Never Tell: Dynamics of Secrecy in Philippe Grimbert’s Un secret

Philippe Grimbert’s 2004 novel Un secret brings together first-person identification, Holocaust-related memory, and psychoanalytic investigation, around the story of the secret circumstances preceding the narrator’s birth and upbringing. The article first reviews the story’s wartime revelations and their progressive unfolding. It then focuses, via a contrast between the psychoanalytic concepts of introjection and incorporation, on those residual features of the story that seem to resist psychological resolution. While making reference throughout to key theoretical discussions of Holocaust representation, the article next centres on recent philosophical objections to the supposed unrepresentability of Holocaust memory, and on how Grimbert’s work might elucidate these arguments. The article then concludes with a consideration of those detailed yet fundamental moments in the work when secrecy nonetheless persists beyond any articulation or representation of loss and sacrifice.