Témoigner clandestinement: les récits lazaréens de Jean Cayrol (review)

The Holocaust survivor Jean Cayrol is perhaps best known as the scénariste of Alain Resnais’s landmark Holocaust film Nuit et brouillard (1955). Indeed, despite the breadth of his activity as a poet, novelist, essayist, and literary theorist, Cayrol has been eclipsed by figures such as Theodor Adorno and Maurice Blanchot in post-war discussions of the possibility of literature after Auschwitz. Currently, however, interest in Cayrol’s work is undergoing a renaissance in France: in 2006 Éditions du Seuil reprinted his early novels, and in 2007 the first international conference devoted to his work was held. As Marie-Laure Basuyaux convincingly shows in this erudite and meticulous study, such neglect is partly explained by the disproportionate focus on Cayrol’s literary manifesto Lazare parmi nous (1950), to the detriment of any sustained discussion of his subsequent literary and cinematographic work. It is also partly due to the difficulty in classifying Cayrol’s diverse and heterogeneous work. The current rediscovery of Cayrol will be substantially aided by Basuyaux’s broadly narratological study, which seeks exhaustively to demonstrate the originality of Cayrol’s voice as it emerged to bear unique witness to a traumatic wartime experience by means of a poetics closely aligned to that of the nouveau roman. Unlike well-known Holocaust writers such as Primo Levi and Robert Antelme, Cayrol was already an established writer by the time he was deported and then interned at Mauthausen camp, and, as such, he sought on his return to theorize the role of literature in the post-Holocaust era. Eschewing the use of direct testimony, Cayrol elaborated an avant-gardist Holocaust poetics that drew on his reading of Kafka, Blanchot, Louis-René des Forês, Camus, Dostoyevsky, and Samuel Beckett. In so doing, he repeatedly explored the fragility of subjectivity, voice, and speech in post-Holocaust lives marked indelibly by what David Rousset termed L’Univers concentrationnaire (Paris: Le Pavois, 1945). As Basuyaux shows (p. 117), Cayrol believed that the experience of the camps was not ‘une connaissance inutile’, as communist survivor Charlotte Delbo suggested in her eponymous work (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1970); rather, it was one that imprinted survivors with a particular knowledge of the parameters of humanity that needed to be transmitted in a post-war world that unwittingly bore its traces. Cayrol’s ‘clandestine’ and oblique testimonial stance in fiction, poetry, and film has produced certain tensions in a post-Holocaust cultural landscape necessarily dominated by first-generation testimonies of the camps and a ‘devoir de mémoire’. Yet, argues Basuyaux, as the complexity of communicating Holocaust memory continues to emerge in public consciousness, Cayrol’s hybrid work offers a bridge between survivor testimonies and more recent Holocaust literature that engages self-consciously with the historical vicissitudes of remembering the event and the architecture of memory. Basuyaux’s impressive study offers an important re-evaluation of Cayrol’s unique work and usefully includes the first comprehensive bibliography of his writings and of secondary sources. It will be an invaluable resource beyond Cayrol studies, as it will certainly interest scholars working in the wider interdisciplinary fields of Holocaust studies and twentieth-century literary studies.