Abstract EN:

Arising in the wake of the major historical disasters of the XXth century, the works of William Faulkner, Joseph Roth, Claude Simon, Georges Perec and W. G. Sebald question the paradoxical inheritance of a vanishing tradition. When the ghosts of history return to haunt the present, this is because their own universe has disappeared, and with it the traditional ways of transmission which ensured the survival of the ancestral world, as well as its representation. Rather than demonstrating the living presence of the past, this haunting presence thus seems to escort the certainty of an unredeemable death, a loss which no literary or artistic monument could make up for. Whereas Romantic representations of the dead associated writing with a form of grave-digging, capable both of resurrecting the dead and making up for their loss, the memory of the departed, in these narratives, is and remains fundamentally melancholic, insofar as it constantly marks the limits of literary resurrection and the fragility of narrative attempts in themselves threatened by the destructive power of Time. However, this departure from the model of the scriptural grave by no means stifles the call for justice accompanying such spectral apparitions. By answering the call of that which is irretrievably lost, these works bear the imprint of a process of memory and oblivion which attempts to recall the memory of the departed, but most of all to keep a trace of their loss. The double ethical pursuit of works such as these, built on the full recognition of the reality of unredeemable death, is to record what can possibly be recorded, and to mark the empty place of that which is beyond recall.