Jorge Semprún: Writing the European Other by Ursula Tidd (review)

Prior to 2014, the only book-length studies of author and public intellectual Jorge Semprún had been published in French, German, and Spanish. Ursula Tidd’s important monograph joins Ofelia Ferrán and Gina Herrmann’s edited volume A Critical Companion to Jorge Semprún (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) as the first comprehensive English-language books devoted to the life and work of a writer who attested at first hand the perils of Francoism, Nazism, and Communism. Though a focused, single-author study, Tidd’s book weaves in extensive analyses of works by literary, artistic, and philosophical giants—Heidegger, Husserl, Levinas, Proust, Sartre, Velázquez, Vermeer, among others—in order to highlight their impact on Semprún’s aesthetics and thought. This approach, in foregrounding the intersection between Semprún and a variety of ‘Others’, tacitly reflects the central contention of the study: namely, that Semprún’s self-writing addresses an implied Other and thereby stages ‘an encounter with his own alterity and the moribund other encountered in Buchenwald’ (p. 7). Tidd bears this thesis out in chapters that attend to Semprún’s exile and identity, political activities, ethical stance, and narrative strategies. The first chapter assesses the texts that do not deal primarily with Buchenwald or Communism, and contends that Semprún produced more works in French than in Spanish as a mechanism for imposing distance from his father’s writing, from his mother and mother country, and from Buchenwald. Tidd is particularly interested in Semprún’s attitudes towards gender, and, reading him against Simone de Beauvoir, she argues that his writings are informed by a ‘patriarchal universalist mythology’ (p. 29). This critique of Semprún — one that Tidd elaborates further in her treatment of his texts about Buchenwald and Europe — demonstrates the extent to which her study resists hagiography. The second chapter analyses Semprún’s political position from the 1930s to the 1960s, tracing in impressive detail his arrest and transit to Buchenwald, and correcting, through in-depth research in the camp archives, the prevailing narrative about Semprún’s recorded identity as a ‘stucco worker’. The next two chapters turn from historical biography to Semprún’s literary representation of Buchenwald. Tidd identifies Semprún’s unique narrative ‘idiolect’ as one characterized by bilingualism, intertextual references, and aesthetic devices such as ellipses and doubling. For Tidd, Semprún’s aesthetics responds to an ethical imperative to confront the absolute evil of Buchenwald. Influenced by and departing from Levinassian ethics, Semprún’s poetics, in this reading, figures a confrontation with the author’s own mortality by representing the death of the Other. In the book’s final chapter Tidd addresses Semprún’s writings on Europe in order to locate his commitment to diversity and openness to alterity. The book’s throughline of alterity offers a convincing theoretical approach to reading Semprún, yet, in so much as it accentuates the work and thought of his interlocutors, also at times seems to deflect analysis from Semprún’s work itself. While her study makes no claim to exhaustivity—indeed Semprún’s Spanish texts receive far less critical attention than his French ones here — Tidd navigates deftly the political, historical, philosophical, and literary underpinnings of Semprún’s complex and multifarious œuvre.