La Littérature en suspens. Écritures de la Shoah: le témoignage et les œuvres by Catherine Coquio (review)

In his acceptance speech in Stockholm in 2002 for the award of the Nobel Prize for Literature, the Hungarian Holocaust survivor Imre Kertész stated that 'Auschwitz a mis la littérature en suspens' (quoted on p. 9). Kertész is, of course, reworking Theodor Adorno's famous remark that 'to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric' (which Adorno himself later modified). Catherine Coquio makes Kertész's statement the guiding principle of this excellent book on literature's response to Auschwitz. To 'suspend' literature after Auschwitz means to ask fundamental questions of its purpose and nature, 'de sa pertinence, de son contenu, de son héritage' (p. 13; original emphasis), for example: What type of literature is now appropriate? What is the relation between literature and experience? Who is speaking and to whom? What is the relation between literature, politics, memory, and ethics? Coquio's book is a vast survey of post-war reflections on these questions. The central question that runs through all these debates — which Coquio considers in an extremely balanced and nuanced way — is the relationship between testimony and fiction. How do witnesses remain 'true' to the event (or 'truthful', in Charlotte Delbo's terms) while being, at the same time, acutely aware of the incommensurable gap between words and the real (Robert Antelme) and the dangers of fictionalization and aestheticization (Elie Wiesel)? Should the 'false testimony' of Binjamin Wilkomirski (whose 'experience' as a Holocaust survivor was exposed as a fiction) be a warning against all literary versions of the Holocaust? The book is divided into two parts, the first on the theories and paradigms developed in Germany, the United States, France, and the USSR after the Second World War, and the second a series of in-depth analyses of different writers, mostly French (David Rousset, Jean Cayrol, Delbo, Piotr Rawicz, Jean Améry, and Kertész, among others). This is probably the most comprehensive tour d'horizon yet produced in French of the different theories of art and the camps (from the post-war period to the present day) and some of the most significant writers of the Holocaust. Although Coquio's approach is occasionally schematic — especially in the first part where the argument takes in philosophy, ethics, politics, and history as well as literature — she nevertheless maintains a clear grasp of all the intellectual debates and is very well versed in US critical literature on trauma, memory, and the Holocaust (Caruth, Felman, LaCapra, Friedlander, Langer, and so on). She is also a fine critical reader of different types of work — fiction, testimony, and everything in between. Coquio has previously made a major contribution to the field of Holocaust and genocide studies in her earlier work on Cayrol, Delbo, and others, and in her co-edited book Parler des camps, penser les génocides (Paris: Albin Michel, 1999), which was a bold attempt to put discussions of the concentration and extermination camps of the Second World War into dialogue with other camp experiences. This latest book is a worthy successor to this output and establishes Coquio as one of the major French theorists of art and the extreme.