From Cultural Amnesia to ‘Anamnesia’ in Reading Life-Writing Narratives of the French Occupation: The Lost Manuscript, the ‘Handwritingness’ of History and the Broken Narrative (original) (raw)

2010, Synthesis: an Anglophone Journal of Comparative Literary Studies

The study of memory turns academics into concerned citizens who share the burdens of contemporary memory crises.-Kansteiner Cultural Amnesia and Cultural Assumptions Focusing on two French texts concerned with experiences of the Second Word War and more specifically with the French experience of Occupation, this article works broadly within the approaches developed (and being developed) within memory studies. 1 It will be suggested that lifewriting may enable a move from a contemporary position of 'amnesia,' understood as related to the inability to trace the past and the urgency to remedy that state, to the Aristotelian concept of 'anamnesis,' or as a recent critical work terms it 'anamnesia': "recollection as a dynamic and creative process, which includes remembering as much as forgetting" (Collier, Elsner and Smith 13). 2 An underlying premise is that both Agnès Humbert's Résistance: Memoirs of Occupied France (published for the first time in English in 2008) and Hélène Berr's Journal (first published in both French and English in 2008) are 'witness' texts. Although they are both partially concerned with recounting traumatic experience, they are not 'trauma texts' as the term 'trauma' is currently understood in memory studies: the authors were reacting immediately on the whole to those experiences and committed them to writing within a short space of time, rather than 'uncovering' them at a later stage as is the case with 'trauma.' 3 Although marketed by their respective publishers as 'memoirs' and a 'diary,' the term 'life-writing narrative' is preferred here. 'Life-writing' covers the production of a more diverse range of writing concerning the self, and importantly its reception, and avoids an over-emphasis on the definition of genre, gaining wide academic acceptance from the 1980s onwards. 4 Both the reception of Humbert's and Berr's texts and a preliminary analysis of the conditions of production of these texts and of their recurring tropes will be considered here. The notion of 'cultural amnesia' will mainly be understood more specifically in terms of the types of 'cultural assumptions' that are made by contemporary readers when reading certain types of historical life-writing narratives that purport to bear witness to historical events. How we read such texts is influenced by what the writer and we ourselves remember, and what the writer and we forget or indeed forget to remember. In fact, it may further be suggested that the contemporary publishing successes of such life-writing narratives may in reality be a symptom of contemporary cultural amnesia-or rather the attempt to remedy it, to move from amnesia to anamnesia: If amnesia is defined as the absence of memory, the linguistic formation of anamnesia refuses this absence in an act of double negativity that recollects something that has always already been lost. Anamnesia, though commonly understood as 'remembrance,' in fact, resists forgetting. (Damlé 229) Undoubtedly one should bear in mind the caveats which will be discussed below concerning the often too facile identification with victims of traumatic events and the consequences of this for the study of history. There is nonetheless, as it will be suggested, a dynamic process at work in the reception of the life-writing narratives of witnesses to history; namely, the opportunity to remember and to rethink what has been (mis)remembered concerning the realities of lived experience. This article therefore has two main aims. It firstly proposes some ideas concerning the reception of life-writing narratives which share the experience of the Occupation with a range of French and (in translation) English-speaking readerships. It also addresses the issue of what these forms of publication and reading experiences in the present might further tell us about cultural assumptions concerning both the historical lived experience of the Second World War and about life-writing narratives and their authors more generally. This emphasis on assumptions is important since, even without the additional 'emotional baggage' of the war period, life-writing is a site of readers' assumptions, notably of course concerning notions of 'truth' and the 'real' in the context of lived experience. All approaches to autobiographical texts involve Debra Kelly, From Cultural Amnesia to 'Anamnesia' in Reading Life-Writing Narratives Synthesis 2 (Fall 2010) 50