Memory and Complicity: Migrations of Holocaust Testimony by Debarati Sanyal (review)

Reviews 267 that characterize the history of literary forms, and makes history into the object of its investigations, searching for forms that give shape to time. University of Chicago Alison James Sanyal, Debarati. Memory and Complicity: Migrations of Holocaust Testimony. New York: Fordham UP, 2015. ISBN 978-0-8232-6548-0. Pp. 352. $37. This study issues a cogent and passionate plea for the power of literature to stage the complexity of overlapping historical memories. It builds on recent interventions in Holocaust and memory studies that have emphasized the interconnections and “multidirectionality”of different histories, memories, and legacies (Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory), as well as the epistemological pitfalls of critical theory and trauma studies in their tendency to singularize and sacralize the Holocaust (Thomas Trezise, Witnessing Witnessing). Sanyal proposes“complicity”as an overarching frame for examining the ethical, political, and poetic stakes of intersecting memories— memories that circulate across historical periods or between subject positions, and that find their expression in diverse works of cultural production. The first chapter elaborates a critique of philosophical paradigms that dehistoricize the Holocaust, and the remaining five chapters, in response, demonstrate how literature and film provide an aesthetic antidote to the failures of philosophy, particularly through their recourse to rhetorical figures (allegory, irony, metaphor, palimpsest). In Sanyal’s reading, Giorgio Agamben’s critical deployment of Primo Levi’s“gray zone”epitomizes a widespread tendency among philosophers and trauma theorists to overextend a metaphor into a fixed paradigm. This critical strategy creates what Sanyal calls a pernicious form of “traumatic complicity” (45), flattening differences between victims, perpetrators, and witnesses, and universalizing the Holocaust as exemplum. Sanyal harnesses the force of poetic figures that, by their very nature, resist endless repetitions of sameness and clue readers into suggestive discontinuities, circulations, and fragmentations. Her sharp, often brilliant, readings reveal how a greater attention to form can defend authors and filmmakers against political or ethical critique. The“figures of contagion” (66) that circulate across Albert Camus’s texts, in the form of rats, plague, and bacillus, weave together the histories of Nazism and colonial Algeria, thus complicating biographical readings of Camus’s political stance. The mobility of images and perspectives in Resnais’s Nuit et brouillard, linking the Holocaust to the context of the Algerian war during which the film was produced, positions the film less as a blind example of banal transhistorical generalization than a metanarrative meditation on documentary’s ability to wrestle with historical intersections. Jonathan Littell’s self-conscious deployment of “ironic complicity” (189) in his controversial Les bienveillantes rehearses and undermines many of the tropes of trauma theory,thereby countering in advance the critiques of a reader’s complicity in a perpetrator narrative.Yet Sanyal is also willing to recognize where literary figuration falls short: while Boualem Sansal’s Le village de l’Allemand productively uses irony to underscore the French Republic’s problematic uses of Holocaust memory (à la Sarkozy), the novel’s unwillingness to interrogate France’s colonial legacy undermines its engagement with comparative histories.While offering fresh insight on a number of canonical texts, Memory and Complicity is timely, provocative , and relevant well beyond the French example: the plasticity of Sanyal’s framework, like the rhetorical figures she assesses, suggests the possibility of new crosspollinations across a range of linguistic and historical contexts. Trinity College (CT) Sara Kippur Sapiro, Gisèle. La sociologie de la littérature. Paris: Découverte, 2014. ISBN 978-27071 -6574-9. Pp. 125. 10 a. As Sapiro explains in her detailed and judiciously conceived survey, the field of studies and research known as the sociology of literature was constituted in the second half of the twentieth century. This new approach to literature originated at a time when literary theory, under the influence of new criticism and structuralism, was increasingly focused on the internal analysis of literary works. In contrast, a sociological perspective developed in the context of Marxist theory and of work done in the field of cultural studies. The fundamental assumption governing a sociological approach is that the meaning of a literary work vastly overflows the boundaries of an authorial intention—not only taking on a significance provided by the context in which the work is...