Susan Rubin Suleiman

Exile and creativity : signposts, travelers, outsiders, backward glances

A major historical phenomenon of our century, exile has been a focal point for reflections about individual and cultural identity and problems of nationalism, racism, and war. Whether emigres, exiles, expatriates, refugees, or nomads, these people all experience a distance from their homes and often their native languages. Exile and Creativity brings together the widely varied perspectives of nineteen distinguished European and American scholars and cultural critics to ask: Is exile a falling away from a source of creativity associated with the wholeness of home and one’s own language, or is it a spur to creativity? In essays that range chronologically from the Renaissance to the 1990s, geographically from the Danube to the Andes, and historically from the Inquisition to the Holocaust, the complexities and tensions of exile and the diversity of its experiences are examined. Recognizing exile as an interior experience as much as a physical displacement, this collection discusses such varied topics as intellectual exile and seventeenth-century French literature; different versions of home and of the novel in the writings of Bakhtin and Lukacs; the displacement of James Joyce and Clarice Lispector; a young journalist’s meeting with James Baldwin in the south of France; Jean Renoir’s Hollywood years; and reflections by the descendents of European emigres. Strikingly, many of the essays are themselves the work of exiles, bearing out once more the power of the personal voice in scholarship. With the exception of the contribution by Henry Louis Gates Jr., these essays were originally published in a special double issue of Poetics Today in 1996. Exile and Creativity will engage a range of readers from those whose specific interests include the problems of displacement and diaspora and the European Holocaust to those whose broad interests include art, literary and cultural studies, history, film, and the nature of human creativity. Contributors. Zygmunt Bauman, Janet Bergstrom, Christine Brooke-Rose, Helene Cixous, Tibor Dessewffy, Marianne Hirsch, Denis Hollier, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Linda Nochlin, Leo Spitzer, Susan Rubin Suleiman, Thomas Pavel, Doris Sommer, Nancy Huston, John Neubauer, Ernst van Alphen, Alicia Borinsky, Svetlana Boym, Jacqueline Chenieux-Gendron

Suite FranÇaise and Les Bienveillantes, two Literary “Exceptions”: A Conversation

Richard J. Golsan: In the new millennium a number of interesting and provocative novels have appeared which confirm that the memory of les années noires and the horrors of Nazism and the Holocaust remain fertile sources of inspiration for the literary imagination. The publication and notoriety of a number of these works suggests that Henry Rousso’s famous ‘‘Vichy Syndrome’’ has not yet run its course, at least in literary and cultural terms. Of the recent works published, certainly none have achieved greater notoriety and acclaim—or provoked as much controversy—as Irène Némirovsky’s posthumous 2004 novel, Suite française and Jonathan Littell’s massive 2006 novel Les Bienveillantes. Both works are ‘‘exceptional’’ by almost any standard.

Historical trauma and literary testimony: writing and repetition in the Buchenwald memoirs of Jorge Semprun

This essay discusses the nature of literary testimony in three autobiographical works by the Buchenwald survivor Jorge Semprun, written over a period of twenty years. By tracing the variations and carefully orchestrated contradictions of a single episode recounted in all three books (Quel beau dimanche!, L’Ecriture ou la vie and Le Mort qu’il faut), the essay explores the function of repetition as well as of literary artifice in the working-through of traumatic experience. I argue that Semprun’s use of inconsistent repetition can be read as an allegory of testimony and of the failures of memory, as well as of the relation between testimony and history.

Reaching Vichy via Budapest: On Zigzags, Waves and Triangles in Intellectual Life

Are there patterns in an individual life and its contingencies that point to more general truths—or at least, to questions of general interest? In this ego-history, Susan Suleiman traces her itinerary from the 1970s to the present, and from structuralism to the study of memory and history relating to World War II France. She traces the non-linear path that has taken her from her first book, Authoritarian Fictions: The Ideological Novel as a Literary Genre (1983), to her latest one, The Nemirovsky Question: The Life, Death, and Legacy of a Jewish Writer in 20th-Century France (2016). Suleiman suggests that intellectual itineraries do not move in a straight line, perhaps especially in the case of people who have experienced geographical and linguistic displacement.

The Question of Readability in Avant-Garde Fiction

All avant-garde literature is in some sense «unreadable»—that is, unintelligible in terms of prevailing norms of intelligibility. Avant-garde fiction aggressively proclaims its transgressions of traditional narrative «logic,» and thus challenges at the same time the readers belief in his or her sense-making ability; the reader may react to this threat by counter-attacking, dismissing the text as «unreadable.» Paradoxically, the term «readable» has a negative value in Roland Barthess terminology, where the «readable text» is opposed to Barthess idealized notion of the truly modern «writable text.» According to Barthes, the «writable text» refuses commentary, defies all attempt at a logical, systematic reading. This view is a romantic one. Barthes suggests that the only appropriate way to read modern texts is by adopting their fragmentariness, yielding to them in a kind of ecstasy (jouissance). I suggest, however, that at least two other ways of reading such texts are possible, and desirable: one way consists in the discovery of new rules of readability, which admittedly tend to lead to new codifications and a new canon (this, I argue, is what has occurred in the case of Robbe-Grillets «transgressive» fictions); the other way consists in seeing how modern texts inscribe the question of their «unreadability» within themselves—in other words, how they thematize the opposition between readable and unreadable, unity and fragmentation, order and transgression. Maurice Roches Compact serves as the text of reference in this latter discussion.