Prosthetic and Palimpsestic Play in Agnès Desarthe’s Le Remplaçant (2009): Revisiting the Holocaust

Chaque famille juive possède son conteur légendaire, et chacun pense que le sien est meilleur que les autres.

Le Remplaçant, p. 7

Home is where we start from.

D. W. Winnicott

Agnès Desarthe’s Le Remplaçant opens with the above pronouncement on storytelling traditions within Jewish culture, and the special place accorded to the storyteller. Desarthe’s own credentials as a lover of stories is already well established. She is a prolific writer of books for adults and children (especially the latter where she has published over 30 books), and a translator (into French, of Loïs Lowry, Anne Fine, Cynthia Ozick, Jay McInerney and Virginia Woolf). Her ten novels have won several literary prizes: the Prix du Livre Inter (1996) for Un secret sans importance; the Prix Marcel Pagnol et Virgin/version Fémina for Le Remplaçant (2009); and the Prix Renaudot des Lycéens for Dans la nuit brune (2010).¹

In Contemporary French Women’s Writing, Shirley Jordan devotes a chapter to Desarthe, highlighting the ambiguities in the author’s experience of identity, and tracing the “ethical motivation in much of her storytelling” (186). She writes that her work “springs from an imagination and a cultural identity which are marked [. . .] by hybridity: born in France but with Eastern European Jewish roots on her mother’s side and a North African Jewish heritage from her father” (185). There is “detailed attention to family, community and gender relations” (185), to ageing and loss, to transmission, and finally, to the history of the Holocaust (185). These characteristics, as identified by Jordan, are all pertinent to Le Remplacant and to my reading of this text here.

The theme of replacement is at the heart of Desarthe’s 2009 narrative, Le Remplaçant. It paints a portrait of Desarthe’s beloved “papi,” who is not in fact a blood relation, but the man who married her bereaved grandmother after the Second World War. A parallel portrait emerges of the eminent Polish Jewish educator and physician, Janusz Korczak (pen name of Henryk Goldszmit, 1878–1942), whose experiences of the Warsaw ghetto (where he looked after orphaned children), provided the impetus for Desarthe’s project.²

In this analysis, I trace the author-narrator’s journey, via the defining moment of her visit to the Ghetto Fighter’s House Museum in Israel, described as the catalyst for the book, to the finding of her own third-generation voice (and place).³ Within an analysis of the stories and memories in Le Remplaçant, and a consideration of the aesthetics of her storytelling, I investigate the pertinence of theories addressing the writing of third-generation narratives of the Shoah. In particular, I consider Marianne Hirsch’s use of “postmemory,” Alison Landsberg’s thesis on “prosthetic memory,” and various perspectives on the nature of “hauntology.” I aim to navigate the complex dynamics of Le Remplaçant to find, via the prosthesis and the palimpsest, a story in which absent figures play a symbolic role, and in which the author-narrator explores the replacement of one story by another: “On veut écrire un livre et c’est un autre qui vient” (68). The palimpsestic process, indicated explicitly in this quotation, lends itself to analyses of transgenerational experience in its emphasis on overlapping traces and links, on conscious and unconscious processes, on the particular and the universal. Max Silverman’s landmark study, Palimpsestic Memory (2013), presents a politics of palimpsestic memory which functions “according to a complex process of interconnection, interaction, substitution and displacement of memory traces in which the particular and the universal, and memory and history, are inextricably held in an anxious relationship” (28). Historical events, lived experience, and their imaginative reconstruction via the writing act will be at the heart of this analysis, where those anxious and ambivalent relationships, between reality and imagination, as highlighted by Silverman, can be explored.

Desarthe, a French author born into a family directly affected by the Shoah, is not alone in returning repeatedly to this experience. Viart and Vercier, in their study...