The Holocaust in French Postmodern Fiction: Aesthetics, Politics, Ethics

With postmodernism being associated with playfulness, parody, irony, and even négationnisme, how suitable a medium is the postmodern novel for representing the Holocaust? The readings of Patrick Modiano's Dora Bruder, Pierre Assouline's La Cliente, Soazig Aaron's Le Non de Klara, Jonathan Littell's Les Bienveillantes, Philippe Claudel's Le Rapport de Brodeck, and Yannick Haenel's Jan Karski reveal that postmodern self-consciousness may help to voice the dilemmas attached to cultural representations of the Catastrophe. While post­modern anachronism, intertextuality, and intru­sive narrators foreground the challenges of retelling the Shoah in the post-witness era, the postmodern novel's frag­mentariness, confused chronology, and silences enable the articulation of trauma. In exploring the ethical risks and benefits of Holocaust fiction, this book questions the political implications for the French memory of the Occupation of six novels written in the wake of Chirac's acknowledgement of France's embroilment in the Nazis' genocidal project.

Helena Duffy is Professor of French at the University Wroclaw in Poland.