu, “Les Tempos de l’écriture,” 6–7.

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Faye explains that he initially did not want to write about war or the genocide, citing that it is exactly what one expects, in France, when reading a book about Africa (or Burundi and Rwanda, in this case); he was rather interested in “writing a novel, in Africa, in which nothing is happening” [“écrire un roman, en Afrique, où il ne se passe rien”].55 A good portion of the story is indeed rather banal: Gabriel and his friends engage in the activities of children such as biking, swimming, and playing. By focusing, in this section, on the question of stains, I am only looking at a very small portion of the text that is dealing with the genocide, and, as such, I am reading this novel exactly how Faye did not intend for it to be read. I contend, however, that as much as it is in fact a story in which very little is happening – a relatively happy childhood that is most disrupted by the separation of Gabriel’s parents – both the reader’s and the narrator’s knowledge of the genocide (the novel is a reminiscence of the adult narrator’s childhood) direct – and, in a sense, haunt – the reading; by haunting, I mean something other than a diffuse sense of dread fueled by the knowledge that the genocide will take place (although that is present as well). Gabriel indeed opens his narration in the prologue with a scene in which his father, Michel, explains to him and his sister Ana that in Burundi, where they live, as well as in the neighboring country of Rwanda, there are three ethnicities (Hutu, Tutsi, Twa).56 When prompted for more information, Michel points out that each ethnicity can be deduced from a person’s physical characteristics: specifically the type of nose – following a made-up grouping carried over from colonial rule.57 As Paul Rutayisire explains, “[there is] a close link that connects 55 Gahungu, “Les Tempos de l’écriture,” 6. 56 For a discussion of how these ethnicities were constructed, based on ideas about race that originated in French thought, and the debates surrounding these categorizations, see Mahmood Mamdani, “The Origins of Hutu and Tutsi” and “The Racialization of the Hutu/Tutsi Difference under Colonialism,” in When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 58–92, 93–119. See also Bennett Collins, Meghan C. Laws, and Richard Ntakirutimana, “Becoming ‘Historically Marginalized Peoples’: Examining Twa Perceptions of Boundary Shifting and Re-Categorization in Post-Genocide Rwanda,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 44, no. 4 (2021): 578–80. 57 In his interview with Gahungu, Faye notes that this episode is part of a short story that was later integrated in the novel: “Small Country started with a short story I wrote, ‘The Nose,’ and the idea of a child that would evoke, in a quirky way

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the genocide and the transformation of traditional collective memory brought about by the missionary project [of the Catholic church]. The missionary discourse, through its stereotypes, its ideology and its myths, has created a new memory/identity which remains problematic.”58 Petit Pays plays with the absurdity of these classifications; as Zoe Norridge puts it, “[w]ith brilliant comic timing, the children realize that the parental explanation doesn’t hold water – noses don’t seem to be a reliable predictor of anything.”59 This scene allows Gabriel to position his narration within the shadow of this historical context and to explain how “[t]he atmosphere was becoming stranger by the day” (2) [“Cette étrange atmosphère [qui] enflait de jour en jour”] (11). While the bulk of the novel takes place within the confines of the family home in Bujumbura and the neighborhood where Gabriel grows up, France and Rwanda also feature as prominent affective locations, albeit for different reasons. France, the country of origin of Gabriel’s father, figures first and foremost as the place of exile. The second part of the prologue, separated by a blank page and marked by the use of italics, rather than continuing chronologically with the story, jumps both forward and back. The first sentence, repeated a few paragraphs later, positions Gabriel as an outsider, as someone who is far away and wants to come back, and in its English translation this process is qualified as a haunting: “I am haunted by the idea of returning” (4) [“Il m’obsède, ce retour”] (13). France is but a sliver of the narration, although temporally it actually makes up a significant part of Gabriel’s trajectory from young child to adult.60 France is also described, from the point of view of Gabriel’s mother, as an imagined promise of refuge and safety. For Yvonne, born in Rwanda and forced to escape in 1963 with her family at the age of four “during a night of massacres” (13) [“pendant une nuit de massacre”] (25), the experience of growing up a Tutsi refugee in Burundi is what makes her yearn for a different life for her children. She remarks early on in the novel (before being cut off [de manière décalée], ethnicity, prejudices, and the Great Lakes region.” Gahungu, “Les Tempos de l’écriture,” 8. 58 Paul Rutayisire, “Le Remodelage de l’espace culturel rwandais par l’Église et la colonisation,” Revue d’Histoire de la Shoah 190, no. 1 (2009): 101. 59 Zoe Norridge, “‘Papaoutai’? Family Memory, Parental Loss and Rwandan Artists Today,” Memory Studies 14, no. 2 (2019): 13. 60 Faye also explains that, in the early version of the novel, there were alternating timelines: Gabriel as a young boy and Gabriel as an adult. Gahungu, “Les Tempos de l’écriture,” 3.

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by Michel): “I want the security I never had, the comfort of raising my children in a country where I’m not afraid of dying just because I’m –”(16) [“Moi je cherche la sécurité que je n’ai jamais eue, le confort d’élever mes enfants dans un pays où l’on ne craint pas de mourir parce qu’on est …”] (30). While her fears are dismissed by Michel, who in his many explanations is espousing a Eurocentric and neocolonialist view of the region – close to that of his Belgian friend Jacques – readers of the novel know what is about to take place in Rwanda and are aware that she is absolutely correct to be weary and afraid; in fact, Yvonne will lose her closest family members during the genocide.61 While, for Gabriel, France is the place where he landed, it is definitely not home: “I’m passing through. I rent. I crash. I squat” (3) [“Je ne fais que passer. Je loge. Je crèche. Je squatte”] (13). There is the sense that a return is necessary, that this obsession, this haunting can only be assuaged if he indeed goes back to the place where he grew up. Gabriel’s relationship to Rwanda is even more fraught. As Norridge remarks, “[i]f Rwanda forms one of three points of origin [alongside Burundi and France] for Faye and Gabriel, it is a Rwanda primarily constructed through the sharing of family memories.”62 Even Yvonne, at the beginning of the novel, has yet to return. Her own memories of her country are mediated by her family and also constructed by the way she is seen as a refugee in Burundi. Indeed, “[m]any parents of Rwandans who were children in 1994, at home and in the diaspora, had already witnessed mass violence.”63 Gabriel’s mother Yvonne, like Mukasonga, whose novels turn time and again to the genocide as well as earlier instances of violence, is of that very generation.64 Having fled Rwanda, and with an identity tied up with the country’s violent history, Yvonne sees herself as a refugee despite having arrived in Burundi at a very young age: “I’m a refugee. […] And I always have been, in Burundian eyes. They make it very clear, with their insults and insinuations, their quotas for foreigners and restricted intakes in schools” (16) [“Je suis une 61 At the end of the novel, Yvonne’s fears are warranted, and we actually find out that Michel is killed a few days following his children’s departure for France (218). 62 Norridge, “‘Papaoutai’?,” 13. 63 Norridge, “‘Papaoutai’?,” 2. For a detailed account of these various histories of violence in Rwanda, see 2–3. 64 For a discussion of Mukasonga’s testimonial writing, see Gilbert, From Surviving to Living, 64–71, 75–79; Hitchcott, Rwanda Genocide Stories, 52, 121–22.

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réfugiée. […] C’est ce que j’ai toujours été aux yeux des Burundais. Ils me l’ont bien fait comprendre avec leurs insultes, leurs insinuations, leurs quotas pour les étrangers, et leur numerus clausus à l’école”] (29). At bottom, Petit Pays is a story of exile, but, as Gabriel puts it at the end of the narrative, the exile is not only spatial, but also, in a sense, temporal: “The memories projected onto what is before my eyes are futile. I used to think I was exiled from my country. But, in retracing the steps of my past, I have understood that I was exiled from my childhood. Which seems so much crueler” (179) [“Mes souvenirs se superposent inutilement à ce que j’ai devant les yeux. Je pensais être exilé de mon pays. En revenant sur les traces de mon passé, j’ai compris que je l’étais de mon enfance. Ce qui me paraît bien plus cruel encore”] (216). The same can be said of his mother, and it is on her presence in the text that I want to focus in the pages that follow. Norridge, in her analysis of testimonies of those who were children during the genocide, examines the effects of this displacement on the structuring of these memories: “For Rwandans who survived as children, their lives before genocide were much shorter than adult survivors, their memories necessarily incomplete and unformed.”65 She explains that this is mirrored in the very way that their testimonies are constructed, in which “[t]he weight of the genocide tends to displace memories of before, the overwhelming legacy of loss is much greater than the memory of parental presence.”66 By contrast, Faye’s novel aims to give space to the memory of childhood; the memories that are often displaced by the memories of traumatic events. In fact, Faye long resisted what he perceived as French readers’ desire to read about the genocide and violence. However, the novel is written in the aftermath of the 2015 Charlie Hebdo attack, and Faye, at the time living in Paris, is very aware of this contemporary moment. Even if it does not explicitly appear in the novel, he finds some parallels, notably in how one can be cut off or shielded from what takes place in other parts of the world: “I realized that people here live in a cul-de-sac, like Gaby. The violence of the world does not exist and, when it occurs, we are surprised and we ask ourselves questions.” [“je me suis dit que les gens, ici, vivent comme dans une impasse, à l’image de Gaby. La violence du monde n’existe pas et, lorsqu’elle arrive, on est étonné et on se pose des questions”].67 65 Norridge, “‘Papaoutai’?,” 5. 66 Norridge, “‘Papaoutai’?,” 5. 67 Gahungu, “Les Tempos de l’écriture,” 5–6.

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In his mise en fiction of the genocide, Faye actually inverts this desire for the representation of horror and gives a greater weight to childhood memories. While, as he has repeatedly stated,68 the book is not a book about the genocide, it is, inescapably perhaps, written in its shadow. Florian Alix notes that “Gaël Faye does not represent the genocide or the civil war: by his own admission, ‘literature could not describe’ such horror. The narrator therefore only sees in fragments the extreme violence in question” [“Gaël Faye ne représente pas le génocide, ni la guerre civile: de son propre aveu, ‘la littérature ne pourrait pas décrire ’ une telle horreur. Le narrateur ne voit donc que par bribes les violences extrêmes dont il est question”].69 In the documentary Rwanda: le silence des mots [Rwanda: The Silence of Words] (2022), co-directed and narrated by Faye,70 he reads one of his texts titled “Bâillonner les poèmes” [“Muzzle the poems”], in which he calls out “those who look at themselves writing” [“Ceux qui se regardent écrire”] with flowery language and rhyme schemes and rather calls for “a silence of words” [“un silence de mots”].71 In this 68 Gahungu, “Les Tempos de l’écriture,” 5. 69 Florian Alix, “Gaël Faye: Petit Pays,” Afrique contemporaine 257, no. 1 (2016): 148–49. Alix quotes from the following interview with Faye: Catherine FruchonToussaint, “Gaël Faye: ‘Petit Pays n’est absolument pas mon histoire,’” RFI, 9 September 2016. www.rfi.fr/culture/20160908-gael-faye-petit-pays-absolumentpas-histoire. 70 Gaël Faye and Michaël Sztanke, Rwanda: Le silence des mots (Arte television documentary, 2022), available at www.youtube.com/watch?v=VCfjB7hiO-4. The documentary follows three women who survived the genocide and who retell of further violence and rape at the hands of French soldiers sent as part of the Opération Turquoise (the French Ministry of Armed Forces refused to go on record with a response in the documentary). For information about the operation, see Andrea L. Everett, “France in Rwanda,” in Humanitarian Hypocrisy: Civilian Protection and the Design of Peace Operations (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2018), 103–36. For testimony of an officer who participated in the Opération Turquoise, see Guillaume Ancel, Rwanda, la fin du silence. Témoignage d’un officier français (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2018). Interestingly, at the beginning of the documentary, Faye reads a quote from Diop’s Murambi, le livre des ossements (2000), written as part of the Écrire par devoir de mémoire project: “What happened in Rwanda is, whether you like it or not, a moment of French history in the twentieth century” (00:04:35–00:04:53). Translation taken from Boubacar Boris Diop, Murambi, The Book of Bones, trans. Fiona Mc Laughlin (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 128. 71 Faye and Sztanke, Rwanda (00:27:37–00:28:43). The poem was first published in 2014 in Africultures. Gaël Faye, “Le Silence des mots,” Africultures, 24 March

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poem we indeed hear detailed horrific descriptions of violence, while every stanza paradoxically repeats that it should not be written [“one does not write”] “on n’écrit pas” – and here, once again, the question of who “on” is should be of note. Although we could certainly read this poem in light of longstanding debates about the (un)representability of atrocities (as we have seen in previous chapters), this belief of his justifies, to my mind, the haunting that takes place in the text: for it is not about aesthetically pleasing (thus suspect) descriptions, but rather about transmission. Something needs to be remembered by the reader rather than aestheticized in lyrical descriptions by narrators or authors. The text itself is the site of haunting, the site of transmission, the possibility of being haunted by memories that are someone else’s – these can be apprehended through fragmented, disjointed glimpses and their prefigurations. I have endeavored throughout this book to think about how certain things (names, lists, objects, and photographs) can function as ghosts. As we have seen with both Sebbar and Adimi, the recurrence of stains (whether symbolic or not) speaks to the question of knowledge and responsibility. I want to consider, by focusing on the appearance of stains, the mechanisms of haunting in Faye’s novel. In 1993, around Christmas, we find out that Yvonne (with Ana and Gabriel in tow) will be heading back to Rwanda for the first time since 1963 (38). She is in Burundi as a refugee and the war is never far from them (65). Alphonse, Yvonne’s brother, had joined the Rwandan Patriotic Front [RFP] army, and Gabriel is trying to decipher what is not being said: “I sensed that the unspoken subject at table – the death of Alphonse – was as present as the flies Ana kept fishing out of the tomato sauce” (50) [“Je devinais ce qui ne se disait pas autour de la table, ce qui était aussi présent que les mouches qu’Ana retirait de la sauce tomate: la mort d’Alphonse”] (67). While Gabriel is mostly concerned with his friends, the stealing of his bike, and also what is happening to his parents’ relationship, History will inevitably catch up with him. While they – Gabriel, his sister, and mother – return to Bujumbura, the rest of Yvonne’s family stays put in Rwanda; a few months later, the killings beginning. Yvonne will have to wait for the end of the genocide for the possibility of going to Rwanda to find her family; she is unable to do anything for 2014. http://africultures.com/le-silence-des-mots-12132/. For a reading of this poem in the context of the commemorations of the genocide, see Mueller, “Memorializing the Genocide of the Tutsi through Literature, Song, and Performance,” 99–102.

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them and has to wait helplessly by the phone for news. This makes her feel guilty, like Nadia Dehr seen in the previous chapter, because, in her view, she failed to save a single person. She was a bystander to the disappearance of her people, of her family, and there was nothing she could do about it. She was losing the ground from under her feet and becoming distant from us, as well as from herself, eaten away at from the inside. (135) [Elle ne parvenait à sauver personne. Elle assistait à la disparition de son peuple, de sa famille sans rien pouvoir faire. Elle perdait pied, s’éloignait de nous et d’elle-même. Elle était rongée de l’intérieur.] (165)

Like Yvonne, the reader is not privy to the events that take place during the genocide: we have to wait alongside her for news of her family; we also only read about the aftermath – there is a lack of knowledge around which Gabriel writes. When Yvonne finally returns from Rwanda, following the genocide, and tells the story of her search for her relatives, one scene in particular encapsulates the horror. She explains her desire to remove blood stains found on the floor of her family’s residence, because, unlike traces that are welcomed (objects, photographs, etc.), the last traces of her family are literally human remains – they are the traces of murder. For Yvonne, these specific traces are the traces of violence, they need to be erased so that the living and the dead can be at peace. In the paragraph, we do not see the violence as it happens in the moment of the murders, yet what we see through the stains is meant to haunt the reader, to have an affective reaction to Yvonne’s words: But in the house there were still those four stains on the floor. Huge stains where they had lain for three months. I scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed with water and a sponge. But the stains wouldn’t go. There wasn’t enough water. […] I scraped the ground with my nails, but their skin and blood had soaked into the cement. […] And those three stains in the living room were Christelle, Christiane, and Christine. And the stain in the hall was Christian. […] So I scrubbed, I scrubbed those stains that will never go. They stayed there, in the cement, in the stone, they stayed … (160) [Mais dans la maison, il y avait toujours ces quatre taches sur le sol. Des grandes taches à l’endroit où ils étaient depuis trois mois. Avec de l’eau et une éponge, j’ai frotté, frotté, frotté. Mais les taches ne partaient pas. Il n’y avait pas assez d’eau. […] Je grattais le sol avec mes ongles, mais leur peau et leur sang avait pénétré le ciment. […] Et ces trois taches dans le salon, c’était Christelle, Christiane, Christine. Et cette tache

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dans le couloir, c’était Christian. […] Alors je frottais, je frottais ces taches qui ne partiront jamais. Elles sont restées dans le ciment, dans la pierre, elles sont …] (190–91)

This traumatic moment for Yvonne represents a rupture in her ability to function, and, after her return, she will constantly replay these memories by waking up her daughter Ana to tell her the story, resulting in the forced transmission of trauma: “She had woken her up to tell her the story of the stains on the ground all over again […] Every night, from then on, Maman insisted on exploring the land of nightmares with her daughter” (162) [“Elle l’avait réveillée pour lui raconter à nouveau l’histoire de taches sur le sol […] Chaque nuit, désormais, Maman lui demandait de parcourir avec elle ses contrées de cauchemar”] (192–93). This compulsion of retelling the story and trying to scrub these stains will not stop, as we will see; and this transmission of trauma has effects on the young Ana, who is shown drawing scenes of atrocities, presumably having created these memories from the stories her mother tells her (162). At this point, I would like to emphasize that, when Gabriel is retelling this story, he is retelling events that have already happened. The short prolepsis in the prologue reminds us that, narratologically speaking, Gabriel writes with the knowledge of the death of his family – it is a staple of most first-person narratives: they are written after the fact, not in the moment of living the event. Therefore, even though he is retelling the story chronologically, bringing us ever closer to the months of genocide, one can argue that the memory of the events is already present in the narration. While the reader may not understand or notice these details upon the first read as they are happening, when encountering the narrative for the second time, or when belatedly understanding the significance of a certain site or scene, I would posit that given scenes are haunted. Looking at the floor is no longer a gesture with no specific meaning – it is a gesture that carries with it another temporality. The juxtaposition of these two time frames is perceptible through a look that anticipates the murders of Yvonne’s loved ones. Gabriel is retelling his 1993 visit to Rwanda and recalling a discussion that took place in which time seems to be – if only for a brief moment – suspended: “‘Our families are living on borrowed time. Death is encircling us, soon it will swoop down and there’ll be no escape.’ Maman’s distress and bewilderment were visible as she glanced for confirmation from Aunt Eusébie, who stared bleakly at a spot on the floor” (114) [“‘Nos familles sont en sursis. La mort nous encercle, elle va bientôt s’abattre sur nous,

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alors nous serons pris au piège.’ Troublée, égarée, maman a cherché des yeux confirmation auprès de tante Eusébie, dont le regard fixait tristement un point sur le sol”] (142). Eusébie will disappear without a trace; all we know from Yvonne’s story is that her children are murdered. While Eusébie, in this description, may not necessarily be looking ahead at the spot on the floor with sadness because she knows what happens, it is certainly Gabriel, who upon remembering what is to come, describes her as sad. He supplements her general sadness with the knowledge of what is to come: she looks exactly at the spot where her children will die. When we later read the description of Yvonne scrubbing stains, we may remember this last family reunion that was already tinged with grief. These moments of haunting are conceived, I would argue, in order to keep us from a reading experience that is just a means to assuage our curiosity, a reading about violence that would leave us unaffected, yet it is a reading that does not presume the possibility of identification. The second site where we will encounter the ghostly return of this stain appears, for the first time, about halfway through the narrative. Gabriel describes it as follows: “The cabaret was the greatest institution in Burundi. The agora of the people. The radio of the pavement. The pulse of the nation. […] [T]he cabaret was the only place you could speak your mind freely. It afforded the same freedom as a polling booth” (68) [“Le cabaret était la plus grande institution du Burundi. L’agora du peuple. La radio du trottoir. Le pouls de la nation. […] [S]eul le cabaret permettait de libérer sa parole, d’être en accord avec soi. On y avait la même liberté que dans un isoloir”] (88). It is described not only as a political space – the agora, the nation, the voting booth – it is also the space that allows people to seemingly go out of themselves, where people are no longer distinct individuals, but become the personification of the country (91) – it is a type of space that Michel Foucault describes as a heterotopia.72 Gino, Gabriel’s friend, likes the cabaret because of the political talk – one hears different takes on current events, on the country’s history and its future – but one can also hear more individual problems, such as someone nursing a heartbreak. The dimly lit cabaret is a place where one can disappear in the crowd and the obscurity, and listen or vent. It is a productive space. It is also the place to which Gabriel comes back at the end of the novel, returning the reader to the novel’s beginning with him as an adult. 72 Michel Foucault, “Des espaces autres,” Empan 54, no. 2 (2004): 12–19.

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A phone call on the morning of his thirty-third birthday gives him the excuse he needs to go back: “To bring this obsessive story to an end, once and for all” (5) [“Solder une bonne fois pour toutes cette histoire qui me hante”] (16). And we can perhaps understand this as both his story and his mother’s story. When Gabriel, as an adult, returns to the cabaret, it is a somewhat updated place, with new technologies interrupting the usual conversations, but this space is still a space in which time is disrupted: he describes it as a type of time travel – he is brought back to his childhood and to the time that he spent in this very space. Yet this feeling of being at home will be itself disrupted when he hears a familiar voice, the voice of his mother. The voice is described as a voice that comes from beyond the grave: his mother is thus described as a revenant. We find out that all those years later she is still talking about stains that cannot be erased or removed: “‘She’s been coming here every evening, for years …’ That voice, a voice from beyond the grave, cuts me to the quick. It mutters something about stains on the floor that won’t go” (181) [“‘Elle vient ici tous les soirs depuis des années …’ La voix, une voix d’outre-tombe, me pénètre les os. Murmure une histoire de taches au sol qui ne partent pas”] (219). Gabriel feels like she recognizes him, but his mother actually mistakes him for Christian, his cousin who died. Through her interminable grief, she has created, it seems, a new descendance: she has become the mother of a ghost – the ghost of who Christian could have been. The dark and anonymous space of the cabaret enables the fulfillment of her mourning ritual – instead of telling her story over and over to Ana, she is able to voice it in this in-between space, where sharing one’s thoughts is encouraged and connections with others can be forged – even if fleetingly. It is uncertain what will happen in this reunion between Gabriel and Yvonne and readers do not know if Yvonne will cease talking about these stains – yet the haunting refrain also stays with us after we conclude our reading. It is telling that Gabriel’s musings, at the start of the novel, also take place at a bar – a transitory space echoing his lack of roots and his feeling of non-belonging. This bar on the outskirts of Paris, that echoes the cabaret of Bujumbura, is also the space where he witnesses a current humanitarian crisis. Rather than understanding memory in relation to one specific space, as Norridge reminds us, drawing from the work of Julia Creet and Andreas Kitzmann, “memory is often out of place, stimulated precisely by movement and migration.”73 In this case, both 73 Norridge, “‘Papaoutai’?,” 6, citing Julia Creet and Andreas Kitzmann, Memory and Migration (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011), 3–10.

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exile and migration have been experienced by the narrator and they are at once reignited by the witnessing of someone else’s migration. This is why Gabriel cannot watch these mediated images, for they only offer one aspect of the story, not the truth of it: “What about the country inside them? – nobody ever mentions that. Poetry may not be news” (6) [“On ne dira rien du pays en eux. La poésie n’est pas de l’information”] (16), he laments. At the end of the novel, Gabriel will ponder once again the shared experience of exile and migration as he thinks of his own trajectory and his flight from Burundi to France (213). The memory of conflicts or traumatic memories are not simply part of a vacuum or silo: those who have lived through traumatic violence, when faced with the traumatic violence against others, find their own suffering reignited. When we witness the refugee and migrant “crises” unfolding on our screens, we cannot separate them from images that have marked us in our learning and hearing of other testimonies – although we should also not simply equate them and erase their contexts and specificities. While cognitively (and in thinking historically) we may be able to comprehend the differences between these various events, affectively these images of human suffering may call us back to the Shoah, to the October 1961 massacre, to the genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda in 1994, to the genocide in Srebrenica in 1995 (the last two almost coinciding). Certain images have become inextricable from others, certain images are parasitized or parasitizing, occupied or occupying (by) others – something to which I will turn in the epilogue.

Epilogue or Reconjuration Haunting Walls Epilogue or Reconjuration: Haunting Walls Ce n’était d’ailleurs plus la mer qu’il voyait lorsqu’il l’affrontait. Il discernait quelque chose de vertical, de dur et d’infranchissable. Un mur qui grimpait au ciel. Besides, when he would brave it, it was no longer the sea that he saw. He detected something vertical, hard, and insurmountable. A wall that climbed up to the sky. Fabienne Kanor, Faire l’aventure [Making the Journey]1

As we reach the final chapter of this meditation on haunting, my hope is that we recognize how we can be haunted by ghosts which do not appear to look anything like what we may expect ghosts to look like or be like. We have seen how names, lists, objects, photographs, and even stains can function as ghosts, shaking certainties, disrupting linear conceptions of the passing of time, but also opening up a space for communication when it seemed previously fraught or even impossible; in paying attention to these ghosts, in welcoming them, we can say that we have been haunted by memories that are not our own but the text’s. I have argued that thinking ghosts means thinking memory and reconsidering our relationship to time. In fact, turning teleological metaphors of time (as an arrow, a river) on their head, we can assert that “[t]he relationship between past, present, and future [does] not flow in only one direction.”2 Each of the contemporary novels I have chosen to discuss in the preceding 1 Fabienne Kanor, Faire l’aventure (Paris: J. C. Lattès, 2014), 294. 2 Roxanne Panchasi, Future Tense: The Culture of Anticipation in France between the Wars (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009), 6.

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chapters is without question haunted by the past, by traumatic memories of events taking place over the course of the twentieth century. Yet, as I close these reflections, I would like to propose that they are also and at the same time haunted by the future. Taking the future as a category of investigation, Roxanne Panchasi, in the captivating Future Tense (2009), explores what imagining the future meant for actors of the interwar period in France. She argues that the way that people conceived of their futures had an impact on how they lived in the present, for they anticipated (and “premourned”) what they thought they would one day come to be missing; she concludes that both “collective memory” and “[c]ollective anticipation” are “structured around traces, loss, and disappearance,”3 we could even say structured around ghosts. In these last few pages, I want to think of a future haunting or the haunting of the future by considering the recurrence of certain ghosts (walls, trains, sites) in the discourse on the memory of migration. Memory studies as a field has, in the past decade (or two), turned its attention more forcefully on the very subject of the future in part “reflect[ing] a larger cultural turn towards futurity in a post-grand narrative world facing existential threats.”4 In contrast to Walter Benjamin’s “angel of history,” whose back is turned on the future towards which it is propelled,5 a “Janus-faced view of memory”6 thinks of past and future as complementary pathways to engage with matters in the present, all the while eschewing a potentially dangerous presentism.7 This “change of direction”8 that hints once again at a reversal of teleological motivations was perhaps to be expected, given 3 Panchasi, Future Tense, 161. 4 Ann Rigney, “Remembering Hope: Transnational Activism beyond the Traumatic,” Memory Studies 11, no. 3 (2018): 368. See Rigney’s article for a discussion of recent texts dealing with memory and the future; see also the chapters in Yifat Gutman, Amy Sodaro, and Adam D. Brown, eds., Memory and the Future: Transnational Politics, Ethics and Society (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). 5 Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2007), 257. 6 Yifat Gutman, Amy Sodaro, and Adam D. Brown, “Introduction: Memory and the Future: Why a Change of Focus is Necessary,” in Memory and the Future: Transnational Politics, Ethics and Society, 1. 7 See, in particular, François Hartog, Régimes d’historicité: Présentisme et expériences du temps (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2003). 8 Gutman, Sodaro, and Brown, “Introduction: Memory and the Future,” 2.

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the fact that (as I mentioned in the Prologue) memory (like the figure of the ghost) has a relationship to time that is paradoxical, non-linear, and shaped, as it were, by an untimely principle – that is, always too early, too late. Getting to the future by way of a detour, I want to briefly return to Jacques Derrida’s Spectres de Marx [Specters of Marx] (1993). I want to return to the beginning that is always a false beginning when it comes to ghosts, because, as it were, they come back. And here we are, at the end of a book about ghosts, re-reading the beginning of a book about ghosts, in which, through a re-reading of another book about ghosts, a forgotten ghost re-appears out of season.9 The question that prompts Derrida’s text is the “question of the future” (coming to us from the past), namely “the question ‘whither?’”10 Thinking ghosts always means thinking both past and future, now, today, thinking about foundations and directions, seeing double, embracing contradictions and paradoxes. Yes, Derrida is speaking about a very specific specter, a specter that haunts his own writing, and a specter that he himself had forgotten and is reminded of when he re-reads Marx and Engels, namely the fact that the first noun of The Communist Manifesto (1848) is “a ghost – ein Gespenst.”11 For Derrida, this moment of haunting is very European. It could even be said to be constitutive of what is known as Europe: “Haunting would mark the very existence of Europe. […] The 9 To put it plainly here: at the end of Mind the Ghost, we re-read the beginning of Spectres de Marx, in which, through Derrida’s re-reading of The Communist Manifesto, a forgotten ghost – the specter of communism haunting Europe – reappears out of season or in an untimely fashion. 10 Derrida continues: “The question old Europe was asking itself was already the question of the future, the question ‘whither?’: ‘whither communism?’ if not ‘whither Marxism?’ Whether one takes it as asking about the future of communism or about communism in the future, this anguished question did not just seek to know how, in the future, communism would affect European history, but also, in a more muffled way, already whether there would still be any future and any history at all for Europe.” Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge Classics, 1994), 46–47. Spectres de Marx drew some criticism from Marxist thinkers. Jacques Derrida, Spectres de Marx: L’État de la dette, le travail du deuil et la nouvelle Internationale (Paris: Éditions Galilée, 1993). See, for example, the edited volume written as a response (as well as Derrida’s response to their responses titled “Marx & Sons”): Michael Sprinker, ed., Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on Jacques Derrida’s Spectres of Marx (London: Verso, 1999). 11 Derrida, Spectres de Marx, 22.

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experience of the specter, that is how Marx, along with Engels, will have also thought, described, or diagnosed a certain dramaturgy of modern Europe, notably that of its great unifying projects”12 [“la hantise marquerait l’existence même de l’Europe. […] L’expérience du spectre, voilà comment, avec Engels, Marx aura pensé, décrit ou diagnostiqué une certaine dramaturgie de l’Europe moderne, notamment celle de ses grands projets unificateurs”].13 One could say it is a “Eurocentric” view, with all the criticism this raises, for these are the projects that, let us not forget, have been fostered through enslavement, colonization, exploitation, wars, and genocides, and which have been forged around the myth of the supremacy of European “reason” (especially since the Enlightenment), as has been notably examined by Aimé Césaire in Discours sur le colonialisme [Discourse on Colonialism] (1950).14 This is something that Derrida also discusses at length in L’Autre Cap [The Other Heading: Reflections on Today’s Europe] (1991). His analysis is one that calls “to think reason and the history of reason” [“penser la raison et l’histoire de la raison”] and “to remain faithful to the ideal of the Enlightenment […] while yet acknowledging its limits” [“tâcher aussi cependant de rester fidèles à l’idéal des Lumières […] tout en reconnaissant ses limites”].15 Keeping this double movement in mind, I want to ask what it means to link haunting to Europe (and Europe to haunting), not only in 1848 (as Marx and Engels do), but anytime we think of unifying projects: what (who?) is left behind, what (who?) is cut off, what (who?) is the remnant, the revenant? It is certainly noteworthy that, when Derrida writes Spectres de Marx, the book which jumpstarts “spectrality studies” in 1993,16 it is also at a moment when Europe literally comes together – Derrida writes right on the heels of the 1992 Maastricht Treaty, which cements a union that will no longer be only economic, but also, and more importantly perhaps, political. As Fatima El-Tayeb points out, the dominant narrative is “(Western) Europe has repented, has proven that it learned from 12 Derrida, Specters of Marx, 3. 13 Derrida, Spectres de Marx, 23. 14 Aimé Césaire, Discours sur le colonialisme (Paris: Présence africaine, 1962). 15 Jacques Derrida, L’Autre Cap suivi de La Démocratie ajournée (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1991), 77. Jacques Derrida, The Other Heading: Reflections on Today’s Europe, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael B. Naas (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 79. 16 See Prologue and Part I of this book.

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its mistakes and reemerges exceptionally qualified for renewed world leadership.”17 Yet the narrative of a Europe that rebuilt itself after World War II and was forged to cement lasting peace often omits that it is a Europe that has not ceased to wall itself in even as it is tearing walls down. This is the Europe that features in Jakuta Alikavazovic’s L’avancée de la nuit [Night as It Falls] (2017) as a (Western) Europe congratulating itself for peace in the early 1990s, all the while looking a bit to the East, wondering whether or not there is a genocide taking place in Bosnia. As Ann Petrila has put it: “This genocide happened in Europe less than 50 years after the Holocaust which was supposed to be the ultimate ‘never again.’ This happened to innocent civilians in plain sight of the international community and under the protection of the UN.”18 This is the same Europe that is announced as the winner of the 2012 Nobel Peace Prize given that “for over six decades [it] contributed to the advancement of peace and reconciliation, democracy and human rights in Europe.”19 This narrative is immediately called out by Giuseppina Maria Nicolini, the then new mayor of Lampedusa – a name that has come to signify the failure of European hospitality – for as Europe congratulates itself once again it does so at the expense of its own principles. She writes: “I am outraged by the feeling of routine which seems to permeate the world, I am scandalized by the silence of Europe which has just received the Nobel Peace Prize, and which is silent in the face of a tragedy that claims as many victims as a war” [“Je suis indignée par le sentiment d’habitude qui semble avoir envahi le monde, je suis scandalisée par le silence de l’Europe qui vient de recevoir le prix Nobel de la Paix, et qui est silencieuse face à une tragédie qui fait autant de victimes qu’une guerre”].20 On 4 October 2013, a year later, the French newspaper L’Obs reprints her letter following the tragic deaths of more than 350 people shipwrecked a few kilometers from Lampedusa’s 17 Fatima El-Tayeb, European Others: Queering Ethnicity in Postnational Europe (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 9. El-Tayeb discusses the (self)-construction of contemporary Europe with regard to a narrative of post-war growth. 18 Preface by Ann Petrila to Petrila and Hasanović, Voices from Srebrenica: Survivor Narratives of the Bosnian Genocide (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2021), 22. 19 The Nobel Peace Prize 2012. NobelPrize.org. Nobel Media AB 2019. www. nobelprize.org/prizes/peace/2012/summary/. 20 Giusi Nicolini, “La Lettre déchirante de la maire de Lampedusa,” L’Obs, 18 November 2016. www.nouvelobs.com/rue89/rue89-monde/20131004.RUE9231/ la-lettre-dechirante-de-la-maire-de-lampedusa.html.

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coast, stating: “Nothing has changed” [“Rien n’a changé”].21 Years are flying by, and the stories are the same – we have become so used to these reports that they could have happened one year ago, one month ago, or yesterday. But what is all the more tragic about these events that are unfolding is the fact that these reports will happen tomorrow, and the next day, and the next, unless something changes; as El-Tayeb puts it, “[w]orldwide movements of migration have already emerged as one of the central issues of the new millennium.”22 Today, toponyms like Lampedusa and Calais have become synonymous with catastrophe. The French city of Calais has been linked to failed French responses to migration ever since the 1990s and the Sangatte camp; it figures as an important site of French memory of migration.23 The island of Lampedusa, although Italian, has in recent years also become such a site in the French literary imagination.24 These places have become synonymous with the loss of human life, with the indifference, unwillingness, and outright refusal of the European Union to find lasting solutions to the current humanitarian “crisis” or hospitality “crisis.”25 I would like to emphasize that it is not, in fact, “a demographic crisis” [une crise démographique], but, if it is a crisis, it is “a political and moral crisis” [une crise politique et morale].26 Nearly daily reports of shipwrecks in the Mediterranean Sea and the Channel resulting in the death of thousands of people, the conditions in the many camps and settlements alongside various borders or points of transit

21 Nicolini, “La Lettre déchirante de la maire de Lampedusa.” 22 El-Tayeb, European Others, 3. 23 See Debarati Sanyal, “Calais’s ‘Jungle,’” Representations 139 (2017): 1–33. 24 See Louis-Philippe Dalembert, Mur Méditerranée (Paris: Sabine Wespieser éditeur, 2019); Marie Darrieussecq, La Mer à l’envers (Paris: P.O.L éditeur, 2019); Fabienne Kanor, Faire l’aventure (Paris: J. C. Lattès, 2014); Maylis de Kerangal, À ce stade de la nuit (Paris: Éditions Verticales, 2015). 25 For a discussion of Derrida’s notion of hospitality in the context of migration, see Ashwiny O. Kistnareddy, Migrant Masculinities in Women’s Writing: (In)Hospitality, Community, Vulnerability (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), 9–17. 26 François Héran, Avec l’immigration: Mesurer, débattre, agir (Paris: Éditions La Découverte, 2017), 7. Though, as Sanyal reminds us, merely speaking in humanitarian terms is empty or can even be harmful: “Both humanitarian and securitarian approaches, however opposed in intention, envision the irregular migrant as a body to be saved, contained, policed, moved around, encamped, kept out, or expelled; in short, as a body to be managed.” Sanyal, “Calais’s ‘Jungle,’” 5.

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have become a constant in our contemporary collective consciousness. It should thus not come as a surprise that the memory of this contemporary moment is inscribed in several of the novels studied within these pages creating untimely echoes. This is why Alikavazovic’s Louise (encountered in Chapters 5 and 6), while in search of her mother, is described in L’avancée de la nuit as going the other way: traveling to a place from which people are fleeing. Although it figures in only a couple of sentences, something of this moment stays and speaks to the reader who has seen similar images in newspapers, on the television, on social media: “And now Louise was crossing the same borders as these men, women, and children fleeing something far worse than any war the world had ever known […] Louise, who was crossing the same boundaries, the same borders that they were. But alone. And in the opposite direction”27 [“Et aujourd’hui Louise franchissait les mêmes frontières que ces cohortes d’hommes, de femmes et d’enfants fuyant quelque chose qui était au-delà des guerres que l’on avait connues […] Louise qui traversait les mêmes lisières, les mêmes lignes qu’eux. Mais seule. Mais en sens inverse”].28 This is Louise, whose French passport allows her to freely move across borders and even into war zones. This is why Cécile Wajsbrot’s train journey in Mémorial (2005) formally begins with: “And the platforms kept filling up and emptying, and people came in and left, governed by complex mechanisms related, perhaps, to migratory flows, or high tides” [“Et les quais ne cessaient de s’emplir, se vider, et les gens affluaient, repartaient, régis par des mécanismes complexes en rapport, peut-être, avec les flux migratoires, ou les grandes marées”].29 This is also why Gabriel (encountered in Chapter 7), at the beginning of Gaël Faye’s Petit Pays [Small Country] (2016), is seen watching the news and observing the reports of boats reaching the shore, pointing out the lack of comprehension that is prevalent: “A twenty-four-hour news channel is broadcasting images of people fleeing war. […] Public opinion holds that they’ve fled hell to find El Dorado. Bullshit! […] I 27 Jakuta Alikavazovic, Night as It Falls, trans. Jeffery Zuckerman (London: Faber & Faber, 2021), 232. 28 Jakuta Alikavazovic, L’avancée de la nuit (Paris: Éditions de l’Olivier, 2017), 241. 29 Cécile Wajsbrot, Mémorial (Paris: Éditions Zulma, 2005), 9. This is the opening “narrative” chapter of the novel; the novel actually begins with the description of the harfang des neiges, the snowy owl, and its habitat. See Chapter 3.

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avert my gaze from images that capture reality, not the truth”30 [“Une chaîne d’infos en continu diffuse des images d’êtres humains fuyant la guerre. […] L’opinion publique pensera qu’ils ont fui l’enfer pour trouver l’Eldorado. Foutaises! […] Je détourne le regard de ces images, elles disent le réel, pas la vérité”].31 Faye’s narrator, who is reminiscing on his own trajectory, knows that the images we see erase individual tragedies; all we see are indistinct masses. This is why Patrick Chamoiseau, and Sarah Chiche, and Delphine Coulon, and Louis-Philippe Dalembert, and Marie Darrieussecq, and Ananda Devi, and Fabienne Kanor, and Maylis de Kerangal, and Marie NDiaye, and Shumona Sinha – and many others still – have very recently written novels that attempt to “channel” [capter] something of what is currently happening, to show individual paths and destinies, to combat the invisibilization of human beings seen only as an indistinct group called “migrants.”32 By now, migrant literature or literature by and about migrants has become “canonical.” As Oana Sabo puts it in The Migrant Canon (2018), it “is at once a cultural artifact, a commodity, and a tool for political engagement.”33 Yet what we also see is that authors are memorializing an event or rather a series of interrelated events even as they are still happening; what strikes me here is that in writing about a present “crisis,” we are, in fact, at the same time anticipating a future haunting. 30 Gaël Faye, Small Country, trans. Sarah Ardizzone (London: Hogarth, 2018), 5. Translation modified. 31 Gaël Faye, Petit Pays (Paris: Livre de Poche, 2017), 16. 32 Though some are more forceful than others in thinking about the stakes and the ethics of writing about this subject, the following are select recent texts in French (published in the last decade or so) by established authors tackling refugee and migrant experiences: Patrick Chamoiseau, Frères migrants (Paris: Points, 2018); Sarah Chiche, Les Enténébrés (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2019); Delphine Coulon, Une fille dans la jungle (Paris: Éditions Grasset, 2017); Louis-Philippe Dalembert, Mur Méditerranée (Paris: Sabine Wespieser éditeur, 2019); Marie Darrieussecq, La Mer à l’envers (Paris: P.O.L éditeur, 2019); Ananda Devi, Ceux du large (Paris: Éditions Bruno Doucey, 2017); Fabienne Kanor, Faire l’aventure (Paris: J. C. Lattès, 2014); Maylis de Kerangal, À ce stade de la nuit (Paris: Éditions Verticales, 2015); Marie NDiaye, Trois femmes puissantes (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 2009); Shumona Sinha, Assommons les pauvres! (Paris: Éditions de l’Olivier, 2011). 33 Sabo also notes that within the genre of migrant literature, “commercial strategies of publishers, the agenda of cultural institutions, the aesthetic visions of authors, and the intellectual and commercial demands of readers intersect.” Oana Sabo, The Migrant Canon in Twenty-First-Century France (Lincoln: Nebraska University Press, 2018), 162.

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When I invoke Derrida and the specter that haunts Europe – now no longer the specter of Marx, but rather the specter of Hamlet and its fortress – in connection to this current “crisis,” I am also thinking alongside Marina Skalova, who argues in Exploration du flux [An Exploration of Flow] (2019) that Europe has indeed and finally become “Fortress Europe.” Now it does not want to let anyone else in – we (understood here as Europeans) do not want to let anyone else in: “The fortress was built around a number of principles. We agreed on a certain number of principles and built ramparts around to protect the principles. The principles are fragile. They catch colds easily” [“On a construit la forteresse autour d’un certain nombre de principes. On s’est mis d’accord sur un certain nombre de principes et on a construit des remparts tout autour pour protéger les principes. Les principes sont fragiles. Ils prennent froid facilement”].34 We have here the repetition of the indeterminate third person pronoun “on” – the “on” of a unified Europe35 – paired with the recurrence and rhythm of “principes.” Yet the more one repeats this term, the less it means anything at all. What is the point of these principles, if they are only an empty word, a word so weak that it can develop sicknesses? The recurring imagery of the fortress is also exemplified in the typography Skalova chooses for some of her pages: words are grouped together to look like crenels [créneaux], places where one can hide to defend one’s fortress, or like the arrow slits [meutrières] from which one can kill without being killed. Skalova continues: if our focus is keeping our fortress safe, then this fortress built on principles becomes meaningless. She thus describes our reality, our mediated reality, where the flow of information – signified once again through repetition – belies our certainties and positions “us” against “the masses”: And then on Facebook, the photos of the camps pour in, the photos of the trains pour in, the photos of those who have not drowned but who have set foot on our ground pour in, those whose feet tread the same ground as us, then come the images of masses crammed into trains, police batons, trains that leave by lying about their destination, walls of police at the arrival, camps and barbed wire, and typhus epidemics in the camps, on our soil, in our regions, today, in Europe, inside the fortress. [Et puis sur Facebook, affluent les photos des camps, affluent les photos des trains, affluent les photos de ceux qui ne se sont pas noyés mais qui 34 Marina Skalova, Exploration du flux (Éditions du Seuil, 2018), 13. 35 This echoes the “on” chosen by Kaouther Adimi in Nos richesses [Our Riches] (2017), discussed in Chapter 7: the “on” of the refusal to take responsibility.

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ont mis les pieds sur notre sol, dont les pieds foulent le même sol que nous, alors viennent les images des masses entassées dans les trains, des matraques des policiers, des trains que l’on fait partir en mentant sur leur destination, des murs de policiers à la sortie, des camps et des barbelés, et des épidémies de typhus dans les camps, sur notre sol, dans nos contrées, aujourd’hui, en Europe, à l’intérieur de la forteresse.]36

Following this wave of pictures, of photographs, we move to images, and then to memories. We begin not only to see what is in front of us, as “pictures” of current events, but as “images” that are part of our consciousness, images or words that are part of our collective memory, images recalling World War II and the Holocaust; indeed, trains and train tracks in the post-war European context could be said to function as ghosts – we are immediately brought back to the camps and to the deportation of Jews enabled by trains.37 When the social media photos and the inner images they elicit are put side by side, according to Skalova, memories that are not directly our own, but ours by virtue of having seen them represented over and over flood our minds: Then, with the images, the memories pour in. Camps and trains are not like boats and people drowning, it’s something we’ve already witnessed, it’s something we’ve developed vaccines against, that’s why in the first place we needed all these principles, it is now suddenly, when we see the images pour in, that we remember that originally, the principles were vaccines, it was that which should protect us, because we had said Never again, because we had said that never again, crowded masses, barbed wire, camps and trains. [Alors, avec les images, affluent les souvenirs. Les camps et les trains, ce n’est pas comme les bateaux et les noyés, c’est quelque chose qu’on a déjà connu, c’est quelque chose contre quoi on a développé des vaccins, c’est pour ça, à l’origine, qu’on a eu besoin de tous ces principes, c’est là subitement, quand on voit les images qui affluent, qu’on se souvient qu’à la base, les principes c’étaient des vaccins, c’était ça qui devait nous protéger, parce qu’on avait dit Plus jamais ça, parce qu’on avait dit que plus jamais, les masses entassées, les barbelés, les camps et les trains].38 36 Skalova, Exploration du flux, 16. 37 I think here of the powerful opening of Lars von Trier’s EUROPA (1991) – another “text” of this early 1990s crucial European moment – beginning on a train track where all one sees is the track for three entire minutes, while a voiceover announces the imminent arrival to “Europa.” Later on, a short sequence juxtaposes train cars with concentration camp barracks filled with emaciated prisoners. 38 Skalova, Exploration du flux, 16–17.

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Skalova describes exactly what Barbie Zelizer has shown with regard to Holocaust memory: “References to the images of the Nazi camps thus activate a memory bank that allows viewers to visualize contemporary acts of atrocity in conjunction with what they remember from the recycled images of World War II.”39 However, in this passage, which recalls all the key images of post-war European memory of the Holocaust, there is a memory missing or erased. By saying that “camps and trains” are not like “boats and people drowning,” because we have only seen the former, Skalova fails to recognize the memory of the Atlantic slave trade and the Middle Passage [commerce triangulaire], the fact that boats and people drowning is something that we – Europeans in this text – have not only known or witnessed, but perpetrated.40 To the contrary, the text that I want to contrast this with, and which likewise employs this same imagery of Europe as a fortress, is written by Fabienne Kanor and published in 2014. Faire l’aventure [Making the Journey] is divided in four parts, four cities, and begins in Mbour, a coastal city in Senegal, with Biram, a seventeen-year-old looking for work and a more stable situation in the city; we find him again three years later in the Canary Islands, briefly remembering the struggle of his trip, and later in Lampedusa, Italy, reflecting on his, by then, decade of memories of migration from one place to the next. But what I want to highlight in this novel is the recurring mention of a house by the beach in Mbour about which Biram often thinks. The novel in fact begins with Biram’s reflection on this house, which was the building where generations of French colonizers had enslaved Senegalese people. Throughout the novel, this house, haunted by the ghosts of the enslaved will figure as a reminder of what Europe’s fortress was built on. During one encounter with a white woman on vacation in Tenerife, Spain, where he is working, Biram explains: “Your wealth, people of Europe, it did not accumulate on its own but on the backs of our ancestors. You say that you did not have anything to do with this, but do not say that you did not profit from 39 Barbie Zelizer, “Remembering to Forget: Contemporary Scrapbooks of Atrocity,” in Remembering to Forget: Holocaust Memory through the Camera’s Eye (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 226. 40 For a discussion of the disparity between memory of the Holocaust and memory of slavery in France, see, in particular, Ana Lucia Araujo, Slavery in the Age of Memory: Engaging the Past (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021), 170–1, 215–17. For a discussion of trains and the memory of colonization, see Morgane Cadieu, “L’épopée ferroviaire: Migrations et mémoire de la colonisation dans le récit contemporain.” Fixxion 14 (June 2017): 49–60.

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it. Profiting from the money that comes from evil is to do evil” [“Votre richesse à vous, les gens d’Europe, elle s’est pas bâtie toute seule mais sur le dos de nos ancêtres. Tu dis que tu n’y es pour rien mais alors ne dis pas que tu n’en as pas profité. Profiter de l’argent qui vient du mal, c’est faire le mal”].41 Describing her as an “implicated” subject who refuses to accept her own “implication,” Biram notes that she refuses to see “she had mud in her eyes” [“elle avait de la boue dans les yeux”].42 Here we see an obverse side of these inner images called up by Skalova, ones we see so much we no longer notice, the others some refuse to even see. Chamoiseau thus reminds us in Frères migrants [Migrant Brothers] (2018) of the spectral echoes of these two spaces (the Atlantic and the Mediterranean): “The continent of the African from the bottom of the Atlantic – a continent without address, where the holds of the slave ship for centuries managed to grind to the foundations of Africa, humanity’s firstborn – joins its double in the Mediterranean in an exact sideration”43 [“Le continent des Africains du fond de l’Atlantique – continent sans adresse, où les cales du bateau négrier ont pu broyer durant des siècles les fondements de l’Afrique, les fils aînés du genre humain – rejoint dans une exacte sidération son double en Méditerranée”].44 At the end of Faire l’aventure, more than a decade has passed, and exhausted by his precarious living conditions, always looking for work, being exploited left and right, Biram decides to be repatriated and walks into a police station in Italy. As he awaits his turn in a long line of people in the same situation as his, he falls asleep and dreams himself back at the haunted house, walking up its steps, only in his dream it is finally not haunted any more. In this novel, it is the house in Senegal, which accompanies Biram throughout (as well as opening and closing the novel), that is a constant reminder – a tangible ghost – of the reason he is, three centuries later, on this path. To conclude, while authors like Skalova warn about the haunting of future ghosts, and engage in anticipatory mourning and memorialization using the memory of the Holocaust, Kanor and Chamoiseau also show us that if our points of references fail to go beyond the twentieth century we are missing a crucial part of our 41 Kanor, Faire l’aventure, 198. 42 Kanor, Faire l’aventure, 199. 43 Patrick Chamoiseau, Migrant Brothers: A Poet’s Declaration of Human Dignity, trans. Matthew Amos and Fredrik Rönnbäck (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018), 11. 44 Chamoiseau, Frères migrants, 24–25.

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collective memory, and might not understand why, despite saying “never again,” we are still faced with these same images we refuse to see. If, as Aleida Assmann has described, “the future has gone from being the locus of expectation and hope to becoming a site of anxiety,” there is a crucial task at hand in the present, for “[w]e can no longer simply rely on the future, but must now tend to it responsibly; otherwise, there might not be a future for coming generations.”45 This is exactly what Derrida in Spectres de Marx has called the responsibility towards those who are not even born yet – one of the ethical pillars of hauntology.46 While haunting often carries negative connotations, as we have seen in Part I, in Derrida’s conception of spectrality and in Cixous’s embracing of its uplifting and its life-otherwise-giving possibilities, haunting is not only a site of potentiality, but also one in which we encounter our ethical responsibility towards those who are not linked to us through similarity, but rather welcomed as irreducibly other.47 That is why such sites as Calais and Lampedusa come to be understood as the sign of a future haunting, for they signify the failures of ethical responsibility. They herald a haunting that is always yet to come as long as there is a failure to live up to promises and principles – a failure to see how atrocities are repeating themselves or a failure of indifference in the face of these types of atrocities repeating themselves. Contemporary literature (in French) is already haunted and lamenting the state of inaction and the lack of responsiveness, even as the “crisis” is going on. I posit that in their “premourning”48 of an ongoing contemporary crisis, the 45 Aleida Assmann, Is Time Out of Joint? On the Rise and Fall of the Modern Time Regime, trans. Sarah Clift (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2020), 4; emphasis my own. 46 Derrida, Spectres de Marx, 16. 47 In Derrida’s seminar on La Bête et le souverain [The Beast and the Sovereign] (2008), the place that he gives to the animal is a place akin to the one of the ghosts in his Spectres de Marx. Refusing an ethics of the similar [semblable], Derrida urges us to recognize that “this unconditional ethical obligation” [“cette obligation éthique inconditionnelle”] is always linked to the possibility and necessity of non-presence and of the dissimilar: “It also binds me twice over to something nonliving, namely to the present nonlife or the nonpresent life of those who are not living […] i.e. dead living beings and living beings not yet born.” Jacques Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, vol. 1, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 110; Jacques Derrida, Séminaire: La Bête et le souverain, vol. 1 (2001–2002). (Paris: Éditions Galilée, 2008), 157. 48 Panchasi, Future Tense, 5.

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novels studied within these pages are indeed both haunted by the past and by the future; they subtly interweave these current or impending losses to those of past events and conflicts. I draw here from Panchasi’s identification of an “anticipatory nostalgia” in the context of interwar France that is defined as “a nostalgic longing for French values and cultural phenomena that had not yet disappeared.”49 While there is certainly a difference between the memory of loss and the nostalgia for values, I find the term “premourning” helpful to address this anticipatory haunting of the loss of human lives of those who have not yet disappeared, but who eventually will as long as the Mediterranean Sea remains a wall – “Mur Méditerranée” (as Dalembert and Kanor remind us). As a closing thought, I would like to turn once again to the work of Hélène Cixous who allowed me to think of the encounter with ghosts as the possibility of becoming untimely ourselves in the moment of reading, prompting the creation of a space of communication. In the midst of a reflection on the painful memories and legacies of the Holocaust recounted in 1938, nuits [1938, nights] (2019), Cixous inserts a short musing on the question of time and catastrophe and perhaps thus offers a way to think of what Literature can do. Her daughter tells her that in 2020 (already in our own past now), the water scarcity in Bangalore will be catastrophic and brings to mind the reality of an ever-growing number of climate migrants. Cixous then asks: – Are you sure you are right to worry about 1938 instead of 2018? I tell myself. Should I interrupt my musings to refresh or update my fear?     I want to imagine 20 million souls in the desert. Going from one place to the other is beyond my imagination     Buchenwald and Bangalore echo one another. [– Tu es sûre que tu as raison de t’angoisser en 1938 au lieu de 2018? me dis-je. Devrais-je m’interrompre pour mettre à jour mon épouvante?     Je veux imaginer 20 millions d’âmes au désert. Aller d’un endroit à l’autre, cela surpasse mon imagination     Buchenwald et Bangalore l’un fait écho à l’autre].50 49 Panchasi, Future Tense, 5; emphasis in the original. This “anticipatory nostalgia” confirms the longing that Susan Stewart identifies within her study of nostalgia as “wear[ing] a distinctly utopian face, a face that turns toward a future-past, a past which has only ideological reality.” Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), 23. 50 Hélène Cixous, 1938, nuits (Paris: Éditions Galilée), 84–85.

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As Cixous wonders about her worries about the past when she is living in a present heralding a dismal future, she reminds us once again of the power of echoes. Even if she feels like she cannot move from one place or one time to the next so easily, by writing these thoughts down, she continues to draw on and to contribute to Literature’s echoes; in light of the catastrophes still happening and still to come, she reminds us of the double suffering [double souffrance] – suffering of the suffering of another – made possible by Literature (as we have seen in Part I); she reminds us that we can, in reading Literature, in writing Literature, open up a hospitable space for those who are different from us, those who are present-otherwise. She also hints at the fact that thinking 1938 is perhaps another way of thinking 2018, of anticipating 2020 without necessarily having to rely on imagination: through Literature she can remember 1938 and thus through the memory of the past she can already remember her responsibility towards the future. Instead of figuring as new “sites of memory” [lieux de mémoire], where we expect to one day commemorate past events, Bangalore, Calais, Lampedusa, and many other such places have become “sites of haunting” [lieux de hantise] – an ongoing haunting that remains still and always to come [à venir]. These ghostly sites of past-present-future hauntings are not sites of dutiful commemoration, but are sites of an encounter with our ethical responsibility, that is never a given, but always something to work towards. These sites of haunting are calls that, as the ones of Cixous’s “double suffering,” enjoin us to keep asking ourselves the question of ethics, relentlessly so.

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Index Index

the 1.5 generation (Suleiman) 104n16, 184, 225 see also postmemory; second generation 17 October 1961 26, 30, 133, 148, 164n26, 220–33, 246 see also Adimi, Kaouther, Nos richesses; Algeria, Algerian War of Independence; Brozgal, Lia; Sebbar, Leïla, La Seine était rouge Abraham, Nicolas and Maria Torok 48–51, 61, 71, 75, 85, 110n40 see also phantoms; psychoanalysis absence 5, 48, 186, 194, 213 and ghosts 8, 9, 53, 118 and photography 193–215 presence of absence 5, 9, 11, 61, 90, 131, 219 signs of 141–42, 144, 162n20 see also disappearance; presence accumulation and the inventory 140, 142–43 see also inventory; lists Adimi, Kaouther 18, 100, 132, 147, 150–51, 154–55, 217, 220, 229, 233, 241 Des ballerines de papicha 147 Nos richesses 147–55, 217, 229–33, 255n35

affect affective bonds, engagement 128, 160–61, 237 affective responses 29, 41, 205, 242, 246 feeling of being haunted 13 and memory 53, 119 and shame 218–20 and the trace 55 see also trauma affiliative postmemory (Hirsch) 40, 100 see also Hirsch, Marianne; memory; postmemory; second generation Agamben, Giorgio on the contemporary 21–24, 82–83 and Primo Levi’s gray zone 220 Algeria 40, 111, 147–55 Algerian authors 147 Algerian Jews 131n7 Algerian War of Independence 35, 40, 100, 164n26, 169, 171, 220–33 Algiers 112, 148, 229, 232 Arabs 228, 230–31 and Cixous 77, 87n64, 131 collaboration during the Algerian War 227 French occupation of 148, 223 see also 17 October 1961; Adimi, Kaouther; colonialism; massacres; Sebbar, Leïla; Stora, Benjamin

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Alikavazovic, Jakuta 18, 100, 157–59, 171, 173–74, 176–77, 180, 191, 193, 196, 204 L’avancée de la nuit 34n81, 174–91, 210–15, 251, 253 “Chaque vampire est un groupe” 174n64 Comme un ciel en nous 177, 193–94 Corps volatils 173, 209–10 Le Londres-Louxor 173–74, 184 Alzheimer’s disease 126–28 and “maladie d’Allemagne” (disease of Germany) 127 Amine, Laila Postcolonial Paris 224 amnesia (French national) 224 anachronism 87 anachronistic deliberations 106 anachronistic quality of memory 1–2 anachronistic temporality 24 to be anachronistic 113 and the contemporary 22, 83 see also the untimely Ancel, Guillaume 171n52, 204n70 animals birds 54–55, 178–79, 182, 215 and ghosts 12–13, 87n63, 179, 259n47 anticipation collective 248 plagiat par anticipation (anticipatory plagiarism) 36 of a scholar to come 37, 56–57 textual anticipation 221, 226, 248 see also mourning; nostalgia antisemitism 106–07, 115, 131n7 anxiety and the future 259 millennial anxiety 10 and the Occupation 102, 138 and the telephone 65–66 and the trace 31 Appanah, Nathacha 8

appropriation from Derrida 3 of pain 41, 100, 190 of someone else’s past 134 of status 186 Arabs 204, 228, 230–31 see also Algeria Araujo, Ana Lucia 257n40 Arendt, Hannah vicarious responsibility 123n69 Assmann, Aleida on the modern time regime 20–21, 25, 52, 111n43, 259 Auschwitz 32, 39, 88–89, 103, 105–06, 121–24, 169 see also camps; the Holocaust; Poland author/reader relationship 37–38 the Balkans 172–73 see also Yugoslavia, former Bangalore 260–61 Barbie, Klaus 107 Barthes, Roland on the contemporary 23 l’effet de réel 133, 169 Fragments d’un discours amoureux 65 on photography 195, 200 becoming fictional 72–73 ghost 4, 72–74, 82, 87, 138, 191 linked 35, 88 living dead 13 text 205 see also the contemporary; the untimely being concept of being (and time) 44, 47, 60–61 modes of being (in Cixous) 44, 55, 60–61, 70, 73–84, 86–87, 91–93, 97, 100 see also the contemporary; the untimely

Index Beinstingel, Thierry Yougoslave 173 Benjamin, Walter on the Angel of History 248 Arcades project 129 constellation 31 the Storyteller 71 birth birthplace 89, 122 and Cixous 87n64 and Modiano 160 proof (birth certificate) 157 rebirth 68 and the scream 63 Blanchot, Maurice 51, 66 La Part du feu 13–14 blood 217–18, 222–24 bloody collapse 199, 206 and Cixous 131 color of 222–23 and the contemporary 23 and cruelty 218 flesh and 9n31 on their hands 228 as matter 217 spilled 183, 218, 224, 226, 228, 231 stains 217–18, 226–27, 236, 242–45 and time 218 and writing 181 see also stains, figurative and symbolic the body absent 218 and Cixous 76–77, 81–82, 84–85, 97 dead 225–26 and disappearance 182, 191, 212 and drones 212, 214 and ghosts 9n29, 9n31, 10, 109–10 and incorporation 143 maternal body 219n10 and matter 217 and memory 177

287

and migration 252n26 and photography 200n22, 212 bomb and destruction 153n72, 196 graffiti 223 name like a 121 books the book-that-I-am-not-writing (Cixous) 72–73, 75, 81, 84 power of (Cixous) 60–64, 70, 76, 81, 86, 105, 190 recipe for writing 153 sending signal in 24n34 bookstore 148–55, 234 Bosnia and Herzegovina 33–36, 40, 100, 171, 173, 181, 202n28, 203, 207, 251 see also Sarajevo; Srebrenica; Yugoslavia, former boundaries spatial 186, 253 temporal 41, 70, 92, 97, 130 Bousquet, René 107, 111–112, 115 Brozgal, Lia on 17 October 1961 222, 229n35 on the contemporary 18n5, 24n34 Buchenwald 32n78, 87, 260 burden of responsibility/memory 125 of suffering 65 of violent history 25 buried alive 13 past as not 159 people 32, 34n83, 109 Burundi 40, 235–38, 241, 244–46 see also Faye, Gaël bystander 28–29, 122–23, 220n13, 228, 242 Cadieu, Morgane 137, 257n40 Calais 252, 259, 261 see also migration Calle, Sophie Fantômes 193–94

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camps 32n78, 93, 103, 118–19, 123, 163, 255–57 concentration 87, 104, 207, 220n13 death 104, 169 internment 117, 145–46 migrant 252, 255–57 see also Auschwitz; Buchenwald Camus, Albert 116, 148–50 Carlini Versini, Dominique 4n9 Carrère, Emmanuel 173 Caruth, Cathy 64n70, 119n65, 217–18 see also trauma; wound catastrophe 101, 105, 117–18, 122–24, 126–27, 252, 260–61 Cayrol, Jean 31n70, 104n14 Césaire, Aimé Discours sur le colonialisme 250 Chambers-Samadi, Chadia 220n15, 224, 231 Chamoiseau, Patrick Frères migrants 254, 258 Charlie Hebdo 53, 239 Charlot, Edmond 148, 150, 153–55, 229 Chiche, Sarah Les Enténébrés 254 Saturne 17, 40 childhood exile from 239 and ghosts 8, 189 and memories 235–36, 239–40, 245 and war/violence 106, 111, 118, 131n7, 169, 219, 225 see also 1.5 generation; Perec, Georges, W ou le souvenir d’enfance; second generation Christianity 4n12, 172 chronological understanding of time 90, 97, 111–13, 146 see also the contemporary; temporality; time; the untimely Cixous, Ève 58, 61, 63, 67, 72, 74, 84–87, 89, 91, 93, 130–32

Cixous, Hélène Algeria 77, 87n64, 131 atoms 69, 76–77, 81–82, 97 birth 87n64 blood 131 body 76–77, 81–82, 84–85, 97 the book-that-I-am-not-writing 72–73, 75, 81, 84 citizenship 95, 131 double souffrance (double suffering) 41, 63–65, 70–71, 88, 100, 105, 110, 113, 190–91, 261 horror 62n68, 63, 91–92 listening 63–64, 69–70, 92 literature’s secret 63–65 mental family 86 modes of being 44, 55, 60–61, 70, 73–84, 86–87, 91–93, 97, 100 mourning 58, 71–72, 74–75, 85–86 poetry 58, 68n81 power of books 60–64, 70, 76, 81, 86, 105, 190 readliving (luvécu) 88 screams 57, 62–63, 66–67, 69–70, 73n9, 92, 105, 190 soul 60, 66, 85, 260 telephone 55–70, 74, 85, 94, 110, 131, 159 traces 72–73, 76–77, 93 witness 78 1938, nuits 87–97, 130–31, 260–61 L’amour du loup 62–63 Ayaï 57–70, 73, 76–77, 82 Chapitre Los 57, 69, 72–79 Les commencements 58 Corollaires d’un vœu 67–69, 73–74, 81, 84–87, 94 Dedans 58, 85n53 Défions l’augure 85–86, 92 Le Détrônement de la mort 57, 78–81 Gare d’Osnabrück à Jérusalem 87, 89–91 Homère est morte 58 Insister: À Jacques Derrida 58, 68 Le jour où je n’étais pas là 58

Index “Le livre que je n’écris pas” 61, 75, 86–87 “Nous en somme” 70 OR 94 Le Prénom de Dieu 85 Ruines bien rangées 90 see also Cixous, Ève; the contemporary; Freud, Sigmund; Laurens, Camille; Rice, Alison; Wills, David collaboration during the Algerian War 227 with Nazis 109, 137, 160, 207 see also Barbie, Klaus; Bousquet, René; Darnand, Joseph; the Occupation; Pétain, Philippe; Vichy regime; war collective body 81, 177 desire 224 experience 23, 40, 53n36, 177 haunting 10 history 89–90, 102, 127 imagination 6n15 memory 25–26, 33, 51, 54n38, 105, 109, 155, 171, 220, 237, 248, 253, 256, 259 projects 20 responsibility 123n69 silencing 92 trauma 184 colonialism 7, 136n27, 148, 230, 236, 238, 257 Discours sur le colonialisme 250 French colonization of Algeria 131n7, 149, 221–22, 224, 229–30 see also Algeria, Algerian War of Independence; postcolonial commemoration commemorative sites 185, 261, 222–23 of events 26, 235n53, 241n71 forms of 25, 71n2, 234 see also memorials; memory; remembrance

289

communication 247, 260 spectral 24, 56–61, 65–67, 70–73, 79–80, 82–83, 87, 92, 94, 100, 114, 122, 126, 128, 130, 132, 144, 154–55, 159, 171, 190–91, 199, 205 transgenerational 224 complicity 214 cynical complicity 202 see also Sanyal, Debarati concentrationary condition 104 memory 169 universe 106, 136 conjuration 2–3, 47, 247 contamination and ghosts 39 by memory 188 by pain 190 of the past 109, 206 by poetry 176, 182, 186–87, 214–15 the contemporary 18–24, 33, 37–38, 52–53, 82–83, 85 to be contemporary 18–24, 36, 39, 44, 60, 80, 82–85, 92, 132 see also Agamben, Giorgio; Hutton, Margaret-Anne; Ruffel, Lionel; temporality; time; the untimely coquille (typo) see timeshells Corsica 40, 197–99, 206, 209 Coulon, Delphine Une fille dans la jungle 254 crimes against humanity 107, 113, 204 Croatia 34n81, 40, 196, 201–02, 206 see also Vukovar; Yugoslavia, former cruelty 218, 239 crypts 50, 61, 75, 85, 143 cryptonymy 49, 51n31, 101 see also Abraham, Nicolas and Maria Torok

290

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Daeninckx, Didier Meurtres pour mémoire 30, 133 Dalembert, Louis-Philippe Mur Méditerranée 252n24, 254 Dantec, Maurice 172 Darnand, Joseph 110–17, 144–45 Darrieussecq, Marie 12, 35–36, 40, 73, 134n17, 179n76 La mer à l’envers 252n24, 254 Tom est mort 40 Davis, Colin 6–7, 10n34, 47–49, 51n31, 103 the dead communication with 63, 65, 69–71, 73, 122 ghosts as figures of 4, 13, 39, 44, 47–48, 51, 55, 61, 132 people wanting you dead 89 responsibility towards the already dead 30, 83, 259n47 return of 9, 72, 92 violence towards 202n28 see also the body; death death 13–14, 40–41, 54–55, 61, 72–78, 84–87, 91, 94, 109, 112–13, 122, 126, 187, 190–91, 243 antideath 57, 73–74, 91, 131 and drones 215 euphemism for 39, 51 and ghosts/haunting 8, 9n29, 11, 31n70, 119 march 33–34 and migration 251–52 of the mother 58, 72, 74, 84–85, 130 and photography 201n23, 213 sentence/penalty 62n68, 65, 84, 112, 218 see also camps; the dead; genocide; the Holocaust; massacres; mourning Deleuze, Gilles 33n79 Derrida, Jacques 86n57, 218, 252n25, 255 appropriation from 3 and Cixous 56–58, 61, 63, 66–69, 73, 76–78, 81–82, 94n92, 96n98

on ghosts and hauntology 2–3, 7n21, 8–9, 22, 29–31, 41, 44–52, 54, 56–59, 71, 78, 83, 120, 205, 249–50, 259 traces 31, 54–56 visor effect 170 L’animal que donc je suis 87n63 L’Autre Cap 250 La bête et le souverain 13–14, 51, 259n47 The Death Penalty 218n5 Échographies de la télévision (with Bernard Stiegler) 9n31 États d’âme de la psychanalyse 66 “Fors: Les mots anglés de Nicolas Abraham et Maria Torok” 49–50, 51n31, 101n1 H. C. pour la vie, c’est à dire 56, 94n92 De l’hospitalité (with Anne Dufourmantelle) 83, 252n25 Spectres de Marx 2, 22, 30, 44, 45–52, 56–57, 78, 120, 170–71, 205, 249–50, 255, 259 destruction of a bookstore 148, 151, 153n72, 154 and the Holocaust 146 of people (Perec) 136 sites of 117–18 of things 132 Devi, Ananda Ceux du large 254 devoir de mémoire (duty to remember) 107–08, 234, 240n70 dialogue with family 117, 119, 122, 124–25, 128, 130, 148, 199 as productive 57, 59, 204, 225 Diderot, Denis 6–7, 56 Diop, Boubacar Boris 234 Murambi 240n70 disappearance 31, 35, 41–42, 49, 51, 76, 78, 131–32, 175–76, 182, 193, 242, 248 of animals 12 euphemism for death 33, 39, 51, 211

Index of a memorial space 53 of milieux (Nora) 25n38 and textual disruption 110, 144, 159 writing disappearance (Perec) 31, 33–34, 167, 169 displacement and memory 239 and photography 146 textual displacement (Rabaté) 31, 33, 52, 167 disruption of concepts 44 disrupted childhood 236 disruptive presence 105, 245 of memory 220 temporal disruption 13–14, 39, 52, 53n36, 54, 70–71, 91, 105, 117–18, 120–21, 124, 128, 132, 136, 147, 158, 163, 168, 245, 247 of the text 11–13, 15, 106, 110, 196, 221 see also the untimely distance disregard of distance (telephone) 55, 59, 65–66 to keep one’s distance (contemporary) 22, 83 between past and present 158 and photography 209, 213–14 Dosse, François 20, 23, 38 double souffrance (double suffering) 41, 63–65, 70–71, 88, 100, 105, 110, 113, 190–91, 261 drone photography 175, 189, 212–15 Duras, Marguerite L’Amant 200n21 duty to remember see devoir de mémoire Eastern Europe 172, 198, 207 see also the Balkans; Europe; Yugoslavia, former ellipsis see suspension El-Tayeb, Fatima European Others 250–52 Enard, Mathias Zone 173

291

erasure of the past 26, 118, 151, 209–10, 233 in photographs 211 Erll, Astrid 25n40 Ernaux Annie on Alzheimer’s disease 126n74 on shame 219 ethics ethical engagement with the past 27, 41, 58 ethical violations 115 and ghosts 29–30, 64, 259, 261 of representation 28, 41, 254n32 of reticence 163 Europe 172, 174, 198, 207, 249–51, 255–57 European Union 172, 252 Fortress Europe 255, 257 see also Césaire, Aimé; colonialism; Derrida, Jacques, L’Autre Cap; Eastern Europe; El-Tayeb, Fatima evil profiting from 257–58 spirits 2 war against evil 112–13, 143 the exhumation turn 34n83, 41n108 exile 233, 235n51, 237, 239, 246 exorcism of ghosts 2, 47, 56, 143 family 89–90, 198, 214, 237–38, 241–44 familial history 101, 103–04, 110, 118–23, 125–27, 131–32, 137n30, 173, 177, 189, 225 familial structure 127–28 familial trauma 184, 188, 221, 235 family pictures 146, 194–96, 199, 205 family secrets 51n31 and memory 100, 108–09, 128, 160n8, 217, 226, 238 mental family (Cixous) 86 and temporal frames 53n36 and the Vichy regime 106, 116, 137n30, 140

292

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le fantastique (the fantastic) 4n11, 6n15, 19n12, 44 Faulkner, William 61, 63, 69 Faye, Gaël 18, 100, 220–21, 233, 235–41, 253–54 Petit Pays (novel) 235, 237–46, 253–54 “Petit Pays” (song) 235 Rwanda: Le silence des mots (with Michaël Sztanke) 240 fear of being deported 117, 146, 170–71 of contamination 215 and contemporary life 175, 177–78 of death 238 about the future 260 and/of ghosts 6, 11, 14, 41n108 primal fear 181 and war 212 Ferrari, Jérôme 18, 34n81, 100, 173, 196–97, 200–06 À son image 34n81, 173, 196–209 Où j’ai laissé mon âme 196n14 fiction becoming fictional 72–73, 81, 97, 211 as communication 64–65, 105, 122, 128, 171 critical consciousness towards 58–60 fictional photographs 194, 197n18 fictional space/space of fiction 13, 29 ghosts associated with 56 identity as 188 spectral function of 19, 23, 40n105 as way into the past 40, 104, 134, 160, 240 filiation (heritage) 58, 128 incestuous female filiation 110n40 intertextual 67 refusal of heritage 187, 214 forensic memory 34n83 Fortress Europe 255, 257 Foucault, Michel on heterotopia 244

fragmentation and the Balkans 173 and the body 97, 131 fragmented transmission 118–19, 128, 151, 162, 175, 182, 186–88, 214–15 knowledge 204, 240–41 sentences 231–32 Freud, Sigmund and Cixous 77, 97 and memory 31 on mourning and melancholia 50 and psychoanalysis 7n23, 50 and trauma 64n70, 112n44 and the uncanny 101n1 see also Abraham, Nicolas and Maria Torok; psychoanalysis the future as anxiety 259 demise of 20 and disappearance 260n49 foretelling 215 and ghosts 3n9, 49, 53, 55, 84, 248–49, 254, 258–60 and memory 189, 248, 261 and the scream 66 see also temporality; time gaps attempts to fill 118–19, 125, 127 and ghosts 5, 11 as separation 220 genealogical nostalgia 125 unthought 110n40 genocide Bosnian 33–34, 36, 100, 171, 173–74, 207, 246, 251 genocide fiction 234, 240 living in aftermath of 25, 40, 250 memory of 41, 100, 176, 236–37, 241n71 against Roma and Sinti populations 101n2 against the Tutsi in Rwanda 27,

Index 28n52, 35n86, 36, 40, 100, 111, 171n52, 221, 233–46 see also the Holocaust; implication; LGBTQ+; perpetrators; survivors; witnesses Germany 87, 127, 131, 229n36, 234 German Jews 131 see also Alzheimer’s disease (“maladie d’Allemagne”); Kristallnacht; Nazis; Osnabrück ghosts definitions of 1–15 function as/of 1–2, 4–5, 12–15, 19, 40n105, 42, 49, 67, 100, 105, 122, 124, 136, 138, 153, 159, 162–63, 170, 205, 219, 241, 247, 256 ghosting 3n9 medieval 4n12, 5n15, 8n29 in the nineteenth century 6, 8, 44 (non-)logic of 13–15, 30, 51, 211 as possibility 46, 49, 52, 56–57, 78, 87, 93, 97, 260 postcolonial 7n24 “proper” ghosts 5, 14, 105, 159 reality of ghosts 3, 8n25, 8n27 religious or spiritual 4 and scholars 6, 8–9, 13, 56–57 textual 5, 11–12, 37, 39, 42, 55 as “thing” (this thing) 1, 5, 11–12, 42, 51, 72, 76, 80, 91, 130 see also haunting; phantoms; specters Gilbert, Catherine 233–34, 235n51, 238n64 Goulet, Andréa 172–73 Goytisolo, Juan 181 graves mass grave sites 34, 146, 190 narration beyond the grave 59–60, 245 no grave 32, 71

293

tombeau littéraire (literary tomb) 71 Grenaudier-Klijn, France 163n22, 164n26 grief 32, 40, 49–51, 72, 85, 112n44, 113, 190, 209, 244–45 see also mourning Gross, David on objects 129–30 Guelma massacre 230, 232 see also Algeria; Sétif massacre Halberstam, Jack In a Queer Time and Place 53n36 Halbwachs, Maurice 25 Hartog, François (regime of historicity) 20, 248n7 Harvey, Robert Witnessness 28n55, 232 haunting being haunted 3, 11, 13, 53, 72, 103, 117, 147, 177, 206, 241 haunted by the past 1, 42, 177, 248, 260 as metaphor 7–8, 30–31, 103 as real phenomenon 3 religious and spiritual conceptions of 4 as sign 11, 14–15, 29, 41–42, 48, 51, 188, 207, 215 and space 15n65, 19, 53–55, 258 hauntology 10, 14, 22, 30–31, 41, 47–48, 56, 70–71, 78, 87, 259 see also Abraham, Nicolas and Maria Torok; Cixous, Hélène; Davis, Colin; Derrida, Jacques heritage see filiation Hiroshima 105, 123–24 Hirsch, Marianne on photography 146, 194–96, 199, 205 postmemory 40, 100, 104, 119, 161, 184, 190

294

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Hitchcott, Nicki 27–28, 221n17, 234, 235n51, 238n64 the Holocaust as bodily memory 27 cooptation of Holocaust memory 207 LGBTQ+ Holocaust history 101n2 memory of 32, 35, 40, 100–04, 171, 220, 246, 251, 258, 260 and memory of slavery 257n40 and photography 146, 179–80, 204, 257 representations of 28–29, 102, 234 and suitcases 163 and trains 120–22, 146, 255–57 see also the 1.5 generation; antisemitism; camps; Jews; postmemory; second generation Homer 58, 61, 69, 73, 77 horror in Cixous 62n68, 63, 91–92 and ghosts 8n29 and photography 146–47, 179–80, 202–03, 205, 208 and poetry 182, 185, 187, 241 representation of 240, 242 hospitality failure of 251–52 towards ghosts 42, 52, 77, 83, 120, 261 Hugo, Victor 8 Huston, Nancy 222n18 Hutton, Margaret-Anne 18–20, 21n21, 24 Huyssen, Andreas 21, 42 identification against 116, 125, 220, 244 and the reader 219 suspension of 29–30 images and ghosts 6, 9n31, 10, 13, 78–79 narratives versus images 201

reign of the visual 210–11 and temporality 133 of war and deportation 146, 175, 203, 205, 246, 253–59 see also photography imagination cultural imagination 40 ghosts as figments of 6 imaginative investment 104, 123, 165, 196 and prosthetic memory 28 implication 26, 258 The Implicated Subject (Rothberg) 28, 123, 163, 169 incorporation of loss 31, 50, 58, 85, 143 see also crypts injustice 176, 187 see also justice intellectual intellectuals 148, 181–82 work 159 intertextuality 55, 57, 67 see also telephone, telephony inventory 69, 129–30, 136, 138, 162 of belongings 108, 139–46, 149, 151, 157–58, 163–64 as communication 132, 155, 157, 171 as forced exorcism 143 and legibility 144, 146–47 lost opportunity 154 and memory 135, 139, 142–43, 146 invisibility 32, 42, 197, 222 of ghosts 44, 48, 60, 158 invisibilization of migrants 254 invisibilization of precarious workers 4n9 see also visibility irony of flight 187, 214 ironic complicity 116, 209 tragic 149

Index Jews Algerian 131n7 French 32 German 131 ghosts and Jewish thought 5n12 and the Holocaust 18, 32, 101, 115, 256 Jewish survivors 89, 91 Polish 168–69 justice 29, 36 social 25n39 see also injustice juxtaposition of memory 30, 133–34, 223, 226 of pictures 147 of spaces 134 of timeframes 243 Kafka, Franz 14, 61, 67, 73 Kamuf, Peggy 68 Book of Addresses 2n5, 3, 14–15, 48n12, 57 Kanor, Fabienne Faire l’aventure 247, 252n24, 254, 257–58 Kawakami, Akane effet d’irréel 133, 169 on Modiano 137n30, 152–53, 160n7 Kerangal, Maylis de À ce stade de la nuit 252n24, 254 Kistnareddy, Ashwiny O. 252n25 knowledge 40, 116, 118, 174–75, 178–80, 189–90, 204, 224–25, 233, 236, 241, 243–44, 254 and ghosts 1, 5, 10, 19, 46–47, 49, 57 lack of 150, 154, 182, 199, 204, 208, 221, 224–26, 242 and names 94n93, 121 present of knowledge (gnomic present) 79–80, 91 and the reader 146–47, 163, 171, 176, 179, 182–83, 205, 166, 198, 204–05, 215, 228–29, 232, 238 traumatic 159, 188, 226 Kristallnacht 87–88, 91 Kurto, Nedžad (Sarajevo Roses) 185–86

295

Lambron, Marc 1941 106n23 Lampedusa 251–52, 257, 259, 261 see also Calais; migration Landsberg, Alison critique of prosthetic memory 27 on ghosts 158–59 Prosthetic Memory 27–29, 180 language 31, 41, 64n70, 69, 76, 93, 97, 121, 143, 161, 178, 180, 184, 240 Lasserre, Audrey 108n32, 109, 139n43 Laurens, Camille on Cixous 68n81 Levi, Primo 220 LGBTQ+ Holocaust history 101n2 the Liberation 38, 230 see also Guelma massacre; Sétif massacre Lieux de mémoire (Pierre Nora) 25–26, 39, 172n58, 261 nœuds de mémoire 25n37, 26 postcolonial realms of memory 26, 222 queer realms of memory 26n42 liminal text 3 in-between space 134, 245 liminality of ghosts 9 linear conceptions of time 13, 20, 25, 31, 52, 120, 133, 145, 163, 247 non-linear conceptions 23, 249 see also chronology; the contemporary; temporality; time; the untimely listening in Cixous 63–64, 69–70, 92 refusal to listen 179 willingness to listen 151, 244 to a wound 64n70 lists function of 132, 136, 157, 162 and ghosts 41, 46, 100, 241, 247 of grievances 130–32, 157 and Modiano 132, 135n19, 136–37, 152

296

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of names 132, 135, 150, 152 and Perec 137 reading lists 140, 147, 151, 153–55 of things 75, 130, 145, 151–52 see also inventory literature’s secret 63–65 Littel, Jonathan Les Bienveillantes 116, 209 loose ends 12, 170–71 Loridan-Ivens, Marceline 169 loss 86, 92, 94, 126, 131, 161–62, 195, 209, 239 of belongings 106, 131, 142, 159, 161–62, 170, 186 dealing with 209 and ghosts 49, 71, 190 and memory 248, 260 and migration 252, 260 personal 32, 40, 42, 51, 58, 72, 74, 110, 132, 159 political 51 Magaš, Branka The Destruction of Yougoslavia 201–02 magic book 60 magical incantation 2n4 magical thinking in Barthes 195n9 names 95, 97 Proust 65 and the telephone 60, 65 Marder, Elissa The Mother in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction 50n26, 65n71, 75, 76n20, 76n22, 82, 94–95, 97, 187 on Barthes’s magical thinking 195n9 Marx 12n52, 249–50, 255 Marxists 45n3, 51n28 massacres of Algerians 26, 30, 133, 148, 220–22, 225–26, 228–29, 231–33, 246 century of 40 in Croatia 34n81, 196, 202, 207

in Guelma 230, 232 memory of 40–41 reports of 111 in Rwanda 237 in Sétif 148, 229n36, 230, 232 survivors of 27 material archival materials 155 culture 18 device 59 expression 55 immaterial 125, 161 loss 159, 162 materiality of the body 81, 217 materially inscribed 77 objects 129, 141 presence 219 proofs 168 traces 122, 142, 144, 200n21, 217 Mathy, Jean-Philippe Melancholy Politics 49n21 May 1968 49n21 Medusa 122, 200–01 melancholia 50 melancholy 12, 49n21, 162 see also Freud memorials makeshift memorials 53, 169, 223–24 memorial architecture 185–86 see also commemoration; memory; remembrance; Wajsbrot, Cécile, Mémorial memorialization 51, 207, 235n53, 241n71, 254, 258 memory anachronistic quality of 1–2 collective 25–26, 33, 51, 54n38, 105, 109, 155, 171, 220, 237, 248, 253, 256, 259 and complicity (Sanyal) 28–30, 116, 209, 213n60, 220, 232n41 devoir de mémoire 107–08, 234, 240n70

Index forensic 34n83 palimpsestic (Silverman) 2n2, 30–31, 133–34, 136n27, 169 postmemory (Hirsch) 40, 100, 104, 119, 161, 184, 190 prosthetic (Landsberg) 27–29, 180 and migration 245–46, 252–54, 257–58, 260 multidirectional (Rothberg) 1n2, 26, 30, 35–36, 102n4, 123, 169n45, 223 of the text 14, 42, 159, 247 see also Alzheimer’s disease; commemoration; contamination; displacement; disruption; Lieux de mémoire; memorials; memorialization; mnemonic; remembrance migration bird of 54–55 of a box 215 family 173, 177 memory and 245–46, 252–54, 257–58, 260 Miller, Nancy K. 219 mind failing mind 126n73 to mind ghosts 32–33 readers’ mind 35, 147, 205, 221, 233, 256 as subject to specters 7, 54, 60 see also Alzheimer’s disease; memory mnemonic discussions 163 practice 35n86, 107n30, 114 projects 26, 104 see also memory modern Europe 174, 250 time regime 20, 111n43 world 187 see also postmodern

297

Modiano, Patrick 17, 23n34, 39, 100, 106n23, 109n38, 122, 132–37, 140, 151–52, 157–61, 186, 191, 200n21, 204 Chien de printemps 133, 164–65 Un cirque passe 165–66 Discours à l’Académie suédoise 160n7 Dora Bruder 106, 138, 162n20, 168, 169, 200n21 Fleurs de ruine 138n38, 166, 170 Livret de famille 133n36, 160–61, 163, 170 Pour que tu ne te perdes pas dans le quartier 23n34, 138n38, 161, 170 Rue des boutiques obscures 135–36, 157 Souvenirs dormants 137–38 Villa triste 132, 167, 170 Montaigne 61, 67, 73 mother mother–daughter relationship 104n15, 106, 110, 114, 117, 126n74, 183, 188–90, 209–10, 213–14, 219, 224–26 mother–son relationship 32, 195, 200, 211, 245 see also Cixous, Ève; Marder, Elissa The Mother in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction Motte, Warren 17 mourning 32, 50–51, 96, 105, 233 anticipatory 258–60 in Cixous 58, 71–72, 74–75, 85–86 and ghosts 49, 71 premourning 248 relentless mourning 32 ritual 188–89, 245 work of 50, 75 see also Freud; grief Mukasonga, Scholastique 234–35, 238 Inyenzi ou les Cafards 234 Notre-Dame du Nil 234

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multidirectional memory (Rothberg) 1n2, 26, 30, 35–36, 102n4, 123, 169n45, 223 musicality music terminology 96n99 of the name 121 Muslims 34, 230 names 33–35, 83, 92–93, 94n94, 121, 146, 174, 168–69, 201, 234 and communication 60, 62, 64, 92–95, 110, 159 of disease 126–27 disturbing and destructive 106, 110–11, 114–18, 121–24 as ghost 13–14, 33, 41, 93–94, 97, 100, 101, 114–17, 124, 128, 132, 134, 241, 247 of the ghost 12, 46–47, 72, 80 names and the inventory 136–38, 144 silencing of 117–20, 125–26 of sites 224–25, 251 tragic proper names 105, 110 war without a name 221n16 see also lists Nancy, Jean-Luc 59 narration from beyond the grave 59–60 the nation 25–26, 49n21 Nazis collaboration with 137, 160, 207 extermination camps 169, 257 genocide 28n54, 35, 101, 102n3 Germany 131 ideology 115 Occupation 160 officials 114–15, 138 see also camps; Kristallnacht; the Occupation; war NDiaye, Marie 104n12 Trois femmes puissantes 254 Nettelbeck, Colin 102 Niang, Mame-Fatou on France’s ghosts 8n24 on universalism (with Julien Suaudeau) 233n40

Nietzsche, Friedrich Untimely Meditations 21, 23 nœuds de mémoire see Lieux de mémoire Nora, Pierre see Lieux de mémoire Norridge, Zoe 237–39, 245 nostalgia anticipatory 260 and the contemporary 22 genealogical 125 reticent 163n22 Noudelmann, François 37–38 nouveau roman 20 objects 129–30, 141–47, 152–55, 157–59, 161–63, 196, 217 boxes 42, 142–43, 157–59, 171, 176–91, 198–99, 204, 214–15 as ghosts 13–14, 29, 33, 41, 100, 144, 147, 158–59, 162, 241–42, 247 lists of objects 151, 157–59, 162 missing and lost 162–64, 169–70, 186, 194–95 suitcases 42, 157–59, 163–71, 222 see also photographs the Occupation memory of 30, 104, 106, 133–34, 137, 160, 171, 200n21, 223 Paris of 39, 134, 160–61 shadow of 171 Orpheus 60–61 Osnabrück (city) 87, 89–91, 93, 131 see also Cixous (Gare d’Osnabrück à Jérusalem); Germany; Kristallnacht the “other” 27, 41, 94 responsibility towards 29–30, 83, 259, 252n22, 261 see also responsibility the OuLiPo 32, 36–37, 173 out of joint 22–23, 47, 52, 111 see also time; the untimely

Index pain 76, 124, 178, 190, 199 and memory 176, 260 of others 41, 88, 100, 105, 190 painful silence 121 Regarding the Pain of Others (Sontag) 201n26, 202–03 and screams 62–63 visual depiction of 205 see also suffering painting missing 157, 193–94 red paint 223–24 and temporality 201 palimpsest 133–34, 164, 205–06 palimpsestic memory (Max Silverman) 2n2, 30–31, 133–34, 136n27, 169 Panaïté, Oana tombeaux littéraires 71n2 Panchasi, Roxane Future Tense 247n2, 248, 259n48, 260 Papon, Maurice 107, 110, 220 the past elusive past 162, 175 Perec, Georges 17–18, 31–37, 39–40, 42, 72n3, 93, 104n16, 106, 118, 136–37, 163–64, 167, 169n46, 195, 211 L’Attentat de Sarajevo 35 Le Condottière 35 La Disparition 32 Les Revenentes 33 La Vie mode d’emploi 36–37, 137 “Le Voyage d’hiver” 36–37 W ou le souvenir d’enfance 32, 106, 118, 195 perpetrators 28–29, 106, 110, 112, 123, 208–09, 220n13 see also names Pétain, Philippe 106, 108, 111–12, 115–17, 140–42 phantoms 8, 9n31, 11, 61, 72 transgenerational phantom (Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok) 48n14, 49 see also ghosts

299

phonebook 135–36, 144, 152, 157, 167 phone numbers 135–36 see also telephone photography 34n84, 44, 74, 197n18, 209, 211–12 drone 189, 212–15 and memory 195, 227n32, 242, 255–56 missing photographs 157, 165, 193–94, 197–99, 206, 209 and the palimpsest 133, 164 photographs and the inventory 144–45, 164 photographs as ghosts 41, 100, 203–05, 241, 247 Ron Haviv (photojournalist) 201 and temporality 201, 205 textual photographs 194, 196, 198–99, 205, 211 war 173, 179, 198, 204, 253 see also Barthes, Roland; Hirsch, Marianne; Sontag, Susan; Zelizer, Barbara Poe, Edgar Allan 66, 69 poetry “Bâilloner les poèmes” (Faye) 240–41 and Cixous 58, 68n81 documentary poetry 180–87, 190–91, 212–15 epic poem 173 Ossip Mandelstam Vek (The Century) 22–23 Ronsard 212 “Rwanda Is NOT Hotel Rwanda!!!” 27n51 what to do with 151–52, 212 as witness 246 Poland 40, 119–24 see also Auschwitz politics 29, 36, 39n103, 51, 225, 254 and ethics 27, 29, 86n57 European Union 240, 252 French 40, 49n21, 102, 105, 115, 172–73, 250

300

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and memory 123n70 political action 108, 225, 230, 254 political theory and ghosts 7n21 and space 206, 222, 244 portmanteau words (reading) 68–69 possession belongings 140–41 spirit 5n12, 6n15, 85 postcolonial memory 26 universalism 232n40 the posthumous and ghosts 14, 81–82, 84 postmemory 40, 100, 104, 119, 161, 184, 190 see also Hirsch, Marianne; second generation postmodern postmodernism 36, 53n36 suspicion 10 post-war Europe 256–57 fiction 102, 160 France 20, 38, 169 growth 251n17 living post-war 103, 123 memory 186 see also the Liberation Prescod-Weinstein, Chanda on “spacetime” 53n36 presence of absence 5, 9, 11, 61, 90, 131, 219 disruptive 105, 118, 190 and ghosts 7–8, 22, 44, 92, 110n40, 248, 259n47 and memory 143, 168, 229n35 metaphysics of 31, 47, 56–57 see also absence the present 11, 22–23, 25, 27, 30–31, 52–53, 70, 78–79, 84, 86, 92, 101, 109, 111, 113–14, 118, 122, 124–25, 140, 158, 169, 173, 205–06, 218, 259 of knowledge (gnomic present) 80

presentism 248 present otherwise 41, 57, 77–80, 97, 105, 118, 194, 259, 261 Prince, Gerald 135 pronouns direct object 231 “on” 70, 80, 230–33, 255 possessive 132 shifting 230, 233 Proust, Marcel 61–65, 67, 73, 82 Le Côté de Guermantes 60, 66 Du Côté de chez Swann 6 psychoanalysis 7n23, 48, 49n21, 50, 51n31, 66, 112n44, 143 see also Abraham, Nicolas and Maria Torok; Freud, Sigmund punctuation 95, 96n99 lack of 91, 144–45 queer Holocaust history 101n2 realms of memory 26n42 time 53n36 Rabaté, Dominique Désirs de disparaître 9, 31, 33, 167 Radoman, Vladan 172 Ravindranathan, Thangam Behold an Animal 12–13, 178–79 the reader address to 24n34, 38 and assumptions 35, 174, 229, 235, 239 and their demands 254n33 and empathy/solidarity 100, 110, 114, 116–17, 180, 214, 244 feeling haunted 14, 29, 42, 100, 103, 105, 117, 132, 142, 144–46, 159, 163, 166, 170–71, 176, 178–79, 198, 203–04, 226, 232, 236, 242–45, 253 and identification 219–20 readers’ encounters 64, 96n99, 147 reading readers 58, 76

Index readliving (luvécu) 88 relationship between author and 37, 52, 205 task of 24, 26–27, 29, 41, 56, 150, 155, 175, 196, 225, 233, 241 reappearance 1, 29, 33, 41, 46, 72, 117, 132, 158–59, 170, 176, 194 see also disappearance regime of historicity (François Hartog) 20, 248n7 remembrance act of 36 ceremony of 34n83 collective 220 and forgetting 188 forms of 25 more than 72–73 see also commemoration reminder 32, 59, 91, 130, 136, 162, 185, 219, 224, 231, 257–58 repetition 97, 174, 232, 255 of atrocities 206 and death 75, 84 and ghosts 46 of a name 105, 114, 124, 174 and trauma 64n70, 108 repository of memories 74, 125, 127, 149, 154, 160 representation ekphrastic 201 ethics of 28–29, 41 literary 2, 222, 224, 234, 240 of the obscene 203 of suffering 64, 69 of the visible/invisible 10, 42 reproduction bourgeois reproduction 53 of ghosts 75–76, 187 heterosexual 127 of a photograph 194, 197n18 see also Marder, Elissa The Mother in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction Resnais, Alain Nuit et Brouillard 213n60

301

resonance 26, 31, 44, 50, 61–63, 68–69, 72, 76n20, 105, 121, 154, 177, 196 responsibility 25, 112, 118, 196, 199, 218, 241 deflection of/skirting 109, 207, 221, 231–33, 255n35 towards others 29–30, 83, 259, 252n22, 261 vicarious responsibility (Hannah Arendt) 123n69 writerly 38 resurrection 60–62, 69, 93, 130–31 the revenant 8–9, 14, 46, 78–79, 83, 89, 92, 105, 109, 144, 245, 250 see also ghosts; phantoms; specters revenge 4, 8, 109, 183 come back with a vengeance 159, 179 Rice, Alison 96, 121, 220n15 on Cixous 94n94 Ricœur, Paul La Mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli 108n32 Roma and Sinti people 101n2 Ronsard 212 Rosenthal, Olivia On n’est pas là pour disparaître 127 Rothberg, Michael The Implicated Subject 28, 123, 163, 169 on Lieux de mémoire 25n39, 26 Multidirectional Memory 1n2, 26, 30, 35–36, 102n4, 123, 169n45, 223, 227n32 Roubaud, Jacques 36–37, 93, 164 Rousso, Henry 102n3 Ruffel, Lionel 21n21 Ruhe, Cornelia 197n18, 200n21, 201, 203, 205n42, 206 rupture and history 230 textual 74, 110 and time 21, 122 and trauma 243

302

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Rwanda 40 genocide against the Tutsi 27, 28n52, 35n86, 36, 40, 100, 111, 171n52, 221, 233–46 see also Faye, Gaël; Mukasonga, Scholastique Sabo, Oana The Migrant Canon 254 Salvayre, Lydie 17, 100, 103, 105–07, 110, 116–17, 132, 139, 142, 144, 154, 220 La Compagnie des spectres 105–17, 139–47 Et que les vers mangent le bœuf mort 114n47, 115n52, 116, 142 La médaille 106 Pas pleurer 106 La Puissance des mouches 117 Quelques conseils utiles aux élèves huissiers 114–16, 140–42 Sangatte 252 see also migration Sangsue, Daniel Fantômes, esprits et autres morts-vivants 4n11, 8, 9n29, 67 Sanyal, Debarati on Calais 252n23, 252n26 on Lieux de mémoire 26 Memory and Complicity 28–30, 116, 209, 213n60, 220, 232n41 Sarajevo 35, 173, 187, 201, 208–10 Sarajevo Roses (Kurto) 185–86 siege of 34, 36, 171n52, 174, 181–84 Sartre, Jean-Paul 37–38 La Nausée 23 scar 119, 121 Schubert, Katja 103n9, 117–18, 124n71 Schwab, Gabriele 7n24 on cryptographic writing 51n31 screams in Cixous 57, 62–63, 66–67, 69–70, 73n9, 92, 105, 190 in Salvayre 113, 144

Sebbar, Leïla 17, 30, 100, 220, 221–22, 224, 227n32, 233, 241 La Seine était rouge 30, 164n26, 221–28 second generation 104–05, 118–19, 123, 125, 176, 184, 190, 195 see also Hirsch, Marianne secrets ghosts and 9, 48n14, 49, 51, 61, 110n40 literature’s secret 63–66, 68 secret life 174 shameful 168 Segarra, Marta 58n58 Senegal 234, 257–58 Serbia 40, 201–02, 206–07 atrocities by Serb-led forces 33, 173, 196, 209 Sétif massacre 148, 229n36, 230, 232 see also Algeria; Guelma Shakespeare 69n89, 73, 77, 81, 85 Hamlet 1, 5, 22–23, 47–48, 51–52, 62–63, 69, 72, 80, 90, 92, 109, 255 Macbeth 54–55, 90, 218 shame 218–220 Shoah see the Holocaust siege see Sarajevo silence collective silencing 92 of Europe 251 family 104–05, 118–19, 123, 125, 190 painful 121–22 refusal of silencing 103 and screams 70 silenced memories 40, 159, 223, 225, 229 silencing of name 117, 126 and trauma 64n70 of words 240 Silverman, Max 104n14, 131n7 on Lieux de mémoire 26 Palimpsestic Memory 2n2, 30–31, 133–34, 136n27, 169

Index Sinha, Shumona Assommons les pauvres! 254 sites defamiliarization of 86 of destruction and violence 117, 209, 213 as ghosts 13–14, 33, 42, 100, 261 mass graves 34 memorial 223–25, 227, 259, 261 of repetition 75 see also Lieux de mémoire Skalova, Marina Exploration du flux 255–58 slavery 7, 35, 250, 257–58 the soldier (figure of) 32, 158, 167–68, 196, 196n14, 201, 202n29, 240n70 French Foreign Legion 171, 197, 208 peacekeeping forces 171 solidarity 36, 116 Sontag, Susan 181–82 on photography 201–04 Sophocles 61–63, 66, 69, 73, 77, 82 soul body and soul 143 in Cixous 60, 66, 85, 260 immortal 105, 109 space 27, 30, 54–55, 68, 77, 86n57, 109, 239, 245, 258 blank space 95–97, 144, 229 heterotopia (Foucault) 244 hospitable 42, 83, 120, 261 juxtaposition of space 30–31, 134, 195, 206 and memory 26, 30, 35, 53, 222 narrative space 68, 100, 105, 114, 117, 119 space of communication 92, 128, 171, 186, 199–200, 204–05, 247, 260 spatialization of time 2, 31, 53n36 for thinking the ghost 13, 19, 29, 37, 47–48 transcending time and space 66, 70, 97, 124n71, 186

303

Spain 103, 106, 257 specters 5–15, 30, 42, 46, 55–57, 60–61, 70, 72, 74, 77–78, 82, 86, 89–91, 103, 105, 108, 119–20, 125, 140, 172, 221, 249–50, 255 see also ghosts; haunting; phantoms; the revenant; spectral; spectrality spectral communication 3, 24, 59, 87, 199, 258 function 1, 19, 40, 52, 55–56, 105, 136, 138, 153, 159 imaginary 102–04 logic 13–14, 51, 211 presence 109, 110n40 (re)appearance 31, 33, 158, 136, 179n76, 189 turn 41, 44–45 spectrality (theories of) 3n9, 5–6, 7n21, 22, 33, 41, 44, 48, 50–52, 56, 72, 76, 78–82, 91, 97, 111–12, 120, 174n63, 205n44, 259 see also ghosts; haunting; phantoms; the revenant; specters Spiegelman, Art Maus 42n110, 194 Srebrenica 33–36, 39, 207, 246, 251n18 see also genocide stains blood 217–18, 226–27, 236, 242–45 figurative and symbolic 219–22, 229–33, 241 as ghosts 42, 100, 247 and knowledge 224–25 and memory 219n10 Stendhal 61, 63, 67, 73, 87, 208 Stewart, Susan On Longing 143, 260n49 Stora, Benjamin on Algeria 221n16 Suaudeau, Julien on universalism (with Mame-Fatou Niang) 232n40 Subotić, Jelena Hijacked Justice 196n15, 202n29 Yellow Star, Red Star 207–09

304

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suffering 118, 246 history of 207–08 see also double souffrance (double suffering) suicide 62n68, 175, 185, 209 Suleiman, Susan Rubin 1.5 generation 104n16, 184, 225 Risking Who One Is 18, 36, 40, 58, 89 Suljagić, Emir 33 see also genocide; Srebrenica summoning of a ghost 44, 158–59 supernatural letters 67 non-supernatural ghosts 105 phenomenon 3 tales 6n15 surveillance 178 novel of 175 survival of the author 73, 77 strategy 125 survivors of genocide 27, 33, 35, 89, 103n9, 104, 119, 169, 184, 186, 190, 218, 220 and testimony 149, 163, 233–35, 238n64, 239, 240n70 see also witness suspension device 70 of identification 29 left in suspense (en souffrance) 12, 53, 182 points de suspension (ellipsis) 145 of the sentence 95–96 of time 201, 243, 37, 68–70 Tadjo, Véronique 234 Tanović, Sabina on Sarajevo Roses 185, 186n85 Taubira, Christiane on social justice 25n39 taxonomy 129, 136 see also the inventory

telephone 153–54, 175, 178, 242, 245 in Cixous 55–70, 74, 85, 94, 110, 131, 159 telephony 43, 59, 65–66, 70, 73, 92, 94, 118 see also phonebooks television 111–12, 140–42, 253 temporality 21, 23, 25–27, 53, 55, 70, 84, 106, 110, 113, 128, 130, 146, 158, 206, 213n60, 218, 243 bringing together of temporalities 59, 82, 86, 91, 105, 163, 247, 261 and ghosts 24, 30, 48, 50, 77, 80, 83, 92, 158 see also the contemporary; time; the untimely textual chronology 13, 221 event 63, 74, 77 ghosts and haunting 5, 11–12, 29, 37, 39, 42, 44, 52, 54–55, 67 grave 71 resurrection 61 photographs 194, 196, 198–99, 205, 211 sign, marker, strategies 144, 232, 234 temporality 110 see also intertextuality thinking otherwise 1, 48, 55, 57, 110 Thobois, Ingrid Miss Sarajevo 173 time accumulated times 53 to be at the same time 33, 44, 48, 66, 77–84, 88, 91–92, 97, 118, 122, 163 concept of being and time 44, 47, 60–61 contretemps 92, 214 disjointed, disorientated, disrupted, unhinged 14, 19–24, 47–48, 52–54, 70, 83, 88, 91, 111–13, 119–24, 132, 162, 205, 213, 218n6, 245, 247–49

Index modern time regime 20–21, 25, 52, 111n43, 259 as objective 21n18 queer time 53n36 “spacetime” 53n36 spatialization of 2, 31 suspension of 201, 243, 37, 68–70 timeshells 33–39, 64, 120 witness of 125 see also chronology; the contemporary; temporality; the untimely timeshells (coquille/typo) 33–39, 64, 120 Todorova, Maria Imagining the Balkans 172 Toussaint, Jean-Philippe Les Émotions 20n17 Touvier, Paul 107 traces 34, 42, 71, 154, 164–65, 218, 242, 248 and Cixous 72–73, 76–77, 93 and Derrida 31, 54–56 destruction of 175, 185, 209–10 of disappearance 35, 151, 167–69, 171, 221 ghosts as 11, 136, 147, 162, 211 of loved ones 100, 122, 140, 146, 176, 187–88, 190, 211 material 122, 142, 217 memory 26, 53, 219n10 of the past 144, 159, 221, 239 photographs as 194, 199–200 temporal 30–31 without a trace 31, 152, 244 trains 120–22, 146, 167–68, 170, 253, 255–57 transgenerational communication 100, 224 phantom 48n14 trauma 52n31, 110n40, 112n44, 189 transmission automatic 118 failure of 233n42 of literature 148

305

of memory 25, 27, 105, 119, 125, 127–28, 151, 154, 157, 159, 176, 183–84, 186, 188, 217, 224, 241 oral 118, 155 spiritual 94 of trauma 104, 119, 243 trauma theory 42, 64n70, 112n44, 119, 184, 217–18 transgenerational 52n31, 110n40, 112n44, 189 transmission of 104, 119, 243 traumatic complicity 220 traumatic events 41, 87–88, 97, 103, 111, 239 traumatic experiences 104, 113, 119, 183, 243, 246 traumatic knowledge 159, 188, 226 traumatic memory 27–29, 105, 108–10, 126, 139, 182–84, 219, 221, 246, 248 turns exhumation turn 34n83, 41n108 reactionary turn 49n21 spectral turn 41, 44–45 timely 45 typos see timeshells the unconscious 10, 51n31 the untimely becoming untimely 36–38, 44, 79–83, 87, 92, 105, 113, 260 and conceptions of time 2n3, 53n36, 120 and the contemporary 23–24, 38, 52 and ghosts 2, 30–31, 44–47, 60, 114, 207, 214 and memory 1–2, 189, 226, 249, 253 out of joint 22–23, 47, 52, 111 untimely return 117, 132, 136, 170, 194, 204–05 see also the contemporary; disruption; temporality; time utopia 136, 260n49

306

Mind the Ghost

vanishing of collective projects 20 and death 109 and forgetting 212 of original owner 169 vanished worlds 135 without a trace 31 see also disappearance; traces vengeance see revenge Vichy regime 102n3, 105–16, 131, 140–41, 160, 222 see also antisemitism; Barbie, Klaus; Bousquet, René; camps; collaboration; Darnand, Joseph; the Holocaust; the Occupation; Papon, Maurice; Pétain, Philippe; Touvier, Paul; war victims of circumstances 208 commemoration of 185 and complicity 220n13 exhumation of 34n83 and ghosts 109, 111–12 and identification 41 and migration 251 positioning as helpless 182n81 subject position 28–29, 122–23, 125, 228 violence colonial violence 222–33 memory of 108, 185, 217–21, 246 representation of 200–09, 240–42, 244 and poetry 212–14 violent histories 4, 7, 25, 28, 30, 35–36, 41, 88, 91, 102–03, 238–39 of words 75, 84, 110 see also trauma; war visibility and ghosts 9 lack of 228 of the past 30 visible sign 144, 146, 219, 232 see also invisibility

visor effect (Derrida) 170 von Trier, Lars EUROPA 256n37 Vukovar 34, 196n15, 201–02, 205–09 Wajsbrot, Cécile 18, 74, 87n64, 89–90, 100, 103, 105, 117 Beaune la Rolande 117 Mémorial 105, 118–28, 148, 201, 253 walls 247, 251, 255 see also Fortress Europe war 23, 118, 178, 208, 236, 240, 251 crimes 113 diary 171n52 and drones 213 against evil 113, 140 refugees of 173, 241, 253 reporter 198–99 zones 189, 206, 213, 253 see also Algeria; camps; collaboration; the Holocaust; the Liberation; massacres; the Occupation; photography, war; post-war; Rwanda; the soldier; Vichy regime; World War I; World War II; Yugoslavia, former Wiesel, Elie 32n78 Wills, David on Cixous 95 on drone penalty 213n60 on the temporality of blood 218 witness and Cixous 78 faulty 149–50 historian as 107n30 phonebook as 135 of migration 245–46 reader as 12 subject position 28–29 survivor/witness 220, 235n51 of time 125 of violence and atrocities 208, 217, 219, 228, 238, 256–57 Witnessness (Harvey) 28n55, 232

Index Wolfreys, Julian 12n56 Wood, Sarah on the trace 10n38, 54–55 work body of work (literary corpus, book made flesh) 81 towards ethics 261 of identification of traces 34 of literature 58–59, 69 of memory 1, 30, 151, 175, 188, 209, 220 of mourning 50, 75, 112n44 precarious work 4n9, 177, 257–58 of the reader 146, 159, 175 reworking 71n2, 115n52, 142 of time 124 workplace novel 106, 173 World War I 158, 207 see also war World War II 18, 40, 101, 148, 160, 172, 177, 204, 207–08, 251, 256–57 see also camps; collaboration; the Holocaust; the Liberation; the Occupation; photography, war; post-war; the soldier; Vichy regime; war

307

wound and communication 66, 97 and the contemporary 23 and cruelty 218 and prosthetic memory 27 Sétif massacre as 230 trauma theory 64n70, 119, 217–18 writing as ambition 73 life writing 82 not writing 73–75, 81, 84 rewriting 116, 142 as spectral communication 59–72 as a tombstone 32n78 and traces 54, 162 writing disappearance 31, 42 Yugoslavia, former 34n83, 36, 172, 174 Yugoslav wars 171–77, 179, 182–86, 190, 196, 198–99, 201–03, 206–07, 212, 214 see also the Balkans; Bosnia and Herzegovina; Croatia; Eastern Europe; Sarajevo; Serbia; Srebrenica; Vukovar Zelizer, Barbie 12n55 Remembering to Forget 179–80, 204, 257