Angela O'Flaherty: Anna Langfus’s Holocaust Writing
Testimony, Fiction and the Reader
Location: Research Beehive
Time/Date: 3rd March 2011, 16:00 - 17:00
Anna Langfus spent the war years in Poland where she experienced the Lublin and Warsaw ghettos before escaping and joining the Resistance. She was eventually captured, tortured by the Gestapo and transferred to Plock and later Plonsk prison. The only survivor of her family, in 1947 she moved to France where she, first, wrote the play, Les Lépreux (1956) before publishing a series of novels, loosely based on her experiences of the Second World War: Le Sel et Le Soufre (1960), the Prix-Goncourt winning Les Bagages de Sable (1962) and Saute Barbara (1965). In interview, Langfus frequently referred to the necessary but difficult process of remembering and articulating the harrowing experiences of the war and while her writing may have represented a personalised response to such experiences, in offering it up for publication she agreed to confront the reality of the outside world as represented by the reader. As she proclaimed, ‘si je considérais l’acte d’écrire comme une affaire personnelle, je ne pouvais toutefois m’empêcher d’imaginer les réactions du lecteur.’ Following a brief foray into dramatic writing in the late 1950s, Langfus had quickly settled on fiction (and specifically the Holocaust novel) as the format which best allowed her to fulfil her desired aims of self-expression and communication. Despite this commitment to the fictional format, Langfus muddied the waters by repeatedly emphasising the autobiographical quality of her texts in interview. As such, her war writing cannot be classed as purely fictional or purely factual, with Judith Kauffmann going so far as to describe her work as ‘romans de témoignage’. Bearing this ambiguous labelling in mind, in this paper, I focus on the extent to which Langfus shapes her texts, both externally through genre choice and internally through narrative and structural devices, in order to appeal to contemporaneous readers and, more importantly, to shape their response to her war writing. I argue that, in particular, the importance she attributes to the three (oft-intertwined) considerations of accessibility, responsibility and authenticity determines the form of her texts as well as her interaction with readers.
Image: René Margritte: La lectrice soumise (1928)
Published: 24th September 2010