Silence Is Death. The Life and Work of Tahar Djaout (review)

We live in a world in which increasing emphasis is placed on virtual or parallel worlds: in so-called virtual reality shows, in parallel lives lived out in cyberspace, and in fantasy football leagues. So perhaps we should not be shocked by virtual research and parallel scholarship. But, reader be warned: the full title of Julija Šukys’s book is misleading. It would reasonably cause us to expect a traditional study of the l’homme-et-l’œuvre variety. However, the most accurate labeling of this product is found on the inside flap of the dust jacket, which describes Silence Is Death: The Life and Work of Tahar Djaout as “an innovative meditation on death, authorship, and the political role of intellectuals [in which] by collapsing the genres of history, biography, personal memoir, fiction, and cultural analysis, Julija Šukys investigates notions of authorial neutrality as well as the relationship between reader and writer in life and death.”

To be sure, Šukys does provide a limited amount of research-based biography, history, and cultural analysis. Those pages provide the book’s most pertinent and rewarding passages. But most of the book is devoted to personal memoir and fiction, and Šukys’s own memories and pure fiction tend to dilute the more solid scholarly material in her book. Thus we read statements that we take to be based on the primary works or on solid biographical inquiry only to be pulled back into Šukys’s virtual world by reminders that the “frame” for much of this inquiry is a fictitious letter to the now-defunct Djaout.

The book is presented in three sections. The first opens with a mostly irrelevant chapter (or “personal memoir”) describing a visit Šukys made to Elkader, Iowa (so-named out of respect for the Emir Abdelkader’s resistance to early French colonization), followed by a discussion of the violence in Algeria with a five-page list of intellectuals, editors, and writers murdered since Djaout’s assassination in May 1993, and the bare essentials of Djaout’s life and death. (Shot on May 26, Djaout lay in a coma for a week before succumbing on June 2, 1993.) The second section is the only one directly involving significant analysis of Djaout’s creative works. These pages are instructive and solid enough, although one would, I believe, benefit as much from a straight reading of Djaout’s novels themselves. In part 3 we are treated to a major demonstration of what we might term “virtual research”: it consists of a long meandering “frame” letter by Šukys to the late Djaout and includes reflections on bones, corpses, and exhumations, viewings of family cadavers in Šukys’s native Lithuania, and a pilgrimage she made to The Shrine of the Holy Relics in Ohio (if she did not, perhaps, pretend she made this trip, too). The book ends with a section of notes devoted mostly to citation of sources and translations of quotations to and from French, a works cited section (there is no bibliography, per se), and an index.

It is the third part of this book that I find most preposterous. I knew Djaout quite well, and to find his legacy usurped in a rhapsodic fantasy that seems to draw more on Jules Verne than on modern Algerian reality is most disturbing. Djaout can, no doubt, put forth his own defense in his novels themselves; but Šukys does not provide him with equal time. Instead, Šukys herself becomes a fictionalized center-stage narrator when she invents a research trip to Algeria out of whole cloth, traveling disguised as a boy and forging her posthumous “interview” with the ghosts of Tahar Djaout, Augustine, and others.

Djaout becomes the invented Grail valorizing Šukys’s quest. She confuses “search” with “research,” and therein, perhaps, lies the fundamental problem with this book. Having earlier introduced an invented travel companion...