Extermination et littérature: Les récits de la Shoah, and: Littérature des camps: La quête d'une parole juste, entre silence et bavardage (review)

Book Reviews conference paper delivered in 1996, Rosello's comparison between Ajar's La vie devant soi and Beyala's Le petit prince de Belleville was the first to identify close textual resemblances that were subsequently to be exploited in angry charges of plagiarism levelled against Beyala by journalists and lawyers. In an end-note, Rosello wonders whether she should regret having failed to capitalise on her original insights, forfeiting what might have been fifteen minutes of fame if she had drawn the inference that the similarities which she had uncovered amounted to textual theft. Instead, she "chose to interpret tiiose unmistakeable echoes instead of trying to explain their presence " (188). There is a sense in which mis applies more widely to her book. Reflecting on die lessons to be learnt from Ajar's narrative, Rosello writes: "Stereotypes are always mere, ready to supply die necessary elements for any scapegoating enterprise" (141). Or, to put it another way, "words are like guns: they don't kill unless some one uses diem to that effect" (141). Rosello presents dazzling interpretations of ethnic stereotypes and textual counterstrategies, but die underlying causes that tum latent potentialities into active stereotypes or countervailing subversion are left largely unexplored. These would, of course, require a wider methodological framework, in which psychological, sociological and political dimensions would take their place alongside Rosello's textual hermeneutics. It would perhaps be unrealistic to expect a single volume to encompass such an all-embracing analysis. Rosello makes a major contribution to our understanding of stereotypes, and her book will be profitably read by scholars in a wide range of disciplines. Alec G. Hargreaves Loughborough University, England Sem Dresden. Extermination et littérature: Les récits de la Shoah. Trans, from the Dutch by Marlyse Lescot. Paris: Editions Nathan, 1997. Pp. 237. 149F. [Vervolging, vernietiging, literatuur . Amsterdam: Sem Dresden and J.M. Meulenhoff, 1991.] Vincent Engel, ed. Littérature des camps: La quête d'une parole juste, entre silence et bavardage. Special no. of Les Lettres Romanes, 1995 (hors série), published at Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium. Pp. 223. Efforts to make sense of the bureaucratic, industrialized march of evil that was me Nazi project began almost as soon as World War II ended, with historical analyses, autobiographical testimony , philosophical essays, and literary representations. But these publications elicited no sustained interest as a group until recently. The debates of me Historikerstreit (and me passage of 50 years) have made what can now be called "Holocaust studies" into a big business. These two books participate in a current academic focus on cultural memory, collective suffering, and postWorld War II Jewish identity. Sem Dresden's book bears a misleading tide in its French translation (its English title, Persecution , Extermination, Literature, is closer to the Dutch original, Vervolging, vernietiging, Hteratuur ); only in rare moments does Dresden analyze works of literature whose subject matter is die Shoah. He opens with die question of whether there can be a Holocaust literature, not because of die incommensurability of die subject matter but as a consequence of die distance between die terror such writing represents and our situation, "assis dans un bon fauteuil, une tasse de café à la main" (9), while reading it. But Dresden quickly leaves behind the historical specificity of die question, instead trying to define "literature" itself, an age-old activity diat takes him far from the territory he claims to investigate. He conflates all writing about war in his assertion mat it makes no sense to invoke traditional aesthetic criteria for some of this material, such as fragments left on scraps of paper. Surely some war-derived literature—The Iliad, Le Rouge et le noir, War and Peace, All's Quiet on the Western Front, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, even perhaps Vol. XXXVIII, No. 3 97 L'Esprit Créateur die works of Primo Levi, Charlotte Delbo, Henri Raczymow, or Dan Pagis—reminds us mat pat criteria for literary value never get us very far. Dresden's diesis, finally, is that "quiconque aborde la littérature de guerre, pénètre dans un gouffre de silence, en proie à une émotion qui le submerge , et où il n'y a...