Jorge Semprún: Writing the European Other by Ursula Tidd (review)

Reviews 271 conceptions of their history (ch. 1), their geography (ch. 2) or their culture (ch. 3). He thus argues that within these works“est ainsi remis en question tout discours dont la fonction principale est d’inscrire le moi dans un même social et culturel en lui fournissant des repères fixes, dans le temps et l’espace”(261). In his final (and longest) chapter, Thibeault examines how individual protagonists reconstruct (or fail to reconstruct ) ties with the various collectivities that those analyzed in his first three chapters rejected (historical, geographical, and cultural), while managing to avoid falling into traditional reductive self-definitions based on those collectivities. Thibeault demonstrates how the individual comes to define himself or herself in relation to others by a multiplicity of connections within the social space:“À l’individu prisonnier d’un même identitaire d’autrefois succède désormais ‘l’individu social’, c’est-à-dire l’individu qui,par ses multiples connexions,constitue à lui seul un espace de sociabilité” (357).Although he deconstructs the traditional cadres in which identity is constructed, Thibeault does not argue that these cadres are no longer important. Throughout his analyses, he points to ways in which individuals define themselves within and against these cadres through their interactions with others, but always (when they are successful) by living those interactions in the here and now. He thus argues convincingly that “l’identité collective devient elle-même plus dynamique et, avec le mouvement identitaire de ses membres, est à même de se (re)contextualiser selon les réalités mondiales auxquelles, par les voies de communication planétaires, elle ne peut échapper” (373). His overarching argument refutes alarmist discourse related to the loss or dilution of communal identities in a globalized world. Instead, Thibeault proclaims that identities constructed in the here and now of human social relationships allow for an enriched sense of personal identity that carries historical, geographical, and cultural influences while emphasizing, above all, individuals’ shared humanity. Elon University (NC) Olivia Jones Choplin Tidd, Ursula. Jorge Semprún: Writing the European Other. Oxford: Legenda, 2014. ISBN 978-1-907747-00-7. Pp. 198. £55. Tidd explores how Semprún—in exile after the Spanish Republic’s fall, resister in France, Buchenwald deportee—crafted an innovative“Holocaust poetics”(166) where he “engages creatively with autobiographical form by mobilizing strategies of intertextuality , bilingualism, multiple aliases and complex narrative structures” (8). His upbringing predisposed him to a “supranational” Europe “respectful of diversity” (161). Solidarity with others at Buchenwald reinforced his transcultural commitment. Expelled from the Spanish Communist Party in 1964, his politics evolved toward “a vision of democratic socialism [...] in the post-Holocaust and post-Stalinist era” (149). Tidd elaborates the influence which Husserl and Levinas exercised on Semprún’s European ethics. The book addresses the quasi totality of Semprún’s oeuvre. The chapters,“Exile and Identity,”“Politics and the Encounter with History,”“Representing Buchenwald,” “Writing the Other,” and “Europe,” explore elements of Semprún’s “testimonial idiolect”(92): multilingualism (his use of German at Buchenwald to help him survive and his choice of French as second maternal language); literary citations/ allusions as means of deepening ethical commitment (Baudelaire, Claude-Edmonde Magny, Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald); painterly references (Patinir,Vermeer,Velásquez, Picasso) to depict “liminal” (84) self-positioning between freedom and hell; and philosophical critique of “radical evil” (75), via Kant, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Levi, and Levinas. Semprún’s witnessing of the dying of others at Buchenwald, such as sociologist Maurice Halbwachs, is given special attention. Tidd shows how“proximity” (121) with death and horror, but also a desire to restore“intimacy”(131) to the other’s dying, often led Semprún to associate fiction and fact. A character in his novel Le grand voyage (1963), “le gars de Semur” who dies in Gérard’s arms as they arrive at Buchenwald, is an early fictional“homage”(131) to real-life model François L., moribund prisoner whose identity Semprún must adopt to evade his own death in Le mort qu’il faut (2001). The gendering of “self-other” relations (34) is carefully examined, with reference to Beauvoir’s Le deuxième sexe. Semprún...