(Gary, Romain Semprún, Jorge Kristof, Agota Ku (B-Ok - Xyz) PDF

European Literary Immigration
into the French Language

FAUX TITRE
313
Etudes de langue et littérature françaises

publiées sous la direction de
Keith Busby, M.J. Freeman,

Sjef Houppermans et Paul Pelckmans
European Literary Immigration
into the French Language
Readings of Gary, Kristof,
Kundera and Semprun
Tijana Miletic
AMSTERDAM - NEW YORK, NY 2008

Illustration cover: Maria Helena Vieira da Silva, Composition blanche,
1953, oil on canvas, 97 x 130 cm.
Emanuel Hoffmann Foundation, permanent loan to the Öffentliche

Kunstsammlung Basel, Switzerland.
© Comité Arpad Szenes - Vieira da Silva / ADADGP, Paris / DACS,
London 2008.
© Photo: Kunstmuseum Basel, Martin Bühler.
Maquette couverture / Cover design: Aart Jan Bergshoeff
The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of

‘ISO 9706: 1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents -
Requirements for permanence’.
ISBN: 978-90-420-2400-7
© Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2008
Printed in The Netherlands
I would like to express my immense gratitude to Dr Felicity Baker,
Reader Emeritus at University College London, without whom this
book would not have seen the light of day. Her encouragement,
extraordinarily refined mind and an incredible ability to be enthused
by sparse and clumsily expressed initial ideas and foresee and
eloquently formulate their many possible distant, creative, but
scrupulously logical conclusions have been very precious to me and
have all left a strong imprint on the text which follows.
Je me mis à concevoir l’homme comme une tentative révolutionnaire

en lutte contre sa propre donnée biologique, morale, intellectuelle.
Romain Gary, La Promesse de l’aube

Introduction
Intense and complex migration patterns count among the

defining characteristics of our age. It is a subject which is frequently
discussed today from viewpoints of many different disciplines. And
yet we do not know whether today’s intensified migration still
comfortably fits within the scope of activities that human beings have
been undertaking for centuries. Nor do we know whether, if it does
not have long term consequences on human evolution, these will be of
much importance, or of little or no significance.
At one extreme end of this phenomenon are the individuals
who transform themselves to an extraordinary degree to adapt to their
new cultural surroundings. When these are writers and their
transformation involves adopting a new language, their writings
present a complex and fascinating subject of study.
This study will explore the work of writers who, coming from
various non-French European cultural backgrounds, have chosen to
adopt the French language for their literary expression, and have
become part of the French or Francophone culture. Literary
immigrants into the French language seems the most fitting
designation, as in essence they are moving away from their original
culture towards the French language and culture which they embrace.
What defines literary immigrants into French? First, although
French is not their mother tongue or first language, and although the
Francophone environment is not native to them, they have made a
decision to use French for their literary expression and they have done
all the necessary work to make that possible. Second, in consequence,
they have an in-depth understanding of French language and culture
and at least one other language and culture. This study will mainly
explore twentieth-century literary immigrants into French who come
from other European backgrounds. This separate sub-group deserves
to be considered as an entity, in particular for its European aspirations.
As this study will show, the choice of French as a literary language is
attractive to other Europeans for the specific and powerful ways in
which it validates their European identity.
This subtle mixture of different cultural influences, whose
extent it is difficult to know in full, places literary immigrants in an
essentially rational and critical position towards society in general.
8 EUROPEAN LITERARY IMMIGRATION INTO THE FRENCH LANGUAGE
This positioning characterises their writing. These sharp observers of

the relative and of dream-like states do not necessarily bring radically
new themes or forms to their writing. It is not just that their
experiences, exceptional even in this day of nomadic living, give an
authority to their writing – their immigrant experience is not the cause
of their literary talent – but that the disillusioned rationality that they
bring to the twentieth-century French literary subjects invests these
with a singular authenticity. Their demonstration of how to generate
hope within a disillusioned reality is honestly engaged with lived
experience rather than just with an enclosed world of story-telling.
The core authors whose work will be explored in this study
are Romain Gary, Agota Kristof, Milan Kundera and Jorge Semprun.
The main novels which will be analysed are: Romain Gary’s La
Danse de Gengis Cohn and Europa; Agota Kristof’s trilogy consisting
of Le Grand cahier, La Preuve and Le Troisième Mensonge, and her
later novel Hier; Milan Kundera’s La Lenteur; and Jorge Semprun’s
La Montagne blanche and L’Algarabie.1 All these novels were
published in the second half of the twentieth century. The Appendix to
this book provides plot summaries of the novels and biographical
outlines for the four core authors, as well as for some other literary
immigrants referred to in the text. My discussion will also refer to or
analyse in part many other works of fiction, and certain theoretical
works from non-literary areas such as linguistics, psychoanalysis,
sociology and philosophy.
On the face of it Gary, Kristof, Kundera and Semprun have
little in common. All of their lives have been shaped by European
wars. But then, so have the lives of most Europeans. They all have
different mother tongues. But again, this would surely be the case with
a most random selection of Europeans. Gary, Kristof and Kundera
originate from what we could call “Eastern Europe”. Kundera and
Semprun are both recipients of the Jerusalem Prize for the Freedom of
the Individual in Society. Kristof is the only woman and the only one
based in Switzerland. Why has this selection been made? I felt it was
important to have a group of authors that would best represent the
variety of Europe and its literature, but at the same time I inevitably
selected writers that I thought were outstanding and whose writing
1
The list of English translations can be found in the Bibliography at the end of this
book. Sadly, the two Jorge Semprun’s novels, La Montagne blanche (The White
Mountain) and L’Algarabie (Algarabia) are not as yet available in English.
INTRODUCTION 9
revealed themes and topoi which had something in common with their
condition as immigrant authors who have chosen French.
The backgrounds of the authors are fascinating in themselves.
The extremes of totalitarianism, communism, fascism and war have
marked all of them in some way, but they have risen above those
circumstances and established themselves as authentic writers who
have important things to communicate about the human condition.
Romain Gary inherited his idealistic view of the French
language and culture from his mother with whom he first came to
France from Vilnius (Lithuania) at the age of fourteen. His life was
crammed with interest and adventure: for example, service in the
Second World War with the earliest group of De Gaulle supporters;
diplomatic service for his adopted country, eventually as consul
general in Los Angeles; two marriages to native English speaking
women, first to English writer Lesley Blanch, second to the famous
American actress Jean Seberg, from whose suicide he never
recovered; over thirty novels and substantial literary works published,
most in French, some in English, under several different pseudonyms.
Although he was a well-known writer during his life, he was not
considered fashionable in France in the sixties and seventies when he
wrote most of his major works. His fiction has recently been enjoying
a well-deserved return in fortunes, with readers, critics and public
institutions alike. In 2000 the new French cultural centre in Jerusalem
was named after him. In 2005 a public library in Nice, his hometown
in France, was renamed after him as part of a festival celebrating his
work, stopping short only of renaming the famous Promenade des
Anglais or Quai des Etats-Unis to Promenade Gary. In June 2007 a
statue in his honour was unveiled in Vilnius, where he was born.
Several important biographies and critical studies of his work have
been published recently. These are just some recent signs of the
renewed interest in his literary work and personality, which hopefully
might also extend to the English-speaking countries. It is only just that
after the years of misunderstanding this great writer should be
recognised at last.
Agota Kristof’s life story is very different. She immigrated to
French-speaking Switzerland at the age of twenty-one, when the
Russians invaded her native Hungary, but only wrote her first novel in
French thirty years later. This was the first volume of the trilogy, Le
Grand cahier, which is still her best known work and has been
translated into thirty-five languages. The thirty-year gestation period

is important to consider in the context of the trilogy’s powerful and
uncompromising representation of bleak existential choices in the life
of its Eastern European characters. Kristof’s writing is for some
uncomfortably close to the essence of basic existential issues and this
is doubtless drawn from the personal experiences of the author. Her
raw writing translates very well to the screen and stage, which has
recently been demonstrated by Silvio Soldini’s excellent film Brucio
nel vento (Burning in the wind) from 2001, which Kristof herself
dislikes, based on her novel Hier, as well as several successful
theatrical versions of the trilogy (the Belgian theatre troupe De
Onderneming from Antwerp and the Chilean theatre troupe Compañía
Teatro Cinema). It is amazing with what ease and relevance Kristof’s
work crosses the language barriers. With characteristic humility, she
shies away from the literary world. And yet she has created a compact
and yet uncannily universal body of work which demonstrates her
passionate and exacting commitment to her writing.
For English-speaking readers, Milan Kundera is probably the
best known of the four authors discussed in this book. He left his
native Czechoslovakia in 1975 because of the immense difficulties he
was experiencing as a dissident writer in a communist system which
was once again recovering its grip on the country. He continued to
write his novels in Czech and to publish them mainly in translation.
Only after twenty years of life in France did he write his first novel in
French, La Lenteur. His relationship with his native country remains
ambivalent, perhaps not surprising when one remembers what many
would like to forget today, that he was stripped of Czech citizenship in
1979 in response to the publication of his novel Le Livre du rire et de
l'oubli (The Book of Laughter and Forgetting). He has not yet allowed
the translation into Czech of his core works written in French: La
Lenteur, L’Ignorance, Les Testaments trahis and L’Identité. The novel
which made Kundera famous, L’Insoutenable Légèreté de l’être (The
Unbearable Lightness of Being) was only published in the Czech
Republic for the first time in 2006, twenty-two years after it was
written. In addition to the political circumstances, this illustrates the
level of control he is not willing to relinquish in allowing public
access to his writing and ensuring it is understood. He is a unique
writer today in his ability to capture the contemporary experience of
immigration, exemplified in his latest novel L’Ignorance. Kundera is
INTRODUCTION 11
at the moment suffering from what we might call the Beckett

syndrome. For Czech critics his earlier works seem more important
and they undervalue and misunderstand some of his French writing.
Perhaps this is not surprising since his French writing is hardly
available in Czech. French critics on the other hand are generally keen
to see continuity through all his novels and understate how much his
work has developed since switching to French. Once his writing is re-
evaluated in the light of the new subject matter, motifs, conclusions
and evolved structures which occur in his French works, their
relevance will become clearer, although he will possibly always
remain a different writer for those who read him in Czech and those
who read him in French.
Jorge Semprun’s life has been profoundly marked by all the
major historical events of the twentieth century. He left Spain at the
age of thirteen, at the dawn of the civil war in 1936. The Gestapo
deported him to Buchenwald in 1943 for his activities in the French
resistance. After the end of the Second World War, he worked
clandestinely for the Spanish Communist Party against Franco’s
regime. Only after becoming disillusioned with communism and
coming to terms with his concentration camp experience did he turn to
writing. But he always remained politically active, and even served,
for three years from 1988, as Minister of Culture in the Spanish
socialist government. This highly erudite writer has written most of
his fiction in French, but considers himself above all a bilingual
writer. His first and most enduring subject is his experience of the
concentration camps. However, he is too often considered mainly a
Holocaust writer and the cultural richness of his work is often deemed
to be merely an accompanying feature. This is certainly not the case; I
would go as far as to say that his description of the concentration
camp experience is unique precisely because of his cultural viewpoint.
Despite and against the powerful hold of politics over his life,
Semprun is above all a writer of cultural identity. He constantly
establishes and reinforces his own hybrid identity as a Franco-
Spaniard with multiple and multi-layered cultural references, which
weave a much wider European identity.
Chapter one discusses the fascinating process of second
language acquisition and adoption. A blessing and a curse at the same
time, a second language gives new freedom, but requires a tremendous
amount of conscious work and self-control to be mastered, and for this
fragile mastery to be preserved. Some of the phenomena associated

with the change of language are universal and apply to all linguistic
immigrants, others are specific to those who have chosen French.
The uniqueness of the experience of mother tongue
substitution accounts for a heightened, and disabused, rationalism in
immigrant writers, in relation both to social and psychical realities.
Literary immigrants are driven by the new insights they wish to
communicate – which are usually triggered by their polyglot and
polycultural experience – and by the need to preserve some internal
continuity through their work.
The specific choice of French is implicated with the
conditional eagerness of the French cultural community to integrate
the literary immigrant into the French cultural domain, resulting for
the immigrant in mixed feelings about the hospitality of the French
culture and language. The conditions French culture places on a
literary immigrant are of a much more linguistic nature than in any
other culture. This linguistic emphasis is unique to the French culture
and if used appropriately can grant exceptional literary freedom to the
literary immigrant into French. Agota Kristof is the only writer out of
the four principally discussed in this book who is not based in France,
but in French-speaking Switzerland. It could be said that she is
influenced by the same francophone linguistic attitudes as the other
writers, but those attitudes will inevitably have a different bias in an
area which is not only a part of another country, which happens to be
fully and officially multilingual and multicultural, but is also at the
south-east periphery of the French language dominion in Europe. In-
depth exploration of social attitudes to language, literature and
immigration in France and Switzerland falls outside the scope of this
study.
More specifically, the choice of French results in the
immigrants’ adoption of French and subsequently the intensification
of their adherence to European cultural values (chapter two), their
appropriation of Utopian and libertine narratives and structures
(chapter three) and the imagery of doubling and incest (chapter four)
in their writing. Thus the larger part of the book is devoted to
exposition of characteristic topoi, recurrent relational structures or
motifs that the chosen writers have in common.
Chapter two explores European identity as expressed by these
literary immigrants into French. For Semprun, Gary and Kundera, the
INTRODUCTION 13
ideal of Europe often takes the form of a cosmopolitan community of

cultured Europeans, foreigners or artists or of a common cultural and
artistic heritage and memory which they revere and, at the same time,
challenge. The myth of Europa as a founding myth of Europe which
they rarely allude to specifically, seems to embody the most important
primordial characteristics of all the female allegories these writers call
on, and functions as a powerful container for the ideal of Europe. The
topos of Europe that these authors voice and recreate is in essence
francophone, a fact demonstrated by their embracing of values such as
freedom, fraternity, tolerance, analytical and critical rationalism and
libertinism. This chapter analyses Jorge Semprun’s La Montagne
blanche and Romain Gary’s La Danse de Gengis Cohn and Europa.
Significantly both Semprun and Gary have known political
involvement in the shaping of Europe, and in their fiction they chose
to defend a passionately cultural understanding of European identity.
Chapter three is devoted to the Utopian ideals expressed in
these works of fiction. All the social Utopian ideals have one thing in
common: a pursuit of and experimentation with forms of freedom
which might be thought of as extreme only in as much as they are
socially liberating. Libertinism is one such form which has a strong
presence in the chosen novels of literary immigrants. The construction
of the novels provides as a framework for discussion of links between
the immigrant writers’ libertine and Utopian subjects and their
adoption of the French language as bearer of the French
Enlightenment’s libertine and Utopian variations. In Jorge Semprun’s
Algarabie, Utopian ideals are expressed politically in the creation of a
left-wing revolutionary community which embraces a traditionally
elitist ideal of culture and a revolutionary sixties and seventies ideal of
sexual liberation. The entire novel functions as an attempt to integrate
the writer’s diverse passionate commitments. Likewise, in Semprun’s
La Montagne blanche, male friendship and sexual fantasy form the
main Utopian structures for the narrative and further emphasize the
importance of literary and cultural ancestry as a Utopian identity for
the immigrant author. Kundera’s La Lenteur creates a Utopian ideal
from an eighteenth-century libertine short story. All these structures
represent new creative paths for preserving hope in a hostile and
deceitful world whose insecurity is intensified by immigration. They
also show the powerful impact of French language and culture on the
aesthetic choices of immigrant authors.
Chapter four focuses on the figures of doubling and incest

which are very prominent in the fiction of literary immigrants. Their
symbolism is multiple and complex and draws together meanings
which are not specific to immigration and in part relate to the literary
heritage, with those that symbolize the dichotomy of the experience of
the literary immigrant. Kristof’s trilogy recreates the archetype of
twins to narrate traumatic migratory experiences. The twins’
narrations double and contradict each other at first and then finally
complement each other in a structural resolution which accompanies a
bleak depiction and conclusion of their unhappy lives. Themes of
incest or near-incest counterpoint the figures of doubling, accentuating
the inescapable tragedy of events. Kristof’s other novel Hier, focuses
on the incestuous desire of an immigrant, which she portrays not as an
aberration, but as a consequence of unresolved mourning. This fourth
chapter also briefly returns to Semprun’s two novels, L’Algarabie and
La Montagne blanche, where the perceptions of doubling and incest
reflect the immigrant’s relationship to cultures and languages as well
as standing for an almost explicit death wish on the part of the main
characters.
This book hopes to shed light on some of the complexities of
the phenomenon of European literary immigration into French –
which although heterogenous in nature, contains certain recurring
patterns, both in the lives of the literary immigrants and in their work
– and to indicate its importance for French and European literature
and culture as a whole.
Language
Introduction
The immigrant writer’s relationship with French as his

adopted tongue, and the other European language which is his mother
tongue, defines his writing. To explore this relationship with language,
this chapter will rely on some biographical and autobiographical
evidence in conjunction with literary examples not just from the four
core authors, Gary, Kristof, Kundera and Semprun, but also other
European literary immigrants. The psychoanalytical studies will also
provide very valuable information about the underlying process of
language adoption, a crucial undercurrent for understanding the
linguistic position of an immigrant writer.
The linguistic relationship in question is essentially dual,
therefore the research into bilingualism can provide many answers. A
small minority of immigrant writers might be writing in a third
language as well, but they will contrast their mother tongue and the
adopted language (or the two of their adopted languages) in the same
way as bilinguals.1
Bilinguals often feel that they have to make a choice between
their two languages. Some bilinguals experience their language
division or hierarchisation as a split in their personality. Others
attempt at all costs to preserve the sense of unity, but this process is
experienced as a brutal homogenisation of heterogeneous information.
The study of bilingualism is by nature a multi-disciplinary
exploration encompassing linguistics, psychology, psychoanalysis,
sociology, anthropology, neurology and other fields. There are few
specialists who choose also to consider bilingualism from a literary
point of view. Those who do mostly concentrate on well known
literary bilinguals such as Beckett and Nabokov, often neglecting the
1
“Once bilingual writers have made their peace with the fact that they have a ‘third’
language, then they can allow themselves to behave linguistically like bilinguals.”
Elizabeth Klosty Beaujour, Alien Tongues, Bilingual Russian Writers of the “First”
Emigration (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), p. 55. On this basis, I will, like
Klosty Beaujour, use bilingual as a generic term for multilinguals, except in the cases
when it is important to know that more than two languages are involved. This will
avoid unnecessary confusion and enable clearer analysis of the issues involved.
process of language acquisition and its psycholinguistic implications.

This chapter will rely on two exceptional sources which provide
conclusive information on the nature of language adoption from a
wide multi-disciplinary stance. The first one is Elizabeth Klosty
Beaujour’s study of literary bilingualism of Russian bilingual writers2
and the second a psychoanalytical exploration of mother tongue
substitution by Jacqueline Amati Mehler, Simona Argentieri and Jorge
Canestri.3 The authors of both books, like most authors of texts which
will be quoted in this chapter, are linguistic immigrants themselves.
This highlights the fact that linguistic immigration and any other form
of multilingualism is a highly personal experience:
We have already often observed that every time an author confronts the
subject of multilingualism within the dimension of the psychoanalytic
rapport, he inevitably ends up talking about himself.4
Writing about that personal experience that is linguistic immigration

inevitably becomes a literary quest of sorts, even within the remit of
these analytical texts.
Literary multilingualism is not an entirely new phenomenon.
However, the contemporary format in which it occurs is new:
A striking aspect of this language revolution has been the emergence of

linguistic pluralism or “unhousedness” in certain great writers. These
writers stand in a relation of dialectical hesitance not only toward one native
tongue – as Hölderlin or Rimbaud did before them – but toward several
languages. This is almost unprecedented. It speaks of the more general
problem of a lost centre.5
This new relationship with languages is heavily indebted to the

psychoanalytical and historical awareness our age benefits from.
Nowadays even monolingual writers have to take into account this
2
Klosty Beaujour, Alien Tongues.
3
Jacqueline Amati Mehler, Simona Argentieri, Jorge Canestri, The Babel of the
Unconscious: Mother Tongue and Foreign Tongues in the Psychoanalytic Dimension,
translated from Italian by Jill Whitelaw-Cucco (Madison, Conn: International
Universities Press, 1993). French translation by Maya Garboua published by Presses
Universitaires de France in 1994. This valuable clinical study enabled me to establish
a framework in this chapter for my own study which will, of course, be literary-
critical and in no sense clinical.
4
Amati Mehler, Argentieri, Canestri, The Babel of the Unconscious, p. 122.
5
George Steiner, Extra-territorial (New York: Atheneum, 1971), p. viii.
LANGUAGE 17
“imaginaire des langues”.6 This chapter will focus on analysing some

aspects of this new relationship.
Typology of bilinguals
Bilingualism is both a social and individual phenomenon. As

a social phenomenon it is transitory – it usually only lasts one
generation. As an individual phenomenon it is not something that can
be enriched by being passed on to one’s children. Each person’s
bilingualism is unique unless they belong to a bilingual social group.
This chapter will concentrate on the individual forms of bilingualism
and immigration.
There are various categorisations of bilingualism depending
on the author’s point of view. The most common differentiation is
between polylinguism (multilinguisme) – more or less simultaneous
acquisition of languages in childhood, and polyglottism
(polyglottisme) – a later acquisition of a new language. The age of
twelve sets the limit between the early and late learning. The main
authors whose work is explored in this book belong to the latter group.
It is generally considered that polyglottism is mainly based on
translation and that it carries fewer emotional connotations than
polylinguism.7 It would be more accurate to say that the emotional
involvement of polyglots and polylinguals is essentially different. The
conscious second language acquisition of the polyglots, unlike that of
the polylinguals, follows a fairly structured, although highly
individual, set of emotional stages. The consciousness of this process
and its enactment in writing clearly distinguishes the polyglot’s
attitude to writing from that of the polylingual, although there is also a
substantial crossover.
It is generally accepted that second language learning is
easier, more natural and seamless the earlier in life it is undertaken.
6
Lise Gauvin, L’Écrivain francophone à la croisée des langues, Entretiens (Paris:
Editions Karthala, 1997), p. 11. Translation: “this imaginary of languages”. All
French quotes appear in this text accompanied by my English translation (unless
otherwise stated) in the main text or footnote. Translations of quotes from the novels
of the four core writers are usually informed by the existing English translation listed
in the bibliography.
7
Amati Mehler, Argentieri, Canestri, The Babel of the Unconscious, p. x.
There is also a general consensus that the number of years spent

actively speaking the second language with its native speakers counts
towards the proficiency in that language. Polylinguals benefit from the
advantage of being on the positive side of both of those statements.
Often the children of parents originating from different linguistic
environments or born to the families of naturalised immigrants, the
polylinguals have the advantage of having a near equal exposure to
the different languages they speak.
The roles of the different languages are less clearly defined
for polylinguals. Overall, they are somewhat more likely to be
categorised as co-ordinated bilinguals. Co-ordinated bilinguals
possess two separate parallel systems of signifiers and signifieds,
whilst for composite bilinguals different words refer to the same
representation in the mind. When Julien Green states: “Je ne
comprenais pas pourquoi, quand une chose avait un nom français, des
gens lui en cherchaient un autre. Pour moi le véritable nom des choses
était français, tout autre terme relevait de la fantaisie et n’avait aucune
relation avec la réalité,”8 he clearly labels himself as a composite
bilingual. Linguists consider co-ordinated bilingualism to be the ideal
form of bilingualism despite the fact that it would obviously cause
difficulties when both systems are in action. On the other hand co-
ordinated bilingualism can allow a more flexible juxtaposition of
various languages. These two types of language organisation often co-
exist in the same multilingual individual.
As mentioned above, languages usually position themselves in
binary opposition. In most cases one language is established against
another and only one language at a time can replace the native tongue.
Most of the multilingual writers who experience the change of
language experience it once in their lives. Acquiring a memory in a
new language, or psychical “legitimacy” as Elizabeth Klosty Beaujour
calls it, is a lengthy process which also consumes a lot of emotional
energy. There simply is not enough time in our lives to change
8
Julien Green, “Une expérience en anglais”, Le Langage et son double (Paris:
Éditions du Seuil, 1987), p. 161. English version on p. 160: “I could not understand
why, when something had a name in French, people would find some other name for
it. To me the true names of things were French; any other terms for them were
fanciful, with no relation to reality.”
LANGUAGE 19
allegiance again.9 Nor would there be enough enthusiasm if the first

“betrayal” or “denial” of the native language failed to bear any results.
As Kundera states in his novel, L’Ignorance:
La notion même de patrie, dans le sens noble et sentimental de ce mot, est

liée à la relative brièveté de notre vie qui nous procure trop peu de temps
pour que nous nous attachions à un autre pays, à d’autres langues.10
The very notion of homeland, in the noble and sentimental sense of the
word, is linked to the relative brevity of our life which gives us too little
time to attach ourselves to other countries or other languages.
Bilinguals and monolinguals
Despite the various differences between bilinguals, some of

which were mentioned previously, the differences between
monolinguals and bilinguals are much greater. As Klosty Beaujour
points out “thoroughly bilingual writers, regardless of national origin,
have more in common with each other than with monolingual authors
in any of the languages they use”.11 Recent neurological research even
suggests that the brains of active bilinguals are differently organised
for language from those of monolinguals. Monolinguals find it
difficult to dissociate thought from word. By contrast, this dissociation
is essential for the routine switching between languages of active
bilinguals. The writing of bilinguals tends to play more with the
separability of sign and object (which Hoffman calls the separability
of signifier and signified) and is generally more tolerant of
ambiguities generated from such a loose and liberated semantic
attitude.12 Eva Hoffman’s book Lost in Translation offers a very
9
Even those writers who are multilingual usually only seriously use up to two
languages.
10
Milan Kundera, L’Ignorance (Paris: Gallimard, 2003), p. 115.
11
Klosty Beaujour, Alien Tongues, p. 162.
12
Ferdinand de Saussure describes the sign as an entity with two aspects: “signifier”
as its phonic element and “signified” as the idea that the signifier evokes. Ferdinand
de Saussure, Cours de linguistique générale (Paris: Payot, 1969) first edition 1915.
Émile de Benveniste stresses the inseparability of the signifier and signified and
further differentiates their relationship from the relationship between sign and object.
Benveniste, Émile, Problèmes de linguistique générale (Paris: Gallimard, coll. Tel,
1997).
detailed account of the second language acquisition of a polyglot, in

her case the appropriation of English against her native Polish. She
gives an interesting insight into the loss experienced upon becoming
intimately aware of the duality of object and word:
But mostly the problem is that signifier has become severed from the
signified. The words I learn now don’t stand for things in the same
unquestioned way they did in my native tongue. “River” in Polish was a
vital sound, energized with the essence of riverhood, of my rivers, of my
being immersed in rivers. “River” in English is cold – a word without an
aura. It has no accumulated associations for me, and it does not give off the
radiating haze of connotations. It does not evoke.
The process, alas, works in reverse as well. When I see a river now, it is not
shaped, assimilated by the word that accommodates it to the psyche – a
word that makes a body of water a river rather than an uncontained element.
The river before me remains a thing, absolutely other, absolutely unbending
to the grasp of my mind. (…)
I am becoming a living avatar of structuralist wisdom; I cannot help

knowing that words are just themselves. But it’s a terrible knowledge,
without any of the consolations that wisdom usually brings. It does not
mean that I’m free to play with words at my want; anyway words in their
naked state are surely among the least satisfactory play objects. No, this
radical disjoining between word and thing is a desiccating alchemy,
draining the world, not only of significance but of its colours, striations,
nuances – its very existence. It is a loss of a living connection.13
Michel del Castillo, another literary immigrant into French,

also writes about the complete rupture between words and meaning.
Words are for him just empty containers generated by language with
no connection with anything else. There is no other reality outside
words.
This awareness of the separability of the sign and the object it
refers to also leads to what Tzvetan Todorov considers to be one of
the benefits of the painful process of acculturation. It leads to learning
to distinguish culture from nature and real from ideal.14 Nancy Huston
adds that it also teaches the relativity of everything in life.15
13
Eva Hoffman, Lost in Translation, Life in a New Language (London: Minerva,
1991), pp. 106-107.
14
Tzvetan Todorov, L’Homme dépaysé (Paris: Seuil, 1996), p. 24.
15
Nancy Huston, Nord perdu (Arles: Actes sud, 1999), pp. 27 and 89. Both Todorov
and Huston are literary immigrants into French, and incidentally husband and wife.
LANGUAGE 21
The immensity of the loss experienced with this realisation

can only be overcome with a slow, long-lasting investment in the new
language. Even when the pain of this structuralist awareness is
overcome, it still remains one of the distinguishing features of the
bilingual. Bilinguals cannot be thought of as a combination of two
monolinguals. Although sometimes it seems to the bilingual that he is
two personalities rather than a double,16 his two linguistic universes
represent an integrated whole which is not comparable to that of the
monolingual.
Many authors debate whether pure bilingualism is possible. It
assumes that thought and word can indeed be fully separated. The
bilingual’s unity of personality hinges both on his verbal virtuosity
and an extensive emotional flexibility which can never be fully
achieved.
“Bilingual writers feel that their languages have volume, that
they take up space, and that there is a physical distance in their heads
between the languages that they master.”17 Scientists have found that
this is neurologically correct, as there are places in the brain where
only one language is present. Translators often feel that when they
translate they do not move between the languages horizontally. They
need to plunge below both languages. Unlike monolinguals, bilinguals
also experience a physical distance between thought and expression.
Some bilinguals visualise their languages as successive
geological layers, with the mother tongue as the deepest. Julia
Kristeva refers to her mother tongue as a “crypte enfouie” (a “buried
crypt”) and a “réservoir stagnant qui croupit et se délite” (a “stagnant
reservoir, rotting and disintegrating”), on top of which she has built
her new residence.18 Nancy Huston on the other hand sees them split
between the two parts of her brain. She thinks French is present only
in the left part responsible for rationality and structure. Her mother
tongue, English, exists in both parts, thus the right hand side of her
16
Julien Green quoted in André Brincourt, Langue française terre d’accueil (Paris:
Éditions du Rocher, 1997), p. 138.
17
18
Julia Kristeva, “Bulgarie, ma souffrance”, L’Infini, 51 (Autumn 1995), pp. 42-53,
http://www.kristeva.fr/Julia%20Kristeva/Bulgarie, %20ma%20souffrance.html.
This article, originally published in L’Infini, is featured in English in Crisis of the
European Subject (New York: Other Press, 2000), pp. 163-183. This is the most
explicit text by Kristeva on her ambiguous relationship with her mother tongue and
native culture.
brain, the centre of emotions and creativity, is entirely anglophone.19

The mother tongue is likely to retain such a hidden emotional
advantage over the adopted language even in the case of its long-term
subordination to the new language.
The mother tongue
When we speak about learning the mother tongue, are we really referring to
the actual maternal relationship, or do we mean the developmental level of
the baby in the first stages of life when he is still completely dependent on
maternal care – whether from the mother or from some other person? Can
we even partially separate these two aspects? (…) If mother tongue
becomes silent, and a new language completely replaces the original one,
what parallel unconscious vicissitudes will organize themselves in
connection with the relationship to the maternal image?20
Through the case studies in The Babel of the Unconscious, it becomes

apparent that in relation to the learning of the mother tongue, the two
aspects, the maternal relationship and the early stage of the
development of an infant, are difficult to separate. As will be shown in
the chapter “Doubling and incest”, the expression of the relationship
with the adopted language often uses the imagery of mother figures.
The second language acquisition is a conscious repetition of the first
language acquisition, and as such naturally refers to the maternal
image as a signifier which has partly lost its original meaning. As the
analysts of The Babel of the Unconscious have found, mental
disturbances in the case of linguistic immigrants often have their
source in an unresolved conflict with the mother figure. This conflict
is often also expressed in an unusual relationship with the mother
tongue.
The traumatic experience of migration itself is modelled on
the birth trauma.21 Bion describes it as the loss of the mother as
containing object. The language is probably the most rooted
component of any culture. As the loss of the mother tongue belongs to
19
Huston, Nord perdu, pp. 61-62.
20
21
León Grinberg and Rebeca Grinberg, Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Migration
and Exile, translated from Spanish by Nancy Festinger (New Haven and London:
Yale University Press, 1989), p. 13.
LANGUAGE 23
the same experience of loss caused by migration, it can be easily

associated with the mother figure. The relationship which exists
between the mother tongue and the mother figure is mainly built
thorough the original language acquisition:
Every clinical experience seems to confirm that the mother tongue is not
simply maternal, not only because, from the very beginning, the primary
relationship can develop in more than one language. In fact, if we take into
account dialects, slang, and family expressions as well as officially codified
languages, then to a certain extent every child is brought up with several
languages. But, at very early levels of existence, the principal characteristic
of the maternal relationship is that of being undifferentiated and of therefore
including other relationships which overlap it, such as those with the father
and with the grandparents.22
Mother tongue is thus linked to the entire range of individuals who

surround the child in his early years: father, grandparents, nannies.
Nannies have a particularly interesting role in second language
acquisition. Frequently of foreign origin, they represent the first
contact a child has with a foreign language. If a strong bond develops
between the child and the nanny, which is not uncommon, the chances
are that the child will also develop an affection for the nanny’s
language and culture. An early cosmopolitan predilection can thus be
easily nurtured.
Narcissistic nostalgia clearly consciously borrows the image
of the mother figure and mother tongue as a stylised metaphor for its
expression. It is as if this ample freedom immigrant writers have
gained with a new language is unmanageable without recourse to the
primordial reference. This could be a mark of the regression the
immigrant writer had to go through with second language learning. On
the other hand, if no one framework can take on an extensive meaning
in the freedom of immigrant writing, the very notion of mother tongue
becomes meaningless. It is only the remnants of its structure that can
be encountered in the literary immigrant’s writing.
Joyce Mansour, a surrealist poet of Egyptian origin who was
brought up in England, but chose to live in France and to write in
French, wrote a revealing erotic poem called La Mangue (literally,
22
The Mango).23 On the face of it this poem bears no relation to the

issue of language. Closer examination reveals that “mangue” is in fact
“m(ère) (l)angue”, a gallicised transcription of “mother tongue”. “J’ai
envie d’une mangue” (“I long for a mango”) the poem starts; “J’ai
faim de la poussière” (“I am hungry for dust”) it adds later; later still:
“Mon coeur a besoin d’une mangue/Il ne faut tuer personne” (“My
heart needs a mango/One must kill no one”). Then, as if inadvertently
mentioning the mother and a language for the first time, the poem
ends with “Et ma mère qui rêve en anglais loin loin/Loin la mangue et
son odeur de nuit” (“And my mother who dreams in English far far
away/Far away the mango and its night smell”). The emotion
expressed seems to be a distant regret for having had to “kill” the
mother tongue (which, by a shift between similar sounding
consonants, becomes a “manque” – a lack) and a morose mixture of
victorious joy and melancholy. As Julia Kristeva suggests: “Le
matricide est notre nécessité vitale, condition sine qua non de notre
individuation, pourvu qu’il se passe de manière optimale et puisse être
érotisé.”24
According to Gaston Bachelard, human language is of a
“liquid” nature and the metaphors of water are essentially feminine
and maternal.25 It seems that language lends itself to the association
with the “maternal” the more easily for the inherent characteristics of
its substance. This water metaphor gives a different meaning to
Cioran’s statement that by changing his language, he managed to
“liquider” (“liquidate”) the past.26 Transferring a content of memory to
23
Joyce Mansour, “La Mangue”, Prose et Poésie, Oeuvre complète (Arles: Actes Sud,
1991).
24
Julia Kristeva, Soleil Noir, dépression et mélancolie (Paris, Gallimard, 1987), p. 38.
“Matricide is our vital necessity, the condition sine qua non of our individuation,
provided that it is enacted in the most faviourable manner and that it can be
eroticised.” In her three books, Soleil noir, Pouvoirs de l’horreur and Étrangers à
nous-mêmes, under the guise of a variety of psychoanalytical topics, Julia Kristeva
analyses her ongoing interest in the states where language and psyche are under stress
and uses her own experience of a female immigrant as a frequent, although
understated, reference. We can only glimpse the important aspects of Kristeva’s
experience in her skilled use of metaphor and poetic language in the generalising
introductions or conclusions of these theoretical works.
25
Gaston Bachelard, L’Eau et les rêves, Essai sur l’imagination de la matière (Paris:
Librairie José Corti, 1996), p. 22.
26
E. M. Cioran, Entretiens (Paris: Gallimard, 1995), p. 29.
LANGUAGE 25
any language, old or new, allows for a temporary freedom from that
content, a fact which psychoanalysis has always put to good effect.
In several of his interviews Cioran recounts an event of his
life which had an extraordinarily liberating effect on him.27 During the
time when he was still living with his parents in Romania, he went
through a period of intense suffering from insomnia. His mother, who
was upset by the way he was wasting his life, told him that had she
known that he would end up like this, she would have had an abortion.
This single utterance, although obviously proffered in a moment of
anger and desperation, was a very important event for Cioran. It
suddenly made him respect his mother, the wife of an orthodox priest,
who had the courage to think and say words which would have been
considered outrageous in her milieu. Far from experiencing it as a
violent rejection, this gave Cioran the freedom to contemplate a
possible detachment from his origins, which later led him to France
and to the French language. It appears that he needed this “blessing”
from his mother to release him from the position in which he was
trapped in order to feel free to leave and build a life that suited him.
This is an explicit biographical example of the connection between the
mother figure and mother tongue in the choices the literary immigrant
makes.
If the mother tongue is experienced as overburdened with
clichés of expression through which it is difficult to reach the
“maternal” core of the language, then adopting a new language also
serves other purely literary purposes. It rescues the writer from clichés
and tired, inescapable cultural references. It allows him to preserve the
innocence and purity of the mother tongue by not using it (though not
in Cioran’s case). Purity and innocence are thus firmly and
permanently associated with the maternal. The very reference to the
mother tongue becomes deliberately ambiguous: on the one hand it is
a language which is too familiar to the writer for him to be able to
express himself in it freely, and on the other hand it is the unknown
language which carries the secret of the unknowable “maternal” pre-
linguistic elements of language which the writer wants to preserve by
not exploiting his mother tongue at all. This is one of the forms which
the mother tongue myth takes in the mind of a linguistic immigrant.
These two extremes are in effect the coordinates of the transitional
27
Cioran, Entretiens, pp. 88 and 137.
space. For any individual to be able to successfully exploit the

transitional space, it must lie somewhere between being too rigid and
paranoid because too much invaded by the mother figure, and
becoming sterile because of her absence.28
Escape from the clichés is what Beckett stated as his reason
for choosing French. But even this reasoning is not devoid of
associations with the mother figure. Patrick Casement’s
psychoanalytical analysis convincingly portrays Beckett’s changes of
allegiance from English to French and back as a function of the
presence and absence of his mother.29 Some consider Beckett to be
unique in the intensity of his uncompromising passion for
indifference. His case is certainly amongst the more exceptional in
terms of his active literary bilingualism and frequent literary changes
between the two languages. Along with Nabokov, he is a better
example of a bilingual than of an immigrant writer.
Octave Mannoni maintains that a multilingual needs to
preserve at least one language which he knows only in part and thus
experiences as more “foreign” than a completely unknown language.30
This may correspond to the need to reproduce the experience of the
maternal part of the mother tongue as something enchantingly both
known and unknown. Everything we understand in our mother tongue
only serves to underline the part, however small in terms of successful
ordinary communication, which we do not know. Abandoning a
mother tongue serves our need to distance ourselves and experience as
“foreign” something which we always felt was deeply foreign.
Mansour’s choice of the term “mangue” is in this sense very apt as it
combines the known and the exotic. If one has abandoned one’s
mother tongue, it is easy to equate it with what Kristeva calls the le
sémiotique.31
28
D.W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality (London: Tavistock, 1971).
29
Patrick J. Casement, “Samuel Beckett’s Relationship to his Mother Tongue”,
International Review of Psychoanalysis, 9 (1982), pp. 35-44.
30
Régine Robin, Le Deuil de l’origine, Une langue en trop, la langue en moins
(Saint-Denis: Presses Universitaires de Vincennes, L’Imaginaire du Texte 1993), p.
26.
31
Kristeva defines the semiotic (le sémiotique) in opposition to the symbolic (le
symbolique) within the signifying process. The semiotic is the underlying element of
meaning that does not signify and is associated with rhythm and tone. It represents the
drives that make the symbolic (associated with syntax or grammar) possible. Julia
Kristeva, La Révolution du langage poétique (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1974).
LANGUAGE 27
On a social level, a writer who has adopted a new language is

pressured to bow to one of the most powerful myths in our society —
to the myth of the mother tongue. It is one of the very few ways in
which a new immigrant can show that he is conforming to society. As
Bernard Shaw is alleged to have stated, if a foreigner wants to be
understood, he has to stick to broken English. It is debatable whether
any immigrant writer, regardless of how much he accepts a
compromise with society, can escape the all-embracing reference to
the myth of mother tongue. This myth, which is also the myth of home
and nostalgia, has a tripartite structure: before the break, the break,
after the break. Some writers use this structure to stress the
unprovoked nature of the break and the overall continuity. Others use
it to reassert their freedom of choice. The former tend to experience
their origins as plenitude (Semprun), the latter as emptiness (Kristof).
The myth of the mother tongue is enchanting and ambiguous
on many different levels. It is responsible for the romantic perception
of the linguistic immigrant as cursed by fate. The French author of
Greek origin, Vassilis Alexakis, tries to diminish this hold of the
mother tongue myth. He claims in Paris-Athènes that the learning of
the mother tongue is nothing other than the acquisition of the first
foreign language.32 All subsequent learning of new languages can only
be easier. In reality, the second language acquisition is more
consciously painful. An adult is reduced to a speechless child and has
to work very hard to appropriate what seems very foreign to him.
Choice of language, choice of French
The decision to adopt another language is a very important

moment in the lives of immigrant writers. However, it is an elusive
decision that few immigrants explicitly admit to, probably fearing that
verbalising it would be a reductive rationalisation of an ambiguous
subconscious process. There are two types of choice: the long-term
choice of main literary language and a choice of a language for a
particular work. In the latter case, writers often state that the language
in which they hear the beginning of the work will be the language
which they will choose. The long-term choice of language is an
32
Vassilis Alexakis, Paris-Athènes (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1989), p. 53.
altogether more complex decision. Klosty Beaujour stresses that the

mental shift which occurs with this choice cannot be brought down
just to external influences. The choice of a literary language is part of
a literary practice and can only be analysed as such. The chosen
language will have to become the most important language for a
writer. The most important language for an individual is, as Green
believes, that single language in which he expresses his intimate
thoughts to himself.33
One of the most direct descriptions of the moment of choice is
the one Cioran gives in his interviews:
Je suis revenu à Paris avec l’idée de ne plus jamais écrire dans ma langue
maternelle. Je me suis imposé une sorte de discipline (...).34
Je vous raconterai maintenant comment j’en suis venu à déserter ma langue

(...) Dix ans passèrent, dix ans de stérilité où je ne fis qu’approfondir ma
connaissance du roumain. (...) Un jour, une révolution s’opéra en moi: ce fut
un saisissement annonciateur d’une rupture. Je décidai sur le coup d’en finir
avec ma langue maternelle. “Tu n’écriras plus désormais qu’en français”
devint pour moi un impératif.35
I came back to Paris with the idea of never writing again in my mother
tongue. I imposed a certain discipline on myself (…).
I will tell you now how I came to desert my language (…) Ten years went
by, ten years of sterility during which I only deepened my knowledge of
Romanian. (…) One day, a revolution occurred inside me: it was a seizure
foreshadowing a break. I decided straight away to have done with my
mother tongue. “From now on you will write only in French” became an
imperative for me.
Despite Cioran’s natural predilection for expressing his thoughts in a

mystical rhetoric, which might make the reader suspicious of his
honesty, it is interesting to note that he states that the decision to stop
writing in his mother tongue was his initial thought which was then
extended into a positive decision of substitution. Furthermore, Cioran
insists on the suddenness of this decision, thus appearing to put up a
stronger resistance to rationalisation.
33
Green, “Une expérience en anglais”, p. 167.
34
Cioran, Entretiens, p. 44.
35
Cioran, Entretiens, pp. 144 and 145.
LANGUAGE 29
The decision to change language is usually made in the

country where the adoptive language is spoken. The transition seems
therefore more natural and sensible and the inevitable feelings of guilt
are less. The linguistic immigrant experiences the conflict of the
different cultural expectations of his native and adopted environments
on a daily basis, particularly during the initial period of acculturation.
Even those polylingual from childhood cannot be said to be
polycultural, and thus the language and the culture of the place where
one lives is usually allowed to dominate. It is not that the linguistic
immigrant is only continuing to conform, he is also trying to follow
the changes within himself. This is why the acquisition of proficiency
in another language might take less time than the decision to formally
substitute language roles, which follows the recognition of the
changes that this proficiency has caused.
When asked to provide reasons for their adoption of a new
language, writers deliver a set of predictable answers. One of the most
frequent responses is that a new language provides them with the
freedom from the conscious and unconscious heritage of their mother
tongue. It allows them to escape from clichés, from the linguistic
conglomerates which so easily appear behind a single word, and gives
them an easier path towards originality. This particular rationalisation
elevates the nature-culture opposition to a higher level. The culture
has become a “second nature” to such an extent (in that the pre-
linguistic elements are lost) that a writer has to search, artificially, for
a déracinement (uprooting) to allow himself a less self-conscious and
therefore more natural access to language. That at least is the writer’s
perception.
The most rational of all the reasons the writers give for their
choice of writing in another language, is that it will enable him to
reach a larger literary audience. There in no doubt that this is a very
beneficial consequence of literary immigration, but it is certainly not
its cause. The size of the audience bears no relation to the life of the
inner reader. It is also far removed from the tremendous personal
transformation the writer will need to undergo to switch languages
within his intimate practice of writing.
The foreignness of a language becomes a good excuse for
alienation, and vice-versa. Analysing the literary style which is thus
born as being a simple mixture of the languages and cultures familiar
to the writer is unlikely to account for the quality of the end product
— in the same way that a bilingual could never be a simple compound

of two monolinguals.
Kristof states that she decided to use French “contre le
hongrois” in order to “mettre une distance entre ses terreurs et son
écriture”.36 “Rien ne naît du hongrois”37 she also adds, confirming that
the French language for her holds the key of creativity. One cannot
fail to partially relate the terrors that Kristof mentions with the
political turmoil of her native Hungary at the time she left. The
language of choice is fundamentally the one and only language chosen
to fulfil adequately the function of langage de deuil (language of
mourning) as Régine Robin summarises it:
Que l’écrivain se trouve au carrefour de plusieurs langues, polyglotte,

multilingue, cela ne s’inscrit que dans une langue, langue d’amour ou
langue d’emprunt, une langue pour opérer le travail de deuil.38
The fact that a writer finds himself at a crossroads between several

languages, as a polyglot or multilingual, can only be inscribed in one
tongue, a language of love or a borrowed tongue, one language for
completing the work of mourning.
It is with this langage de deuil that the family romance is written, and
that the real origins are put to rest. Brodsky expresses this chosen
purpose with his elliptical and powerful statement: “May English then
house my dead”.39 For Del Castillo the mastery of French is likewise
“la conquête d’une langue où déposer mes blessures”.40 The main
characteristic of the langage de deuil is the acceptance that the
“maternal” elements of language are lost. Using a new language
simply means taking this acceptance a step further. At the same time,
a new language can give a new form to the mourning — the form of a
36
Brincourt, Langue française terre d’accueil, p. 187. “against Hungarian in order to
put a distance between its terror and her writing”
37
Erica Durante, “Agota Kristof, du commencement à la fin de l’écriture”,
Recto/Verso, No 1 (www.revuerectoverso.com/spip.php?article19, June 2007).
“nothing is born from Hungarian”
38
Régine Robin, Le Deuil de l’origine, p. 261.
39
Joseph Brodsky, “A Room and a Half”, Less than One: Selected Essays (London:
Viking, 1986).
40
Michel del Castillo, Le Crime des pères (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1993), p. 293.
“the mastery of a language in which to place my wounds”
LANGUAGE 31
freer and a more indulgent regression, as can be seen in the work of

Jorge Semprun.
It is not possible to determine objectively why a bilingual uses one language

rather than another. (...) And while it is true that bilinguals frequently shift
languages without making a conscious decision to do so, polyglot and
bilingual writers must deliberately decide which language to use in a given
instance. The conscious awareness of an option is both the greatest blessing
that bilingualism provides the writer and the greatest curse. (...) The
bilingual writer, constantly conscious of the relativity of his symbolic
systems, is always in what might be termed the “anthropological stance”,
distanced in his use of language to communicate with the outside world,
and, even more important, in internal conversation with himself. 41
One cannot overestimate the importance of the decision a linguistic

immigrant makes, and as Klosty Beaujour stresses:
Whatever the idiosyncratic solutions worked out by individual writers, (...)

they all share the consciousness of linguistic option, and it is the fact of
choosing, not the particular choice, that is determinant.42
It is this decision which defines the linguistic literary immigrant and it

is the root of his individuality. For Tahar Ben Jelloun the choice of
French is due to pure chance.43 Even this is a rationalisation. The only
certain thing about it is that it is a fundamentally emotional decision.
The choice of a language in which to write obviously depends much less on

the constraints of the external context than does the choice of a language for
any given utilitarian speech utterance. There are even fairly frequent
instances when a bilingual writer will choose the language in which he
writes a work against the logic of subject matter and context. Take, for
example, the decisions of several bilingual Russians to write their childhood
memoirs first in a language other than their mother tongue, even at periods
when they were actively using Russian for other literary purposes. Or
consider Julien Green, who wrote novels drawn from his American
experience in French, whereas he wrote a book about his French childhood
in English.44
41
42
Klosty Beaujour, Alien Tongues, pp. 39-40.
43
Gauvin, L’Écrivain francophone à la croisée des langues, p. 132.
44
Semprun’s case is interesting in the light of this argument. All of his

fiction work so far is written in French. The original impetus and a
constant point of reference for his fiction writing was his experience
in the concentration camps which he has narrated in several of his
récits. His first major work in Spanish was Autobiographie de
Federico Sánchez recounting his history as a member of the Spanish
communist party.45 As a political exile, the political part of his being
is what he finds closest to his mother tongue, whilst his childhood and
concentration camp experiences are best verbalised from the distance
given by the adopted tongue. Besides, memories of political activities
are probably furthest removed from the emotional uses and meanings
of the mother tongue. It was emotionally safe for Semprun to recount
these passionate, but nevertheless impersonal, experiences in his
mother tongue.
The workings of memory play an important part here. Writing
about one’s earliest memories against the mother tongue or against the
tongue in which they occurred involves a process of reassessment and
rewriting. The writer thus converts those memories into something
further removed from the original experiences, less accurate, but
equally more alive, because appropriated by the present. For a writer
who has acquired a new personality in a new language, the
recollection of memories connected to his mother tongue is a painful
experience. Recollection of mother tongue experiences in the adopted
language helps to mend this discontinuity of personality. Equally, the
choice of writing in a language other than one’s mother tongue
weakens the status of the language as a main psychical container.
In his autobiographical narrative Adieu, vive clarté …,
Semprun for the first time gives his readers the description of the
moment in time when he made the choice of adopting French. He was
a Spanish exile aged sixteen in Paris when he was thrown out of a
bakery on the boulevard Saint-Michel because of his Spanish accent.
Il fallait que cette vertu d’étrangeté fût secrète: pour cela il me fallait
maîtriser la langue française comme un autochtone. Et même, mon orgueil
naturel y mettant son grain de sel, mieux que les autochtones.
C’est dans cette entreprise – qui n’était pas purement intellectuelle, qui avait
une composante angoissée, dans la déréliction de l’exil et de la perte
absolue de repères culturels que celui-ci entraînait, qui était aussi quelque
45
Jorge Semprun, Autobiographie de Federico Sánchez, translated by Claude and
Carmen Durand (Paris: Edition du Seuil, 1978).
LANGUAGE 33
chose de sensible, de charnel, donc – dans ce travail d’appropriation d’une

langue – patrie possible, ancrage solide dans l’incertain de mon univers –
que Paludes me fut d’un secours inestimable.
La boulangère du Boulevard Saint-Michel me chassait de la communauté,

André Gide m’y réintégrait subrepticement.46
It was necessary that this virtue of foreignness remained secret: for that I
had to master the French language like a native. And even, natural pride
intervening, better than the natives.
It is for this venture – which was not purely intellectual, containing an

anxious component in the feelings of abandonment of exile and the absolute
loss of cultural references that exile entails, which was thus also something
sensory, carnal – in this work of appropriation of a language – a possible
homeland, a solid anchorage within the uncertainty of my universe – that
Paludes gave me invaluable assistance.
Even while the baker of the Boulevard Saint-Michel chased me out of the
community, André Gide was surrepticiously putting me back in it.
The young Semprun wanted to be able to reply to the baker

and all those who mistrusted him because he was a foreigner. It was
fortunate that at this tender age when books are often a refuge, he was
receptive to French literature and its language. He could oppose the
unfamiliarity of the new territory with the welcoming understanding
of literature.
Semprun proceeds to say that during his literary career he has
given many varying explanations to the journalists about why he
chose French. There is some truth in all of them, he states, but the
main reason only occurred to him when recollecting the early years of
his exile. For Semprun, French is a decisive part of his personality, in
particular his literary self. French has offered him a home without the
horrors of patriotism. Yet it has never led to a denial of his
relationship with Spain or changed the fact that Spanish as a language
also belongs to him. Thus, Semprun defines himself as a bilingual
individual and a French writer.
The choice of French is for Semprun intimately implicated
with the vision of an ideal place. The paragraph from Adieu, vive
clarté…quoted in the section “The picaresque” of my chapter
“Libertinism and Utopia” illustrates this.The centre of the universe for
46
Jorge Semprun, Adieu, vive clarté … (Paris: Gallimard, 1998), pp. 120-121.
Semprun is a square in Paris. It is crucial for him to be involved in

what is for him not necessarily the most important place of all, but
certainly emotionally the most relevant location on earth.
Kundera simply declares his love for the French language and
his preference for being able to make a free choice:
J'ai préféré ma liberté à mes racines. La langue tchèque m'appelle: reviens à

la maison, voyou! Mais je n'obéis plus. Je veux rester avec la langue dont je
suis éperdument amoureux.47
To my roots I prefer my freedom. The Czech language calls me: come

home, rascal! But I don’t obey any more. I want to stay with a language that
I’m passionately in love with.
Ghérasim Luca, a poet of Romanian origin who wrote in

French, emphasises the pain of loss and adoption of languages in some
of his poems.48 Dans tes chaussures (In your shoes) is a game of
coupling similar sounding words with different meanings. The
repeated “plante des pieds” (“sole of the feet”) becomes “plainte”
(“moan”) of feet with no roots. Zéro coup du feu (Zero shot) is a set of
erotic variations on the theme “ta langue dans ma bouche” (“your
tongue in my mouth”). The erotic overtones hide the seriousness of
questioning which language is the right one. They also highlight the
passion and incomprehensibility involved. Mixing languages is a
playful activity, but the ownership of the languages, or its lack, always
remains clearly stated. Luca feels that he is borrowing a language
which can never be rightfully his.
Todorov owes his choice of Paris to a vision passed to him by
an acquaintance named Karata. This man captivated Todorov. He
denigrated everything except Paris, for which he had a naïve and
complete affection:
Son amour pour Paris était comme un petit jardin de bonheur au milieu d’un
univers dévasté. Son rire sardonique s’arrêtait aux portes de ce jardin et il en
parlait avec attendrissement, presque naïvement.49
47
André Clavel, “L'intransigeant amoureux de la France”, L’Express,
(livres.lexpress.fr/dossiers.asp/idC=6548/idR=4, 3 April 2003)
48
Ghérasim Luca, La Proie s’ombre (Paris: José Corti, 1991)
49
Todorov, L’Homme dépaysé, p. 236.
LANGUAGE 35
His love of Paris was like a little garden of happiness in the middle of a
devastated universe. His sardonic laughter stopped at the entrance to this
garden and he spoke of it with emotion, almost naively.
Todorov needed such a Utopian idea of Paris to motivate his decision.

He adopted this vision in the same way he will later adopt France as
his home, with a wilful suspension of disbelief. He defines the
nostalgia for Paris Karata provoked in him as a yearning for a
“civilisation”, similar to Semprun’s desire to be in the centre of the
world.
Gary adopted French under the strong influence of his mother.
Nancy Huston quotes his own admission of the European nature of
this obsession with France which his mother passed on to him:
Elle était atteinte de cette maladie dont était atteinte souvent l’Europe à
l’époque (…): la francophilie galopante, Jeanne d’Arcisme typique
notamment des Juifs de l’Europe de l’Est.50
She was suffering from this illness which often affected Europe at the time
(…): galloping francophilia, Joan of Arcism particularly typical of the
Eastern European Jews.
Gary, who adopted French as the main language of his literary

expression, chose to write six of his novels in English. Lady L is a
stunning example of his surprising choice of this language and of his
proficiency in it.51 Using his favourite method of literalising, he based
the story on the English figure of speech “skeletons in the cupboard”.
Gary, who was at the time married to the Englishwoman Lesley
Blanch, saw the adoption of English as yet another linguistic
challenge. His impressive mastery of English shows his incredible
determination to prove that he can be a linguistic chameleon whenever
he chooses. Significantly, the main character of his novel is an
impostor, no doubt reflecting how he perceived his excursion into a
new literary language.
At the age of twenty-four, Esteban made a choice of writing
his poetry in French, because the three words “Il fait jour” (“It is
dawn”) which came to him to conclude a crisis he was experiencing,
were in French. He assumes from this experience that a choice was
50
Nancy Huston, Tombeau de Romain Gary (Arles: Actes Sud, Babel, 1995), p. 18.
51
Romain Gary, Lady L (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1959).
made for him. He considers this to be the most marvellous gift he has
ever received. This choice of French seems to be a desired result of his
“amputation toute volontaire”52 (“entirely voluntary amputation”)
from the Spanish culture and heritage which he acted out during his
schooling. He behaved like a bad double of his Spanish classmate in
the all-French environment. He never really fully gained psychical
legitimacy in Spanish, it always remained a fairy-tale language for
him. Despite Esteban’s subsequent attempts to gain a knowledgeable
respect for Spanish culture, French always remained his first choice.
Vassilis Alexakis wrote his novel Paris-Athènes about the
choice of language: “Je voulais justement écrire sur la difficulté de ce
choix, mais comment écrire sans choisir?”53 He found that the choice
of French was natural for writing about his life in France. He tells an
anecdote as an incidental proof of this. His Vietnamese neighbours in
Paris speak Vietnamese between themselves, but French to the cat
they adopted in France.
In both of his languages Alexakis could find a territory which
was a home. This was possible in the case of his adopted language,
because, as he claims, French knows him as well as he knows it. He
even states that he writes in order to convince the words to adopt him.
In La langue maternelle, he declares that he writes in order to have an
excuse to open dictionaries.54 The full psychical legitimacy needs to
be established before the choice is made. The transition period is thus
mostly over by the time the conscious choice is made. The love of
language and words and by extension literature, is one of its strongest
motivations.
Commenting on the title of his book Paris-Athènes, Alexakis
says that he cannot explain why he entitled it so rather than Athènes-
Paris. Apart from the obvious reason that the former rolls off the
tongue better, the subject matter could possibly explain this. Having
decided to write about his choice of French, what became important
was not the relationship of his mother tongue with his adopted tongue,
but the relationship of his adopted language with his mother tongue.55
52
Claude Esteban, Le Partage des mots (Paris: Gallimard, 1990), p. 65.
53
Alexakis, Paris-Athènes, p. 10. “I precisely wanted to write about the difficulty of
this choice, but how could I write without choosing?”
54
Vassilis Alexakis, La Langue maternelle (Paris: Fayard, 1995), p. 137.
55
Alexakis wrote La Langue maternelle in Greek, then translated it into French. He
later made revisions to the original Greek version based on his French translation.
LANGUAGE 37
For an author who has already established himself in the adopted

language, what matters is the reintegration of the past. Todorov’s
experience of going back to Bulgaria, which will be discussed in the
section “Hierarchisation”, further confirms this. Alexakis is building a
bridge from his adopted language to his mother tongue. He
substantiates this in the narrative by saying:
Je comprends, je crois comprendre en tout cas, pourquoi j’ai préféré intituler

ce récit Paris-Athènes, plutôt que Athènes-Paris: j’avais besoin d’indiquer
dans quel sens ce voyage m’était le plus agréable.56
I understand, or in any case I believe I do, why I preferred to entitle this

narrative Paris-Athens, rather than Athens-Paris: I needed to indicate in
which direction this journey was the most pleasant for me.
Alexakis fantasised about a French pseudonym long before

emigrating to France.57 This was the first step towards the desired
familiarity with French which he would later achieve. French stopped
being a foreign language through his affinity with the writing of other
immigrant writers such as Ionesco and Beckett. He chose French to
communicate with his newly acquired French friends, but also to play
with words. It felt to him easier to construct independent sentences in
French than in Greek. This symbolises the freedom gained with a new
language, where the writer’s obligation to indulge in reference shrinks
to a bare minimum. This shedding of unnecessary baggage
accompanies all immigrant writers.
Betrayal, pain and loss
Perception of betrayal is intimately implicated in the choice of

a new language. Bilinguals experience the abandoning or
subordinating of the mother tongue as a crime they have committed
leading to frequent comparisons of their linguistic situation with
bigamy, adultery or incest. The seemingly insurmountable task of
mastering a new language to the high level required to be able to write
in it adds to the negative impression. It seems as if trying to write in a
56
Alexakis, Paris-Athènes, p. 144.
57
This is reminiscent of Gary’s account of himself and his mother dreaming up
appropriate literary pseudonyms for him.
foreign language is an unnatural and artificial pursuit. It takes a while

before a bilingual writer is able to discard this notion and perceive his
bilingualism in a positive light, as enriching rather than destructive or
subtractive. However, the negative immigrant imagery should not be
solely ascribed to their linguistic situation:
Themes of loss and psychic division are plentiful even in the works of exiles
who continued to write in their first language (…). These themes may be
ascribed to exile or to bilingualism per se, or to some combination of both,
but it would not be accurate to attribute such preoccupations exclusively to
the professional abandonment of the mother tongue.58
Literary immigrants are worried that they might contaminate

their mother tongue if it comes in contact with their adopted language.
The fear of forgetting the mother tongue is a constant feature of their
psychical make up, as confirmed by Julien Green:
Une petite absence de mémoire n’est pas un drame, mais pour un homme de
culture, chaque mot de sa langue maternelle fait partie de l’héritage qu’il
doit préserver dans son intégralité. Oublier l’un de ces mots est une cause
d’inquiétude et de tristesse, parce que cela veut dire que quelque chose
d’une valeur incalculable vient d’être menacé.59
I do not wish to dramatize what seems, after all, only a small lapse of
memory, but to a man of culture, every word of his mother tongue is part of
a heritage which must be preserved in its entirety, and to forget one of those
words is a cause of worry and sadness, because it means that something of
incalculable worth is being threatened in him.
For Green the horror of forgetting the mother tongue is even stronger
than the desire to learn a new one. At the same time he acknowledges
the apparently skin-deep adherence of any language to our psyche. He
thus criticises the superficiality of the concept of mother tongue, but
religiously believes that ultimately the connection with the mother
tongue is beyond superficial forgetting.
Unless one is multilingual from relatively early childhood, the
second languages are never perfect substitutes for the original
language. Even when linguistically and emotionally appropriate, the
chosen adopted language is fragile because it is constantly betrayed by
58
59
Green, “Une expérience en anglais”, p. 159. English version on p. 158.
LANGUAGE 39
memory which easily acquires the status of a criminal. Its contents

become enveloped in the mystique of imaginary crime, welcoming
connections with metaphors of incest, guilt or betrayal. For instance,
Claude Esteban sees his bilingual situation as Faustian, while Nancy
Huston sees herself as “une femme malhonnête”.60
In the mourning process the immigrant will have to come to
terms with feelings of guilt, be they of persecutory or depressive
nature. The feelings of guilt and helplessness are often the source of
family romance and heroic structures in immigrant’s writing. The
writing in itself will help the completion of the mourning process.
There is also a different type of betrayal, that of the language.
Del Castillo believes that Spanish is a manipulative language which is
not true to what the speaker desires to express. This suspicious attitude
to language is also an expression of the psychical condition of a
bilingual. Most of them feel that they are betraying the source
language when engaging in translation. However, betrayal is a
necessity for an immigrant, and the sooner he can learn to accept that
its immorality is a part of his personality the better. Kundera’s Sabine
from L’Insoutenable Légèreté de l’être is an example of an immigrant
who lives her betrayal to the full.
For some linguistic immigrants keeping the accent in their
adopted languages is an emotional need to counteract their betrayal or
simply to reassert their identity. Although his first wife Lesley Blanch
claims that his English was almost without an accent, Gary states that
he always had a Russian accent in English.61 Gary’s belief is due to
both his perfectionism and his emotional need to mark himself as a
foreigner and even create his own myth around it. Todorov also kept
his accent which he defines as a sign of confidence of his identity and
his linguistic status. His wife Huston says that her accent gives her the
distance necessary for all the different roles she needs to play in life.62
A writer’s self-censorship usually weakens subsequent to
immigration, due to his initial indifference towards the rules of social
acceptance in a new language and society. This is often experienced as
the loss of the addressee or the inner reader. The loss of the inner
reader is synonymous with the loss of the psycho-social boundaries
60
Huston, Nord perdu, p. 41. “a dishonest woman”
61
Lesley Blanch, Romain, un regard particulier, translated from English by Jean
Lambert (Arles: Actes sud, 1998), p. 113.
62
Huston, Nord perdu, p. 38.
necessary for any creation. Claude Esteban eloquently sums up the

quality of this imaginary figure which will be further discussed in the
section entitled “The inner reader” in the chapter “Doubling and
incest”. Built out of the introjected object choices, both at once inner
reader and linguistic space, it is also firmly connected with the
language the writer will later choose as his home:
Lorsque je finis par comprendre le concept de “langue maternelle”, je ne

parvins pas à l’associer durablement à la figure de ma mère, mais à quelque
entité plus haute, plus exigeante, plus vénérable, qui de très loin veillait sur
moi. J’apportais en effet à l’usage du vocabulaire français un respect de
nature quasiment religieuse, comme si, de prononcer ces mots chargés de
sens, j’avais communié avec la substance même d’un pays sous les espèces
de sa langue.63
When I at last grasped the concept of the “mother tongue”, I did not succeed
in associating it permanently with my mother, but to some higher, more
demanding, more venerable entity which from very far away was watching
over me. In fact I brought to the use of French vocabulary a respect almost
religious in its nature, as if, by pronouncing these words loaded with
meaning, I had communed with the very substance of a country through the
currency of its language.
The experience of many literary immigrants is that this

destinataire imaginaire (imaginary addressee) tends to fade away
when a change of language occurs. For this to happen, it would have
to be clearly related to the native environment and culture or more
specifically to the language itself, as Esteban states. This would
suggest that this relationship is established very early, during the
process of primary language acquisition. The reinvention of this
addressee involves a going-back in order to go forward.
The transition period
The length of the transition period varies depending on

personal circumstances. Immigrants usually experience it as endless,
unsure where it will lead them. It seems too long even in hindsight:
Une heure seulement sépare les deux pays, (…) Au cours de cette pénible
période où je n’avais pas encore commencé ce récit, où je n’arrivais pas à le
63
Esteban, Le Partage des mots, pp. 51-52.
LANGUAGE 41
commencer, je me disais que j’avais sacrifié vingt ans de ma vie juste pour
gagner une heure.64
Only one hour separates the two countries, (…) During this painful period
when I still had not started this narrative, when I could not bring myself to
start it, I kept telling myself that I had sacrificed twenty years of my life just
to gain one hour.
The freer the choice and the decision they have made, the
easier the transition period:
The more compulsory the uprooting, the greater the tendency of the
immigrant to develop a regressive attitude, to isolate himself, develop his
own false ideas on relationships, and misjudge his new surroundings.65
Immigrant writers are examples of successful negotiation of the

transition period, who have resisted this regressive urge.
Using the word adoption for the choice of second language as
the main means of literary expression highlights two aspects of this
phenomenon. First, the role the family romance fantasy plays in the
adoption (which will be analysed in a separate section of this chapter).
Second, the tough discipline the adopted language and the writer have
to subject themselves to in order for the new language to become a
substitute for the old one. Cioran calls this discipline “camisole de
force”66 and “supplice fascinant”.67 This tough period is inescapable
for the writer to be able to deliver on his decision of choice. The
challenge of this learning period gives more weight to the difficulty of
making the decision. The process takes longer than simple language
acquisition, because through it the inner reader is recreated.
This discipline is not artificial as it results from a genuine
passion for language. There is a wonderful anecdote about Cioran and
Beckett which illustrates the passion shared by these two literary
immigrants into French. They spent a whole night trying to find an
accurate French translation for the English word Lessness which
Beckett used as one of his titles. The exploration was unsuccessful and
64
65
Richard Kolm, The Change of Cultural Identity; An Analysis of Factors
Conditioning the Cultural Integration of Immigrants (New York: Arno Press, 1980),
p. 147.
66
Cioran, Entretiens, p. 28. “straitjacket”
67
Cioran, Entretiens, p. 144. “fascinating torture”
they had to settle for Sans (Without), a metaphysically empty

preposition:
Nous tombâmes d’accord qu’on devait abandonner l’enquête, qu’il n’y avait
pas de substantif français capable d’exprimer l’absence en soi, l’absence à
l’état pur, et qu’il fallait se résigner à la misère métaphysique d’une
préposition.68
We agreed that we should abandon the search, that there is no French noun
capable of expressing absence in itself, absence in the pure state, and that
we should resign ourselves to the metaphysical poverty of a preposition.
It is not by chance that this particular term is in question. A

major challenge in working out the particular meaning of “lessness” is
that it describes so well the feelings of those who abandon one
language and adopt another. The importance of finding the word for
the loss experienced in the adopted language marks the need for a
language in which the loss can be mourned and overcome. The words
denoting loss, verbs in particular such as “jeter”, “perdre” and
“abandonner” (to throw, to lose, to abandon) appear very frequently in
Beckett’s writing belonging to the transition period69 and in the
writing of other literary immigrants. The new language often seems
emotionally dead for the whole duration of the transition period (as
seen in Eva Hoffman’s quotation in the section “Bilinguals and
monolinguals”). For a time, the writer has no language in which he
can express himself: he is refusing to use his mother tongue and his
adopted tongue is refusing to be used by him.
The cult of discipline in the adopted language is something
that always remains with the immigrant writer. He will always doubt
whether the language he is using is correct. He will also always
engage in the arduous and obsessively self-conscious practice of
constantly checking his writing to combat this suspicion.
The predicament of the main characters in one of Nabokov’s
earlier novels, Bend Sinister, can be said to represent the apparently
spellbindingly static position of a person who is in the throes of
abandoning one language for another. Adam Krug is trapped in a
68
E. M. Cioran, “Quelques recontres”, Cahier de l’Herne – Samuel Beckett, Tom
Bishop and Raymond Federman (eds.) (Paris: Éditions de l’Herne, 1976), p. 48.
69
Erika Ostrovsky, “Le silence de Babel”, Cahier de l’Herne – Samuel Beckett, p.
192.
LANGUAGE 43
totalitarian state. His wife died leaving him with his young son. One
of his friends describes his wife as a mother figure withholding the
secret of the “maternal” part of language, having “something
ventriloquial about her, a continuous soliloquy following in willowed
shade the meanderings of her actual speech”.70 Under Krug’s skin,
Nabokov says, “was a dead wife and a sleeping child”.71 This could be
seen as an allusion to mother tongue and new language co-existing in
the writer’s mind. The function of the grotesque invented Germano-
Slavic vernacular, which appears in brackets throughout the novel, is
to distract from this hidden, but clear and painful, juxtaposition of
wife as mother tongue and child as new language. The apparent
hybridisation symbolised by the invented language hides a very clear
division between the actual languages. Krug avoids dwelling on his
wife’s death and concentrates wholly on his child, unsuccessfully
trying to keep him alive. Nabokov here alludes to his fear that his
switch between languages has happened too late for the new language
to successfully replace his mother tongue. He blames himself and his
nostalgia for taking too long to recognise the need for choosing the
new language.
Nabokov’s The Real Life of Sebastian Knight72, is an allegory
on the process of language acquisition and loss. Throughout the novel,
love and fidelity are coloured by linguistic allegiance. Mother figures
are here related to fated languages. The external doubling that
Sebastian sustains (in the shape of a brother) is the least disturbing of
the various regressive experiences and psychical adjustments he has to
go through. It is a disturbing battle between the same and the different
which belongs to twinhood narratives, which will be discussed in the
chapter “Doubling and incest”.
Most writers engage in the transition process with a certain
rational coolness. They are mostly secretive about it, as they are
usually not able to foresee where this development will lead them.
Thus this period is often externally seen as silent. The literary
immigrants usually completely suppress the active use of their mother
tongue during this period. Some writers even feel the need to keep up
70
Vladimir Nabokov, Bend Sinister (London: Penguin, 1974), p. 36.
71
Nabokov, Bend Sinister, p. 48.
72
Vladimir Nabokov, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (London: Penguin Books,
1995).
this dissociation or hierarchisation afterwards. Michel Maffesoli’s

gardening metaphor expresses the true nature of this cultivation:
Les jardiniers le savent bien, il faut couper certaines racines, s’alléger pour
mieux se développer, s’épurer pour mieux réintégrer. Le nomadisme est
ainsi, une sorte d’ascèse.73
As gardeners well know, one should cut certain roots, lighten the better to
develop, refine the better to harmonize. The nomadic approach is thus a
type of ascesis.
“Déracinement” (uprooting) is another frequent gardening

term applied to immigrant writers. They often initially impose upon
themselves the discipline of self-translation from the native to the new
language as a linguistic and mental preparation for writing in the new
language. Most multilingual writers find self-translation to be a real
torture. Some of them even refuse to translate their own works into
their mother tongue once they have started to write in a new language.
The first successful attempts at writing in a new language seem very
easy compared to the earlier agony of self-translation, which hastens
the end of the transition process.
Gary is an interesting case of a literary immigrant who spent
part of his transition period in England, learning English. He wrote
several books directly in English, but his choice of allegiance to the
French language and France remained unchallenged.
The most rational method for quantifying this period of
adjustment is by measuring its duration. In Les Testaments trahis,
Milan Kundera attempts to find the magic mathematical formula
which might answer the question why certain artists choose to use
another language actively whilst others do not. The comparison of the
number of years spent in the native and foreign countries respectively
is an important parameter. However, the simplicity of this find is
challenged by the fact that the years of youth seem to carry more
weight than the years of maturity. The closest Kundera comes to a
personal statement about the transition period is his remark that an
73
Michel Maffesoli, Du nomadisme, Vagabondages initiatiques (Paris: Librairie
Générale Française, 1997), p. 142.
LANGUAGE 45
artist “doit mobiliser toutes ses forces, toute sa ruse d’artiste pour
transformer les désavantages de cette situation en atouts.”74
Successful substitution
Successful substitution of the mother tongue with the new

language does occur, although very few theorists or even immigrant
writers themselves dare to acknowledge this possibility.75 It is usually
based on a successful negotiation of migration:
If, because of his character predisposition or the conditions of his migration,

the immigrant’s ego is too seriously damaged by the traumatic experience or
the past or present crisis, it will be difficult for him to recover from the state
of disorganisation into which he has fallen, and he may suffer any one of
many forms of mental or physical illness. If, however, he has sufficient
capacity for working through, not only will he overcome the crisis but there
will be a quality of rebirth to his recovery and a development of his creative
potential.76
The migratory experience itself is extreme enough to grant either a

positive or a negative outcome. The Grinbergs stress on several
occasions how positive this outcome can be if the immigrant has to
power to achieve it. They call the experience of migration a
“catastrophic change”77, an extraordinary event which requires a
tremendous psychical effort to be integrated into the small patterns of
daily experiences.
The language substitution is a fragile accomplishment. By
repeating the process of the original language acquisition, the
individual encounters many of the psychical dangers which occur in
74
Milan Kundera, Les Testaments trahis (Paris: Gallimard, Folio, 1993), p. 115. An
artist “must mobilise all his strength, all his artist’s cunning to transform the
disadvantages of this situation into advantages”.
75
The Babel of the Unconscious and Le Deuil de l’origine are the only two works I
have come across which, one from the psychoanalytical and the other from a general
cultural and literary perspective, allow for the possibility that the mother tongue can
be successfully replaced by another language. Vassilis Alexakis in Paris-Athènes talks
about his in anger at hearing a reputable linguist claim that one can write original
literature only in one’s mother tongue. Vassilis Alexakis and all other successful
literary immigrants are the very proof of this possibility.
76
Grinberg and Grinberg, Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Migration and Exile, p. 13.
77
the development of infants. Literary immigrants seem to be

understandably frightened of the possibility of an uncontrollable
regression back to where they have started from. The acquisition of a
new language is a result of an immense, conscious effort to detach
oneself from at least one part of what one had been predestined for, an
immense desire to combat biological and cultural determinism and to
prove that to rise above our origins is the most important statement of
freedom that a human being is capable of.
From the point of view of bilingualism, according to Elizabeth
Klosty Beaujour, a bilingual writer has fulfilled his potential when he
is able to reincorporate his mother tongue into his life after the
transition period and thenceforth to alternate freely between his
different languages. Tzvetan Todorov is in agreement with this view
when he claims that to accede to “transculturation”, his term for
nomadic bi- or multi-culturality, the immigrant has to pass through the
acculturation, the full adaptation to the chosen culture.78
From the point of view of literary immigration, a literary
immigrant has fulfilled his potential when he feels that the new
language has replaced his mother tongue to the point that he feels at
home writing in this new language. There are degrees to this
substitution and it certainly does not preclude active, parallel and even
literary use of the mother tongue. Active multilingual practice can
only enrich creative work, although some writers feel that it might
contaminate the one language they have chosen as their main means
of expression.
The reintegration of the past in a new language certainly has
its psychically beneficial aspects. It prepares the individual to be
reunited with his original language, if this were indeed where the
psychical problem or the writer’s literary path lies. Equally it could
help the writer who perseveres in writing in his adopted language, to
achieve a certain unity of his memories. This experience usually
provides increased psychical stability, regardless of which language
ultimately gains the writer’s allegiance.
The cases reported by Amati, Argentieri and Canestri in The
Babel of the Unconscious of female patients who underwent
psychoanalysis in a language other than their mother tongue, bring
conclusive insight into the benefits of language substitution. What all
78
LANGUAGE 47
these patients had in common was an unresolved relationship with the

maternal figure. Adopting a new language (“conveyor of new thought
and affect routes”79) was a defensive move in their lives which
provided them “albeit at the cost of deep and painful splittings, with
valid and structured introjections on which to reorganize their adult
feminine identity”.80 It also represented for them “a new opportunity
for repeating the evolutive journey towards the acquisition of a more
developed and less mutilated identity”.81 Reorganising traumatic
memories from the past in the new language allowed them to come to
terms with them. For these patients, the new language provided a
defence mechanism which was only temporary. They needed to go
through the traumatic experience of facing up to the original conflict,
helped by the analyst. This experience also led them back to reassess
their relationship with their mother tongue, the language in which the
original trauma occurred.
Bilinguals tend to exploit their defence mechanism of
switching languages depending on the situation, which accounts for
the common perception of bilinguals as chameleon-like. In Pseudo,
Romain Gary recreates the point of view of a deranged individual who
manages to keep his psychical unity by constantly trying to escape his
linguistic condition:
J’ai fait des études de linguistique, afin d’inventer une langue qui m’eût été
tout à fait étrangère. Cela m’aurait permis de penser à l’abri des sources
d’angoisse et des mots piégés, et des agressions intérieures et extérieures,
avec preuves à l’appui.
Je n’y suis pas parvenu à cause de haute surveillance. Le cerveau sait très
bien que si nous parvenions à inventer un langage sans précédent et sans
aucun rapport, ç’en serait fini de notre caractère démentiel. C’est pour parler
de ce danger que les sources d’angoisse nous ont pourvu du cerveau, tel
quel, spécialement conçu pour nous entretenir en état de manque,
d’impossibilité et de caricature.82
I studied linguistics in order to invent a language which would be entirely

foreign to me. This would allow me to think protected from the sources of
anxiety and from the traps hidden in words, from internal and external
aggression, and to back myself up with supporting evidence.
79
80
81
82
Emile Ajar, Pseudo (Paris: Mercure de France, 1976), p. 31.
I did not succeed, due to close surveillance. The brain knows very well that
if we managed to invent a language without precedent and without any
relationship to anything else, that would be the end of our insane character.
It is so that we can talk about this danger that the sources of anxiety have
provided us with our brain, such as it is, specially designed to keep us in a
state of lack, impossibility and caricature.
Gary’s narrator mocks his own persecutory feelings by exaggerating

them to the point where his linguistic virtuosity coupled with its
highly cynical-idealised content can appear as a form of humour to the
reader. Unlike Gary’s narrator in Pseudo, who obviously has not come
to terms with his linguistic position, Gary the author was able to turn
his linguistic situation into an advantage and he is able, through his
characters, to envisage various other options that his linguistic
situation might have led him to.
The choices of both polyglots and polylinguals reflect the
need for “further” individuation, although this can sometimes be
masked by their enjoyment of regression. However, it is in the case of
the polyglots and not polylinguals that “we are certainly able to
observe the creation of new associative and connecting pathways
between representational systems, through unknown combinations not
previously available to the subject, and through new articulations of
the defence mechanisms.”83 This is the crucial characteristic which
distinguishes polyglots from polylinguals and accounts for the overall
more positive role of the new language within the polyglot’s defence
mechanisms. In the case of the polylingual, the linguistic routes are
“polluted” by the emotional content of the past. Therefore, although
their multilingualism is more natural to them, because psychically
more archaic, polylinguals’ other languages cannot provide such a
significant refuge as do the polyglots’ other languages. The polyglot’s
survival instinct is thus implicated in his choice.
We owe to Ferenczi the intuition that the processes of splitting and

repression occurring between mother tongue and foreign language do not
necessarily have to be considered as phenomena that exclude and mutilate.
In fact, through the words of a new language, they are also able to
encourage alternative thought pathways that have shallower roots and a less
83
Amati Mehler, Argentieri, Canestri, The Babel of the Unconscious, p. 286, my
italics.
LANGUAGE 49
intimate connection with primary experiences — perhaps a reasonable price

to pay for the preservation of equilibrium.84
It is a known fact that there are fewer cases of schizophrenia

in bilingual communities. Superficiality is an important feature of the
defence mechanism, but shallower roots are not necessarily the
weakest. As new emotional content is gathered behind the new
language, they gain in strength and psychical relevance. This
alternative emotional content calls for a new approach to analysis,
particularly in the cases of those who have successfully negotiated
their linguistic substitution, for whom the substitution has become
more than a temporary defence mechanism and who see their primary
experiences in the mother tongue from an ever-increasing distance.
Julien Green perceptively describes the conflict in the perception of
the importance of the different parts of immigrant’s experience:
Souvent je suis tenté de croire que les racines du langage plongent jusqu’au
fond de notre personnalité et que c’est notre façon d’être qui est en jeu
quand on nous apprend à parler en une langue plutôt qu’en une autre. Un
petit Français n’appréhende pas l’univers comme le fait un petit Américain,
et c’est en partie à cause de la langue à travers laquelle, si l’on peut dire, cet
univers leur est présenté. (...) Mais à d’autres moments, je suis tenté de
croire le contraire. Peut-être, en effet ces questions de langage ne sont-elles
que superficielles. J’ai remarqué que beaucoup d’étrangers qui s’établissent
aux Etats-Unis finissent par oublier, tant soit peu, le bon usage de leur
langue maternelle, à moins qu’ils ne luttent pour défendre le patrimoine
qu’ils emportèrent intact lorsqu’ils quittèrent leur pays. Au bout d’un certain
temps, ce qu’on pourrait appeler des infiltrations anglaises se trahit (sic)
dans leur langage ordinaire.85
I am often tempted to think that that the roots of language reach to the
bottom of our personality and that our manner of being is at stake when we
are taught to speak one language rather than another. A French child does
not comprehend the universe in the same way as an American child, and
this is in part due to the language through which, so to speak, this universe
is presented to them. (…) But at other times, I am tempted to think the
opposite. Perhaps, in fact, these questions of language are only superficial. I
have noticed that many foreigners who settle in the United States end up
forgetting, be it ever so slightly, the correct use of their mother tongue
unless they fight to protect the heritage which they took away unadulterated
84
Amati Mehler, Argentieri, Canestri, The Babel of the Unconscious, pp. 112-113, my
italics.
85
Green, “Mon premier livre en anglais”, Le Langage et son double, p. 213.
when they first left their country. After a while one can detect what one
could call English infiltrations into their daily language.86
Both perceptions are equally true: our linguistic allegiances are

closely connected with our personality and reflect or relate to
fundamental developments of our personality, however, at the same
time, our linguistic instincts are survival instincts.
Identity
The literary immigrant is a writer who mostly adheres to his

choice of a new language and does not return to his mother tongue as
his main writing language, an option some would still consider more
natural – and which has been integrated in the past within a traditional
and nationalistic type of narrative. It is equally a writer who does not
actively write in both or all of his languages – which would represent
a certain cosmopolitan or globalising option. Has he simply been
passively assimilated by another culture and language even while he
thought he was committing an act of freedom? Or has he in fact
successfully negotiated the narrow path between nationalism and exile
which Edward Said suggests could be two conflicting varieties of
paranoia?87 The key to the literary immigrant’s identity is his
profound understanding of his adoptive language and culture. His
cosmopolitanism is based on this depth of knowledge. In the case of
86
Green’s own translation is on p. 212: “Sometimes I am tempted to think that the
roots of the human language go very deep in our personality. To teach a child a
language in preference to another is to interfere with that child’s manner of being for
the rest of his days. A little Frenchman does not see the universe as does a little
American, and this is due, for the most part, to the language through which the
universe is, so to speak, presented to them. (…) However, there are other times when I
feel inclined to believe quite the opposite of what I have just written. Perhaps, after
all, these problems of expression are only superficial. I have noticed that a great many
foreigners who settle in America end by forgetting what is considered the good usage
in their mother tongue, unless they struggle to defend that portion of their national
heritage. After a certain time, traces of foreign infiltration can be discerned in their
speech.” As can been seen in comparing the two examples, Green’s English version
departs considerably from his original French text, particularly in the italicised
sentence. It would be a fascinating study to try and determine where the idiomatic
translation stops and Green’s interpretation based on his American personality starts.
87
Edward Said, “Reflections on Exile”, Reflections on Exile and Other Literary and
Cultural Essays (London: Granta Books, 2000), p. 177.
LANGUAGE 51
those who have chosen French, their attachment to France and French
language, and by extension to a European cultural identity, is a result
of an advanced immersion into the French language and culture. This
attachment does not exclude a healthy relationship with the writer’s
native culture and language.
By anchoring himself to a foreign language of choice, the
literary immigrant searches for depth in the foreignness which appears
superficial because it is unknown. Conversely, by abandoning the
mother tongue, he asserts superficiality where others see depth. This
reversal of values can be seen as perverse. The immigrant creates his
own hierarchy to which he adheres, but he also keeps a very open
mind. He has created his own cosmopolitanism and he does not take it
for granted.
Being able to maintain a positive sense of identity is crucial
for successful language substitution and cultural adaptation. There is
no doubt that, even when the immigrant has adapted to his new
environment, the experience of immigration still has an important hold
on his psychical processes. Semprun’s depiction of his character
Artigas attempting to obtain valid documents in L’Algarabie, which
will be analysed in greater detail in the next chapter, opens up the
thorny legal, and by extension political, philosophical and social,
aspect of immigration. As various psychoanalysts point out, this
experience of constantly having to justify and legalise one’s status can
have a strong behavioural impact:
On ne sort pas toujours indemne de ces histoires de papiers, avec leur

cortège d’attente, d’insécurité, de dépendance à l’égard d’une
administration contraignante et puissante. Ceux qui ont vécu dans leur
enfance, comme une exigence impérieuse, la nécessité d’être “en règle”,
dûment inscrits, identifiés, enregistrés, ceux qui ont ressenti la précarité
dangereuse de l’irrégularité, trouant d’incertitude leur devenir, intériorisent
parfois cette expérience au point d’être animés par un profond désir de
conformité.88
One does not always come unscathed out of these problems with identity
papers with their accompaniment of waiting, insecurity and dependence on
a constraining and powerful administration. Those who have in their
childhood experienced the necessity of their papers being “in order”,
properly registered, identified, recorded, those who have felt the dangerous
precariousness of irregularity, which marked their future with uncertainty,
88
Quelle identité dans l’exil? Fafia Djardem (ed.) (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1997), p. 176.
sometimes internalise this experience to the point of being driven by a

profound desire to conform.
The immigrant’s desire to conform, which could be said not to be

always consistent, could be treated as a subject in its own right. France
might seem a hospitable land to some, but others have the opposite
experience. French law requires that in order to acquire French
nationality, the name of the individual in question must be
pronounceable in French. Some immigrants would no doubt see this
as plainly xenophobic, but for the purposes of this text, what is of
interest is the incredible force of language even in this reductive legal
vision of the French nation.
The immigrant’s identity is misinterpreted by his new
compatriots. Alexakis gives several examples of this in Paris-Athènes.
The French often consider immigrant writers ambassadors of their
native culture, which attaches much false exotic appeal to their
understanding of those writers. They do not understand that, for most
of these writers, the appeal of the French and European identities lies
in their strongly urban and cosmopolitan character. Instead, French
readers expect them to write about their native culture, and are
sometimes condescendingly lenient when judging their linguistic
mastery. Alexakis even states that his wife, a Frenchwoman who is a
teacher of French, always suspected him of having married her to
correct his mistakes in French.
Semprun joins Alexakis in his irony about French
expectations of immigrants. He denounces the cultural arrogance of
those French people who think France should be the second “patrie”
(“homeland”) to all.89
When identity is no longer validated by the closest circle of
individuals who are now left behind, it is easy for it to lose its
importance, become confused and start to fade. Trying to keep it up in
an inhospitable environment, or in an environment where this identity
is no longer of use, is at least tiring, and a linguistic immigrant lives
with this ambiguity of not knowing whether it is worth the effort.
Nancy Huston, a French writer of English Canadian origin, calls her
89
Jorge Semprun, L’Algarabie (Paris: Fayard, 1981), p. 295.
LANGUAGE 53
cultural disorientation “perdre le nord”90, thus also signalling the loss

of her Northern origins.
Patrick Chamoiseau claims that the relationship between
language and identity is less strict in our time.91 Adopting a language
does not assume an unconditional and exclusive adoption of the
associated world view. However, the choice of French as a literary
language is usually accompanied by the desire to be admitted into the
French language and its literature. It goes without saying that this
means that a compromise is necessary, that of adopting at least a
significant portion of the French world view.
Most literary immigrants find it difficult to express the
different parts of their personality at the same time. Their internal
organisation is that of a double – they are more than one which is
paradoxically also less than one. This pseudo-splitting is sometimes
experienced as a lack of unity of the individual. It is interesting to
think that in the nineteenth century, patients diagnosed as
“schizophrenic” were treated by being taught foreign languages.
Paradoxically, the in-depth knowledge of more than one language
brings the speaker to replicate, at least in form, some of the divisions
symptomatic of what have been called schizophrenic states. As occurs
in some mental disorders, linguistic immigrants use their new
language as a defence mechanism. Their double loyalty makes
translation and full transparency very difficult and almost impossible.
The doubling in Gary’s fiction which will be discussed in the
chapters “Europa” and “Doubling and incest” is at the core of his
relationship with language:
Romain Gary n’aura de cesse sous ce nom ou sous celui d’Ajar de mettre en
scène les figures d’aphasie, du doublage, la ventriloquie, le dibbouk dans la
langue. Parler pour l’autre, à la place de l’autre, avec la voix de l’autre …
Dans ces exemples, la langue étrangère induit un effet d’étrangeté qui fait
retour sur la sienne propre, une jubilation et de la panique. Le plus proche
est aussi le plus lointain.92
Romain Gary has never stopped presenting, under his own name or that of
Ajar, figures of aphasia and doubling, ventriloquism, the dybbuk in the
90
Huston, Nord perdu, p. 14. “Perdre le nord” stands for “to lose one’s bearings”, but
also “to lose one’s head”.
91
Gauvin, L’Écrivain francophone à la croisée des langues, p. 37.
92
Robin, Le Deuil de l’origine, p. 31.
language. Speaking for the other, instead of the other, with the voice of the
other …
In these examples the foreign language induces the effect of strangeness

which reflects its own foreignness, an effect of jubilation and panic. The
closest is also the most distant.
Alienation and jubilation are the two sides of the immigrant’s

relationship with the language. Both can be beneficial to their literary
work. It could be said that it is their constant showing of their
linguistic mastery in the second language which is for them the most
potent means of recreating a jubilatory state of mind. The quest for
wholeness is what characterises most strongly the literary immigrant’s
work. Unlike their peers who go through literary exercises of denial of
personality, the literary immigrants tend to seek, through their writing,
a temporary relief from fragmentation.
Hierarchisation
Hierarchisation is a method for organising memories of

different languages in such as way as to minimise interference and
speed up the switching between the two. Most bilinguals have
spontaneously, consciously and unconsciously, elaborated similar
organisational methods. The almost exclusive use of a new language
during the transition period and after is only one of the aspects of this
method. Nabokov, for instance, wrote his prose in English and his
poetry in Russian. Some even believe that this method is crucial in
preventing the bilingual’s potential tendency to splitting and
disintegration, which could also be closely related to the loss or
change of the inner reader.
In the case of polyglots, as their second language acquisition
is a more conscious process anyway, successful hierarchisation is
crucial for the success of their bilingualism or second language
adoption. Tzvetan Todorov, a well-known immigrant linguist, bases
his belief in the need for hierarchisation on his definition of the nature
of language as totalitarian.
The practice of code-switching is the complete opposite of
hierarchisation. This known linguistic phenomenon occurs when
bilinguals communicate within their bilingual communities. It consists
LANGUAGE 55
of switching for longer stretches of discourse between the languages

known to the interlocutors. It is different from a loan – a single word
or expression borrowed from the other language and integrated into
the main language of expression, usually filling a semantic gap.
Immigrant writers use loans occasionally, but on the whole relatively
rarely. They at times see some value in using loans to build a world
view around a single borrowed word. A loan in their writing is usually
a pretext for a digression; this is particularly the case with Semprun
and Kundera. As immigrant writers see languages as mutually
exclusive, they take pride in preserving the educated purity in all of
their languages and never engage in code-switching, at least not in
their writing. Code-switching can be said to belong to a certain
bilingual ghetto mentality. Although a very creative practice on the
surface, it can easily become lazy and self-indulgent. Immigrant
writers prefer to forge their language with discipline and thus gain
social respectability. Also “having once stepped outside the system of
language, they can never return to the thoughtless and unprincipled
literary use of it”.93
Katalin Molnár’s writing is an exception amongst the group of
writers discussed. The poems of this writer of Hungarian origin are
reminiscent of the perversity of the code-switching practice. She has
invented her own method of phonography of French which resembles
phonetic transcription. It is also reminiscent of the spelling of Louis
Wolfson, an American diagnosed as schizophrenic who wrote two
books in French. Molnár’s French grammar is also deliberately
bastardised to proffer artificial examples of a foreigner’s mistakes in
French. She thus describes everything outside herself as foreign in the
extreme. However, this foreignness still provokes childlike surprise
and positive amazement. In her collection poèmesIncorrects et
mauvaisChants chansTranscrits, her poems are printed on the right
and accompanying notes on the left. The notes carry all the emotional
weight of the empty poems on the right. It is the notes which seem
like the real poems. Note 31 says:
Ôjourd’ui 25 déssanbr 1994, j’apèl ma mèr. S’è mon frèr kadé Fèri, ki
dékroch le téléfonn, Je tradui: K’è-s ke tu fè? J’ékri oen livr. Mè moa
93
dedan! Koman veu-tu ke j te mèt dedan, je l’ékri an fransè. Mè Fransoa, j

m’an fich. Tu n di ryèn a pèrsonn é tu m’i mè. Ô milyeu j voudrè.94
Toodei 25 Decembr 1994 I kol mai mathr. It’s my yangr brathr Feri hoo
piks ap th fon, I transleit: Wot r u doing? I’m wraiting a book. Put me
insaid! How can I put u in mai book, I’m wraiting it in French. Put Fransoa,
I don’t ker. U don’t say anything to anywan end u put me in ther. In th midl
I’d laik.
She forces the French to be what it is not. She blends both her
languages into a concoction which can not be identified as either
language. Deliberately trying to place herself out of reach of possible
comparisons with other French writers, Molnár creatively enacts her
isolation and fear.
Polylingual writers who were multilingual from early
childhood and who experience the languages as parallel, are strong
believers in the totalitarian nature of language. Those who experience
language as totalitarian usually perceive their origins as plenitude and
unity, whilst those for whom language is liberal see their origins as a
fragmented emptiness on which they need to build. The feeling of
exile has prestige in our day precisely because it incorporates these
two contradictory ontological experiences.95
The polylingual Julien Green considers that bilingualism is
impossible, because at any moment, he chooses to express himself in
one of his two languages. He also experiences language as an all-
embracing closed whole. The polylingual Claude Esteban senses the
totalitarian pressure as a vertiginous fear of splitting and discovering a
void in this split between his two linguistic options. He finds having
two names for everything profoundly destabilising. Similarly to a
monolingual, Esteban connects the sign firmly to the object referred
to, and refuses to accept the disassociation between word and concept
which makes him more vulnerable to splitting, to the “névrose de
Janus” or “bi-frontalité douloureuse” as he calls it.96 It is interesting
that Esteban chooses French as opposed to Spanish. He does this
despite the fact that French is for him overburdened with painful
94
Katalin Molnár, poèmesIncorrects et mauvaisChants chansTranscrits (Paris:
fourbis, 1995), p. 34.
95
Huguette Dufresnois and Christian Miguel, La Philosophie de l’exil (Paris:
L’Harmattan, 1996).
96
Esteban, Le Partage des mots, p. 95. “Janus’ neurosis” or “painful bi-frontality”
LANGUAGE 57
emotional content from the past. It might seem more logical if he were
to choose Spanish, which for him embodies an imaginary paradise
with all the implications of primary unity. However, Esteban’s case is
one of polylinguism, where the choices are differently motivated.
In Le Partage des mots (The sharing of words)97, Esteban
describes what a special, almost religious, ritual was for him, in his
childhood, the crossing of the Franco-Spanish border. This perception
shows the effort towards hierarchisation. Assigning a clear place to
each language inevitably strengthens the sense of identity. The
travelling that Esteban experiences between the two languages,
instead of being a joyful experience of plenty, prevents him from
feeling his unity as a person. For him the bilingual “s’épuise dans
cette relation”.98 The energy which could be better used elsewhere is
wasted on a delusional sense of mastery of two languages.
Beckett is considered to be one of the rare writers who
practised both of his languages in an equal measure. But even he
needed to apply a certain hierarchy and usually wrote in one language
at the time. Rewriting instead of translating has in Beckett’s case led
his two audiences, Francophone and Anglophone, to sometimes
completely ignore one half of his work. This in itself is a result of the
author’s hierarchisation of his languages. The different versions of the
same book fit into completely different cultural environments in such
a way that the native language speakers of the respective languages do
not seek exotic explanations for what they perceive as unusual. In this
sense, Beckett was privileged to be able to isolate his literary activities
in his different languages. Each audience accepted the one half it was
given and was not inclined to interpret his work as a mixture of
different cultural environments.
Todorov’s experience
However stable an immigrant’s identity may be in the new

language, any really substantial contact with the mother tongue is
capable of triggering an identity crisis. It is difficult for an immigrant
to accept and reconcile in daily existence his plurality of firmly
97
The word partage means not only sharing, but also splitting or deviding.
98
Esteban, Le Partage des mots, p. 166. “exhausts himself in this relationship”
rooted, but apparently unrelated “personalities”. Choosing the

language of the new environment against the mother tongue is an
attempt to relate the personalities, to create connections which will
strengthen the overall mental framework as well as a logical choice of
social adaptation.
In his essay about his bilingual experience, Tzvetan Todorov
admits his most intimate ambiguous emotions about his two
languages.99 His linguistic experience adds scientific validity to his
analysis. Todorov’s story centres around his return to Bulgaria in
1981, eighteen years after leaving for France. During his life in Paris,
prior to this journey, he was often prey to nightmares of going back to
visit his native country and being unable to return to Paris. These
nightmares (an important feature of Kundera’s L’Ignorance) are fairly
common amongst immigrants, particularly those from Eastern Europe.
The Eastern European experience of a totalitarian political system
adds anxiety of political persecution to the already unsettling
experience of immigration. According to Todorov, the source of these
fears is the lack of clear hierarchy, the only organising principle which
can make bilingualism and biculturalism possible.
Todorov compares his visit to Bulgaria to a descent into deep
caves to observe the behaviour of organisms under exceptional
circumstances. It is as if when an immigrant goes back to his home
country after a long absence, he sees everything, including himself,
through a detailed X-ray or magnifying glass. The intensity of this
experience demands a gigantic, stoical mental effort and perseverance
from the immigrant. This not only signals that Todorov, like most
immigrants, had to practise suppression to enable his acculturation,
but also the immensity of the mental work which has gone on behind
the scenes to enable his adaptation to a new society.
During his eighteen years in Paris, Todorov had little contact
with his native culture. Partly no doubt to aid his adaptation, but also
due to loss of interest in what he left behind. During the transition
period, Todorov had slowly and without particular traumas adopted
his new language and culture. Upon his arrival in Bulgaria he was
faced with his existing knowledge of his country, which rivalled in
99
Tzvetan Todorov, “Bilinguisme, dialogisme et schizophrénie”, Jalil Bennani,
Ahmed Boukous, Abdallah Bounfour and Khatibi Abdelkebir, Du Bilinguisme (Paris:
Editions Dunoël, 1985) — the same topic is reworked in Tzvetan Todorov, L’Homme
dépaysé (Paris: Seuil, 1996).
LANGUAGE 59
status his acquired knowledge of France. The mental pressure and

unease he felt throughout his stay was due to the totalitarian linguistic
and cultural systems competing for domination. This was revealed to
him when he attempted to translate the speech he wrote in French into
Bulgarian. His speech on cultural politics demanded a change of angle
in a different language, almost to the point of contradiction. Todorov
even felt that in changing language, he was also addressing a different
inner reader. When using Bulgarian he could only address his
Bulgarian peers.
Todorov uses this experience as an illustration that
bilingualism is impossible. All the attempts he had made to represent
both of his worlds at the same time seemed to him profoundly
inauthentic. He perceives the two cultures he belongs to as complete
opposites which he cannot combine without causing unease and
confusion in his mind. He could not speak of his French experiences
to his Bulgarian friends. This was not only because they could not
identify with those experiences, but because it seemed to Todorov that
he would be falsely representing himself as a Frenchman. He could
equally not speak of his Bulgarian experiences to his Bulgarian
friends. They were irrelevant, because eighteen years old. Todorov’s
attempts to communicate were also additionally hindered by the envy
of his Western lifestyle felt by his Bulgarian friends and
acquaintances.
His Bulgarian friends thought they were complimenting him
when they were saying that he had not changed at all. Todorov
experienced this as additional pressure, reductive of his personality
and negating the eighteen years he spent in France. Everything
seemed to him to conspire to force him to return to his life as it was
before he left. His time spent in France seemed completely unreal.
There was no crossover between the two experiences of life which
reinforced Todorov’s feeling of totalitarian realities.
The ten days Todorov spent in Sofia seemed like years to him.
Every day he felt older from the incredible pressure he had to endure.
He gladly used physical activity as an escape from having to face his
anxiety. The physical work reassured him about the integrity of his
body which he felt was threatened by the apparent fragmentation of
his mind. He could imagine exactly what his life would have been
had he stayed in Bulgaria. This ease of plunging back into a reality he
left so long ago seemed disturbing. It threatened the very existence of
his French self. One of his two lives had to be a dream, as there was
no means available for accommodating both. Todorov compares his
situation to that of Henry James’ character, Spencer Brydon, from the
short story The jolly corner, who in turn is very similar to that of
Kristof’s twins (analysed in chapter “Doubling and incest”). A
character returning to his home country after thirty years encounters
his alter-ego, a ghost of what he would have become had he stayed.
Todorov also likens this experience of doubling to his distinction
between public and private discourse in totalitarian regimes.
Todorov’s unease continued after he came back to Paris and
subsequently the entire journey seemed to him like a dream.
Kundera’s novel L’Ignorance describes a very similar return
to the native country of his two main characters, Irena and Josef.
Alexakis also writes of similar experiences:
Chaque fois que mes parents venaient à Paris, je devenais très maladroit.
Leur présence suffisait à ressusciter mon double. Je ne savais plus comment
me comporter, quoi dire. J’étais capable de jouer un rôle, mais pas deux à la
fois.100
Every time that my parents came to Paris, I became very clumsy. Their
presence was enough to revive my double. I no longer knew how to behave,
what to say. I was capable of playing a role, but not two at the same time.
Analysing the sources of this acute anxiety, Todorov

establishes that before undertaking his trip home, his two languages,
French and Bulgarian, had clearly allocated roles:
Avant cette visite, ma connaissance du bulgare ne rendait nullement ma vie

en France malaisée: l’usage de ma langue maternelle y était réservé à trois
ou quatre situations bien précises. Quelques mots en fin de conversation
avec les rares Bulgares que je connaissais à Paris; la correspondance avec
mes parents; quelques lectures bien espacées; la table de multiplication et
deux ou trois jurons.101
Before that visit, my knowledge of Bulgarian did not bring any unease to
my life in France: the use of my mother tongue was reserved for three to
four very specific situations. A few words at the end of a conversation with
the few Bulgarians that I knew in Paris; the correspondence with my
100
101
LANGUAGE 61
parents; very infrequent reading; the multiplication table and two or three
swear words.
He concludes :
La coexistence de deux voix devient une menace, conduisant à la

schizophrénie sociale, lorsque celles-ci sont en concurrence; mais si elles
forment une hiérarchie dont le principe a été librement choisi, on peut
surmonter les angoisses du dédoublement et la coexistence devient le terrain
fertile d’une expérience nouvelle.102
The coexistence of two voices becomes threatening, leading to social

schizophrenia when the two are in competition; but if they form a hierarchy
whose principle has been freely chosen, one can overcome the anxieties of
doubling and the coexistence becomes a fertile field for a new experience.
He had learnt how to establish this hierarchy on the territory of the

French language. However, not having been back in Bulgaria for a
long time, he has not had the chance to do the same on Bulgarian
territory. Todorov confirms that an individual can change his language
and culture. In some cases this acculturation will be successful, in
others not. What defines a successful acculturation according to
Todorov is the ability to preserve one language, be it first or second,
as the main language:
L’individu ne vit pas une tragédie en perdant sa culture d’origine à

condition qu’il en acquière une autre; c’est d’avoir une langue qui est
constitutif de notre humanité, non d’avoir telle langue.103
The individual does not experience the loss of his original culture as a
tragedy provided that he acquires a new one; what constitutes our humanity
is having a language, not having a specific language.
Todorov admits that his experience might be different from those of

creative writers. Language is their work, not just a means of
communication. For them the forceful opposition of languages could
be fertile.
102
103
The perception of French
However well the writer may have adapted to his new

language and culture, he experiences it as something “apart”,
physically “distanced” from him. This can be felt to be both very
salutary (and deliberately sought) and very tragic. Compare for
instance the very similar statements by Cioran and Semprun who
glorify the precision of the French language and its suitability for
abstract thought:
Le français est une langue idéale pour qui veut prendre ses distances: une
langue abstraite, précise, avec une grammaire tellement rigide. (...) Il y a en
français une certaine discipline de la langue. (...) Oui, cette distance m’est
très nécessaire.104
French is an ideal language for a person who wants to keep his distance: an
abstract, precise language, with such a rigid grammar. (…) There is in
French a certain discipline of the language. (…) Yes, that distance is very
necessary to me.
Et la langue française me plaît justement parce que c’est une langue pour
juristes et logiciens. Et c’est le côté abstrait de cette langue qui m’a attiré, je
peux me servir de cela.105
And I like the French language precisely because it is a language for

lawyers and logicians. And it is the abstract side of this language which
attracted me; I can use that.
French language itself is perceived to have this inherent

quality which helps establish a distance. If inspiration is a
phenomenon of depersonalisation as Michel de M’Uzan claims,106
then the search for a detachment afforded by language should
facilitate the advent of inspiration. French could then be a perfect
language for creation.
Claude Esteban also considers this detachment from the world

not to be simply a quality attributed to any new language, but a
104
Jorge Semprun cited by Gérard de Cortanze, Cent ans de littérature espagnole
(Paris: Edition de la Différence, 1989), p. 574.
105
Cioran, Entretiens, pp. 184-185.
106
Michel de M’Uzan, De l’art à la mort, Itinéraire psychanalytique (Paris:
Gallimard, 1977), p. 6.
LANGUAGE 63
characteristic of the French language itself, which would make it a

welcome land for literary immigrants: 107
Il semble en effet que le français ait travaillé sans relâche, et tout au long de
sa démarche historique, à se constituer en système clos, cultivant une
autonomie et presque une autarcie des notions où le discours s’enchante de
lui-même. Les mots, certes, ne peuvent manquer d’y faire référence au
sensible, mais comme à regret, et pour ne conserver de lui qu’une
quintessence subtile, immatérielle, idéale.108
It seems that French has worked relentlessly, and throughout its historical
development, to constitute itself as a closed system, cultivating a certain
autonomy, almost an autarky of notions, with discourse in a state of self-
enchantment. Of course, the words cannot fail to refer to the sensible world,
but reluctantly, as it were, and to preserve only a subtle, immaterial, ideal
quintessence of it.
An old cliché perpetuated through popular culture has it that French is

the language of emotion, or love and courting. By contrast, what
literary immigrants appreciate is its rationality. It is this detachment of
French that Esteban likes. Like most writers, Esteban categorises
French as an abstract language. Beckett even states that it is easier to
write without style in French than in English. Green, on the other
hand, appreciates the ease of moving from seriousness to frivolity in
French in comparison to English:
En français, il est beaucoup plus facile de passer, comme on dit, du plaisant

au sévère; la langue elle-même a l’air de sourire, et sans cesser de sourire,
elle sait pourtant être grave; c’est ce qui fait son charme si difficile à
analyser. En anglais, on a d’une manière beaucoup plus vive et beaucoup
plus fréquente le sentiment de côtoyer la limite de l’indiscrétion, alors que
le français passe et repasse cette limite comme en se jouant, sans qu’il y
paraisse trop.109
In French, it is much easier to move, as they say, from the agreeable to the
severe; the language itself seems to smile, and without ceasing to smile, it
yet knows how to be serious; this is its charm, so difficult to analyse. In
English, one has much more frequently a much sharper sense of bordering
on indiscretion, whereas French crosses that border over and over again, as
if playfully, hardly letting it show.
107
Esteban, Le Partage des mots, p. 125.
108
Esteban, Le Partage des mots, pp. 152-153.
109
Green, “Mon premier livre en anglais”, p. 225.
Literary libertinism relies on this flexibility and versatility of French.

As will be discussed in the chapter “Libertinism and Utopia”, the
adoption of French comes with the heritage of libertine writing that
French as a language seems to have naturally evolved with.
Along the lines of this rationality, Semprun also appreciates
the non-sentimentality of French and its natural predilection for meta-
writing:
J’ai eu recours naturellement au français. Cela tient sans doute à une

nécessité d’échapper au pathétique. Le français est une langue plus
littéraire, mais aussi moins trompeuse. Elle permet d’être à la fois à
l’intérieur et à l’extérieur d’un récit.110
I naturally resorted to French. This is no doubt due to the need to escape

from pathos. French is a more literary but also less deceitful language. It
allows one to be both inside and outside a narrative at the same time.
This characteristic is crucial for all immigrant writers who establish

the literary trees of ancestry in their writing.
The nomadic impulse and the myths of home, nostalgia and the
mother tongue
All migrations are triggered by a nomadic impulse which is

never completely free of the seeds of sedentary desires to belong. The
choice of a new language is an act of idealism (or desperation) –
which could still be called nomadic – and which counterbalances the
general disillusionment of an immigrant. It could be the last “act of
faith” a foreigner is capable of, and so it is not surprising that the new
language itself is often experienced as the only true home. As Eric
Orsenna concludes: “Dans les incertitudes de l’appartenance (…), la
langue demeure. (…) Je m’aperçois que ce qui reste pour la deuxième
génération ou la troisième génération (…), c’est l’appartenance à la
langue française, comme si la langue française était leur terroir, était
110
Quoting Semprun from an interview with Jacobo Machover, Brincourt, Langue
française terre d’accueil, p. 245.
LANGUAGE 65
leur pays.”111 Kristeva points out these connections between sedentary

desires and the nomadic actions:
Tous les étrangers qui ont fait un choix ajoutent à leur passion pour
l’indifférence un jusqu’auboutisme fervent qui révèle l’origine de leur exil.
Car c’est de n’avoir personne chez eux pour assouvir cette rage, cette
combustion d’amour et de haine, et de trouver la force de ne pas y
succomber, qu’ils errent de par le monde.112
All the foreigners who have made a choice add to their passion for
indifference a fervent perseverance which reveals the origin of their exile.
For it is because they have no one at home who can appease that rage, that
combustion of love and hate, and in order to find the strength not to
succumb to it, that they wander around the world.
It is true that a passion for the new language often compensates for the
lack of meaning felt initially in a new environment. After a time, the
ambiguous nature of the myth of the mother tongue (as described by
Julien Green quoted on page 49) is directly felt. If we give too much
importance to our random allegiance to our mother tongue, we will be
surprised and ashamed at the ease with which we will understand and
appropriate somebody else’s tongue and culture. And the greater the
ease with which another language is mastered, the greater our
capability to doubt the foundations of our personality. The minute we
assume that skins can be shed without the slightest inconvenience, our
memory will set us a trap. One of the defences against this ambiguity
is to pretend to re-enact the myth of nostalgia or the myth of the
mother tongue and this is what a substantial number of immigrant
writers choose to do. As Régine Robin concludes, a writer’s identity,
and the immigrant writer’s identity in particular, depends on this
constant clash and negotiation with the myth of the mother tongue:
L’écrivain est celui qui sans le savoir la plupart du temps fait par son travail
d’écriture le deuil de l’origine, c’est-à-dire le deuil de la langue maternelle
ou plus exactement de la croyance qu’il y a de la langue maternelle.113
111
Mireille Sacotte (ed.), Romain Gary, écrivain – diplomate: colloque du 2 février
2002 (Paris: Ministère des Affaires étrangères, 2003), p. 19. “Within the uncertainties
of belonging (…), the language remains. (…) I notice that what remains for the
second or third generation (…), is the belonging to the French language, as if the
French language was their soil, their country.”
112
Julia Kristeva, Étrangers à nous-mêmes (Paris: Gallimard, Folio, 1988), p. 20.
113
Robin, Le Deuil de l’origine, p. 13, my italics.
The writer is he who, usually unawares, accomplishes through the work of

his writing the mourning for the origins, which is the mourning for the
mother tongue or more precisely for the belief that such a thing as mother
tongue exists.
It can be argued that the conscious choice of preference for a

new language is not necessarily a desire to settle or to acquire a set
personality or to be that one ephemeral, intermediary, bilingual
generation using all its energy to bridge the gap between two
monolingual generations. It could just be an individual nomad’s desire
to travel, to move through a never-ending family romance whilst
preserving a façade of settledness. Kundera’s Lenteur suggests that
this might be the best way to travel through time and place using only
one’s imagination. Nomads are fascinated with sedentary life, but they
would never trade their own freedom for sedentary security or
“continuity”, as Romain Gary used to call it.114 When they are allowed
to, nomads give new blood to the stagnant sedentary cultures and it is
by now accepted that the linguistic immigrants into French have
dynamised French literature in the last fifty years.
According to many literary immigrants like Cioran, being an
apatride is the ideal condition for any writer. National allegiance
should not be the burden that a writer carries. He should be free of it
to be able to create and point out in his creations his independent and
apt observations of the world. Kundera gives this nomadic attitude of
achieving a distance from the original community to one of his more
rational female characters, Sabine in L’Insoutenable Légèreté d’être.
Nabokov on the other hand in his first novel in English, The Real Life
of Sebastian Knight, chooses the chess metaphor of the knight to
allude to the “free floating position between cultures”115 or to the
apparently haphazard and wandering movement of his cosmopolitan
character through life. Those who have abandoned a language know
that with this act they willingly refuse to sustain the illusion of a
single, irreplaceable true home. Instead, they re-enact the myth of
“home”.
114
Blanch, Romain, un regard particulier, pp. 25 and 33.
115
John Burt Foster Jr, Nabokov’s Art of Memory and European Modernism
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), p. 164 — the use of the word
“floating” again refers to the linguistic nature of this journey.
LANGUAGE 67
The spirituality of our being is expressed in our perception of

space as unhomogeneous.116 From this perspective, home represents a
break with homogeneous space as an opening which allows direct
contact with the spiritual “above”. Hence the description of the home
as being in the centre of the world. However archaic this cultural
instinct is, it still inhabits the recesses of our minds and influences our
choice of home. It is essentially a religious instinct, just as nostalgia
for the place of origin is a religious feeling. The place we choose is
special, because there we feel in a position to communicate with the
world outside, or in other words, to be at peace with ourselves. “La
multiplicité, voire l’infinité, des Centres du Monde ne fait aucune
difficulté pour la pensée religieuse”.117 This type of thinking offers a
possible method for overcoming the contemporary tendency of
believing that there is only one home and language for each
individual.
The country or language the immigrant writer chooses as his
home is selected with this spiritual consideration in mind. However
disabused he might be, the immigrant writer tends to hide his spiritual
reasons behind apparently innocent rationalisations. Immigrant writers
are disabused because they do not believe in a true “home”. However,
they have no choice but to learn to glorify this search for “home” on
the level of the family romance, a fact eloquently described by Jan
Vladislav:
Man does not make decisions which most concern him. By the time he
begins to be conscious of those facts, it is too late for him to change the date
of his birth or the place already designated by him and others as his country,
his home. Most people identify this home with their birthplace, but home
can be also found thousands of kilometres from one’s native soil. Some
people traverse continents, only to discover, to their astonishment, that they
are at home simultaneously in many parts of the globe, since our country,
our home, refuge and anchorage, the centre of gravity, which prevents us
from falling back into nothingness, is fixed above all in time. (...) With
some effort, or nostalgia, we can evoke our country’s true geography.
Slowly, but correctly, we can redraw its faded contours. But it is impossible
to return there in reality. Not only has everything changed, but we ourselves
are also different, and above all, time has changed — ours, as well as
everyone else’s. (...) Our home is the place from which we originate, and
116
Mircea Eliade, Le Sacré et le profane (Paris: Gallimard, Folio, 1995).
117
Eliade, Le Sacré et le profane, p. 55. “The multiplicity, indeed the infinity, of the
Centres of the Universe does not create any difficulty for religious thought.”
toward which we turn to look from an ever-increasing distance. (...) We

never stop carrying within us this meeting place with ourselves, with all our
successive and abandoned selves, this place of recognition, of acceptance or
rejection of ourselves and the rest of the world. Perhaps that is the hell
which each of us is said to carry in his heart. But if our hell is there, so too
is our paradise. (...) To accept the home, a place which has merged with
time, is to accept that one is forever leaving it.’118
Facing up to the myth demands great courage and very few

are capable of it without having recourse to the same myth. By
shifting the problem from place to time, Vladislav avoids having to
repudiate the need for nostalgia. In contrast to this attitude, Kundera
gives us his very rational and disabused analysis of nostalgia, as he
sees it in our time, in his novel L’Ignorance. He finds close
etymological links between the terms nostalgia and ignorance and
defines nostalgia as a suffering caused by ignorance. Initially
ignorance refers to not knowing what is going on in one’s native land.
Kundera further expands this into a relationship where nostalgia feeds
off ignorance in the widest possible sense of the word. He then goes
on to undermine the whole notion of nostalgia and its associated moral
hierarchy of feelings. His two main characters suffer because they feel
they need to submit to the expectations of others and live out their
feigned nostalgia. Ignorance thus becomes a pejorative term
signifying the ignorance of those who unquestioningly accept
nostalgia as a moral value, as well as the open-minded ignorance of
those who are forced into compliance with this view.
Some writers continue to write in their mother tongue in a
foreign country. They create a tiny homeland for themselves in this
language, an isolated and protective core where they live. Indeed they
do not truly live in a new country, they have transported their home
with them. Sometimes the new surroundings can enhance their mother
tongue. The Spanish writer Juan Goytisolo who first lived in France
and then in Morocco whilst always writing in Spanish is a good
example of this. This experience is very different from that of a person
writing in a new language. The new language provides the writer with
a new creative space which has to be private and protected, as a home
would be, in order to be creatively useful.
118
Jan Vladislav, “Exile, Responsibility, Destiny”, Literature in Exile, John Glad (ed.)
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1990), pp. 14-15.
LANGUAGE 69
One should not underestimate the powerful creative stimulus a

new environment and language can supply. It is worth considering
that without it, some writers might not have developed as successfully.
Winnicott calls one of his chapters discussing his concept of
transitional space, the “sacred” space between the fixed inner and
outer reality — “The Place Where We Live”.119 This space which
Winnicott considers to be the cultural domain, forms during the
individuation process. This is the only space available to the
individual which is not subjected to heredity, therefore it is akin to the
family romance. The important characteristic of transitional objects is
that they are not forgotten or mourned, but simply lose their meaning
by being diffused throughout the transitional space. If the language
could be considered to be a transitional object, its substitution would
not be considered to be traumatic. Although a loss of a language
would be mourned within the inner or outer reality, it would not be
mourned in the transitional space.
Régine Robin, an author and literary critic of Polish Jewish
origin, brought up in Paris and living in Montréal, Québec, betrays in
her fiction an obsession with the interior and exterior appearance of
possible homes for her characters. As soon as she locates and grasps a
certain personality of one of these possible homes, she abandons it in
her writing and looks for a new one.120 In one of her critical works she
states:
Impossible pour l’écrivain de se situer tout à fait dans sa ou ses langues, de

faire corps avec sa langue natale ou maternelle, d’habiter complètement son
nom propre ou sa propre identité, impossible de coïncider avec soi-même ou
avec un quelconque fantasme d’unité du sujet, impossible peut-être même
d’occuper une place de sujet autrement que dans l’écriture.121
It is impossible for a writer to position himself fully within his one or more
languages, to form one body with his native or mother tongue, to fully
inhabit his own name or his identity; it is impossible to coincide with
oneself or with any fantasy of unity of the subject, impossible perhaps even
to occupy the position of the subject in any way other than through writing.
And even then it is only a short-lived illusion to be re-enacted over

and over again. When the points of reference change, the centre is no
119
Winnicott, Playing and Reality.
120
Régine Robin, La Québécoite (Montréal, XYZ, 1993).
121
Régine Robin, Le Deuil de l’origine, p. 9, my italics.
longer what it used to be. The multilingual experience allows the

individual to “regress” to the archaic societies’ acceptance of
multiplicity of centres as analysed by Mircea Eliade. Also, as Ian
Chambers and many other social analysts confirm, contemporary
understanding of an individual’s identity is slowly departing from the
need to equate origins with authenticity:
Our sense of belonging, our language and the myths we carry in us remain,
but no longer as “origins” or signs of “authenticity” capable of guaranteeing
the sense of our lives. They now linger on as traces, voices, memories and
murmurs that are mixed in with other histories, episodes, encounters.122
Our condition at the beginning of the twenty-first century allows us to

recognise that our origins weigh as much as any other experience, a
feeling that Kundera strongly expresses in L’Ignorance. Semprun’s
method of referring to the large pool of European memory follows this
post-modern appreciation of identity. The strength of an experience is
measured by its authenticity for the individual rather than by its
adherence to the founding values of origin and filiation.
Typology of migrants and foreigners
The expression “immigrant” has been used throughout this

study as the most suitable term accounting for: 1) the coming into a
foreign country to live (to settle more or less permanently) when
accompanied by linguistic relocation – moving into a foreign
language, and subsequently the active nature of the status of the
immigrant; 2) the direction of the movement towards the new culture
and language; 3) the process of migration which involves a change
and which remains as a permanent sign of the change experienced and
an announcement of possible changes to come. Various other terms
are in use to describe the migrant experience or experience of a
foreigner in relation to the countries of origin and settlement, the most
common being “exile”, “emigrant”, “expatriate” and “refugee”.
The term “exile” is inadequate for describing a literary
immigration or pilgrimage to another language, since it focuses on the
political aspect of an individual’s situation. Those who are explicitly
122
Ian Chambers, Migrancy, Culture, Identity (London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 18-19.
LANGUAGE 71
banished from their country – which is the narrow meaning of the

word “exile” – represent a minority of migrants. Even those will
generally try to modify and overgrow their status of exiles as soon as
they can. Most of those who leave their native land do so out of their
own choice, although sometimes in serious danger for their lives or
freedom. By leaving they chose their freedom or other reality
incompatible with their native land over their national allegiance.123
“Exile” is one of the denominations of our time which most of
the writers who adopt a new language try to escape from. This is
particularly the case of Eastern European writers who had to accept
this label for the convenience of the West. The term “exile” assumes
that its subject is petrified by his or her condition. Milosz confirms
this when he says that an exile ceases to be an exile when he adopts
the language of his adopted country.124 He implies that this is a
negative development. There is an unspoken hierarchy of the migrant
terminology which Milosz refers to. “Exile” still has for some an old-
fashioned heroic ring which suggests that we are talking of “the one
who has not compromised” (as opposed to undignified “refugee”
which has the same contemporary meaning as “exile” but assumes a
status of the victim). This is distinct from the assumptions of
cowardice associated with the “emigrant” who is deemed rather “the
one who escaped when the going got tough” and the even more
cowardly “immigrant” who is equated with “the one who is being
assimilated”. It is interesting to observe the hierarchy of these
nationalistic implications of a common terminology which starts with
the most active and heroic of associations and ends with the passivity
allocated to the immigrant. Kundera groups all of these connotations
under the name of l’émigré (expatriate, but also exile and immigrant)
summarising the opposing moral values associated with the term as
“le Grand Traître ou le Grand Souffrant, comme on veut”.125 An all-
to-easily attributed and highly subjective value of loyalty to the
origins is the measure of value here. This nationalistic hierarchy can
be challenged on various grounds. Even if an exile was in fact
123
This can be associated with Kristeva’s description of the foreigner in Étrangers à
nous-mêmes as the one who desperately wants to believe that he left his country of his
own free choice and that he was not in any way “forced” to do so.
124
Literature in Exile, John Glad (ed.), p. 137.
125
Kundera, L’Ignorance, p. 33. “the Great Traitor or the Great Martyr, whichever
you prefer”
banished, his adoption of a new language would be a sign of courage

and maturity to take the next step in life. There is nothing heroic about
not being able to let go of the past. The term “immigrant” is usually
associated with the poorest of migrants who want nothing but to work
and to rebuild their lives, and there is nothing passive or cowardly
about their attitude.
All the different varieties of migrants can be grouped under
the social type of the stranger as defined by Simmel in his
contemporary-sounding essay from 1908:
The stranger will thus not be considered here in the usual sense of the term,
as a wanderer who comes today and goes tomorrow, but rather as a man
who comes today and stays tomorrow – the potential wanderer, so to speak,
who, although he has gone no further, has not quite got over the freedom of
coming and going. (…) The state of being a stranger is of course a
completely positive relation; it is a specific form of interaction.126
The nomadic impulse discussed earlier or the “migrant” part of the

terms immigrant and emigrant is underestimated, while in fact it
represents a socially positive value which no migrant should be made
to feel ashamed of.
The two categories of immigrant writers established by André
Karátson and Jean Bessière, internationalists and emigrants, seem
these days to merge into writers with a similar aesthetic.127 Their
political views might diverge, but their literary paths are parallel.
Their definition overlaps the psychoanalytical distinction between two
types of responses to immigration summarised by Grinberg and
Grinberg:
The myths of Eden, Babel and Oedipus illustrate and make more intelligible
the conflict between those parts of the personality which seek knowledge
and those which actively oppose this search. The conflict itself points up
man’s desire to “migrate”, to go beyond fixed borders in search of
knowledge, wherever it may lie, while at the same time this man has a
tendency to put obstacles in his own path (prohibition). By so doing, he
transforms the “search migration” into an “exile-expulsion-punishment”
which gives rise to pain, confusion and isolation.128
126
Georg Simmel, On Individuality and Social Forms, Selected Writings (Chicago:
The University of Chicago Press, 1971), p. 143.
127
André Karátson and Jean Bessière, Déracinement et littérature (Lille: Université
de Lille, 1982), pp. 7-8.
128
LANGUAGE 73
Exile is an essentially negative (and perhaps sedentary) understanding

of migration. The word “exile” also contains the reminder of the
original banishment from paradise, from the primary protected union
with the mother figure. Kristeva’s “sémiotique” can here be
hyperbolised into the mythical pre-Babel all-embracing language. As
the authors of The Babel of the Unconscious state:
The configurations that the human mind has designed in order to express
nostalgia for the Primordial one, for a universal language with its
transparent and immediate adherence to the object, are almost infinite.129
Indeed, it is almost impossible to step out of the nostalgic structures

fabricated by the human mind.
Julia Kristeva divides strangers into two categories in
Étrangers à nous-mêmes. Kristeva calls “ironistes” (ironists) “ceux
qui se consument dans l’écartèlement entre ce qui n’est plus et ce qui
ne sera jamais” and “croyants” (believers) “ceux qui transcendent: ni
avant ni maintenant, mais au-delà, ils sont tendus dans une passion
certes à jamais inassouvie, mais tenace, vers une autre terre toujours
promise, celle d’un métier, d’un amour, d’un enfant, d’une gloire. Ce
sont des croyants, qui mûrissent parfois en sceptiques.”130
According to Kristeva, to the first category belong those who
might seem disabused about life’s illusions, whilst the second is in its
essence closer to the thought pattern of homo religiosus.131 However,
it could also be said that the nostalgic essence of Kristeva’s so-called
ironists entrenches them more deeply in illusion. Her believers, on the
other hand, are in fact idealists, but their idealism does not have to be
unrealistic. If we translate Kristeva’s categories into social categories
depending on the relationship with the native and adopted lands, her
terminology seems somewhat misleading. Her ironists are essentially
129
Amati Mehler, Argentieri and Canestri, The Babel of the Unconscious, p. 199.
130
Kristeva, Étrangers à nous-mêmes, p. 21. “those who get consumed by the
agonising indecision between that which no longer exists and that which will never
be” and “those who transcend: neither before nor now, but beyond; they are stretched
in a passion which certainly can never be satisfied, but is tenacious, towards another
land which is still promised, that of a profession, a love, a child or a glory. These are
the believers who sometimes mature into sceptics.” In Critique of Pure Reason Kant
briefly points out that the sceptics are a species of nomads who break up from time to
time all civil society. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, translated by Norman
Kemp Smith (London: Macmillan, 1929), p. 8.
131
This is in reference to Eliade’s concept of homo religiosus.
emigrants, and believers — immigrants. This possible equation

requires a shift in the emotional accent in her typology. If ironists are
emigrants, they are essentially believers, those who statically observe
the past which they worship unquestioningly. Kristeva’s believers,
that is immigrants, are on the other hand nothing other than idealistic
nomads. This idealism does not exclude a certain dose of scepticism
or cynicism. But Kristeva is right when she says that her believers,
unlike her ironists, “mûrissent”. The immigrant attitude is much more
open to development and maturing than that of the exile or emigrant
who really needs to discard at least some of his nostalgia to be able to
move forward.
As opposed to those who value origins over experience are
many others who above all appreciate the free nomadic enterprising
spirit. Adam Zagajewski divides people into the settled, the emigrants
and the homeless. According to him, the homeless are the chosen few
who are given the precious nomadic inclination.132
Moris Farhi, who lives in England and mostly writes in
English against his mother tongue, Turkish, talks about the term
“insabbiati” (fish caught in the sand) which he has heard from an
Italian expatriate living in Ethiopia and which designates the whole
fraternity of strangers: exiles, refugees, immigrants, displaced people,
outsiders, outcasts, which he describes as follows:
A creature neither dead nor quite alive; a creature that could not adapt to its
native matrix – or never got the chance to do so – yet one that managed to
survive, sometimes even thrive, in unknown and outlandish environments.
Indubitably, an ancient species with genes that must still be the envy of
chameleons.133
Farhi would rather describe himself as an outsider than an

immigrant. Alexakis, on the other hand, prefers to be called “étranger”
(foreigner) rather than immigrant, as it seems more elegant and rare to
him.134 For André Brincourt “étranger” is not a suitable denomination.
It does not express the fact that the linguistic immigrant has found a
new home and identity in the new language. He therefore suggests a
132
Adam Zagajewski, Two Cities; on Exile, History and the Imagination, translated
from the Polish by Lilian Vallée (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1995).
133
Moris Farhi, “Writing in Tongues”, Modern Poetry in Translation, No 17 (2001),
Mother Tongues, pp. 128-130 (p. 128).
134
LANGUAGE 75
more ethereal and poetic “venus d’ailleurs”135 which incorporates the

double cultural allegiance as well as the fact that these writers are not
“déracinés” (uprooted), but “transplantés” (transplanted). His find
however lacks the crucial “migrant” part of the experience. Therefore
it is less precise than the politically overloaded “immigrant” used in
this book. There is no lack of creativity in the attempts at naming the
experience of linguistic immigration. It seems to be impossible to
incorporate all the important aspects of this unique experience in a
compact expression.
André Brincourt is conscious that he is doing the immigrants a
favour in completely accepting them. Being a Frenchman he is also
culturally in a favourable position to do so. However, an immigrant
would not be true to his identity if he did not fully take on his
ambiguous status. Brincourt does not forget about the “double
appartenance” (double belonging), but decides not to reflect it within
his designation, showing kindness typical of a certain French
acceptance of “métèques” (a pejorative term for dark-skinned
foreigners). French culture has for the immigrant the very important
role of the “dispenser of acceptance”.136 As will be shown in the
chapter “Europa”, French hospitality is based on the French
perception of their culture as the core of European civilisation.
Tolerance, for the French, is based on feelings of cultural superiority
and on the knowledge that immigrants will be culturally absorbed into
this French-speaking culture which they will subsequently enrich.
They know that other allegiances of immigrants, be they political,
cultural or emotional, will be to a large extent governed by this
adopted French-speaking attitude. The immigrants into French are free
to pursue their other allegiances, but those will never have the same
cultural importance in the society in which they have chosen to live as
their adopted French-speaking heritage.
The family romance
The writing of authors who have adopted a new language

contains, in one form or another, some elements of the family romance
135
Brincourt, Langue française terre d’accueil, p. 15. “those who arrived from
elsewhere”
136
Kolm, The Change of Cultural Identity, p. 99.
as described by Freud and elaborated by Marthe Robert to designate a

literary structure. Specific examples of this will be further mentioned
in the section “Friendship” of the chapter “Libertinism and Utopia”
and throughout the chapter “Doubling and incest”.
The romance narrative of early novels is supposed to show
that the invented, “better” parents, who are often foreign, are in fact
the “real” or the “natural” family of the subject who is a “foundling”.
The whole undertaking displays the desire to return to that time in
early childhood when parents seemed as perfect as gods. In most
contemporary fiction, the invented parents have disappeared together
with all other illusions of belonging and of stable clear-cut identity.
The real parents are not denied, but the detachment from them is much
greater, than in, for example Robinson Crusoe where a pre-Oedipal
idyll is recreated.
Despite the pre-Oedipal nature of the “foundling” figure, the
invention or adoption of a new language is better suited to the fantasy
of a “foundling” who invents a new world from scratch than to that of
the “bastard” of nineteenth-century novels, who partly conforms with
patriarchal society. That fact, and the fact that the figure of the
“foundling” is generally prevalent in today’s literature, suggest that
we should recognise the possibility that Robert’s definitions have
evolved.
Although the incest metaphor should in theory belong to the
“bastard” type of family romance, in all the works of literary
immigrants analysed in this study where an incest metaphor is present,
it seems to blend with a version of the “foundling” type of narrative.
In those works, incest itself is almost portrayed as natural. Although a
faint feeling of imminent danger is always associated with the
incestuous individual, there are never any external constraints which
could be interpreted as an existing awareness that incest is forbidden.
This suggests that even the incest metaphor, when considered as an
element of expression for the literary immigrant, belongs to the pre-
Oedipal, “foundling” type of family romance. Thus it is possible to
distinguish a separate “immigrant” type of family romance which
incorporates some of the main elements of the “foundling” type and
structurally represents a freer fantasy based on certain nomadic values.
This can be also confirmed by clinical research which points to
LANGUAGE 77
similarities between the fantasies of adopted children and migrants.137

The external opportunity for language substitution further exacerbates
the regression of the migrant and his need for a family romance
structure.
In Semprun’s fiction, literary heritage takes on the very clear
role of the shaping influence one would expect parental figures to
exert. His passion for literary and historical reference in general
reveals a need for rootedness in history. Gary, on the other hand,
revels in his “bastard” status in his autobiographical fiction and draws
his originality from it.
Most immigrant writers share a desire to shed the reference to
their past lives, a desire which has guilt as its counterpoint, and
therefore a partial reinvention of references as its consequence. Michel
del Castillo’s literary persona is a strong testament to this. His mother
is Spanish and his father French. His choice of pseudonym reverses
the truth, recreating a somewhat dystopian family romance fantasy.
His choice makes several important statements. First, it confirms his
adoption of French as a mother tongue substitute, and thence his
acceptance of his orphan status. Second, it stresses the connection
with his original language, thus firmly situating him within what he
calls the Spanish hatred which he finds repulsive and would like to
disassociate himself from.
In his autobiographical novel Le Crime des pères, Del Castillo
gives an in-depth account of the nature and intensity of the Spanish
hatred and self-hatred:
Je déteste l’Espagne et j’ai pourtant choisi de porter un nom qui me désigne,

de façon provocante, comme Espagnol. Le hasard n’est pour rien dans ce
choix. (…) J’étais pourtant conscient du malentendu qui en résulterait.
Trompé par la sonorité de ce nom, les lecteurs français me considéraient
comme un écrivain espagnol, alors que les Espagnols s’obstineraient à me
tenir pour un déserteur, un afrancesado. (…) J’étais le premier à juger mon
obstination incompréhensible et même idiote. (…) A ce choix insensé,
j’inventerai toute sorte de raisons. J’expliquerai que, à travers son nom,
c’est la figure de mon père que j’avais rejetée. Je n’avais pas beaucoup de
motifs de l’estimer, c’est vrai. L’argument ne vaut toutefois rien, puisque je
n’avais pas davantage de raisons de souhaiter me rattacher à ma mère, fût-ce
de manière symbolique. La sagesse eût donc été de suivre l’avis de mon
mentor littéraire et d’oublier mes deux parents pour adopter un pseudonyme
137
Grinberg and Grinberg, Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Migration and Exile, p.
201.
qui, de manière explicite, marquât mon appartenance à la France. Ce geste

d’émancipation, j’ai refusé de l’accomplir.
Avec l’âge, je voudrais me persuader que cet enlisement dans une identité
hasardeuse exprime une fidélité à l’exil dont je serais issu. A cette fable, il
m’arrive encore de m’accrocher, les jours de paresse.138
I detest Spain, but have nevertheless chosen to carry a name which marks
me, in a provocative fashion, as a Spaniard. The choice is not at all
haphazard. (…) Yet I was aware of the misunderstanding which would
ensue. Misled by the sound of this name, French readers would consider me
a Spanish writer, while the Spanish would persist in considering me a
deserter, an afrancesado [Gallicised person]. (…) I was the first to consider
my stubbornness incomprehensible and even stupid. (…) I will invent a
whole host of reasons for this demented choice. I will explain that, through
my name, I have in fact rejected the figure of my father. I have not had
many reasons to respect him, that is true. That argument is worthless since I
had no more cause to wish to restore my links with my mother, even in a
symbolic sense. So the sensible thing would have been to follow the advice
of my literary mentor and to forget my parents, to adopt a pseudonym apt to
indicate explicitly my belonging to France. I refused to perform this gesture
of emancipation.
With age, I would like to convince myself that my being thus bogged down
in a risky identity expresses a loyalty to the exile I have come from. On lazy
days I still sometimes hang on to that fairy tale.
Del Castillo is fully aware of the manipulative attempts of his

own rationalisation, submitting to them or refusing them, depending
on circumstances. His melancholic lack of illusions is what he has in
common with other literary immigrants. Nevertheless, Del Castillo
writes copiously about this Spain which he hates. It is through family
romance structures that he is able to mould his subject matter.
The paradox of a linguistic literary immigrant is his desire to
free himself from all contexts and at the same time invent new
contexts which he will be free to disown at any time. He wants to be
able to call it all off as it were, suddenly admitting that it was all his
creation. At the same time he wants his readers and addressees to
recognise his inventions as valid. In Gary’s fiction it is represented
with a combined ironic reversal and appropriation of the traditional
family romance structures:
138
Michel del Castillo, Le Crime des pères, pp. 11-12.
LANGUAGE 79
J’ai tout essayé pour me fuir. J’ai même commencé à apprendre le swahili,
parce que ça devait quand même être très loin de moi. J’ai étudié, je me suis
donné beaucoup de mal, mais pour rien, car même en swahili je me
comprenais, et c’était l’appartenance.
J’ai alors tâté du hongro-finnois, j’étais sûr de ne pas tomber sur un Hongro-
Finnois à Cahors et de me retrouver ainsi nez-à-nez avec moi-même. Mais
je ne me sentais pas en sécurité: l’idée qu’il y avait peut-être des engendrés
qui parlaient le hongro-finnois, même dans le Lot, me donnait des
inquiétudes. Comme on serait seuls à parler cette langue, on risquait, sous le
coup de l’émotion, de tomber dans les bras l’un de l’autre et de se parler à
coeur ouvert. On échangerait des flagrants délits et après, ce serait l’attaque
du fourgon postal. Je dis “l’attaque du fourgon postal”, parce que ça n’a
aucun rapport avec le contexte et il y a là une chance à ne pas manquer. Je
ne veux aucun rapport avec le contexte.
Et cependant je continue à chercher quelqu’un qui ne me comprendrait pas

et que je ne comprendrais pas, car j’ai un besoin effrayant de fraternité.139
I tried everything to escape from myself. I even started learning Swahili,

because it was surely very far away from me. I studied, I put myself through
a lot of trouble, but for nothing, because even in Swahili I could understand
myself, and that is belonging.
I then dipped into Finno-Ugric; I was sure I would not run into a Finno-
Ugric in Cahors and thus find myself face to face with myself. But I did not
feel safe: the thought that there were perhaps even some people born in the
Lot who spoke Finno-Ugric was worrying. As we would be the only ones
speaking that language, we risked falling into each other’s arms under the
impact of emotion and talking heart-to-heart. We would exchange blatant
lies and after it would be the attack of the mail van. I say “attack of the mail
van”, because it bears no relationship with the context and that is a chance
not to be missed. I do not want any relationship with the context.
And yet I continue to look for someone who will not understand me and
whom I will not understand, because I have a frightening need for fraternity.
This tremendously dense and apparently absurd outburst typical of

Romain Gary deals with several important linguistic and creative
issues at once. The persecutory feelings and the anxiety of integration
expressed in the text could be associated with the intrusive presence of
the inner reader, or with the problems occurring within the transitional
space due to the dominant mother figure. “L’attaque du fourgon
postal” is not at all out of context. It is another persecutory symbol for
139
Ajar, Pseudo, pp. 11-12.
communication and identification. The language here takes the place

of a desired family, accentuated by the fact that “hongro-finnois”
(Finno-Ugric) is not a single language, but a family of languages. This
choice is interesting as the Finno-Ugric languages are the only group
in Europe which does not belong to the Indo-European family,
therefore symbolising here the most extreme linguistic foreignness
within the European identity. The conflict between identity and
difference is unresolved, as if the narrator is undergoing a process of
individuation (or resisting it) as he speaks. The paradox of wanting to
be a part of a community and at the same time finding this possible
belonging utterly physically repulsive is a recurrent theme in Romain
Gary’s writing. It can also be found, expressed differently, in the
works of other immigrant writers. For instance, Jorge Semprun’s need
to belong, even if it means losing his individuality, is much stronger
than his repulsion. In Pseudo, Gary’s narrator dreams of situating
himself at the right distance from the world for his identity to exist
freely, which is made impossible by the fact that the right distance
constantly changes.
The migrant writer wishes first and foremost to obliterate his
origins or to diminish their importance to such an extent that talking
about them becomes irrelevant. It is only later that this desire is
moderated into a possible creative reinvention of references. For an
immigrant, a human being is and must be more than his origins. The
possibility of a stable immigrant identity depends on this:
A l’ “origine”, précisément, l’étranger — tel un philosophe en action —

n’accorde point le poids que le sens commun attribue. Cette origine —
famille, sang, sol — il l’a fuie et, même si elle ne cesse de le tirailler, de
l’enrichir, de l’entraver, de l’exalter ou de l’endolorir, et souvent le tout à la
fois, l’étranger en est le traître, courageux et mélancolique.140
The foreigner – like a philosopher in action – does not give as much weight
to the “origins” as common sense does. He fled those origins – family,
blood, soil – and, even if they have never stopped pestering, enriching,
hindering, exciting or paining him, and often all at the same time, the
foreigner is their traitor, brave and melancholic.
Perhaps it is because his origins and his aim obviously and

deliberately are not in continuity that his origins are not as important
140
Kristeva, Étrangers à nous-mêmes, p. 46.
LANGUAGE 81
to him as to everyone else. Most people see their aim in life in relation
to where they have come from. Immigrants cannot afford to do this,
for the road to where they need to get to would be endless. Distance,
for a foreigner, is not measured with the same yardstick. The distances
he covers would induce vertigo in those who bring everything into
relation to their origins. For instance, Alexakis says at one point that
he cannot remember what he looks like in a mirror.141 The changes he
is going through are so rapid that every self-examination dates and is
quickly forgotten.
The immigrant has to find affirmation in the re-creation of
facts. Creating a memory in a new language is an act pertaining to the
family romance as well as to mourning. The memory of the “old”
language is allowed to interfere only when the linguistic immigrant
allows it, when it suits his narrative.
The immigrant writer can decide that his imaginary home is in
fact the new language, or else the cosmopolitan fraternity of writers or
the very history of literature. While he has no say as far as his real
origins are concerned, he can always choose his literary filiation.
Salman Rushdie elects a deliberately polyglot ancestry: Gogol,
Cervantès, Kafka, Melville, Machado de Assis. Kundera and Semprun
do the same. Kafka, the ultimate homeless figure for many, seems to
be part of most family trees. His detached relationship with German,
the only one that he could consider his native language, makes him the
first modern predecessor of a linguistic immigrant.142 Like immigrant
writers he considered himself to be a guest in the language he was
using for his literary expression. In Les Testaments trahis (Testaments
Betrayed), Kundera defends Kafka’s detached style from translators
who have a tendency towards linguistically elaborating and
“normalising” the source text. The right distance so important to the
141
Alexakis, Paris-Athènes, pp. 111-112.
142
Commenting on the relationship between the Jewish minorities in Europe and the
German language, Claude Hagège says: “Pour une minorité de lettrés, l’allemand lui-
même fut, durant de nombreux siècles, l’objet choisi d’une sorte de culte. Plus encore,
il devint la voix européenne de l’universel, jusqu’à ce qu’on la contraignît à s’éteindre
dans un génocide étrangement suicidaire.” “For a well-read minority, the German
language itself has been for many centuries the chosen object of a sort of cult.
Furthermore, it became the European voice of the universal, until that voice was
forcibly extinguished in a curiously suicidal genocide.” Claude Hagège, Le Souffle de
la langue (Paris: Éditions Odile Jacob, 2000), p. 69.
linguistic immigrant cannot be removed from his writing without

resulting in a misrepresentation of his literary aesthetic.
Unlike Kundera, Semprun and to a certain extent Gary,
Kristof does not belong to the type of immigrant writer who chooses
to belong to a literary community. Seeing that she is based in the
French-speaking part of Switzerland, perhaps one of the reasons for
this is her distance from the Paris literary world. In her interview with
the magazine Le Matricule des Anges Kristof gives an impression of
indifference with regard to reading, as if it is only through writing that
she can create a sense of a reprieve.143 On the other hand, family
romance fantasies abound in her work, and will be analysed in the
chapter “Doubling and incest”.
The immigrant writers are constantly extending their fields of
reference, always fearful of being pigeon-holed and reduced to either
their biological origins or to just one aspect of their family romance.
Their re-invention of their ancestry or their home uses new methods
which extend the family-romance type of fictional and
autobiographical expression beyond the types analysed by Marthe
Robert.
Self-translation
There are two types of approaches to translation: they attempt

to reproduce either the creative process which engendered the original
work, or its effect on the reader.144 When translating their own work
most literary immigrants opt for the first approach. The author-
translator has more freedom to deviate from the original text and the
translation appears the more authoritative – because translated by the
original author – to the point of being recognised as a fully valid
substitute for the original text. Kundera’s revisions of the translation
of his early Czech novels fall into this category of works that are
accepted as if they were written in French.
143
Philippe Savary, “Livres en exil”, Le Matricule des Anges, No 14 (November 1995
– January 1996), 17.
144
These two types of translation are called onomasiological and semasiological.
Brian T. Fitch, An Investigation into the Status of the Bilingual Work; Beckett and
Babel (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988), p. 25.
LANGUAGE 83
The attitude Gary has towards self-translation is very common

amongst immigrant writers. He finds it torturous because of the time
and effort it takes and often feels the need to rewrite the original text
rather than translate it. Gary states that his French translations of his
English novels are heavily reworked partly because he felt that the
intervening time had given him additional means to better tackle his
themes. Gary was known as a fast writer. However, whilst Lady L
took him only six weeks to write, its translation into French took nine
months.145
Julien Green’s Le Langage et son double represents a very
interesting exercise in self-translation, confirming the author’s view
that the two linguistic universes he belongs to, English and French,
naturally incorporate very different world views. As has already been
mentioned, immigrant writers perceive self-translation as a painful
experience. They only accept this labour in an attempt to avoid having
their writing mistranslated by others. The first impression of
comparing the two versions of their texts is that they are very
different. Analysis of the differences brings to the fore the different
cultural mentalities they rightly associate with the different languages.
Julien Green was brought up in Paris by his American parents.
Although French was from the beginning the language of his
schooling, English always had a special place in his personal life,
having been from an early age associated with his close relationship
with his mother. He perceived English as his mother tongue while he
was at home. When he went to school, English became a foreign
language. Green slightly changes his first name depending on which
language he is using for his writing. Thus Le Langage et son double
which is originally written in English by Julian, is translated into
French by Julien.
Style in a new language
The quality of the new literary language is often different

from the old — not that it is easy to compare very different codes
which carry completely different nuances and associations. In
accordance with the general distancing which writers experience and
145
Roman Gary, La Nuit sera calme (Paris, Folio, 1974), p. 254.
seek from their new language, their style in French tends to be simple,
“dépouillé” (bare, stripped of ornaments) or “volontairement
appauvri”146 (Beckett, Kristof) or just simpler, barer and less intense
than in their own language (Kundera, Semprun, Cioran). This
generally seems to be thought of as the most important advantage of a
new language, the ability of a writer new to it to appreciate its most
microscopic nuances and build his style on them. This new,
minimalist style is sometimes misinterpreted as being unidiomatic,
because a society always needs to be able to recognise its foreigners.
Some critics are also quick to point out, on a superficial level, an
alleged mixing of various languages, which is usually only one of the
components of an individual writer’s style.
The virtuosity of Gary’s French phrasing is of chameleon-like
perfection. His preference for the formal register he had to adopt when
he was in the diplomatic service is another frequent occurrence in
immigrants’ linguistic development.147 Their desire for distance and
for speaking and writing in the most correct language often translates
into a preference for a more formal language. Some examples of this
will be given later in the analysis of Kristof’s trilogy.
Semprun’s style contains the complex baroque phrasing of
Castilian and frequent lengthy and organic digressions and repetitions,
all perfectly domiciled in French. The baroque phrasing seems to have
found a natural affinity with Proust’s style. The self-referential nature
of his writing is equally suited to the adopted language. He freely
invites occasional hispanicisms, but their use is clearly contained
within French: they are usually translated or at least distinctly
separated from the surrounding text.
Kundera claims that there is no discontinuity between his Czech
and French works. It is natural that he claims this, since continuity is
the literary immigrant’s life’s work. Immigrant writers often strive to
use the purest French they can. They model their style on the
perfection of eighteenth-century literary French (Cioran, Kundera).
Their purist approach to French is built into the hard work of its
acquisition. It also reflects the immigrant writer’s craftsmanlike pride
in his chosen tool of trade.
146
Huston, Nord perdu, p. 18. “deliberately impoverished”
147
Blanch, Romain, un regard particulier, p. 85.
LANGUAGE 85
Cioran claims that it is with French that he learnt to appreciate

the “bien-dire”.148 His words mark a certain Utopian and modernist
infatuation with France as a cradle of civilisation and this is not just
flattery on his part. Cioran often said that he was not talented for
religion. His affection for France and the French language seems like
a compensation for the impossibility of belief.
The reputation of languages
The languages most “immigrated into” today, as far as

literature is concerned, are English and French. The only languages of
the past which could rival this migration are Ancient Greek and Latin.
Multilingualism was not considered a special phenomenon until fairly
recently. Today the apparent tolerance and glorification of
multicultural practices seems paradoxically to go hand in hand with a
belief that multilingualism is unusual.
Fairchild distinguishes four types of migration: 1) invasion –
aggression of a “lower” culture upon a “higher”; 2) conquest –
aggression of a “higher” culture upon a “lower”; 3) colonisation – a
peaceful takeover of a “lower” by a “higher” culture; 4) immigration –
a peaceful movement from one culture to another, its equal.149 This
confirms that the perception exists that some cultures are “lower” and
some “higher”, which also, according to the experiences of immigrant
writers, affects immigration.
From the perspective of most other cultures, the cultural status
of the French language is among the highest. This remains the case, at
the present time, despite the recent loss of prestige of French culture
in some parts of the world. The foundations of this reputation can be
seen in the legend of Paris as a literary town (popularised in the
nineteenth century), as well as the strong political position of French
in the eighteenth century. Most multilinguals experience an emotional
hierarchy within their languages which is partly the result of prevalent
social attitudes in their surroundings towards various languages. Most
immigrant writers experience an imbalance in the cultural prestige of
148
Mariana Sora, Cioran jadis et naquère (Paris: L’Herne, 1988), p. 89. “well-
spokenness”
149
Henry Pratt Fairchild, Immigration: A World Movement and its American
Significance (New York: Macmillan Co., 1925).
their languages of origin and adoption (and this hierarchy is likely to

be different depending on whether it is based on the social attitudes of
the country of origin or the country of adoption). Beckett is in the
minority of authors who is unlikely to have been affected by these
reputations, since English and French are considered to be on a similar
cultural footing. In France, languages such as Spanish or Russian, or
other Eastern European languages are perceived as being of inferior
cultural worth. Claude Esteban describes this French snobbery as
derived from the strong affinity of the French culture with the
classical origins of Europe:
Comme si le génie des Latins et des Grecs se fût naturellement transplanté

en France, en Angleterre et en Allemagne, abandonnant ce “tiers monde”
méridional à son insignifiance et à ses manifestations folkloriques.150
As if the genius of the ancient Romans and Greeks was naturally

transplanted to France, England and Germany, leaving this southern “third
world” to its insignificance and folkloric expressions.
Literary immigrants into French alternate between fighting to

validate their native cultural heritage (even if at the same time they are
themselves denying it) and accepting the local attitude which is part of
their adopted world view. On the face of it, morality is on the side of
defending one’s mother tongue and this is undoubtedly their first
instinct. Nevertheless, this defence cannot go very far unless the
immigrants devote their life to it. On the other hand, the immigrant is
by nature someone who can open-mindedly identify with the views of
his new country. The concomitant feeling of inferiority is translated
into both a more fervent adherence to the new language and a greater
detachment from it, thus exacerbating the literary immigrant’s
inherent ambiguities.
The Canadian scholar Eric Kaufmann has coined the
expression asymmetrical multiculturalism for the prevalent
inconsistent expectations in contemporary Western societies whereby
minority groups are supposed to express their ethnicity while
dominant ones are supposed to transcend theirs. In L’Ignorance
Kundera elegantly expresses this perception in relation to the Swedish
character Gustaf and his Czech wife Irena:
150
Esteban, Le Partage des mots, p. 104.
LANGUAGE 87
Lui-même vient d’une ville suédoise qu’il déteste cordialement et où il se

défend de remettre les pieds. Mais dans son cas, c’est normal. Car tout le
monde l’applaudit comme un sympathique Scandinave très cosmopolite qui
a déjà oublié où il est né.151
He himself comes from a Swedish town which he detests wholeheartedly

and to which he takes care not to return. But in his case, that is normal. For
the whole world congratulates him on being a charming very cosmopolitan
Scandinavian who has already forgotten where he was born.
As we can see the type-casting of immigrants goes as far as

deciding what should be the hierarchy of their values, which even
extends to how they should relate to their country of origin. It is
almost impossible for the immigrant to satisfy expectations or
establish for himself in the new society a positive role of difference.
The question of how to catalogue the immigrant writer is
solved in the more nationalist Québec by classifying literary
immigrants under the fashionable “ethnique” (ethnic) caption. France
on the other hand tries very hard to accommodate new writers within
her literature, giving rise to the very frequent expression “écrivain
d’expression française” (writer who writes in French). This seems to
be a successful solution, as it does not assume anything except the
language of choice, which is after all the only defining characteristic
of a literary immigrant.
Conclusion
The polyglot linguistic immigrants have the unique

opportunity to establish new emotionally virgin pathways with their
new language which facilitate originality in their literary expression
and style. On the other hand, a general direction of their work which
tends towards the preservation of their psychical continuity prevents
them from being radical experimenters with form. Their subject
matter, enriched by their linguistic experience, makes up for their
relatively traditional approach to form.
Immigrant writers praise French for its rational and abstract
quality, which helps them establish a minimal style of writing where
the true meaning of their expression becomes glaringly and sometimes
151
Kundera, L’Ignorance, p. 28.
disturbingly apparent. The shedding of cultural personality that their

migration comprises, turns them into proponents of a minimalist use
of literary artifice. Their explorations of French are conducted with a
sense of measure and maturity characteristic of those who have had to
undergo a lengthy and painful regression towards the origins of the
word in order to be able to honour their chosen language. They are
helped by the unique linguistic appreciation which French culture
extends to literary immigrants into the French language.
Europa
Introduction
Throughout this text, the idea, notion or topos of Europe is

understood as the cultural entity based on geopolitical, historical and
artistic parameters, which is related to the myth of Europa and heavily
indebted to the myth of Europe. Indeed the idea of Europe and the
myth of Europe are sometimes undistinguishable, as the highest
elements of the notion are a pure striving in the domain of idealism
and Utopia.
The idea of Europe is at the heart of the cultural identity of
many authors who have immigrated into French. The immense and
mature cultural canon this identity espouses and its fluidity and
freedom make it the most stable and yet flexible identity the
immigrant writers can pertain to. Like France’s Marianne, Europe is
occasionally revered through its mythical origin, Europa. The myth of
Europa is a convenient allegory for the history of the continent, an
allegory which due to its mythical nature offers an identity oasis for
cultured immigrants.
Rather than fully assuming a French identity which might
exclude their previous allegiance by birth, immigrant writers opt for a
larger entity giving them the freedom to switch between their different
acquired facets. At the same time, the notion of Europe they adopt is a
very French-biased vision. French culture1 is perceived as at the centre
of Europe, identifying the transition of the immigrant’s identity from
the original one to a European one as a very natural progression. It
acknowledges its own rejuvenation through new immigrant blood.
Before being accepted into the cultural sphere, immigrants face a long
journey of learning and absorbing the new culture which becomes
their tool for measuring and understanding their new European
identity. Appropriately for this book, the myth of Europa also
1
Culture in the context of this book will mainly refer to two of its meanings: 1) a
system of shared beliefs, values, customs, behaviours, and artefacts specific to a
community of people who use this system as a tool for survival, and transmit it to new
generations; 2) that system or parts of that system that constitute the social identity of
an individual and are either their inherited or acquired possession.
replicates the immigrant’s journey from one sedentary experience to

another via a turbulent initiation.
The three French-language novels which will be analysed in
this chapter under separate headings incorporate the topos of Europe
in different ways. Jorge Semprun’s La Montagne blanche talks about
Europe through its small community of multicultural characters who
all rely on European cultural references for their identity. Romain
Gary’s La Danse de Gengis Cohn and Europa offer the reader cynical
literary myths. The female characters they focus on resemble
allegories who very distantly mimic and deform some of the structures
of the myth of Europa. Both authors express the importance the idea
of Europe has for them. They achieve this by including opinions and
analyses in their fiction and also by trying to capture the essence of
the intensity of their own passion for Europe.
European political identity
Any identity is exclusive of another. This gives the European

identity the racist prestige of any nationalism. If seen, however, from
the narrow political viewpoint of a fairly self-contained Europe, it
represents a positive transcending of local nationalisms.
Nowadays, Britain successfully combats Europhile
tendencies. It constantly attempts to sabotage the idea rather than, as it
might misleadingly appear at first, provide a genuine open-minded
stance. In France the concept of Europe has been taken on with no
hesitation and has proved incredibly culturally fertile due to both
historical and cultural circumstances. It is primarily a cultural
phenomenon – its driving force being the possibilities of its realisation
rather than the constant questioning of its authenticity. This type of
energy validates a chapter like this one which primarily concentrates
on the literary forms that the idea of Europe takes.
Any study of European identity must, at some stage, admit the
vagueness of its subject in comparison to other types of political or
national identities we are used to referring to. Historically, Europe was
always an umbrella identity, simply because there was no need for it
to be anything else. One of its unique characteristics was that “several
separate cultures living alike under the same umbrella were equal in
EUROPA 91
cultural power”.2 National identities were strong enough and the

industrial and cultural leadership of European countries over the rest
of the world was not in doubt, at least as long as the ethics of
modernity were dominant. Most will say that this leadership is now
over, which is true to the extent that that overvaluation of the modern
has elapsed. Europe has started to recognise the rest of the world, and
this has led to a stronger verbalisation of the existing European
identity. Nevertheless Europe was always defined against other
continents – for a long time Asia was its main counterpart – and
according to Frederico Chabod we owe this type of thinking to the
Greeks:
Or la première opposition entre l’Europe et quelque chose qui ne soit pas

l’Europe (à savoir l’Asie, qui devait rester en permanence le comparant
jusqu’aux dernières décennies du XVIIIe siècle, date à laquelle l’Amérique
allait jouer également ce rôle) est due à la pensée grecque. C’est entre
l’époque des guerres médiques et l’époque d’Alexandre le Grand que se
forme, pour la première fois, le sentiment d’une Europe opposée à l’Asie
par ses moeurs et, plus encore, par son organisation politique: d’une Europe
représentant l’esprit de “liberté”, face au “despotisme” asiatique. 3
Thus the first opposition between Europe and what is not Europe (namely
Asia, to which Europe was always to be compared until the last decades of
the eighteenth century, at which date America would also play this role) is
due to ancient Greek thinking. It is between the period of the Median wars
and that of Alexander the Great that the awareness of a Europe as opposed
to Asia by its customs and, even more, by its political structure – a Europe
which represents the spirit of “freedom” in contrast to Asian “despotism” –
appears for the first time.
In this day and age any absolute and uncritical patriotism is

considered naïve. According to Michel Maffesoli, we are moving
away from the modernist enclosure of identity and “l’assignation à
résidence”4 towards a nomadic collective unconscious built on initiatic
experiences and behaviour. The great European idealism is thus
2
The Idea of Europe, Problems of National and Transnational Identity, Brian
Nelson, David Roberts and Walter Veit (eds.) (New York, Oxford: Berg, 1992), p. 23.
3
Frederico Chabod, “Histoire de l’idée d’Europe” (1958-1959), Europes, de
l’antiquité au XXe siècle, anthologie critique et commentée, Yves Hersant and
Fabienne Durand-Bogaert (eds.) (Paris: Robert Laffont, 2000), p. 216.
4
Maffesoli, Du nomadisme, Vagabondages initiatiques. “house arrest”
finding its home within a looser cosmopolitan identity, a different type

of identity altogether.
Cosmopolitanism was always a strong feature of the European
identity. In recent times it has often been rejected as being simply a
façade for a Europhile, globalising or anti-national attitude. Any
idealistic and liberal attitude still appears dangerous with the historical
and emotional baggage acquired with the Nazi concentration camps in
mind. However, the new type of identity is not political, despite the
efforts to persuade us otherwise. All the European political institutions
are somewhat marginal developments compared to the immense and
intricate cultural heritage they anxiously try to refer to or to pass over
in silence. The new type of identity is a cultural affinity, which
perhaps like any true cosmopolitanism can only be elitist.
Cosmopolitanism
Socrates, “Citizen of the world”, sowed the first germ of the

cosmopolitan ideal, but we owe the first explicit form of
cosmopolitanism to the Cynics:
These vehement social critics, while never passing beyond their negative
contempt of society and its follies, began the cosmopolitan tradition in
Western thought and exercised considerable influence on the Stoics, who
integrated some of their doctrines into a more positive and mature ideal.5
It is crucial for understanding cosmopolitan Utopianism to note that

this concept was engendered by one of the most disillusioned
philosophical movements. The Cynics are often ignored by “serious”
philosophy. Among the last philosophical groups to live as they
preached, the sensory experience of the world defined their thinking.
Cosmopolitanism appears to be a product of a heightened critical
ability and humanistic impulse:
The tension, which began in antiquity with the two fold development of
cosmopolitanism by the Cynics and the Stoics, resulted from the attempted
alliance of an elitist belief in the intellectual camaraderie of the enlightened
happy few with the egalitarian doctrine that all men are brothers and that
5
Thomas J Schlereth, The Cosmopolitan Ideal in Enlightenment Thought (London:
The University of Notre Dame Press, 1977), p. xvii.
EUROPA 93
mankind is a universal and uniform entity. Stoicism’s imperative to the

“wise and the good” to write and work for all mankind never completely
overcame Cynicism’s selfish identification of the philosopher solely with
the kosmos, that is, with the universe and not humanity. Hence a stubborn
strain of paternalistic elitism remained in cosmopolitanism. Neither the
Stoics not their admirers in the Enlightenment ever resolved
cosmopolitanism’s basic juxtaposition: a belief in the individualism of the
elite and an abstract faith in the humanity of the mass.6
In fact, there can be no question of “resolving” this defining

proposition of cosmopolitanism. The two poles feed off and constantly
re-establish each other: there can be no abstract faith in the humanity
of the masses without an elitist viewpoint, neither can there be
individualism without a strong belief in the humanity from which this
individualism has emerged. One cannot praise the masses if one is not
somewhat distinguished from them, even if one has ultimately evolved
from them. Nothing has changed since the Enlightenment as far as this
primordial balance is concerned. There is no use in hypocritically
regretting the elitist aspect of cosmopolitanism, as without it, the
visionary idealism responsible for much of Europe’s turbulent history
as well as for the hope which allowed millions to survive it, would
never have been possible.
This elitist ingredient of cosmopolitanism is responsible for
the first formulations of the European ideal and for all the early
appearances of the notion of European identity. Jorge Semprun, who
has always been a politically and culturally active propagator of the
idea of Europe, stated at his talk in London that the existence of
poverty and the working classes does not disqualify the project of
Europe.7 Milan Kundera even goes so far as to say that the words
“elitism” and “elitist” appeared in French in 1967 and 1968 and reflect
the disrespect for the cultural elites on whom the concept of Europe
rests, and their decline.8 The elitist origins of European identity are
acknowledged by many other theoretical sources:
If anything, Europe is a political and cultural concept, invented and

experienced by an intellectual elite more specifically whenever there was
cause to give a more precise definition of what can pragmatically yet simply
6
Schlereth, The Cosmopolitan Ideal in Enlightenment Thought, p. 14.
7
Jorge Semprun’s talk entitled Europe, My Europe was held on 29th January 2002 at
the Institut Français in London.
8
Milan Kundera, L’Art du roman (Paris: Gallimard, 1986), pp. 152-153.
be described as the western edge of Eurasia, the earth’s largest land mass
(...). For the fact that the “Idea of Europe” was often voiced explicitly either
as Utopia, or as the propaganda instrument only of an elite, in no way
means that it has not become a reality of sorts in the course of time, both for
that elite and for larger groups of people who made and make no claims to
that status.9
Drawing on the ancient Greek ideal of balance between citizenry and

cosmopolitanism, Europeanism is in many ways an expression of
cosmopolitanism for Europeans. As a hybrid between a politically
unworkable and culturally enriching cosmopolitanism and a politically
lucrative and culturally exhausted national identity (because formed
on the basis of negation and exclusion), Europeanism or the European
identity is a very potent construct. In practical terms it relies on the
rich European cultural heritage and on collective memory.
Commenting on Valéry’s vision of Europe, Hélène Ahrweiler says:
What this means in effect is that Europe is a world of historical references

and memories shared by all Europeans who draw sustenance from these
teachings. Or, to put it another way, the governing principles, notions,
concepts and aesthetic responses, in short the ethical and intellectual values
and way of life in general, are, if not identical to all the peoples of Europe,
then at least identifiable to all those who are blessed with a share in them.
We might simply say that their museums, libraries and music collections
stand a good chance of containing the same works.10
This view coincides with the European context expressed in the works
of fiction which will be analysed hereafter.
Kant’s definition of cosmopolitan right in Toward Perpetual

Peace represents an important milestone in the history of
cosmopolitanism:
As in the preceding articles, our concern here is not with philanthropy, but
with right, and in this context hospitality (hospitableness) means the right of
an alien not to be treated as an enemy upon his arrival in another’s country.
If it can be done without destroying him, he can be turned away; but as long
as he behaves peaceably he cannot be treated as an enemy. He may request
9
Peter Rietbergen, Europe, a Cultural History (London: Routledge, 1998), p. xviii.
10
Hélène Ahrweiler, “Roots and Trends in European Culture”, in European Identity
and the Search for Legitimacy, Soledad Garcia (ed.), (London: Pinter Publishers,
1993), p. 32.
EUROPA 95
the right to be a permanent visitor (which would require a special,

charitable agreement to make him a fellow inhabitant for a certain period),
but the right to visit, to associate, belongs to all men by virtue of their
common ownership of the earth’s surface; for since the earth is a globe, they
cannot scatter themselves infinitely, but must, finally tolerate living in close
proximity, because originally no one had a greater right to any region of the
earth than anyone else.11
Kant’s thoughts are prompted by the concern for peace, which as

André Suarès stresses is what anyone who claims to be European
aspires to first of all.12 Kant defines cosmopolitanism not as a choice
of those spoilt by privileges, but, reversing the focus, points instead at
the sedentary inhabitants who owe hospitality to a foreigner. Tahar
Ben Jelloun goes further in this vein in his Hospitalité française.13
Jacques Derrida develops a similar thesis about the “right of asylum”
(“le droit d’asile”) and the concept of “free cities” (“villes franches”)
in Cosmopolites de tous les pays, encore un effort!.14 He also
discusses the theological origins of Kant’s natural right to hospitality,
rightly pointing out the debatability today of Kant’s thoughts on the
right to be a permanent visitor. In a manner suited to the nature of the
issue, vision has more value than heritage in Kant’s and Derrida’s
discussions.
As a token of tolerance leading to perpetual peace, a greater
good for all, Kant’s attitude clearly belongs to democratic tolerance.
However, if we consider his statements as practical suggestions, they
seem unrealistic. Although they form a necessary idealistic base for
the Law of the sedentary communities, and for moral education in
tolerance, they contribute little to cultural matters. For his purposes
Kant places the freedom of the traveller in the hands of the local
inhabitants. For immigrant writers the only possible resolution of this
cruel dependency lies in transferring this conflict to the more abstract
11
Immanuel Kant, Perpetual Peace and Other Essays (1795), translated by Ted
Humphrey (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1983), p. 118; A more recent
edition translated by Mary J. Gregor in Practical Philosophy, Cambridge Edition of
the Works of Immanuel Kant (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp.
328-329.
12
André Suarès, “Le ‘principe europeéen’” (1926), Europes, de l’antiquité au XXe
siècle, Hersant and Durand-Bogaert (eds.), p. 169.
13
Tahar Ben Jelloun, Hospitalité française (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1984).
14
Jacques Derrida, Cosmopolites de tous les pays, encore un effort! (Paris: Galilée,
1997). (translated as On Cosmopolitanism)
and relevant ground of language. The Egyptian born French poet

Edmond Jabès (1912-1991) focuses on this most precious hospitality
for writers:
La langue est hospitalière. Elle ne tient pas compte de nos origines. Ne

pouvant être que ce que nous arrivons à en tirer, elle n’est autre que ce que
nous attendons de nous.15
Language is hospitable. It takes no notice of our origins. Being only what

we succeed in getting out of it, it can only be what we expect of ourselves.
The ultimate, frightening freedom of the immigrant is in this

ability to use the new language in any way he wants. This experience
is a source of both joy and anxiety and it pushes to the limit the
expectations the immigrant has of himself.
The true cosmopolitan Europeans from the past have always
belonged to the privileged classes. Romain Gary’s contempt for their
privileged ignorance contains admiration for the simplicity of their
illusions:
La société qu’il évoquait était celle des privilégiés dont l’éducation, la

distinction et la délicatesse tempéraient l’individualisme, des aristocrates du
coeur et de l’esprit pour qui la fraternité était un mariage blanc. Ils ne
connaissaient du peuple que la boniche qui les avait déniaisés, voulaient
refaire le monde, mais par des moyens d’hommes du monde, et auraient
protesté avec indignation si on leur avait dit que, pour eux, la société était
avant tout la bonne société.16
The society he referred to was that of the priviledged whose education,

distinction and refinement moderated their individualism, the aristocrats of
the heart and mind for whom fraternity was an unconsummated marriage.
All they knew of the people was the maid with whom they lost their
virginity; they wanted to redo the world, but with the methods of gentlemen,
and would have protested indignantly if anyone told them that for them,
society meant first and foremost high society.
Their protected childhood nourished their inherent or assumed naivety

and tolerance when dealing with the practical implications of
fraternity. The personality of the narrator in Jorge Semprun’s novels
15
Edmond Jabès, “L’hospitalité de la langue” in Le Livre de l’hospitalité (Paris:
16
Romain Gary, Europa (Paris: Folio, Gallimard, 1972), p. 197.
EUROPA 97
usually falls into this category. This shelteredness although misleading

is responsible for some of the most beautiful ideals of humanity. The
positivity of these ideals could only have come from those people who
never had to get their hands dirty when dealing with humanity.
According to Romain Gary’s character in his novel Europa, Danthès,
the “impossibility” of Europe in practical terms rests on this
incompatibility between the purity of the ideal and the sheer physical
weight of humanity:
La démographie à elle seule suffisait à rendre l’Europe impossible: la

distinction de l’esprit, la noblesse du comportement, la tolérance, le souci
d’atténuer l’excessif par le sens de la mesure, la beauté, l’esthétique en tant
que morale, étaient incompatibles avec le déferlement humain et le coude à
coude démographique. La patience d’une méditation, d’une réflexion
sereine, de la sagesse, ne pouvait se concilier avec l’âge de la vitesse et la
rapidité des solutions qu’exigeait la prolifération de l’homme sur la
planète.17
Demographical factors alone were sufficient to make the idea of Europe

impossible: intellectual distinction, noble behaviour, tolerance, concern to
attenuate the excessive with a sense of measure, beauty, aesthetics
conceived as ethics, were incompatible with the rising demographic tide and
crowding of humanity. The patience necessary for meditation, serene
reflection, wisdom, could not be reconciled with the age of speed and the
quick solutions demanded by the proliferation of the human species on the
planet.
Similarly to Rousseau in his own time, and to Kundera and others,

Gary questions the speed of life today and finds it incompatible with
the real reflection and full living that were possible in the eighteenth
century. Cosmopolitanism is possible in a world where a human being
is a rarity.
In contemporary terms, cosmopolitanism is an acquired
individual characteristic. Writers who have adopted a second language
are probably the most extreme example of this allegiance:
Bref on ne naît pas cosmopolite, on le devient par un acte d’amour et de

respect illimité, en acquittant une dette sans fin envers une réalité étrangère.
Avant d’éprouver l’ivresse de jouer sur plusieurs registres, plusieurs
claviers, il faut d’abord s’incorporer des pans entiers d’un autre monde,
faire l’apprentissage modeste, ingrat, d’une culture étrangère dont on
17
Gary, Europa, p. 198.
reconnaît le caractère formidablement opaque. La connaissance n’ennoblit

qu’au prix d’efforts démesurés: si toute éducation normale est violence
infligée à un enfant qu’on arrache à son innocence, à son confort douillet
pour l’incarner dans la dimension de la parole, l’éducation cosmopolite est
déchirement à la puissance x, accès très chèrement payé à une liberté
supérieure. Transiter d’une civilisation à l’autre est l’équivalent d’une mue,
d’une métamorphose qui implique peine et travail, et n’a rien à voir avec le
glissement feutré du jet reliant tous les points de la planète. C’est pourquoi
les grands apatrides constituent la noblesse et l’aiguillon de l’esprit; …18
In short, one is not born cosmopolitan, one becomes it by an act of love and
limitless respect, settling an endless debt towards a foreign reality. Before
experiencing the exhilaration of playing on several registers, several
keyboards, one must first incorporate entire facets of another world, serve
the humble, thankless apprenticeship in a foreign culture whose formidably
opaque nature we recognise. Knowledge only ennobles if we pay the price
of disproportionate effort: if any normal education is violence inflicted on a
child torn away from his innocence, from his cosy comfort to be incarnated
within the dimension of language, cosmopolitan education is a tearing-away
to the power of x, a dearly paid access to a superior freedom. The transition
from one civilisation to another is the equivalent of a sloughing-off, a
metamorphosis which requires effort and work and which has nothing to do
with the muffled glide of a jet connecting all the points on the planet. This is
why the great stateless individuals represent the nobility and stimulus of the
mind; …
Impossible, impensable par conséquent de “démocratiser” le

cosmopolitisme, d’en faire un droit au même titre que la santé ou le
logement; …19
Therefore “democratising” cosmopolitanism, turning it into a right in the

same way as health or housing, is impossible, unthinkable; …
The nobility and elitism of cosmopolitanism persevere in its more

mature wisdom, as naivety is replaced with a deep physical
knowledge of another culture. The knowledge is appropriated through
a lengthy and painful process of learning, which is not academic and
thus neutral in nature, but similar to the acquisition of the first
language, a full, bodily learning experience which we can expect will
modify elements of our nature formed in childhood. The type of
cosmopolitanism described by Bruckner is typically European as it
18
Pascal Bruckner, Le Vertige de Babel: cosmopolitisme ou mondialisme, (Paris:
Arléa, 2000), pp. 30-1.
19
Bruckner, Le Vertige de Babel, p. 32.
EUROPA 99
embodies the European concept of knowledge as “acquisitive”, as

opposed to, for instance, the American and Indian modes of
understanding of knowledge as a tool for action or a means of
liberation from the self.20
The myth
If the European identity is indeed a purely cultural construct,

the myth of Europa is its first literal point of reference. The core of the
myth is the abduction and rape of Europa by Zeus transformed into a
bull. There are differing views as to whether this is a myth of love
which was later “sensationalised as rape”,21 a violent myth of
foundation, or merely a rape glossed over and as such more or less
openly enjoyed by armies of male literary and art critics, collectors
and other men whose opinion mattered. Two offshoots of the story
represent the actual building of Europe. First, Zeus takes Europa to
Crete where she becomes the wife of the king and gives birth to Zeus’
illustrious children. Second, Europa’s brothers set out to search for
their sister and whilst they never find her (and should never find
her),22 in the process they establish important settlements in Europe.
On voit aussi combien, dès ces débuts fabuleux, il paraît difficile de

“retrouver Europe”. C’est la poursuite de son image mythique qui fait
découvrir aux cinq frères sa réalité géographique et fait bâtir une ville au
plus actif d’entre eux. Voilà qui est plein d’enseignements. Rechercher
l’Europe c’est la faire. En d’autres termes: c’est la recherche qui la crée.23
It can be seen how difficult it seems to be to “find Europa”, since those

mythical beginnigs. It is the pusuit of her mythical image which leads five
brothers to discover the geographical reality of Europe and one of the more
active amongst them to build a city. This teaches us many lessons. To
search for Europe is to create it. In other words: it is the search which
creates Europe.
20
The Spanish author and diplomat Salvador de Madariaga (1886-1978), quoted in
Denis de Rougemont, Vingt-huit siècles d’Europe; la conscience européenne à
travers les textes, d’Hésiode à nos jours (Paris: Payot, 1961), pp. 360-1, elaborates on
the typically European concept of knowledge.
21
John Hale, “The Renaissance Idea of Europe” in European Identity and the Search
for Legitimacy, Soledad Garcia (ed.), p. 48.
22
Cadmus is even advised by Pythia to abandon his quest and to build a city instead.
23
Denis de Rougemont, Vingt-huit siècles d’Europe, p. 27.
Rougemont concludes as a true European idealist. The quest itself is at

the heart of the European identity.24 Indeed, one can easily get the
impression that the two epilogues contain the main meaning of the
myth and that the abduction and rape function as a prelude. In that
case, the abduction and rape could be understood as a provocation for
either the telling of an educational story celebrating the enterprising
spirit, or for the generation of a myth of origins to justify a social
necessity.
The dream of a character in the novel La Langue maternelle
by Vassilis Alexakis shows the strong cultural implications of the idea
of Europe:
Quand j’étais jeune, dit-il, je rêvais souvent que je découvrais une belle
main de femme dans la terre. Mais je recherchais en vain le reste de la
statue. J’apprenais qu’elle avait déjà été découverte et qu’elle était
éparpillée entre différents musées: sa tête se trouvait au Vatican, son autre
main à Copenhague, ses seins au British Museum, ses hanches au Louvre,
une de ses jambes à Berlin-Est et l’autre à Berlin-Ouest. J’entreprenais une
véritable croisade à travers l’Europe pour essayer de réunir tous les
morceaux et de les coller. Je voyageais inlassablement d’une ville à l’autre,
je suppliais, mais personne ne voulait me céder ce qui lui appartenait. J’étais
désespéré.25
When I was young, he said, I often dreamt that I discovered a beautiful

female hand in the earth. But I searched in vain for the rest of the statue. I
found out that she had already been discovered and had been scattered
amongst different museums: her head was in the Vatican, her other hand in
Copenhagen, her breasts in the British Museum, her hips in the Louvre, one
of her legs in East Berlin and the other in West Berlin. I undertook a real
crusade through Europe to try to reunite all the pieces and put them
together. I travelled tirelessly from one city to the next, I begged, but no one
wanted to give me what was theirs. I was in despair.
The Greek heritage which the character talks about, belongs equally to
the whole continent; its fragmented nature represents the European
identity. This allegory shows the mixture of cultural unity and
24
According to Fabrice Larat the difficulty Romain Gary had in communicating the
simplest true facts of his biography was due to his life-long search for an identity and
this search was at the source of his European identity as expressed in his writing.
Fabrice Larat, Romain Gary, Un itin¡raire europ¡en (Ch¦ne-Bourg: Edition M¡decine
et Hygi£ne, 1999), p 11.
25
Alexakis, La Langue maternelle, p. 264.
EUROPA 101
political independence which has always been the reality of Europe.

Alexakis’ multi-layered association of the representation of Europe
with a female allegory will be echoed time and time again in various
art forms and other fields of human enquiry.
Artistic depictions of Europa vary in sensitivity – some are
purely decorative or narrative and deliberately superficial uses of a
potentially erotic myth, others more original and challenging. The two
most “photogenic” and iconic moments, which later depictions of the
myth mainly concentrate on, are:
i. The moment prior to the abduction, when Europa is picking

flowers with her friends while the bull approaches her and lies
down submissively at her feet. This often takes on the
symbolism of the preparation for a wedding, her companions
like procuresses (Paolo Veronese, Jacob Jordaens),
accomplices (Gerda Wegener) or innocent child-like virgins
(Liberale da Verona). Every so often the mostly passive
Europa becomes a more “knowing” and decadent character
(François Boucher).
ii. The abduction itself, with visual representations focusing

mainly on the crossing of the sea which is an elegant
continuation of the older oriental theme of a goddess on a
bull. The journey is a symbolic wedding or initiation offering
a host of various options of characterisation and interpretation
of the scene from the sensuous embrace (Pietro Campara,
Herculanum), Amazonian passage (Albrecht Dürer), helpless
despair (Titiano Vecello – Titian), wedding procession on sea
(Noël Nicolas Coypel), a pure celebration of dreamlike
sensuality (Gustave Moreau, version dating from 1880) to
more challenging renditions, such as the nude asleep on the
back of a galloping bull where it is uncertain whether we are
seeing her dream or her reality, with only her self-
containedness evident (André Lhote).26 Lhote’s version is
26
There are many other astounding, rarely heard-of twentieth-century versions such
as Matisse’s Enlèvement d’Europe from 1929 on which the painter worked for three
years, producing 3000 drawings before committing it to the canvas. “En fait
d’enlèvement d’Europe, il s’agit plus d’une superbe baigneuse allongée à côté d’un
taureau qui ressemble à un animal comblé. Le tout dans un ensemble de grande
very much a twentieth-century vision of the myth, “sous

l’influence de la psychanalyse, comme témoin de l’érotisme et
de la stabilisation de la sexualité féminine ou symbole de
voyage initiatique de tout un continent vers un horizon
d’aventure et de mystère.”27 More often than not Europa looks
back (toward the east) and if her friends abandoned on the
coast can be seen, they are more often than not in a state of
agitated horror. One of the earlier commonplaces was also the
depiction of Europa seen from the back holding on to the bull.
This enhances the perception of the characters speedily
moving away and the marine eroticism of the story. As
Christian de Bartillat and Alain Roba point out in passing,
Europa is always depicted whole, her body a vital part of her
myth.28 A parallel can be drawn with the geography of
Europe, often disregarded as not particularly contributory to
its cultural and political identity apart from the “temperate
climate”, and yet a much more important precondition for its
existence. It is interesting to note that the scene of the
abduction, less prominent or significant within the narrative,
has by losing its context gained the distinctiveness and the
polyvalence of a symbol.
pureté.” “Rather than an abduction of Europa, it is more a case of a magnificent bather

lying next to a bull who looks like a satisfied animal. All contained within a canvas of
great purity.” Christian de Bartillat and Alain Roba, Métamorphoses d’Europe, trente
siècles d’iconographie (Paris: Editions Bartillat, 2000), p. 138. There is also a version
at Cornavin, the Geneva railway station, of Europa on the bull leaning far back from
the speed of progress. This eternal traveller is a female version of Ulysses, another
great symbol of the European. It is also interesting to note that the Statue of Liberty
by Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi (1886), modelled on Marianne, a symbol of the French
Republic, has a striking resemblance to the images of Europa created at the time (such
as for instance Charles Lemaire’s Europa at the Museé d’Orsay in Paris).
27
Christian de Bartillat and Alain Roba, Métamorphoses d’Europe, p. 5. “under the
influence of psychoanalysis as a witness of the eroticism and of the stabilising of
female sexuality; or else symbolising an entire continent’s voyage of initiation
towards a horizon of adventure and mystery”
28
This becomes particularly interesting in the context of an exploration of mediaeval
maps of Europe in the shape of the “Queen of Christianity”. Historical maps instead
of offering the expected clinical scientific material generally tend to reveal some of
the Utopianism of the desired identities. A stunning example of this is Victor Mailet’s
Utopian map of Europe from 1867 entitled “Carte utopique de l’Europe Pacifiée”
(Utopian map of Europe at peace) which contains an entity called “conféderation
danubienne” (Danubian confederation) encompassing Bohemia and the Balkans.
EUROPA 103
“O gloire qui m’alarme autant qu’elle m’enchante!”29 best summarises

Europa’s diverse emotional responses to the abduction. She “knows”
that her name will be famous as she is the “chosen” one.30 From the
earliest epic versions of the myth the “divine genealogical forecast
after intercourse”31 is a regular feature. The original funerary and
fertility meanings of oriental origin are also never completely lost.
Through the centuries various other layers of meaning are
superimposed: the beauty who has tamed the bull, the warrior
goddess, virgin head of the church (politically Europe was for a long
time synonymous with Christendom), seductress. It is particularly
significant that this feminine symbolism managed to survive, albeit
highly inhibited, in the allegory of Europe as the Christian church: the
most distinct departure from the original Pagan myth.
A new enriching element appears in the version of the myth
by Moschus, the Sicilian poet of the second century BC. It takes the
form of a dream Europa has the night before the abduction. Two lands
in the shape of two women are arguing over which one is Europa’s
mother. The more familiar woman, Asia, claims to be the natural
mother who gave birth to and nurtured Europa; the other, physically in
front of the dreaming princess, but unnamed, is violently dragging the
submissive Europa away, saying that Zeus has decided that Europa
belongs to her. Europa wakes up from this premonitory dream
appeased. “The single most striking feature of Moschus’ treatment is
the subtle and oblique way in which the question of her [Europa’s]
consent is made to dominate the poem.”32 In what he calls an
“alternative rape-story” Malcolm Campbell’s interpretation draws
attention to the hidden erotic nature of Europa’s sweet but unsettling
29
From “Jupiter et Europe”, Nicolas Bernier’s cantata with Jean-Baptiste Rousseau’s
libretto; quoted in Christian de Bartillat and Alain Roba, Métamorphoses d’Europe, p.
103. “Oh the glory which alarms me as much as it enchants me!”
30
In Famous women, Boccaccio states that Europa’s fame was achieved mainly
through her marriage to a great divinity and gives four reasons why the continent
might have been named after her: her exceptional nobility (being Phoenician – and
Phoenicians’ numerous achievements made them more famous than other peoples of
ancient lineage), reverence for her divine husband, respect for her kingly sons and her
extraordinary virtue. Giovanni Boccaccio, Famous women (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 2003), p. 24.
31
Moschus, Europa (2 BC), edited with introduction and commentary by Malcolm
Campbell (Hildersheim: Olims-Weidmann, 1991), introduction, p. 3.
32
Malcolm Campbell in Moschus, Europa, p. 6.
dream which psychologically prepares her for the violent fulfilment of

her desires. The unnamed foreign woman in her dream represents
what Europa will become, “a mother”, which significantly is the very
last word of the poem. The foreign woman has to claim her
motherhood violently, and so will Europa’s experience be a violent
one.
C’est sans nul doute le songe du début de l’idylle qui contient, pour nous
tout au moins, la véritable signification du mythe; ces deux terres qui se
disputent Europe, “la terre d’Asie et la terre d’en face”, le continent déjà
civilisé et celui qui n’a pas de nom, qui veut un nom et un esprit, et qui va
l’arracher par la violence, mais non sans l’aide de Zeus lui-même.33
It is without a doubt the dream at the beginning of the idyll that contains, for
us at least, the real meaning of the myth; those two lands which fight over
Europa, “the Asian land and the land opposite”, the already civilised
continent and the one that has no name, that wants a name and a spirit, and
that will seize it violently, but not without the help of Zeus himself.
This symbolic acknowledgement of the precedence of Asia

and the continuance of Europe from Asian heritage, which
manipulates Zeus into giving it his blessing, proposes a myth of
origination in which creation or birth is less important than the
provision of an explanatory narrative for an existing reality.
For the citizens of one of the founding civilisations of Europe,
the Greeks, Europe was the elsewhere which they did not know or
want to know, the land of Barbarians excluded from their civilisation.
“L’Europe était comme une forme vide, que la civilisation occidentale
allait investir peu à peu tout en s’appropriant le nom qu’elle-même lui
avait donné”.34 Once this form was filled, the original myth lost its
purpose and was quickly repressed. This was ensured by the
totalitarian operation whereby the Christian church set out to devalue
all the myths which it could not successfully inflect to strengthen its
own dominion.
The characterisation of the two women fits the twelfth-century
identification of Europe with warrior strength and Asia with fecundity
33
34
Michel Pastoureau and Jean-Claude Schmitt, Europe, mémoire et emblèmes (Paris:
Les éditions de l’Épargne, 1990), p. 17. “Europe was like an empty form that Western
civilisation would gradually invest in, even while appropriating the name that it had
itself given it.”
EUROPA 105
(the third sociological element which usually accompanies these two,

the value of the sacred, being associated with Africa). Europa’s dream
espouses the historical and geographical reality of Europe, the fact
that European peoples mostly originate from Asia, that European
culture is younger than and heavily indebted to Asian civilisation, and
that geographically speaking, Europe’s status as mere peninsula on the
Asian continent can explain the aggressiveness of the desire to
establish its own identity. At the same time the dream also glorifies
the spirit of adventure and the positivist and modernist imperialism so
characteristic of Europe throughout its history.
The common root of rape/rapt/rapture and their associated
meanings and undertones in English and French are rich in
suggestions for the interpretation of the myth of Europa. The
contradiction between the violence of the rape and the “joyous
feeling or lofty thought” of rapt are a potent reminder of the
dominance of the masculine viewpoint in our civilisation. That fact
perhaps trivialises this choice of a beautiful passive princess to
symbolise the desirability of a new virgin continent.
A recent attribution to Veronese sheds some interesting light
on the long history of the representation of Europa. Whilst “The Rape
of Europa” in the ducal palace in Venice is one of Veronese’s most
admired paintings, a little picture of the same subject in the National
Gallery in London was long dismissed as a copy. The reevaluation
proved this to be a Veronese original painted shortly before the larger
canvas in Venice. Another version of the topic held in the Pinacoteca
Capitolina in Rome seems to be a vital link between the other two. A
close comparison of the three paintings reveals that despite the
apparent similarity in the layout of the scene, the pictures project very
different meanings. The version in Venice is often described as a
highly decorative work in comparison to Titian’s famous rendering of
Europa:
La toile de Véronèse exprime le calme, la placidité et la galanterie, une

peinture apollinienne à l’inverse de la peinture dyonisiaque de Titian.35
Veronese’s canvas expresses calm, placidity and gallantry, an Apollonian

painting as opposed to Titian’s Dionysian painting.
35
Christian de Bartillat and Alain Roba, Métamorphoses d’Europe, p. 60.
The Rome version reverses the layout of characters as if in a mirror,

but retains the frivolous and carefree nature, whilst the London canvas
while keeping the same positioning of characters as the Rome version,
gives us a view of painfully deceitful events: the horrified Europa is
being methodically prepared by “faceless” officious maids or female
companions to travel on a deceptively gentle bull whose eyes twinkle
devilishly. Cherubs seem childishly upset whilst the maids are
obviously two-faced. In the distance we can see a later moment: the
back of the tamed Europa, in a childlike submissive posture, riding off
on the bull guided by her companions towards the coast.
The realism which makes that painting interesting today must
have been seen as raw, compared to the subsequent more sophisticated
examples in Rome and Venice. A parallel can be drawn with
Artemisia Gentileschi’s paintings where the first version of a subject
was always the more realistic rendition, subsequently beautified for
patrons eternally in search of entertainment in art. The fact that the
subject-matter is first of all a rape is what makes even the purely
decorative versions of the myth very powerful. It is also what creates
unease when the scene’s beauty is perversely glorified. Europa is the
eternal victim of her own innocence, but also a survivor.
A darker alter-ego of the myth of Europa is the myth of
Persephone, another beautiful virgin kidnapped whilst innocently
picking flowers and raped by Pluto, lord of the dead. Zeus commands
Pluto to free his prey, Pluto obeys, but before releasing Persephone
gives her the seed of a pomegranate to eat, to ensure she will come
back to him. Zeus then orders that Persephone should spend two thirds
of the year with her family and one third underground with her
husband. Semprun gives his version of the myth in L’Algarabie,
which will be analysed in more detail in the chapter “Libertinism and
Utopia”. His Perséphone, daughter of Demetria (in the myth –
Demeter) and Eleuterio (the original Greek myth takes place in the
independent state of Eleusis), sister of Pénélope and Penthésilée, twin
sister of Proserpine, elopes with Joe Aresti,36 the warlord who owns an
underground brothel, after she has found out that the man she loves,
Rafael Artigas, is her real father. The whole community perceives this
as an abduction, although Perséphone, as an incarnation of a modern
young woman, seems to have in fact wanted to get rid of her virginity.
36
She is picking flowers in the Luxembourg park when Joe Aresti approaches her.
EUROPA 107
What is more, in line with the libertine plot of the novel, and to the
patriarchal horror of Aresti who wants to marry her, Perséphone
decides to work in his brothel and finds great pleasure in this. Upon
Artigas’s (Zeus) intervention she is reunited with her family. Before
she leaves, Aresti gives her a necklace with a luxurious pendant
resembling a pomegranate, asking her to come and visit him from time
to time.
Perséphone’s abduction is mirrored in the two abductions of
the libertine vicomtesse rouge37 which, despite some violence, are
libertine events, both enjoyable, but differently so. Perséphone’s
abduction is then also gently echoed in the “ravissement”38 (rapture,
but also abduction) that Demetria can see or literally read in the eyes
of Artigas (Zeus) who is listening to her life story, as well as in the
affair Demetria once had with Artigas. The narrators of this irreverent
picaresque pastiche of different Greek myths question at the end
whether enough of their time was given to the character of
Perséphone. They wonder whether she, like some of the others, should
have been given a chance to voice her own version of events herself.
They conclude that it is best if she remains a mystery, as that means
remaining true to the vagueness of the identity of any young woman.
One of the fundamental features of the myth of rape is that the victim
of the rape has an ambiguous status. Perséphone thus joins Europa and
others as a voiceless female heroine whose thoughts are allocated to
her by others. Perséphone should be considered as a negative
counterpart to Europa. Her myth is not a myth of man-made progress
like the story of Europa, but of an inescapable natural cyclic
repetition, which Semprun portrays as somewhat depressing.
Perséphone’s libertinism has much earthier and heavier undertones
than that of various substitutes for Europa, such as Gary’s Lily in La
Danse de Gengis Cohn.39 Nevertheless, the myth also preserves its
original meaning of mirroring the changing of the seasons which
makes life on earth possible.
In his analysis of the kore or maiden-goddesses in Greek
mythology, C. Kerényi points out the co-existence of the mother
Demeter and the daughter Persephone, as begetter and begotten, in the
37
“Red viscountess” – variation on Louise Michel known as “vierge rouge” (“red
virgin”)
38
Semprun, L’Algarabie, p. 424.
39
Romain Gary, La Danse de Gengis Cohn (Paris: Gallimard, 1967).
same goddess.40 In some versions of the myth Hecate appears as a

double of Demeter and the three aspects of the female heroine – the
maiden Persephone and her two companions Hecate and Demeter –
seem to form a primordial triad of goddesses representing three
feminine aspects: maiden, mother and moon. Hecate as the Mistress of
spirits is closer than Demeter to the realm of the underworld to which
Persephone belongs. There is striking similarity between this image
and Europa’s dream (described above) in Moschus’ version of the
myth. However, Europa’s chosen home is the opposite to
Persephone’s underworld and her progression is linear as opposed to
Persephone’s cyclic existence.
For all its grandeur as a myth, 41 Europeans don’t identify with
the story of Europa:
There is (…) no hint that Europeans actually thought of themselves, or their

continent, as owing anything to this Europa. And with the reformation there
came an increasing hesitation about accepting so frankly pagan a founding
myth.42
The myth of Europa is always referred to as something

curious, as if Europeans were in ironic denial of the special status this
founding myth confers on them.43 But then this ironic denial itself is
the typical European stance of keeping things at one remove, a stance
which the better contains and holds in place the original reference.
The recent interest in this myth can be brought into
connection with the increasing popularity of the postmodern nomadic
approach to life. The metaphor of initiation within the myth of Europa
is crucial for such an understanding. Her nomadic destiny disturbs the
imagined desirability of the sedentary order. One could say that this
40
C. G. Jung and C. Kerényi, Science of Mythology (London: Routledge, 1951).
41
“What a subject this was! Sex, violence, seascape, landscape, beauty and the beast,
gestures of alarm and affection.” John Hale, “The Renaissance Idea of Europe” in
European Identity and the Search for Legitimacy, p. 48.
42
John Hale, “The Renaissance Idea of Europe” in European Identity and the Search
for Legitimacy, p. 48.
43
“Nous avons même constaté que dans les milieux les plus cultivés, à part une petite
cohorte valeureuse de spécialistes, on méconnaît presque tout de cet emblème qui se
situe ‘au zénith’ de la conscience européenne.” “We have even noticed that in the
most cultivated circles, apart from a small courageous group of specialists, this
emblem which is situated ‘at the peak’ of European consciousness is almost entirely
unknown.” Christian de Bartillat and Alain Roba, Métamorphoses d’Europe, p. 161.
EUROPA 109
disruption is necessary to uphold the crucial relationship of tension

between the sedentary and nomadic values. However, her violent
initiation or passage between two destinies has many tamer
equivalents in everyone’s life.
It is her transition from being a princess to being a queen
which apart from signifying a natural maturing process captures the
imagination of all cultural migrants. The drama and epic nature of this
initiation are particularly reminiscent of the transition period of a
linguistic immigrant discussed in the previous chapter.
Europa, ultimately a culturally ambivalent figure of a
foreigner, serves as an intermediary with the external world. The
recognition of the value that a token foreigner brings to a society is
not something that is new to our times. However, our times bring to it
an unusually self-conscious effort to prove it with physical facts. What
in earlier centuries could have been a fanciful attempt to explain the
violence of the building of Europe, has in today’s self-conscious
multicultural society become yet another symbol for the sacred – as
both excluded and special – value of the foreigner.
La Montagne blanche
Europe as an intersection of cultural references
Semprun’s novel La Montagne blanche best encapsulates the

spirit of Europe not only in the meanders of its narrative and in the
strong opinions it expresses, but also in the dense cultural wealth
which permeates its writing. Such an understanding of European
culture is essentially a French construction, although Semprun as an
immigrant writer adds other cultural influences to it. Like other texts
by Semprun, the novel seems fairly explicit in many of its references,
while others are present as common underlying assumptions which are
organically built into its tissue and which the reader is free to
recognise, thus winning the complicity of the author.
The face of Europe is inbuilt in that way, on many different
levels. One almost literal example of this shows how a woman’s face
can become a symbol of Europe. The juxtaposition of the vision of
Antoine’s incestuous aunt, Ulrike, floating down the river to her
death, with the examination of Europa’s face in the painting
L’Enlèvement d’Europe44 (The Abduction of Europa) is a multilayered

allusion to the many mythic elements of varying age, and to the
ambivalence, both synchronic and diachronic, contained within the
representation of Europe and of those other elements of the topos of
Europe which exceed its representation. Europe’s destiny, just like
Ulrike’s, is played out behind the scenes while Husserl holds his
conferences on Europe, in Vienna in the spring of 1935.45
The ambiguity of Europe is first alluded to by the erotic nature
of its portrayal, its first appearance being Europa’s désir effrayé
(frightened desire).46 Semprun’s characters discover that the
representation of Europe is too close for comfort to the traditional
visualisation of Allegories as female characters. The physical and
creative proximity of Veronese’s Europa and one of his likewise
personified Virtues, the Dialectic (Logic), who has proven her
destructiveness throughout the twentieth century, is yet another
reminder for the European mind of Semprun’s characters of the
indestructible intertwining of European culture and history.
The serpent, Ripa explains, is the attribute held by the woman who
symbolises Logic: “signifying the prudence necessary for logical thought,
and also the poisonous inaccessibility of logic to those without sufficient
intelligence, which, like the snake, kills those who dare to oppose him.”47
European history has proven more than once that this logic can easily
be taken beyond the point where Ripa’s artificial description becomes
literally accurate. Semprun, as a survivor of the Second World War
concentration camps, personally testifies to this.
On the narrative level, the microcosm of Europe is
represented in Semprun’s novel by the three male characters
originating from different (and mixed) European cultural backgrounds
and all at home in France, that is, Europe. Their cultural world is fully
European. First, it is based on the European artistic heritage which is
44
Jorge Semprun, La Montagne blanche (Paris: Gallimard, Folio, 1986), p. 270.
45
Plot summary of La Montagne blanche and other novels which will be analysed in
this study can be found in Appendix 1.
46
Semprun, La Montagne blanche, p. 271.
47
Cesare Ripa, “Logica” (second entry), Iconologia (Rome, 1603), Erna Mandowsky
(ed.) (Hildesheim and New York: Georg Olms Verlag, 1970), p. 299; quoted in Mary
D. Garrard, Artemisia Gentileschi, The Image of the Female Hero in Italian Baroque
Art (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1989), p. 269.
EUROPA 111
truly cosmopolitan. Second, it reflects European history, above all the

despair and questioning subsequent to the events of the twentieth
century, specifically the concentration camps of the Second World
War. This brotherhood of the European cultural elite, very much akin
to the Republic of Letters, is so small that incest is a founding
metaphor. It is a metaphor for the “similarity”48 of Europeans and as
such for the strength of European identity. Diversity versus similarity
is a frequently debated European topic – the conclusion is usually the
balance of the two, reinforcing the classical reference to the golden
mean. Semprun always insists on cultural similarity within what he
considers European culture to be, and allows for diversity in other
domains.
Salvador de Madariaga exalts form as another typical
expression of the European spirit.49 The myth of Europa has survived
only as a structure provoking formal transformations, as myths do. All
the cultural and historical references that shape the European identity
are referred to as containers which are part of the common memory of
those sharing in it. As many sociologists and historians continue to
confirm “‘Europe’ and ‘European’ were, and are even now, cultural
rather than political, and historical rather than geographical terms
(...)”50
Semprun frequently refers to Husserl’s thoughts on Europe to
substantiate his vision of European history. At one point he quotes one
of Husserl’s idealistic statements:
Il y a dans l’Europe quelque chose d’un genre unique, que tous les autres
groupes humains eux-mêmes ressentent chez nous, et qui est pour eux,
indépendamment de toute question d’utilité, et même si leur volonté de
48
It is likely that the word “identity” originates from the same root as “similarity”:
“The formation out of Late Latin ident- was probably constructed from idem because
a need was felt to convey ‘sameness’ as a parallel form with similitas which expresses
the sense of ‘likeness’, but overlaps with identitas in the sense of ‘oneness’.” Robert
K. Barnhart (ed.), Chambers Dictionary of Etymology (New York: Chambers, 1988),
p. 505.
49
50
John Lukacs, Decline and Rise of Europe, a Study in Recent History with
Particular Emphasis on the Development of European Consciousness (Westport,
Connecticut: Greenwood Press Publishers, 1965), p. 6.
conserver leur esprit propre reste inentamée, une incitation à s’européaniser

cependant toujours davantage …51
There is something unique in Europe that is recognised in us by all other

human groups, too, something that, quite apart from any consideration of
utility, becomes an incitement for them to increasingly Europeanize
themselves, even if their will to preserve their own spirit remains intact …
Such a confirmation of the imperialism of the European spirit to

which non-Europeans voluntarily submit and bow is rarely heard
today. This is nowadays an old-fashioned thought, as it is widely
believed that Europe is no longer at the forefront of “progress” or at
“the centre” of the world. Furthermore, various forms of nationalism
are flaring up and achieving cultural recognition. European
imperialism which used to be military and then ecclesiastical is now
perhaps only cultural. Its strength is still surprising regardless of its
apparent decline. If Europe in Husserl’s statement is understood as a
cultural entity rather than a race, then all linguistic immigrants within
Europe, writers in particular, must find some truth in it for themselves.
It certainly still holds true not just for Semprun’s intellectual
characters, but also for most of those who have embraced a
cosmopolitan attitude in Europe. This voluntary desire to join the
giant pool of European culture is not just the pull of an older,
prestigious culture known for its ongoing diversity and unity, it is a
sign that Europeans are becoming ready to enjoy the benefits of the
supra-national identity which Husserl advocated.
When Karel finds out that the painting L’Enlèvement
d’Europe (The Abduction of Europa), held in the ducal palace in
Venice, was “abducted” (“enlevé”)52 by the French in 1797, during
Bonaparte’s invasion of Italy, this becomes for him an important and
amusing cultural fact. It extends the myth of Europa and gives it
crucial historical relevance. He considers using it as an “orchestration
narrative”, that is, a structural container, for his article for the
magazine L’Autre Europe (The Other Europe). The aggression of this
“cultural” abduction matches in spirit the warrior mentality without
51
Semprun, La Montagne blanche, p. 260. My translation based on Edmund Husserl,
The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, translated by
David Carr (Evanston: Northwestern University, 1970); “The Vienna Lecture”
delivered on 10th May 1935 appears in the appendix of this edition, p. 275.
52
EUROPA 113
which European cultural values would not have been built. It is also
yet another specular image, so dear to the European metacultural
spirit. The recognition of elements of European cultural identity
makes Semprun’s characters smile. In the highly fragmented existence
of the twentieth century, these cultural references have a founding
function. Semprun’s equivalent to Proust’s madeleine, La Montagne
blanche is also a “mot de passe” (“password”),53 if we take into
account the strong initiatic aspect of the novel. Like the madeleine, the
cultural references are a comforting reminder of who we are, where
we came from and what we are fighting for. This possibility of
memory is crucial to our identity.
Collective memory and hierarchy
La Montagne blanche functions as a reminder of the

importance of collective memory for building a common identity. In
Semprun’s Utopia, although the different characters’ multiplicity of
different feelings and views are associated with the shared memories,
the facts on which this memory is based remain largely unified. If this
were not the case, Semprun’s world would fall apart. The rigidity of
this single assumption can easily remind us of Semprun’s own long
personal political history as one of the strong proponents of dogmatic
communism. Equally, the assumption of one such certainty cannot but
be a necessity for self-preservation in the mind of an immigrant into
the French language and culture – however privileged he may be.
The wealth of information contained in the common pool of

memory is overwhelming and its logic is impeccable. As Paul Valéry
remarks the European
est une manière de monstre. Il a une mémoire trop chargée, trop entretenue.
Il a des ambitions extravagantes, une avidité de savoir et de richesses
illimitée. (…) Il est pris entre des souvenirs merveilleux et des espoirs
53
Semprun, La Montagne blanche, p. 230. George Steiner believes that the first
function of human language was speaking to oneself which subsequently developed
into a shared secrecy where the word was first of all a password. George Steiner,
Extra-territorial (New York: Atheneum, 1971), pp. 125 and 242.
démesurés, et s’il lui arrive de verser parfois dans le pessimisme, il songe

malgré lui que le pessimisme a produit quelques oeuvres de premier ordre.54
is a kind of monster. His memory is too full and too continuous. He has
extravagant ambitions, an unlimited greed for knowledge and wealth. (…)
He is caught between marvellous memories and immoderate hopes, and if
sometimes he tends to pessimism, he cannot help noting that pessimism has
produced certain works of art of the highest order.55
Antoine remembers what Karel is unsuccessfully trying to

recall. Antoine shares this knowledge with Karel and the reminder
acts as a bond between them despite Antoine’s reluctance to have
much to do with Karel. There is a clear, almost caste-like hierarchy in
Semprun’s cosmopolitan world. Antoine enjoys the greatest prestige
as the immigrant who has lived longest in France with the additional
advantage of officially possessing the woman who confers most
prestige (Franca). Juan is the next one in line and Karel is almost
looked down upon at times as the most recent immigrant who still has
to shed many of his national characteristics. The relationships of
respect between characters follow this hierarchy strictly. Furthermore,
it is the male relationships that are defining and important; women
function as almost invisible connectors between the male characters.
Such a chauvinistic Utopian vision can hardly be offensive when it
only reproduces reality, and a possibly slightly improved version of it,
at that. It is also in keeping with the mythic Europa’s role, assumed in
the novel by the character of Franca.
Franca holds a similar place to Europa in the hierarchical
structure of characters. It is not by chance that Franca’s name reminds
us of a Latinised version of France or of lingua franca (or possibly
even Derrida’s ville franche). As a perfect host, she is the channel of
communication amongst characters. The “ownership” of Franca
however is in contention. Karel decides not to try to seduce her after
finding out the culturally authoritative position of her husband,
Antoine. He also states with resigned indifference that as an exile
from “l’autre Europe souterraine” (“the other underground Europe”),
54
Paul Valéry, “Note (ou l’Européen)” (Revue universelle, 1924), Europes, de
l’antiquité au XXe siècle, Hersant and Durand-Bogaert (eds.), p. 419.
55
Translation from Paul Valéry, History and Politics: The Collected Works of Paul
Valery, Vol. 10, translated by Denise Folliot and Jackson Mathews (London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962), p. 315.
EUROPA 115
he is not in a position to court and abduct Europa. This is reserved for

Zeus, or the most powerful man. This idea also appears in caricature
in Romain Gary’s La Danse de Gengis Cohn which will be discussed
later in this chapter. Gary’s character, the nymphomaniac Lily, a
metaphor for humanity and Europe, has yet to find a man who can
satisfy her.56 It is only the powerful who can allow themselves the
luxury of cultivating and shaping the idea of Europe. All that is left to
mere mortals, even the cultural elite, is the simple joy of cultural
references within the common European memory.
Semprun alternates between, on one hand, the belief that the
literary or cultural reference is the most important element of his (or
any) identity and that it takes precedence over memory, and, on the
other hand, withdrawal into considering his experience of the
concentration camp as the only valid, and therefore the founding,
experience of his life.57 His works are a testament to this eternal battle
between good and bad, culture and history. Throughout his work
Semprun affirms that the concentration camps58 are an essentially
European phenomenon which strikes at the heart of the idea of Europe
and alters it irremediably.59 The smoke of concentration camps
shamefully and shamelessly creates a “nous” (an “us”):
56
Gary, La Danse de Gengis Cohn, p. 157.
57
Here we encounter one of the frequently recurring themes in Semprun’s work, that
of the incompatibility of literature and reality. This is also the main theme of André
Gide’s Paludes which features prominently in Semprun’s literary pantheon. Semprun
is reassured by the way Gide gives priority to writing: “L’écriture semble être faite
pour se substituer au réel, de sorte que le narrateur se réjouit de la défectuosité de son
expérience.” “Writing seems to be created as a substitute for reality so that the writer
rejoices in the imperfection of his experience.” David H. Walker, “L'écriture et le réel
dans les fictions d’André Gide”, Roman, réalités, réalismes, Jean Bessière (ed.)
(Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1989), p. 121, www.gidiana.net/
dossiers_critiques/textes_generaux/walker_reel.html.
58
Semprun finds the expression death camps disconcerting as it denies his survival, in
L’Algarabie, p. 345.
59
Semprun, La Montagne blanche, p. 111. As Colin Davis suggests “Buchenwald is
itself a symptom, a sign of something deeper, rather than the sole cause of the novel’s
traumatised textuality”. Furthermore, “In Semprun’s novel personal trauma is
associated with a more general view of Europe itself, which functions as a sort of
mythical lost object.” Colin Davis, “Recalling the Past: Jorge Semprun’s La
Montagne blanche (1986)”, French Fiction in the Mitterrand Years, Colin Davis and
Elizabeth Fallaize (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 75 and 79. All
representations of Europa discussed in this chapter (such as Franca in La Montagne
Même les anciens déportés du Goulag soviétique, disait Juan, dont la

mémoire recèle les mêmes trésors abominables, sans doute encore plus
riches, plus monstrueux que les nôtres, même eux, ne connaissent pas cette
odeur de fumée des crématoires sur les paysages de l’Europe. C’est notre
bien à nous, l’essence de notre vie!60
Even those deported to Soviet gulags, Juan said, whose memory conceals a
wealth of the same horrors, doubtless even richer, more monstrous than
ours, even they did not know this smell of crematorium smoke on the
landscapes of Europe. This is our very own wealth, the essence of our life!
In line with Kundera’s airian imagery, in contrast to that heavy odour

of smoke, the cultural reference invites the material imagination. It is
“l’oxygène de la vraie vie”,61 the sensuous pleasure of the smell of
books.
The French topos of Europe
The appropriation of L’Enlèvement d’Europe by the French in

1797 symbolises their laying claim to the idea of Europe. When
Avignon became the centre of European spiritual power, its defenders
claimed that it was better placed to be so than Rome, being equidistant
from the boundaries of the Christian world, that is Europe. Similarly,
Bonaparte’s invasion is an example in European history of France
presuming to become the strongest cultural influence in Europe.
Semprun’s European-minded characters have chosen to live in France.
This represents their inevitable cultural bias, constitutive of their
Europeanism on all levels.
France has long assumed it has special status within Europe.
Historically speaking, the Italian and French cultures are considered to
have contributed more than the others to European culture overall.62
blanche and Lily in La Danse de Gengis Cohn) assume the role of the lost mythical
object which has to be mourned.
60
61
Semprun, La Montagne blanche, p 213. “the oxygen of real life”
62
“Since the fifteenth century, as a result of contacts with the courts in Italy and with
French culture, that is, the culture of the French kings, these national cultures, while
retaining their own character, yet acquired a more ‘European’ aspect as well.”
Rietbergen, Europe, a Cultural History, p. 270.
EUROPA 117
The French intelligentsia views Europe somewhat as an extension of

French culture. Not only the French, but other Europeans, perceive the
French cultural identity and national character as the epitome of
Europeanism. Some of the authors whose work is explored in this
book, including Semprun and Gary, express similar feelings from their
immigrant perspective. The present decline of French cultural prestige
is not felt in the way immigrant writers, particularly those of other
European origins, share their appropriated vision of French and
European culture. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why the French
cultural scene has so apparently easily accepted immigrant writers
who continue to celebrate the French language.
Semprun’s European cultural universe, a territory of heritage
as much as imagination, draws its unified and contained character
from the European identity as it was before the First World War, and
to a lesser degree, before the Second World War. It is based on the
journeys the cultural elite used to undertake and on the culturally
unified Europe of the years preceding the Second World War, a
Europe which was already aware of the dangers ahead, being warned
by Husserl and others.
Psychoanalysts who have researched the mental development
of linguistic immigrants stress the importance of various mother
figures, and that of the respective languages of these figures, for the
language acquisition of the immigrants in childhood.63 Semprun
relates the Francophile tendencies of the European identity to the
frequency with which French nannies were employed throughout
Europe to bring up and educate children in aristocratic and wealthier
middle-class families. He stresses, tongue in cheek, the erotic
undertones of this inadvertent initiation to French culture.
Kafka, Kundera and Central European cultural references
In literary terms, Kafka stands permanently at the centre of

Semprun’s cultural universe, with inevitable reference to other Central
European and European writers of similar stature. In La Montagne
blanche this is accentuated by the presence of the Czech character,
Karel, who in addition to being responsible for the title of this novel
63
Amati Mehler, Argentieri, Canestri, The Babel of the Unconscious.
(Bila Hora being a landmark in Prague as well as an important

historical reference)64 is a stereotype of the Czech intellectual émigré.
His character is heavily indebted to Kundera’s literary world, in
particular to the concepts and imagery of L’Insoutenable Légèreté de
l’être. In fact Semprun takes Kundera’s novel as a blueprint for the
Czech experience of voluntary exile. Such adopted literary influences
bring with them associated ideas which take on a life of their own.
One of the most striking examples is the theme of incest, omnipresent
on several levels of the novel, from the narrative level to that of
literary references, almost becoming a stylised allegory for European
identity.
We again feel the powerful presence of Kundera when Karel’s
drunken dream functions as a structural interlude. Although told at a
chronological point when Karel falls asleep before the narrative
climax, it coincides, if indeed dreams remembered are those which
occur prior to waking, with the most intense moments of crisis
experienced by the other characters who have remained awake. Karel
walks through an endless series of apartments on the same floor
without ever having to open doors, seeing either couples of the same
sex asleep in bed together or prostitutes in a brothel. The more he
advances – and he advances purposefully, not paying too much
attention to what he encounters – the more remote seems the
likelihood of his reaching the end of this series. At this point, as if the
dreamer perceives the pure metaphysical message of the dream which
he feels he has to destroy at any price, various surrealistically
unrelated elements invade the dream, and it loses its clear thread and
deteriorates. The beginning of the dream reflects Karel’s thoughts of
the day, about giving up his libertine lifestyle. At the same time, it
becomes a strong metaphor for the experience of immigration: always
travelling further and betraying further, without ever reaching the
meaningful end the immigrant has promised himself. Furthermore, the
64
The battle of Bila Hora (White Mountain), on the 8th November 1620 between
European Catholics and Czech Protestants, resulted in the exile of Protestants from
the Czech territory: a major local event, considered minor by European historians.
The battle of Bila Hora stopped the expansion of the Czech language in Europe and as
such also symbolises the marginalisation of some European languages and cultures.
The Jewish cemetery where Karel had to work is also located at Bila Hora. The title of
La Montagne blanche also alludes to Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain (La Montagne
magique in French translation) as well as “une montagne de livres” in Jorge Semprun,
Le Grand Voyage (Paris: Gallimard, 1963), p. 88.
EUROPA 119
presence of the same-sex couples suggests the unsatisfying monotony

of sameness, a metaphor closely related to the European incest
imagery and the European understanding of cultural identity.
According to Claude Lévi-Strauss, as opposed to Amerindian myths
and popular beliefs, those of Europe always represent twins as
completely identical.65 It is tempting to draw a parallel between the
representation of twins in myth and the understanding of cultural
identity. Chapter four discusses this incest and doubling imagery in
more detail.
Juan’s play, which brought him and Karel in contact, is
centred around Kafka. Kafka’s family formally interrogates him after
he has broken off his engagement with Felice Bauer. The event very
much resembles a trial from Kafka’s fiction. In the background of the
scene are Grillparzer, Dostoïevski and Flaubert talking about Kleist’s
suicide and debating whether married life or any sort of life is harmful
to writing. It is to this fraternity of writers or artists that Juan, Antoine
and Karel have chosen to belong.
In Romantic fashion, Kafka’s grave becomes a meeting place
for similarly-minded intellectuals, marginalised in one way or another.
Through apparently minor but vital references to initiation (endowed
with the charm of secrecy and exclusivity), Semprun establishes the
transmission of heritage as the most relevant force of self-preservation
and continuance. Even the joy the received knowledge brings is vital,
originating from or resulting in a fortuitous complicity. The libertine
sharing of women results in a transmission of experiences as well, and
this too is considered part of progress.
Semprun, like Kundera, generates certain characters from a
metaphysical notion or a literary reference. The omnipresent idea of
Europe, the wider context for the narration, envelops such a creation.
Likewise the impression is created that the characters themselves have
stumbled across the thought of Europe by speculation and thus
affirmed its existence or even created it.
In La Montagne blanche Semprun uses a chess metaphor for
Europe, where the match between Korchnoï and Karpov represents the
East-West division of Europe. The dissident Korchnoï does not simply
stand for the values of Western Europe. More importantly, he is a
symbol for the dissident individualism of Eastern Europe which is
65
Claude Lévi-Strauss, Histoire de Lynx (Paris: Plon, 1991), pp. 303-304.
losing its running battle against the communist state collectivism.

Indeed “totalitarianism, the power of absolute control, is as much a
European invention as liberal democracy.”66 The strength of the
individual character of both players is exalted, accentuating the tragic
quality of the encounter. Karel, a dissident himself, almost
masochistically enjoys this losing battle, which in effect replays the
persecution he suffered in Prague.
In his book-length “récit-confession” (confession narrative)
La Nuit sera calme where he is interviewed by François Bondy67,
Romain Gary voices a very similar chess metaphor for Europe:
Mais dès qu’on se met à parler “indépendance européenne”, on fait

semblant d’oublier que la valeur “Europe” a été lancée en 1947-49 comme
un contenu idéologique concurrentiel face à l’offre communiste, un “nous
aussi, nous avons quelque chose à proposer”. On était alors à la recherche
d’une dynamique de parade et “faire Europe” fut d’abord une nouvelle pièce
dialectique sur l’échiquier de la guerre froide. 68
But as soon as they start talking about “European independence”, they seem
to forget that the value called “Europe” was launched in 1947-49 as an
ideological content to rival the communist offer, a certain “we too have
something to offer”. We were then seeking a dynamic, or an outward show
thereof, and “creating Europe” was at the start a new dialectical piece on the
Cold War chessboard.
The interweaving of totalitarianism and democracy in

European history seems unique. Amongst other developments, it has
led to an essential rift between Western and Eastern Europe which is
nowadays slowly starting to heal. This rift has conditioned many of
today’s cultural phenomena, but that does not justify basing on
political facts any judgements about cultural contribution. The
reintegration of Eastern and Central Europe into the current political
landscape of Europe is not only important for the historical reason of
the past glories of this region. The cultural heritage of these less-
western parts of Europe forms an integral spontaneous part of
66
The Idea of Europe, Brian Nelson, David Roberts and Walter Veit (eds.), p. 17.
67
According to Fabrice Larat in Romain Gary, Un itin¡raire europ¡en and Myriam
Anissimov in Romain Gary le caméléon (Paris: Denoël, 2004), the interview never
took place and Gary wrote the entire book himself in a gesture typical of Gary’s need
to mislead his critics.
68
Gary, La Nuit sera calme, pp. 84-85.
EUROPA 121
European culture which authors like Semprun and Kundera are trying
to reinstate with a legitimate sense of urgency.
La princesse de légende (La Danse de Gengis Cohn)

Beauty and betrayal in European art
Gary’s Princesse de légende is a compact ironic euphemism

for one of the overwhelming characteristics of European culture, the
glorification of Woman in art.69 The passion for sanctifying beauty,
purity and therefore art and artistic heritage, is the irrational current
which accompanies the crude historical and physical reality. It lends
itself to ridicule only too easily, but Gary insists that “le rire est le
propre de l’homme”.70 Only laughter can embrace both the high
aspirations and the low yield of existence. The princesse de légende is
humanity, or Europe as the cradle of that humanity, but could also be
France, the Madonna, Europa71 or Mona Lisa. Gary plays with the
versatility of his find and never clarifies which of the many myths of
universal femininity or humanity he is referring to exactly. The
essence of the female allegory is to mark the contrast between
European reality and art, the real and the imaginary:
On a tort de dire que nous croyons, nous autres, à un Dieu sévère,

impitoyable. Ce n’est pas vrai. Nous savons que Dieu n’est pas inaccessible
à la pitié. Il a ses moments de distraction, comme tout le monde: parfois, il
oublie un homme, et ça fait une vie heureuse.
Je pense à cet étudiant qui avait essayé de mutiler la Joconde. C’était un

pur. Il avait horreur du cynisme.72
69
It is inspired by de Gaulle’s poetic reference to France as “princesse des contes”
(“fairytale princess”) and “madonne aux fresques des murs” (“madonna of the
frescoes”).
70
Gary, La Danse de Gengis Cohn, p. 45. “laughter is peculiar to man”
71
The myth of Europa could even find a literal equivalent in Gary’s vision of history
as the endlessly reiterated rape of humanity’s great dream.
72
Gary, La Danse de Gengis Cohn, p. 37. The student who lacerated Mona Lisa
reappears in Romain Gary, Europa, p. 495. The laceration of Mona Lisa never
happened in reality. Gary’s invention is likely to be based on an event which
happened on December 30th 1956 when a Bolivian man named Ugo Ungaza Villegas,
having stared at the painting for hours, threw a rock at it, permanently damaging the
pigment near the left elbow.
They are wrong to say of us that we believe in a severe, merciless God. That
is not true. We know that God is receptive to pity. He has his moments of
absentmindedness, like everyone else: sometimes, he forgets a man, and that
makes one happy life.
I’m thinking of that student who tried to deface Mona Lisa. He was the real
thing. He loathed cynicism.
Those who are not able to reconcile themselves to the

duplicity of existence are both “blessed” because they are left behind
by the mainstream’s acceptance, but are also an inspiring presence, a
reminder to the rest of us of the compromises we make daily.
Gary’s character Cohn experiences both fear and desire
(feelings closely connected with the myth of Europa) at the thought of
being turned into a work of art himself. The ideal of art is in itself in
contradiction with justice, fairness and decency according to Gary’s
purely ethical understanding of aesthetics.73 He is outraged at the
immorality of the development which Nietzsche analysed so
admirably:
Almost everything we call “higher culture” is founded on the

spiritualization and internalisation of cruelty – that is my proposition; that
“wild animal” has not been killed-off at all, it lives, it thrives, it has simply
– made itself divine.74
Gary like Semprun maintains that in order to be a powerful

means of preserving life and sanity, art must transcend and therefore
betray reality:
Ce qui m’étonne encore, figurez-vous, c’est la beauté de la Joconde. C’est

assez curieux, les chefs-d’oeuvre, vous ne trouvez pas? Vous ne trouvez pas
qu’ils ont quelque chose de dégueulasse? Je dis ça comme ça, à propos de
bottes. Mettez-vous dans un trou qu’on vous aura fait creuser en famille,
regardez les mitraillettes et pensez à la Joconde. Vous verrez que ce sourire
... Tfou. Ignoble.75
What still surpises me, would you believe it, is the beauty of Mona Lisa.
Masterpieces are peculiar, don’t you think? Don’t you find they have
73
Paul Audi, “Réflexions sur l’Europe d’Europa” in Romain Gary et la pluralité des
mondes, Mireille Sacotte (ed.) (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2002), p. 25.
74
From Beyond Good and Evil, Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 164.
75
EUROPA 123
something disgusting about them? I just say it like that, for no reason at all.
Get into a hole which they’ve made you dig with your family, look at the
machine guns and think about Mona Lisa. You will see that that smile …
Ugh. Revolting.
This incredibly strong survival instinct of the human race is immoral.

It is disrespectful to the suffering and yet it is the only way to appease
that suffering. The greatness of European art and heritage is owed to
this betrayal – it is what the European spirit does best. Kundera also
explores this aspect of betrayal which generates art through the
character of Sabine of L’Insoutenable Légèreté de l’être.
Cultural naturalisation
Within the context of European culture, naturalisation has

positive connotations of belonging and enriching. It also highlights the
fact that Europe likes to consider itself the home of a globally liberal
attitude towards newcomers. The story of La Danse de Gengis Cohn is
written in a farcical and cynical tone from the perspective of a Jewish
ghost haunting a former Nazi. Cohn is the “locataire clandestin”,76 a
theme dear to Gary, a naturalised immigrant himself. Despite the Nazi
attempts to annihilate the Jews, Jewishness has been absorbed into the
German and European mind, almost more deeply, Gary seems to
suggest, than if the Nazi concentration camps had not happened.
Naturalisation is another theme of ridicule for Gary, but that does not
detract at all from his obvious cynical idealisation of Europe and its
culture.
Gary and Semprun also use the theme of Jewishness to
pinpoint their allegiance to Europe and its culture. They perceive in
the Jews a nomadic spirit they could identify with77, one that excels at
the careful preservation of its culture regardless of where fate throws
it. Semprun believes that the destruction of the Jewish communities
(cosmopolitan in essence) is still felt as a fundamental absence or lack
in the Europe of today.78 Kundera also acknowledges the essential
76
Gary, La Danse de Gengis Cohn, p. 54. “illegal lodger”
77
Gary was Jewish, but often felt the need to conceal or misrepresent this fact.
Anissimov, Romain Gary le caméléon.
78
Jorge Semprun’s talk Europe, My Europe, 29th January 2002, Institut Français in
London. Gary expresses a similar view in two interviews “Un picaro moderne” and
culturally cosmopolitan and European spirit of the Jews in his speech

given on the occasion of being awarded a prestigious literary prize in
Israel.79
Although during his life Gary shared a strong allegiance to
France in a patriotic sense, in his work he questions the nuances and
ambiguities of the relationship a naturalised foreigner has with various
cultural values and pressures. Along with the positive aspect of a
multicultural society, Gary does not forget to stress the “bigger”
cultures’ power of absorption. Cohn might be torturing Schatz and
influencing his behaviour most of the time, but Cohn is invisible to
everyone else but Schatz. Similarly to the fate of an immigrant in any
multicultural society today, Cohn’s strong individuality as well as his
strong affiliation and belonging to his cultural group are
unacknowledged. They are absorbed undigested into the
consciousness of the cultural majority.
The myth of Lily and Florian
In La Danse de Gengis Cohn, Lily is the aberrant incarnation

of the ideal of the princesse de légende (fairytale princess). The
Baronne von Pritwitz is a cultured, frigid woman d’une beauté
aveuglante,80 a perfect beauty who disappears with her gamekeeper
Florian (an incarnation of Death) in search of a man who can satisfy
her. She is willing to try out any idea in the hope that it will lead to
happiness. Her life is a parody on European history. Gary suggests
that her search for happiness is doomed never to succeed. He uses the
methods she has tried out or intends to try, such as religion and
psychoanalysis, to mock the various forms of faith European history
has generated. The Baronne appears to be too demanding, thus
portraying Europe’s immoderate ambitions. She dreams of things
lasting, and yet she has no memory herself. Immoderate as she is, she
can only exist in the developed countries, that is, in the West.81
“Genghis Cohn c’est moi” in Jean-François Hangouët and Paul Audi (eds.), Romain
Gary (Paris: Editions de l’Herne, 2005), pp. 12 and 37.
79
Kundera, L’Art du roman, p. 189.
80
Gary, La Danse de Gengis Cohn, p. 132. “a dazzling beauty”
81
Gary, La Danse de Gengis Cohn, p 243.
EUROPA 125
Florian kills all Lily’s unsuccessful lovers. Like all those who
succumb to art or the European ideal, Lily’s victims die with ecstatic
expressions on their faces. The incarnation of Europe itself in La
Danse de Gengis Cohn seems to be a punishment for the abstraction
of European art and the European ideal. In its apparently pure pursuit
of culture, Europe has neglected the suffering, the basic reality of life,
that now exacts vengeance. The ideal couple, Lily and Florian, a frigid
woman and a eunuch, form a new version of the European myth:
Je suis simplement heureux de savoir que Lily va bien et que Florian veille
toujours sur elle. Ils font un très bon couple, et, tant que l’humanité durera,
ce couple sera inséparable. Je le dis sans rancoeur. J’aime les belles
légendes, moi aussi, qu’est-ce que vous croyez.82
I am simply happy to know that Lily is well and that Florian still watches
over her. They make a very good couple, and for as long as humanity lasts,
that couple will be inseparable. I say it without bitterness. I too like
beautiful legends, what do you think.
Je connais Lily et je connais Florian, et nul ne sait mieux que moi ce dont ils
sont capables. C’est une très vieille affaire qui est depuis longtemps à la
recherche de sa propre solution et qui risque fort de la trouver bientôt. C’est
aussi, incontestablement, une belle histoire d’amour, et qui n’a pas fini de
faire couler au moins autant d’art que de sang: bref, il y a là tout ce qu’il
faut pour faire une légende. Je ne puis m’empêcher d’éprouver une certaine
sympathie pour le Baron, lorsqu’il fait avec tant de conviction et de lyrisme
le portrait de Lily. Il a raison. Elle est très belle. Elle est aussi irrésistible.
Moi qui vous parle, par exemple, je l’aime encore. Je suis prêt à tout lui
pardonner. Lorsqu’il s’agit de Lily, je perds tous mes moyens comiques. Je
verse dans le sentimentalisme, dans le lyrisme bêlant. Je n’arrête pas de lui
trouver des excuses. Je mets tout sur le dos des nazis, des communistes, des
individus, j’accuse les Allemands, les Français, les Américains, les Chinois.
Je lui fabrique des alibis. Je suis toujours prêt à témoigner qu’elle n’était pas
sur les lieux du crime, mais dans un musée, dans une cathédrale, avec
Schweitzer, en train de soigner les lépreux, ou avec Fleming, en train de
découvrir la pénicilline. Je suis le premier à bouillir d’indignation
lorsqu’une voix s’élève pour crier que c’est une détraquée, une
nymphomane. La vérité est que j’en suis toujours très amoureux et que je
pense à elle tout le temps. Un amour comme le mien est non seulement
indestructible, mais encore grandit tout ce qu’il touche.83
82
83
I know Lily and I know Florian, and no one knows better than I what they
are capable of. This a very old story which has been looking for a resolution
for a very long time and is in great danger of finding it soon. It is also,
without a doubt, a beautiful love story which never stopped inspiring at least
as much art as it has split blood: in short, it contains everything necessary to
become a legend. I cannot help feeling somewhat sorry for the Baron when
he evokes Lily with so much conviction and lyricism. He is right. She is
beautiful. She is also irresistible. I who am talking to you, for instance, I
still love her. I am ready to forgive her everything. When there’s anything to
do with Lily, I lose all my comical abilities. I lapse into sentimentality,
inane lyricism. I never stop finding excuses for her. I blame the Nazis, the
communists, or individuals for everything; I accuse the Germans, the
French, the Americans, the Chinese. I create alibis for her. I am always
ready to testify that she was not at the scene of the crime, but in a museum,
a cathedral, with Schweitzer, nursing lepers, or with Fleming discovering
penicillin. I am the first to boil with indignation when a voice is raised to
exclaim that she is insane, a nymphomaniac. The truth is that I am still very
much in love with her and that I think about her all the time. Love like mine
is not only indestructible, but it also magnifies everything it touches.
This is the core of Gary’s declaration of his humanism and

Europeanism. The story of Lily and Florian is a metaphor for the
tortured history of Europe; it is a story of a “cultured” continent which
through its unbelievably naive idealism causes bloodshed and
suffering to its peoples. They, in turn, take their suffering gallantly in
the name of the same higher European ideal of art and heritage, which
apparently cannot be tarnished even by Europe’s horrendous record.
This is what makes Europe in a certain sense indestructible – her drive
for perfection, accompanied by an idealism too naïve for her age; as
well as the masochism that induces Europe, and humanity in general,
to take more massacres and more destruction. Despite this acute
awareness of the failings of the European ideal, Gary claims when
talking about Lily – apparently tongue-in-cheek, although true belief
easily transpires – that “Il faut l’aider à se réaliser. Nul homme n’a le
droit de renoncer à cette mission.”84
84
Gary, La Danse de Gengis Cohn, pp. 227-228. “She must be helped to fulfil herself.
No man has the right to give up this mission.”
EUROPA 127
The aristocratic ideal of humanity
As a European ideal, Lily is bait for death. She also here

becomes the symbol for the whole of humanity: on one hand the
totality of the population as an abstract quantity, on the other
humanity, exchangeable with Mona Lisa, as a work of art and
possession whose rightful owner claims to be Baron von Pritwitz, an
aristocrat by origin and temperament. Gary laughs at the Baron’s and
his friend’s aristocratic belief in art over action: “On sent que leur
patience est à bout, qu’ils vont rentrer chez eux et lire un beau
poème.”85
He also ridicules the fact that “les deux natures d’élite”86 are
not in touch with reality and claim ignorance, neutrality and good
upbringing as an excuse for inaction. Aristocrats have initiated the
concept of Europe and continually claim its ownership, even though it
has escaped into the world and causes havoc as a mal aimé (ill-loved).
Aristocrats have known how to love this ideal (or so they claim),
purely spiritually, whilst the crude simple love of ordinary people (“la
plèbe”) is not satisfactory. One only sees the ideal as a
nymphomaniac, a lunatic frigid woman condemned to failure, if one
does not believe in her: “Il faut savoir l’aimer. Personne ne sait
l’aimer vraiment. Alors, elle cherche. Elle se désespère. Elle fait des
bêtises.”87
The European ideal is malformed and as such it is a perfect
subject for a tragic love story. Gary makes a political point here, but
does so as a novelist. He makes the most of the situation to produce an
ambivalent and complex insight into the state of the European ideal
whilst using apparently crude comparisons.
85
Gary, La Danse de Gengis Cohn, p. 130. “One senses that their patience is running
out and that they will go home and read a beautiful poem.” Gary seems to have named
his character after Friedrich von Prittwitz, German ambassador to the US, who was
the only higher-ranking diplomat to resign in protest against the Nazi government in
1933.
86
Gary, La Danse de Gengis Cohn, p. 132. “the two elite types”
87
Gary, La Danse de Gengis Cohn, p. 90. “We have to know how to love her. No one
really knows how to love her. So, she is searching. She is despairing. She is making
mistakes.”
Europe or Europa as inspiration to art
In Gary’s cynical and idealistic vision of humanity, both

victims and persecutors contribute to humanity’s glory. Europe (or
Humanity) and her faithful follower Death, that is Lily and Florian88 –
– the grandest couple of murderers of all time – “laissent toujours
beaucoup de littérature sur leur passage”. 89 In the same vein, Cioran
further deforms the caricature:
L’Europe n’offre pas encore assez de décombres pour que l’épopée y

fleurisse. Cependant tout fait prévoir que, jalouse de Troie et prête à
l’imiter, elle fournira des thèmes si importants que le roman et la poésie n’y
suffiront plus … 90
Europe does not yet have enough ruins for the epic genre to flourish.
However, everything allows us to anticipate that Europe, jealous of Troy
and eager to imitate her, will provide topics of such magnitude that novels
and poetry will no longer be adequate …
Almost competing as to who could insult her more, Gary and Cioran
are both experts in vitriolic humour, rejoicing to find ever wittier
criticisms to ridicule Europe’s pretences and her violence. Cioran sees
Europe as so deteriorated that she’s not even capable of giving her
decadence a fittingly noble expression. Cioran’s Europe used to be
like Lily and has become like aged Malwina (Gary’s character in
Europa): “L’Europe, coquette et intraitable, était dans la fleur de
l’âge; – décrépite aujourd’hui, elle n’excite plus personne.”91
But Lily does not leave only literature in her wake; all art
finds ultimate inspiration in Humanity symbolised by a beautiful
woman:
88
Florian is also a name of a historically famous caffè with Revolutionary anti-
royalist associations on the Piazza San Marco in Venice, frequented, amongst others,
by Casanova, Lord Byron, Goethe, Madame de Staël, Chateaubriand, Charles
Dickens, Marcel Proust and Rousseau.
89
Gary, La Danse de Gengis Cohn, p. 168. “always leave plenty of literature in their
wake”
90
E. M. Cioran, Syllogismes de l’amertume, in Œuvres (Paris: Quarto Gallimard,
1995), p. 752. This statement was originally published in 1952.
91
Cioran, Syllogismes de l’amertume, in Œuvres, p. 772. “Europe, flirtatious and
uncompromising, was at the peak of her powers; – decrepit today, she no longer
excites anyone.”
EUROPA 129
Je vois Lily apparaître parmi les ruines. Aussitôt, une cascade se jette à ses
pieds, des paons se placent sur les branches des arbres et font des effets de
miniature persane, des chérubins de Raphaël commencent à froufrouter
autour d’elle, des licornes se mettent à gambader, Dürer se précipite,
chapeau bas, s’agenouille et attend une commande, Donizetti se déchaîne,
Watteau soigne le charme, Hans Holbein le Jeune étale son Christ assassiné
à ses pieds pour lui donner un air de Vierge, et aussitôt des centaines de
Christ se disposent un peu partout, avec un sens aigu de la composition,
pour le bonheur de l’oeil. (…) Bref, tout l’art des siècles saute à pieds joints
dans la balance et rétablit l’équilibre budgétaire malgré les centaines de
millions d’exterminés, il n’y a plus de débit, il n’y a plus de déficit, la
fécondité créatrice est telle autour de notre princesse de légende que le sang
et les immondices sont instantanément recouverts par ses serviteurs, elle
retrouve sa virginité.92
I see Lily appear among the ruins. At the same instant a waterfall throws
itself at her feet, peacocks take up their positions on the tree branches,
preening as in Persian miniatures, Raphael’s cherubs begin to rustle around
her, unicorns start leaping about, Dürer springs forward hat in hand, kneels
down and awaits a commission, Donizetti is unleashed, Watteau cultivates
charm, Hans Holbein the Younger displays his murdered Christ at her feet
to make her look like the Virgin, and immediately hundreds of Christs are
placed everywhere, with a strong feeling for composition, for the pleasure
of the eye. (…) In short, all the art of the centuries jumps with both feet into
the balance and re-establishes the budgetary equilibrium despite the
hundreds of millions of exterminations, there is no more debit, there is no
more deficit; so great is the creative fertility around our fairytale princess
that the blood and filth are instantly covered by her servants and she
recovers her virginity.
The desperate Romanticism and the crudeness of the myth (“L’absolu,

ça ne se mange pas avec les doigts”)93 are additionally ridiculed
through occasional echoes of Die Freischütz and mythic figures such
as the lady with the unicorn, with the sound of the hunting horn
creating a self-aware, artificial, sinister suspense. Europa is an
extraordinary inspiration to art, despite or even through having
“vraiment l’air très putain”.94 In contrast to Kundera who tries to
establish a very clear line between art and kitsch in his fictional world,
Gary uses false logic to blur the boundaries between them. Kundera’s
Eastern European puritan attitude to kitsch is not tenable in Gary’s
92
Gary, La Danse de Gengis Cohn, pp. 133-4.
93
Gary, La Danse de Gengis Cohn, p. 196. “You can’t eat the absolute with your
fingers”
94
Gary, La Danse de Gengis Cohn, p. 202. “very much the look of a prostitute”
world which always tries to contain the totality of human experience,

mixing the good with the bad in a haphazard manner which
caricatures life. He makes clear that the sublimated source of art is not
as abstract as it might seem in the mythification of heritage, nor is it
an allegory: “Car inutile de vous dire que Lily n’a rien d’allégorique:
c’est une créature de notre chair et de notre sang.”95 This allows him
to play, literalising the metaphors as far as he can, and then freely
bringing back the abstract elements when the literalising process has
been exhausted.
Florian, a symbol of death, whose love is eminently suited to
Europe because entirely abstract, is a true artist. There is a perceptible
inflation of the value of human life in relation to art, exemplified to
perfection by the history of Europe. Florian used to work “for the love
of art” at the time when only one life, that of Christ, was enough to
generate an abundance of masterpieces. Now art has become more
expensive. As Gary ironically states, without all this violence, the
world would be truly barbaric because without art.96
Humanists are blind to the true destructiveness of Lily. Like
Cohn, they do not want to lose what is entirely a product of their
imagination. Primordial human idealisation is almost untarnished
despite all of Gary’s make-believe efforts. For one moment in the
novel it appears that even Florian is more scrupulous than Lily. Her
perfume is gas. But the perfect couple are soon back in one and the
same frame of mind, ready for more destruction.
Europa
Malwina and Erika
A female metaphor for the duality of Europe is carried

forward in Gary’s novel Europa. The complete irreconcilability
between the reality and the ideal of Europe is represented by the
vision of two different women in the deranged mind of the French
ambassador in Rome, Jean Danthès.
95
Gary, La Danse de Gengis Cohn, p. 174. “For I hardly need to tell you that there is
nothing allegorical about Lily: she is a creature of our flesh and blood.”
96
EUROPA 131
Both mother Malwina and daughter Erika are in love with

Danthès, of the dying breed of cultured aristocratic Europeans, one
who upholds European culture as the highest value in his life.
Malwina is malevolent, as her name suggests. A witch, and a former
prostitute now confined to a wheelchair following a car accident,
Malwina has grown ugly, vindictive and scheming. Throughout the
novel, the question whether she herself was behind the wheel and
therefore responsible for the accident which crippled her or whether it
was Danthès, remains suspended in ambiguity as each denies
responsibility and blames the other.
Malwina is trying to use her young and beautiful daughter
Erika to destroy Danthès in revenge for his having abandoned her
twenty-five years previously. If we take into consideration the time
this novel was written (1972), the break-up between Danthès and
Malwina would coincide with the Second World War. Erika, on the
other hand, is the pure face of Europa, but a face which shows her
dark side in what seem to her to be moments of amnesia and mental
disturbance. There is no question of rape, as the narrator concludes
from the photographs submitted to him: Erika fully participates in and
enjoys orgies with the Nazis or the two brutes, one from the East, the
other from the West (representing the two powers surrounding Europe
during the cold war). Facing up to the truth about this lost time, in
addition to finally finding out from her mother that she is in fact
Danthès’ daughter, is more than Erika can cope with. As Gary
explains: “Chaque fois que l’Europe eut à faire face à sa propre nature
– une réalité sociale inacceptable – elle s’est réfugiée dans la folie, une
folie meurtrière.”97 As exemplified in Erika’s withdrawal from reality
and suicide, wars, atrocities and totalitarianism are expressions of the
inability of Europe to integrate its aspirations with its reality:
Chaque fois que la beauté de son domaine imaginaire se mettait à lui dicter
une éthique et sommait ainsi l’Europe de vivre ses mythes, celle-ci fuyait
dans la folie, plutôt que de se mesurer avec la tâche, ou acceptait de se
protéger contre les “chants de sirène” de sa culture par la carapace
totalitaire.98
97
Gary, Europa, p. 174. “Every time Europe had to face its own nature – an
unacceptable social reality – it took refuge in madness, murderous madness.”
98
Whenever the beauty of its imaginary domain began to dictate an ethic and
thus to call on Europe to live out its myths, Europe fled into madness rather
than rising to the task, or accepted the protection of the totalitarian carapace
against the “siren song” of its culture.
In contrast to Gary’s other fiction, a cyclical understanding of time

prevails in Europa and La Danse de Gengis Cohn, his most
pessimistic works according to JÀrn Boisen.99 The picture Gary paints
of Europe might seem extremely negative, but it is always
accompanied in his writing by the presence of a genuine ideal of
Europe, the unquestioning acceptance of the value of European art and
a humorous narrative technique.
Fabrice Larat claims that the consistency of Gary’s idealism
for Europe in his writing is in contradiction with his actual
disappointment with Europe in real life.100 However, as much
idealistic cynicism seems to transpire from his fiction as from his
other statements of opinion. On the other hand, despite his highly
idealistic and overwhelming affinity with a European identity, in the
political dimension, and possibly influenced by De Gaulle, Gary could
not envisage a supra-national identity. This impasse, together with the
alienation he experienced working in the diplomatic service, could
have been the real-life impetus behind the creation of Europa.
The image of the eighteenth century
Like Europe, Erika is not mentally strong enough to be able to

incorporate her past into her present. The eighteenth century that she
thinks she is visiting during her moments of absence is the sheltered
time of heritage that is the fundamental basis for Gary’s idea of
Europe. Like her mother Malwina who lives in an imaginary world
wherein the French Revolution had failed, Erika, although not as
obsessed by the eighteenth century as her mother, considers it a strong
mental point of reference, particularly in relation to her dreams and
fantasies. She can only recognise Danthès, for instance, if he is
wearing his eighteenth-century attire. How comical and out-of-date
99
JÀrn Boisen, Un picaro métaphysique, Romain Gary et l’art du roman (Odense:
Odense University Press, 1996), p. 288.
100
Larat, Romain Gary, Un itin¡raire europ¡en, pp. 75-76.
EUROPA 133
the ultimate European seems from this depiction. The reader can also
recognise an ironically simplified and distorted cliché vision of the
aristocratic life prior to the French Revolution in Gary’s description of
a trip Danthès and Erika undertake:
C’était un parc aimable où l’on s’arrêtait tous les dix pas pour priser du
tabac et échanger des propos sur l’immortalité de l’âme, où l’on s’asséyait
sur un banc pour philosopher agréablement et ramener l’éternité et l’infini à
la divertissante dimension d’un jeu de quilles. La mort était renvoyée dans
les communs; on n’en parlait pas. Le peuple n’existait que comme sagesse
populaire et valet de comédie; on savait que l’art de vivre consistait à éviter
les désagréments et à choisir sa compagnie. Le mot “révolution” évoquait
uniquement le mouvement des astres.101
It was a charming garden where one would stop every few yards to take a
pinch of snuff and exchange remarks on the immortality of the soul; where
one would sit on the bench and philosophise pleasantly, bringing eternity
and infinity down to the amusing proportions of a game of skittles. Death
was banished to the outhouses; it was not talked about. The common people
only existed in the form of popular wisdom or a valet in a play. Everyone
knew that the art of living consisted in avoiding displeasure and choosing
one’s company. The word “revolution” referred solely to the movement of
the stars.
Gary uses the contrast between the aristocracy and the bas
people (the lowest classes), which he always sketches with intense
elliptical irony, as a fecund and elegant literary method for providing a
simple and logical explanation of the course of history – the advent of
the French Revolution with its share of mortality. The described
idyllic (in the Kunderian sense) and protected self-containedness of
the aristocratic world evokes a certain perverse nostalgia for this era.
The pleasantness of this life is based on an essential rejection – Gary
condemns it, but also enjoys a rambling reminiscence of its pleasures.
Other literary immigrants such as Kundera and Cioran also
use images of the eighteenth century as a point of reference and have
an ambiguous nostalgic relationship with this time. In La Lenteur
Kundera exalts the purposefully slow and lucid pleasure-seeking and
enjoyment of Ancien Régime:
Pourquoi le plaisir de la lenteur a-t-il disparu? Ah, où sont-ils, les flâneurs

d’antan? (…) Un proverbe tchèque définit leur douce oisiveté par une
101
Gary, Europa, pp. 337-8.
métaphore: ils contemplent les fenêtres du bon Dieu. Celui qui contemple
les fenêtres du bon Dieu ne s’ennuie pas; il est heureux.102
Why has the enjoyment of slowness disappeared? Ah, where are they, the
amblers of yesteryear? (…) A Czech proverb describes their gentle idleness
by a metaphor: they are gazing at God’s windows. A person gazing at God’s
windows is not bored; he is happy.
Both Gary and Kundera acknowledge the Epicurean happiness of this

time. Although the attraction of the eighteenth century is based on
different elements for Gary, Kundera and Cioran, the vision of each
has similarities with the others’ in that they all share playfulness,
lucidity, an important sense of heritage, and the assumption of a
deliberately stereotypical portrayal of the aristocratic libertine
decadence of the Ancien Régime. This vision does not question the
fundamentals: that the eighteenth century is the cradle of most of the
contemporary vision and thought, and that the French Revolution was
a historical and cultural necessity. However, it is a nostalgic vision
where a certain aristocratic Europe, French in essence, still has its
power to fascinate with its exoticism. The nostalgia for this era is
sometimes in part a formal device, as in numerous precisely chiselled
aphorisms by Cioran:
Deux époques où j’eusse aimé vivre: le XVIIIe siècle français, et la Russie

tsariste . . . L’ennui élégant, et l’ennui morne, crispé, infini …103
Two periods during which I would have liked to live: the French eighteenth
century and Tsarist Russia … An elegant boredom, and a gloomy, tense,
infinite boredom …
Cioran’s fascination with the Ancien Régime originates in his

interest in extreme historical times which are on the brink of a radical
change. The grandeur of those times is all-consuming, even in
hindsight:
Tout au long du XVIIIe se déploie le spectacle envoûtant d’une société

vermoulue, préfiguration de l’humanité arrivée à son terme, à jamais guérie
de tous les lendemains. L’absence d’avenir, cessant alors d’être le monopole
d’une classe, s’étendrait à toutes dans une superbe démocratisation par la
vacuité. (…)
102
Milan Kundera, La Lenteur (Paris: Gallimard, 1995), p. 11.
103
E. M. Cioran, Cahiers 1957-1972 (Paris: Gallimard, 1997), p. 52.
EUROPA 135
Toute société que flatte la perspective de sa fin succombera aux premiers

coups; démunie de tout principe de vie, sans rien qui lui permette de résister
aux forces qui l’assaillent, elle cédera au charme de la culbute. (…)
Le malheur veut qu’une fois lucide, on le devienne toujours davantage: nul

moyen de tricher ou de reculer (…) Tout était cérébral, même le spasme.104
The entire eighteenth century unfolds the spellbinding spectacle of a rotten

society, foreshadowing humanity’s arrival at its end, forever cured of all
tomorrows. The absence of a future, then no longer the monopoly of one
class, spread to all the others in a superb democratisation through vacuity.
(…)
Any society attracted to the prospect of its end will succumb at the first
blow; lacking any life principle, having no resource for resisting assailing
forces, it will yield to the charm of the fall. (…)
Unfortunately once we are lucid, we become ever more so: there is no way
of cheating or retreating (…) Everything was cerebral, even the spasm.
Kundera’s La Lenteur, which will be analysed in more detail

in the next chapter, celebrates the eighteenth century as that age of
cerebral enjoyment, without referring to its political realities. The
author also uses Vivant Denon’s eighteenth-century story as a
structural skeleton for this novel. For Kundera, this period is first and
foremost “l’époque heureuse où le roman n’avait pas de ‘mission’”.105
Another reason for the fascination with the eighteenth century
for many immigrant writers is the height of formalism attained in that
era by the French language as exemplified in the writing of one of
Cioran’s favourite authors, Mme du Deffand. All literary immigrants
strive to master French at its best and the eighteenth century often
stands for this ideal of linguistic perfection.
According to Gary in Europa, the split between reality and
culture has only become problematic since the eighteenth century,
after social consciousness became the responsibility of culture, not
104
E. M. Cioran, Écartèlement, in Œuvres, pp. 1420-1422. Cioran’s vision of the
aristocratic world prior to the revolution echoes that of Jean Starobinski in 1789: les
emblèmes de la raison (Paris: Flammarion, 1973).
105
Jocelyn Maixent, Le XVIIIe siècle de Milan Kundera (Paris: Presses Universitaires
de France, 1998), p. 2. “the happy time when the novel did not have a ‘mission’”
God.106 The only thing which prevents Erika from withdrawing

completely from reality is her worry about leaving her mother alone,
which is nothing but the budding social consciousness of the “new”
Europe. Danthès’ social consciousness directs him towards diplomacy
as the only area where he could reconcile his “old-fashioned”
aristocratic Europeanism with the contemporary world. This possible
integration, however incongruous or hallucinatory, offers some hope.
Europe as a topos of the privileged classes
Cultured Europeans, just like the aristocrats who first

generated the idea of Europe, are guilty of inaction: “Chaque fois que
la culture forçait les élites européennes à des prises de conscience
‘déchirantes’, ces élites devenaient aliénées au lieu de devenir actives
et la révolution qu’elles avaient préparée se faisait contre elles.”107
The very nature of their idealising aspiration is not compatible with
historical action. The very fact that they are elites prevents them from
taking the centre stage in history. And yet it is those elites who fuel
and perpetuate the noblest aspects of the abstract myth of Europe.
Peut-être pensait-il, ainsi posé au bord de l’hilarité, à la phrase que Jean-

Jacques Rousseau avait écrite à Malwina, dans sa dernière missive: “Il n’y a
plus de Français, d’Anglais ou d’Allemands, il n’y a que des Européens”,
parlant ainsi des caniches de salon et oubliant entièrement ces humbles
bâtards, les masses populaires, où Voltaire, Diderot et Rousseau lui-même
recrutaient simplement leurs domestiques. Le peuple répondit à ces jeux
futiles en passant à quelque chose de sérieux: il coupa la tête des premiers
Européens.108
Perhaps, thus poised on the brink of hilarity, he thought of the sentence that
Jean-Jacques Rousseau had written in his last letter to Malwina: “There are
no more Frenchmen, Englishmen or Germans – only Europeans.” He was
referring to the salon poodles and completely forgetting the humble
bastards, the masses, from whom Voltaire, Diderot and Rousseau himself
106
Gary’s vision of this split is reminiscent of Simmel’s tragedy of culture, the
paradox generated by the duality of the “fixed and timelessly valid” and the “restless
and finite”. Simmel, On Individuality and Social Forms, Selected Writings.
107
Gary, Europa, p. 173. “Every time the European culture forced its elites into
‘agonising’ reappraisals, those elites became alienated instead of active and the
revolution for which they had paved the way was directed against themselves.”
108
EUROPA 137
merely recruited their servants. The people responded to those trivial games
by passing onto something serious: they cut off the heads of the first
Europeans.
In his usual manner Gary is deconstructing the European heritage that

he is himself assuming, this time by reductively fictionalising the
three great Enlightenment writers. The movement of Gary’s irony
usually sets off with some reversal of the truth, which through the
violence and wit of its evasive methods at moments exposes the
complexities of the reality. It is as if Gary uses the simplifying
approach to expose the underlying reductive necessities of reality, or
of any communication. His mixing of the true and the false is a
recreation of the primordial creative energy of the human race that he
aspires to.109 The consequences of the actual reality and of Gary’s
deformed version of it are the same: at the beginning of the eighteenth
century the break between the aristocracy and the people intensifies to
such an extent that the privileged can no longer identify with the
people on any level. Readers can recognise this blasphemous mode of
literary irony, as Gary himself calls it, without being able to fully tell
apart the true from the false. Gary’s ironic and quasi-populist tone
allows for multiple levels of (mis)understanding.
The last quotation clearly states that the idea of Europe is a
creation of the upper classes. Gary suggests that it is only an
inadvertent by-product of the privileged way of life. The community
of Europeans has always in the past been established only among
members of the privileged classes. Peter Rietbergen finds the source
of this in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries:
Reading contemporary travel letters and diaries, it seems German or English

aristocrats felt rather more at ease with the luxurious life of a Frenchman or
an Italian of their own social class than with the drudgery of a labourer in
their native country; they simply understood each other better, even on the
level of language.110
109
“C’est de cette fidélité à ce qui n’est pas que naît ce qui est, et il n’y a pas d’autre
voie de la barbaque à l’homme.” “It’s from this truthfulness to what is not, that what
is is born, and there is no other way that mere flesh can become human.” Romain
Gary, “Les Français libres”, in Ode à l’homme qui fut la France et autres textes sur le
général de Gaulle (Paris: Gallimard, Folio, 2000), pp. 83-84.
110
Rietbergen, Europe, a Cultural History, p. 280.
Contacts were more frequent between nationals of different European

states who were better off and able to travel. Education certainly
contributed to the articulation of the European ideal. In the present age
of democracy, the European ideal still remains the property of an elite,
seemingly unaffected by any corrections to the imbalance of wealth,
education or the cost of travel.
Gary senses the full extent of the subtle ironic ambiguity of
the social position of the elite, aristocratic or otherwise:
Erika ne put décider, même après avoir lu et relu cent fois ces billets, si son
père était un homme qui avait énormément souffert, ou simplement un
homme qui n’avait jamais manqué de rien.111
Even after reading and rereading those letters for the hundredth time, Erika
could not decide whether her father was a man who had greatly suffered, or
simply a man who had never lacked anything.
The narcissistic position of someone who has everything is ultimately

a state of pain. This pain is not necessarily compatible or comparable
with other types of suffering caused by real want, but it is still
nevertheless the real pain of denial and isolation. The gentle nobility
of this pain is reflected in the nostalgia of the European myth. As
Kundera points out, the European is: “celui qui a la nostalgie de
l’Europe”.112 The wording of his definition accentuates the palpability
of the value or weight which the European holds and is burdened with.
Furthermore Europe “n’était jamais vraiment née, parce qu’elle était
trop bien née”.113 Like Erika, “elle n’est pas vraiment de ce monde,
tragiquement condamnée à une autre dimension …”.114 Gary
repeatedly claims that Europe does not really exist, which gives him
the privileged position of a storyteller who tells of an impossible
invention. According to Gary, if culture indeed represents the
engendering of ethics from aesthetics, then it is debatable how Europe
could ever be considered a culture. Paul Audi bases his philosophical
exploration of Europe on what he considers to be the main premise of
Gary’s novel – that Europe is a fantasy (phantasme) which has never
111
112
Milan Kundera, L’Art du roman, p. 159. “someone who is nostalgic for Europe”
113
Gary, Europa, p. 233. “had never been really born, because she was too well-born”
114
Gary, Europa, p. 247. “she is not really of this world; she is condemned, tragically,
to another dimension …”
EUROPA 139
existed and could never exist and whose essence is its inexistence.115
This fantasy is based on the European equation of culture and Europe
– which Paul Valéry expressed in “La crise de l’esprit”116 – and which
Gary adopts.
Gary suggests that the concept of Europe never emerged from
the over-protected limbo in the minds of those who never believed in
the realisation of ideals (although they were possessed by the regret
resulting from the impossibility of realisation) and who knew that they
should cherish the abstract state in which they entertained their ideals.
“L’aristocratie qui aurait pu faire naître l’Europe comme la Grèce
avait fait naître la démocratie, n’avait jamais, au fond, ni compris ni
cru qu’elle pouvait servir à quelque chose.”117 Gary never openly
acknowledges that the idea that the aristocracy never fell into the trap
of usefulness and preserved Europe as an ideal is also an integral part
of what we see as the greatness of European culture.118 It is a
testament to its power to generate myths and keep them alive, which
in itself places Europe beyond decay.
Europe as the creation of the European
Some always see a victim of rape as a femme fatale. As

incarnations of Europe, Gary’s Malwina and Lily are subject to this
reversal throughout, whereby Gary takes a humorous allegorical
approach to the destiny of Europe. Gary gives a stereotypical
description of the locally tinted admiration which various peoples
have for the old Europe, aka Malwina, who, just like Lily, is a
“dévoreuse d’hommes”:119
“C’est une femme extraordinaire.” La phrase, tant de fois entendue, était

prononcée par les Américains avec la conviction profonde où ce peuple
115
Paul Audi, L’Europe et son fantôme (Paris: Éditions Léo Scheer, 2003).
116
Paul Valéry, “La crise de l’esprit” (NRF, 1919), Europes, de l’antiquité au XXe
siècle, Hersant and Durand-Bogaert (eds.).
117
Gary, Europa, p. 242. “The aristocracy, which could have given birth to Europe, as
Greece had given birth to democracy, had in fact never either understood or believed
that it could serve a purpose.”
118
We may note that Gary does not refer to the usefulness of the French aristocracy’s
careful patronage of its Enlightenment critics.
119
Gary, Europa, p. 53. “maneater”
torturé par l’angoisse aime se jeter la tête la première, cherchant par là la fin
du doute; par les Anglais avec la pointe de cet humour auquel ils confient la
tâche d’atténuer tout ce qui risquerait de ressembler à un excès de confiance
dans leur propre jugement; par les Français, avec force, à très haute voix et
toujours un peu agressivement, parce que, monsieur, moi je sais de quoi je
parle. “C’est une femme extraordinaire, aussergewöhnlich”, disaient les
Allemands, avec une lenteur non dépourvue d’hésitation, comme il sied à un
peuple qui pèse longuement le pour et le contre, avant de se ruer en avant
quel que soit le nombre des morts.120
“She’s an extraordinary woman.” These words, heard so many times, were

pronounced by the Americans with that profound conviction into which that
people tortured by anxiety likes to jump head first, thus searching for the
end of doubt; by the English with a hint of that humour to which they
confide the task of attenuating everything that might resemble an excess of
confidence in their own judgment; by the French, emphatically, very loudly
and always with a touch of aggressiveness – “I know what I’m talking
about, monsieur.” “She’s an extraordinary woman, aussergewöhnlich.”, the
Germans would say, with a slowness not entirely deprived of hesitation, as
it is proper for a nation that weighs the pros and cons at length, before
hurling itself forward, whatever the number of the dead.
Mireille Sacotte stresses the incredibly stereotypical descriptions of

various nationalities in Gary’s work.121 According to her, the proper
names for countries (and consequently, nationalities) are the most
reductive proper names which in Gary’s writing “sous couvert
d’évasion, entretiennent un double rapport avec l’enfermement”.122
These clichés are also important means of anchoring his allegorical
fiction to a semblance of reality, to producing an illusion of reality.123
Gary fully adopts the stereotypes and develops them further into
extreme examples of closure which nonetheless still appear usable and
believable. He thus proves that those clichés can never be worn out
and rather than despair of this forced referentiality, he indulges in it.
He shows with this gesture the mechanism behind an immigrant’s
conscious adaptation to a new society. The immigrant is more aware
of these cultural clichés than the native, but he also knows that the
only way to communicate in his new cultural environment is to use
120
121
Mireille Sacotte, “Géographie singulière et lieux communs chez Romain Gary” in
Romain Gary et la pluralité des mondes, Mireille Sacotte (ed.), pp. 151-167.
122
Sacotte, “Géographie singulière et lieux communs chez Romain Gary”, p. 151. “in
the guise of escape, maintain a double relationship with confinement”
123
Boisen, Un picaro métaphysique, Romain Gary et l’art du roman, p. 106.
EUROPA 141
these reductive terms in the way natives do. He knows, further, that
the only way to undermine these meanings is to enact them with
feigned naivety.
To loosen this frozen relationship of signifier and signified
Gary sometimes uses the names of countries as symbols in the
personal mythologies of his characters. Good examples are Mongolie-
Extérieure (Outer Mongolia) and Madagascar which, for Lenny in
Adieu Gary Cooper, stand for heaven and hell.124 Geographical
references are “des leurres ou des pièges”125 representing in miniature
Gary’s staggering equation of the ethical and aesthetic.
Malwina impresses the English and the Americans with her
good English. Her age also does not seem to alter her power to
enchant: “On vieillissait, mais le rêve n’avait pas pris une ride.”126 For
all the characters, culture redeems all the impurities of living:
“D’ailleurs, lorsqu’on est pétri de culture, on sort toujours intact des
poubelles.”127 Such occasional glimpses of culture as enabling
survival underpin the overall historical disaster of European
civilisation. Although imbued with irony, their meaning is ultimately
positive. Furthermore, despite appearances, culture survives:
Et pourtant, ce rêve d’une Europe dont elle ne voulait plus entendre parler,
la jeunesse en héritait aujourd’hui jusque dans l’inconscience avec laquelle
elle la rejetait.128
And yet, though they wanted to hear no more of it, young people were today
inheriting the dream of Europe in the very unawareness of their would-be
rejection of it.
Mais cette génération ne s’apercevait même pas qu’elle demandait

seulement aux idées révolutionnaires ce que la bourgeoisie attendait de l’art,
et que ces idées passaient ainsi dans la culture, c’est-à-dire qu’elles ne
touchaient plus à rien.129
124
Romain Gary, Adieu Gary Cooper (Paris, Gallimard, 1969).
125
Sacotte, “Géographie singulière et lieux communs chez Romain Gary”, p. 163.
“lures or traps”
126
Gary, Europa, p. 68. “She was aging, but the dream had not a single wrinkle.”
127
Gary, Europa, p. 135. “Besides, those who are steeped in culture always emerge
clean from the garbage.”
128
129
But that generation was not even aware that all it asked of revolutionary
ideas was what the bourgeoisie expected from the arts, and that those ideas
were thus being absorbed into the culture, which meant that they no longer
affected anything.
Gary suggests an almost complete separation of the realms of

action and imagination. What migrates from one to the other is never a
hybrid; imaginary action is a contradiction in terms. It also transpires
from Gary’s writing that at the same time, nothing is pure: once we
have stripped the action of the myth, our survival instinct requires that
we remythify it, while on the other hand myth always yearns for
action. The reality is, for Gary, synonymous with the demythification
of the human and therefore with crime on a large scale. It is only the
layer of myth that protects our humanity from sinking to the level of
the beast, and this layer, although based on an invention, is the real
“truth”, because sustained purely through belief. Although culture can
be easily criticised and blamed on account of its historical irrelevance,
its main value remains that it acts as a protective shell for humanity’s
humanity.
Danthès abandoned Malwina for a dream of Europe, now
incarnated in Erika, but this dream of art is a product of reality in the
same way that Erika is Malwina’s (and Danthès’) daughter. The
natural progression of the cliché of a man who abandons one woman
for another advances towards the eventual occasional troubled vision
that the two women are in fact one and the same. The anxiety of the
thought that both women might be products of his imagination is even
stronger by virtue of the fact that he cannot prove either woman’s
existence. Also, this anxiety can be brought into connection with the
incestuous relationship he has with the mother and daughter.130 In his
more or less constant hallucinatory state Danthès alternates between
the belief that he is manipulated by Malwina or her husband, the
Baron, another aristocratic figure and a kind of mascot for Gary’s
130
According to Françoise Héritier in Les Deux Soeurs et leur mère (Paris: Editions
Odile Jacob, 1994), the incest taboo primarily designates a sexual relationship of a
man with two sisters or mother and daughter. As will be discussed in chapter four, she
explains the taboo in terms of the necessity to distinguish identity and difference.
Dantès’ uncertainty as to the existence of the two women seems related to such an
understanding of incest.
EUROPA 143
writing,131 and a sense of intense self-confidence and strength. He

mirrors the state of the writer absorbed by his characters. Danthès’
demented memory with its always slightly altered repetition of events,
with its doubts about what is reality and what a dream, with its
escapes into imaginary worlds, obsessions, amnesia and paranoia is
also akin to European history. As Paul Audi suggests, the narrative of
Europa takes place on one hand in the psyche of Danthès and on the
other “à l’intérieur de la Psyché européenne, c’est-à-dire de l’Europe
comme Psyché.”132 Danthès, the true European, is as responsible for
the generation of the myth of Europe, as is Malwina or Erika, the
myth of Europe, responsible for the invention of the true European.
Europe is the ideal woman dreamt of intimately and passionately by
European cultural aristocrats, and the European is the ideal man
imagined at the core of the European myth by the community of those
same European cultural aristocrats as the only possible support for the
myth of Europe. This complements well one of Gary’s personal
visions of only being able to fulfil himself by living in a woman’s
dream. In fact, it is enough that Europeans stop thinking affectionately
of Europe for it to cease to exist. Unfortunately this responsibility for
the myth entails also the responsibility for Europe’s reality, and thence
for its history full of bloodshed.
The mismatch of the ages of the European and Europe also
accounts for their tragic inability to form a lasting partnership.
Danthès (the European) was young and inexperienced when he met
the streetwise Malwina (Europe) with a four-hundred year memory.
Now Danthès has aged whilst Europe has, at least temporarily, a new
lease of life (Erika).
The myth of Europe is however a larger and a more important
entity than the figure of the European – this becomes clear when the
fate of Danthès, whom Malwina wants to destroy, is dismissed by
higher spiritual powers as an issue too minor to deserve intervention.
131
The Baron also appears in Le Grand Vestiaire, Les Couleurs du jour, La Tête
coupable, Les Mangeurs d’étoiles, Les Clowns lyriques, Les Cerf-volants and of
course in La Danse de Gengis Cohn.
132
Audi, L’Europe et son fantôme, p. 84. “inside the European psyche, that is to say
inside Europe envisaged as Psyche”
The Baron is the emblem of the perseverance of mythified

reason,133 playing his mute aristocratic role at the required distance
from the tides of history. The meaning of his silence generates the
narrator’s constant puzzled deliberation. This quintessential European
has remained unchanged through history:
Danthès avait dit à Erika qu’il était apparu pour la première fois à la
Renaissance, à la cour des Médicis, bien que certains historiens croient
découvrir déjà sa trace dans la notion de chevalerie, et il avait été le
compagnon inséparable d’Érasme, lequel en parle à plusieurs reprises avec
estime dans son Éloge de la folie. Sur les tableaux de l’époque, on le trouve
en compagnie de toutes les allégories aux fesses abondantes, Vertus,
Europes emportées sur le dos du Taureau Jupiter, fêtes de l’Esprit en
compagnie des Muses, Gloires ailées et festins d’Épicure, et sa
ressemblance est particulièrement frappante avec le philosophe penché sur
son écritoire dans le célèbre tableau de Rosencranz, à la Pinacothèque de
Munich, où l’on voit le Baron écrire un traité sur l’immortalité de l’âme, à
la lumière d’une bougie, cependant qu’autour et au-dessus de lui
froufroutent toutes les Vérités qui éclairent le Monde. Danthès prétendait
que le plus grand effort et la plus grande réussite du Baron, dans cette
permanence de l’imposture qu’il assurait à travers les âges, fut de se
maintenir aussi propre qu’au premier jour de la foi en l’homme.134
Danthès told Erika that he had appeared for the first time in the
Renaissance, at the Medici court, although some historians believe they can
already trace him in the notion of chivalry, and he was also the inseparable
companion of Erasmus who makes several respectful allusions to him in his
In Praise of Folly. In the paintings of the period, he can be seen in the
company of all the Allegories with their abundant buttocks, the Virtues, the
Europas carried away on the back of Jupiter the Bull, the festivities of the
Mind in company of the Muses, the winged Fames and the Epicurean feasts.
He bears a particularly striking resemblance to the philosopher leaning over
his writing desk in the famous canvas by Rosencranz at the Pinakothek in
Munich. Here the baron can be seen writing a treatise on the immortality of
the soul, by candlelight, whilst around and above him flutter all the Truths
that illuminate the world. Danthès claimed that the baron’s greatest effort
and achievement, in that imposture permanently maintained throughout the
ages, was to keep himself as clean as on the first day of faith in the human
race.
133
In the sense of the relationship between reason and myth analysed in Theodor W.
Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment (German original 1944,
London: Verso, 1997), where a demythified understanding of the world in itself
represents a retreat or regression into further mythification, accompanied by the sense
of uselessness and superfluousness of the world.
134
EUROPA 145
Like the female Allegories and Muses that almost physically define
the European space of heritage in the Venetian scene with Karel and
Ottla, Semprun’s pair of literary Europeans in La Montagne
blanche,135 the Baron is cosily surrounded by all the paraphernalia
with which the European mind has populated its metaphysical space.
He is universal, a monument to himself, but by no means
irreplaceable. He is an ever-present supporting actor in the European
space, who despite persevering in his avoidance of compromise with
reality maintains the impression of possessing a certain mysterious
power over the events which unfold.
The relationship between Europeans on one hand, and their
culture and the idea of Europe on the other, is the same as the
relationship between Danthès and Erika – entirely imaginary, dream-
like, apparently inexistent at times. However, the persistence of this
dream’s influence on reality can be compared with the impact of the
Greek pagan gods and Christianity on the European spirit.136 Unlike
Lily and Florian who see each other as they are, Danthès and Erika
constantly invent each other, which for Gary (and Goethe) is the
essence of love. The notion of love, which has proven to be one of the
most attractive features of Christianity, perseveres here in a form not
incompatible with Christianity. That fact is far from negligible. Gary
even goes so far to claim that if it had been possible to establish
Christian fraternity, the idea of Europe would have been
superfluous.137 Europe itself in the end is merely something ephemeral
floating in the smile of the Virgin Mary, although even that is only a
work of art.138
Heritage and Art as the refuge of Europeans
The topos of Europe enriches the individual European with its

perspective and its knowledge of continuity and mythification:
Cette femme qui lui parlait des siècles qu’elle avait connus, mais en riant,
pour qu’il ne mît pas en doute sa raison, lui avait apporté plus qu’elle-
135
136
137
138
même: la compagnie de tous ceux dont le présent sait doter le passé, à la

lumière d’une connaissance historique que le passé n’avait pas de lui-même,
et à l’aide d’un talent qui permet de donner à ce qui n’avait jamais existé, ou
avait existé autrement, plus pauvrement, parfois plus salement, une
somptueuse présence.139
This woman who told him of all the past centuries she had known, but
laughing as she did so, so that he would not doubt her sanity, had given him
more than herself: she provided the company of all those with whom the
present can endow the past, in the light of a historical knowledge of the past
that the past itself does not have, and with the help of a talent which allows
us to give a sumptuous presence to that which had never existed, or had
existed differently, more poorly, sometimes more squalidly.
This enables the establishment of heritage and its subsequent

veneration by enhancing the past solely through the process of
preserving continuity. The result is a “jardin de délices”,140 a
“sumptuous” presence of the past within the present, a characteristic
abundantly used in European writing, which by itself creates a joyous
and balanced erudite European identity.
The main failure of Europe’s dual nature is that while reality
enriches art, art does not change reality: “la misère finissant ainsi dans
le luxe, chose après tout normale dans une Europe où la souffrance
servait aux poèmes et où les guerres faisaient plus pour la littérature
que la littérature contre la guerre.”141 The eventual apotheosis would
be reality (mother) forgiving the imaginary (daughter), but that is
becoming less and less possible. As any madness contains a strong
element of wilfulness, it might have been possible to turn things
around by awakening Europe’s survival instinct, but ultimately
Erika’s existence is a dead end.
Art has become the last refuge of true Europeans. After all, it
generates works more permanent than history. According to Gary,
reality had style up to the eighteenth century. Nowadays the aesthetics
of living has severed all of its links with ethics and the result is an
ugly existence. Malwina’s fall into banality is due to her capitulation
before democracy which has demystified all the shady occupations:
139
140
Gary, Europa, p. 298. “garden of delights”
141
Gary, Europa, p. 151. “thus poverty ended in luxury, which after all was only
natural in a Europe where suffering was used for poetry, and where war did more for
literature than literature did against war.”
EUROPA 147
La seule chose qui avait volé en éclats beyond repair, irréparablement,

c’était le monde auquel elle avait appartenu: l’Europe. La fête était finie. On
pouvait encore être maquerelle, faire le trafic des faux tableaux, s’installer à
Paris comme voyante extralucide, mais tout cela était maintenant devenu
réaliste, c’est à dire moche. On ne pouvait plus être sauvé par le style. Les
courtisanes étaient devenues des putains, les aventuriers devenus des
truands, le demi-monde, le milieu. C’était une époque où Don Juan se serait
logé une balle dans la tête.142
The only thing which was shattered beyond repair, was the world to which
she used to belong: Europe. The party was over. One could still be a
madam, deal in forged paintings, set up shop in Paris as a clairvoyant, but
all of that had now become realistic, in other words, ugly. One could no
longer be saved by style. Courtesans had become whores, adventurers
crooks, and the demi-monde was now the underworld. It was an age when
Don Juan would have put a bullet through his head.
By becoming a madam, Malwina attempts to preserve the connection

between ethics and aesthetics, but in our time, the relationship
between the two has become very superficial and unproductive.
Immorality has lost its power to outrage, according to Gary, becoming
nothing more than an aesthetic. Art and heritage have gained
tremendously from this shift (Erika is growing and developing into a
beautiful, although disturbed, young woman), but the banality of
ethical judgement has rendered powerless those who are in a position
to fight against truly extreme forms of destruction.
Malwina, Erika and Danthès all live in their imaginary worlds
constantly inventing each other. Their interaction, although seeming
very real, takes place on a purely abstract level where one can
construct and reconstruct events apparently sheltered from any
consequences. All three characters are “schizophrenic”, which
according to doctor Jarde, the mouthpiece for Gary the immigrant, is
the natural state of the human brain. They cannot help reflecting the
irremediable duality of the surrounding world:
Ceux qu’on appelait “schizophrènes” étaient des témoins et des accusateurs,

pionniers et victimes de leur effort désespéré pour accomplir la soudure
entre la réalité et l’imaginaire.143
142
143
Those whom they called “schizophrenics” were witnesses and accusers,

pioneers and victims of their desperate efforts to bridge the gap between the
real and the imaginary.
Their courage in tackling the non-perfectibility of the world

should be acknowledged. Their partly successful attempts to hide the
divergence between the story of Europe and its reality are heroic
efforts to preserve the credibility of European civilisation. The
narrative cannot survive its inventions’ being challenged. The only
therapy is to think of culture as pure entertainment, something that the
middle classes discovered a long time ago:
Monsieur l’ambassadeur, croyez-moi, contentez-vous de jouir, un peu

d’hédonisme, une touche de cynisme, voilà ce qui vous manque pour
assurer votre santé psychique. Pour l’instant il ne convient point de chercher
dans la culture autre chose que du plaisir, dans la compagnie si satisfaisante
de nos immortels qu’un délassement, un pique-nique sur ces hauteurs où
l’on se refait de bonnes provisions d’oxygène, lesquelles permettent ensuite
de s’accommoder de toutes les puanteurs.144
Ambassador, trust me, be satisfied with enjoyment, with a little bit of

hedonism, a touch of cynicism, this is what you need to ensure your mental
health. For the time being it is not advisable to look to culture for anything
but pleasure, to the very satisfying company of our immortals for anything
other than abandonment, a picnic on those heights where we replenish our
reserves of oxygen, which then enable us to cope with all the stench.
The death of Europe is her consciousness that she is an

invention of the “true Europeans”. Discovering that she is the
daughter of the one she loves, Erika is pushed over the edge to
insanity and death, fulfilling the incestuous literary path of the
author’s brainchild and of Europe’s attempt at (re)birth. She thus
represents the reintegration of the prohibition of incest and the return
of the Law.
The purposeful, non-cultural Europe
The Europe Danthès dreams of is not only at odds with

European history, but also with the new administrative Europe which
144
EUROPA 149
has been taking shape in the last thirty years. Europe was always the
concept of the privileged; democratising it has brought it down to
monetary and military issues. The orderly bourgeois interests are in
fact threatening to destroy the old cultural ideal of Europe, the very
spirit of Europe:
Au cours des mois qui avaient précédé sa nomination à Rome, il avait été le
délégué de la France à quelques-unes des plus pénibles conférences d’“unité
européenne”, où il n’était question que d’économie, des prix et des
monnaies, dont la plus indigne fut celle d’août 1971, au cours de laquelle le
ministre allemand Schiller avait retrouvé jusque dans les coups de poing sur
la table, les accents et les éclats de sa voix, toute l’arrogance traditionnelle
du nationalisme botté et casqué. Il avait été obligé de reconnaître une fois de
plus que son Europe, celle dont il rêvait si passionnément, demeurait et
risquait de demeurer à tout jamais une entité purement mythologique, quand
elle n’était pas simplement un vague à l’âme très fin de siècle, plus proche
de toutes les “princesses lointaines” ou autres “éternels féminins” que d’une
quelconque réalité.145
In the months before his appointment to Rome, he had represented France at

some of the most painful conferences on “European unity”, where all talk
was about the economy, prices and currencies. During the most shameful
one which took place in August 1971, the German minister Schiller had
rediscovered the full range of the traditional arrogance of booted and
helmeted nationalism, including hitting the table with his fist and raising the
volume of his voice. He had been forced to admit once more that his
Europe, which he dreamt of so passionately, remained and was likely to
remain forever a purely mythical entity, when it was not merely a decadent
vague melancholy, much closer to all the “far away princesses” and other
“eternal feminines” than to any reality whatsoever.
… les éditoriaux des journaux parlaient à qui mieux mieux de l’”échec de

l’esprit européen”, comme s’il pouvait y avoir quoi que ce fût de commun
entre cet esprit-là et l’Europe des marchés, des sociétés anonymes et des
prix de revient. Depuis des années, nulle part, jamais, autre chose que
l’armée et l’économie, à la table des grandes conférences, à propos de la
patrie de Valéry, de Barbusse et de Thomas Mann.146
… the editorials in the papers competed at spelling out “the failure of the
European spirit”, as if there could be anything in common between that
spirit and the Europe of the markets, limited companies and cost price. For
years, everywhere, never anything but the army and the economy on the
145
146
table of the big conferences, when addressing the subject of the homeland of
Valéry, Barbusse and Thomas Mann.
For Gary the only valid ideal for Europe, “cette entité aussi dépourvue
de réalité et de contenu que la divinité mythologique du même
nom”147 – that noisy opera that lasted three centuries without content
or author, “vrai triomphe de la mise en scène sur l’absence de contenu
et d’auteur”148 – is the cultural myth which he considers to be a
continuation of Europe’s founding myth. The abstraction of the myth
of Europa encapsulates all too well what since the eighteenth century
has become an identity for the European elite. French as a universal
language is closely connected with this identity and, as Pascale
Casanova claims, it could become the language of all those who do
not mix literature and business, that is, those who demand autonomy
for literature.149
Beauty and female representation
More importantly, as stated in the opening remark on La

Danse de Gengis Cohn, European culture glorifies beauty, which is
primarily female. Adoration of the untouchable female principle,
connected to Christianity, is the basis for the development of the
European myth(s) and the myth of Europe or Europa:
Ce que l’Europe avait de plus caractéristique, ce en quoi elle se différenciait

le plus nettement de l’Amérique et de l’Orient – bien qu’elle ignorât, ou fit
semblant d’ignorer cette vérité scandaleuse, jamais avouée, mais dont est
née toute la culture occidentale – c’est que, depuis le Moyen Age, la priorité
était donnée secrètement à la beauté. (…) L’idéalisme européen a été
d’abord et par-dessus tout une esthétique.150
What was most characteristic of Europe and distinguished it most clearly

from America and the Orient – although Europe ignored or pretended not to
know this shocking secret, and has never admitted it, although it gave birth
147
Gary, Europa, p. 228. “this entity as devoid of reality and substance as the
mythological figure of the same name”
148
Gary, Europa, p. 479. “a real triumph of staging over lack of content and author”
149
Pascale Casanova, “De la singulière propension à écrire en français” in Marianne
Alphant and Olivier Corpet (eds.), L’Espace de la langue, Beyrouth Paris (Paris:
Éditions du Centre Pompidou, 2000), p. 107.
150
EUROPA 151
to the whole of Western culture – was that ever since the Middle Ages it
secretly gave priority to beauty. (…) The idealism of Europe was first and
foremost an aesthetic.
Hence the suitability of the myth of Europa, which although never

explicitly referred to except in the title, provides the blueprint of
Gary’s vision of Europe. Taking pleasure in the perfection of the form
is an essential characteristic of the European spirit. Gary suggests that
this glorification exists at the expense of ethical considerations, thus
condemning the superficiality inherent in the foundations of European
culture.
The parallel with Europa is constantly re-established; Erika’s
beauty is “mythologique”,151 a troubling and disturbing beauty which
“vient d’ailleurs”152 just as Europa’s beauty is Asian, distant in origin.
It is also “pure”, “reasoned” and Cartesian, based on a harmony of
moderate elements just like its classical architecture: “…la blanche
géométrie de ses colonnades sous le toit en triangle, légèrement posé,
que l’Occident néo-classique avait moins emprunté à l’Acropole qu’à
sa propre nature …”153
Malwina and Erika embody the time-honoured male inability
to accept the existence of a multifaceted female personality, which can
possess both the traditional masculine characteristics and be strong,
powerful, threatening, and devious (such as the witch and prostitute
Malwina) and the feminine features exalted by Christianity of virtue
and purity (represented by the seemingly naïve Erika). Malwina’s
physical ugliness and repulsiveness is repeatedly accentuated, whilst
Erika is the very ideal of beauty. The thought of the integration of
these two facets increases Danthès’ paranoia and leads him further
into madness.
Gary’s adoption of this dual representation is certainly ironic,
and represents another example of his deliberate and literal use of a
cliché. However, it also rests comfortably on centuries of reductive
representations of women, where allegories played a very prominent
part. The ambiguous tradition of personifying abstractions as female
characters, whether or not it stems purely from the Latin gender of
151
Gary, Europa, p. 176. “mythological”
152
Gary, Europa, p. 176. “comes from elsewhere”
153
Gary, Europa, p. 315. “… the white geometry of its colonnades beneath the lighly
poised triangular roof that the neo-classical West owes more to its own nature than to
a borrowing from the Acropolis …”
abstract nouns, has persevered in the Western artistic and literary

tradition. These representations have been used as vehicles for both
patriarchal and feminist values and have strongly marked the
European visual memory. It is not accidental that abstract values have
been usually represented as female characters. The “female” nature of
these symbols is almost completely disassociated from the “female”
reality (be it out of misogyny, aesthetic considerations or the need to
represent the “otherness” of the world of ideas). Thus these
occurrences simply ignore rather than misrepresent and discredit the
female reality. They are only aesthetic expressions of a phallocentric
thought, which, however limited, has given us what we recognise
today as the great European artistic heritage.
Liberty and libertinism
The connection between the notions of Europe and notions of

liberty are particularly strong. Karl Jaspers as well as many other
thinkers and writers believe freedom to be one of the core values
which distinguish Europe from other continents. Ironically it is the
continent which has enslaved most of the rest of the world at some
point in time.
“La liberté est le lot de l’homme en général. Mais l’Européen
en a pris conscience.”154 This is reflected above all in the ideals of the
French Revolution. Within the realms of French literature and
thought, inspired by all the historical meanings of libertinism,155 it
spills into all aspects of personal freedom: “L’Europe des esprits avait
toujours été une Europe galante, le libertinage était à la liberté ce que
la France était à l’Église: sa fille aînée.”156 Drawing the parallel with
the Christian church is a potent reminder of the importance of
Christianity in the generation of the ideas of both Europe and
libertinism. The Christian church was one of the main driving forces
154
Karl Jaspers, “Une tâche infinie”, Europes, de l’antiquité au XXe siècle, Hersant
and Durand-Bogaert (eds.), p. 471. Quoted from “Conférence du 13 septembre 1946”
in L’esprit européen (Neuchâtel: Éditions de La Baconnière, 1947). “Freedom is the
destiny of man in general. But the European has made himself conscious of this.”
155
Antoine Adam, Les Libertins au XVIIe siècle (Paris: Éditions Buchet/Chastel,
1986).
156
Gary, Europa, p. 232. “The Europe of the intellectuals had always been licentious,
and libertinism was to freedom, what France was to the Church: its eldest daughter.”
EUROPA 153
behind the cultural unity of Europe, and libertinism started out as an

atheist rebellion against the church; only a century later was it to start
signifying primarily a certain form of sexual liberation. The decline of
the influence of Christianity is a Pan-European achievement in
itself.157
“Est-ce que vous croyez qu’on peut séparer l’idée de l’Europe
du libertinage?”158 Danthès asks his superior. More of an aggressive
statement of conviction than a genuine question, it only receives what
might be an answer later, from the disabused Malwina:
On peut très bien être un rêveur et fuir avec horreur dès que le songe
menace de devenir réalité. On peut très bien rêver de l’Europe du libertinage
et des lumières amorales, et puis comprendre brusquement qu’au fond, on
n’aimait que les lectures … Ce sont des siècles à lire et à relire, mais de là à
leur être fidèle …159
It’s quite possible to be a dreamer and to run away in horror as soon as the
dream threatens to become reality. It’s quite possible to dream of the Europe
of libertinism and amoral enlightenment, and then suddenly realise that all
one really liked was reading about it … One can read those centuries over
and over again, but as for being true to them …
Eighteenth-century libertinism indeed functions within the ideal of

Europe as a bookish idea ceaselessly, volubly and luxuriously
celebrated by the likes of Semprun following in a long tradition of
prominent figures such as Casanova. Interestingly, along with
Semprun and Casanova (who can be thought of as one of its
originators), some of the major representatives of this current are
foreigners who have chosen to write in French. They are not the most
prominent or numerous group; rather, the concept of libertinism (and
with it that of incest) and the celebration of it in literature have been
among the more attractive options for foreign writers “converted” to
French as one of the purest expressions of personal freedom with
which the choice of a new language, different from the mother tongue,
is intimately implicated.
JÀrn Boisen states that central European culture should be
counted amongst Gary’s main literary influences, a fact which
157
From The Joyful Science in Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, p. 273.
158
Gary, Europa, p. 296. “Do you think the idea of Europe can be separated from
libertinism?”
159
accounts for his predilection for ironic lucidity, sense of reality, love
of the novel, aversion for all forms of absolutism, suspicion of all
exaltations of the future at the expense of the present and love of the
Si£cle des Lumi£res (century of the Enlightenment) and the libertine
spirit.160 These characteristics identified as central European by
Boisen are essentially European, and could be said to be common to
all the main authors studied in this book. For Kundera and to a certain
degree Kristof these are very much formative influences, whilst
Semprun shares them in part through his love of central European
literature and his personal understanding of Central and East European
political realities.
The tolerance and the balancing of a multiplicity of freedoms
have always been a European philosophical and political aspiration.
According to Gary, libertinism, which he extends towards the general
meaning of pleasure-seeking and freethinking, is integral to society
and culture and it serves as a health check for the rational collective
freedom – which needs to moderate its totalitarian tendency – as well
as for a purist and abstract ideal of art and heritage:
Il reconnaissait qu’il y avait entre la volupté et la culture, entre la beauté et

l’impureté, des liens qu’il était impossible de trancher sans détruire tout ce
qui, dans une civilisation, se crée et s’épanouit à partir du plaisir. Le
libertinage mettait la liberté à l’épreuve, tâtait la confiance qu’elle avait en
elle-même, la morale ne s’offensait que lorsqu’elle manquait de certitude,
les excès étaient le prix que payait la mesure pour demeurer fidèle à elle-
même, et éviter de devenir excès à son tour en sévissant. Dans la déraison
même, il entrait comme la nostalgie d’une raison supérieure. C’était le
rapport entre la fête des fous et les certitudes sacrées qu’elle profanait, pour
révéler ainsi à tous leur miséricordieuse, sereine et souveraine puissance.161
He recognised that between sensual pleasure and culture, between beauty

and impurity, there were links which it was impossible to break without
destroying that whole part of civilisation that derives from pleasure.
Libertinism was putting the freedom to the test, checking its self-
confidence. Morality was only offended when it lacked certainty. Excess
was the price which moderation paid to remain true to itself and avoid
turning moderation itself into excess by running rampant. Even in
irrationality, there was a sort of nostalgia for a superior reason. The relation
was the same as that between the feast of fools and the sacred certainties
160
Boisen, Un picaro métaphysique, Romain Gary et l’art du roman, p 320.
161
EUROPA 155
which it desecrated so as to reveal their merciful, serene and sovereign

power to all.
Following the Nietzschian Dionysiac principle, this dépense

(expenditure) which in Bataille’s analysis redresses the balance is
typical of European culture. Guy Scarpetta analyses these values
which in his opinion distinguish Europe from the currently most
powerful nation in the world:
S’il existe une dimension européenne étrangère au modernisme américain,

elle réside bien dans la survivance, en Europe, de valeurs culturelles et
esthétiques antérieures au monde industriel, au monde bourgeois: ces
valeurs qui font que quelque chose de la “dépense” aristocratique, comme
l’indiquait Bataille, a été relayé dans l’expérience artistique (son
“improductivité” fondamentale).162
If there is a European dimension foreign to American modernism, it surely

resides in the survival, in Europe, of cultural values and aesthetics which
precede the industrial world, the middle-class world. Those values are
responsible for transmitting a part of aristocratic “expenditure”, as Bataille
indicated, to artistic experience (as can be recognised in its fundamental
“unproductiveness”).
This allowance for something that exceeds simple economics has

always been the strength of European art. Apart from brushing aside
all of the basic arguments against art, it allows the social self-
consciousness of art to stand independently and as such our debt to it
must be limitless.
Multiculturalism and multilingualism
In the same way that different European nations perceive the

“extraordinary” nature of Europe in different ways, they also have
divergent views on what the meaning of Europe is:
- Dis, p’pa, qu’est qu’c’est, l’Europe?

- En Angleterre, cela voulait dire: savoir mourir pour ses attitudes. En
France: tenir toujours prête une excuse hautement humanitaire. En
Allemagne, cela n’a jamais signifié rien d’autre que l’Allemagne.163
162
Guy Scarpetta, L’Impureté (Paris: Grasset, 1985), p. 73.
163
- Tell me daddy, what is Europe?

- In England it used to mean being prepared to die for one’s opinions. In
France it means always having ready an extremely humanitarian excuse. In
Germany, it has never meant anything but Germany.
Yet against this multicultural understanding, which is a mode of

Gary’s irony, the European and his Europa speak to each other in
German, Malwina and Erika’s mother tongue:
Ils parlaient presque toujours allemand, car c’était amusant de contrarier

cette langue qui avait un tel goût et une telle habitude des grands desseins,
des puissants échafaudages, de la solidité à toute épreuve. Leur complicité
dans l’instant s’amusait à jouer avec cette Allemagne d’un vocabulaire fait
pour durer et non pour être mangé tout de suite … 164
They almost always spoke in German, because it was amusing to go against

the grain of a language that had such a strong taste for and habit of great
schemes, powerful scaffoldings, unfailing solidity. For their complicity in
the present instant it was amusing to play with that Germany whose
vocabulary was made to last, and not to be eaten straight away …
German, a European language and the language of Europe –

of Gary’s choosing in Europa – has to be spoken differently to
represent truly the European ideal. By extension, no specific language
can be the true language of Europe without change of usage. For the
French, German seems to be second in importance among the
European languages. Gary’s choice of an “other” language rather than
his mother tongue or his adopted tongue, demonstrates the essential
nature of the “chosen” language as a “different” language. It also
questions which one of the three European languages “à vocation
fédératrice”,165 namely English, French and German, is the ultimate
language of Europe.
One of the very important ideas understatedly sketched in
Europa is the relationship between France and Europe. Very often, in
the abstract elaboration of the idea of Europe, it becomes apparent that
Europe only means France; that France represents in a sense a core of
European culture. The female identities of Europe and France
164
165
Claude Hagège, Le Souffle de la langue (Paris: Éditions Odile Jacob, 2000), p. 125.
“with a federative vocation”
EUROPA 157
merge,166 proving the fluidity of the concept of Europe and the

centrality of France for the French understanding of Europe.
Cosmopolitan francophilia was originally instilled in Gary by his
mother, who, in Gary’s own account, is responsible for most of the
mythifications and idealisations of his life and fiction.
The order which Europe has come to represent on the surface
is nowadays a far cry from the meaning of Europe, the sentimentality
of its ideal and the power of its identity. On the other hand, the
language of the European ideal has always been constituted on the
irony of knowing the extent of its impossibility. European cultural
diversity, and consequently the European understanding of tolerance,
rest on its unusually rich linguistic heterogeneity. According to
Umberto Eco, this Babel of languages is in fact the very origin of
Europe:
In front of the massive unity of the Roman Empire (which took in parts of
Africa and Asia), Europe first appears as a Babel of new languages. Only
afterwards was it a mosaic of nations. (…) Europe was forced at the very
moment of its birth to confront the drama of linguistic fragmentation, and
European culture arose as a reflection on the destiny of a multicultural
civilisation.167
What also contributed to this tolerance of the multiplicity of

tongues is no doubt the fact that the numerous versions of the Bible,
the most sacred founding text of European culture, are all translations.
This early opportunity to challenge the relationship between languages
is responsible for the development of translation beyond simple
craftsmanship, and also for the assumed respectful awareness of
different linguistic realities inherent in European consciousness, even
in the case of monolinguals.
Despite the fact that for a long while Latin was the lingua
franca of Europe, Utopian thinking – whose birth interestingly
coincides with the beginning of a theoretical elaboration on the
question of Babel168 – focused on the idea that a universal language
166
167
Umberto Eco, The Search for the Perfect Language, translated by James Fentress
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), p. 18.
168
Marco Carapezza, “L’Europe et les langues: Bacon et Campanella” in L’Europe,
naissance d’une utopie?, Michèle Madonna Desbareille (ed.) (Paris: L’Harmattan,
1996), pp. 25-6.
existed amongst people of pre-European and pre-Christian times.

Dante Alighieri’s subsequent establishment of the cult of the mother
tongue channelled this thinking in a new direction.169 His humanistic
defence of the “vulgate” tongues constitutes the beginning of
European identity much more than the upholding of a lingua franca,
be it Latin or any other language. It inaugurates the apology and
glorification of the mother tongue as a double-edged sword of
nationalism and cosmopolitanism; religiousness and secularity.170
The contemporary notion of cosmopolitanism together with
linguistic immigration, which although not a new phenomenon was
not considered particularly culturally significant in the past, are only
today starting to challenge this by now deeply-rooted stronghold of
the mother tongue. Europe, with its specific attitude towards linguistic
heterogeneity, is generating its own brand of cosmopolitanism,
sometimes restricted to the bounds of Europeanism. This
cosmopolitanism is not always tolerant, but is linked to the European
artistic heritage in such a way as to create an interesting setting for the
further development of new structures of identity.
Cultural heritage and the novel
The cultural heritage that defines Europe is immense. The

different strands playfully cross-reference each other adding further
layers of complexity to the fiction writing of immigrants: the myth of
Odysseus and the mystique of Joseph Conrad intertwine in the
narrative of Sergio Kokis171; Patinier’s blue fills the gaps of the
unspoken and unspeakable in the texts of Jorge Semprun, whilst
Antoine becomes the shadow of Nicolas de Stäel or perhaps Antonio
Saura; Kundera constructs his variations on a theme of Vivant Denon
in La Lenteur, and uses the trivial alleged love story between Goethe
and Bettina von Arnim as the sentimental second subject of his
symphonic structure in L’Immortalité.172 The examples of obvious and
169
Dante Alighieri, De vulgari eloquentia.
170
Throughout this book mother tongue is taken to mean the actual mother tongue of
an individual rather than the sole primordial language of Utopian thought.
171
Sergio Kokis, Errances (Québec: XYZ éditeur, 1996).
172
Eva le Grand considers L’Immortalité to be the most European of all Kundera’s
novels due to its structure of variations on the themes taken from the European
EUROPA 159
less-obvious references and influences and of their careful, thoughtful

and extensive creative development (rather than deconstruction) are
many. It is enough to read one book by Jorge Semprun to be fully
convinced that this heritage is the real substance of the European
identity. However, one can go further and claim, together with Milan
Kundera, that the novel is essentially a European genre:
La société occidentale a pris l’habitude de se présenter comme celle des

droits de l’homme;173 mais avant qu’un homme pût avoir des droits, il avait
dû se constituer en individu, se considérer comme tel et être considéré
comme tel; cela n’aurait pas pu se produire sans une longue pratique des
cultural heritage and its temperament as a “transcription ludique” of the European

cultural essence. Eva Le Grand, Kundera ou la mémoire du désir, (Paris:
L’Harmattan; Québec: XYZ éditeur, 1995), p. 102.
173
This is a constant bone of contention in Kundera’s more recent work: “Mais
comme en Occident on ne vit pas sous la menace des camps de concentration, comme
on peut dire ou écrire n’importe quoi, à mesure que la lutte pour les droits de l’homme
gagnait en popularité, elle perdait tout contenu concret, pour devenir finalement
l’attitude commune de tous à l’égard de tout, une sorte d’énergie transformant tous les
désirs en droits. Le monde est devenu un droit de l’homme et tout s’est mué en droit:
le désir d’amour en droit à l’amour, le désir de repos en droit au repos, le désir de
l’amitié en droit à l’amitié, le désir de rouler trop vite, en droit de rouler trop vite, le
désir de bonheur en droit au bonheur, le désir de publier un livre en droit de publier un
livre, le désir de crier la nuit dans les rues en droit de crier la nuit dans les rues. Les
chômeurs ont le droit d’occuper l’épicerie de luxe, les dames en fourrure ont le droit
d’acheter du caviar, Brigitte a le droit de garer la voiture sur le trottoir et tous,
chômeurs, dames en fourrure, Brigitte, appartiennent à la même armée de combattants
des droits de l’homme.” Milan Kundera, L’Immortalité (Paris: Gallimard, 1990), pp.
206-7. “But since in the West people do not live under the threat of concentration
camps, since they can say and write anything, as the fight for human rights was
gaining in popularity, it was losing all concrete content and has finally become a
common attitude of all towards all, a sort of energy transforming all the desires into
rights. The world has become a human right and everything has mutated into a right:
the desire for love into a right to love, the desire for rest into a right to rest, the desire
for friendship into a right to friendship, the desire to drive too fast into a right to drive
too fast, the desire for happiness into a right to happiness, the desire to publish a book
into a right to publish a book, the desire to shout at night in the streets into a right to
shout at night in the streets. The unemployed have the right to take over the luxury
bakery, the ladies in fur have the right to buy caviar, Brigitte has the right to park her
car on the pavement, and all, unemployed, ladies in fur and Brigitte, belong to the
same army of fighters for human rights.” The rights of the author are far more
important for Kundera and he fully agrees with the definition of literary property
stated during the French Revolution as “la plus sacrée, la plus personnelle de toutes
les propriétés” (“the most sacred, the most personal of all forms of property”). Milan
Kundera, Les Testaments trahis (Paris: Gallimard, 1993), p. 324.
arts européens et du roman en particulier qui apprend au lecteur à être

curieux de l’autre et à essayer de comprendre les vérités qui diffèrent des
siennes. En ce sens Cioran a raison de désigner la société européenne
comme la “société du roman” et de parler des Européens comme des “fils
du roman”.174
Western society habitually presents itself as the society of human rights (see
footnote 173); but before a man could have rights, he had to become an
individual, had to consider himself and to be considered an individual; that
could not have been accomplished without a long practice of the European
arts, and of the novel in particular which teaches the reader to be curious
about the other and to try to understand the truths different from his own. In
this sense Cioran is right to refer to European society as the “society of the
novel” and to talk of Europeans as the “sons of the novel”.
Whether one agrees or not with Kundera’s idealising

implication that the arts have an impact on reality, in sharp contrast
with Gary’s cynicism, is irrelevant, as the main point here is not
political, but cultural. The arts in Europe, and the novel as a European
invention in particular, have shaped European consciousness. The arts
are what Europe is recognised and respected for: “La plus grande
gloire, ou peut-être la seule car, s’il est nécessaire de le rappeler, ce
n’est pas grâce à ses généraux ni à ses hommes d’Etat que l’Europe
fut admirée même par ceux qu’elle avait fait souffrir.”175 The aesthetic
affinity of novel writers from different parts of the world can only be
explained, Kundera claims, by the common aesthetic root and heritage
of the novel. The history of the novel is the only history Kundera
acknowledges belonging to. Like most East European writers and
intellectuals, he wilfully marginalises political history. Indeed,
European history seems like a rape to most Europeans. Cioran
observes:
Au fond, tous les gens de l’Est de l’Europe sont contre l’Histoire. (…) C’est
que les gens de l’Est, quelle que soit leur orientation idéologique, ont
forcément un préjugé contre l’Histoire. Pourquoi? Parce qu’ils en sont
victimes. Tous ces pays sans destin de l’Est de l’Europe, ce sont des pays
174
Kundera, Les Testaments trahis, pp. 16-7.
175
Kundera, Les Testaments trahis, p. 325. “The greatest glory, or perhaps the only
one, because, if it is needs to be recalled to mind, it is not thanks to its generals or its
political leaders that Europe was admired even by those it made suffer.”
EUROPA 161
qui ont été au fond envahis et assujettis: pour eux l’Histoire est
nécessairement démoniaque.176
In fact, all the people of Eastern Europe are against History. (…) The people
from the East, whatever their ideological orientation, are inevitably
prejudiced against History. Why? Because they are its victims. All those
countries without destiny in Eastern Europe are the countries which were
occupied and enslaved: for them History is unavoidably diabolical.
The fraternity of writers established by Kundera in his

analysis of the novel is similar to that implied in Semprun’s
perception of collective memory and the European cultural heritage,177
and is very much in tune with Gary’s “frère océan” (“brother ocean”),
the repository of works of art where their individual authorship
becomes insignificant:
La culture est la fin heureuse des chefs-d’oeuvre individuels. Elle est le

retour des chefs-d’oeuvre dans la réalité et le commencement de leur
victoire authentique sur la puissance. Elle est la noyade heureuse des chefs-
d’œuvre individuels dans un fond collectif, nouvel Océan originel qui
annonce une nouvelle naissance de l’homme sous sa seule autorité.178
Culture is the happy end of individual masterpieces. It is the masterpieces’

return to reality and the beginning of their authentic victory over the
powers. It is the happy drowning of individual masterpieces in collective
depths, in a new primeval Ocean that announces the rebirth of the human
race under its sole authority.
L’océan originel qui nous a donné naissance, et à la culture, ce nouvel océan

ambiant, fraternel et nourricier, où commence à peine une étape de
l’évolution qui cherche à faire de l’homme sa propre œuvre.179
The primeval ocean which gave birth to us and to culture, this new
surrounding ocean, fraternal and nourishing, where a stage of evolution is
just starting, which seeks to make man its own creation.
176
Cioran, Œuvres, p. 1749.
177
Of all four writers studied here (Gary, Kundera, Kristof and Semprun), Semprun
rejects political history least. The political is a very important part of his perception of
culture (fitting, perhaps, for a former Minister of Culture).
178
Romain Gary, Pour Sganarelle, Recherche d‘un personnage et d’un roman (Paris:
179
Gary, Pour Sganarelle, p. 12, my italics.
In contrast to the views expressed by his narrator in Europa, Gary

here voices some faith in the ability of art to influence reality. The
commonplace metaphor of birth and nurture from water can be
applied to the experience of mother tongue acquisition and new
language adoption. The welcoming homeliness of culture replacing
the narrow and limiting mother-child relationship is a natural
progression.
Il s’agit désormais d’une qualité en soi, d’un “jouir” esthétique qui situe
l’homme sans aucune discrimination spécifique et sans aucun critère
totalitaire au niveau d’une essence de chef-d’œuvre qui est une réalité
vécue, un moment de bonheur fugitif, mais qu’il peut déclencher à volonté
dans sa conscience, qui est désormais en lui et qui éclaire de plus en plus la
réalité parce qu’il s’agit d’une expérience du bonheur que l’homme
cherchera dorénavant à imposer à tous ses rapports avec la vie ce qui ne
cesse de marquer la réalité et de lui dicter une organisation, une direction,
une forme toujours renouvelée dans la poursuite de la perfection (…) le
choix des idéologies devient aussi un simple pragmatisme culturel, en
présence du critère rigoureux d’une expérience vécue que l’on peut
retrouver à volonté.180
From now on, it is a matter of a quality in itself, an aesthetic “pleasure”

which situates man without any specific discrimination or totalitarian
criterion at the level of an essence of masterpiece which is a lived reality, a
moment of fleeting happiness, but which he can trigger at will in his
consciousness, which is from now on in him and which increasingly
illuminates reality, because it is a matter of an experience of happiness
which man will henceforth seek to impose on all of his relationships with
life, which will ceaselessly mark reality and dictate to it an organisation, a
direction, an always new form in the pursuit of perfection (…) thus the
choice of ideologies also becomes a simple cultural pragmatism in the
presence of the rigorous criteria of a lived experience that one can recreate
at will.
This sentence is a masterpiece in itself, describing within its sinuous

structure (reaching culmination in the italicised text and then
unwinding towards its last pragmatic and calm details) the nature of
the cultural hedonism of those, inevitably culturally privileged, who
rejoice in the recognition and the repetition of the details which to
them represent their cultural allegiance. This is what the mature
identity of a cultured European consists of, the only identity he can
claim is his own entirely, his remembrance of things past, sometimes
180
Gary, Pour Sganarelle, p. 203, my italics.
EUROPA 163
with its associated auto-erotic pleasures. Valéry’s description of the

European and Semprun’s joyful wanderings through the treasures of
European art are remarkably close in spirit to Gary’s description.
Pour Sganarelle is an unusual work in Gary’s opus. It
functions as a contrived literary manifesto of sorts. Its style, wordy
and flowery, is opposed to what his readers are used to, even with his
wide range of different stylistic responses to different narratives. It is
as if Gary had difficulty in finding a way to articulate an ideal without
irony. With or without the contrast between this idealising view and
the cynicism Gary usually voices in his fiction, the following is a valid
statement of faith in culture and above all in the novel: “Il me faut
maintenant trouver le roman, la seule chose qui compte. Tout le reste
est littérature.”181 Gary is here on his stylistic territory again, using a
literary reference to wittily understate his thought. He opposes roman
total (a total novel) to roman totalitaire (a totalitarian novel), the
former superior to the latter in its self-contained nature, unsubmissive
to an outside reality. Kundera calls this suspension of moral
judgement. The great European value of freedom can be clearly seen
in this literary aesthethic. It is thus not a surprise that Gary’s ideal
character, a pícaro, a symbol for the innate playful and humorous
nature of the novel, can be closely related to Kundera’s fascination
with Diderot’s Jacques le Fataliste. Gary and Kundera keep in touch
with the sources and the original values of the European novel born in
works by Rabelais and Cervantes.
There are many aspects of the contribution of the European
novel, writes Kundera, which go unrecognised:
Tous les grands thèmes existentiels que Heidegger analyse dans Être et
Temps, les jugeant délaissés par toute la philosophie européenne antérieure,
ont été dévoilés, montrés, éclairés par quatre siècles de roman européen.182
All the great existential subjects which Heidegger analyses in Being and
Time, considering them neglected by all the earlier European philosophy,
were revealed, demonstrated and clarified by the four centuries of the
European novel.
181
Gary, Pour Sganarelle, p. 12. “I now need to find the novel, the only thing that
counts. Everything else is literature.”
182
Kundera, L’Art du roman, p. 15.
The non-dogmatic method of the novel is often not taken

seriously, whereas its gift of freedom and in consequence its unbiased
initiatic wisdom would deserve more serious consideration. The best
examples of the European novel are now, according to Kundera,
written outside Europe. This does not make the European novel any
less European. Firmly founded on its initial values, fully participating
in its own history (as that, according to Kundera, is the only way great
works of art can be created), it is strong enough to grow and develop
further.
Si l’Europe n’était qu’une seule nation, je ne crois pas que l’histoire de son
roman aurait pu durer avec une telle vitalité, une telle force et une telle
diversité pendant quatre siècles.183
If Europe was a single nation, I doubt that the history of its novel could
have lasted with such vitality, such strenght and such diversity for four
centuries.
This statement by Kundera is one of his very few acknowledgements

of the part European political history has played in the development of
the novel: it points out the uniqueness of the unwritten political
constitution of Europe to which the attributes vitalité, force and
diversité equally apply. It is again a tribute to Europe’s appreciation of
freedom, which allowed for its diversity, albeit intolerantly. The form
this freedom takes politically is what we may call a confederation184 of
nations, which is becoming an established reality today. As Herman
von Keyserling commented already in 1928, the structure of the
European identity chose this political form – an equivalent of
polyphony in music which Kundera and his critics often use to explain
the structure of his texts – as its most suitable expression:
Exiger d’Europe qu’elle s’unifie comme l’Amérique ou la Russie, c’est la

méconnaître à fond du point de vue théorique et, pratiquement, vouloir sa
ruine. Si tout va bien, une nouvelle unité d’ordre supérieur se constituera
183
Kundera, Les Testaments trahis, p. 42.
184
This term is here used just in its wide, general primary sense. Exploring all the
different debates which have shaped its evolution and defined its meanings would be a
digression of little relevance for the subject of this book.
EUROPA 165
au-dessus des nations, lesquelles subsisteront, du reste, avec leur ancienne

vigueur.185
To demand of Europe that it unifies like America or Russia, is to

fundamentally misknow it from the theoretical point of view, and in
practice, to want its destruction. If all goes well, a new unity of a superior
order will compose itself above the nations which will survive, moreover,
with their prior vigour.
Conclusion
The European vision of Europe is an endless hall of mirrors.

Its intricacy is a fertile ground for analysis and speculation,
particularly as it is a living vision, constantly changing, which
attempts to encompass tolerantly a multiplicity of different
viewpoints. In the immigrant’s vision of Europe, what is of particular
relevance is the immensity of Utopian need and hope moderated by
very experienced wisdom. This is not a vision waiting to be realised,
but rather an aesthetic and intellectual obsession, a vision of “horizons
culturels”186 originating in relatively simple questions of identity and
exaggerating the common human extremes. It is a notable contribution
to the endless battle between the social and the individualistic urges of
the human.
The adoption of the French language and French culture
greatly intensifies the Europeanness of the European writers who have
immigrated into French. Their belonging to Europe becomes more
than just their private allegiance. Their fascination with the adopted
French-biased European heritage becomes the strongest statement of
identity in their writing and it provides them with many other
recurring themes. We speak of “European identity” in a much looser
sense than national identities. Immigrant writers who have chosen to
write in French have a unique opportunity to voice the complex but
loose structures of this identity from their unique cosmopolitan and
nomadic perspective, reinforcing through their writing the freedom,
tolerance and cultural wealth that constitute European identity.
185
Herman von Keyserling, Analyse spectrale de l’Europe (1928), quoted in Europes,
de l’antiquité au XXe siècle, Hersant and Durand-Bogaert (eds.), p. 933.
186
Semprun, La Montagne blanche, p. 73. “cultural horizons”
Libertinism and Utopia
Introduction
The previous chapter demonstrates that the fantasy of an ideal

community, whether subjected to critical dismantling or not, plays an
important part in any discourse contributing to the constantly
changing perceptions of Europe. It engages on various different levels
with the concept of freedom which so many see as a defining feature
of the European identity. This chapter will focus on Utopia as a
distinct entity in the novels of literary immigrants into French and
discuss how it contains the concept of freedom, blurring the
boundaries between libertaire and libertin. The opportunistic
approach to passing pleasures and a need for a communal fusion go
hand in hand as characteristic expressions of nomadic freedom.
It is no coincidence that France – whose national identity is
built and maintained on the revolutionary spirit – is the country and
French the language in which immigrant writers have found it
appropriate to celebrate a contemporary sentiment of revolutionary
community. In both Semprun’s L’Algarabie and Kundera’s La
Lenteur, two of the works of fiction studied in this chapter, this is not
purely a homage to the adopting country. It would be more true to say
that the homage to France is a consequence of the writers having
adopted, at least for the duration of their novels, the French world
view. The revolutionary spirit L’Algarabie and La Lenteur celebrate is
not an imitation, but a disciplined and inspired development in the
best French tradition. This chapter will also briefly turn back to La
Montagne blanche which was already studied in the previous chapter
to stress some important Utopian and libertine moments in this novel,
particularly in relation to friendship, a significant Utopian notion
throughout Semprun’s work.
Occasionally a certain Bohemian gentleness or Castilian
fatalism and arrogance, which are not an obvious match for the subject
matter, can be detected in these novels. They are not just a cross-
pollination intended to enrich French literature, but also a very
important expression of the versatility of each writer’s repertoire, and
a statement of their choice.
All three novels explore the logic of freedom in such a French

way that the historical stages of French cultural development – from
seventeenth and eighteenth-century libertinism, via revolutionary
pragmatism and rationalism, to numerous nineteenth-century social
Utopian projects – seem a more seamless development than in reality.
In addition to this, how this heritage was and is written down becomes
more important than the historical facts. This primacy of text over fact
finds a spontaneous expression in the works of literary immigrants.
The focus on the “how” of literary expression removes the pressure
from the narrative to be real or feasible. The narratives still remain
more real(istic) than not, but that has little relevance for literary
expression. Recognition that the power of “how” is irreversible,
tracing future limitations, is crucial for the use of freedom.
Neither Semprun nor Kundera proffer a new interpretation of
the historical or cultural history. They write about it, adding their
names to it. The novelty of their point of view allows them to restate
their existing aesthetic values in a new way.
The French language itself has been conditioned through that
cultural development to become the language of libertinism par
excellence. This quality of the language is difficult to analyse. It is
contained within the world view whose adoption is necessary for
expression in French to be as natural as that of the native speaker.
L’Algarabie
Political Utopia
Had De Gaulle been killed in an accident in May 1968, the

world might have been a different place. From this historical premise,
Semprun constructs a Second Paris Commune. Established through
the unrest in 1968, the Commune comprises most of the Left Bank,
more precisely the fifth, sixth, fourteenth and parts of the thirteenth,
and also the first and second arrondissements (districts). Three groups
contest its hegemony: (1) a communist/anarchist bilingual Spanish
community headed by Eleuterio Ruiz, marginal by its very nature, (2)
the gang of criminals of Joe Aresti, owner of the most famous
underground brothel in Europe, and (3) the maos, the army of Auguste
le Mao, a dogmatic follower of the thought of Mao Tse-Tung. The
violent interaction of these groups, in addition to attracting numerous
LIBERTINISM AND UTOPIA 169
criminals and gangs, provides a fertile ground for intellectual and

cultural developments alike. Consequently the Commune boasts a
large number of heavyweight intellectuals gathered around prestigious
Left Bank universities and institutions, most of them having some
interest in political or historical research into communism and
Utopianism. As we can already see, knowledge of the contemporary
French cultural and political landscape is essential for understanding
this Utopia.
Only at one point do we get a glimpse of the author’s opinion
of the political present he is writing from. A group of characters
speculate as to what France would be like in 1975 had De Gaulle not
died. “Quelle horreur!”1 is the only comment of the main character
Rafael Artigas, which provokes laughter among his friends around the
table. This tongue-in-cheek reversal of the main premise of the literary
Utopia we are reading reveals the passion behind the Utopian
constructions of the novel. The death of De Gaulle is one of many
mysterious events functioning as a mythical blessing upon the Second
Commune’s credentials. The reversal of the motif from which the
whole novel originates mirrors the narcissistic upside-down world of
Rafael Artigas who is searching for his identity. There is an argument
for making a connection between the attraction of the portrayal of an
upside-down world and Semprun’s personal experience of
concentration camps which represent a total inversion of civil society.2
This constructed world haphazardly compensates for some of the
unfairness he perceives in the present: the leaders of francophone
Africa, for instance, now have the role of the enlightened and civilised
political personalities who help bring about a peace agreement
between the warring sides. This change of roles is not humbly
accepted:
Que des parachutistes de Harlem, de la Côte d’Ivoire ou de Zaïre eussent été

envoyés pour séparer d’un cordon sanitaire les factions rivales qui se
déchiraient sur le territoire de la douce France, fille aînée de l’Eglise, mère
des armes, des arts et des lois, cela avait semblé à certains un sacrilège, une
souillure nationale, une honte inexpiable et -plicable. A d’autres, tiers-
1
Semprun, L’Algarabie, p. 408. “How dreadful!”
2
Peter Forbes makes a similar claim for Primo Levi, another survivor whose work is
closely related to Semprun’s, in his introduction to Primo Levi, The Search for Roots,
A Personal Anthology (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Allen Lane, The Penguin Press,
2001).
mondistes acharnés et obtus, un juste retour des choses, peut-être même la

possibilité historique d’un renversement des valeurs bourgeoises.3
That the paratroopers from Harlem, Ivory Coast and Zaire were sent to
separate with a quarantine line the rival factions which were tearing each
other apart on the territory of la douce France, eldest daughter of the
Church, mother of arms, the arts and the laws — this to some seemed
sacrilegious, a national dishonour, an inexpiable and inexplicable shame. To
others, the fierce, obtuse Third-Worldists, it was a just reversal of things,
perhaps even a historical chance of overthrowing bourgeois values.
The overreaction on both sides exposes the extent of the

present arrogance of France and Europe. However this humorous turn
of events provides an appropriate outlet for the democratic possibility
of difference. Similarly to Gary’s humorous approach which
repeatedly takes apparently reasonable arguments to the point where
they can only seem absurd, Semprun enjoys this opportunity to
formulate a desire to overturn bourgeois values. The negation of the
importance of the middle classes, nowadays an outdated gesture,
pointed at the time the novel was written to the ridiculousness of some
of the gems of contemporary leftist thought.
Indeed the dominant political criticism in the novel is directed
against dogmatic left wing thought, whichever form it might take,
such as the ideology of the Maoists. The novel equally ridicules
movements such as Tel Quel, from the “dialectical” premise that there
is always something more dogmatic than the dogmatic. This criticism
is almost always made from the viewpoint of a character who is an
educated left-wing intellectual. The author thus gives himself the
opportunity to voice some long-harboured resentments towards the
communist movement of which he was for a long time a prominent
member. This critical thread does not in any way counteract the fact
that the novel’s own image of Utopia is politically a left-wing
construction. Despite Semprun’s awareness of the destructive nature
of Utopianism when it is converted to reality4, it goes without saying
that in many areas he advocates a communist society of sorts. In many
ways his Utopia can be said to reflect the French ideal of “liberté,
égalité, fraternité” (freedom, equality, fraternity).
3
4
Utopia for Semprun contains the germ of its impossibility.
Another aspect of this political criticism is that of

bureaucracy. Artigas’ original intention for the one day to which the
novel’s action is limited, is to obtain an official identity with the
authorities. In addition to the oppressive Kafkaesque glimpses of an
administration that has forgotten its raison d’être, the intricacies of
this one-day adventure are discussed with a joyful suicidal fatalism.
Artigas wants to obtain a passport in order to go back to Spain, which
effectively amounts to an “escape” from the quasi-communist paradise
that Semprun has created for his alter-ego. The desire to exit from
Utopia demonstrates an acceptance of the artificial and alien nature of
the immigrant’s self-created identity. Abandoning this identity is
necessary for the full circle of a destiny to be completed. Giving us an
example of an immigrant’s life cycle, Semprun shows us that he
considers it to be in good taste to know when to give up an identity.5
The immigrant constantly lives with the dilemma of deciding whether
his latest discovery of self-delusion is a warning that death is near,
that is, that all self-delusions are over, or whether it is just another
identity crisis. At the end, death and peace reside outside the man-
made ideal identity for Artigas as they do for Kundera’s Agnès of
L’Immortalité. This is also the case for Tomas and Tereza of
L’Insoutenable Légèreté de l’être whose tortured lives end
unexpectedly peacefully.
Just as Marx’s third daughter wanted to marry a Frenchman as
her sisters had done (to the despair of her mother),6 so has Marxism
found its most fertile ground once again on French territory. Drawing
on the French libertarian tradition of the Commune of 1871 and
recreating the nineteenth-century Romanticism necessary to render the
5
A parallel can be drawn here with Romain Gary who has been acquiring and giving
up identities throughout his life and fiction and whose suicide could be also said to be
one such instance of letting go of an identity. For an immigrant, returning to his native
land and thus completing the circular movement of life can only mean the death of
one of his identities.
6
“J’avais sincèrement espéré que le choix de Jenny (pour changer) se serait porté sur
un Anglais, ou un Allemand, plutôt que sur un Français, qui, mélangées avec les
qualités nationales du charme, n’est pas dépourvu des autres, tout aussi
caractéristiques, la faiblesse et l’irresponsabilité.” Jorge Semprun quotes Mme Marx
in L’Algarabie, p. 313. “I sincerely hoped that Jenny (for a change) would have
chosen an Englishman, or a German, rather than a Frenchman, who, in combination
with the national trait of charm, is not without the other equally characteristic traits of
weakness and irresponsibility.”
project of the Second Paris Commune feasible at all, Semprun also

assimilates various traits of the only similar long-standing European
project, also urban in nature, East Berlin. The wall surrounding his
Commune has an important role of containing and filtering, and every
danger is physically sensed through this boundary. In this sense the
Commune also resembles the early urban settlements. Semprun takes
the opportunity to stress that for him, European culture is essentially
urban.
This thought from Marx’s The eighteenth brumaire of Louis
Napoleon could easily be quoted at the beginning of L’Algarabie:
The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the
brain of the living. And just when they seem engaged in revolutionizing
themselves and things, in creating something that has never yet existed,
precisely in such periods of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up
the spirits of the past to their service and borrow from them names, battle
cries and costumes in order to present the new scene of world history in this
time-honored disguise and this borrowed language.7
Not only do Semprun’s characters borrow language, institutions and

revolutionary ideas from the past, even Penthésilée’s army of
Amazons wear the same uniform as the Amazones de la Seine
(Amazons of the Seine) from 1870.8 The historical data on this all-
female regiment reinforces Eleuterio’s daughter Penthésilée’s sense of
identity borrowed from the Greek myth and Kleist’s play Penthesilea.
However, it is the visual aesthetic of the regiment’s appearance which
sways her to emulate the namesake army from the past. Repeating
elements of history, usually prompted by cultural affinity, is
considered an invaluable method of progress in Semprun’s fictitious
world.
To enjoy the contrast such large-scale failed social projects –
on whom Semprun’s Commune was modelled – provide to the rest of
Europe’s middle-class uniformity as Semprun does, might seem to be
no more than to revel in a certain perverse exoticism. Exoticism has
always been part of Utopian thinking, uplifting or alienating
depending on the circumstances. However, it is important for
Semprun, it seems, that these large unrealistic projects have been
7
Karl Marx, The Karl Marx Library, vol. 1, Saul K. Padover (ed.) (New York:
McGraw Hill, 1972), p. 245.
8
attempted in order to guide and temper the humane search for a better
community.
The commune is in decline, we are regularly reminded by the
narrators, who are apparently writing the novel after the Commune
has been absorbed into the rest of the country: “La Commune ou
plutôt ce qu’il en subsistait encore sous les oripeaux parodiques de la
farce, allait retomber bientôt comme un fruit mûr – pourrissant – dans
le giron de l’Etat démocratique reconstitué.”9 There is also the other
side of the coin: “… la Deuxième Commune est en train de sombrer
sans gloire et sans combat, de s’enfoncer irrémédiablement dans la
fange et la farce de l’Etat renaissant …”.10 These ironic and pragmatic
statements also chart Semprun’s ambiguous perception of the
historical development of the communist movement in Spain and the
rest of Europe. Although Semprun believes, having rejected the
communist dogma, that a democracy based on a capitalist economy is
the only way forward for a society, some bitterness transpires from
Carlos’ description of the way leftist progressive ideas are absorbed
by society and unacknowledged:
Mais c’est une vieille histoire: la gauche fabrique des théories, invente des
formes d’avant-garde, crée des valeurs, et c’est la droite – ou, pour le dire
autrement, le pouvoir, les institutions dites libérales – qui en profitent, les
intégrant à leur projet de société, qui est plutôt un rejet, on le sait bien!11
But that is an old story: the Left produces theories, invents avant-garde
forms, creates values, and it is the Right – or, to put it differently, power,
the so-called liberal institutions – which makes use of them, integrating
them into its social project, which is more like a rejection, as we well know!
As an experienced politician Semprun is well aware that a society

which offers a maximum to its citizens needs both the stability of the
established order and the possibility for creating change. Regardless of
that, he still needs to exorcise his Communist demons in a literary
Utopia of a leftist community which despite all its downsides –
9
Semprun, L’Algarabie, p. 102. “The Commune, or rather what still remained of it
underneath the parodic rags of farce, would soon fall, like a ripe fruit – rotting – into
the bosom of the restored democratic State.”
10
Semprun, L’Algarabie, p. 84. “… the Second Commune is foundering without
glory or combat, sinking irremediably into the mud and the farce of the reviving State
…”
11
constant violence, high level of crime, dependence on the good will of

the rest of France for many basics like electricity, awful state of
disrepair and ruination of most buildings – has a lot of good points,
however unusual and haphazard they may be. It is a world, after all, in
which Artigas is asked to temporarily store a valuable Goya painting
stolen from the Louvre, which he simply keeps hung on his bedroom
wall.
Semprun is depicting the Commune during a state of decline
which many factors allude to, such as disregard for the collective
heritage. This phase is also a crucial part of the Utopia, as a time when
the contrast between political theory and reality is enhanced to the
point of appearing tragicomic and farcical. Choosing to depict an ideal
state during its decline is full of literary opportunities for the writer to
simultaneously expose the weaknesses and strengths of the Utopia
without endangering the believability of the narrative. This period is
“brève, misérable et glorieuse, comme toutes les périodes historiques
vraiment intéressantes”.12
The commerce in the Commune is reduced to what could
tentatively be described as the highest and lowest forms of goods: it is
only the book and sex trades that are flourishing. This adds another
dimension to the libertine theme of the novel. In a farcical speech,
Eurasien successfully uses pieces of the communist ideology in trying
to convince the Spanish community to allow his brothel to stay open
on their territory:
Que voyons-nous dans notle alentoul? Une communauté où les femmes,

poul des laisons histoliques et sociales tlès plècises, sont moins nobleuses
que les hommes. Il n’y a donc, poul supplimer la misère sexuelle latente –
qui est un facteul contle-lévolutionnaile, ne l’oubliez pas! – que deux
solutions: ou bien l’établissement d’une communauté sexuelle totale, pal la
supplession ladicale de toute applopliation plivée du plaisil, et cela, vous le
savez bien, est encole impensamble à l’heure actuelle: ou bien le
létablissement de l’accès individuel et malchand au plaisil – une solte de
N.E.P. de la sexualité en somme, disait l’Eurasien – comme seule possibilité
d’éviter une guelle des hommes entle eux, une guelle des classes d’âge
masculines poul le contlôle du malché féminin. Ainsi, terminait-il sa
péroraison, mon établissement de plaisil – qui compolte aussi un aspect
utilitaile et hygiénique, pal son côté bain-douches! – léactionnaile si on le
juge selon des clitèles abstlaits, est la seule solution démoclatique avancée
12
Semprun, L’Algarabie, p. 271. “brief, wretched and glorious, like all the really
interesting historical periods”
au ploblème existant, si on veut bien l’envisager sous l’angle d’une analyse

conclète.13
What do we see alound us? A community where the women, for vely
plecise political and social leasons, are less numelous than the men. So, in
order to abolish the latent sexual destitution – which is a countel-
levolutionaly factor, do no forget!– there are only two solutions: either the
establishment of a total sexual community, by ladically abolishing all
plivate applopliation of pleasure, and this, you are well aware, is still
unthinkable at the plesent time: or the establishment of individual
commercial access to pleasure – in short, a sort of N.E.P.14 of sexuality, the
Eurasian was saying, and he went on – as the only chance of avoiding a war
between the men, a male class war of the age groups for contlol over the
female market. Thus, winding down his oration, he concluded, my pleasure
establishment – which also contains a utilitalian and hygenic aspect, with its
public baths! – leactionaly if judged by abstlact clitelia, is the only advanced
democlatic solution to the existing ploblem, if one is willing to consider it
from the angle of conclete analysis.
The falseness of Eurasien’s logic is not the target of

Semprun’s ridicule: it is the reductionist dialectical system which
allows this logic to be taken seriously. Despite his great affection for
the Spanish community in this novel, Semprun shows them as not
being up to the task of manipulating communist dogma in the way
Eurasien does. Even a great self-taught anarchist libertarian like
Eleuterio has a literal understanding of the political strategy. Semprun
both envies and looks down on this naivety. Eurasien’s eloquence also
shows, as is frequently the case in life, that those with no lofty ideals
are usually much more cunning and practical in achieving what they
want. What might seem furthest removed from political theory,
commercialised sexual promiscuity, one of the most extreme
expressions of individual freedom, cannot be easily dismissed as
shallow in the context of libertarianism.
The picaresque
L’Algarabie is a historical fantasy which, like a true modern

European novel in the sense promoted by Kundera, draws on many
necessary elements of the picaresque genre. The central character,
13
14
New Economic Policy established by Lenin in 1921.
Rafael Artigas, Semprun’s alter ego, is a modern pícaro. He is a

rootless character whose real name we never find out, free from social
obligations and pursuing a quest for a place to call home. As opposed
to the political Utopia which borrows most of its ingredients from
French culture, the picaresque, applied mainly to the central character,
and therefore private in nature, embodies the Spanish culture in the
narrative. This is an example of an internal division in an immigrant
writer which is externalised and well integrated into the fabric of the
text. In this context, it is also interesting to note that the writer
oscillated between Spanish and French when he started writing this
novel.
The moment of Artigas’ exile from Spain represents his
picaresque second birth and preparation for a life of adventure.
Staying in his apartment off the boulevard Saint-Germain when the
fighting started gave him a convenient opportunity to cut his links
with the past.15 The pícaro’s “internal chaos is externally reflected in
his protean roles. The instability of personality is seen in the
picaresque novel as a reflection of the outer chaos discovered by the
plot patterns. The picaresque character is not merely a rogue, and his
chaos of personality is greater than any purely moral chaos. It reflects
a total lack in the structure in the world, not merely a lack of ethical or
social structure.”16 This belief that the world is in total chaos is buried
very deep underneath a narrative whose disordered character only
appears superficial. It seems logical that this belief originates from the
Spanish side of the novel’s personality, as that is the original part of
the writer’s personality which has been thrown into confusion through
immigration. The native culture was acquired more spontaneously at
an early age, and analysing it rationally is not a natural tendency. This
side is in opposition to the French element which largely stands for
order and rationality.
The pícaro’s original impulse to tell a story originates from
his yearning to integrate fragments of his life and make sense of his
existence. The superficial order or disorder that he creates appeases
his soul tormented by fragmentation. Even the disorder of his fiction is
15
16
Stuart Miller, The Picaresque Novel (Cleveland: Press of Case Western Reserve
University, 1967), p. 131 quoted in Ulrich Wicks, Picaresque Narrative, Picaresque
Fictions (New York: Greenwood Press, 1989), p. 29.
orderly compared to the disorder of life. The “poupées russes”

(Russian dolls)17 structure of his memories is a euphemism.
Ultimately the pícaro’s narration is itself a trick, a lure, a narrative analogue

of the tricks he has played to survive. (…) Shallowness is the key to the
picaresque; there is incongruity between the depth of probing that the
confessional narrative form implies and the actually shallow surface
skimming that picaresque life portrays.18
The populist, light or crude nature of some of the events in

L’Algarabie, in particular some of the libertine episodes, is freely
mixed with lofty intellectual conversations and recognition scenes in a
manner which Semprun frequently uses. This openly exposes the ludic
character of writing from which the European novel as a genre
originates, according to Kundera and like-minded twentieth-century
writers such as Semprun and Gary.
Semprun perfects the identification of the immigrant with a
literary archetype. Originating from a Spanish novel and wandering
through the unknown world as an eternal stranger, the pícaro is a
universal and yet a culturally biased symbol. One can hardly imagine
a symbol more appropriate for the expression of the European cultural
understanding of identity and diversity. Semprun’s proof of the
immigrant’s cultural acceptability relies on the acceptance of the
pícaro as one of the cornerstones of the European novel.
Through the depiction of the Commune, Semprun assembles,
like a true pícaro, the pieces of his own identity.19 First, there is the
territory of the Left Bank which he knows well, his home. Conflicting
depictions of Artigas isolated in an unknown place: “Plus de voisins,
plus d’amis de toujours, plus de famille, plus rien. Il restait seul,
17
“Mais je Mais j’y reviens Je m’étais égaré hors de ce long couloir de Madrid De
mon enfance Egaré dans les récits sortant les uns des autres comme des poupées
russes qui s’emboîtent (…)” Semprun, L’Algarabie, pp. 416-417. “But I But I’m
returning there I lost my way and found myself outside of this long corridor in Madrid
Of my childhood Lost in the stories emerging from each other like Russian dolls that
fit inside each other (…)”
18
Wicks, Picaresque Narrative, Picaresque Fictions, p. 58.
19
The role of the pícaro in Gary’s writing, in many ways comparable with Semprun’s
use of this symbol, is a large topic in its own right that would merit a separate study.
comme s’il avait brûlé ses vaisseaux, abordant une terre inconnue”20,
alternate with statements boasting excellent knowledge of the locale:
“Mais l’Espagnol qu’on appelle Rafael Artigas connaît chaque pouce
de ce terrain, depuis le temps.”21 Semprun here recreates both aspects
of an immigrant’s condition: the heroic pride of isolation and the
conquering of a new terrain.
The full importance of topography is revealed in Adieu, vive
clarté…, which contains the most detailed autobiographical account of
Semprun’s relationship with the two languages and cultures:
La place du Panthéon était le centre de l’univers. Du mien, cela va sans dire.

Mais peut-être aussi de celui de l’univers connu et civilisé. Je sais bien que
Jean Giraudoux (…) a situé le centre du monde ailleurs. Toujours à Paris,
bien sûr, mais du côté de Montparnasse. (…) Ses arguments ne sont pas
négligeables. Mais l’endroit qu’il a désigné, pour des raisons culturellement
respectables, manque de l’un des traits les plus appropriés à un centre réel
de l’univers: la hauteur de vue, l’élévation de la perspective.22
The Place du Panthéon was the centre of the universe. My universe, it goes
without saying. But perhaps also the centre of the known and civilised
universe. I know that Jean Giraudoux (…) situated the centre of the world
elsewhere. Still in Paris, of course, but in the Montparnasse area. (…) His
arguments are not insignificant. But the place he selected, for culturally
respectable reasons, lacks one of the most appropriate traits for a real centre
of the universe: the height of the view, the elevation of the perspective.
Taking pride in such detailed examination of appropriateness

of the chosen places is characteristic of immigrant writers.
Furthermore, Semprun shows the ease with which he has adopted a
Paris-centred view of the world from the French intelligentsia.
Homing in on the concept of the “centre of the universe”, familiar
from Eliade’s analyses of the sacred, enhances the spiritual
importance of location.
Second, despite an apparent isolation, Artigas is closely
integrated to the Commune’s Spanish community.23 It provides him
20
Semprun, L’Algarabie, p. 40. “No more neighbours, lifelong friends, family,
nothing. He remained alone, as if he had burnt his bridges, approaching an unknown
land”
21
Semprun, L’Algarabie, p. 13. “But the Spaniard whom they call Rafael Artigas has
known every inch of this terrain forever.”
22
Jorge Semprun, Adieu, vive clarté… (Paris: Gallimard, 1998), p. 139.
23
with a regular connection to his mother tongue and to the relationship

Spanish bilingual speakers have with French, but also to his past as an
activist in the Spanish communist party. There is a clear
understanding that Artigas’ bilingualism is far superior to that of his
compatriots: “En vérité, les Espagnols de la Z.U.P. ne parlent plus
aucune langue correctement. Ils parlent, très précisément, un sabir:
mot, ce dernier, d’origine espagnole, comme chacun sait, et qui situe
parfaitement les sources déracinées de leur savoir langagier.”24
The presence of the brotherhood of Artigas’ peers, equally
erudite, cosmopolitan and multilingual intellectuals, gives him his
intellectual environment seasoned with the companionship of cultured
libertine women. Joe Aresti and Auguste Mao provide the necessary
contrast; they are the negative characters against whom to reaffirm his
identity. Semprun recreates here a fictional post-war era that probably
corresponds to the time he thought he would know after the Second
World War, when he came to Paris as a survivor of the concentration
camps.
The narrative contains all the essential picaresque elements
enumerated by Guillén:
(1) a dynamic psychosociological situation (or series of situations) focused

on a pícaro, an orphan, a “half-outsider” who can “neither join nor actually
reject his fellow men” (…); (2) a pseudo-autobiographical form of narration
with “a double perspective of self-concealment and self-revelation” (…); (3)
a partial and prejudiced viewpoint that “offers no synthesis of human life”
(…); (4) a total view that is reflective, philosophical and critical on religious
or moral grounds, tending towards the roman à thèse (…); (5) a stress on the
material level of existence, on “sordid facts, hunger, money” (…); (6)
observation of a number of collective conditions such as social classes,
professions, caractères, cities and nations providing “a standing invitation to
satire” (…); (7) a “horizontal” movement through space and a vertical
movement through society (…); and (8) an episodic structure that makes a
picaresque fiction “formally open, so to speak, and ideologically closed”.25
24
Semprun, L’Algarabie, pp. 56-7. “In fact, the Spaniards of the Z.U.P. speak no
language correctly any more. They speak, to be precise, in pidgin, in ‘sabir’: this last
word is of Spanish origin as everyone knows, and perfectly locates the uprooted
sources of their linguistic knowledge.”
25
Claudio Guillén, “Toward a Definition of a Picaresque” (1962) in Literature as
System: Essays toward the Theory of Literary History (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1971) quoted in Wicks, Picaresque Narrative, Picaresque Fictions,
p. 38/9.
Semprun’s interpretation is modern on many levels,

consequently this is a picaresque-like novel rather than fiction
belonging to the picaresque genre. The novel also contains the more
marginal paraphernalia typical for the genre such as classical
divinities, proverbial sayings, allegorical figures and pictorial
emblems.26 And all this in an intricate mass of digressions and
apparently muddled narratives which also have a self-reflective
quality:
C’est l’avantage de ces romans touffus, taillés sur le patron du genre

picaresque hispanique, avec des personnages nombreux et des épisodes
rebondissants: on peut aller de l’un à l’autre, revenir en arrière, couper au
plus court, se perdre apparemment dans les digressions, reprendre le fil un
peu plus loin, telle est la loi d’un genre aujourd’hui hors la loi.27
That’s the advantage of thick novels, shaped on the pattern of the Spanish
picaresque genre, with numerous characters and sudden new episodes: one
can go from one to the other, return, take a shortcut, get apparently lost in
digressions, go back to the story a bit further on: such is the law of this
today outlawed genre.
This genre is a haven where the narrator can digress at will

into any literary, artistic, libertine or political consideration he desires.
All the digressions are nevertheless perfectly controlled and always
bring us back to the cyclic time of the Commune on the day when the
main character, Artigas, will die. The picaresque problem of finishing
a novel whilst the main character, that is the author, is still alive is
expediently solved with an epilogue explaining that the novel was
assembled by two of the other narrating characters, Carlos and
Elizabeth (apparently Anna-Lise’s real name), after Artigas’ death.
Etymology
There is a general confusion as to what the acronym Z.U.P.

used for the Commune stands for: whether it is Zone d’Utopie
Populaire28 (for the anarcho-spontanéistes29), Zone où s’Unifiera le
26
Wicks, Picaresque Narrative, Picaresque Fictions, p. 10.
27
28
Zone of the Populist Utopia
29
Spontaneous anarchists
Peuple30, Zone Urbaine Prolétarienne31 (for the Maoists) or Zone

Urbaine de Pénurie32 (according to the government of the rest of
France now in Versailles). It is open to interpretation as best suits a
free community. Similarly, the narrator is forgiven for contradicting
himself as his confusion only mirrors the chaos of his subject matter.
The only certainty is that it is a zone, a self-contained area out of reach
of any large enough “imperialist” force which could homogenise it
and standardise it overnight. In our time this can only be a Utopian
figure and a thing of the past.
Questions of etymology are very important in Semprun’s
bookish communist Utopia. Similar to the communist countries, where
etymology, just like everything else, was closely monitored, and false
etymology encouraged when necessary, given the diversity of the
inhabitants of the Commune and their desire to stamp their heritage on
this newly acquired freedom, the multiplicity of their versions does
not always add up to a larger identity. For the first time in his novel-
writing, Semprun has a very strong excuse for using hispanicisms. He
takes advantage of this opportunity to explore how his bilingualism
compares with that of his compatriots, and also to analyse linguistic
changes which are the result of the natural development of a language
in an ideal enclosed environment.
The title of the novel, L’Algarabie, is Semprun’s own
hispanicism originating from a Spanish nursery rhyme. Throughout
his fiction Semprun has a predilection for nursery rhymes as a way of
reminding the reader of an individual’s helplessness when dealing
with the power of childhood memories. According to Semprun,
childhood memories account for an individual’s fate much more than
the grown-up’s willpower. The word Algarabia which originally
meant “the Arabic language”, has become the equivalent of “charabia”
or gibberish, meaning an incomprehensible, foreign, incorrect
language, connoting a slight tinge of contempt for the speaker who is
unable to make himself understood. It is as if Semprun has launched a
Beckettian tongue-in-cheek crusade to rearrange the language of the
natives not only with his hispanicisms but with his world view – as an
idealistic bilingual survivor of the concentration camps. Semprun’s
Utopia is based on a compromise that a foreigner has to make in order
30
Zone where the People will Unite
31
Urban Proletarian Zone
32
Urban Poverty Zone
to communicate effectively. The lost childhood identity only remains

in the name (as in the name of the author), but is in fact almost fully
absorbed by the new, chosen heritage.
The ideal reader and narrator
The self-contained appearance of the novel, its enclosed

centrifugal structure, its distinct recycling of heritage33 and picaresque
influences which represent Semprun’s strategy for preserving identity
are important expressions of the literary Utopia, as opposed to the
political and libertine Utopia we encounter in L’Algarabie. Another
aspect of literary Utopianism arises in the very unflattering and
ambiguous role allocated, in the novel itself, to the ideal reader,
breathing down the author’s neck. Rose Beude, a policewoman who
repeatedly delays providing Artigas with a passport, is in fact besotted
with him and spies his every step. The partly Baudelairian qualities of
Rose Beude, “le lecteur de notre choix, astucieux lecteur, notre
semblable, notre frère”,34 make her a deserving target of the author’s
attention. She is the addressee of the writing, “unique objet”35 of
Artigas’ true sentiments, the only person the writer needs to please,
however hypocritical that makes him. Her name, rosebud with a
French accent, also refers to the obscure object of desire from Citizen
Kane which could be understood as an emblem of the security, hope
and innocence of childhood.36 As well as being drawn to her,
Semprun’s narrator also mocks her sentimental fragility. She is chosen
by the writer, just as he has chosen his language, in a vain attempt to
control the life of his work. Her memory is excellent (as a good
33
Not in a superficial sense at all: the recycling is always executed not to demean the
value of the original item, but to use it up to the last drop for purposes of self-
preservation.
34
Semprun, L’Algarabie, p. 147. “our chosen reader, astute reader, our fellow, our
brother”
35
Semprun, L’Algarabie, p. 276. “sole object”
36
She could also be the death drive for the author/narrator/main character. We find
one of the more explicit variations on this character in Quel beau dimanche!. The
woman called Daisy sitting at the next table is perceived by the narrator as the very
impersonation of death: “Et puis, elle était polyglotte, il ne nous manquait plus que
ça.” Quel beau dimanche! (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1980), p. 178. “In addition to that,
she was polyglot, that was the last straw.”
reader’s should be) and she obsessively follows up every single

reference Artigas drops on his way as a clue to his personality. The
catch is that in doing so she does not in fact learn much about Artigas,
but only about his heritage and background. Even that type of
knowledge tends to be obsessive in character. In the process, she
slowly turns into a cultured European. This Pygmalion-like education
is typical of Semprun’s depiction of libertinism.
When Artigas catches her following him, he gives in to his
own excitement on seeing hers. He lives up to her libertine
expectations and thus acknowledges the identity she provides for him.
In Semprun’s fiction an important element of libertinism is the sexual
and moral education which is transmitted in conjunction with the
sexual experiences. Libertine writing itself enacts this in the relation
to the reader. Provoking his audience, the author stresses, tongue in
cheek, that the education of the reader is inherent in this as in any
popular novel.37
Curious, demanding and destructive, Rose Beude is the ideal
reader the author depends on for his identity. Instead of it being the
role of the reader to discover, here it is the role of the narrator to
prove. The narrator suggests ironically that it is easy for Rose Beude
to discover the tricks of the narrative, now that he has given her all the
necessary knowledge.38
In most of Semprun’s novels the roles of the author, narrator
and main character overlap. In L’Algarabie the narrator, or narrators,
often appear impotent compared to Artigas, the “original” narrator and
character, the impersonator of Zeus on several levels of the novel. The
last two narrators, Carlos and Elizabeth, try to continue the spell of the
novel’s labyrinth for as long as they possibly can after the
disappearance of the novel’s raison d’être, Artigas. In doing so they
are mirroring the Commune’s long decline and its lingering conviction
that it decides its own fate, when in fact it is other external forces
which actively manipulate it and are responsible for its development.
Carlos and Elizabeth’s human ineptness at playing God contrasts with
the assurance of the original traditional narrator. There is a subtle
criticism of loose narratorial construction in the way the novel is
firmly led by the traditional narrator beneath the pretence that Carlos
37
38
and Elizabeth are its real guides. Sometimes taking the form of gentle
ridicule of the traditional omniscient and omnipresent narrator,
sometimes of a homage to the writers who did not have to worry about
the acceptability of traditional writing methods, Semprun states the
importance of possessing the full structure of one’s work:
(Saluons au passage, d’un grand coup de chapeau, l’allègre innocence qui

permettait à Eugène Sue d’écrire de cette façon, intervenant dans le récit, le
construisant et le déconstruisant à sa guise par cette intervention, annonçant
ses cartes, découvrant ses enjeux, démontrant, en somme, que l’écriture est un
jeu, et, bien entendu, un jeu ou un enjeu du Je, ou même, un en-Je du jeu!)39
(Let’s hail in passing, raising our hats high, the light-hearted innocence which
allowed Eugène Sue to write in this manner, intervening in the narrative,
constructing and deconstructing it at will by his intervention, announcing his
cards, revealing his game, demonstrating in short that writing is a game, and of
course, either a game or exploit where the “I” is at stake, or even an exploit
where the “game of the I” is at stake!)
Since the narcissistic nature of writing cannot be hidden, it is best if it

is openly acknowledged and included in the narrative itself. Calling on
the heritage of Fielding, Balzac, Dickens, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Joyce,
and Faulkner who have in their novels recreated a total reality with a
totalitarian, but disinterested narrator, Semprun chooses a topic which
allows him, as far as possible, a fantasy of a total reality.40 However,
the impossibility of avoiding the partiality of the narrator confers on
him a more humanly fallible power, following the example of Greek
mythology.
The two substitute writers who are drawn in different ways to
experience Artigas’ thoughts and dreams, feeling sometimes that they
are in his head, only receive crumbs from the main narrator’s table
and even that is sometimes more than they can cope with. When
Carlos complains about the disturbing appearance of Artigas’
memories in his mind, Artigas can only say: “Et alors? (…) Ça arrive
tout le temps, des choses pareilles!”41 It seems ridiculous that the
narrators cannot comprehend what is larger than their experience.
Their isolation, like the Commune’s, paves the way for the return to
39
40
41
Semprun, L’Algarabie, p. 344. “So what? (…) Things like that happen all the
time!”
traditional authority. Their position is as tenable as that of the

“autorités révolutionnaires”,42 a contradition in terms.
Friendship
A crucial aspect of Semprun’s Utopia in all of his oeuvre,

particularly relevant to the expression of Utopia and libertinism, is
friendship. From revolutionary camaraderie to intellectual like-
mindedness, friendship is another important container of the narrator’s
or author’s individuality and quest for being remembered, and its
power to elevate is tremendous. This companionship also has its roots
in the picaresque tradition which establishes the nomadic figure. A
nomadic expression of solidarity, it exemplifies the extremes of
nomadic attachment.
The bookish community in L’Algarabie, similarly to the
group of characters in La Montagne blanche, is remarkably united in
its intellectual pursuits. Their regular “banquets platoniciens”43 are the
opportunity for the sensual exchange of intellectual pleasures, for the
reaffirmation that they all swim in the same sea of collective memory
and European cultural heritage which continues to excite them with its
semantic nuances whose analysis adds quality to their existence. It
seems narcissistic and incestuous and it is; incestuous or quasi-
incestuous allusions play an important part in this community. The
fascination with the written word is only matched by the fascination
with the women, although the former is at times the temptation more
difficult to resist. Women find this competition irresistible. Not being
the main centre of attention always provokes their curiosity (at least in
Semprun’s universe). Semprun’s characters are very often found
laughing out loud at something they have read. Then they slowly
implicate those around them in their enchanted state, either by sharing
the joke, or more frequently not. This creates a certain complicity
among characters, narrators and readers which reveals the sacred
nature of writing.
When Carlos, Artigas’ closest friend, or more precisely, the
friend who is most similar to Artigas, starts remembering Artigas’ life
42
Semprun, L’Algarabie, p. 252. “revolutionary authorities”
43
Semprun, L’Algarabie, p. 240. “Platonic banquets”
as if it was his own, it is a sign to the reader to prepare for the

impending death of Artigas. We later find out that this is a
transmigration spirituelle.44 Artigas’ soul “peut-être parce qu’elle
sentait que son itinéraire spirituel n’était pas encore épuisé – essayait
de transmigrer chez un être plus jeune, dont la qualité lui semblait
probablement digne d’une nouvelle aventure”45 and chose its amigo
del alma. On one hand we have a reappearance of the picaresque
theme – that life is a dream – frequently used by Cervantes and his
contemporaries, and which Semprun appropriated in his novels as an
ideal expression of his identity formed in the concentration camps; on
the other we see the theme of ideal friendship unfolding.
The spiritual, religious perception of friendship and fraternity
has a long history in French literature (in the twentieth century:
Giraudoux, Péguy, Eluard). Montaigne’s Essais, as one of the earliest
secular apologies of masculine friendship in French, seem to be an
important basis for Semprun’s conception of masculine friendship as a
rudimentary unit of Utopia.46 A tender sentiment bordering on love,
although temperate, unlike passion, “chaleur constante et rassize”,47 is
also at the same time “ardante affection”.48 An apparent contradiction,
this is both a temperate and a passionate feeling. “Aimance” coined by
Abdelkebir Khatibi reflects the absolute nature of the ideal
relationship which transcends both friendship and love.49 The
homosexual aspect of male friendship is openly acknowledged by
Semprun. In his elliptical definition of it, there is an added strong
emphasis on literary heritage: “Une sorte de coup de foudre de la
complicité littéraire. Ou masculine, plus primitivement”.50
This affection originates from a name. On one hand, a person
idealises an unknown friend-to-be from a name: “nous nous
44
Semprun, L’Algarabie, p. 300. spiritual transmigration
45
Semprun, L’Algarabie, p. 386. “perhaps because it sensed that its spiritual journey
had not yet reached its end – was trying to transmigrate into a younger being who
seemed likely to be worthy of a new adventure”
46
47
Michel de Montaigne, Essais I, De l’amitié, chapitre XXVIII (Paris: Didier, 1969),
p. 233. “constant and calm warmth”
48
Montaigne, Essais I, De l’amitié, p. 237. “ardent affection”
49
Jacques Derrida, Politiques de l’amitié (Paris: Galilée, 1994), p. 23.
50
Semprun, La Montagne blanche, p. 24. “A sort of love at first sight based on
literary complicity. Or masculine complicity, at a more primitive level.”
embrassions par noz noms”51. The idealised person turns out exactly
as imagined or better, a tactic Semprun uses quite often. It is important
here that both feelings of idealisation/expectation and
reality/fulfilment are mutual. On the other hand, the name introduces a
concept of heritage, a contract one enters into by engaging in
friendship. Friends share everything, including women (Montaigne
clearly states this and Semprun puts it in practice in his fiction) and
memories. A man vouches for his friend’s immortality by taking on
himself his friend’s heritage and identity, by ensuring that a memory
of his friend’s identity continues to last and develop after death.
According to Cicero in De amicitia, the ecstasy of immortality is the
most important benefit of friendship. The perceived similarity
between friends allows for this transmission. Derrida points out the
underlying narcissism of such feelings:
L’ami est-ce le même ou l’autre? Cicéron préfère le même (…) Si l’amitié

projette son espoir au-delà de la vie, un espoir absolu, un espoir
incommensurable, c’est parce que l’ami est, comme dit la traduction, notre
“propre image idéale”. Nous le regardons comme tel. Et c’est ainsi qu’il nous
regarde: amicalement. Cicéron se sert du mot exemplar qui veut dire portrait,
mais aussi, comme exemplum, la copie, la reproduction, l’exemplaire aussi
bien que l’original, le type, le modèle. (…) Or selon Cicéron, on projette, on
reconnaît dans l’ami vrai son exemplar, son double idéal, son autre soi-même,
le même que soi en mieux. Parce qu’on le regarde nous regarder, se regarder
ainsi, parce qu’on le voit garder notre image dans les yeux, en vérité dans les
nôtres, la survie alors est espérée, d’avance illuminée, sinon assurée, pour ce
Narcisse qui rêve d’immortalité.52
Is the friend the same or different? Cicero prefers the same (…) If the
friendship projects its hope beyond life, an absolute incommensurable hope,
this is because the friend is, as the translation states, our “own ideal image”.
We look at him as such. And he also looks at us in the same way: amicably.
Cicero uses the word exemplar which means portrait, but also, like exemplum,
a copy, reproduction, the exemplary one as well as the original, the type, the
model. (…) Therefore according to Cicero, we project, we recognise in the
true friend our exemplar, our ideal double, the other us, the same as us but
better. Since we look at him looking at us and thus look at ourselves in this
way, because we see our image preserved in his eyes, in fact in our own, we
hope for survival, which is revealed in advance if not ensured, for this
Narcissus who dreams of immortality.
51
Montaigne, Essais I, De l’amitié, p. 236. “we kissed through our names”
52
Derrida, Politiques d’amitié, p. 20.
Semprun does not reject either the attraction of the possibility of

immortality or the inherent narcissism. The continuation established
through the relationship between Rafael Artigas and Carlos
Bustamante positively incorporates and exemplifies both ideas. It is
not far-fetched to suggest that in the same way Semprun contributes to
the memory of the authors whom he quotes and refers to, he would
like his work to be part of a similar chain of remembrance in the
future.
There is a seriousness attached to the idea of friendship in
Semprun’s fictional universe. The ties of friendship might sometimes
be described with a nostalgic baroque pomposity, but this does not
take anything away from their fundamental value for the identity of
Semprun’s main characters.
L’interrogation de la jeune femme (…) avait réveillé chez lui l’image de

Lucas, ami de l’âme, comme on dit en castillan, amigo del alma, expression
parfaitement appropriée pour qualifier une véritable amitié masculine – nous
ne disons pas virile, volontairement, il suffirait pour comprendre ce que nous
entendons de se reporter à ce que Montaigne écrivit de son compagnon La
Boétie – compañero de alma, en effet, Lucas, pendant toutes ces années
cinquante, à Madrid (…).53
The interrogation of the young woman (…) awoke in him the image of Lucas,
the soul mate, amigo del alma as one says in Castilian, a perfectly suitable
expression for describing a true male friendship – we intentionally do not say
virile; to understand what we mean it would suffice to refer to what Montaigne
wrote about his companion La Boétie – compañero de alma in fact, Lucas,
during all those years through the fifties, in Madrid (…).
There is very little space for irony in the description of

Semprun’s characters’ attachment to each other – perhaps this is
another core element for the author himself who, through building
such a solid relationship between his characters, reinforces his own
identity. The above quotation is part of a larger structure which will be
examined further in the section “Libertinage” of this chapter. The
narrator goes in circles through successive layers of several important
memories by free association. Friendship is revealed as one of the
layers which needs the protection of other less vulnerable memories.
By extension the doubling described by Derrida has various
other echoes in Semprun’s novels, as well as in those of Agota Kristof
53
and Romain Gary: as a sign of a perfectionist writer’s protection of his

or her fundamental “narcissistic space”,54 while at the same time it
describes an impossible private Utopia based on an endless
claustrophobic conversation of two.55
The role of a friend incorporates the promotion of the correct
interpretation of the other person’s intentions and achievements. As
such, it is crucial for the critical appreciation of literary works after
their author’s death. In Les Testaments trahis Kundera, in the shadow
of various misinterpretations, reevaluates the possibility of returning
to true original meanings which can be summed up with the question:
“Pendant combien de temps l’homme peut-il être considéré comme
identique à lui-même?”56 Max Brod remains an eternal emblematic
figure of a friend whose “ardeur désintéressée”57 in promoting the
work of his friends Kafka and Janá ek is responsible for both the
recognition of these artists and the frequent and widespread
misunderstanding of their aesthetic. Kundera takes a critical view of
this dangerous alliance, making a clear distinction between the
writer’s private persona and the personality he may show in his works.
He places this in the context of totalitarian anti-individualism, stating
that he prefers the respect for personal space associated with a
different (cooler) mentality:
Depuis mon enfance j’entends dire que l’ami est celui avec qui tu partages tes
secrets et qui a même le droit, au nom de l’amitié, d’insister pour les connaître.
Pour mon Islandais, l’amitié est autre chose: c’est être un gardien devant la
porte où l’ami cache sa vie privée; c’est être celui qui n’ouvrira jamais cette
porte; qui à personne ne permettra de l’ouvrir.58
Since my childhood, I‘ve heard people say that your friend is the one with
whom you share your secrets and who even has the right, in the name of the
friendship, to insist on knowing them. For my Icelander, friendship is entirely
different: it means being a guardian in front of the door where the friend hides
54
Cf. Kristeva’s account of this space as the heterogenous space of the battle of
meanings inhabited by the Kristevan writer, “sujet en procès”. Kristeva, La
Révolution du langage poétique.
55
Montaigne incorporates these antisocial elements into his interpretation of the
classical ideal of friendship.
56
This is one of the subheadings in Milan Kundera, Les Testaments trahis (Paris:
Gallimard, 1993), p. 255. “For how long can a person be considered identical to
himself?”
57
Kundera, Les Testaments trahis, p. 302. “disinterested ardour”
58
his private life; it means being he who will never open that door; who will
allow no one to open it.
The sense of duty in respecting a friend’s will is sacred. Regardless of

his devotion and enthusiasm, Brod’s behaviour is nothing other than
betrayal according to Kundera, a term with plenty of shades of grey in
his vocabulary. In L’Algarabie, the question of the fidelity of the two
narrators to Artigas, the original author and friend, is discarded as
impossible to answer and possibly less relevant than the numerous
factual arguments the narrators voice in their defence. Without their
interference, the book would never have been finished, even if Artigas
had not died. In a spirit contrary to Kundera, Semprun vulnerably
allows his books to be a reflection of his life, protecting himself only
with the numerous layers of identity of the narrator.59 Semprun’s need
for an identity confirmed by others is stronger than his need for the
precision of their understanding.
Although Artigas’ existential anguish is calmed by the
knowledge that nature will survive him and will not in any way be
altered by his existence or disappearance, his illusory, but humanly
arrogant, desire to leave a trace is duly continued by his friends who
tie up the narrative. The reader knows that Semprun, as the master
narrator, has insured their fidelity to Artigas:
Et sans doute certains esprits chagrins, ou méfiants, ou tout simplement agacés

par le personnage d’Artigas, par cette impression qui se dégage du texte et qui
semble suggérer que toutes les femmes en ont gardé un bon souvenir – ou
plutôt un souvenir durable, bon ou mauvais, et c’est là l’essentiel – ce genre de
lecteur, donc, aura sans doute une réaction d’incrédulité à lire que la gérante
du café d’Ascona se souvient encore d’Artigas, trente-cinq ans après son
passage. C’est pourtant vrai et cela n’a d’ailleurs rien d’étonnant.60
And doubtless some disgruntled or suspicious souls, or those simply irritated

by Artigas’ character, by the impression which emerges from the text, seeming
to suggest that all women have kept good memories of him – or rather lasting
memories, good or bad, that’s the crucial point – that type of reader will
doubtless react with incredulity on reading that the manageress of the café in
Ascona still remembers Artigas, after thirty-five years. It is true, nonetheless,
and besides, it is not at all surprising.
59
Semprun calls L’Algarabie “mon livre le plus personnel” (“my most personal
book”). Françoise Nicoladzé, La Deuxième Vie de Jorge Semprun (Castelnau-le-lez:
Éditions Climats, 1997), p. 68.
60
Semprun has narrated his stay in Ascona, usually attributed to

the main character, in several of his books of fiction. It is an important
moment in his recovery subsequent to his survival of Buchenwald. He
openly acknowledges his narcissistic desire to be remembered as well
as he himself remembers. Similarly the death of the main character is
often portrayed as a narcissistic return to the womb:
Je serais enfin revenu dans le sein maternel. Dans le giron maternel de ce lit
conjugal et mortuaire où s’allongea jadis le corps sans vie de ma mère. Dans le
sein maternel de la mort qui me poursuit desde que ha nacido. Ou que je
poursuis depuis que je suis né.61
I would at last have returned to the maternal womb. To the maternal bosom of
that bed, both conjugal and mortuary, where long ago the lifeless body of my
mother lay. Back to the maternal womb of death which has pursued me desde
que ha nacido. Or that I have pursued since the day I was born.
The freedom of this libertine gesture (that the character of Rose Beude
also refers to) is in its drive to become an undifferentiated part of
mother nature.
Whilst cunningly establishing the context for the evaluation of
his own oeuvre in Les Testaments trahis, Kundera also gives us his
understanding of friendship, situating it mainly within the fraternity of
writers and artists. It is a friendship unaltered by death: “Tout
simplement un mort que j’aime ne sera jamais mort pour moi. Je ne
peux même dire: je l’ai aimé; non, je l’aime.”62 The survivor has the
obligation to choose mourning in order to remain the bearer of the
residual part of his friend’s individuality. It is only through such a
confrontation with death that the continuity of heritage which has built
the European novel can be established and enriched.
Perhaps a beginning of an aptitude for political community
and certainly the beginning of the cosmopolitan ideal,63 the
61
Semprun, L’Algarabie, pp. 433-434. On other occasions the fantasy of death in
Semprun’s fiction relates very closely to Bachelard’s complexe de Caron (Charon
complex) and sometimes to the complexe d’Ophélie (Ophelia complex). Gaston
Bachelard, L’Eau et les rêves; essai sur l’imagination de la matière (Paris: Librairie
José Corti, 1942).
62
Kundera, Les Testaments trahis, p. 333. “Simply, a dead person that I love will
never be dead for me. I cannot even say: I loved him; no, I love him.”
63
“Il va de soi que le cosmopolitisme, la démocratie universelle, la paix perpétuelle
n’auraient aucune chance, aucune chance de s’annoncer et de se promettre, sinon de
se réaliser, sans la présupposition d’un tel ami [l’ami des hommes].” Jacques Derrida,
community of friends becomes a pool of communal memory where

frequent commemorations ensure that what is shared is not forgotten.
“Il y avait la mémoire, je le savais,”64 says Sempun after narrating
Maurice Halbwachs’s death at his side in Buchenwald. This is not just
a homage to a friend who was an authority on collective memory. It is
an intimate acknowledgement of the foundations of his identity: “Je
pèse le poids de fumée de tous mes copains morts, partis en fumée. Je
pèse le poids infime, infiniment lourd, de ma propre fumée. Je pèse le
poids impalpable de cette odeur de fumée sur le paysage …”.65 Our
memory defines which community we belong to, remembering
becoming an expression of the desire to be part of a community.
The family unit, by its nature representing the boundary
between the private and the social, is the most important catalyst of
our social interactions, particularly whilst we are growing up.66 The
security a family offers to an individual is both vital and suffocating.
The negotiation of the relationship with the family is crucial for
establishing any other significant relationships. Perhaps for most
people the family still remains the most significant relationship of
their life, whilst others (immigrants in particular) desperately try to
establish more significant relationships elsewhere and to avoid
reproducing the same family patterns in those relationships. Derrida
laments this inability of human beings to extricate themselves from
their families:
La plupart des hommes n’auront existé que par et pour leur famille; où nous
vivons et mourons en étant aimés, commentés, un peu déplorés. Parmi les
Politiques d’amitié, p. 292. “It is self-evident that cosmopolitanism, universal

democracy and perpetual peace would not have a chance, not one chance to announce
and to promise their coming, even if not realise themselves, without the
presupposition of such a friend [friend of men].” The notion of L’ami des hommes
transcends patriotism and its rejection of the foreigner.
64
Jorge Semprun, L’Évanouissement (Paris: Gallimard, 1967), p. 76. “There was the
memory, I knew that.”
65
Semprun, La Montagne blanche, p. 123. “I measure the weight of smoke of all my
dead companions who disappeared in smoke. I measure the minute, infinitely heavy
weight of my own smoke. I measure the impalpable weight of that smell of smoke in
the landscape …”
66
It is interesting to note that the earliest surviving European Utopia, Plato’s
Republic, promotes the abolition of the family at the same time as the continuation of
slavery (though only for foreigners). Plato, The Republic, translated with introduction
and notes by Francis Macdonald Cornford (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1941).
tentatives désespérées pour exister outre famille: écrire; ou … aimer; qui

emporte, altère, adultère. (…) Et voyez, à peine se sont-ils arrachés à la
famille par l’amour, ils font une famille.67
The majority of people will only have existed through and for their family;
where we live and die loved, talked about, mourned a little. Among the
desperate attempts to exist outside the family are: writing; or … loving;
which sweeps us away, alters, adulterates. (…) And behold, hardly have
they torn themselves away from the family by way of love that they form a
family.
We have a natural bias towards adopting a family structure in social

situations. Fraternity, writing and other forms of escape can easily
borrow family romance characteristics. The family romance helps to
balance the social and individualistic in a sheltered structure, the
purpose fairy tales effortlessly achieve. However, ultimately, these
forms of escape have an important social function to perform:
Writing is perhaps an act of brotherhood, first and foremost. Writing

demands solitude, sometimes profound and radical solitude, but it usually is
a tunnel leading to other people, dug in a fertile earth (and this earth is
imagination and narcissism, compassion and indifference, tenderness and
arrogance, music and ambition, blood and ink). Even suicides write letters.
Poets kill themselves. Critics kill authors. Readers are easily bored and
drown books as if they were kittens. But who said fraternity was easy?
Please turn to the Bible …68
The precondition of friendship is the giving of a pledge of

memory, the promise relying on faith where “une mémoire s’engage
d’avance”.69 This makes a friend a brother. Many male writers on
friendship have found women lacking in this dimension. Their soul is
not strong enough for such a powerful bond, says Montaigne.
Nietzsche repeatedly states that women are not as yet capable of
friendship. In Politiques d’amitié (The Politics of Friendship) Derrida
gives a very insightful analysis of the reasons given for excluding
women from fraternity:
La femme n’est pas assez fraternelle, pas assez amie, elle ne sait pas encore ce
que veut dire “fraternité”, elle ne sait surtout pas ce que cela voudra et devra
67
68
Zagajewski, Two cities; on exile, history and the imagination, p. 208.
69
Derrida, Politiques d’amitié, p. 21. “a memory is engaged in advance”
dire, elle n’entend pas, pas encore la promesse fraternelle. Elle connaît bien le
mot, mais elle n’en a pas le concept, elle le lit comme à l’école maternelle, elle
le lit sans le lire. Elle le lit dans sa lettre, mais n’a pas encore accès à ce qui s’y
pense en esprit – et c’est le sacré qu’elle manque alors, et l’histoire et l’avenir,
rien de moins.70
Woman is not fraternal enough, not sufficiently a friend, she does not yet
know what “fraternity” means, above all she does not know what it will and
will have to mean; she does not hear, not yet, the fraternal promise. She knows
the word, but she does not know the concept, she reads it as if she were in
primary school, she reads it without reading it. She reads it literally, but has no
access as yet to what is being thought in spirit through the word – so what she
lacks is the sacred, and history, and the future, nothing less.
The thought of women participating in fraternity is more than an

etymological nonsense.71 Largely deriving the misogynist explanation
from Michelet (Le Peuple), Derrida tries to describe this indescribable
gap between men and women. The objectively contemptible allegation
of a female inability to invest in a social project must be considered in
its long historical context of inequality and lack of social conditioning.
However, the reality that we have to contend with here is the
widespread belief that women cannot and do not take part in
friendship, fraternity or any form of Utopian community, at least not
in the “true” sense that men do. Perhaps one of the last strongholds of
patriarchal chauvinism, it is difficult to refute its argument because it
is apparently based on ethereal concepts. In the writing of Semprun
and Kundera, the exclusion of women is based on the writers’
particularly traditional view of heritage. The transmission of heritage
is deemed a distinctly masculine affair. Even Agota Kristof never
attempts to extend fraternal bonding to include female characters.
Despite the sexist attitude of his male characters, Semprun should be
given credit for exploring some of the possible solutions for the
perceived incompatibility of women with friendship and brotherhood.
Militant Amazonian spirit, libertine attitude and metaphors of incest
all provide a symbolic, violent incorporation of women into masculine
social structures. In real life, Semprun had a literary friendship with
Claude-Edmonde Magny. She dedicated her Lettre sur le pouvoir
70
71
The terms fraternity and brotherhood create a class in the logical sense to which
women logically cannot belong. There does not seem to be a successful transcendence
for this.
d’écrire to him, a young immigrant striving to become a writer. A

dedication by an established author, it had a strong impact on the
young Semprun. In this particular case, the fact that we are talking
about a female writer is never questioned. Claude-Edmonde Magny
presumably takes her place alongside male peers in the French cultural
universe, but Semprun includes no such female character in his
fictional work. Semprun perseveres in his unbalanced depiction of
women as a strict adherence to a realistic portrayal of the male fantasy
of which the whole novel is a representation. The depiction of the
lesbian character Paula Negri in L’Algarabie comes closest to a
successful representation of intellectual equality within the realm of
sexual difference. It seems that the similar bias of Paula’s sexual
fantasies makes this possible.
Libertine writing and language
Libertinism and libertarianism go hand in hand in

L’Algarabie. Euroasien’s speech quoted earlier is essentially libertine.
His rational seductiveness is an attempt worthy of Valmont to
convince by appealing to the most basic sexual instincts in the guise of
pragmatism. Uninterested in political fraternity, Eurasien only wants
to further his business interests. He possibly also finds it satisfying to
turn communist logic perversely on its head, using it to justify an
openly “immoral” and gratuitous erotic cause. The pleasure of
successful persuasion is part of the libertine act. The realm of
libertinism is fully announced in this Utopian confusion of libertine
behaviour and libertine discourse:
L’Utopie, dont le terme est censé renvoyer à une réalité bien déterminée, ne
nous piège-t-elle pas dans la mesure où elle comporte toujours une dimension
auto-référentielle au sens où ce genre n’existe peut-être nulle part tout à fait en
acte ou en œuvre, parce que son centre est partout et sa circonférence nulle
part?72
Does not Utopia, whose name is supposed to refer to a well defined reality,
trap us to the extent that it always contains a self-referential dimension, in the
72
Jean Jacques Wunenburger, “Utopie: variation autour d’un non-lieu”, in Utopie et
utopies, L’imaginaire du projet social européen, textes réunis par Claude-Gilbert
Dubois (Bordeaux: Editions InterUniversitaires, 1994), p. 13.
sense that this genre perhaps does not fully exist anywhere, in action or in
works, because its centre is everywhere and its circumference nowhere?
A religious source of Utopia is suggested in this equation of Utopia

with God: “Dieu est une sphère dont le centre est partout, la
circonférence nulle part.”73 The playfulness and lack of commitment
of the true novel (in the Kunderian sense), as well as the traditionally
authoritarian attitude of the classical narrator, are an ideal form for
libertinism, which is essentially textual, and by extension, Utopian by
nature. Thus the libertine novel is an ideal genre for literary
immigrants into a new language who have experienced the
multiplicity of metaphysical centres very personally.
The circular temporal structure of L’Algarabie seems to
convey a somewhat fatalistic claustrophobic belonging to “nowhere”
which is a totality. As Sollers points out “if there is sometimes a
weakness in the libertine novel, it is this impression of a perfectly
constructed novel that refuses, denies any possible weakness, any
vulnerability, and that thus refuses to take any risk.”74 It is interesting
to observe how in the name of freedom, an equally powerful driving
force for both libertarianism and libertinism, a formally totalitarian
Utopia can arise. This organisation can easily be accommodated
within the character of the European novel, even while the genre
historically resists and repudiates it.
Language is crucial to the French concept of libertinism. One
of the best-known masters of the genre, Casanova, is an eighteenth-
century instance of a linguistic immigrant. One can learn a lot about
literary immigration into French from his life and writing. He
mistakenly believed his political Utopia Icosaméron would grant him
immortality, failing to notice the Utopian continuity between it and his
best known work nowadays – the Histoire de ma vie. His obsession
with recording his sexual encounters in his memoirs is matched in
intensity by the passionless cataloguing of features and events in his
stifling Icosaméron. The founding incest of this Utopia and its cyclic
73
Georges Poulet, Les Métamorphoses du cercle (Paris: Flammarion, 1979), p. 26.
“God is a sphere whose centre is everywhere, its circumference nowhere.” This is
part of the Scholastics’ definition of God.
74
Philippe Sollers, “What is Libertinage?”, Yale French Studies, 94 (1998), 199-212
(p. 204).
temporality can only contribute to the nauseous feeling which

permeates his invented world in Icosaméron: 75
Le paradoxe d’un paradis qui est (presque) exhaustivement décrit comme tel
et qui ne suggère en fait que l’envie de s’en faire expulser est encore plus
évident si l’on décèle aussi, à l’intérieur du récit de Casanova, une
composante de répulsion. 76
The paradox of a paradise that is (almost) fully described as such but which
in fact only suggests the desire to be expelled from it is even more obvious
when we also detect, inside the narrative, an element of repulsion.
Chantal Thomas analyses the role of language, that is the

change of language, in the textual identity that libertinism confers.
Venice as the desired location in Casanova’s writing is replaceable.
French, the language of his writing, on the other hand, is a natural
ingredient, if not a foundation, of a very rationally constructed
world:77
Dans cet univers parfaitement contrôlé et désirable par cela même, on

comprend comment toute faute de langue, lapsus, balbutiement, sont
impardonnables. L’amour-passion étant vécu comme un dérèglement de
langue pouvant aller jusqu’à l’aphasie, d’autres signes le plus souvent
involontaires en deviennent les éléments clefs. Le discours amoureux
échappe à toute reproduction littérale. Il ne se répète pas. Il n’appelle pas la
performance.
Casanova aborde la langue française comme la langue même du libertinage.

C’est-à-dire comme une langue qui ne se parle qu’à la perfection. C’est
pourquoi il ne se permet aucune imperfection et se montre impitoyable tant
à son propre égard qu’à celui d’autrui. À Paris, il prend régulièrement
pendant un an des cours avec Crébillon (père) et ne manque aucune
occasion de se perfectionner. Il exerce une sévérité totale contre ceux qui ne
font pas preuve du même perfectionnisme.78
75
There is a complete predestination and purposeful use of time in the new world
discovered in Icosaméron. Its inhabitants, Megamicres, know when they will die, they
give birth and marry on the same day and they do not sleep. Giacomo Casanova,
Icosaméron (Paris: François Bourin, 1988).
76
Chantal Thomas, Casanova, Un voyage libertin, (Paris: Denoël, Folio, 1985), p.
196.
77
Casanova said that he chose French because he thought of it as a superior language
to Italian.
78
Thomas, Casanova, Un voyage libertin, pp. 118-9.
In this perfectly controlled and thus desirable universe, we understand why

any mistake in the language, slip of the tongue, stammer, is inexcusable.
Since passionate love is experienced as a disturbance of the language which
could lead as far as aphasia, other, most often involuntary signs become its
key elements. The lovers’ discourse escapes all literal reproduction; it
cannot be repeated. It does not invite performance.
Casanova approaches the French language as the very language of

libertinism. That is to say as a language that is only spoken perfectly. That
is why he does not allow any imperfection and appears ruthless as much in
relation to himself as to others. In Paris, he regularly takes classes with
Crébillon (the father) and does not miss any opportunity to improve. He
exerts total severity towards those who do not show the same perfectionism.
Many aspects of our mastery of our mother tongue are out of

our control. We acquire it at an age when our learning processes are as
instinctive as possible. Learning a new language is a perfect
opportunity to establish an illusory control over the tool of expression
and by extension, the subject matter. The rationalism of such learning
leads to the perfectionism described, which is particularly
characteristic of French-language adoption. The cultural predilection
of the French themselves for taking pride in an educated linguistic
expression is certainly a strong influence. The French language, many
authors claim, demands extreme precision and control. Therefore the
rational art of the libertine finds it to be a perfect tool.
It is equally true that in the process of second language
acquisition, the importance and the status of the new language are
inflated. This is crucial for the process of language substitution to be
envisaged as possible. The new language has to become a vehicle for
the expression of the person’s innermost desires. This overestimation
also induces perfectionism.
Libertinage
For Semprun’s characters libertinage is “d’esprit”.79 In

addition to its being a method “pour perfectionner la maîtrise de soi”
(to perfect self-mastery), it is also a means to “enrichir l’imagination
79
Semprun, L’Algarabie, p. 397. “of the mind”
et la sémiologie érotiques”,80 whereby an overconscious practice

becomes almost academically a means of improvement and self-
education. Erotic practices, in his writing, are so closely related to
reading that their sole raison d’être becomes that of inspiring a literary
reference, be it a discovery of a new text or a pleasurable reminiscence
of a text already absorbed, sometimes suddenly seen in a new light.
The challenge to the text comes from the senses or from the
otherworldliness of erotic relaxation. Carlos’ yearning for Fabienne is
first a “besoin romanesque”,81 almost a desire for a fresh
reinterpretation of the very well known bookish universe. The first
words spoken at the beginning of a possible romantic or libertine
encounter gain in importance from this constant, imposed textual
reference. They are promised an optimistic immortality before even
being judged and when they are evaluated they are freely (lightly and
joyfully) considered in isolation. A libertine novel also needs a
voyeuristic reader; we find this reader in Rose Beude. Including the
ideal reader within the narrative helps create the illusion that the work
successfully contains the totality of the author’s Utopian project.
Libertinage is not exclusively nor always merely frivolous and
coldly devious (because rational). It may be as deep and complex or as
temperately naïve as the diversity of human temperaments and
internal personal multiplicity allow. In the context of the general
celebration of freedom and text, libertinage is also a libertine
character’s ruse to free herself from the omnipresent eye of the
narrator. This is the case of Yannick de Kerhuel: “Ce n’est pas pour
retomber sous la coupe d’un Narrateur dont elle ignore tout qu’elle
s’est libérée dès son plus jeune âge, de la tutelle paternelle!”82 The
most libertine character of all, la vicomtesse rouge, fully uses the
power of discourse, repetition, order and spectacle to seduce and
satisfy her own needs. The public confession, a catholic “genre”
turned communist, is only one in a range of her methods – genres
littéraires83 – which perpetuate the textual nature of libertinism.
Giving her full control of the crowd which thought it could control
80
Semprun, L’Algarabie, p. 210. “to enrich the erotic imagination and erotic
semiology”
81
Semprun, L’Algarabie, p. 228. “novelistic need”
82
Semprun, L’Algarabie, p. 68. “She did not free herself from her father’s supervision
at a tender age, now to fall prey to a Narrator of whom she knows nothing!”
83
Semprun, L’Algarabie, p. 325. “literary genres”
her, her use of seduction proves the superiority of those who have
rationally analysed human psychology over those who suppress
feelings, and in that context, illustrates a superiority of the individual
over the group.
Occasionally we are reminded of an existential value of
libertinism: as both at once a death wish84 – an attempt to reach that
last frontier of jadedness – and a survival mechanism: a desire to
forget the horrors of life, the concentration camps. Losing oneself, and
thus losing the sharp rationality with which the context is considered
before and after an erotic encounter, is the other side of the coin:
(A moins qu’elle ne se livrât réellement qu’à elle-même, à son seul démon

intérieur, on ne sait jamais, en effet, dans les aventures du sexe et de l’âme
d’une aussi violente espèce, et ça n’avait d’ailleurs pas beaucoup
d’importance, car, qu’elle se livrât à Carlos ou rien qu’à elle-même ou rien
qu’au jeu de se perdre, c’est avec lui que cette dépossession, ou ce vertige,
avec lui seulement qu’ils semblaient possibles. Du moins pour l’instant, ou
pour l’heure, ou pour le temps indéfini du bonheur).85
(Unless she was only really abandoning herself to herself, to her own internal
demons; one never knows in fact, in such violent adventures of sex and the
soul, and anyway it was hardly of any importance, because, whether she was
abandoning herself to Carlos or merely to herself or merely to the game of
abandonment, it was with him, only with him, that this dispossession, or this
intoxication, seemed possible. At least for that instant, or for that hour, or for
the indefinite time of happiness).
The downward spiral away from consciousness or deeper into the

physical experience of that consciousness is structurally captured in a
moment within parentheses. That brief moment of awareness is crucial
for the libertine as it defines the libertine attitude. Self-knowledge
pushed to the nth degree acts as a constant against which the success
of the libertine enterprise is measured. Semprun’s characters are in
pursuit of the impossible libertine ideal which they never achieve – to
reach the extreme point where loss of self will coincide with
consciousness, control and self-knowledge.
The erotic encounter is inscribed in the absence of the desired
object: Carlos’s cousin Mercédès replaces Aunt Inés in the same
84
In her study of the public influence of Semprun’s writing, Françoise Nicoladzé also
reminds us of the strong links between seduction and death in Spanish culture.
Françoise Nicoladzé, La Lecture et la vie (Paris: Gallimard, 2002), p. 110.
85
manner that later Fabienne replaces Mercédès. This slow progression

away from incest comes full circle at the end of the narrative,
exemplifying Semprun’s perception of the life cycle.
“Lorsqu’il avait constaté, donc, la présence de Fabienne, sur
la terrasse surplombant la plage de Canadell, il avait aussitôt prévu
l’absence de Mercédès”.86 The only way Carlos’ mind can minimise
the importance of unknown internal developments of desire is by
jumping ahead of the events by means of a rationalisation. It is not
often that a libertine regrets the nature of his enterprise:
Est-ce vraiment juste que le plaisir ne soit pas unique, qu’il ne soit pas, plutôt,
produit par un seul être, (…), qu’il ne soit pas révélation monogamique?
Mercédès, Fabienne, Elizabeth, source d’un plaisir qui à force d’être identique
devient autre, étrange, confus, insaisissable, est-ce juste que le plaisir glisse
sur le corps comme eau de pluie, rafraîchissante, soudaine, dans la chaleur
orageuse d’un été d’enfantines découvertes? qu’il glisse et s’évanouisse,
retenu non par le corps lui-même, poreux, oublieux, vivant dans la
transparence de l’éphémère, du perpétuel présent, mais retenu prisonnier par le
filet des mots, raffinés ou empreints de brutale précision, (…).87
Is it really fair that pleasure is not unique, that it is not created by a single
being, (…) that it is not a monogamous revelation? Mercédès, Fabienne,
Elizabeth, sources of a pleasure which because identical becomes different,
strange, confused, elusive, is it fair that pleasure slides down bodies like rain
water, refreshing, sudden, with a tumultuous warmth of a summer of
childhood discoveries? That it glides and fades, relinquished by the body
itself, porous, forgetful, living in the transparency of the fleeting moment, of
the perpetual present, but held captive by the net of words that are refined or
marked by a brutal precision (…).
Even when he does so, his understanding is always rational, always in

search of new strategies to capture the volatile sensuous experience.
The most tragic knowledge for a libertine is the transitoriness of the
experience which defines him; he is doomed to be its joyful recipient.
The spoken word adds substance to the written, and vice-versa, in the
feverish quest for memory. Frequent structural repetitions mirror the
impossible desire. When Paula asks Artigas whether he remembers a
scene in La Corte de Faraon, this question triggers several layers of
86
Semprun, L’Algarabie, p. 220. “So when he had noticed Fabienne’s presence on the
terrace overlooking the Canadell beach, he had at once predicted the absence of
Mercédès.”
87
Semprun, L’Algarabie, pp. 334-5.
memory before being reduced to the simple refrain “tu t’en

souviens?”88 and then finally being reintegrated into the whole
original question. The pool of memory is so full that it only needs a
very slight push to spill into digression with several versions of events
merging into one, where the unique incident has a lesser right to be
remembered. The libertine’s task is to constantly manipulate memory
into remembering the unique, by endlessly mirroring and repeating it.
What is sacrificed in the process is the libertine’s ability to distinguish
the unique.
The poupées russes structure of this section of the text
protects at its core the memory of how Carlos and Artigas met. This is
the central male friendship in L’Algarabie, which is crucial for
Artigas’ identity. It is contained within several layers of reminiscences
by different characters, namely – going from the largest container to
the smallest – Paula’s memories of childhood; Paula’s memories of
the planning of the production of La Corte de Faraon; Artigas; Lucas;
Carlos. The series demonstrates the fragility and importance of this
memory, which can only survive buried within a more robust womb of
Oedipal recollection, “doux cocon maternel”89. This fantasy of
survival, which takes on the form of death with the return to the
womb, projects the belief that the immortality of friendship can be
engineered through a manipulation of memory.
L’Algarabie is a long, farcical juxtaposition of left-wing
revolutionary attitudes – supposedly libertarian, but in fact mostly
profoundly patriarchal, anti-libertine and sexist – and the libertine
bookishness which mostly includes libertarian values. For the
patriarchal revolutionaries, there is a conflict between what is
considered to be freedom for the community and what is freedom for
the individual. The former is thought of as a very serious and
important pursuit whilst the latter is criticised as antisocial and
frivolous. The latter also invalidates the former in their eyes –
Semprun gives Sollers as an example of a writer whose double
allegiance to libertarian and libertine values disqualifies him as a
serious thinker in the eyes of a patriarchal community.90 The libertine
intellectuals do not experience this as a conflict, except in their gentle
derision of the patriarchal revolutionaries. Semprun often denounces
88
Semprun, L’Algarabie, pp. 368-9. “do you remember?”
89
Semprun, L’Algarabie, p. 244. “soft maternal cocoon”
90
the religious components of this patriarchal prudishness. However, he

is also perfectly aware of the closeness of the perceived opposites
which is illustrated with the caricature-like marginal character of
Xavier Dudimanche, libertine turned right-wing priest.
L’Algarabie is a stunning formal example of the refinement of
the structures of Utopian and libertine writing to enable them to
accommodate much more than the expression of a typical masculine
political and private fantasy. The incorporation of a culturally
heterogeneous and fragmented universe, European in essence, leads
the way towards a soothing fictional integration and reconciliation of a
multi-faceted identity. That such an impressive integration is, against
all odds, achieved in the French language is a strong testament to the
hospitality and flexibility of the French language and French culture,
as well as to the outstanding talent of Jorge Semprun.
La Montagne blanche
In Semprun’s fiction, libertinism is an extension of his brand

of brotherhood. Women are shared amongst male friends and however
strong the bond is between a man and a woman, it could never
outshine or outmatch the common ground of masculine friendship. A
woman thus becomes a symbol for the libertine morality, almost an
abstract visual allegory similar to Galatea, around which revolves the
free life of these Pygmalions. This is the case for Mary-Lou in La
Montagne blanche whose sole purpose in the novel is to be the
original link between the two male characters, a pledge of their
friendship. Since she is a mere symbol, “modèle de tendresse
libertine”,91 a shared woman is surprisingly untainted by the
circumstances and is rarely remembered as an individualised being.
Antoine and Juan talk to each other about Mary-Lou only once, when
Antoine informs Juan of her death. Although their grief is silent and
no doubt sincere, it does not “create” Mary-Lou as a fully-fledged
character. The women sometimes rebel against this brotherly sharing,
but only to fall into an even more restricted and perverse entrapment
91
Semprun, La Montagne blanche, p. 115. “a model of libertine tenderness”
of loyalty, as we see for instance when Juan tells Nadine that he will
decide whether and when he will give her to Karel.92
Men are always the originators of the bond between men and
women, the godly match-makers who have a far better overview of the
total situation than any woman. In La Montagne blanche, Franca even
jokingly suggests that she is a child of the original couple’s union, the
product of the primordial friendship between her husband and her
lover, as she was born on the day they first met: “C’est une histoire de
dieux de l’Olympe!”,93 she says. As the power of spiritual fathering is
essentially divine, Franca’s comparison of the two men with
Olympian gods also refers to the overall authorship of the novel. Thus
Franca is an example of “literary creation” within a novel itself. So it
is not surprising that her name Franca Castellani (in addition to its
symbolic force discussed in the previous chapter) also refers to
numerous literary influences: Franz Kafka, his novel The Castle,
Franz Grillparzer’s play Blanca of Castille and others.94 Grillparzer’s
play is about the rivalry of two brothers over a woman who is married
to one of them. In Kafka’s novel, K.’s interest in Frieda is entirely due
to her relationship with one of the important men from the castle:
Il la juge belle dans la mesure exacte où il surprend sur elle le reflet de

l’amour de Klamm, et comme l’éclat brisé de la majesté du Château.95
He considers her beautiful exactly in proportion to the reflection of

Klamm’s love that he perceives on her and, as it were, a broken shard from
the Castle’s grandeur.
This is a typical example of Réne Girard’s triangular desire

which will be analysed later in this chapter. Franca’s name could be
derived from a combination of the two women’s names: Frieda and
Blanca of Castille. This would only confirm her role as the object of
attention of the two men, the mirror where their glances meet.
Similarly to Paula’s memories holding the memory of a
primordial male friendship (a structural relation), Franca’s value
resides in her privileged position as the strongest physical link (or
92
93
Semprun, La Montagne blanche, p. 82. “It’s a story of Olympic Gods!”
94
Franz Grillparzer (1791-1872) was the leading Austrian dramatist of the nineteenth
century.
95
Marthe Robert, Kafka (Paris: Gallimard, 1960), p. 76.
even proof) of this friendship. Whilst Antoine and Juan are obviously
not one another’s sexual object, the strength and the nature of their
friendship is such that they have subconsciously engineered the
existence of Franca as a homosexual tie between them.
Karel Kapela, the Czech character in Semprun’s La Montagne
blanche, is a libertine modelled, along with his nationality, on
Kundera’s Tomas from L’Insoutenable Légèreté de l’être. He is a
libertine immigrant who floats emotionally in his adopted country,
probably not much more than he would have done in his homeland,
automatically engaging in libertine encounters with no obvious
decision entailing choice. Despite his innate sharp rationality and
intellect, he nurtures some surprisingly sentimental ties to his
homeland, such as his relationship with Ottla. Ottla, whose name
suggests incest,96 mirrors Tomas’ partner, Tereza not only in her
gentle libertine weakness, but also in the mixture of frivolity and
despair so characteristic of many of the female characters in
Kundera’s Czech novels. Semprun’s portrayal of Ottla is a free
pastiche of the language of Kundera’s descriptions of Tereza:
Elle traînait toujours des valises, lourdes en apparence. Lorsqu’elle les

défaisait cependant, il n’en sortait jamais que de la lingerie, en masses
légères et vaporeuses: de la soie, des guipures, des guêpières, du frou-frou.
Peut-être était-ce cette légèreté libertine qui était lourde à porter, allez
savoir.97
She was always lugging suitcases which looked heavy. However when she
unpacked them, she took out only underwear, light and diaphanous amounts
of underwear: silk, guipures, guêpières, frills. Perhaps that libertine
lightness was heavy to carry, work it out if you can.
Ottla, like Tereza, carries heavy unfashionable Eastern Block

suitcases filled with a clumsy desire to be desirable according to a
cliché of the West. Karel, like Tomas, exemplifies the libertine whose
adventures have become too much of a task. He and everyone around
him have come to expect libertine behaviour from him, but his heart is
not in it any more. He needs to redefine his identity, but does not
96
Ottla was the name of Kafka’s sister. Karel feels particularly close to Kafka
intellectually, emotionally and in his aesthetics as a theatre director, having also at a
low point in his career been forced to work as a keeper at the Jewish cemetery where
Kafka is buried.
97
know how, without falling into the deepest sentimentality. Not having
reached the point where his identity has evolved naturally, such that
he could make an obvious decision, he does not have the strength to
disappoint expectations with a radical change. He commits himself to
it in word, but so suddenly that he gains little credibility from his
friends. Unlike Tomas, Karel at least attempts to make this decision of
ending his libertine period, and this is where we can glimpse
Semprun’s understanding of Kundera’s character. What is at stake is
not libertinism as an expression of freedom, but an ability to evolve,
so important to an immigrant precisely in order to be able to learn how
to preserve his freedom in different circumstances and at different
stages of life. However, the question remains open whether the change
Karel has envisaged for himself is possible, or even good for him.
Karel is haunted by women who have the same names as
those from Kafka’s life. They fulfil the purpose of bringing back the
dead, of renewing the obsessive connection between the heritage
(precursor writers who are perceived as friends) and the present. The
family tree of the writers which Semprun, Kundera and Gary establish
in their works contains almost entirely male and European writers.
The attempt at drawing up the lines of ancestry seems to bring
together most European writers, as their lists have many similarities:
I have not foreseen, setting out on the work, that among my selected authors I
should not find a rogue, nor a woman, nor anyone from a non-European
culture; that my experiences in the concentration camp should weigh so little;
that the magicians should prevail over the moralists, and the latter over
logicians.98
Primo Levi’s surprise mirrors that of Semprun, particularly with

regard to the cultural impact of the experience of the concentration
camps. Levi and Semprun also share the vulnerability of the relentless
exploration and revelation of their literary ancestry while Levi and
Kundera both include in their choice early proponents of novelistic
playfulness, notably Diderot. The bravery of exposure of heritage is a
constant trait of Semprun’s work. It persistently challenges readers’
possible perceptions about the writer’s arrogance or foreignness.
Agota Kristof, on the other hand, the only female writer whose work
will be analysed in detail in this book, not only omits any reference to
98
Levi, The Search for Roots, A Personal Anthology, p. 5.
her literary heritage, but does not include any named cultural
references in her work. Her writing relies on a very few clear hints to
major historical events which the majority of readers would
effortlessly recognise, and even these are made universal by
alternating with strong and simple renditions of human nature and
experience.
The overall matrix of relationships in La Montagne blanche is
symmetrical and circular. 99 The three main male characters, Juan,
Antoine and Karel, form the circular or triangular core. They are
additionally connected through the female characters who all have a
clear, fixed position, either solely connected to one main character, or
situated between any two of the main characters. The female
characters add perspective to the schematic representation of the flat
and straightforward relationship between the men. They add nuance
and ambiguity to the inexorably positive connections between the
male characters.
Antoine, Juan and Franca stand in a relationship typical of
Réne Girard’s triangular desire which is replicated in other groups of
three characters in the novel: Antoine, Juan and Mary Lou; Juan,
Karel and Nadine, and so on. In Girard’s theory desire is triggered
solely by an imitation of somebody else’s desire for the same object:
which makes a mockery of our belief that we make a free choice in
our relationships. According to this view, it is characteristic of a close
male friendship to generate envy, or a desire to share a woman. The
desire of a woman is enhanced by the fact that she is somebody else’s
lover or wife, even more so if that somebody else is a close friend.
The person who models his desire on another’s is usually convinced
that his choice is spontaneous and purely owed to the object of desire.
Somebody else’s perceived desire gives a value to the desired object,
particularly if that somebody else is someone whose opinion we
respect. Semprun’s characters are intelligent and self-aware enough to
be capable of acknowledging this filiation of desire, at least partly.
The story of the triangular relationship in La Montagne
blanche unfolds through the following stages: (1) Franca meets Juan
and engages in a relationship; (2) Juan leaves her shortly after without
explanation, and directs her (or so he would like to think) towards his
best friend Antoine, whom she subsequently marries; (3) Juan and
99
See Appendix 3 for a diagram of the relationships among the characters.
Franca rekindle their affair a few years into Franca’s marriage. Both
Antoine and Juan think of themselves as mediators, i.e. the originators
of the desire for Franca, whilst the reader supposes something in
between: they have both inspired each other with their love for Franca.
One can say very little about the object of desire. Is the character all
she is portrayed to be? Or is her portrayal determined by the idealising
desire of Juan or Antoine?
Whilst for men libertinism means a joyful immersion in the
social context, for women it means breaking out of a social context.
The two main female characters in La Montagne blanche, Franca and
Nadine, are further apart than any other two characters. This is not just
due to jealousy, which exists equally between the men. There is no
sisterhood alongside brotherhood. Female libertines or strong female
characters are always solitary individuals lacking any of the
complicity of male friendship. On occasion, they have friendships
with men that are closer in essence to male friendship than any
relationships they have with other women.
As the writing of Kundera and Semprun and their
predecessors shows, the education of women is an important feature
of libertinism. For instance, Casanova’s central emotional
involvement was in the initiation of virgins. Then, as a writer in
advanced age, he shared these experiences with readers. Semprun
plays with the erotic suggestiveness of education of women in La
Montagne blanche, where Karel and Juan compare notes on the sexual
tastes that each has passed on to their shared mistress. Libuše, in La
Montagne blanche, seems to have been seductive only through what
she learnt from her male lovers, through the sharing between the men
of their appreciation of what they had taught her, as if a woman can
never make herself as desirable through her own instincts and
knowledge as by adopting a role in a male fantasy. “L’aspect
pédagogique du libertinage est l’un des plus gratifiants, c’est bien
connu.”, Semprun says.100
Semprun’s fictional world mirrors an anthropological given in
which men are the custodians of inherited values which they pass on
to women, always staying ahead of them in their knowledge. This is of
course marked in the patriarchal society with the keeping and giving
100
Semprun, La Montagne blanche, p. 242. “The pedagogical aspect of libertinism is
one of the most gratifying, that is a well known fact.”
of the name, where women’s names have no power of inheritance.

Semprun’s women miss the opportunity to turn this to women’s
advantage, unlike Nancy Huston:
Comme nous l’avons déjà souligné à propos des accents, les femmes ont,
plus souvent que les hommes, une conception souple de leur identité.
Depuis toujours elles ont été obligées de s’adapter; elles en ont l’habitude;
elles s’adaptent. En se mariant, elles doivent pouvoir envisager de changer
non seulement de nom (et c’est énorme! Vous rendez-vous compte, vous les
hommes? Songez à tout ce que, sur le plan symbolique et affectif, vous
investissez dans votre patronyme et imaginez l’effet que ça vous ferait d’en
changer: une, deux, voire plusieurs fois au cours de votre vie adulte!), mais
éventuellement d’allégeance aussi, de religion, de patrie, de langue …101
As we have already stressed with regard to accents, women have, more

often than men, a flexible understanding of their identity. They have always
been forced to adapt; they are used to it; they adapt. When they get married,
they need to be able to envisage changing not only their name (and that is
huge! Do you realise, you men? Think of everything on the symbolic and
emotional level that you invest in your surname and imagine the effect on
yourselves if you had to change it: once, twice or many times during your
adult life!), but also, if need be, their allegiance, their religion, their
homeland, their language …
According to Huston, adaptability helps women to overcome

the instability of immigration more quickly and painlessly. Indeed it
does seem that, in reality, female immigrant authors reinforce their
identity in a different way from their male counterparts. Semprun’s
Franca is an Italian woman settled in France. The reader is never made
aware of any consequences of this immigration. Whilst the
multicultural past of the three male characters is one of the main
components of the novel, Franca’s cultural baggage is never
discussed. The difficult question to answer, in her case, is whether this
omission is due to the writer’s machismo or is just an expression of a
feasible reality. As discussed in the previous chapter, Franca’s name
stands, amongst other associations, for France, the adopted country for
the three male characters.102 Although Antoine and Juan know her
101
Nancy Huston, Nord perdu (Arles: Actes Sud, 1999), p. 93.
102
Franca could also be related to “francus” meaning “free” in medieval Latin. Indeed
Franca is free in as much that she is a symbol for “Europe” and “France” and also in
that she is a free libertine woman. She is not free in the sense that she is Antoine’s
wife.
well, she retains all the mystery of the never fully possessed culture,
or woman. In Kundera’s fictional universe the desire for privacy,
indifference towards the possibility of leaving a nominal trace, and
nomadic ease are rightfully positive feminine features. Kundera goes a
step further than Semprun in recording these characteristics as
feminine.
The obsession with France translated into a woman’s name
reappears in Semprun’s latest short story, first exclusively published
in Le Monde.103 The main character, the cosmopolitan libertine France
Babelson, is a French woman living in America. Her first name stands
for her native country and her last name identifies her as daughter of a
“son” of Babel, the first mythical city aware of containing and being
founded on a multiplicity of tongues.
One could even go so far as to say that Semprun’s particular
mixture of libertinism and libertarianism always benefits his male
characters: when they want a woman to be their intellectual equal they
opt for the context of libertarianism and when they want her just as a
sexual object, they switch to libertinism. The enlightened male
attitude is thus no more than a subtle transfer between libertinism and
libertarianism, in which the perception of the woman as an object is
never lost. In other words, it is the woman as object of male desire that
determines and governs the link between libertarianism and
libertinism. The woman is of uppermost importance in Semprun’s
fictional universe, whatever the degree of the author’s indulgence in a
sexist attitude towards his female characters. The centrality of the
woman as a symbol, as opposed to the marginality of female
characters as intellectuals, creates the motivation for the story told and
for the structure of values established. In that sense the role of the
woman is interchangeable with that of political or linguistic ideals,
both essential features for the expression of the male fantasy of a
political and private Utopia. Both L’Algarabie and La Montagne
blanche, like Gary’s novels analysed in the previous chapter, retain
the woman as a polyvalent sign of Utopian ideals. The first such ideal
is writing in the French language, the pre-condition for the
communication of all others. Not just a simple means of expression,
the French language is a chosen privileged location for the
continuation of the libertarian and libertine traditions.
103
Jorge Semprun, Les Sandales (www.lemonde.fr, 2001).
The reductive portrayal of female characters is additionally

redeemed by the compassionate expression of the underlying tragic
insufficiency of life, despite and against the amazing self-sufficiency
of the author’s fictional universe. In that context, the bond created
between libertine players has its own peculiar strength. Although
Semprun’s world is nothing like Laclos’ scenario of perpetual
betrayal, the complicity of his libertines has similar undertones. For
instance, Vailland’s description of Laclos’ world applies equally to
Semprun’s: “Une tendresse d’une espèce toute particulière: la
mutuelle pitié de deux êtres également conscients de la parfaite
inutilité, de l’absolue gratuité du jeu auquel ils se consacrent
totalement. Je ne connais rien d’aussi intégralement désespéré.”104
Existential malaise finds here its natural context.
La Lenteur
Literary libertinism
La Lenteur is another striking example of a Utopian libertine

narrative where the choice of French is intimately connected with the
subject matter and literary methods used. Kundera bases his story on a
French eighteenth-century libertine literary work whose narrative and
linguistic logic he adopts and expands into his structure and
expression. He thus automatically situates himself within the French
language and literature without the need to justify his belonging or
further establish his credibility as a French language author. His
development of the libertine theme from within the French literary
tradition remains nonetheless original and unique.
Whilst Semprun’s libertine Utopia is based on a recreation of
historical circumstances from the past, Kundera refuses the possibility
or feasibility of a reconstruction of ideal conditions. Instead, he
juxtaposes the twentieth and the eighteenth centuries in a study of
libertinism which clearly celebrates the bygone age as the prime time
for its ideal expression. In La Lenteur, Kundera uses the late
104
Roger Vailland, Laclos (Paris: Seuil, 1953), p. 138. “A particular type of
tenderness: the mutual pity of two beings who are both equally conscious of the
perfect pointlessness, the absolute gratuitousness of the game to which they are totally
dedicated. I know of nothing so completely hopeless.”
eighteenth-century libertine short story, Vivant Denon’s Point de

lendemain, counted “aujourd’hui parmi les ouvrages littéraires qui
semblent représenter le mieux l’art et l’esprit du XVIIIe siècle”,105 as a
blueprint against which the failure of the present to preserve the main
values of libertinism and of its context is judged. Comparing reality to
a work of fiction (albeit within another work of fiction) is likely to
favour the latter. The literary nature of the eighteenth-century story is
part of Kundera’s choice of preference. Having made his preference
for Denon’s story clear at the beginning, Kundera goes on meandering
through his own pleasurable, although strictly structured, narrative. A
summary of Denon’s story frames the contemporary narrative which
demonstrates the worst examples of the present-day delusion of the
self in search of glory and validation. Kundera’s modernity is a time
where speed is a cure for the pain of memory and where the continuity
of time is rejected in favour of a search for a moment of ecstasy
outside time. Genuine pleasure, desire, even “l’envie”106, the first
word of the novel, are missing from this utilitarian puritan world. The
knowledge and the understanding of the art of pleasure are forgotten.
Kundera’s persistent envie to record this dystopia constrasts with
Denon’s desire to write with the aim of preserving and extending the
memory of pleasure, despite the fact that Denon’s depiction of
pleasure is not devoid of self-deception and pain. Denon’s creation is
an “utopie de la mémoire”107 which has its purposeful role in the
libertine tradition. Kundera’s structure, whilst creating a Utopia from
the past, still allows the author to assume fully the privileged role of
the disabused writer dissecting the illusions of the present.
105
Milan Kundera, La Lenteur, (Paris: Gallimard, 1995), pp. 14-5. “today considered
to be amongst the literary works that seem to represent best the art and the spirit of the
eighteenth century.”
106
Desire, longing, want, need
107
“utopia of memory”. Utopia is taken to mean here an attempt at preserving the
memory of desire, an attempt at private immortality as illusory and sometimes as
ridiculous as any attempts at public immortality, but approved by Kundera as the very
form of “slowness”. Milan Kundera, L’Immortalité (Paris: Gallimard, Folio, 1993), p.
460. Eva Le Grand reminds us that the author is however aware of the ultimate
illusion too: “Mais le romancier sait que le souvenir n’est pas la négation de l’oubli
mais une forme de l’oubli.” Eva Le Grand, Kundera ou la mémoire du désir, p. 121.
“But the novelist knows that the memory is not a negation of forgetting but a form of
forgetting.”
In the present time, bodies are “hors du jeu”.108 Nor does

narrative appropriate the joyful, playful nature of the true novel
according to Kundera, except through juxtaposition with Denon’s
text.109 Slowness is assumed as the key precondition and paradox of
lucid pleasure. Its sensual invitation mirrors the rationality of
philosophical flânerie (strolling), concisely summarised by Michel
Delon as “la fragmentation d’une pensée qui ne prétend plus à
l’unité”.110 This kind of deliberately casual exploration can only be
undertaken by a writer, or characters, with a passion for lucidity.
Sollers takes on the challenge of European literary friendship by
continuing the variations on this theme. His conclusion is that Point de
lendemain, in addition to being libertine writing, is also a
metaphysical tale, a statement with which Kundera would
undoubtedly agree. For Kundera and Sollers, slowness presupposes a
knowledge of speed:
Une vitesse infinie paraît immobile. Rien de plus lent qu’une rapidité extrême,
et on peut le vérifier immédiatement en sachant que la terre, là, en ce moment,
tourne sur elle-même à l’allure de 27 000 kilomètres par seconde. La vitesse
nous donne la lenteur. Seul un esprit très rapide peut savourer la lenteur.111
Infinite speed appears motionless. There is nothing slower than extreme speed,
and we can immediately verify that by remembering that the earth, right here
at this moment, is rotating at the velocity of 27000 kilometres per second.
Speed grants us slowness. Only a very swift mind can savour slowness.
Reinforcing the elitist component of libertinism, Sollers directs us to a

more nuanced appreciation of slowness. He takes his cue from
Denon’s description of a night of pleasure full of illusions and
manipulations, whose mystery is accepted so as not to cloud its
hedonist memory:
Enfin, voilà une nuit qui durera toujours puisqu’elle n’a point de lendemain.
Même chose pour ce texte. Grâce à elle, à lui, tout ira désormais plus vite: il
108
Kundera, La Lenteur, p. 10. “out of play”
109
Another playful exception is the wonderful invention of Kundera’s tenderly
ridiculous compatriot Mr Cechoripsky.
110
Michel Delon, “La Promenade des Lumières”, Magazine littéraire, avril 1997, No
353, 30 (p. 30). “the fragmentation of a thought which no longer asserts its cohesion”
111
Sollers, Le Cavalier du Louvre, p. 94.
n’y aura pas de lent demain. Dieu nous préserve de la lourdeur, de la

pesanteur, de la mauvaise lenteur!112
Finally here is the night that will last forever, because it has no tomorrow. It is
the same for this text. Thanks to the night, and the text, everything will move
faster from now on: there will be no more slow tomorrows [lent demain]. May
God save us from all that is heavy, weighed down, the wrong slowness!
There is no place for the “bad slowness”, which lets the heaviness of
pain settle and leaves the mind unoccupied, in the carefully
constructed world of the libertine. He celebrates a different kind of
“utility” which allocates each moment of time to continue the pleasure
for as long as possible. Besides, the essence of time is in its passing:
“Le temps perdu ne se rattrape pas, la vérité d’une seconde est dans sa
fugacité.”113 It is only worth engineering the illusion of duration if one
has an acute awareness of the reality of mere moments.
The increase of knowledge also makes the mind race ever
faster. Indeed, “On va vite avec l’imagination des femmes” (“The
imagination of the women moves fast”), Denon states, shortly after the
virtuoso opening where speed is conveyed with such tremendous,
frivolous elegance that through it the reassuring maturity of the
storyteller easily transpires:
J’aimais éperdument la comtesse de …; j’avais vingt ans, et j’étais ingénu; elle

me trompa, je me fâchai, elle me quitta. J’étais ingénu, je la regrettai; j’avais
vingt ans, elle me pardonna: et comme j’avais vingt ans, que j’étais ingénu,
toujours trompé, mais plus quitté, je me croyais l’amant le mieux aimé, partant
le plus heureux des hommes.114
I was madly in love with the Countess of …; I was twenty and naïve; she
cheated me, I got angry, she left me. I was naïve and I missed her; I was
twenty, she forgave me: and as I was twenty and naïve, still cheated, but no
longer abandoned, I thought of myself as the best loved lover, and hence the
happiest man in the world.
112
Sollers, Le Cavalier du Louvre, pp. 95-6.
113
Michel Onfray, L’Art de jouir, Pour un matérialisme hédoniste (Paris: Grasset,
Livre de poche, 1991), p. 243. “Lost time cannot be recuperated; the truth of a second
is in its transience.”
114
Vivant Denon, Point de lendemain (Paris: Gallimard, Folio classique, 1995), p. 35.
“C’est donc bien une histoire de vitesse, comme le rythme saccadé des phrases, en
ouverture, nous le fait entendre.” (Sollers, Le Cavalier du Louvre, p. 97.) “Thus it is
indeed a story about speed, as the jerky rhythm of the sentences announces at the
beginning.”
As far as the form is concerned, this is another eighteenth-century

source of the playful repetitiousness so important for Kundera’s
writing. The humorously breathless introduction takes us straight to
the crux of the story’s meaning – happiness.
Happiness and maturity
For Kundera, Denon’s story represents a metaphysical recipe

for happiness in the Epicurean sense of a melancholic embracing of
pleasure as the only stable means for avoiding pain. Kundera regrets
that our present-day attempts are so far away from these methods.
Fleeting feelings such as anger and regret are the convenient
replacement in the libertine world for the too deep, tragic and long-
lasting unhappiness. Of course avoidance of pain is not enough by
itself; there is also the art of sharing pleasure with another. This
departs further from Epicurus, who was sparing on the subject of
carnal pleasure.115 Nevertheless, Epicurus was highly regarded in the
eighteenth century as a provider of a method of thinking despite,
against and beyond Christianity. Aristippus of Cyrene and his
followers gave us much more active and positive, and thus
controversial, thinking on this subject.116 According to them, an action
is moral if it allows the realisation of pleasure. Michel Onfray states
categorically that this hedonist morality is only possible in a world
devoid of religion: “L’athéisme est la condition de possibilité de
l’hédonisme: l’existence de Dieu est incompatible avec la liberté des
hommes.”117 The possibility of a contemporary approach to hedonism
is only possible outside any reference to Christianity.118 The
115
Onfray, L’Art de jouir, p. 213.
116
Aristippus of Cyrene (c. 435-356 B.C.) was a follower of Socrates and the founder
of the Cyrenaic school of philosophy notable mainly for its empiricist and skeptical
epistemology and its sensualist hedonism.
117
Onfray, L’Art de jouir, p. 233. “Atheism is the condition of the possibility of
hedonism: the existence of God is incompatible with the freedom of man.”
118
“La possibilité d’une philosophie du corps est récente, même si l’hédonisme n’a
jamais cessé de parcourir, en énergies souterraines, l’histoire des idées. La seule mise
en accusation du christianisme permet l’émergence d’une nouvelle positivité qui fasse
l’éloge du corps enthousiaste” (Onfray, L’Art de jouir, p. 187). “The possibility of a
philosophy of the body is recent, even if hedonism goes right through the history of
development of the concept of the libertine from a satanic rebel

against religion to a promiscuous individual was determined by this
relationship with Christianity. Libertinism still relies on its
understated Christian foundations. The abandonment of all references
to Christianity, although a philosophical aspiration for the likes of
Michel Onfray, is no more than an ideal. The removal of Christian and
more importantly, religious structures in general, implicit in
libertinism seems impossible.
Libertinage, as an awareness and exploration of the body and
a subversive social practice based on a demand for freedom,
contributed significantly to the establishment of rational thought
during the Enlightenment:
La captation des puissances libertines érudites est même pour beaucoup

dans l’élaboration de la pensée éclairée. A certains égards, les penseurs
baroques qu’on dit mineurs vont plus loin que les emblèmes tels Rousseau,
Montesquieu ou Condorcet. Sur la raison et ses usages, la morale et ses
pouvoirs, le corps et ses potentialités, l’athéisme et sa radicalité, les libertins
du XVIIe siècle ont puissamment fait la lumière, jusque dans l’outrance, en
prêchant l’exemple et en agissant plus qu’en élaborant de lourds volumes
théoriques.119
The gains of the erudite libertine powers are largely responsible for the
elaboration of enlightened thought. In some respects, the Baroque thinkers
called minor go further than emblematic figures such as Rousseau,
Montesquieu or Condorcet. Preaching by example, and taking action, more
than by elaborating heavy theoretical volumes, the seventeenth-century
libertines shed light in powerful ways — even to excess — on reason and its
uses, morality and its powers, the body and its possibilities, atheism and its
radicalism.
Michel Onfray’s analysis of rational and hedonist methods

comes to the following conclusions: the body is the origin of every
thought and irrationality the source of all reason. Apollo will thus
always have the heritage of Dionysos to contend with, just as
Descartes, father of modern rationalism, received his initial inspiration
in the irrational form of a dream. The interaction of knowledge of the
ideas with its subterranean energies. Only the indictment of Christianity allows the
emergence of a new positivity which celebrates the enthusiastic body”. Kundera’s
criticism of the modern embracing of the status of the “elected” in La Lenteur as an
essentially non-hedonist gesture belongs to this opposition of hedonism and religion.
119
Onfray, L’Art de jouir, p. 229.
body and rationality is an essential characteristic of the ideal world of

La Lenteur. It is only when this relationship fails in the twentieth
century of the main character, Vincent, that the question arises which
one of the two, the knowledge of the body or rationality, is older.
It is in the light of its relationship to happiness that Robert

Mauzi defends libertine morality:
La frivolité serait condamnable si l’homme avait quelque chance de pouvoir

résoudre toutes les énigmes. Mais s’il est vrai qu’il ne pourra jamais saisir de
la réalité que la pellicule des apparences, il ne faut plus considérer la frivolité
comme un travers ou une mode, mais comme la seule morale s’ajustant d’elle-
même à notre nature.120
Frivolity would be reprehensible if man had any chance of resolving all

enigmas. But if it’s true that he will never be able to grasp anything more of
reality than a very thin veneer of appearances, we should not consider frivolity
any more as a failing or a fashion, but as the only ethic which fits our nature.
Since it belongs to those who attempt to understand this world

intellectually, such a libertine morality is elitist, which is also clearly
expressed by Sollers in Le Cavalier du Louvre. From this starting
point, Mauzi describes the libertine method for rationally achieving
happiness as based on a high degree of successful individuation and
on the ability to maintain the right distance from the world:
Le bonheur appartient à ceux qui ont inventé un milieu entre la solitude et la

sociabilité, sachant se tenir par rapport au monde à la bonne distance. Il exige
surtout qu’on ait résolu le difficile problème de l’unité intérieure et de la
liberté, en instituant une vivante dialectique entre le divertissement et la
passion.121
Happiness belongs to those who have invented a middle ground between

solitude and sociability and who know how to keep themselves at the right
distance from the world. Above all, it requires us to have resolved the difficult
120
Robert Mauzi, L’Idée du bonheur dans la littérature et la pensée françaises du
XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Librairie Armand Colin, 1960), p. 28. According to Derrida’s
analysis of Condillac, frivolity is born when the signifier stops relating to the signified
and becomes empty and useless. The resulting semantic crisis is non-identity which
has been referred to in the first chapter when relating the experiences of second
language adoption (see in particular the quotation from Eva Hoffman). Jacques
Derrida, L’Archéologie du frivole (Paris: Galilée, 1973).
121
Mauzi, L’Idée du bonheur, p. 35.
problem of inner unity and freedom, by establishing a living dialectic between

entertainment and passion.
A certain maturity – which Vincent, the present-day version of

Denon’s chevalier, lacks – is therefore crucial for achieving this
balance between the self and the world. According to François Ricard,
Vincent exemplifies the “situation fondamentale de l’immaturité”
(“fundamental situation of immaturity”) along with other young male
characters in Kundera’s fiction.122
An even clearer separation between the inside and the outside

is required of an immigrant who has to face the clear-cut options of
belonging and exclusion. This might make his or her choice of
libertinism or libertine writing seem a perfectly natural progression.
From a familiar structured environment to the immature temptation of
complete freedom or to the full realisation of individuation where the
lucid game of libertinism is an adult version of the fort-da game, the
immigrant writer has a distinct opportunity to at least attempt to
achieve the impossible happiness by way of libertinism.
With this defensive attitude to the world, a result of an

achieved maturity, libertine happiness is formed through rational
control; this is what distinguishes eroticism from mere sexual activity:
Le bonheur suppose donc un triple équilibre entre le désir et possession, entre

la possession et l’espérance, entre le désir et l’espérance. Le commencement
du bonheur, c’est d’espérer ce qu’on désire. Son achèvement de désirer ce
qu’on possède. Il faudrait que le désir survive à la possession, que la
possession, vivifiée par le désir, soit doucement gonflée par l’espérance de se
conserver ou de s’accroître modérément; il faudrait surtout, que cet espoir
devienne une limite que ne franchirait aucun nouveau désir.123
Happiness thus entails a triple equilibrium, between desire and possession,

possession and hope, and desire and hope. The beginning of happiness is to
hope for what one desires. Its completion is to desire what one possesses.
Desire needs to survive possession; possession, enlivened by desire, needs to
be gently inflated by the hope of preserving or moderately increasing itself; it
is necessary, above all, for the hope to become a limit that no other desire will
cross.
122
François Ricard, Le Dernier Après-midi d’Agnès, Essai sur l’œuvre de Milan
Kundera (Paris: Gallimard, 2003), p. 80.
123
This is how libertinism becomes a Utopian project. In Mauzi’s

description libertinism comes very close to the aspirations of love, but
this too can be resisted through fastidious application of rational
control, in Mauzi’s interpretation:
Être heureux, c’est posséder l’art de conduire un même plaisir à travers des
zones différentes: de l’imagination aux sens, des sens à la mémoire. Experte
en cette alchimie, la conscience voluptueuse doit en outre veiller à la pureté du
plaisir, l’isoler contre toute contamination passionnelle, préserver l’âme du
trouble et de l’aliénation. Enfin le bonheur exige que survive la bonne
conscience. Si l’ordre moral et l’ordre du plaisir ne coïncident pas, il suffit de
les laisser coexister sans en sacrifier aucun et sans souci des contradictions.124
To be happy means to have the skill to direct one and the same pleasure to
different areas: from the imagination to the senses, from the senses to the
memory. The voluptuous consciousness, expert in this alchemy, must
moreover watch over the purity of pleasure, isolate it from any contamination
by passion, and preserve the soul from turmoil and alienation. Last, happiness
demands that a clear conscience be preserved. If the ethical and hedonistic
order do not coincide, it is enough to let them coexist without sacrificing either
of them and without worrying about contradictions.
A degree of obsession with consistency is essential for this method to

be pursued “by the book”. The resulting ruthlessness is inevitable,
when relying on rational control to create an imaginary vital order.
The weakness of hedonism, for Kundera, lies not in its
egotism, but in its desperately Utopian character, its incompatibility
with human nature.125 This includes the impossibility of having
rational control over anything, even pain. The greatness of the
libertine works of the eighteenth century, Kundera states, “ne consiste
pas dans une quelconque propagande de l’hédonisme, mais dans son
analyse.”126 However, incisive analysis cannot be separated from its
powers of persuasion, which equally applies to Kundera’s La
Lenteur.127
124
125
Kundera, La Lenteur, p. 16.
126
Kundera, La Lenteur, p. 16. “does not consist in any promotion of hedonism, but in
its analysis.”
127
The purpose of libertine analysis according to Sollers is to prove that “La surface
n’est pas le contraire de la profondeur. Il s’agit de le faire savoir au monde entier.”
Sollers, Le Cavalier du Louvre, p. 47. “The surface is not the opposite of depth. The
whole world must be told about this.” At the metaphysical level this is what the
libertine world view tries to show.
Female libertines
Unlike Semprun’s fiction where the education of women is an

important feature of libertinism, in La Lenteur, it is the main female
character from Denon’s story, Mme de T., who teaches the narrator,
not only the art of love and seduction, but also the art of memory and
happiness. Acquisition of knowledge, in the sense described in the
previous chapter as distinctive of the European, is a very important
characteristic of libertinism in Kundera’s and Semprun’s fictional
universe. According to Kundera, the agenda of this “reine de la
raison”128 is ambiguous. She is an intimate friend of la comtesse, the
narrator’s lover, and wants to preserve that friendship. Not that the
threat to the friendship seems substantial, even though she has
borrowed her friend’s lover for a night. The only certainty about Mme
de T. is that she is not frigid as her official lover, le Marquis,
claims.129 The ambiguities of her actions are not devoid of purpose.
The manipulated narrator understands them to be purposeful, without
in fact knowing their aim.
Pourtant, la morale est là: c’est madame de T. qui l’incarne: elle a menti à
son mari, elle a menti à son amant de Marquis, elle a menti au jeune
chevalier. C’est elle le vrai disciple d’Épicure. Aimable amie du plaisir.
Douce menteuse protectrice. Gardienne du bonheur.130
Yet morality is there; Madame de T. embodies it: she lied to her husband,
she lied to her lover the Marquis, she lied to the young chevalier. It is she
who is the true disciple of Epicurus. A lovable friend of pleasure. A gentle
protective liar. A guardian of happiness.
There is no strong female character on the twentieth-century

side of the story in La Lenteur to match Mme de T. – none who has
the benefit of this assumption of depth of intention and self-
knowledge like Denon’s or Laclos’ female characters, or even the aura
of mystique of Semprun’s female characters. The strongest and freest
contemporary female character in Kundera’s fiction remains the
libertine Sabine from L’Insoutenable Légèreté de l’être. Le Grand
remarks: “ne l’est-elle pas justement parce que son code existentiel se
128
Kundera, La Lenteur, p. 41. “queen of reason”
129
130
base sur la ‘trahison’ qui, comme l’écrit Bataille, est la vérité même de
l’érotisme.”131 Sabine continues on her path westward from one
betrayal to the next, desperate to avoid every association with kitsch
which has become the cliché for the way her foreignness is perceived.
It is her aesthetic standards which define the association with her
native country as repulsive. She has no nostalgia and her melancholy
is that of the lack of ties to be broken.
Perhaps this failure of the twentieth-century libertine
discourse in La Lenteur is solely based on the author’s inability to
reinvent the object of the male erotic fantasy by reconciling the notion
of pudeur132 (the central value of the Kunderian male erotic fantasy,
representing a value of defence of personal privacy) with the age of
public transparency.
An art of memory
Vincent’s attempt to seduce Julie is narrated against the

background of the powerful impact of the public seducers of the
twentieth century. These seducers are media personalities who provide
a complete contrast to the private seducer of the eighteenth century.
Vincent’s seduction is nothing more than an exhibitionist simulation,
in contrast to eighteenth-century methods of slowness. After its
inevitable failure, Vincent tries to reorganise his experience in his
mind, to turn a failure into a success, a simulation into reality, so that
his vanity and self-confidence can accept it. He has no sophisticated
methods at his disposal like those of Denon, who might have told his
story in order to achieve a similar purpose of understanding and
accepting his role in the events which at first seemed to belittle him.
Vincent tries to think of a crude orgy, then tries to remember the girl
he was trying to seduce, Julie, and finds no way of bringing the two
together. Neither the libertine cataloguing that avoids any metaphor
which might lead into love,133 nor the European sentimental romantic
131
Le Grand, Kundera ou la mémoire du désir, pp. 189-190. “Is she not so, precisely
because her existential code is based on ‘betrayal’ which, as Bataille writes, is the
very truth of eroticism.”
132
Pudicity
133
Milan Kundera, L’Insoutenable Légèreté de l’être (Paris: Gallimard, Folio, 1989),
p. 201.
tradition, suits Vincent’s taste or ability. Kundera understands desire

similarly to Kierkegaard or Bataille, as “une donnée intérieure de
l’être”134, and he reveals the best methods for guiding this desire in La
Lenteur through the eighteenth-century libertine characters and
narratives. Vincent’s desire to impress an audience is a negation of a
possible fulfilment of the Kunderian notion of desire. He does not
even have a chance of being able to apply libertine discourse to his
event, as his event is by his own fault a non-event. As far as the reader
is aware, the chevalier’s experience is authentic and true (or is it just
so because it is within a successful libertine narrative?). By
concentrating on his desire to convert a desired outcome into reality,
Vincent has missed an opportunity to truly experience something.
Finally, Vincent decides that the least painful option is to
forget. The fast speed of his motorcycle is to his desire to forget what
the slowness of the carriage is to the desire of Denon’s narrator to
remember. In the last stretto section of the novel Kundera negotiates a
meeting between Vincent and Denon’s character across the boundary
of time, giving in to the temptation to show an explicit contrast which
brings forth an incredibly rich comparison of the two stories and two
centuries.
To help the analysis of the encounter of these two characters,
an interesting parallel can be made at this point between the two
versions of Denon’s story. The first was published in 1777, the other,
widely known and referred to as the main version, in 1812. The 1777
version, written by a younger Denon, is accusatory towards Mme de
T. for having manipulated him. In the version from 1812, on the other
hand, “Le héros n’est plus un libertin aguerri de 25 ans, mais un
novice de 20 ans qui ne demande qu’à apprendre.”135 The 1812 story
appears, alongside the earlier Denon’s version, as a much more
polished and mature work, where the lack of subjective distance has
been minimised and overcome for the benefit of the text. This later
version of Denon’s story, used by Kundera, functions in relation to
Kundera’s own present-time narrative in a manner similar to the way
in which the two versions by Denon relate to each other. Denon’s
1812 story becomes an ideal of the art of memory whose perfection is
enhanced by the lacklustre twentieth-century narrative.
134
Le Grand, Kundera ou la mémoire du désir, p. 119. “an inward given of being”
135
Michel Delon, Préface to Denon, Point de lendemain, p. 27. “The hero is no longer
a 25-year-old hardened libertine, but a 20-year-old novice who wants only to learn.”
Similarly, in the meeting between Vincent and Denon’s

character, it is the twentieth century which shows its youth and
immaturity compared to the eighteenth. The chevalier wants to tell the
truth, Vincent to invent a better reality. It is Vincent who
misunderstands the chevalier, not the other way round, as one might
expect. The eighteenth century shows a superior understanding in the
chevalier’s perception of Vincent’s way of talking as that of a
foreigner: “(..) comme s’il était un messager venu d’un royaume
étranger et qui aurait appris le français à la cour sans connaître la
France.”136 It is the twentieth-century man who does not know how to
listen to the message from a different wiser world. Kundera seems to
identify with Vincent in this moment of unfavourable comparison. He
subtly suggests his perception that as a foreigner, he is irremediably
missing some vital and inborn understanding of the French heritage,
and is for this reason an object of contempt.
With the contrast he creates between the eighteenth and
twentieth-century narratives, Kundera expresses his awareness that his
writing will be unfavourably judged compared to that of the literary
masters of the past. But he does not even want to enter into this
contest. He admits defeat in advance, expresses admiration for his
adopted literary heritage, but also establishes its Utopian distance
from the contemporary world he is facing.
As Guy Scarpetta points out, adding “français” to the term
“libertinage du XVIIIe siècle” is a pleonasm.137 An intimate awareness
of this fact permeates the writing of, amongst others, Casanova,
Semprun and Kundera. Kundera’s libertinism is a literary libertinism
of the same ilk as Casanova’s, which allows his characters to be
donjuanesques at will, haphazardly venturing into sentimentality and
coming back to their inherent rationality.
A private Utopia
In La Lenteur, the immigrant’s Utopia as an ideal place has

been channelled into a literary vision of a different time. Kundera
136
Kundera, La Lenteur, p. 149. “(..) as if he were a messenger from a foreign
kingdom who had learnt French at court without knowing France.”
137
Guy Scarpetta, Introduction to: Le Grand, Kundera ou la mémoire du désir, p. 21.
Adding “French” to the term “eighteenth-century libertinism” is a pleonasm.
envies not only Denon’s subject matter, but also the distance of his
eighteenth-century narrator from the private thoughts of his
characters. The last words of the novel urge that the illusion of the
happiness of the chosen time be preserved. This is a very rare
expression of belief in the importance of Utopia in an opus mainly
devoted to demonstrating the unpleasant and slippery lack of
substance of any illusion.
Kundera considers the public and private spheres of life to be
distinct, opposed poles of existence. Only the latter has the option of
attaining the luxury of the art of freedom. Les cortèges138, symbols of
the morbid character of any public expression of political opinion, are
anathema to Kundera. False by nature, or as false as anything public
is, they undertake to falsify history and to provide erroneous notions
of value. As Georges Palante states: “L’idéologie démocratique tend à
résorber toutes les libertés dans la liberté dite politique. Mais la liberté
politique n’est pas du tout la même chose que la liberté
individuelle.”139 This is, in a nutshell, the political thesis of Kundera’s
L’Immortalité which is also present in Kundera’s other fiction.
Any attempt to realise in concrete existence a fusion of
political and individual freedom is doomed not only to fail, but also to
generate a dangerous illusion. Any political Utopia has to be
deconstructed, even that of a friendship. The person whose approval
Vincent seeks with all his actions, Pontevin, is one of the public
seducers in the twentieth-century narrative of La Lenteur. He attracts
everyone, including Vincent, with his voice and his speech. This
unequal friendship, which is sometimes painful for Vincent, represents
another example of male friendship as a cornerstone of heritage, based
on the transmission of knowledge. Unlike Semprun’s examples of
male friendship already discussed in this chapter, Pontevin’s mode of
seduction relies on manipulation and thus on betrayal. Although
Vincent sees the similarity between Pontevin and Berck, he still
follows without questioning the order of his master Pontevin to create
havoc at the conference. Pontevin’s seduction is another negative
138
“Processions”
139
Georges Palante, L’Individualisme aristocratique (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1995),
p. 93. “Democratic ideology tends to reduce all freedoms down to the one known as
political freedom. But political freedom is not at all the same thing as individual
freedom.”
twentieth-century counterpart of Mme de T.’s performance, all the

more dangerous as it passes for friendship.
However, Pontevin’s manipulation is minor compared to
Tamina’s Utopian island in Le Livre du rire et de l’oubli, which is the
worst nightmare of a forced community in Kundera’s oeuvre.140 The
deconstruction of such a Utopia is the most important favour that can
be done to human beings. The public figures of Berck and Duberques
push the disgust with modern politics to the limit.141 Georges Palante
appropriately sums up the sources of this development:
Aristote a défini l’homme un animal politique; on pourrait avec autant de

vérité le définir un animal menteur. Le mensonge semble être l’atmosphère
naturelle de la vie sociale. L’être social ment à autrui et se ment à lui-même. Il
ment par égoïsme individuel et par égoïsme collectif; il ment comme unité et
comme groupe.142
Aristotle defined man as a political animal: it would be equally true to define

him as a lying animal. Lying seems to be the natural atmosphere of social life.
A social being lies to others and to himself. He lies from individual egoism
and from collective egoism; he lies as an individual unit and as a group.
The performance of Berck and Duberques is far beyond what Georges

Palante could have imagined at the beginning of the century. The
vulgarity of their objectives on one hand and the extent of their public
exposure on the other are enough to withhold any credibility from
modern politics. Does it take someone with the burden of having lived
in a communist country to experience this outrage so acutely?
Kundera voices his own extremist position in L’Insoutenable Légèreté
de l’être: “La fraternité de tous les hommes ne pourra être fondée que
sur le kitsch.”143 His uncompromising stance in refusing to accept the
basis of the twentieth-century cosmopolitan and European political
ideals has, after all, found the compromise it can make without
contradicting itself irreparably. His compromise consists of accepting
140
Milan Kundera, Le Livre du rire et de l’oubli (Paris: Gallimard, Folio, 1985);
Tamina’s character brings multiple references to the character of the same name in
Mozart’s The Magic Flute.
141
The obvious derivation of both names from either the English or French “berk”
adds to the author’s ridicule of these characters.
142
Georges Palante, Combat pour l’individu (Paris: Felix Alcan, Éditeur, 1904), p.
111.
143
Kundera, L’Insoutenable Légèreté de l’être, p. 362. “The fraternity of all men
could only be based on kitsch.”
and honouring somebody else’s written Utopia based on its

unquestionable values of literary quality; that is Denon’s Point de
lendemain.
In his sensitive analysis of Kundera’s work François Ricard
singles out the figure and the gesture of the “deserter” who gives up
the fight against the world.144 He further defines two types of mature
responses to the world in Kundera’s fiction – which involve this
desertion or capitulation – in the figures of the libertine and the exile.
In the light of this Kunderian voicing of the underestimated value of
disengagement from the world, and with Kundera’s particular
rejection of the public face of politics in mind, it is interesting to note
the distinction between Vincent and Berck on one side and Denon’s
chevalier on the other. Vincent and Berck use exactly the same words
at one point. Berck is very pleased with the last improvised phrase of
his speech: “l’homme digne de ce nom est toujours en révolte, en
révolte contre l’oppression, et s’il n’y a plus d’oppression . . . (…)
contre la condition humaine que nous n’avons pas choisie”145 It is a
cliché phrase, owing much to Camus, and Berck uses it as such, as
suits a hypocritical media personality. Vincent, on the other hand, has
not heard this speech, but uses almost the same words in his statement
to Julie: “La seule chose qui nous reste c’est la révolte contre la
condition humaine que nous n’avons pas choisie!”146 Unlike Berck,
Vincent means it in all his naivety. The word “révolte” appears again
in the description of the chevalier who rejects “la voix de la révolte”
(“the voice of revolt”) which incites him to tell the true story of his
adventure to the whole world.147 Perhaps the choice of a pre-
revolutionary world as an ideal is fitting for this fictional world where
the characters know they have no power to make any change. Kundera
positions Denon’s chevalier in the superior position of a hero who
naturally evolves to the point where he can abandon the struggle
gracefully, without any losses and with a possible gain of a
144
Ricard, Le Dernier Après-midi d’Agnès.
145
Kundera, La Lenteur, p. 82. “any man worthy of the name is always in revolt, in
revolt against oppression, and if there is no oppression (…) against the human
condition that we did not choose”
146
Kundera, La Lenteur, p. 102. “The only thing that remains is to revolt against the
human condition that we did not choose!”
147
Kundera, La Lenteur, p. 147. The word “révolte” has the additional power in
Kunderian fiction to denote the tragic in the sense which the human condition has
long outgrown.
pleasurable memory. These characteristics appear in other novels by

Kundera, associated with other characters, and represent one of the
forms of his fictional private Utopia. The figure of the “deserter” is
very close to the figure of the immigrant. For both of them, leaving is
a positive value which allows them to transcend an impasse. Kundera
repeatedly states that the possibility of immigration is superior to the
possibility of return.
In Kundera’s political spectrum, where Berck and Duberques
are one extreme, there is also a less powerful, but omnipresent figure
of homo sentimentalis, the generator of kitsch. For Kundera he has the
existential value of a reductive and homogenising approach to human
existence. He works against the authenticity and sovereignty of the
human being as a rational seeker of happiness and pleasure. François
Ricard analyses the concept of idyll, as opposed to the communist
Idyll in L’Insoutenable Légèreté de l’être.148 He defines it as a certain
individualist wisdom one can reach after repetitious failures. It is a
transgression of a transgression, a maturity of sorts which allows the
appreciation of beauty, as opposed to kitsch. The Idyll only rightly
belongs to those creatures who have no human rationality, like dogs,
for whom Kundera’s characters have a lot of tenderness.149 This
notion of idyll has evolved through the later novels of the author, in
particular in his French phase.
L’Immortalité is Kundera’s last work written in Czech while
he was already living in France. The narrative concentrates on a slow
linear achievement of a certain inner peace for the main character,
Agnès. There is much less emphasis on helplessness and bitterness
overcome than in the story of Tomas and Tereza in L’Insoutenable
Légèreté de l’être. La Lenteur, on the other hand, introduces a more
active and shameless Utopian thinking on the part of this actively
ironic author. It introduces a possible method, albeit literary and
tongue-in-cheek, for achieving happiness. L’Identité and L’Ignorance
take the emancipation of characters even further. Is this new direction
in Kundera’s writing mainly due to the conditioning of place and
time? Kundera might have lost his sense of humour in his French
148
François Ricard, “L’Idylle et l’idylle, relecture de Milan Kundera”, in Kundera,
L’Insoutenable Légèreté de l’être, pp. 457-476.
149
Dogs are part of the Czech literary heritage, and the reader can feel that Kundera
even approves a sentimental tenderness towards them (L’Insoutenable Légèreté de
l’être).
novels (as Nancy Huston states),150 but has certainly gained a more
positive wisdom which he is willing to share through his masterfully
crafted novels.
More can be said about the importance of the location for
Kundera. Already in L’Insoutenable Légèreté de l’être, he writes
“Prague est devenue laide”.151 The note about the author in all the
more recent Folio editions states only: “Milan Kundera est né en
Tchécoslovaquie. En 1975, il s’installe en France.”152 This elliptical
formulation contains three carefully weighed statements which
express how the author wishes to be known. The very important
beginning for him is in Czechoslovakia. The present opening into the
future is in France. The date of the change is 1975. In true immigrant
fashion, his identity, in addition to his works, is specified only with
two locations and one date.153
In La Lenteur we have one location and two dates instead.
Kundera analyses the metaphysics of nostalgia by reversing the reality
of his own experience of identity and shows the important part played
by choice in any representation of self. There is much less repulsive
closeness in Kundera’s more recent novels than in the earlier works
such as Le Livre du rire et de l’oubli. There is just an airian desire to
be closer to things that matter.
Although Kundera would fully agree with Georges Palante’s
criticism of the gregarious nature of social interaction, he would be
suspicious of the sentimentality with which Palante glorifies the
individual. Kundera’s archetypal figure of homo sentimentalis is
closely related to his notion of kitsch. In L’Art du roman Kundera
explains his use of the term:
Dans la version française du célèbre essai de Hermann Broch, le mot

“kitsch” est traduit par “art de pacotille”. Un contresens, car Broch
démontre que le kitsch est autre chose qu’une simple œuvre de mauvais
150
François Ricard clarifies this, referring to the two Czech phases which can be
distinguished in Kundera’s work: “le recours à un certain comique de situation proche
du burlesque est plus fréquent dans la première période que dans la seconde”. Ricard,
Le Dernier Après-midi d’Agnès, p. 41. “Kundera resorted more frequently to a certain
comedy of situation close to the burlesque in his first phase than in the second.”
151
Kundera, L’Insoutenable Légèreté de l’être, p. 336. “Prague has become ugly”
152
“Milan Kundera was born in Czechoslovakia. He settled in France in 1975.”
153
Likewise, in Semprun’s fiction the date of exile of his characters acquires a very
strong symbolic significance.
goût. Il y a l’attitude kitsch. Le comportement kitsch. Le besoin du kitsch de

l’homme kitsch (Kitschmensch): c’est le besoin de se regarder dans le miroir
du mensonge embellissant et de s’y reconnaître avec une satisfaction émue.
Pour Broch, le kitsch est lié historiquement au romantisme sentimental du
XIXe siècle. Puisque en Allemagne et en Europe centrale le XIXe siècle
était beaucoup plus romantique (et beaucoup moins réaliste) qu’ailleurs,
c’est là que le kitsch s’est épanoui outre mesure, c’est là que le mot kitsch
est né, qu’il est encore couramment utilisé. À Prague, nous avons vu dans le
kitsch l’ennemi principal de l’art. Pas en France. Ici, à l’art vrai, on oppose
le divertissement.154
In the French version of the famous essay by Hermann Broch, the word
“kitsch” is translated as “cheap art”. A mistranslation, as Broch shows that
kitsch is not a simple work of bad taste. There is the kitsch attitude. Kitsch
behaviour. The need for kitsch of the man of kitsch (Kitschmensch): this is
the need to observe oneself in the mirror of an embellishing lie and to
recognise oneself in the reflection with emotional satisfaction. For Broch,
kitsch is historically linked with the sentimental Romanticism of the
nineteenth century. Since the nineteenth century was much more romantic
(and much less realistic) in Germany and in Central Europe than elsewhere,
that is where kitsch spread to excess, that is where the word kitsch was born
and where it is still in current use. In Prague, we saw in kitsch the main
enemy of art. Not in France. Here, the opposite of true art is entertainment.
Homo sentimentalis is the same as l’homme kitsch who

contributes, albeit in a small way, to the treacherous belief in
community, because kitsch is seductive, more seductive than a
rational acknowledgement of the multiplicity of meanings. This is
Kundera’s baggage; against this he sets his Utopia of controversial
continuity in La Lenteur, designated by Le Grand a “continuité
historique de l’amour à travers la figure de discontinuité et de rupture
par excellence: figure de Don Juan précisément”.155 Nearly four
centuries of the myth of Don Juan mostly overlap with the four
centuries of the history of the European novel. Perhaps more
relevantly the figure of the literary libertine is only formed in the
eighteenth century. The existence of the social type of libertine to
whom Denon implicitly refers becomes impossible after the
154
Milan Kundera, L’Art du roman (Paris: Gallimard, Folio, 1986), pp. 160-161. The
laughter that Kundera promotes as an integral element of the European novel is
sometimes metaphysically quite close to the pathos of suffering, the domain of homo
sentimentalis, which he seeks to avoid.
155
Le Grand, Kundera ou la mémoire du désir, p. 179. “historical continuity of love
through the figure par excellence of discontinuity and rupture: none other than the
figure of Don Juan”
Revolution. This event leaves no room for any but individual libertine
expression. This change is in accordance with Kundera’s
individualism, although the implications of community that Kundera
attributes to libertinism, visible in the treatment of Point de
lendemain, suggest an inner conflict in Kundera’s work. Why are the
transitions between private and public Utopia so hidden in this work
of an author who strives to denounce every illusion? And how is his
allegedly private Utopia shared? Kundera’s gentleness is as
manipulative as Mme de T.’s performance.
In today’s world of normative thinking, “le libertinage
redevient une manière de survie”.156 Anything individual and personal
can more easily survive hidden behind the label of the outrageous
where no one will try to assimilate it to a norm. As an extreme
defence of personal freedom, first put into practice with liberation
from the religious straitjacket, libertinism still serves the goals, above
all, of personal freedom. Laclos’s achievement in Les Liaisons
dangereuses lies not only in the portrayal of gratuitous seduction, but
also in the exhaustive celebration of “la fabuleuse libérté” (“fabulous
liberty”) at all levels of personal existence .157 Here it is pure freedom
that is at stake, fascinating in its innovative clarity. “Le libertinage est
encore ‘lisible’ après la Révolution, même s’il est désormais reçu à
travers la figure de Satan et du révolté social ou religieux, mais il n’est
plus ‘scriptible’”,158 states Yvan Leclerc. This is the balance that both
Kundera and Semprun redress through their work. They take their
writing into the heart of the topos of libertinism and bring it closer to
the original eighteenth-century phenomenon. They thereby negate the
importance of its political justification. Kundera says “Si je devais me
définir, je dirais que je suis un hédoniste piégé dans un monde politisé
à l’extrême.”159 Michel Onfray’s description of the hedonist can
156
Anon., “Les Libertins – séduction et subversion”, Magazine littéraire, No 371
(décembre 1998), p. 19. “libertinism once more becomes a form of survival”
157
Ludovic Michel, La Mort du libertin, agonie d’une identité romanesque (Paris:
Larousse, 1993), p. 10.
158
Yvan Leclerc, “Les Enfants de Sade”, Magazine littéraire, No 371 (décembre
1998), p. 47. “Libertinism is still lisible (readable) after the Revolution, even if it is
now mediated by the figure of Satan and the social or religious rebel; but it is no
longer scriptible (writable).”
159
Milan Kundera, Introduction à une variation, Jacques et son maître, hommage à
Denis Diderot (Paris: Gallimard, 1981), p. 10. “If I had to define myself, I would say
that I am a hedonist trapped in a world politicised in the extreme.”
further clarify Kundera’s view of himself: “L’hédoniste se moque de

la pseudosécurité qu’offre le social en retour du don des reliefs de son
autocastration.”160 However, despite this contempt for the social, the
pressures of Kundera’s personal political circumstances upon his work
give rise to references to present-day politics. But even in those
references, his criticism is fully politically non-committed and tends to
be metaphysical rather than political. It is this unique tension in his
work that not only makes him fashionable, but together with other
qualities of his writing, contributes to his status as one of the greatest
contemporary novelists.
Literary heritage
Kundera’s narratives have always focused mainly on the

present and significantly, his first more substantial reference to the
past (which is literature) occurs in La Lenteur.161 In addition to the
veneration of Diderot in his Beckettian variations on the theme of
Jacques le Fataliste, La Lenteur is his first literary statement of roots
in his chosen genre – the novel; his first self-analytical glance at what
is his past and at his ways of justifying his existence as a writer on
French soil and in the French language. Les Testaments trahis, L’Art
du roman and Jacques et son maître162 establish the context in the new
language for this exploration in La Lenteur. The first two do so in the
essay form, whilst Jacques et son maître represents a closer reworking
of an Urtext in the form of a play. La Lenteur is the first attempt to
tackle these issues within a novel, the European genre most prized by
Kundera, and his first novel written directly in French. The latest
offerings, L’Identité and L’Ignorance, follow closely in this new
direction. As Pietro Citati points out: “Il privilégie désormais les
160
Onfray, L’Art de jouir, p. 213. “The hedonist mocks the pseudo-security which the
social offers in return for handing over the remnants of auto-castration.”
161
Kundera’s other significant reference to the past appears in L’Immortalité where he
introduces the story of Goethe’s admirer Bettina as one of his main themes. The
reference is literary, but does not refer to literary fiction (it is based on real events); it
centres on the nineteenth rather than the eighteenth century and the story mirrors
rather than opposes the contemporary narrative.
162
Jacques et son maître was written in Prague in Czech and therefore precedes any
of the works written directly in French such as La Lenteur, Les Testaments trahis,
L’Art du roman, L’Identité and L’Ignorance.
petites mesures, si chères à la tradition européenne, celles qu’aimaient

Vermeer, Chardin et, à notre époque, Calvino. Il n’écrit plus des
romans, mais des apologues.”163 A moral fable, but also an apologia
for the use of French, La Lenteur is carefully interwoven with the
elaboration of literary roots.
La Lenteur also exemplifies the art of organising time through
conversation and writing, the art of digression, variation, narration,
stopping and recommencing: “Imprimer la forme à une durée, c’est
l’exigence de la beauté mais aussi celle de la mémoire.”164 It is not
surprising that this method of writing has so much in common with
the libertine method of seduction. The obsessive repetition of the act
of seduction is mirrored in the obsessive rewriting of the same
thought, both trying to hide the void above which our illusions sustain
us. This repetition opposes the unbearable quality of duration, setting
up a tension, essential to the human, between continuity or
remembrance and the vanishing moment. The other libertines in
Kundera’s fiction, like Tomas or Rubens, are ordinary, contemporary
characters – modern deformations of the libertine ideal. They take part
in the game of seduction driven by their need to escape passing time.
In this game any choice is difficult to recognise as their own. Whilst
Kundera does consider the libertine existence to be more authentic
than most, its only realisation belongs to the literary past.
The stylistic virtuosity of Denon is also what brings him close
to Kundera. The ambiguous versatility of the word “point”165 is the
subject of an extensive analysis by Philippe Sollers in his Le Cavalier
du Louvre. What better emphasis for the Utopian nature of eighteenth-
century libertinism than the title of Denon’s story? Is the twentieth
century in such a void because the eighteenth century lived as if there
was no tomorrow? Kundera is often jokingly accused of refusing to
accept today’s realities. He fully accepts the charge, and has one of his
characters address him:
163
Pietro Citati, “La Joyeuse Froideur de Milan Kundera”, La Nouvelle Revue
française, 540 (janvier 1998), 84-96 (p. 84). “He now favours the small forms, so dear
to the European tradition, loved by Vermeer, Chardin and, in our age, Calvino. He no
longer writes novels, but apologues.”
164
Kundera, La Lenteur, p. 44. “Imprinting form on a period of time is what beauty
demands, but so does memory.”
165
“Point”, “full stop”, “period”, but also part of a verbal negation (ne ... point),
translated as “not” or “not at all”
Vous semblez regretter, cher monsieur, que le temps avance. Retournez

donc en arrière! Au XIIe siècle, voulez-vous? Mais une fois là vous
protesterez contre les cathédrales, les tenant pour une barbarie moderne!
Retournez donc encore plus loin! Retournez parmi les singes! Là aucune
modernité ne vous menacera, là vous serez chez vous, dans le paradis
immaculé des macaques!166
You seem to regret, dear sir, that time moves on. So go back! How about to
the twelfth century, would you like that? But when you get there, you’ll
complain about the cathedrals, judging them a modern barbarity! So go
back further still! Go back amongst the apes! No modernity will threaten
you there; you will be at home in the immaculate paradise of the macaques!
However, Utopian thinking being so foreign to his temperament,

Kundera’s refusal of present reality has generated a Utopia built from
literature, where an idealised picture of France can be protected at the
centre. No doubt his vision of endless variations envies Denon’s
perfect and final ending with “point”. Kundera’s novel ends with “je
démarre”167, a sobering return to the world of cars, where progress is
taken literally.
Conclusion
Car si les déracinés sont les êtres les plus assoiffés de la vie collective, ils
sont aussi les moins capables de s’enraciner.168
For if the uprooted are those who thirst most after collective life, they are
also the least capable of putting down roots.
The idealising vision of belonging to a Utopian imaginary

community is a strong feature of immigrant writing. The impossibility
of this belonging is suitably expressed in a chosen adopted language.
Libertinism and libertarianism as forms of textual Utopia
naturally evolve from the French understanding of the European
identity, embraced by immigrants into the French language. The
individual freedom which is so important for the nomadic perspective
is the most crucial attribute of all Utopian structures voiced by these
166
167
“I start the car”
168
Karátson and Bessière, Déracinement et littérature, pp. 7-8.
authors. L’Algarabie, La Montagne blanche, La Lenteur, and other

works of fiction analysed here, exemplify the deep penetration of the
libertarian Utopian structure into the writing of immigrants into the
French language.
Doubling and incest
Introduction
The figures of doubling and incest emerge from the Utopian

and libertine thinking explored in the previous chapter and feature
prominently in the writing of literary immigrants.
Doubling appears in various guises, usually in a
representation of an alter-ego of the author or one of the main
characters. In Semprun’s novels, this doubling is closely implicated
with the theme of friendship as brotherhood, and regularly focuses on
two very similar male characters, one of whom is the main narrator or
an alter-ego of the author. In Kristof’s trilogy the doubling is even
closer to the coinciding of the two characters. This not only creates
exceptional narrative tension but recreates the archetype of twins –
celebrated in European myth and art – which all fictional character
doubling in essence draws on. The fascination with the myth of twins
originates in their near-coincidence, which generates various narrative
tensions between them: rivalry, substitution, imitation and
transference. Twins or doubles have always been thought of as
dangerous and sacred: “because they incarnate the forces of
supernatural conflict, or because they reproduce the image of cosmic
near-symmetry in a literal manner which violates the boundaries of the
secret”.1 It is not surprising that the theme of doubles appears
frequently in immigrants’ writing; it can be considered a fitting means
of visualising the troubled and sometimes split identity of those who
treat two different languages as their mother tongue.
Both incest and doubling are also Romantic literary symbols,
achieving their peak of popularity in the nineteenth century with
German Romanticism. Increasing psychological knowledge and
introspection have made the exploration of the doubles theme more
sinister than it was at the beginning of the age of the novel:
A partir du XVIIIe siècle, on ne joue plus avec le double, le double ne fait

plus rire et les sosies désertent progressivement la scène des théâtres pour le
1
John Lash, Twins and the Double (London: Thames and Hudson, 1993), p.12.
roman, changeant ainsi de statut: on assiste à une intériorisation du thème

du double, qui devient un fantasme, une obsession inquiétante.2
From the eighteenth century, no one plays with doubles any more, they are
no longer funny and they gradually abandon the stage for the novel, thus
changing their status: we witness the internalisation of the doubles theme,
which becomes a fantasy, a disturbing obsession.
In accordance with his desire to see the European novel go back to its
roots, Kundera wrote Jacques et son maître3 as his version of
Diderot’s story of the coupled master and servant. The only way
Kundera could manage to capture the playfulness of the eighteenth-
century idea of doubles was by writing his version in the form of a
play. Kundera found it impossible to ignore the fact that the
understanding of the nature of doubling has substantially changed
since the eighteenth century. The play thus features many twentieth-
century existential moments which remind us of Beckett’s treatment
of his theatrical couples. Our understanding of psychical phenomena
has gained in depth due to the development of psychoanalysis since
the beginning of the twentieth century. The human mind can either
internalise or externalise the Other; doubling thus appears either a
defence against narcissism or narcissism itself. Since narcissism is a
total phenomenon, literature is a very suitable vehicle for its
expression.
A continuation of brotherhood in a sense, the incest metaphor
is a more complex and subtle means of expressing ambiguous aspects
of the immigrant’s existence: the intensity with which any true bond is
experienced in a world bereft of childhood familiarity, the Utopian
urge to be part of a special, closely knit community, or the many
perceptions of transgression or “indecency” in the life of an
immigrant, such as the intensity of introversion dictated by survival
instincts – many of these aspects relating to the use of language.
Ultimately incest represents an identity short-circuit, bringing into
direct relationship the elements which are the same or very similar.4
2
Wladimir Troubetzkoy, L’Ombre et la différence: le double en Europe (Paris: PUF,
1996), p. 6.
3
Milan Kundera, Jacques et son maître, hommage à Denis Diderot (Paris: Gallimard,
1981).
4
Pierre Bonte and Michel Izard (eds.), Dictionnaire de l'ethnologie et de
l'anthropologie (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1991).
DOUBLING AND INCEST 237
Incest blurs the boundaries between the social and the antisocial and
as such is closely related to friendship as analysed in the chapter
“Libertinism and Utopia”. The term itself carries a charge similar to
the notion of adultery explored by Denis de Rougemont.5 Numerous
detailed anthropological studies throughout the twentieth century state
that actual incest is theoretically the most fundamental social
transgression. Scientific analysis of the incest taboo has hardly
diminished the strength of the fascination with it. If anything, it has
rendered the meaning of the taboo more ambiguous, particularly
within the boundaries of fictional representation, provoking feelings
of horror, disgust, fear, but also the excitement of a transgression and
a challenging of the notion of community.
Françoise Héritier’s analysis of the incest taboo helps the
literary analysis of this motif and also establishes the connection
between metaphors of incest and doubling.6 According to Héritier
there are two types of incest: the sexual relationship between related
individuals of the opposite sex and the perceived sexual connection
between related individuals of the same sex who have had the same
partner. The first type evolves from the second. The incest taboo is
thus based on the prohibition of mixing the same with the same and
the breaking of the taboo consequently represents a denial of
difference. The same is true of the doubles metaphor which is based
on the similarity of merged identities. The concern for establishing the
distinction between the same and the different is by the very
circumstances enhanced in the life of an immigrant.
One of the literary precursors of the use of the doubles
metaphor to signify an immigrant’s or bilingual’s relationship with his
languages is one of the greatest immigrant writers, Vladimir Nabokov.
In his first novel in English, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, the
two half-brothers have different mother tongues corresponding to the
different nationalities of their mothers, the one being English and the
other Russian. This initial premise allows the author to express
intricate complexities of the relationships between languages and
characters.
We might define incest in simplified terms as a moral
violation of something that we love unconditionally. Unconditional
5
Denis de Rougemont, L’Amour et l’Occident (Paris: Plon, 1972).
6
Françoise Héritier, Les Deux Soeurs et leur mère (Paris: Editions Odile Jacob,
1994).
love is usually connected with those elements of our life we have no

control over. For instance, we cannot choose the country we are born
in, or our mother tongue. A writer sometimes chooses to write in a
different language in order to protect the purity of his mother tongue.
But not writing in one’s mother tongue is not as serious a moral
violation as is the translation of the mother tongue which is often felt
to be illegitimate and disloyal. The violation experienced is also a
result of the restructuring of one’s memories and of one’s past in a
different language. This restructuring is essential to establish
continuity between the past and the present, associated with different
languages.
Casanova is one of the first literary immigrants into French to
write about incest and doubling. Doubling and incest are not only the
main theme of his Utopia Icosaméron7, but are also closely related.
Edouard and his sister-wife Elizabeth find themselves in a world of
fantastic creatures, Mégamicres, inside the Earth. They spend eighty
one years living there during which time Elizabeth bears eighty
children to Edward. She gives birth to twins, one male and one female
every 1st October for forty years. Casanova justifies the union between
brother and sister by referring to the Book of Genesis. He seems to
wish to return to the time when incest among the gods or their
children was a “generative, world-shaping act”.8 He takes on the pre-
Darwinian view that a single couple had to be ancestors to all. Incest
helps Casanova to make this world as stable, symmetrical and
predictable as possible. Casanova himself had a very nomadic and
tumultuous existence and in this fantasy he expressed his craving for a
fanatically organised, sedentary life. The metaphor of incest
sometimes hides a certain nostalgia for home in the works of literary
immigrants. At the same time, it is a fantasy about the most extreme
form of freedom and the bravest transgression of libertinage.
Some authors claim that incest is the main motif around which
Casanova constructed the whole of his memoirs:
Leonardo Sciascia est le seul, à ma connaissance, à avoir insisté sur le rôle

que jouait l’inceste dans la construction littéraire des Mémoires: “A partir
d’un certain point, écrit-il, au cours de mes relectures, il m’est arrivé de me
7
Giacomo Casanova, Icosaméron, 1788 (Paris: François Bourin, 1988).
8
Lash, Twins and the Double, p. 69.
demander, et avec de plus en plus d’assiduité et de raisons, s’il n’est pas

possible de voir l’œuvre de Casanova comme un petit univers, comme un
‘système’ qui tourne autour d’une idée fixe, d’une utopie – l’idée fixe, qui
devient utopie, de l’inceste.”9
Leonardo Sciascia was to my knowledge the only one who insisted on the
role which incest played in the literary construction of the Memoires: “From
a certain point on, he wrote, while re-reading the Memoires, I started to
wonder, with ever more persistence, whether it was possible to envisage
Casanova’s work as a small universe, as a ‘system’ which turns around one
obsession, one Utopia – the obsession, which becomes a Utopia, of incest.”
Furthermore, according to Roustang, Casanova seems to

justify incest in his memoirs:
Casanova met d’abord dans la bouche du duc ce qu’il pense lui-même,

comme le ferait tout autre philosophe des Lumières: déclarer horrible
l’union d’un père avec sa fille est le fruit d’un préjugé. Si l’on n’a pas
l’esprit dépravé, mais au contraire une bonne éducation, le préjugé devient
devoir. Passant à la ligne, il semble que Casanova reprenne la parole à son
compte: le devoir suppose en amour l’égalité qui n’existe pas entre le père
et sa fille. L’union entre eux est tyrannique, monstrueuse, abominable. Vous
êtes bien d’accord. Et pouitch! Une pirouette, un point virgule, et la morale
et le devoir s’évanouissent; cette union n’est pas abominable si les deux
s’aiment et ignorent l’interdit qui les concerne. Une nouvelle pirouette, une
simple virgule cette fois: les incestes, depuis les Grecs jusqu’à nos jours, me
font rire.10
Casanova puts into the duke’s mouth what he himself thinks, as any other
Enlightenment philosopher would have done: to declare that the union of
father and daughter is horrible is a consequence of prejudice. If one is not
depraved, but on the contrary well bred, this prejudice becomes a duty.
Starting a new paragraph, it seems that Casanova himself is now talking on
his own behalf: duty requires in love an equality which does not exist
between father and daughter. A union between them is tyrannical,
monstrous, abominable. You surely agree with me. And bam! A side-step,
semicolon, and both ethics and duty disappear; this union is not abominable
if the two love each other and are unaware of the prohibition which
concerns them. Another side-step, a simple comma this time: incest from
ancient Greeks to this day makes me laugh.
9
François Roustang, Le bal masqué de Giacomo Casanova (Paris: Les Editions de
Minuit, 1984), pp. 157-158. Leonardo Sciascia “L’utopie de Casanova”, La Nouvelle
Revue Française, 1 January 1981, pp 1-11.
10
Roustang, Le bal masqué de Giacomo Casanova, pp. 160-161.
Casanova claims that incest is good for society because it

secures the inheritance and that the incest taboo is based on hypocrisy,
the foundation of human relationships. He recognises the immorality
of incest, but sees nothing tragic in it. For him, it is both pleasurable
and beneficial. Twentieth-century writers might look up to his
frivolity and jovial immorality, but the interpretation of incest in their
writing has a different, less literal, significance.
Although it is difficult to fully categorise the use of the two
metaphors, the following typology lists the main types appearing in
the works analysed. The figure of doubling appears: 1) in the external
relationship of the author to a work, i.e. in the creation of a
pseudonym (Romain Gary); 2) in the creation of an alter-ego of the
author as the main character of the novel, either in the form of a fully-
fledged realistic character (Semprun’s La Montagne blanche and
L’Algarabie) or in that of a shadow (Gengis Cohn in La Danse de
Gengis Cohn); 3) in the creation of characters or narratives that double
each other, either in the most obvious form of twins (Kristof’s
trilogy), of mother and daughter (Europa), or of friends (Semprun’s
novels), or in the much looser form of parallel, contrasting characters
or narratives (Vincent as the bad shadow of the eighteenth-century
character in Kundera’s La Lenteur). The figure of incest appears: 1) in
the narration of an actual committed incest where it represents the
primordial trauma (Antoine in La Montagne blanche and Victor in La
preuve); 2) in the narration of a near-incest where it represents the
consequence or the repetition of a primordial trauma (Klaus in Le
Troisième Mensonge and Tobias in Hier); 3) in the representation of a
near-incest or spiritual incest as an explanation for an inhibition and
an adoption of the tragic mode (Artigas in L’Algarabie and Larrea in
La Montagne blanche).
Immigrant writers into French exploit both metaphors, that of
incest and that of doubles, in an exploration of the identity of their
characters which is a figure of their own search for a linguistic
identity.
The Trilogy
The narrative of exile in Agota Kristof’s trilogy about

twinhood has numerous similarities with her life. Similarly to
Semprun’s approach, it is the crucial dates from real life that invade
the writing with all their associated fantasies. Kristof did not envisage
the trilogy as a structural whole from the beginning. The work grew
with the addition of each novel to reach a perfect structure about
which it is difficult to believe that it was not planned.
Only very vague references situate the narrative in place and
time. However, it is clear that the action of the trilogy takes place in a
country in Eastern Europe, most likely Kristof’s native country,
Hungary. The Second World War, the cold war and the period just
after the fall of the “iron curtain” are the respective historical
frameworks of the three novels. Nevertheless, the trilogy could be
read without any reference to history. The author has deliberately
given us very scant references which make her story not only
universal, but ultimately existential. Her writing can be interpreted
from a historical point of view as much as Kafka’s. Their ultimate aim
is to position their writing outside of time, but they do not deny the
historical forces that affect them and define their texts as writings of a
certain epoch.
The subsequent analysis of the trilogy will follow the linear
development of the reader’s perceptions as he reads the trilogy in
chronological order. This will help reveal the complexity of the
metaphors of doubling and incest and their relationship to the
experience of immigration.
Le Grand Cahier
Fusional twinhood
Le Grand Cahier is the first novel of the trilogy. It is

presented in the form of a wartime diary written by twins who are not
distinguishable as individuals, and who are contained in a “nous”
(“we”) which runs through the narrative.
The act of writing coincides for the twins with the intrusion
into their lives of an increasing number of strangers. Their mother
leaves them in a little town near the border in the care of their
grandmother, a foreigner who in her private moments speaks her
mother tongue. We can conjecture that this may be Russian. This
abandonment of the twins is the beginning of the need to write and
create a family romance, but what the twins present us with seems to
have little to do with an ideal world.
The core of the text contains the narrative of events which, for
the twins, have an educational purpose. They engage in what they call
“exercises” which, in an excessively rational manner, help them to
come to terms with all the cruelties of life that they have experienced
from a very early age. A lot of the exercises are based on learning
basic survival skills, such as catching fish with their bare hands.
Others, also physical and practical, are mental exercises. For instance,
they methodically hit and physically hurt each other in order to learn
to endure pain. They achieve a state of alienation from pain, which
almost damages their sense of identity. They also exchange insults and
terms of endearment in order to become insensitive to both. They even
apply strict rules of literary realism to their own writing, excluding
anything that contains subjectivity. The indivisible “nous” of the twins
is presented as the cornerstone of this alleged objectivity, which seems
to rely heavily on the perception of those around them: “Je les
connais. Ils ne font qu’une seule et même personne,”11 says their
grandmother. It also seems to result from an extreme defensiveness in
relation to the cruelty of the world around them.
This rationality extends to the various other exercises which
the twins perform and document, most of them based on emulating the
condition of others in order to understand them better. However, their
understanding is never based on an emotional empathy acknowledged
as such, but purely on facts that the twins have been able to glean. For
instance, they perform exercises in begging, deafness and blindness,
hunger and finally killing. Initially an attempt to stay one step ahead
of the others and to survive the conditions which, although never
explicitly described, seem to be difficult enough to provoke such
extreme defence measures, these exercises, figures of the twins’
approach to life, eventually run the risk of turning them into monsters.
11
Agota Kristof, Le Grand Cahier, La Preuve, Le Troisième Mensonge (Paris:
Editions du Seuil, 1991), p. 28. “I know them. They are one and the same person.”
They gain the reputation of being dangerous, which further helps them
to survive.
The twins’ response to the situation they are in may be read as
a figure of the condition of the immigrant. In order to build emotional
responses to an unknown culture, the immigrant starts by relying on
rational analysis of the behaviour of others. The discipline the twins
employ in their analyses is akin to that of the immigrant. The
misconceptions this approach generates in the case of the twins are of
the same kind as those an immigrant may create in an attempt to
adapt. The discipline of applying rules literally is the only way to
learn, but the belief necessary to uphold this discipline throughout the
learning process is by its very nature erroneous. Like the immigrant,
the twins do not have their family around them to shield them from
the effects of these necessary mistakes while they are learning.
Valérie Petitpierre explains the unusual use of “nous” in Le
Grand Cahier:
Mais le “nous” omniprésent dans Le Grand Cahier correspond-il à la

définition habituelle du pronom? Selon la célèbre formule de Benveniste, le
“nous” n’implique pas qu’il y a “une multiplication d’objets identiques,
mais une jonction entre ‘je’ et le ‘non-je’ […]”. Le linguiste ajoute même
qu’ “il n’y a de ‘nous’ qu’à partir de ‘je’, et ce ‘je’ s’assujettit
l’élément ‘non-je’ de par sa qualité transcendante”. Cette définition
implique que le pronom renvoie nécessairement au couple nodal {“je” + “3e
personne ou 2e personne”}. Or, le roman semble figurer un “nous”
différent, un “nous” qui représenterait exclusivement le couple {“je” +
“je”}. Preuve en est que les frères ne discutent jamais entre eux et qu’ils ne
se concertent pas. Leurs voix sont indissolublement liées: elles ne peuvent
être mises face à face. Il arrive cependant parfois que le “nous” englobe les
jumeaux et un (ou plusieurs) tiers. Mais ces apparitions sont rares: le “nous”
comme double première personne domine largement.12
But does the “we” omnipresent in The Notebook correspond to the usual
definition of the pronoun? According to the Benveniste’s famous formula,
the “we” does not imply that there is “a multiplication of identical objects,
but a joining between ‘I’ and the ‘non-I’ […]”. The linguist even adds that
“a ‘we’ can only exist based on the ‘I’, and this ‘I’ subordinates the ‘non-I’
with its transcendent quality”. This definition implies that the pronoun
necessarily refers to the nodal couple {“I” + “third or second person”}.
However, the novel features a different “we”, a “we” which exclusively
represents the couple {“I” + “I”}. The proof is that the brothers never
12
Valérie Petitpierre, Agota Kristof: d’un exil l’autre (Genève: Editions Zoé, 2000),
pp. 95-96; referring to Benveniste, Problèmes de linguistique générale, vol I.
discuss things between themselves or consult each other. Their voices are
indissolubly linked: they can not be made to face each other. Nevertheless,
occasionally the “we” encompasses the twins and one (or more) third
persons. But these occurrences are rare: the “we” as a double first person
dominates to a large extent.
This use of the pronoun also accurately represents the alienation of a

foreigner, or that of the twins in difficult living conditions.
Occasionally, the reader is allowed to distinguish two characters
within the “nous”, for instance in the chapter about the twins’
theatrical sketches where they are named “le riche” (“the rich”) and
“le pauvre” (“the poor”). In those cases, the two characters are always
interchangeable. Their twinhood is irreducible.13 The twins’
anonymity is preserved until the end of Le Grand Cahier. Their
individual experiences are never mentioned. They are hidden behind
the joint, simultaneous experiences of the twosome. “L’assimilation
est si parfaite que l’on n’est pas surpris d’apprendre dans Le Troisième
Mensonge qu’elle relève de l’utopie.”14 In subsequent novels of the
trilogy it will be gradually revealed that the twinhood of Le Grand
Cahier is a product of the loneliness of one of the brothers. The single
“je” (“I”) does not so much double his strength and protection by
asserting the “nous”, as finds in it the necessary means to survive. The
gradual disappearance and modification of “nous” in the two
subsequent novels charts the development of the subjective dimension
and its acceptance into the narrative.15
13
A hare-lip is conceived as an incipient twinhood in mythology and the twins’
neighbour, who is nicknamed Bec-de-Lièvre because of her hare-lip, is a tortured soul
who will not be able to survive as opposed to the strong and united twins. Her
character also points to the inherent vulnerabilities of twinhood.
14
Petitpierre, Agota Kristof: d’un exil l’autre, p. 103. “The assimilation is so perfect
that we are not surprised to find out in The Third Lie that it is Utopian.”
15
It is interesting to note the uncomfortable relationship that writers who have
experienced living under communism have with the pronoun “we”, used and abused
in the overwhelming and shameless promotion of society or group over the individual.
Buried within the five hundred pages of the Soul Mountain is a rather restrained
condemnation by the Chinese Nobel Prize-winning writer Gao Xingjian, who found
refuge in France: “I don’t know whether or not you’ve noticed but when I speak of me
and you, and she, him, feminine they and masculine they, I never speak of we or us. I
believe that this is much more concrete than the sham which is totally meaningless.”
Gao Xingjian, Soul Mountain, translated from Chinese by Mabel Lee (Sydney:
HarperCollins, 2000), p. 347.
Rational linguistic exercises
The severity with which the twins judge their writing parallels
the process of second language adoption in the case of immigrant
writers. The only two books they have, a dictionary and the Bible, are
used strictly in the exercises for mastering language. The short essays
they write (and which, in the structure of the novel, are represented by
chapters of two to three pages) have to satisfy the rules of language
and of verisimilitude in order to gain a good mark and thus be copied
into le grand Cahier. For an adult, second language acquisition is
exactly that kind of overconscious process. It seems unnatural that the
twins, at the age of about seven, have such an adult approach to
learning. The extremeness of their situation can “explain” this to some
extent, but at the same time, the entire novel can be perceived as a
metaphorical description of the immigrant’s linguistic predicament,
particularly that of the polyglot as opposed to the polylingual. Second
language adoption forces an adult to regress to certain childhood
learning patterns, but equally leaves him exposed as an adult in an
unknown world. When the twins go to the bookshop to obtain
stationery for their writing, they talk to the bookshop assistant using a
language which is too bookish and proper for their age:
Nous disons:
— Nous sommes disposés à effectuer quelques travaux pour vous en
échange de ces objets. Arroser votre jardin, par exemple, arracher les
mauvaises herbes, porter des colis …
Il crie encore:
— Je n’ai pas de jardin! Je n’ai pas besoin de vous! Et d’abord, vous ne
pouvez pas parler normalement?
— Nous parlons normalement.
— Dire à votre âge: “disposé à effectuer”, c’est normal, ça?
— Nous parlons correctement.
— Trop correctement, oui. Je n’aime pas du tout votre façon de parler!
Votre façon de me regarder non plus! Sortez d’ici!16
We say:
— We are available to perform certain tasks for you in exchange for these
things. We could water or weed your garden, for example, carry
parcels …
He continues to shout:
16
Kristof, Le Grand Cahier, p. 31.
— I don’t have a garden! I don’t need you! And, for a start, can’t you
speak normally?
— We do speak normally.
— Is it normal, at your age, to say: “available to perform”?
— We speak correctly.
— Far too correctly, yes. I don’t like one bit the way you speak! Or the
way you look at me! Get out!
The twins are perceived in the same way as immigrants or foreigners

who have learnt a second language from books, and speak it too
properly compared to the natives. The natives can find this disturbing
and threatening. It makes the immigrant stand out uncomfortably, as
an adult physically and mentally, and yet like a child because at a
helpless stage of a language learning process most often associated
with children. In this context, the “nous” of the above excerpt sounds
rather like the traditional language teaching methods which teach an
over-formal discourse at the beginning, or else like a sign of the
foreigner’s initial inability to distinguish between different registers of
language. The “nous” and “je” might stand in the same relationship as
“vous” and “tu”. And yet the “nous” is also a clear statement of the
doubling of the speaker with the presence of two mother tongues and
two respective cultures of belonging.
The “nous” seems like the only irrational feature of the twins’
initial linguistic rationalism. The narrators surround this mythical
irreducible core whose unity they take as an essential given with
excessive linguistic order, trying to fix or limit any ambiguity which
the multiplicity of “nous” suggests. The twins’ linguistic rationalism
opposes and contains their twinhood in a movement which can only
be described as a stage in learning how to grapple with their twinhood.
The twins exclude all abstract nouns from their writing:
Nous écrirons: “Nous mangeons beaucoup de noix”, et non pas: “Nous

aimons les noix”, car le mot “aimer” n’est pas un mot sûr, il manque de
précision et d’objectivité. “Aimer le noix” et “aimer notre Mère”, cela ne
peut pas vouloir dire la même chose. La première formule désigne un goût
agréable dans la bouche, et la deuxième un sentiment.
Les mots qui définissent les sentiments sont très vagues; il vaut mieux éviter
leur emploi et s’en tenir à la description des objets, des êtres humains et de
soi-même, c’est-à-dire à la description fidèle des faits.17
17
Kristof, Le Grand Cahier, p. 33.
We will write: “We eat a lot of walnuts” and not: “We love walnuts”,
because the word “love” is not a reliable word; it lacks precision and
objectivity. “To love walnuts” and “to love Mother”, don’t mean the same
thing. The first expression denotes a pleasant taste in the mouth, the second
a feeling.
Words that define feelings are very vague. It is better to avoid using them
and stick to the description of objects, human beings, and oneself, that is to
say, to the faithful description of facts.
For the twins the best way of dealing with the uncertainties of their
situation is to repress them completely. As we will see in the other two
novels of the trilogy, this approach will come back to haunt them
when they grow up. They can accept the cruelty of facts, but not that
of subjectivity.
There are many examples of the way that Kristof, through her
seemingly rational use of language, positions it on a par with
twinhood as a defence mechanism. Kristof’s or the twins’ style of
writing (“la syntaxe est plate, le vocabulaire banal”18) is highly
significant in this sense. It illustrates the twins’ journey of learning, of
neutralising the language by pulling it apart. The highly simplified
style of Kristof’s writing represents both her extreme rebellion
(exemplified by her two characters) against her surroundings and a
mature, accepting questioning of the nature of language from the
perspective of a second language writer. Kristof refuses to indulge her
new mother tongue. She wants to minimise every sign of effort in
using the painfully acquired tongue, and at the same time to show the
devastating mental effort invested in this appropriation. Rather than
show her mastery of a perfect and complex rhetoric as do Gary or
Semprun, she chooses the other extreme of total simplicity, similar to
Kundera.
Parental death
When the twins’ mother comes back and wants to take them
with her, they refuse to go. With her young baby, she is killed on the
spot by a bomb. One can make a parallel between the twins’
18
Petitpierre, Agota Kristof: d’un exil l’autre, p. 10. “the syntax is flat, the vocabulary
banal”
relationship to their mother and grandmother and one of the possible

relationships the immigrant could develop with his native country or
mother tongue and with his adoptive country or new language. The
relationship with the new language is difficult and rough. It takes a
long time to get used to it. One can see every wrinkle on the face of
the new country and language – although some might experience it as
a youthful demanding presence – and there is a nostalgia for the native
country and tongue. At a certain point, the choice between the two
needs to be made. The artifice of the mother’s death functions as a
wish-fulfilment on several levels: it is a fitting literary punishment for
the mother who has abandoned her children (and furthermore has
come back with another child) and it also symbolises the desire to end
the ambiguity of the double allegiance to two mother figures or two
cultures and languages.
Subsequently, after their father comes back and digs out the
grave, the twins take the skeletons of their mother and half-sister,
polish them and hang them up in the attic. This act of preservation,
seemingly devoid of all emotion, also brings to mind a stage in an
immigrant writer’s relationship with his unused mother tongue. Not
sure whether he will ever use it in a socially participatory way, the
immigrant keeps it in his mind as a suppressed relic.
Le Grand Cahier ends with another dark incident. The twins’
father asks his sons to help him cross the border which is very near the
grandmother’s house. Knowing that the area is mined in a certain way
and that if one goes in a straight line one will only come across one
mine, the twins make a macabre use of their father. He is blown up by
the mine and one of the twins can then cross the border by going over
his dead body. Thus at the end of the novel, the twins separate for the
first time. To make this possible, they had to brutally remove their
family. As will be clear in the subsequent novels, these symbolic
killings are essential for the twins’ development. For the brother who
emigrates, they are even more important to enable him to start his new
life abroad. The only way an immigrant can truly invest in his new life
is by at least temporarily breaking all his ties with his past. This
burning of bridges can be experienced as much more brutal than it is
in reality. It can be said that the death of the parents does not function
as a “real” event, but illustrates the psychical development of an
immigrant.
La Preuve
Individuation
The second novel in the trilogy, La Preuve, is written from the

perspective of the twin who has remained in the country where he
grew up. In the first sentence we find out his name for the first time –
Lucas. No one seems to be querying where his brother is, as if Lucas
has been alone all along. He admits having been traumatised by the
bombing and he talks to himself in such a comforting way that one
wonders whether his brother was not his invention all along:
— Comment faire maintenant?

— Comme avant. Il faut continuer à se lever le matin, à se coucher le soir,
et à faire ce qu’il faut faire pour vivre.
— Ce sera long.
— Peut-être toute une vie.19
— How will we live now?

— As before. Continue to get up in the morning, go to bed at night, and
do what one needs to do to live.
— It will be long.
— Perhaps an entire life.
This would have been a realistic explanation for the doubling and it
holds, not without ambiguity, throughout the first part of the novel.
At the beginning of the novel, Lucas forgets the world around
him for several months and loses all awareness of time. He admits
having an illness which the priest calls a “maladie de l’âme”20 and
attributes to his tender age and his great solitude. If La Preuve is read
after Le Grand Cahier, it appears that Lucas is suffering because his
brother left. Otherwise he may just appear to be experiencing a
standard adolescent crisis. But as no one mentions Lucas’ brother at
all from the beginning of La Preuve, in this second novel Lucas’
identity is initially established by itself without any reference to his
brother. He appears older than the twins in Le Grand Cahier, despite
the fact that the action of La Preuve takes place immediately after Le
Grand Cahier. As Valérie Petitpierre points out, La Preuve shows “la
19
Kristof, La Preuve, pp. 175-176.
20
Kristof, La Preuve, p. 183. “sickness of the soul”
brusque émancipation du frère resté au pays”.21 Although very well

spoken, like the twins in Le Grand Cahier, he likes to be officially
considered as mentally retarded, so that officials, and people
generally, leave him in peace.
The notebook is suddenly referred to in lower case. The same
applies to the nouns “grandmother”, “mother” and “bookshop” whose
importance was inflated in a child-like manner in Le Grand Cahier.
Lucas has grown up and although still crucial to his life, the written
word does not have the same sacred aura any more.
Les frères étaient les écrivains-narrateurs du premier manuscrit; ils ne sont

plus désormais que des personnages, désignés à la troisième personne et
relégués avec les autres sur la seule scène de l’histoire. Ils ont perdu
l’autorité que leur donnait l’écriture, et ce n’est pas leur destinée qui les
démarque de leur entourage. Ils sont en effet nombreux à être amputés
d’une moitié, dans La Preuve: Clara a perdu Thomas (son mari), le père de
Yasmine est en prison, le mère de Mathias disparaît et Michel
(l’insomniaque) est veuf. Au même titre que les personnages gravitant
autour d’eux, les jumeaux sont victimes du sort.22
The brothers were the writers-narrators of the first manuscript; now they are
only characters referred to in the third person and relegated with others to
the sole stage of history. They have lost the authority which the writing
conferred to them, and their destiny does not distinguish them from those
around them. In fact, many have lost their other half in The Proof: Clara lost
Thomas (her husband), Yasmine’s father is in prison, Mathias’ mother
disappears and Michel (the insomniac) is a widower. In the same way as the
characters who revolve around them, the twins are victims of fate.
The post-war period with its grief now coincides with the existential
grief of the twins. The admission of helplessness is painful for Lucas,
but it is the logical step in the development of his character. His
rejection of anonymity and assumption of a named identity helps him
progress towards adulthood.
21
Petitpierre, Agota Kristof: d’un exil l’autre, p. 24. “the brusque emancipation of the
brother who remained in the home country”
22
Petitpierre, Agota Kristof: d’un exil l’autre, p. 113.
Yasmine’s incest
Lucas shelters a young girl, Yasmine, with her baby, a product

of her incestuous relationship with her father. Yasmine has even
named her son Mathias after her father. Lucas comments:
— Tu l’aimais donc tant?

— Je n’avais que lui.23
— You loved him that much?

— He was all I had.
This summarises all the relationships in the Kristof trilogy. Everyone

is so lonely that even incest appears to be an understandable choice.
After his wife’s death, Yasmine’s father married Yasmine’s
aunt, but he only truly loved his daughter. Kristof here amplifies the
notion of incest by featuring two relationships which can be called
incestuous. Although it is only Yasmine and her father who are blood
relatives, the official and accepted relationship between Yasmine’s
father and her aunt is also incestuous and would be considered to
belong to the original type of incest according to Françoise Héritier.24
The previous sister-in-law – brother-in-law relationship between
Yasmine’s father and aunt qualifies their original relationship as that
of a brother and sister by law.
By entering into a relationship with Yasmine, Lucas becomes
a father substitute for both Yasmine and Mathias. Not belonging to
their family, he also puts himself in a situation where he is a stranger
by nature. There are again similarities with the situation of an
immigrant. To someone from another country, the practices of people
in a new country can appear to drown in contemptuous similarity.
Incest can be a metaphor for this perception of the foreigner.
Victor’s incest
Victor is the only other character apart from the twins who is
allowed to be a narrator for one section in La Preuve. The story of his
23
Kristof, La Preuve, p. 199.
24
Françoise Héritier, Les Deux Soeurs et leur mère (Paris: Editions Odile Jacob,
1994).
life echoes the most important motives of the twins’ journey and
contains the second narrative of incest in La Preuve.
When Lucas gets to know Victor, the latter owns a bookshop
in the centre of the town. Due to his need for stationery and books,
Lucas visits the bookshop quite often. When Victor’s sister, Sophie,
visits her brother after many years, she reminds him that as a child he
was planning to write a book. He seems to be neglecting himself,
drinking and smoking too much, so his sister suggests that he should
sell his bookshop and come and live with her. She would provide him
with a healthy lifestyle and he could just concentrate on writing his
book. This is indeed what Victor decides to do. He sells his bookshop
to Lucas and goes to live with his sister.
The relationship with Sophie deteriorates rapidly as she
forbids him to drink or smoke and invades his privacy, constantly
enquiring about the progress of his manuscript. After a brief attempt to
live by his sister’s rules, Victor starts smoking and drinking in secret.
As he feels completely uninspired to write, but forced to pretend, he
copies sentences from other books into his “manuscript”:
Il n’y avait aucun risque qu’elle découvre ma supercherie, car elle ne lisait
jamais, elle n’a peut-être jamais lu un seul livre de sa vie, elle n’en a pas eu
le temps, dès l’enfance, elle a travaillé du matin au soir.25
There was no chance of her seeing through my deceit, for she never read
herself; she possibly never read a single book in her life. She never had the
time – since childhood she has worked from morning till night.
This sums up the condition of women in Kristof’s literature.

They are hardworking, uneducated, blindly pushing things ahead in
their ambition to achieve a better life.
The situation was not tenable for very long. One evening, the
police bring the drunken Victor home and the final scene erupts
between him and his sister. During the painful argument that ensues,
the reader discovers that the brother and sister had an incestuous
relationship as children. Victor was profoundly disturbed by this
experience, initiated by Sophie, and has hated her ever since. When
this comes to light, brother and sister start fighting. Victor strangles
Sophie and ejaculates afterwards.
25
Having killed his sister, Victor sits down and starts writing.
By the time the police find him and he is convicted of murder and
condemned to death, he manages to write down the story of the two
last years of his life, the years with his sister, starting with the moment
he moves in with her and ending with her death.
The theme of incest in Victor’s narrative draws together a
multiplicity of threads. It highlights the importance of writing and its
close links with incest as both a trauma and a symbol for any
individual’s private history, particularly that of growing up, which
needs to be mourned. In both Victor’s and Yasmine’s case it is the
woman who is the initiator of incest. This could be another projection
of the masculine viewpoint Kristof adopts, which will be discussed
further in the section “Exclusion of the mother figure and the female
principle”. It could also signify a more general absorption of guilt by a
female figure as a symbol for the immigrant author.
The family is a great source of misfortune in Kristof’s trilogy.
In the effort to help its members survive very difficult conditions of
life, it does not teach them how to direct their affections outside of the
family. This results in a claustrophobic existence and a continuous
painful disturbance which individuals do not know how to break away
from. Victor’s killing of Sophie is another murder of the mother
figure. It is also a metaphor for the removal of inhibitions, such as that
of the mother tongue, to achieve the full freedom of adulthood. It is
only when individuals are released from their inhibitions that they are
free to talk and write about them. This monstrous figure of a radical
action to achieve freedom stands for the incredibly difficult world
Kristof’s characters live in. By elision and allusion alone, it captures
the essence of the Eastern European experience of the second half of
the twentieth century more accurately than most other novels that treat
the subject. Even the closeness of the twins is forced by
circumstances, rather than being a question of choice. Incest is a
metaphor for this emotional claustration which explicitly defines the
emotional responses of the characters as those of individuals who are
in a permanent state of pain. It corresponds to the emotional state of a
recent immigrant who suffers from intense depressive nostalgia for his
country and language and is still mainly turned towards the past rather
than the future.
A delusion of twinhood
Another confirmation for a reading of the previous novel, Le

Grand Cahier, in the perspective of a delusion of twinhood appears
when the priest suddenly starts using “tu” to address Lucas:
— Vous me tutoyez, mon père.

— Excusez-moi, Lucas. Je me suis laissé emporter par la colère. Mais
c’est parce que je vous considère comme mon propre fils, et que je
tremble pour votre âme.
Lucas dit:
— Continuez à me tutoyer, mon père. Cela me fait plaisir. 26
— You are addressing me as “tu”, my father.

— Forgive me, Lucas. I let myself get carried away by anger. But it’s
because I think of you as my own son, and because I fear for your soul.
Lucas says:
— Continue to call me “tu”, my father. It pleases me.
The memory of twinhood in Lucas’ mind could have been just an

illusory figure resulting from polite language. Lucas seems to have
overcome the need for a twin. The use of “tu” simplifies things for
him, as it leaves no space for wondering where his double is.
However, the figure of the brother re-emerges. The first time
Lucas mentions him is in an intimate conversation with his new lover,
Clara. Lucas empathises with Clara’s loss of her husband and it
reminds him of his brother with whom he formed one being:
— Vous ne pouvez imaginer ce que j’ai vécu.

Lucas dit:
— Je connais la douleur de la séparation.
— La mort de votre mère.
— Quelque chose d’autre encore. Le départ d’un frère avec qui je ne
faisais qu’un.
Clara relève la tête, elle regarde Lucas:
— Nous aussi, Thomas et moi, nous n’étions qu’un seul être: Ils l’ont
assassiné. Ont-ils assassiné aussi votre frère?
— Non. Il est parti. Il a traversé la frontière.
— Pourquoi n’êtes-vous parti avec lui?
— Il fallait que l’un de nous reste ici pour s’occuper des bêtes, du jardin,
de la maison de Grand-Mère. Il fallait aussi que nous apprenions à
vivre l’un sans l’autre. Seuls.
26
Clara pose sa main sur la main de Lucas:

— Quel est son nom?
— Claus.
— Il reviendra. Thomas, lui, ne reviendra plus.27
— You can’t imagine what I’ve been through.

Lucas says:
— I know the pain of separation.
— The death of your mother.
— Something else as well. The loss of a brother with whom I was as one.
Clara raises her head. She looks at Lucas:
— We too, Thomas and I, we were a single being: They killed him. Did
they also kill your brother?
— No. He left. He crossed the border.
— Why didn’t you leave with him?
— One of us had to stay to look after the animals, the garden,
Grandmother’s house. We also had to learn to live without each other.
Alone.
Clara rests her hand on Lucas’:
— What is his name?
— Claus.
— He will return. Thomas, on the other hand, won’t.
The reference to the single entity he formed with his brother still
fosters the suspicion that Lucas’ twin was always only in his mind.
This impression is reinforced by Lucas’ acknowledgement of the
necessity of separation for entering adulthood. It could be interpreted
that he is saying that abandoning an imaginary twin is essential for
growing up. For the first time we read his brother’s name – Claus.
While Clara constantly dreams of her dead husband, Lucas
dreams of his brother, telling him that he lives “dans une solitude
mortelle”.28 Solitude and isolation repeatedly justify the creating of
doubles and the move towards incest. The word “mortel” is used here
in a similar manner to the beginning of the novel when Joseph warns
Lucas: “Faites attention, Lucas! L’amour est parfois mortel.”29 The
allusion to death is not just rhetorical. Solitude and love, just like other
emotions, are dangerous and even lethal, particularly when
experienced as emotions of mortals.
27
28
Kristof, La Preuve, p. 240. “in a deathly solitude”
29
Kristof, La Preuve, p. 180. “Be careful, Lucas! Love can be fatal.”
Lucas explains to Mathias that the dead are “nulle part et

partout”.30 Just like the absent, they have entered a Utopian region of
human understanding. One of the main themes of the trilogy is that of
abandonment and absence. The immigrant recreates abandonment and
absence at will. Kundera’s character Sabine exemplifies this repeated
pattern of abandonment and absence as being the most important
characteristic in the archetype of the immigrant.
The inner reader
When Lucas leaves his manuscript with Peter, we are

explicitly told that Claus, Lucas’ twin, is the destined addressee of
Lucas’ writing. However, Peter’s amazement that no one ever
mentioned to him that Lucas had a brother adds weight to the general
doubt over his existence. It is the absence and abandonment of the
twin which have created the need for communication through writing.
Throughout the trilogy the twins metaphor frequently alludes to the
relationship between the author and her inner reader. Michel de
M’Uzan’s description of the characteristics of the inner reader helps
elucidate this relationship between the twins:
Car on écrit toujours à l’intention de quelqu’un, pour ou contre un

quelconque autrui qui peut rester tout à fait silencieux, mais dont l’opinion
implicite importe au plus haut point. Tout le problème consiste donc,
puisqu’un pareil personnage n’est pas concevable dans la réalité, à créer une
figure intérieure avec qui et sur qui le jeu de toutes les tendances
contradictoires soit possible. Cet autrui anonyme à qui en quelque sorte on
dédie l’œuvre dans le moment même où elle est conçue, ne se confond
nullement avec le public réel que l’œuvre faite doit en principe affronter tôt
ou tard. Mais ce n’est pas non plus le père réel, bien qu’il procède
nécessairement d’une image parentale introjectée, puisque les parents sont
normalement le premier public, pour ainsi dire les premiers dédicataires de
l’enfant. Je note en passant que chez certains poètes, plus peut-être que chez
les romanciers, cette figure intérieure semble marquée par des traits
fortement maternels.31
For we always write for someone, for or against somebody or other who can
remain completely silent, but whose implicit opinion matters to the highest
30
Kristof, La Preuve, p. 244. “nowhere and everywhere”. This echoes the Scholastics’
definition of God referred to in the previous chapter.
31
M’Uzan, De l’art à la mort, pp. 18-19.
degree. Therefore, since such a character cannot exist in reality, the crux of
the problem is to create an interior figure with whom or about whom the
play of all the contradictory tendencies could be possible. This anonymous
other to whom we in a way dedicate the work in the very moment we first
conceive it, cannot be confused with the real audience that the completed
work will in principle sooner or later have to face. But neither is it the real
father, although it inevitably originates from an internalised parental image,
since the parents are usually the child’s first audience, or his first
dedicatees, so to speak. I remark in passing that for some poets, perhaps
more often than for novelists, this internal figure seems to possess strong
maternal traits.
This inner reader, M’Uzan writes, is a successful combination of the

Superego and Ego-Ideal and it takes different forms, modelled on
different people, provoking different feelings. It could become the
alter ego of the author “qui cherche par ce détour à restaurer son
intégrité narcissique”.32 This process can lead to a homosexual
identification, most evident in some of Jorge Semprun’s doubles, such
as Juan and Antoine in La Montagne blanche or Rafael and Carlos in
L’Algarabie. On the other hand, Semprun’s Rose Beude, discussed in
the section “The ideal reader and narrator” of the previous chapter, is
almost a caricature of what the inner reader could become if too
obviously externalised. Gary’s Gengis Cohn could also be said to
represent a version of the inner reader, incorporated into the narrative.
In an interview Romain Gary called his own inner reader a “témoin
intérieur”33. For him, the inner reader is unambiguously represented
by his mother.
In Kristof’s trilogy itself, we can see something like Gary’s
hyper-conscious practice. Each brother is up to a certain point the
addressee of the other’s writing. In Klaus’ narrative in Le Troisième
Mensonge, the question arises for a while that his mother may be more
important to him than his brother (and he is a poet, in keeping with
M’Uzan’s generalisation about the importance of mother figures for
poets). The doubt remains at the end as to who is the true addressee of
his writing.
M’Uzan sees the literary text as a kind of more complex, non-
immediate “double” for the relation to reality.34 Incorporating this
32
M’Uzan, De l’art à la mort, p. 20. “who seeks in this roundabout way to restore his
narcissistic integrity”
33
Gary, La Nuit sera calme, p. 27. “inner witness”
34
M’Uzan, De l’art à la mort, p. 6.
insight into the narrative is a method often used in twentieth-century

fiction, adding another dimension of self-consciousness to the texts.
However, the awareness of psychoanalytic findings which refer to the
creative process can be said to be typical of French writers. Immigrant
writers into French have adopted this together with the language, all
the more readily for the fact that it allows them to analyse their
relationship with the new language. This conscious writing practice
referring to a multitude of meanings is immensely enriching and very
powerful.
Exclusion of the mother figure and the female principle
Lucas states that he does not understand the meaning of the

word love. Both he and his brother have closed themselves off from
anything subjective and emotional at a very early age. It is as if a
whole part of their being has been amputated and that therefore they
are only half-people, which may explain why they need each other so
badly. This is well illustrated in the following conversation between
Lucas and Clara when he asks her:
— Quand cesserez-vous de me parler de Thomas?

— Jamais. Jamais je ne cesserai de parler de Thomas. Et vous? Quand
commencerez-vous à me parler de Yasmine?35
— Will you never stop talking to me about Thomas?

— Never. I’ll never stop talking about Thomas. And you? When will you
start talking to me about Yasmine?
Lucas lives with Yasmine and has a relationship with her and yet he
never talks about her. He does not even seem to think about her except
in practical terms about what he needs in order to provide for her.
Writing is the most important thing for Lucas and as his writing is
meant for his brother, his brother is his most important relationship.
Lucas announces to Mathias one day that Yasmine has left
them and gone to the big city. Yasmine apparently abandons them in
the same way Lucas’ mother did. The suggestion that Lucas might
have killed Yasmine only arises much later. There is no obvious
35
motive for this, any more than for the killing of the maid in Le Grand
Cahier which seems likely to have been committed by the twins. It is
clear that Lucas always wanted to keep Mathias, with whom he had a
very special relationship. The loneliness, physical deformity and high
intelligence of the young child reminded him no doubt of his own
childhood (this is particularly true in hindsight, after reading the third
novel). Although Lucas takes care of Mathias like a father, he relates
to him like a brother. Mathias replaces Lucas’ lost brother for a time,
absorbing in his personality some of the most painful negative aspects
of Lucas’ existence.
Lucas saw Yasmine as primarily a mother, which made it
impossible for him to truly bond with her. The killing of Yasmine
marks the return of the motif of the killing of a mother figure,
represented in Le Grand Cahier with the deaths of the twins’ mother
and the caring maid. When reading the account of the maid’s death in
Le Grand Cahier, the strongest explanation for why the twins might
have wanted to kill her seems to be the maid’s mockery of a convoy of
deportees. In the light of Yasmine’s disappearance, the doubt
reappears as to whether the killing of the maid was a result of the
twins’ moral condemnation of her. The understanding of morality is
very ambiguous and fluid throughout the trilogy.
The only true bonding in the three novels is that which occurs
between the men. It might seem strange that in a novel by a woman,
women are removed and dissociated from anything of ultimate
importance. Twinship in mythology is essentially male. The writing’s
detachment from women can be interpreted in many different ways, of
which only some are relevant here:
(1) The status of the mother figure is implicated very deeply in

the mother tongue and native country. In order to appropriate
a new language and fully adapt to a new country, an
immigrant must, at least temporarily, “kill” the mother tongue.
The female relationship with the mother figure is essentially
different – more complex and ambiguous – than the male one.
The choice of male characters removes this unnecessary
further complication in a story which is essentially focused on
the relationship with the mother tongue and the adopted
language.
(2) The accepted archetypes in our patriarchal and phallocentric

cultures hold that the hero who is on a journey of initiation is
male (the pícaro, for example), that any close friendship is
male (an assumption discussed in the previous chapter) and
that mythical twins are male. Kristof does not concern herself
with this. By distancing her gender and therefore herself from
the deeply personal developments of her characters, she
successfully projects vulnerability onto characters of opposite
sex, as male writers have often done. She also points yet again
to her consciously alienated position as an immigrant writer
who is a guest in the French language. It could be said that the
fact that she is a woman contributes to this alienation. Some of
her plays are a testimony to this.
Valérie Petitpierre recognises voluntary exile on several levels

of Kristof’s choices as a writer:
Car la romancière ne se borne pas à dire qu’elle ne contrôle pas ses écrits:
elle va jusqu’à ne pas assumer la rédaction du Grand Cahier, de La Preuve
et du Troisième Mensonge, qu’elle attribue dans la fiction aux jumeaux.
Agota Kristof aurait par conséquent fait de sa situation d’exilée un principe

d’écriture. Exilée de son pays, exilée de sa langue maternelle, exilée de son
sexe (elle s’est transformée en garçon pour écrire), elle s’exilerait encore de
ses textes.36
For the novelist does not limit herself to saying that she does not control her
writing: she goes so far as not acknowledging the authorship of The
Notebook, The Proof and The Third Lie and attributing it in her fiction to the
twins.
We conclude that Agota Kristof has turned her situation as an exile into a
principle of her writing. Exiled from her country, from her mother tongue
and from her sex (she transforms herself into a boy in order to write), she is
also in exile from her texts.
(3) Another accepted archetype is that the writer is male. Kristof

seems to accept in her trilogy that it is the “masculine
principle” which is responsible for literary creation. In her
trilogy as well as in Hier the narrators are male. Lucas and
Claus in the trilogy, and Tobias in Hier are all writers.
36
Petitpierre, Agota Kristof: d’un exil l’autre, pp. 10-11.
Some time after Yasmine’s alleged departure, Lucas and

Mathias spontaneously perform what might be deemed a ritual
disposal of the dead mother in the shape of a tree. There is a dead tree
in the garden of their new house. Some time elapses before they get
around to cutting it down. Mathias has nightmares about the felling of
this tree, in which he hears the voice of Yasmine coming from the
trunk. His nightmare merges in the narrative with the actual cutting of
the tree. When the tree is chopped and burnt, Mathias refers to it as
“she”: “Maintenant, elle n’est plus qu’un tas de cendres.”37 A
grammatical mistake in the new language is always a reminder of the
mother tongue. But here this possible mistake is interwoven into the
characters’ battle with the maternal elements which are seen as guilty,
irreparably tragic and impossible to reconcile with their narrative.
The homosexual aspect of brotherhood
An interesting aspect of twinship is brought out when Lucas

becomes infatuated with a blond boy who comes to his bookshop. He
does not mention any aspect of his feelings, and the reader only finds
out about their intensity through the perceptions of Mathias and his
questioning of Lucas. Mathias is jealous and hurt that Lucas likes
someone else more than him. In his defence, Lucas states that the
main reason for this attraction is that the boy, Samuel, reminds him of
Claus. This does not remove the ambiguity. Mathias tries to draw
Lucas’ attention away from the boy to a young girl, Agnès, but she
turns out to be the boy’s sister. Mathias perceives Lucas, Samuel and
Agnès as representing an ideal family from which he is excluded.
When Mathias invites Agnès over, she brings Samuel with her.
Mathias disappears into his room deeply hurt and Lucas goes over to
speak to him:
— Laisse-moi tranquille. Je veux dormir.

— Tu les as invités, Mathias. C’est une question de politesse.
— J’ai invité Agnès. Je ne savais pas que son frère c’était lui.
— Moi non plus, je ne le savais pas. Fais un effort pour Agnès, Mathias.
Tu l’aimes bien, Agnès?
— Et toi, tu aimes son frère. Quand je vous ai vus arriver dans la cuisine,
j’ai compris ce que c’était une vraie famille. Des parents blonds et
37
Kristof, La Preuve, p. 265. “Now she is a mere pile of ash.”
beaux, avec leur enfant blond et beau. Je n’ai pas de famille, moi. Je
n’ai ni mère ni père, je ne suis pas blond, je suis laid et infirme.38
— Leave me alone. I want to sleep.

— You invited them, Mathias. It’s a matter of courtesy.
— I invited Agnès. I didn’t know he was her brother.
— I didn’t know either. Make an effort for Agnès’ sake, Mathias. You
like Agnès, don’t you?
— And you, you like her brother. When I saw you all come into the
kitchen, I understood what a true family is. Beautiful, blond parents
with their beautiful, blond child. I have no family. I have no mother
and no father. I’m not blond, I’m ugly and crippled.
Lucas manages to reassure and calm Mathias and it seems that the
homosexual attraction does not develop any further but functions in
the text as an aspect of feelings of near-incest. The allusion to near-
incest in this episode is derived from multiple ambiguities in the
relationships and various uncomfortable reminiscences such as
Samuel’s alleged similarity to Lucas’ brother, the feeling of a family
setting which develops between the characters and which Mathias
sensitively recognises, as well as the way this sudden experience of a
family-like human presence inevitably reminds Mathias and Lucas of
Yasmine’s original incest. These ambiguities and reminiscences are
the fabric of the immigrant’s situation. Kristof’s characters do not
distinguish between different types of feelings, because they suppress
them all, and because of their isolation and alienation. Like
immigrants, they need to learn to differentiate between their desperate
need for affection and recognition and a genuine range of different
feelings and the moral codes that corresponds to them.
Writing as a survival technique
The act of writing is intimately connected with the figures of

the narrators (the twins and Victor) and is a substitute for twinhood as
a defence mechanism.
Unlike the twins who learnt to fight back at an early age in
order not to be victimised, Mathias thinks differently and cannot bring
himself to fight bullies with their own weapons: “Les blessures
38
physiques n’ont pas d’importance quand je les reçois. Mais si je

devais en infliger à quelqu’un, cela deviendrait une autre sorte de
blessure pour moi que je ne saurais supporter.”39 His morality can be
seen as a reproach to Lucas, but Mathias does not manage to survive
for very long because of his mental vulnerability. In the rough world
where these characters live, moral righteousness is still seen as right,
but also as sad, as it conflicts with the survival instinct. Mathias does
not have different moral values from those of his stepfather, but he
applies them differently, according to his nature. He also adopts his
stepfather’s habit of writing a diary in an attempt to make his daily
existence more bearable. When Lucas advises him to start writing a
diary, he has already started doing so. He views writing in exactly the
same way as Lucas – as a private and sacred practice which helps the
writer to survive the injustice of life.
Writing is a way of comforting oneself; a subjective way. This
is clear on a rare occasion in the trilogy when we can compare events
and the way they have been recorded. When Mathias commits suicide,
Lucas writes in his diary: “Pour Mathias tout va bien. Il est toujours le
premier à l’école et il ne fait plus de cauchemars.”40 We can infer from
this instance that the characters’ reality is always much worse than it
has been portrayed. Lucas needs to appease his conscience, to work
through his mourning and to give himself strength to go on. The only
way he finds of doing all this is by writing down what to anyone not
knowing the context can only seem like a lie. It is difficult though, in
Lucas’ position, even imagining that someone might read his diary out
of context.
In contrast to Le Grand Cahier, in La Preuve the act of
writing has become less insular. Victor is allowed to be a narrator of
his own story, but Lucas also engages with his surroundings in a much
more grown-up fashion which inevitably influences his writing. Also,
we are for the first time told of Lucas’ interaction with his text: “J’y
fais des corrections, j’élimine, je supprime tout ce qui n’est pas
39
Kristof, La Preuve, p. 283. “Physical wounds don’t matter when I receive them. But
if I had to inflict them on someone else, that would wound me in a way I couldn’t
bear.”
40
Kristof, La Preuve, p. 317. “All is well for Mathias. He is still the best at school and
no longer has nightmares.”
indispensable.”41 Like an immigrant writer undergoing the

apprenticeship of the new language, Lucas constantly revises his
writing, constantly simplifying and perfecting his survival technique.
Now that the manuscript is destined for his brother – and a large part
of La Preuve is that manuscript – Lucas’ motivation as an author
becomes more complex.
Writing is intimately connected with truth in Victor’s
narrative and as such with incest. Inventing is impossible and writing
has to rely on true experiences. This is very much the twins’ view too,
despite many contradictions in their writing. They start with an
extreme view in Le Grand Cahier where no subjective opinion is
allowed, despite the possibility of the whole diary being an invention
and the fact that, reading between the lines, its subjectivity is
sometimes very apparent. This view is slowly modified and brought to
the more measured opinion which permeates Le Troisième Mensonge.
Claus, whose turn it is to write in the third novel of the trilogy, when
questioned about his writing by the prison guard, states:
Je lui réponds que j’essaie d’écrire des histoires vraies, mais, à un moment
donné, l’histoire devient insupportable par sa vérité même, alors je suis
obligé de la changer. Je lui dis que j’essaie de raconter mon histoire, mais
que je ne le peux pas, je n’en ai pas le courage, elle me fait trop mal. Alors,
j’embellis tout et je décris les choses non comme elles se sont passées, mais
comme j’aurais voulu qu’elles se soient passées.42
I answer that I try to write true stories but that at a given point the story
becomes unbearable because of its very truth, and then I have to change it. I
tell her that I try to tell my story, but that I can’t do it – I don’t have the
courage, it hurts too much. So I embellish everything and describe things
not as they happened, but as I wish they had happened.
Here it is clear that rather than excluding subjectivity, it is a

question of incorporating reality in the only way possible, that is, by
fictionalising it. No landmark events in one’s life can or should be
banned from the writing, as that would make writing impossible.
Those events are modified to help the author face the facts more
accurately. This shift follows the twins’ growing up and mellowing. It
41
Kristof, La Preuve, p. 276. “I make corrections, I discard, I remove everything that
isn’t indispensable.”
42
Kristof, Le Troisième Mensonge, p. 341.
also mirrors the path of an immigrant writer who starts by excluding

and then learns to incorporate selectively.
The brother’s reappearance
At the point when the reader has lost all faith in the possibility
of Lucas’s brother’s existence, Claus finally appears in chapter eight
of the second novel, arriving by train in the little town of his
childhood. His identity is strangely asserted by the first inkling the
trilogy gives us of the twins’ surname: the initial of Claus’ surname is
T. By this time Lucas has already disappeared from the town,
following the discovery of what could have been Yasmine’s dead
body. The twins once again exchange roles. Whilst in Le Grand
Cahier this substitution was hidden behind the “nous” of a secretive
childhood, in La Preuve it is completely open, in the form of
exclusion. The existence of one denies the possibility of existence to
the other.43 The same place which withstood their merging into one
another, can now only take one of them at a time. La Preuve can be
said to be l’épreuve, a challenge of existence thrown to the twins
which incorporates a competition between the two. The conversation
between Peter and Claus reveals new elements in the relationship
between the brothers. Peter asks him:
— Pourquoi ne lui avez-vous jamais écrit?

— Nous avons décidé de nous séparer. Cette séparation devait être totale.
Une frontière n’y suffisait pas, il y fallait aussi le silence.
— Vous êtes pourtant revenu. Pourquoi?
— L’épreuve a assez duré. Je suis fatigué et malade, je veux revoir Lucas.
— Vous savez bien que vous ne le reverrez pas.44
— Why have you never written to him?

— We decided to separate. It had to be a total separation. The border
wasn’t enough, we needed silence as well.
— And yet you came back. Why?
— The ordeal has lasted long enough. I’m tired and ill, I want to see
Lucas again.
— You know very well that you won’t see him again.
43
The same applies to Mathias who represents a more distant double of a lost brother.
44
The statement of choice establishes a new parallel with the figure of

the immigrant. The choice the immigrant makes has to be exclusive. It
includes the silence of the mother tongue and native culture to enable
the acquisition of a new language. However, the myth of return is
always haunting the immigrant. The decision to come back to his
native country might not be grounded in this myth, but is always
subsequently coloured by it.45 The myth of return is a powerful part of
the global culture and it defines all of the immigrant’s choices. The
attempt to live in another country is an ordeal, a difficult (dur) and
endless (qui dure) test of one’s adaptability and endurance.
As to Claus’ life abroad, he has very little to say about it.

Kristof borrows his voice to express a brief critique of the West:
C’est une société basée sur l’argent. Il n’y a pas de place pour les questions
concernant la vie. J’ai vécu pendant trente ans dans une solitude mortelle.46
It’s a society based on money. There is no place for questions about life. I
spent thirty years in deathly solitude.
Kristof defines her subject matter as existential, which explains why

there is little space in the trilogy for the distracting influence of Claus’
adoptive country.
There are very few political references in Kristof’s writing.
Similarly to Kundera, although originating in a very politicised part of
Europe, she refuses to let politics rule her fiction as it has ruled her
life. Lucas represents the writer’s point of view when he falls asleep
on the couch out of boredom because the conversation was about
politics.47
As his brother heard in his dream, Claus has been painfully
alone. Upon his return, he decides to sleep with the skeletons of his
mother, her baby and Mathias, just as Lucas used to do. This
communion with the dead or the absent – who have more importance
in their lives than the living – has accompanied both brothers
throughout their lives. Claus, a genuine fictional immigrant, now fully
takes on this form of nostalgia typical of the figure of the immigrant.
45
Kundera’s latest novel L’Ignorance is an exploration of this distortion brought
about by the myth of return.
46
Kristof, La Preuve, pp. 328-329.
47
La Preuve ends with the arrest of Claus, now a foreign citizen,

who has overstayed his time in his native country without a valid visa.
The postscript contains the police report which denies the possibility
of Lucas’ existence and yet mentions Maria Z. who could possibly be
the twins’ grandmother from Le Grand Cahier, thus bringing the
narrative full circle. The report is a battle between madness and
bureaucracy, in the style of Kafka. The reality of the Eastern European
political heritage leaves a definite stamp on a story which has
attempted to escape its tight grip.
Le Troisième Mensonge
Claus’ childhood: a new version of events
The third novel of the trilogy continues the narrative where

the second ends, with Claus writing in prison. Claus tells us a story of
his childhood, which is completely different from what the first two
novels of the trilogy led the reader to believe, thus doubling the
original narratives. He says he spent most of his childhood in a
hospital without any contact with his parents or his brother. He admits
often having written letters to his family which he never sent. On this
new level of the fiction, his writing seems to be connected with what
now seem fictionalised accounts of his childhood in Le Grand Cahier
and La Preuve.
He had to learn to walk again at the age of five. The
determination that made this possible, as well as his determination to
survive in a foreign country, reveals an unsuspected strength of
character. Various motifs of his story coincide with those of the first
two novels, but the context is very different. For instance, after the
bombing of the hospital where many children were killed, Claus was
questioned about his name, parents and address. He pretended that he
was deaf and dumb, so that he could be left in peace. This coincides
with one of the twins’ exercises in Le Grand Cahier where they tried
to imagine what it is like to be deaf or dumb; an exercise carried out
during the bombing. What in Le Grand Cahier seems a childish
inquisitive game now appears as part of a traumatic experience.
A young blond boy whom Claus treats cruelly, and who is
killed in the raid, is very similar to the child Samuel who appears in
La Preuve. The guilt of having been cruel to the boy in Le Troisième
Mensonge translates, in La Preuve, into fascination and awe for an

apparently ordinary character. At the same time, Claus’ envy of this
boy’s letters from his parents in Le Troisième Mensonge is transferred
in La Preuve on to Mathias’ envy of Samuel’s prettiness, health and
family.
Claus’ childhood dream of wanting to live in one of the
houses on the main square, notably the bookshop, has a displaced
realisation in La Preuve, where Lucas buys the bookshop on the
square. Also, as becomes clear later, his brother briefly lived on the
main square, completely unaware of Claus’ presence in the same
town. This spiritual connection is characteristic of Claus.
In several instances, what is recounted in the first two novels
seems like a sublimation or fictionalisation of what is narrated in Le
Troisième Mensonge as a true event. In place of the usual progression
where sublimation follows reality, the reader is presented with a
reversed process. It now seems that the two novels are Claus’ fiction
written in an attempt to survive difficult events in his life. The only
reasons why the narrative in Le Troisième Mensonge is the one that
retains our suspension of disbelief, despite its title, is that it is the last
narrative we read, and that it reinstates disbelief vis-à-vis the first two.
It is also the only narrative which provides an explanation for the
other two. When the novels are read in chronological order, each
narrative can be accepted on its own terms until the next one
destabilises the reader’s relationship to it. With this structure Kristof
accurately represents the human understanding of the truth, which
changes depending on circumstances. More importantly, although we
learn very little of the characters’ motivation, the fragmentary and
non-convergent nature of their narratives suggests that they are
severely traumatised. This expression of non-convergence, where the
familiar is repeatedly rendered opaque, is the main clue we are given
for understanding the characters and their trauma. As an immigrant
writer describing an Eastern-European experience to her French-
speaking audience, Kristof can only remain true to her subject-matter
and communicate it to her audience by representing that experience as
opaque, incomprehensible and undergoing a constant reappraisal and
metamorphosis.
Claus writes that he was housed as an orphan by an old
woman whom he called “grandmother”. But he is on his own there
and not with his twin brother as narrated in Le Grand Cahier. While
there he writes his thoughts into a notebook, but now, instead of

claiming the truth of his writing as the twins do in Le Grand Cahier,
Claus calls this childhood text “mes premiers mensonges”.48
The authorities threaten to throw him off the grandmother’s
property after her death, as he has no valid documents. Like Rafael
Artigas in L’Algarabie, this lack of an identity on paper is practically
what forces him to leave the country. Kristof, like Semprun,
emphasises the notion that the lack of papers can only reveal an
existing crack in identity, just as an ID can only reinforce an identity
that is there already. Insufficient identity moves an individual into
immigration.
Claus meets a man who wants to cross the border. In the
manner described at the end of Le Grand Cahier, he escapes abroad.
The only difference between the accounts in Le Grand Cahier and Le
Troisième Mensonge is that in the latter novel, the man is not his
father. This is one of the first examples of an event that does not seem
as traumatic, in the third novel’s version, as in the first. Kristof’s mix
of revelations and silence points to the true nature of immigration. The
full trauma of immigration is rarely glimpsed. If the subject could
represent it fully, it could be exorcised. That is why the writing of
immigrants often comprises complex pointers to the trauma, often
meshed with other emotional complexities that they try to voice
through their characters.
Claus’ negotiations of identity
Claus later admits that he has invented the life with his brother
at the grandmother’s house, which he described in Le Grand Cahier.
He admits it to himself (in his narrative), but not to the outside world.
Publicly, he disowns his manuscript (which effectively represents Le
Grand Cahier) and claims that his brother wrote it. Throughout the
third novel, the differences between the two unconnected lives, that of
childhood in the native country and that of adulthood abroad, for
which the twin metaphor is very apt, are difficult to reconcile.
Claus then narrates what happened after the gaze of his
brother lost him when he crossed the border. To the authorities on the
48
Kristof, Le Troisième Mensonge, p. 371. “my first lies”
other side of the border he tells three lies: that the person with whom
he had crossed the border was his father, that he is eighteen and that
his name is Claus. These are off-the-cuff lies meant to enable his
survival. They will however stay with him throughout the rest of his
life. The real name of the twin whose narrative we have been reading
from the beginning of the third novel is Lucas. He has adopted his
brother’s name, rearranging the letters, after crossing the border. What
initially seemed an act of maturity, leaving his imaginary twin behind,
now appears more complex. From a split-off personality, he has
chosen to identify himself fully with his double, thus wilfully
becoming a shadow of himself. The Lucas of La Preuve is also a
shadow, the abandoned other half of himself that Lucas left behind.
The official name associated with this single split-off character is
Claus. The depression and anxiety he suffers from can justifiably be
associated with his split-off state. He searches for what he has lost, be
it his brother, or an imaginary part of his self. He is in search of
wholeness. His immigration has only accentuated the loss of
wholeness which had occurred before any writing began. This stage of
the narrative deepens the trilogy’s highly elaborate poetic figure of
immigrant existence and reveals its analytical force.
Throughout the trilogy the number two is used as a subliminal
reminder that the novels’ central focus is the analysis of doubling.
Kristof’s twins are a figure of ambiguity – of the two different
personalities that an immigrant is. Upon leaving the native country,
the immigrant wants to remain who he is and clings to his existing
personality, in an initial urge to resist any changes, but he also wants
to start a new life; Claus’ adoption of his brother’s name enacts this
ambiguity. His brother stands for what he leaves behind, whereas the
change of name prepares a new life ahead. Wearing his heart on his
sleeve by identifying himself with his brother, Claus at the same time
adopts another personality.
Each brother at some point borrows the other’s name. The
fusion of their identities is their object of desire, and what they would
like the reader to believe in. They behave as one man, like an
immigrant who desperately tries to reconcile the different personalities
he carries within himself, whilst at the same time insisting on their
differences. They try different methods for providing continuity
within themselves, and perceive that they have failed. Their personal
failure is contrasted with their literary success.
Claus returns to his native land twenty years after his

brother’s disappearance following the discovery of Yasmine’s dead
body. Twenty years is the time it takes for the criminal to be out of
reach of prosecution. This coincidence further suggests that the two
brothers could be one and the same person.
The amazing coincidences of the twins’ different narratives
are often undermined by their literary conflicts. The reader’s
assumption, born of Le Grand Cahier, that the twins are virtually
identical haunts his reading of the entire subsequent narrative. It is
only from the perspective of that fused existence that the twins’
differences and discontinuity seem extreme. The metanarrative about
the reader reading the trilogy in sequence functions as a Bildung – an
education of the reader about the immigrant experience. The location
of the “assumption of identity” is the reader. The assumption of the
similarity of the two parts of the immigrant’s personality and life is
constructed in Le Grand Cahier with the positioning of the
unchallenged double at the centre of the story. This assumption is then
subsequently undermined throughout La Preuve and Le Troisième
Mensonge, by destabilising the believability of the twinship first of all
and then destabilising the individual identities of Lucas and Claus,
starting with blurring the distinction between their names. If the reader
himself is an immigrant who inevitably has to sustain in his own eyes
the continuity of his existence in order to survive, the experience of
reading the texts undoes his denial of the division of his life.
The meeting of the twins and the revelation of “la chose”
At the point when the reader is certain that everything about

the existence of Claus’ brother must be a lie, Claus is given a chance
to find his brother. It is in the embassy of his adopted country that
they bring to his attention the existence of a certain Klaus T, a
reclusive poet, who uses the name Klaus Lucas as his pseudonym. A
true brother is recognised by the name, like a true friend according to
Montaigne; as discussed in the previous chapter. At the point when he
manages to pluck up the courage to telephone his brother and arrange
a meeting with him, the narrative changes hands. We are now in the
second part of Le Troisième Mensonge where the narrator is Claus’s
brother, Klaus T. It is interesting to note that from the point of view of
Le Troisième Mensonge, the official name of the narrator throughout

the trilogy is Claus or Klaus. This is based on the assumption that the
first two novels and the first part of the third were written by the twin
who left the country (who took on the misspelt name of his brother
Claus) and the last part of the third novel by the twin who remained in
the country, Klaus. Apart from reflecting the insecurities of the author
herself whose brother, who lives in Hungary, is also a writer, it
confirms that the authority of writing can ultimately come only from
one identity. It also suggests that the metaphor of twinship is only a
variation on the author’s or an immigrant’s identity. The change of
spelling is reminiscent of the linguistic nature of the author’s
immigration.
Klaus T recognises Claus as his brother as soon he starts
talking to him on the telephone. He never admits this to Claus and
repeatedly lies to him, denying that they could possibly be brothers. In
a way the brothers are re-enacting a scene from Le Grand Cahier
where one of them pretends to be deaf and the other blind. Klaus is
protecting the monstrously painful and boring life that he lives with
his manipulative old mother, protecting himself from the return of a
son his mother has always praised out of her sense of guilt about
losing him. He is protecting the status quo of a life based on a
superficial covering up of the initial trauma which has deeply marked
all the family members.
The original tragedy which is the source of all the
unhappiness in the twins’ lives happened when they were four, at the
beginning of the war. The twins’ father announced to their mother that
he was leaving her and the family for another woman who was already
expecting his child. Although they were supposed to be asleep, the
twins heard all this, eavesdropping behind the door. After the
argument that ensued, the twin’s mother shot her husband and also
accidentally hurt one of the children, Lucas.
The twins’ father died immediately and the mother was taken
to the psychiatric hospital. Lucas was admitted to hospital and then
taken to a rehabilitation home. He eventually ended up living with
“grandmother”. Klaus was adopted by Antonia, who turned out to be
his father’s mistress, but he went back to live with and take care of his
mother once she was released from the hospital, never mentioning to
her his life with Antonia.
The event of their mother shooting their father is the tragedy

from which no member of the family ever recovered. Even after
psychiatric care, their mother remains a prey to delusions. Klaus has
always lived a very sad and depressed existence. The only positive
point in his life is his poetry, which is not only successfully published,
but is, by all accounts, what he pours his depression into to help
himself live. He refers to the event as “la chose”49, the unnameable
and inexplicable “thing” that he never came to terms with. For both
Lucas and Klaus, this event is the main underlying reason for their
writing.
Lucas has repressed everything he saw and experienced
during the family incident. When he manages to meet Klaus for the
first and last time after fifty years of separation, he asks him to tell
him how he got a bullet lodged next to his spine. Klaus answers that
he does not know as he is not his brother. So Lucas never finds out the
whole truth. Klaus does not believe that revelations or recognitions
would make any difference so late in their lives. He protects his
claustrophobic life with his mother, reminiscent of the tortured life
Victor leads with his sister.
“La chose” is the initial trauma that disperses the family, but
from the point of view of the literary text, it is also the explanation for
the unhappiness of all the characters. The reader feels relieved to find
out that there is an ultimate reason for so much tragedy which so far
seemed gratuitous. The act of writing allows Kristof as an immigrant
to create a decoy which acts as a false “justification” for the trauma of
immigration.
Nomadic versus sedentary
The conflict between Lucas and Klaus is that of a nomad

versus a sedentary individual. An exotic and mythical attractiveness
always surrounds the nomad in the eyes of sedentary people. For the
twins’ mother, Lucas is the good and Klaus the bad twin, despite the
fact that Klaus has spent most of his life caring for her. Significantly
enough, Lucas’ official name is Claus, which renders the good Lucas
inexistent. Although the twins’ mother’s perception is extreme due to
49
her mental illness, it contains the germ of the perception the

immigrant habitually confronts. He is always favourably compared to
his peers in the country of his origin simply because he is not there.
This nostalgic appreciation of those who are absent is a feature
explored on various levels of Kristof’s trilogy. The “nous” of Le
Grand Cahier is as much based on this as is the mother’s favouritism
of Lucas. In effect, as Valérie Petitpierre points out, there are no
believable descriptions of the twins’ life together anywhere in the
trilogy.50 If their existences ever coincided at the same place and time,
that occurrence has been so highly fictionalised because of “la chose”,
cause of their separation, that it has become a sacred myth for both
Lucas and Klaus. The “nous” of Le Grand Cahier is the primordial,
naïve, Utopian and most visible expression of this personal myth. It
coincides nicely with the immigrant’s desire for a community. The act
of immigration can often be interpreted as an act of rationalisation of
personal inadequacies. For instance, Lucas partly blames his
loneliness on his immigration. Klaus’ empty existence suggests that
Lucas would be just as lonely if he had remained in his native country.
A fantasy of returning home haunts only the immigrant Lucas. The
sedentary Klaus knows that the immigrant’s return, in the sense of a
reestablishment of communication, is impossible. This conflict in
perception between the one who left and the one who stayed behind is
unresolvable.
The meeting of the twins discussed in the previous section is
not the first time Klaus and Lucas have met without recognition.
When Klaus lived with Antonia’s parents for a short while, he noticed
through the window a little boy who regularly went to play the
harmonica in the bars of the town:
Le soir, je tire une chaise devant la fenêtre, je regarde la place. Elle est
presque vide. Seuls quelques ivrognes et quelques militaires y circulent.
Parfois un enfant, plus jeune que moi il me semble, un enfant claudicant
traverse la place. Il joue un air de son harmonica, il entre dans un bistrot, il
en sort, il entre dans un autre. Vers minuit, quand tous les bistrots ferment,
l’enfant s’éloigne vers l’ouest de la ville jouant toujours de son harmonica.
Un soir je montre l’enfant à l’harmonica à l’oncle Andréas:

— Pourquoi à lui il n’est pas interdit de sortir tard dans la nuit?
Oncle Andréas dit:
50
— Je l’observe depuis une année. Il habite chez sa grand-mère au bout de

la ville. C’est une femme extrêmement pauvre. L’enfant est sans doute
orphelin. Il a l’habitude de jouer dans les bistrots pour gagner un peu
d’agent. Les gens ont l’habitude de le voir parmi eux. Personne ne lui
ferait de mal. Il est sous la protection de toute la ville, et sous la
protection de Dieu.
Je dis:
— Il doit être heureux.
L’oncle dit:
— Certainement.51
In the evening, I draw a chair up to the window and watch the square. It’s
almost empty. Only a few drunkards and soldiers wander through it.
Sometimes a limping child, younger than me, it seems, crosses the square.
He plays a tune on his harmonica; he goes into one bar, leaves, and goes
into another. Around midnight, when all the bars close, the child heads
westward through the town, still playing his harmonica.
One evening I point out the child with the harmonica to uncle Andréas.
— Why isn’t he forbidden from going out late at night?
Uncle Andréas says:
— I’ve been watching him for the past year. He lives with his
grandmother at the edge of town. She’s an extremely poor woman. The
child is bound to be an orphan. He’s got used to playing in the bars to
make a little bit of money. People are used to seeing him amongst
them. No one would harm him. He’s under the protection of the whole
town, and under the protection of God.
I say:
— He must be happy.
Uncle says:
— Definitely.
There is no recognition of Lucas in this episode, a forerunner

to the twins’ later meeting at Klaus’ house where recognition is
denied. There is an explicit envy of Lucas’ freedom even before he
has left the country. Lucas has the sacred aura of a person who has
been wronged. Recognition is impossible as Lucas never sees Klaus.
In fact, even when the twins meet at the end of the novel, the reader
never finds out how Lucas perceives Klaus. Claus or Klaus remain the
eyes and the voice of the narrator. Lucas has to adopt his brother’s
name in order to be heard. Another important difference between the
twins slowly becomes apparent: Lucas is the more sensitive and
imaginative twin who is denied validation and identity, Klaus by
51
contrast is pragmatic and has natural authority. It is Lucas who, at the

time when he played in the bars, constantly imagined the presence of
his brother. It is Klaus who is given to narrate the truth, or the closest
we get to it in Le Troisième Mensonge. Once Klaus and Lucas meet in
reality, the narrative falls naturally into Klaus’ realistic domain. These
characteristics match and possibly evolve from their roles in life.
Lucas is allowed to be a free nomadic spirit. Klaus, by contrast, fulfils
his sedentary destiny until the end. He remains tied to his mother and
the family house. Their respective literary choices could seem
unexpected: Lucas is a prose-writer and Klaus a poet. But Kristof is
making a statement here about literary natures; the novel as a genre is
more representative of the nomadic nature, whilst poetry is in essence
sedentary. Kundera’s analyses of the phenomenon of the European
novel agree with this view, and his novel La Vie est ailleurs explores
the poetic nature and its links with a sedentary existence.
As befits the narrative of a sedentary individual, Klaus’ story,
unlike Lucas’, is linear and contains more specific references to place
and time. His narrative is more rooted is his environment. Whilst
Lucas’ inner reader is definitely made in the image of his brother,
Klaus’ inner reader is a more composite figure drawing on various
family influences. Lucas never expresses a particular interest in
finding out what happened to his parents. His thinking and
imagination focus almost exclusively on his brother. Klaus, on the
other hand, is much more turned towards his family as a whole, and
his mother in particular.
Lucas’ prose represents a good proportion of the trilogy whilst
there are no examples of Klaus’ poetry. In the second part of Le
Troisième Mensonge, Klaus adopts Lucas’ genre, no doubt as a
homage to his brother, instead of the recognition he could not give
him. Klaus has spent all his life waiting for his brother to return only
to refuse to let him enter his life once he does come back. Nothing has
changed or can change for Klaus. He is the eternal guardian of the
status quo.
Klaus’ narrative finishes the trilogy. As in real life, the
sedentary needs to round off the nomadic, to bring it into the context
of the everyday human attachments to people and places.
The importance of writing
In Kristof’s world, the written word seems more true than the
spoken word. The twins’ denial of each other’s existence is expressed
in reported dialogue. By contrast, their writing acknowledges their
relationship. The immigrant is likewise forced to deny his doubling in
his daily existence, in order to adapt and survive more effectively. The
detour of writing can bypass this denial – without undoing it – and can
integrate different facets of the immigrant’s being.
When the twins’ father’s name, Klaus-Lucas T, appears in the
narrative, this throws a new and different light on the twins’ identity
and their name-changing. Lucas could have wanted to change his
name to Claus just in order to imitate the first part of his father’s
name. Competition between twins for primacy is a well-known
occurrence. And Klaus could have changed his name to fully emulate
the identity of his father. After all, he does replace his father as his
mother’s sole carer. The most powerful motivation for all the actions
of the trilogy’s characters is their longing for the absent and the dead.
The twins’ predilection for writing has its source in their
father. In their childhood, the twins experienced the regular noise of
their father’s typewriter as pleasant and reassuring.52 Klaus-Lucas
used to write in the evening and at night. Both Klaus and Lucas (and
Lucas’ invention, Victor) do the same. Early auditive memories are
associated with the mother during the pre-linguistic stage of the
child’s development and with the father when they relate to first
language acquisition. The sound of the typewriter can also be brought
into connection with the “primal scene” for the twins and their
subsequent writing could be seen as a substitute for a missing mother-
father relationship.
Klaus-Lucas is the one who gives a strong positive linguistic
example to the children. One of the two sacred books the twins have
in Le Grand Cahier, the dictionary, is their father’s. In the trilogy, the
unitary although mostly weak father figure is set against the
multiplicity of ambiguous and deluded mother figures. Both
influences are followed through: the strength of the need to write and
of its fulfilment are as unambiguous as the father figure; the changes
of language and country alliances mirror the volatility of the mother
52
figure. The whole of the trilogy being written in French, this narrated
volatility of language and country is perfectly contained within a
structured fulfilment of the need to write.
Motherhood and Klaus’ near incest
When Klaus finds out from Antonia, at the age of eight, what
has happened to his family, he goes to visit his mother in the
psychiatric hospital. He comes back resentful and says to Antonia:
— La femme que j’ai vue n’est pas ma mère. Je n’irai plus la voir. C’est
vous qui devez allez la voir, pour vous rendre compte de ce que vous
en avez fait.
Elle demande:
— Tu ne pourras jamais me pardonner, Klaus?
Je ne réponds pas. Elle ajoute:
— Si tu savais combien je t’aime.
Je dis:
— Vous ne devriez pas. Vous n’êtes pas ma mère. C’est ma mère qui
devait m’aimer, mais elle n’aime que Lucas. Par votre faute.53
— The woman I saw is not my mother. I won’t go to see her again. It’s
you who should be going to see her, to realise what you have done.
She asks:
— Could you ever forgive me, Klaus?
I don’t answer. She adds:
— If you only knew how much I love you.
I say:
— You shouldn’t. You’re not my mother. It’s my mother who should love
me, but she only loves Lucas. And it’s your fault.
Motherhood is completely dislodged in the novel. It is the explanation

for suffering and even perhaps for immigration. Both twins
misguidedly look for mother figures in other women they meet in their
lives. Klaus understands the reasons for his unhappiness too well for
his own good. It is only motherly love from the real mother that
matters. Nothing and no one can replace this.
If the same opinion is brought into discussion about the
mother tongue, it is clear that Kristof expresses a doubt as to whether
53
the mother tongue is replaceable. However, her writing is a testimony

that some form of successful substitution is possible.
The only love of Klaus’ life is his half-sister, Sarah, Antonia’s
daughter. He only finds out that this relationship is impossible when
he is told that he cannot marry her because they are related. To both
him and Sarah, the love they have for each other seems completely
natural. Before Sarah was born, Klaus imagined the baby in Antonia’s
stomach to be Lucas. Apart from his longing for his real brother,
Klaus’ desire to double himself is one of the novel’s justifications of
the incestuous impulse. Kristof gets under the skin of this
overwhelming desire. The characters never state it and yet it governs
their behaviour. The love between Klaus and Sarah along with other
motifs of incest in the novel points out the restrictive nature of the
society described. The hopeless social system forces the characters
into impossible relationships. It is as if Klaus’ natural predilection for
doubling has been encouraged with the existence of his twin. Like his
brother, he is trying to apply the logic of twinship, which is an
extraordinary and exceptional occurrence in reality, to all the
situations he finds himself in. Similarly, the linguistic immigrant uses
his dual linguistic base as a natural premise. For everyone else life
with two mother tongues is an exceptional and obscure phenomenon.
The resistance based on this lack of understanding results in
categorising the phenomenon as impossible and unhealthy. By using
the metaphor of incest, Kristof challenges this understanding.
Symmetrical twinhood
The narrative voice is transformed through the three novels:

the “nous” (“we”) of Le Grand Cahier becomes “il” + “il” (“he” +
“he”) in La Preuve and “je” + “je” (“I” + “I”) in Le Troisième
Mensonge.54 The figure of twinhood is never compromised and the
initial homogeneity becomes symmetry.55 In this general movement
towards maturity and differentiation, there is one event which Lucas
54
This makes an interesting parallel with Beckett’s writing in French and English.
When Beckett started writing in French he shifted from a third-person to a first-person
narration. When he started writing in English again, the third-person narration
reappeared.
55
finds particularly difficult to integrate into his identity – his act of

immigration. According to Valérie Petitpierre, this difficulty is
illustrated with shifts in the narrative voice at the two different points
in the narrative when this event is remembered:
1) In chapters 8 and 9 in Le Troisième Mensonge the “je”

disappears again in favour of “l’enfant” (“the child”). These
two chapters chronologically follow from chapter 5 describing
the escape into another country. It is significant that this
regression in the narrative voice occurs at the point when
Lucas is remembering the second most significant event in his
life after “la chose”. It is also significant that after narrating
the event up to the point of crossing the border (where the
narration of Le Grand Cahier ends), he interrupts the story
and comes back to the present time for chapters 6 and 7.
Chapters 6 and 7 are particularly tortured and painful as this is
when Lucas becomes increasingly deluded and gets arrested.
The narrative in chapter 8 then continues where chapter 5 left
off. Lucas now refers to himself in the third person singular.
Alienation coincides with immigration and also with
remembering the rupture between the old and the new life.
The last words of chapter 5 are: “je ne risque rien” (“I risk
nothing”). Of course, “I” does not risk anything. Nothing
happens to it. It is hidden and protected while “he” takes over.
It could be said that the “I” remains on this side of the border,
while the shadow that crosses it is reduced to “he”.
2) The description of the same event creates the break between

the first two novels of the trilogy, Le Grand Cahier and La
Preuve, causing the narrative voice to shift from “nous” to
“il”.
The crossing of the border represents loss of identity. In the narrator’s
fictionalised account of events in La Preuve, the loss of the double
stands for the alienation of immigration. Significantly, the immigrant
writer, Lucas, gives his own name to the brother who remained in the
country in his narrative in La Preuve, where he tries to imagine how
his brother lives without him. The same name points to all Lucas’
characteristics and experiences which he transfers on to the character
to whom he gives his own name. He transforms his own loss of
identity caused by immigration into his character’s loss of a double.

Both his character and his double are Lucas himself. The narcissistic
wound of Lucas’ loss of identity is appeased by imagining a
narcissistic fulfilment of his desire to see someone missing and
needing him.
The two descriptions of loss of identity are followed by very
similar descriptions of hiding:
De retour dans la maison de Grand-Mère, Lucas se couche près de la

barrière du jardin, à l’ombre des buissons.56
On his return to the Grandmother’s house, Lucas lies down by the garden
gate in the shade of the bushes.
Marchant dans les traces de pas, puis sur le corps inerte de l’homme, il
arrive de l’autre côté, il se cache derrière les buissons.57
Walking in the man’s footsteps, then over his motionless body, he reaches
the other side and hides behind the bushes.
Although hiding in this way suggests the fear, shock and

loneliness provoked by the events, it also alludes to a possible
blending into nature through momentary lack of identity.
When Klaus and Lucas meet, Klaus addresses him as “vous”,
which for the reader again hints at the illusion of Lucas’ childhood
vision of twinship from Le Grand Cahier. The twins’ conceptual
conflict between the social and the individual is also an allegory of the
European cultural division into East and West. The two Europes
constantly reproach each other for the illusion of togetherness and
similarity. They throw the categories of the social and individual in
each other’s face in superficial criticism of difference.
Important dates
In the trilogy where there are hardly any references to place or

time, the only two dates mentioned stand out as particularly
significant. One is the twins’ birthday (which is the same as that of the
56
57
author), the other, the day of Lucas’ return to his native country.
Kristof’s approach is here similar to Semprun’s. In Semprun’s fiction
two dates usually feature prominently: the main character’s birthday
(which is sometimes Semprun’s too) and the date of the beginning of
his exile or immigration. It is understandable that in the trilogy, where
the narrative is strongly biased towards the native country, the date of
the return replaces the date of exile. Such an approach to structuring
the life of a character typifies immigrants’ view of their own life.
Kundera analyses the arithmetic of emigration in Les Testaments
trahis.58 The dates which mark the transition from one country to
another are crucially symbolic; the length of time spent in different
cultural environments becomes a marker of what an immigrant is
capable of. These dates are among the very few milestones in the
volatile and nomadic life of immigrants. The rationality of numbers is
well suited to the immigrant’s disabused nature. And yet, quite often,
notably in Semprun’s writing, these dates are imbued with a certain
mythical importance. They enhance the role that fate and chance play
in any life, in particular that of an immigrant.
There are two conflicting dates given for Lucas’ return to his
native country. He tells us that he travelled back on the 22nd April
while the police report gives us 2nd April as the true date. The use of
the number two is part of the trilogy’s manifold allusions to doubling.
The dates also include the word “mois”, playing on the notion of the
doubling of the self.59 Lucas’ mistake in giving us the number 22
points to his alienation. He is starting to doubt whether his brother
exists only in his head. He spends the initial period in his native
country in a state of confusion and bewilderment, so it is not
surprising that he has lost twenty days of his time. The number 22
could also be a humorous reference to the fact that he seems to be
drinking too much.
The immigrant’s identity
The problem of identity is the most fundamental issue that

immigration raises. In the story about the twins, Kristof has found a
58
59
“mois” = “month(s)”; “moi” = “me”;
perfect metaphor to express the complexity of the immigrant’s

situation:
On pense aussi au fait qu’Agota Kristof a attribué l’écriture de ses romans

aux jumeaux, comme si, exilée, elle ne pouvait plus assumer son identité.
Rien d’étonnant dès lors à ce que la romancière ait avoué: “Je voulais, après
les deux premiers romans, raconter l’histoire du jumeau qui est parti à
l’étranger, m’inspirant de ce que j’ai vécu en Suisse. Je n’ai pas réussi. J’ai
été ramenée à la petite ville.” Quitter son pays, c’est perdre le droit à la
parole.60
We remember also that Agota Kristof attributed the writing of her novels to
the twins, as if, because she was exiled, she could no longer write with her
own identity. It is not surprising, then, that the novelist admitted: “After the
first two novels I wanted to tell the story of the twin who went abroad,
based on my experience in Switzerland. I did not succeed. I was brought
back to the little town.” Leaving one’s country means losing the right of
speech.
Kristof devoted her next novel Hier to the theme she wanted
to explore in Le Troisième Mensonge. It is almost as if she needed to
clarify her ties with her native country through the analysis of the
roots of the immigrant experience, before being able to undertake the
project of building her new identity with reference to her country of
immigration. This is often the path immigrant writers assume in their
work which follows their own personal development. The writer needs
to feel that he has earned the right to write in the new language about
the new cultural environment. Similarly to second language
acquisition itself, this right is earned by emulation, imitation and the
borrowing of a foreign voice. Choosing two male characters as her
main narrators, Kristof illustrates the mental distance the immigrant
writer has to bridge between himself and the authority he has to be
able to take on in order to be able to write.
Throughout the trilogy, narrative truth is based on fictions
elaborated to hide the painful reality. It is only when the characters
have come to terms with the pain that the real truth can be revealed.
External reality is thus subservient to the inner world of the characters
throughout the three novels. It is only in Le Troisième Mensonge that
the narrators allow themselves to express their subjectivity. They are
adult, even middle-aged men now, who have understood that trying to
60
hide and suppress one’s feelings is futile. They know that their
subjectivity is important. They acknowledge their attempts to
manipulate the reader by embellishing the truth.
There is hardly any reference to the life of the twins between
the age of twenty-two and forty-five. Lucas from La Preuve stops his
writing at the age of twenty-two, having lost his adopted son, Mathias.
At about the same age Klaus loses Sarah, the only woman he has ever
loved. These losses are a repetition of their loss of each other and of
their family environment.
It takes a long time for an immigrant to adapt enough to be
able to influence his new surroundings. Everything before that can be
experienced as a forced silence. In that manner the break in the life of
the characters repeats that of the author. In that sense, Valérie
Petitpierre’s comment that the trilogy itself is Kristof’s equivalent of
the excavation of “la chose”61 rings true. She argues that the stripping
of all references to time and place result from the impossibility of
telling the truth. There are equally strong arguments for this view in
the relationship with language that Kristof has had to work out as an
immigrant writer.
Quand on lui demande quel rapport il y a entre ses romans et sa vie, elle
répond significativement: “C’est la même chose.”62
Whey they ask her about the relationship between her novels and her life,
she gives a revealing answer: “It’s the same thing.”
As a literary immigrant, Kristof had to construct her literary world

very consciously. The lack of historic location is not a pose, but
reflects her profound understanding of her role as a writer. On the
other hand, the numerous subtle autobiographical references in the
trilogy are primarily structural devices (as in Semprun’s fiction).
Paradoxically, they confer anonymity on her stories about mastering
the language. The trilogy is written in Kristof’s adopted tongue,
French, while the twins presumably write in what is their mother
tongue. It is never stated which language the twins write in, neither is
the transparency of their writing to all who read it ever questioned.
61
62
This reveals Kristof’s belief in language as a perfect Utopian tool of

communication.
Every linguistic immigrant has a visual metaphor for the
relationship between the different languages. Kristof seems to express
the perception of her adopted tongue enveloping and containing her
mother tongue. It is the mother tongue that contains the pain which is
thus removed from direct contact with the individual. In the novels,
the impersonal style of writing represents this distance. There is no
mention of Lucas’ writing in his adopted tongue, although he says at
one point that he intends to translate his writing into the adopted
language and even to write directly in the new language. This
abandoned project may be seen as the main element of Lucas’
downfall. Unlike Lucas, Kristof has succeeded in completing her
literary project.
Mirroring despair
In Klaus’ narrative, there is no opening towards his brother.

Both he and Lucas are solipsistically absorbed by their own personal
pain. Their two narratives mirror each other, but blindly. Like their
authors, they turn their backs on each other in a Janus-like fashion.
The habitual two-headed representation of Janus, Roman god of
doors, is an apt visual metaphor for the immigrant’s destiny. In
Chagall’s painting of Paris63 there is a Janus-like figure representing
the painter himself. One head looks eastward towards his homeland
Russia, with a blue face and offering his heart on his hand. The other
head looks westward in what seems a hypocritical enjoyment. Claude
Esteban also uses the term “névrose de Janus”64 for the constant
dilemma of those who have been bilingual from childhood about
which language to use to “catalogue” impressions, events, reactions
etc. “Etymologically, ‘twin’ denotes both union and separation,
joining and parting.”65 Janus is almost an undifferentiated twin, the
completed symbol for the bilingual.
63
Marc Chagall, Paris through my window, 1913, oil on canvas, 135.8 x 141.4 cm,
Guggenheim Museum, New York.
64
Esteban, Le partage des mots. “Janus’ neurosis”
65
Lash, Twins and the Double, p.6.
Towards the end of the story of his life, at a moment of

structural climax in the trilogy, Klaus states the intensity of his
relentless despair. The novel itself in its entirety communicates this
utter lack of hope:
Je me couche et avant de m’endormir je parle dans ma tête à Lucas, comme

je le fais depuis de nombreuses années. Ce que je lui dis, c’est à peu près la
même chose que d’habitude. Je lui dis que, s’il est mort, il a de la chance et
que j’aimerais bien être à sa place. Je lui dis qu’il a eu la meilleure part,
c’est moi qui dois porter la charge la plus lourde. Je lui dis que la vie est
d’une inutilité totale, elle est non-sens, aberration, souffrance infinie,
l’invention d’un Non-Dieu dont la méchanceté dépasse l’entendement.66
I go to bed and before I fall asleep I talk to Lucas in my head, as I have

done for many years. What I tell him is more or less the same as usual. I tell
him that if he’s dead he’s lucky and that I’d very much like to be in his
place. I tell him that he got the better deal, I’m the one who has to carry the
heavier load. I tell him that life is totally pointless, absurd, an aberration, an
infinite suffering, the invention of a non-God whose viciousness surpasses
understanding.
This despair is common to both twins. Their writing is a way of

avoiding facing directly this truth about life as they experience it. And
yet, Klaus’ lamentation proves that no invented story can hide the real
despair. It seems natural to Klaus’ character and destiny that he
expresses his despair with such brutal simplicity, and yet such
openness has been long coming. His cry of pain represents the relief
of a sudden acceptance of pain, often experienced at the approach of
death.
It is only after Klaus has nearly completed the story of his life
that he learns of Lucas’ suicide. The heights of drama have long past.
The thought he leaves us with is a lucid approval of Lucas’ method of
suicide. He seems to consider following in his footsteps, if only to
ensure that the whole family will meet again beyond the grave.
Kristof’s despair remains non-attenuated at the end, but the
impact of her writing is in its brutal and cathartic depiction of an
immigrant’s true state of mind where doubling and incest reproduce
various processes of self-delusion and self-defence, particularly in
relation to second language adoption for literary expression.
66
Hier
There are many similarities between Hier and the trilogy. Hier
also features a male narrator, an immigrant who writes and is
infatuated with his half-sister. In many ways the character of Tobias
Horvath is a continuation of Lucas and Klaus from the trilogy. His life
is another possible version of what Lucas’ life of immigration could
have been.
Tobias has migrated from an obviously Eastern European
country (presumably Hungary) to Switzerland (the watch factories
give it away, amongst other hints). Although Agota Kristof refuses to
name places, her description can be easily recognised as that of an
Eastern European experience. She renders it identifiable for what it is,
for how it feels, rather than prejudicing the reader by naming
geographical or cultural landmarks. This strategy can also be seen as
avoidance of naming because it pertains to a masculine attempt to
dominate. Unlike Semprun’s fiction, where events are always
explained, albeit in a very erudite and inconclusive fashion, Kristof’s
writing pushes analysis aside.
Tobias Horvath is lonely and unhappy with his monotonous
existence. The only symbol of hope for him is the idea of a woman
called Line who he believes will soon appear in his life. And she does,
but is not quite the person he expected. It is the real Line who starts
working in the same watch factory, not the imaginary one. This Line
is his first childhood love and also, unknown to her, his half-sister. It
is as if he forgot, or chose to forget, how the name Line first
insinuated itself in his mind. His vision of the perfect woman was,
without his realising it, very closely based on his first object-choice.
When he is lying to his psychiatrist that Line is his mother’s name,
this revealing detail cannot be said to be too far away from the truth.
Kristof’s constant point is that lying is always based on the truth.
At the age of twelve, Tobias overheard a conversation
between his mother Esther, the village prostitute, and the village
teacher, Sandor, which revealed to him that Sandor, Line’s father, is
his father too. Tobias stabs them both and runs away, eventually
arriving abroad. He claims to be a war orphan for fear of being
discovered. His story of orphanhood is a typical example of a family
romance invention to cover up an unsatisfactory and shameful
background. However, since truth and fiction are often reversible in
Kristof’s writing, it is quite possible that the identity he believes in is

his family romance. After all, it is based on a conversation overheard,
which he could have easily imagined. He could have imagined that the
teacher was his father as he was the only person ever to be kind to
him. Besides, Tobias’ murderous desire appears to be Oedipal in
nature.
He never tells anyone who he believes his father is. Even Line
never finds out that she is his half-sister; it is as if the whole episode is
just Tobias’ personal fantasy.
The murder provides him with a reason for fleeing and not
coming back to his country. It also gives him his alias, Sandor Lester.
However, it turns out that both his mother and father have survived.
Similarly to parental deaths and murders in the trilogy, symbolic
murder is part of the immigrant’s strategy. The ethereal quality of
fiction extends to the main character himself. Thus his second attempt
at murder, this time of Line’s husband, also fails. But then, this second
attempt is only a re-enactment of the first. Both symbolic murders are
fuelled by anger at a man’s desire to take the child away from its
mother. It is anger at “déracinement” which is the reality of Tobias’
life. The metaphor of a desired but never-fulfilled incest is his only
hope of reuniting with his original identity.
Line, although sweet mannered, symbolises demonic forces in
Tobias’ life:
One important variant of the myth [of Adam and Eve] includes another
woman, Lilith, who figures as the demonic half-sister or twin-sister of
Adam. As Adam’s “first wife” Lilith is a female double of the First Man,
created from dust as his twin and equal.67
Line is indeed his equal and Tobias finds it difficult to reject

her influence. She will always haunt him as his first object choice.
Tobias writes “dans la langue d’ici”68 which Line does not
understand; consequently she looks down on his attempts, saying: “Il
est déjà difficile d’écrire dans sa langue maternelle. Alors, dans une
autre langue?”69 After that conversation, Tobias starts writing poetry
67
68
Agota Kristof, Hier (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1995), p. 100. “in the language
spoken here”
69
Kristof, Hier, p. 100. “It is already difficult to write in one’s mother tongue. So, in a
different language?”
in his mother tongue, while still continuing to write his “histoires

bizarres”70 “dans la langue d’ici”. He adopts the language
hierarchisation familiar to bilingual writers. He only recites his verses
in their mother tongue to Line once. On that occasion she
compliments him. After she has left and gone back to their native
country, Tobias stops writing. This whole process, where writing
clearly has a therapeutic value, exemplifies the work of mourning.
Regardless of having lived abroad for a number of years, Tobias has
neither come to terms with the break from his background and
language, nor accepted the lack of affection throughout his life,
originating in his childhood. According to Julia Kristeva, this wound
is the impetus of immigration:
Une blessure secrète souvent inconnue de lui-même, propulse l’étranger

dans l’errance. Ce malaimé ne la reconnaît pourtant pas: le défi fait taire
chez lui la plainte.71
A secret wound, often unknown to himself, propels the foreigner to wander.

However, the outcast does not recognise it: his defiance silences his
complaint.
The appearance of Line gives him an opportunity to re-live his

loss and in that sense it is understandable that he had expected her.
One of his visions or dreams includes a dead bird which he
cannot bury, because there is no soil:
De temps en temps, je fais des promesses:

— J’irai chercher de la terre.
Mais je n’y crois pas tellement. L’oiseau n’y croit pas non plus. Il me
connaît.
Pourquoi aussi est-il mort ici, là où il n’y a que des pierres?72
Every now and again, I make promises:

— I’ll go and look for some earth.
But I don’t believe this, really. The bird doesn’t believe it either. It knows
me.
So why did it die here, where there is nothing but stones?
70
Kristof, Hier, p. 101. “strange stories”
71
Kristeva, Étrangers à nous-mêmes, pp. 13-14.
72
Kristof, Hier, p. 66.
In this new land which seems infertile and where it seems impossible
to put down roots, Tobias is dragging with him a corpse of a bird
which is paradoxically still alive, signalling that his mourning is
incomplete. This past that Tobias refuses to bury affects the possibility
of continuing his life, of free choice of a new direction.
Tobias’ incestuous desire is mirrored by the triangular
relationship between his compatriots, Paul, his wife Kati and her sister
Véra. Véra commits suicide while Paul and Kati are on holiday,
because she is in love with her sister’s husband. Paul then leaves Kati,
admitting that the love was reciprocal. The incestuous desire between
Paul and Véra, and between Tobias and Line, although never
consumed, is a driving force behind the events.
In Hier, Tobias’ mother makes him an outcast, someone who
has to go away to gain any respectability. Line, on the other hand,
wants to go back to the respectability she perceives in her background.
The fact that Line’s father was not only Tobias’ mother’s client, but
also the father of her child makes this respectability very fragile. Line
refuses Tobias mainly for being a simple factory worker. Avoiding
this type of marginalisation is one of the clear advantages of exile,
turning Line’s refusal into nothing but a rejection of his native
country. The prohibition of incest and the rejection of the native
country merge into one and the same impossibility which prevent
Tobias from developing. And yet he gives incest the naive and child-
like positive aura of a family romance:
J’ai lu ou entendu quelque part que, chez les Pharaons, le mariage idéal était
un mariage entre frère et soeur. Je le pense aussi, bien que Line ne soit que
ma demi-soeur. Je n’en ai pas d’autre.73
I’ve read or heard somewhere that the Pharoahs regarded the mariage of
brother and sister as the ideal marriage. I think so too, even though Line is
only my half-sister. I have no other.
Tobias is the only character who rejects the prohibition of

incest. The incest symbolises the impossible he is trying to achieve, be
it the adaptation to the new environment or a successful end to his
mourning. He has to believe, against all odds, that the relationship
73
Kristof, Hier, p. 87.
with Line is possible. His hope could not be less realistic, revealing
the extremes of belief necessary to an immigrant.
Tobias feels that he will die if Line, the only element of his
former identity remaining to him, leaves him. However, from the
epilogue we learn that, after Line left, he superficially adapted to the
society he joined. He is still unhappy, but is going through the motions
of the life that people around him lead. Kristof’s epilogue is imbued
with nostalgia, not only for the past in the native country, but for the
period of mourning as well. It states melancholically that only
melancholy is worth writing about. This narcissistic predilection is
closely connected with the metaphor of incest.
In a fascinating film adaptation of Kristof’s novel, Burning in
the Wind (Brucio nel vento), the script writer and director Silvio
Soldini felt that the depressing end of Kristof’s text would not
successfully translate to the screen. In his epilogue we see Tobias,
Line and Line’s child together on a sunny Italian beach, learning
Italian.
L’Algarabie
The friendships in Semprun’s fiction show various
characteristics of doubling. In L’Algarabie, the main character, Rafael
Artigas, has a double in his alter-ego, Carlos-María Bustamante.
Bustamante’s mind is intruded upon by Artigas’ intimate memories.
Artigas has the magical power to project a double in the shape of
Bustamante which confirms his godly status in the narrative. The
memory intrusions are explained by Artigas’ approaching death; his
vital energy attempts a spiritual transmigration. Semprun here uses a
widely held mythical belief:
Across diverse cultures and times, there is a universal consensus that the
sighting of the double is a warning of imminent death. Although normally
invisible, the double of each person becomes condensed, as it were, a few
days before death.74
There are several reason why Carlos is chosen to be the

recipient of Artigas’ memories. They are very good friends and they
74
have very similar backgrounds and interests. They are both Spanish
immigrants who have adopted French culture. In L’Algarabie, a novel
about the immigrant’s identity, language plays a key part. Both Rafael
and Carlos are European bilinguals who effortlessly switch between
French and Spanish. Also Carlos’ date of birth coincides with Rafael’s
date of exile. These two crucial dates almost mean the same thing;
hence their interchangeable ability. The immigrant’s life is defined by
these two dates. As Adam Zagajewski points out: “no matter where
one cuts and divides life, one cuts and divides it into two halves”.75
We observed in the chapter “Libertinism and Utopia”, that
memories are the core of individuality for Semprun, the only proof of
being. The loss of memory, however minor, is always accompanied by
extreme anxiety, since it puts the person’s entire existence into
question. Here memory, doubling and incest are all intimately
connected. It is only in the very last pages of the novel that the incest
is revealed, similarly to La Montagne blanche where Antoine’s
painful memories of incest are only revealed in the penultimate
chapter.76 In an inhibited monologue placed in brackets,77 Carlos
reveals his incestuous relationship with his aunt Inés. This original
incest was one of the reasons for Carlos’ attraction towards Inés’
daughter Mercédès with whom he subsequently also has a sexual
relationship. The first intrusion of Artigas’ memories which is
described in the novel occurs while Carlos is making love to Mercédès
for the first time. We are told that these strange invasions often occur
to Carlos during love-making when he is most or least himself. Carlos
experiences total amnesia in respect of what is happening to him in
reality. He feels these “memories” as something foreign and external,
although he is also conscious that they should be his own recognisable
memories featuring his own family members. Carlos perceives
Artigas’ memories from Artigas’ point of view. Nevertheless, it seems
that he draws these memories, through incest, from a common pool
where they have been deposited to form part of a common heritage.
This common pool has striking similarities with Maurice Halbwachs’
notion of collective memory.78 Spiritual heritage is one of the
75
Zagajewski, Two cities; on exile, history and the imagination, p. 4.
76
The status of these revelations is similar to that of “la chose” in Kristof’s trilogy.
77
78
Maurice Halbwachs, La Mémoire collective (Paris: Presses Universitaires de
France, 1950).
strongest ties in Semprun’s fiction, and incest and doubling, which

come the closest to a complete denial of difference, allow characters
to accede to its depths. As I said in relation to La Montagne blanche,
friendship is here for the author a vehicle for the expression of his
Utopian narcissistic desire to show how very personal intimate
memories could become part of collective memory. Incest and
doubling are the metaphorical methods which can make this possible.
Another psychoanalytic insight into the figure of the double
concerns the conflict between the superego and the necessity for
aesthetic truth without which a work of art would be fully
conformist.79 Semprun’s use of the word indécent points at this
conflict. He usually uses it to express the imagined unacceptability of
his mental survival techniques for dealing with his memories from the
concentration camp. In some contexts, this expression represents, in a
wider sense, the opposition of artistic interests and real life. The
perceived indecency of being occupied with artistic concerns while the
unacceptability of real life continues is sometimes closely linked with
the choice of the incest metaphor. We are socially conditioned to
perceive incest as the most extreme indecency. Semprun uses it to
brand what he perceives as the paradox of our being in the world,
which fascinates him.
Carlos’ incest is mirrored by Artigas’ near-incest with
Perséphone. Artigas’ accidental death almost immediately follows the
revelation about Perséphone being his daughter. The dangers of incest
and death are perceived as synonymous. Both lead us back to our
origins, closing the cycle of life. The haunting childhood image of his
mother’s room is the last recognition of Artigas’ dying brain. Access
to this room was unspokenly denied to all the children. The door
finally opens, and Artigas sees the forbidden body of his mother, the
body he spent his whole life looking for. The deepest secret of his
identity which is also the secret of his death is at last revealed to him.
Flirting with Perséphone was flirting with death for Artigas, in so far
as he thus enacts a desire for a non-differentiation of subject and
object which he perceives as an alluring danger.80 It was also an
admission that, despite his attempt to obtain a passport, he never
would have really gone back to Spain. Recovering the lost unity (split
79
M’Uzan, De l’art à la mort, p. 11.
80
It is interesting to point out that Perséphone has a twin sister Proserpine who has a
much tamer personality, but that Artigas is only attracted to Perséphone.
between various aliases, places, extreme experiences and two

languages) is not possible, or only theoretically possible in death.
Fabienne is a substitute for Mercédès. Carlos sees her on three
occasions when looking for his cousine-soeur81, a composite notion
from Spanish that allows Semprun to stress the obviousness of the
incestuous relationship. Carlos’ relationship with his married cousin,
Mercédès, stands for his relationship with the Spanish language.
Spanish is his mother tongue – a language too familiar for an
inhibition not to exist – which is at the same time somebody else’s
language, the language of the country he is not living in any more. His
relationship with Fabienne stands for his relationship with the French
language. Fabienne is French, but also married like Mercédès. French
is Carlos’ adopted language, there to underline the slipping away of
the mother tongue.
Comme si Fabienne n’apparaissait, énigmatique et charmante, que pour

souligner l’absence de sa cousine-soeur (...) que pour souligner la
disparition de Mercédès, sa fugitive essence, sa douloureuse volonté de lui
marquer des distances.82
As if Fabienne was appearing, enigmatic and charming, only to emphasize

the absence of his cousin-sister (...) to emphasize the disappearance of
Mercédès, her fleeting essence, her painful intention to indicate that she is
keeping her distance from him.
French also is somebody else’s language. Indeed, every time the

writer reaches for his mother tongue, it escapes him, and all he finds is
the adoptive language:
Chaque fois qu’il a trouvé Fabienne sur son chemin (...) c’est Mercédès
qu’il cherchait, qu’il espérait trouver.83
Every time he found Fabienne along the way (...) it was Mercédès he was
looking for, hoping to find.
The presence of the adoptive language is a clear sign of the absence of

his mother tongue: “[Fabienne] dont la présence signifie, de façon
aussi mystérieuse qu’irréfutable, que Mercédès ne viendra pas non
81
cousin-sister
82
83
plus cette fois-ci”.84 The totalitarian closure of any language means

that two languages cannot adopt the same function side by side
without threatening the psychical wholeness of the subject.85 The
adoptive language is waiting for him, offering itself, signalling its
availability, and promising to reveal itself fully to him. There is a
feeling that fate is at work here. More than that, there is a sense that
this is a negative development out of one’s control. Writers often feel
their writing in a new language is a transgression and believe that their
ability to choose a language is a curse. This is how Carlos perceives
his meeting with Fabienne: “impression irritante de sournoise fatalité,
de destin agencé par quelque esprit malin ou maligne”86. However, the
immigrant writer, similarly to Carlos, seems to have no alternative but
to abandon himself to the fluidity of fate.
At that point, the writer has to work out very carefully how to
approach or woo his new language, which mots d’introduction,
d’abordage, de passe87 to use. And these must not be too self-
conscious or contrived. They have to be a result of a lengthy
maturation process:
C’est venu tout naturellement, comme le résultat imprévisible mais évident

d’un long mûrissement réflexif qui imprégnait ces mots d’une aisance,
d’une sorte d’objectivité qui gommaient ce qu’ils pouvaient contenir
d’arbitrairement brillant ou d’apprêté.88
It came completely naturally, as an unpredictable but obvious result of a

long maturation of thought which imbued the words with ease, permeated
them with a sort of objectivity which erased everything arbitrarily showy or
affected that they might have contained.
The writer first wishes to transpose his cultural knowledge into the
new language. It is his first instinct to start using his known subject
matter in his new language, i.e. to translate. Thus Carlos’ first thought
was to start the conversation with Fabienne with a witty remark about
84
Semprun, L’Algarabie, p. 223. “Fabienne’s presence signifies, in a manner as
mysterious as it is irrefutable, that Mercédès will not come this time either.”
85
As argued by Tzvetan Todorov in L’Homme dépaysé.
86
Semprun, L’Algarabie, pp. 219-220. “the irritating impression of a treacherous fate,
of a destiny set in motion by some malicious spirit”
87
Words of introduction, approach, passwords
88
Hermann von Keyserling.89 This would have been a mistake as she

would not have known of the German writer and philosopher.
Inspired, he changes his mind at the last moment and refers to Proust.
How better to charm the French language than by referring to one of
its greatest writers. Despite frequent “remembering” of Proust
throughout the novel, the precise nature of Semprun’s relationship
with Proust is described within the narration of Carlos’ and Fabienne’s
first meeting. Proust establishes the missing connection between the
two languages, Spanish and French.
Although critics have often found common ground between
Semprun’s and Proust’s writing, Semprun claims never to have read
the whole of A la recherche du temps perdu, as the familiarity of the
subject matter bored him. He transposes this experience on to his
character, Artigas:
De Swann je ne pourrais te dire que le vague ennui que sa lecture morose

distillait en moi: c’était un peu comme si je lisais une interminable
chronique familiale, une chronique de ma propre famille, je veux dire.90
On the subject of Swann I could only tell you about the vague boredom that
that morose reading exuded in me: it was a little bit like reading an endless
family history; my own family history, I mean.
Furthermore, in the process of rejecting the idea of Proustian

influence, Artigas perversely claims that Proust’s writing reads better
in the Spanish translation:
Proust était de toute évidence illisible en français, la seule façon de prendre

un plaisir relatif à sa lecture consistant à se servir de la remarquable
traduction espagnole de Pedro Salinas.91
Proust was quite obviously unreadable in French; the only way to somewhat
enjoy reading him would be to use Pedro Salinas’ outstanding Spanish
translation.
However true this proud denial of the qualitative difference of reading

the work in the original language might be, it conveys an association
89
Semprun, L’Algarabie, p. 294. This is above all a reference to Europe and to the
cosmopolitanism of Keyserling’s writings as well as his situation as an aristocratic
immigrant from Estonia.
90
91
with the same issues of linguistic and personal identity and difference
which are expressed in the metaphors of incest and doubling. With
this statement, the author also confirms the metatextual importance of
Proust for his writing:
Cette allusion à Pedro Salinas, donc, aurait permis d’élucider d’où lui
venait, à lui, Artigas, son côté proustien: de la matière même, originelle et
matricielle, du langage, de l’essence même du phrasé castillan – complexe,
structurellement enclin au baroque, naturellement porté aux arabesques des
incidentes et des digressions – sous-jacent chez lui, même lorsqu’il écrivait
en français.92
So this allusion to Pedro Salinas could clarify where Artigas got his
Proustian side: from the original tissue, the very matrix of the language,
from the very essence of Castilian phrasing – complex, structurally inclined
to the baroque, naturally turned to ornamental parenthetical clauses and
digressions – submerged in him, even when he wrote in French.
He even states this in a sentence written in Proustian style. The subject

matter is here fused with the language itself. Proust’s style of writing
fuses with the natural rhetoric of Castilian Spanish. Artigas has been
introduced to another language and culture from within his own,
which makes the connection even more powerful.
In Carlos’ case, Fabienne (the French language) is a substitute
for the “near-incestuous” relationship with Mercédès (Spanish).
However, the relationship with Fabienne is still illegitimate and hardly
any less intense than the one with Mercédès. Having known the
intensity of incest, Carlos will always look for the same type of
relationship. The same can be said in relation to language. A writer
always has a passionate relationship with his mother tongue. He could
only write in a new language if he succeeds in recreating the same
passion with that language.
A psychoanalytical insight into the immigrant’s relationship
with knowledge uncovers another important meaning of the incest
metaphor:
The prohibition against true knowledge appears to have its origin in the
seeker’s inability to regard knowledge as a symbol; rather the seeker tends
to consider true knowledge as though it were actually an incestuous relation,
92
taking literally the biblical expression “to know a woman” in the sense of
having sexual union with her.93
True migrants and nomads are above all seekers of

knowledge. The acquisition of a language is experienced as a physical,
bodily experience, and more particularly so when it is also includes
the adoption of the world view associated with the language. Speaking
a new language often also involves some corporeal shifting. The voice
changes, frequently also the facial expressions and gesticulation. It is
easy therefore to understand this acquisition as something very literal,
which is how literalness comes to be a frequent method of textual
development in the writing of linguistic immigrants. Incest thus
becomes a symbol for the in-depth knowing of a language.
La Montagne blanche
Actual incest
The motif of incest is also one of the thematic threads in Jorge

Semprun’s La Montagne blanche. Only one actual incestuous
relationship occurs, but the importance of the theme extends beyond
the narrative fact.
All the women in the Stermaria family have been in love with
their brothers. Whether or not this love was fulfilled, it has often led
them to suicide. Antoine de Stermaria’s mother had to tolerate an
incestuous relationship between her husband Nicolas and his sister
Ulrike. After the husband and brother’s death, the two women became
close. The reader is even led to suppose this closeness is a sexual
relationship. Then Ulrike fell in love with Antoine and used her new
lover, Antoine’s art teacher Natacha, as a front for their liaison.
Antoine thus became a part of a triangular relationship.
When she is discovered, Ulrike commits suicide, in a very
theatrical manner with all the imagery of an Ophelian drowning,
although the cause of death was her cutting her veins. Ulrike slowly
floats down the river in a boat surrounded by red and white roses in
view of Antoine’s room. The motif of reflexivity abounds in
Semprun’s fiction, its narcissistic aspect being also at the heart of the
93
incest motif in these works. According to the later Egyptian myth

Osiris was punished in a similar fashion for his incestuous relationship
with his sister. He was floated in a coffin down the river towards the
sea. This symbolic punishment can paradoxically be equated with the
fulfilment of the transgressive desire which led to it. The motif of
drowning keeps reappearing throughout the novel, often
counterbalancing incest allusions. The only possible exit from the
emotional state of incest is suggested to be a symbolic return to the
pre-natal wholeness, for which water is the closest natural equivalent.
Antoine’s life is inevitably strongly marked by this episode of
his sexual initiation. At the end of the novel there is hope that having
relived this experience after a lifelong silence, he might be able to
finally reconcile himself with his primary incestuous image. This is
paralleled by the ways in which the other two main male characters,
Juan and Karel, have to come to terms with their similarly heavy
emotional baggage.
The situation appears more complex if the incestuous
relationships in the Stermaria family are analysed as belonging to the
“second type” of incest, where according to Françoise Héritier there is
no actual kinship between the partners and the taboo is broken through
the sharing of the same partner.94 By having an incestuous relationship
with his aunt Ulrike, Antoine is also sharing his father’s partner (and
by extension his mother’s). Both types of incest occur in this instance
and yet it is the second which emotionally outweighs the first. It is the
second type of incest which introduces a more unsettling and abject
thought of the same fluids mixing, of everything being brought down
to the same, of any differentiation being denied, which ties individuals
within the vicious circle of not being able to escape their origins. As
Héritier stresses:
Il (l’inceste du deuxième type) met en jeu ce qu’il y a de plus fondamental

dans les sociétés humaines: la façon dont elles construisent leurs catégories
de l’identique et du différent. (...) C’est parce qu’il y a plus de substance,
d’identités communes entre un père et son fils qu’entre un père et sa fille
que l’union corporelle d’un homme avec la femme de son père ou celle de
son fils peut être traitée comme plus dommageable que le rapport sexuel
d’un père et de sa fille dans certaines sociétés.95
94
Héritier, Les Deux Soeurs et leur mère.
95
Héritier, Les Deux Soeurs et leur mère, pp. 11 and 14.
It (the second type of incest) brings into play the most fundamental
characteristic of human societies: how they construct their categories of the
same and the different. (...) It is because there is more common substance
and identity between a father and a son than between a father and his
daughter that in some societies a bodily union of a man with his father’s or
his son’s wife can be considered more damaging than the sexual
relationship between a father and his daughter.
This partner-sharing which one can simply call adultery is

ever present in Semprun’s fiction. Adulterous relationships are
frequently referred to as incestuous, even where there is no
justification for this in terms of kinship. The highly civilised and
cultured aura Semprun wishes to give his characters comes with
higher moral awareness as well as a higher level of transgressive
desire.
Imaginary incest
Other allusions to incest are based not on actual, but on

spiritual kinship.96 This is how they become metaphors for a certain
Utopia of fraternity as well as for a complex relationship with native
tongue/country and adoptive tongue/country.
In the triangular relationship of the incest motif, the accent is
not so much on the object of shared interest (most often a woman), but
on the bond that this sharing creates or reinforces between individuals
of the same sex (most often men). Thence a certain homosexual
tendency is stated. It expresses the reflexivity which according to
Semprun is one of the main needs of any individual, man or woman.
Going beyond René Girard’s literary triangular desire, it represents the
foundation of fraternal Utopia discussed in the previous chapter. The
fraternal community is one of the incentives for respecting the incest
taboo. Héritier recalls that when Margaret Mead asked the men of the
Arapesh tribe what would happen if they married their sisters, they
responded:
Tu voudrais épouser ta sœur? Mais qu’est-ce qui te prend? Tu ne veux pas

avoir de beau-frère? Tu ne comprends donc pas que si tu épouses la soeur
96
“Spiritual twinning is a Titanic love-affair, overwhelming the meagre strength of
human needs.” John Lash, Twins and the Double, p.27.
d’un autre homme et qu’un autre homme épouse ta soeur, tu auras au moins
deux beaux-frères, et que si tu épouses ta propre soeur tu n’en auras pas du
tout? Et avec qui iras-tu chasser? Avec qui feras-tu les plantations? Qui
auras-tu à visiter?97
What, you would like to marry your sister! What is the matter with you
anyway? Don’t you want a brother-in-law? Don’t you realise that if you
marry another man’s sister and another man marries your sister, you will
have at least two brothers-in-law, while if you marry your own sister you
will have none? With whom will you hunt, with whom will you garden,
whom will you go to visit?
The importance of a masculine community reinforces the

incest taboo. Antoine’s friendship is more important to Juan than his
relationship with Antoine’s wife Franca. He sacrifices the relationship
with Franca on the altar of friendship.98 The relationship between
Antoine and Juan is that of spiritual brothers who share many
similarities, akin to the classical twins Castor and Pollux.
The doubling between Juan and Antoine is strong enough to
have “created” Franca. She was born on the day Antoine and Juan met
for the first time and established their “metaphysical complicity”,
which makes her their spiritual daughter. This fateful and irrational
coincidence is reminiscent of the memory intrusion sequence in
L’Algarabie. Franca is a mirror where the glances of the two spiritual
brothers meet. Similarly to Fabienne who we suggest symbolises the
97
Quoted in Héritier, Les Deux Soeurs et leur mère., p. 22; originally in Margaret
Mead, Sex & Temperament in Three Primitive Societies (New York: William
Morrow, 1935), p. 84.
98
Semprun is influenced by Faulkner’s understanding of incest, kinship and
friendship where offspring are shadows of the father and kinship is a relationship of
suffocating importance. He also transposes Faulkner’s association of incest with the
self-made outsider without a known past (as seen in Absalom, Absalom written in
1936, the year Semprun went into exile). An immigrant is a self-made man in essence,
therefore this association acts as a punishment (in the eyes of the community) for the
arrogance of independence through the immigrant’s internalised feelings of guilt
towards the community. The self-made man is a one-off phenomenon in the first
generation of immigration. The community is fascinated by this figure whom it
ultimately misunderstands. Henry, Judith and Charles in Absalom, Absalom stand in a
similar triangular relationship to Juan, Franca and Antoine in La Montagne blanche;
or Rafael, Elizabeth and Carlos in L'Algarabie. The male bond of authority, respect
and acknowledgement is more important than the incestuous relationship: thus
Charles would give up his sister Judith if his father would acknowledge him, and Juan
gives up Franca in order to retain Antoine. In that sense incest becomes a figure of the
choice of those who are rejected and excluded.
French language in L’Algarabie, Franca is a linguistic symbol and

could stand for any of the languages linguistically or symbolically
important to the writer: French, lingua franca99 or Castillian,
Semprun’s mother tongue (Franca’s surname is Castellani).
But apart from being their “daughter”, Franca is also their
“sister”. When Franca first met Juan, they were warned by a common
acquaintance:
Vous ne craignez pas l’inceste? (...) Vous êtes identiques, (...) Même sang,
même race, même destin. Vous êtes comme des jumeaux, je le vois. Frère et
soeur, ça peut faire mal!100
Aren’t you afraid of incest? (...) You are identical, (...) Same blood, same
race, same destiny. You are like twins, I can see it. Brother and sister, that
can hurt!
Juan joked about this, but only to tone down the

uncomfortable feeling left by the statement. Even if taken as
completely wrong, the words created a certain tragic bond between the
two characters. It convinced them that their relationship was meant to
be in some way illegitimate and so the more passionate. This is again
a situation where coincidences are taken to signify and are built into
the very foundations of primary choices. In a world where the notion
of identity is extremely unstable, external coincidences are the only
pointers. They gain in value when there is a third party noticing them.
Being seen to be something is the ultimate and the only confirmation
of existence: “As lookers who cannot know how we look except by
reflection from the Other, we are all condemned to be twins.”101
So, in order to reinforce the sense of being, Semprun’s
characters accept and adopt these superficial judgements which come
from passers-by. Franca and Juan have been perceived as a couple
who are too well suited, therefore that is what they are. It is their
misfortune to have been perceived as such, and thus being denied the
possibility of exiting from the tragic stage.
99
Lingua franca was a mixture of Italian, French, Greek, Arabic and Spanish, thus
encompassing the Mediterranean core of European culture. Lingua franca is an apt
symbol of the cosmopolitanism of the characters in this novel whose national identity
is European.
100
101
As Juan and Franca continue their relationship unknown to

Antoine (who suspects it, but does not want to admit it to himself),
they experience it not only as secretive, but also as full of prohibitions.
This is almost an attraction for them:
Peut-être pourrait-on dire qu’il (l’inceste) est vite devenu pour les poètes le
symbole de toutes les passions sexuelles d’autant plus violentes qu’elles
sont plus contraintes, plus punies et plus cachées. En effet, l’appartenance à
deux clans ennemis, comme Roméo et Juliette, est rarement sentie dans nos
civilisations comme un obstacle insurmontable; l’adultère banalisé a, de
plus, perdu beaucoup de ses prestiges par la facilité du divorce; l’amour
entre deux personnes du même sexe est en partie sorti de la clandestinité.
L’inceste seul demeure inavouable.102
Perhaps we can say that it (incest) quickly became for the poets a symbol
for all sexual passions: the more violent the more they are constrained,
punished or hidden. Indeed, belonging to enemy clans, like Romeo and
Juliet, is rarely felt in our civilisations to be an insurmountable obstacle;
adultery has become banal and furthermore has lost most of its prestige due
to the ease of divorce; love between two people of the same sex has lost
some of its secrecy. Only incest remains unavowable.
The three characters see themselves as “abominablement

alliés”.103 Here again the tragic language of intimacy is used. The role
of the allusions to incest is to exacerbate the tragic and violating
nature of any closeness. Juan’s impossible love for Franca is another
minor addition to the overall impossibility of his life after the
Buchenwald experience. His sacrifice of Franca could be interpreted
as a final giving in to the “social pressure”. He gives up and gives
away “his sister” in a manner which mimics the anthropological
description of anti-incestuous social practices.
Triangular desire, as described in the chapter “Libertinism and
Utopia”, can be seen to be responsible in part for this predestination of
Juan and Franca for each other. The incest metaphor itself is a trick,
trying to establish the pre-existence of an original desire where there
is clearly none. This is similar to another pair of Semprun’s characters
in Netchaïev est de retour. Marc Liliental and Adriana Sponti’s
relationship is described as a “lien direct (...) quasiment incestu-
102
Jacques-Dominique de Lannoy and Pierre Feyereisen, L’Inceste (Paris: PUF, Que-
sais-je, 1992), p. 6.
103
Semprun, La Montagne blanche, p. 190. “abominably allied”
eux”.104 Death in the novel, according to Girard, is a giving up of the

mediator, a final facing of the void. It is in this sense that Juan’s death
is more than a deferred ending of his Buchenwald experience.
If we take spiritual brotherhood as seriously as Semprun’s
characters do, their inadvertent or deliberate “women-sharing” closely
resembles Françoise Héritier’s second type of incest. If we assume
that the female characters symbolise the languages, and male
characters represent cultures to which the languages belong, “women-
sharing” appears in a slightly different light. A woman (or language)
belonging to an “older”, settled man (or culture) with a clear sense of
identity (despite a haunting incestuous and possibly racist past) has
more prestige. Her reputation is enhanced by being coveted by other
men (or cultures) and by her owner’s generosity. A man who is in a
superior position in the hierarchy has the right to “give” or “lend” a
woman. Juan challenges Antoine’s superiority by having an affair
with Franca. This challenge is surprisingly peacefully resolved in a
way that leads the reader to suspect that Antoine considers Juan to be
an equal. Semprun thus hints that the Spanish culture is accepted into
the multicultural European fold which has a distinct French bias.
Incest, along with suicide, is a frequent recurring theme in
European literature, particularly in works by Central European writers
which Semprun’s characters assume as their heritage. As Juan
eloquently points out to Karel:
Je veux juste te faire remarquer que l’inceste et le suicide, depuis Heinrich

von Kleist, au moins, jusqu’à Klaus Mann, semblent être des thèmes favoris
de la littérature et vie allemandes. De la vie des littérateurs allemands, en
tout cas. Que l’un et l’autre – suicide et inceste – soient réalisés, vraiment
accomplis, est un point secondaire: j’en parle comme horizons culturels et
normatifs, comme possibilités concrètes.105
I just want to point out to you that incest and suicide, from Heinrich von
Kleist, at least, to Klaus Mann, seem to be favourite themes of German
literature and life. Of the life of German literary hacks, in any case. Whether
one or the other – suicide or incest – really happen, actually occur, is
secondary: I refer to them as cultural and normative horizons, as concrete
possibilities.
104
Jorge Semprun, Netchaïev est de retour (Paris: JC Lattès, 1987), p. 222. “direct
link (...) almost incestuous”
105
Semprun, La Montagne blanche, pp. 73-74.
Semprun here reaffirms his need and desire, so similar to Kundera’s,

to belong to the European literary tradition. The very borrowing of the
theme of incest is incestuous. Semprun’s constant intertextuality can
be seen as an incestuous practice. Karel’s lovers are called Ottla (the
name of Kafka’s sister) and Milena Jesenskà (one of Kafka’s
epistolary relationships). This again is enough to hint at incest, given
the father-figure status allocated to Kafka.
According to Otto Rank, incest is based on the sibling
complex which is a “second edition” of the parent complex, the
Oedipus complex.106 If one decides to belong to a family of one’s own
choosing, to live one’s Freudian “family romance”, any intimate
closeness between human beings, real or imaginary, creates inhibitory
feelings which can be expressed through the metaphor of incest. These
feelings confirm the existence of very strong sentiments of difference
and of self-creation which are as intense as they are fragile. Linguistic
immigrants who have in a sense recreated themselves, are much more
aware of various borrowings, as those are more conscious. The
relationships that Semprun as a linguistic immigrant singles out as the
most important are those that are an occasion for an exchange or an
adoption of certain elements of the other. However positive, they
destabilise the immigrant’s identity and provoke minor identity crises
which the metaphor of incest can express.
Juan Larrea
The main character’s name, Juan Larrea, is borrowed from

another literary immigrant into French, a Basque poet renowned as the
“little known father of surrealism in Spain”107 or as “un gran poeta
español en lengua francesa”.108 He chose to write most of his poems in
French and claimed that even those written in Spanish were conceived
in French. Larrea’s first visit to Paris, where he was later to settle,
106
Otto Rank, The Incest Theme in Literature and Legend, Fundamentals of a
Psychology of Literary Creation (Baltimore, London: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1992).
107
Vittorio Bodini quoted in David Barry’s introduction to Juan Larrea, A Tooth for a
Tooth (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1987).
108
Introduction to Juan Larrea, Versión Celeste (Barcelona: Barral Editores, 1970), p.
15.
occurred in 1923, the year of Semprun’s birth. This apparently

fortuitous synchronism is reminiscent of the coinciding of Carlos’ date
of birth and Rafael’s date of exile in L’Algarabie. Throughout both
texts Semprun repeatedly proves that this recurrence of the same dates
is more than just a coincidence. There are many spiritual similarities
between the real Larrea and Semprun’s character. They share a similar
cultural bilingualism, having chosen the adopted language as their
main means of expression. They also share the same two languages
and the psychical development of literary immigrants. The doubling of
Juan Larrea the poet with Semprun’s character Juan Larrea, testifies to
the importance for Semprun of this poet’s status as a European literary
immigrant into French.
Semprun had to use many pseudonyms during his time as an
undercover agent of the Spanish communist party. He often uses these
pseudonyms as names for his leading characters. This doubling of the
author can be paralleled with Gary’s literary pseudonyms.109
Commenting on the nature of his various names, the fact that Romain
(originally Roman) although an Eastern European name also stands
for the literary genre which was to become his profession, Gary says:
“Les noms vous savez … Tous des pseudonymes”.110 This profound
sense that everything is a game and identity is only skin-deep is a
recurrent theme in Gary’s work, deeply connected with his immigrant
status.
The poet Larrea attributed great importance to a childhood
trauma which started when his parents “lent” him to his aunt who
could not have children; he lived with her between the ages of four
and seven. The sense of loss of paradise he experienced when he had
to leave his aunt haunts most of his poetry. He defines her as his
109
Romain Gary’s literary pseudonyms include: Emile Ajar, Fosco Sinibaldi and
Shatan Bogat. At the point in his life when he had already a substantial reputation as a
writer, Gary for several years duped the literary establishment he detested by being
the unrecognised author of four successful novels. He was even awarded a Goncourt
prize for one of these novels, written under the name Emile Ajar. Gary acknowledges
his Protean desire to double himself which sometimes touches the borders of madness.
He had fun proving that literary critics do not read and analyse books as well as they
should. He particularly states his joy at having been able to fully experience what it
means to disappear as the physical writer of his books. He achieved many a writer’s
dream of complete detachment of author from work.
110
Huston, Tombeau de Romain Gary, p. 20. “The names, you know … they’re all
pseudonyms”
“mère qualitative” as opposed to his mother who is merely the “mère

quantitive”.111 The doubling is repeated later in his life when he
chooses French against his real mother tongue. Although there is no
mention of incest in the biography of the real Juan Larrea, his unusual
closeness to his aunt must have played a role in his break with his
mother tongue. In fact the poet himself suggests this. The relationship
between the child and the mother is psychically and mythically
important for the acquisition of language. Literary immigrants seem to
instinctively introduce certain unusual elements in the relationship
between their characters and their mother-figures, as if to justify their
own déracinement langagier.112
Conclusion
The symbols of incest and doubling in the writing of literary

immigrants reflect attempts to restructure the past. Incest imagery
marks an attempt to incorporate the past into the present without
discontinuity, while doubling states that a distinct break is inevitable.
Despite various incestuous allusions, Kristof’s writing never loses
sight of the fact that a break is necessary in the life of an immigrant
and that it needs to be acknowledged. Semprun advocates Utopian
continuity by using the motif of incest which is interlocked with the
themes of fraternity and family romance. Kundera writes about
perpetual breaking and betrayal. He does not allow much time for the
doubling to be experienced as closeness or similarity. In Gary’s case
the doubling is mostly experienced at the level of the authorship of
texts. Gary doubles himself as a writer in an attempt to create different
literary identities in his works which nevertheless reproduce
characteristic recognisable themes.
The doubles in literature are as often similar as they are
different. Of the four writers discussed here, two portray their doubles
as similar, almost identical (Kristof’s twins and Semprun’s main
character or narrator and his alter egos) and the other two as mostly
different (Kundera’s chevalier and Vincent, Gary’s Malwina and
111
Robert Gurney, “Juan Larrea” (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of London,
1975). “qualitative and quantitative mothers”
112
“linguistic uprooting”
Erika, Cohn and Shatz). Kundera goes the furthest in the expression of
substantial qualitative difference between his characters. These
instinctually different approaches perhaps mirror the writers’
perception of the existing or desired relationships between their two
languages and cultures. It is interesting to note that Kristof and
Semprun have a more nostalgic, Kundera and Gary a more critical
relationship to their origins, and that the latter do not engage
substantially with the metaphor of incest which seems to complement
the doubling conceived as identical. The Utopian nature of the
metaphors of the double and of incest seems clear: the nostalgic
writers, while acknowledging the split in their lives or personalities
with the strangeness inherent in the doubling they represent, seek to
reproduce the mother tongue experience in the new language. The
critical writers, on the other hand, pursue distance and difference.
Incest and doubling are poetically fertile polysemic marks of
fragile identity, and of the complexity of linguistic choices for writers
who have decided to write in French. Literary immigrants are in a
continuous state of tension, as they carry within themselves the
paradox of twins, the “nonresolving duad”.113
113
Conclusion
Literary immigrants into French share very similar

experiences of language adoption – experiences which offer them a
tremendous new freedom, but which also lead them to question
continuously the linguistic assumptions of native speakers. Their
writings, although demonstrating great variety, unanimously but
selectively embrace Francophone cultural values and the literary
heritage implicated with the territory of the French language. The
difference, the specificity of the fictional writing of the European
literary immigrants into French analysed in this study reside in their
various combinations of these four aspects: (1) the unique process of
mother tongue substitution; (2) the declaration of European identity as
the only cultural identity which can contain their work; (3) the
expression of Utopian and libertine structures in their fiction,
continuing the French tradition and voicing their need to entertain an
idealising hope and belief in individual and social freedom and
progress; and (4) the use of figures of the double and of incest to
signify their double allegiance to their mother tongue and adopted
language, and to point to the trauma of migration. In combination,
these four elements, every one of which is substantial and would merit
its own separate study, hugely enrich the patrimony of French
literature to which ultimately these writers and their work belong.
Although these four elements interrelate, they cannot be said
to form a closed structured entity as that would be normative and offer
a restrictive view of the immigrant writer’s oeuvre and its place within
French literature. Whilst mother tongue substitution is a precondition
for the existence of literature analysed in this study, as well as a wider
social and psychical phenomenon, the other three elements represent
certain facets of immigrant writers’ expression of identity which
strongly feature Utopian longing and hope, even when buried deep
inside painful, depressed or ironic narratives. The metaphors of the
double and of incest are mainly private fantasies, although inevitably
also, to a considerable extent, a consequence of social expectations
and double binds that the writers have to confront. They portray a
more passive experiencing of the mixture of different languages and
cultures than the Utopian imagery discussed in chapters two and three.
The writers’ Utopian responses – those of imagining libertarian,
libertine and European social structures – enact the next step, in

attempting a possible literary resolution of the traumatic conflict
which the metaphors of the double and incest reveal. In fact, the very
conceiving of those two metaphors is the primary, or most
fundamental step towards that resolution. The social Utopian response
is not the only promising outlet for the state of linguistic immigration
that can be detected in the works analysed, but it is certainly the most
obvious and possibly the strongest. The two types of Utopian imagery
analysed in chapters two and three stand close to each other and
frequently overlap. Indeed many of the other strategies of these
writers can be called Utopian at different levels.
The change literary immigrants undergo incorporates
adaptation to French-speaking society and culture which includes
establishing a different relationship to writing and the written word, to
language itself; a repositioning of the imaginary addressee; and
incorporation of certain values of their French-speaking environment.
Literary immigrants develop a singularly critical, self-
conscious, analytical, disabused and suspicious stance towards
language and the written word in general: an effect of being on the
periphery of the new language and culture, and having another
important relationship with another language, their mother tongue,
which is substantially different from their relationship with French.
This is true for all linguistic immigrants, not just immigrants into
French, although the increased rationality of this critical stance and its
precision might be said to fit the specifically French context in a
unique way. The immigrant writers’ position is relative to multiple
languages, and in their fictions, that relative position is translated into
their characters’ fragmented identities, which the author never judges
or discriminates against, because their existential fluidity must be
accepted. The author’s relative position vis à vis language also results
in the expression of views which are often more quirkily free-spirited
in relation to prevalent social norms. Again, this can apply to all
linguistic immigrants, not just immigrants into French; nevertheless,
the French values adopted largely contribute to this liberated attitude.
A French-style respect for the language and the written word, as well
as for culture and the arts in general (the Utopian aspect) entails a
certain pride of belonging to the French language. It seems natural that
the immigrant writers would feel that this pride is not rightfully theirs,
that they are impostors superficially adopting the values of the natives
CONCLUSION 311
without having experienced the underlying cultural history. This

facilitates the process whereby this pride becomes contained within a
larger European cultural identity, as one cannot deny that these writers
are European by origin. The tendency to lean on the European
identity, to use it as the only stable cultural support, can instigate the
Utopian fantasies we have discussed. The pride of belonging is also
encouraged by the respect the French show to anyone who writes well
in their language, a phenomenon which seems substantially more
intense than in other European cultures. The combination of a certain
distancing from the language (facilitated by the so-called abstract
quality of the French language) with the need to write a very correct,
very precise language (out of respect for the French language) often
translates into an apparent simplicity of the writer’s style.
A repositioning of the imaginary addressee of literary
immigrants’ writing should also be viewed in more practical terms in
the context of the adopted French literary audience. The fact that these
writers now have to write for a French audience means that they
cannot possibly contemplate doing so unless they have absorbed some
of the main French cultural values. In addition, the French publishing
world subjects them to culturally specific criteria which they need to
learn to negotiate.
Important methods deployed by the literary immigrants
discussed to establish and maintain a sense of psychical legitimacy in
the new language include the following:
Creating metaphors of multiple language acquisition: This is
where the emotional aspects of second language acquisition can be
expressed, although these aspects are still subject to internalised social
pressures and imperatives (examples are the metaphors of incest and
doubling, and that of pícaro). This method, discussed at length in
chapter four, has emerged here as the most creative, and indubitably
offers an important insight into the creative personalities of literary
immigrants.
Integrating French values and the French heritage within the
writing: In addition to values such as freedom, equality, fraternity,
Epicureanism, the right to political protest, and others, this also
includes references to the French literary heritage, establishing an
imaginary literary community and a family romance with chosen
French and European authors. The literary immigrant’s attitude to
cultural assimilation itself is ambiguous, at one and the same time
jubilant, conforming, fearful or melancholic, and frequently ironic.

The phenomenon of conformity in successful literary immigrants is
another virtually untouched topic that could be further explored. It
would also be interesting to see this phenomenon analysed in the
context of the re-emergence of the discredited notion of assimilation
within the discourse on immigration within the social and political
sciences.
Integrating values from the native cultural environment with
French values: Examples of this are descriptions of a multicultural
universe, enactments of contrast, complementarity or similarity in
these values, and accommodation of different world views. In
Semprun and Kundera’s fiction this cultural comparison is at times
revealed as comical, highlighting the fundamental incompatibility of
different cultural universes, and also in those instances acknowledging
the dominance of the French world view. For Kristof there can hardly
be any communication between the different cultural viewpoints;
furthermore, when an exchange does occur, its emotional content is
scarce or hidden. Gary’s writing is criss-crossed with variations on
cultural clichés, reversed, exaggerated, simplified or taken out of
context in an attempt to deconstruct the very idea of cultural
authenticity. It is almost impossible to isolate culturally homogeneous
elements. In fact, unravelling the various threads mainly serves the
purpose of proving Gary’s point, that the validity or authenticity of
values and opinions do not increase as you dig deeper or go further
back in time.
Referring to external contributors to (il)legitimacy: Examples
include references to hospitality and acceptance of France and the
French language, or the lack of these; references to the legal status of
characters, identity papers, stereotypical and unconventional opinions
held by characters based on nationality, relationships with French
characters, institutions, heritage.
In addition to these observations about the writers’ procedures
and methods for establishing a sense of their own inner legitimacy in
the use of the new language, it is equally important for understanding
the writing of these authors to further elaborate on the much more
general remark I made in the introduction, that Gary, Kristof, Kundera
and Semprun have important things to communicate about the human
condition. All my discussions in the preceding chapters deal with what
the writers communicate in diverse ways, but at this point I would like
CONCLUSION 313
to identify briefly certain kinds of knowledge about the human

condition which emerge from the dynamic of the works in question.
Gary’s works impart the reflection that the ways in which we
behave are always to a larger extent than we recognise pre-determined
and marked by our cultural backgrounds. The only possible escape
from this is by creating authenticity out of imposture, through a slow
process of labour, akin to a mollusc creating a pearl to seal off an
irritation that made its way from the outside. Cultural assumptions are
the inescapable flaw, but also the strength and wealth of being human.
We must embrace existence as a whole lest it swallow us.
In Kristof’s works it is clear that the existential values cannot
be taught or acquired; that we always yearn for the impossible; that
enforced positivity can only be another form of dictatorship; that truth
is not factual; that to see and describe the truth is the closest we can
get to being authentic human beings.
Kundera’s novels assert that we can choose how to interpret
our history and that it is an unspeakable crime for anyone to force an
unwanted interpretation on anyone else. Free interpretation is the most
basic human freedom, worth acquiring at any cost.
Semprun’s works demonstrate that art can be an amazingly
powerful tool for survival in the most extreme circumstances; and that
art attains an even higher value for having been a survival tool in the
most extreme circumstances. According to Semprun, our lives are a
constant variation on a handful of early dreams and aspirations which
we slowly learn to mould into something a little closer to our liking.
Our confidence in this ever-evolving misinterpretation of life is
another powerful survival mechanism.
The progress of my study of literary migrants’ writings moved
from collective identity to the drama of the self. After elucidating the
process of language substitution in chapter one, I followed chosen
characteristics of the idiosyncratic expression of these writers, starting
from the macro-scale of larger, containing elements of European
cultural identity down to the smaller, contained components of the
splitting and coinciding, rejecting and absorbing self. Thus from the
most outward expression of literary immigration into French we
arrived at the first obvious verbalisations of personal trauma and the
metamorphosis that it triggers. I felt this order was necessary to bring
the reader through to the process of linguistic change which, in the
twentieth and twenty-first centuries, is first of all a personal and
individual phenomenon. The collective (Utopian forms) and the

particular (the double and incest) imagery and thought stand in
contrast to each other, but also grow out of each other and ultimately
represent the network that the writers build, on one hand for safety,
and on the other hand both to voice their personal history (however
abstract that voicing might be), and to reinforce their sense of the
becoming of their identity as French writers.
Immigrant writers often feel like impostors in their new
language and culture. Gary, in particular, frequently plays with the
idea of imposture in his work, most often by caricaturing it. For him,
imposture, however untenable, is the only path to authenticity. This
idea invites further exploration from the point of view of identity
formation, as well as in relation to second language adoption.
Texts written directly in French, even when they hint at the
proximity of another language, reveal in their themes, motifs and
forms, as well as in the way they contain references to another
language, the trauma and process of second language adoption. I
believe self-translation is a different case, since it to a large extent
attempts to hide both the process and the trauma. It allows the authors
to normalise their text for a different audience. For literary scholars,
self-translation makes a fertile subject of study, shedding light on the
author’s linguistic ability and aesthetics, but it does not reveal
significant new aspects specific to second language adoption. That
shortcoming may be a contributing factor in the difficulty that some
writers say they experience in the process of self-translation. My
conclusion, on which I have acted here, is that for the study of second
language adoption, the monolingual reading of the works offers a
more promising exploration than the bilingual one.
While an ideal self-translation might represent a smooth
accommodation of the substantial differences of two languages,
personalities and texts, it is obviously hard to attain, and its end result
would in a sense negate the heterogeneity of identities. Thus, we could
conjecture that self-translation provides a lesser mental reward for the
writer, because it does not provide continuity or appease
fragmentation. However, for those writers who enjoy translating their
own texts, that procedure doubtless offers its own rewards.
What distinguishes these polyglot writers from monolinguals,
and also from polylinguals, is that they have gone through a language
appropriation experience a second time, as adults. They verbalise this
CONCLUSION 315
experience from an essentially different perspective because they have

gone through it as adults. Although they refer to first language
acquisition, their perspective is a far cry from a nostalgic yearning for
a pre-linguistic universe. For them the adopted language a priori offers
a mesmerising and confusing richness of cultural and identity-related
meanings that are much further removed from, and much more
engrossing than, the original narcissistic scar conferred by the
appropriation of a first language. The plethora of linguistic riches can
at times be so overwhelming that the writer does actually express
nostalgia for the simplicity of a world defined by the original loss
(Semprun and Kristof).
The multilingual and multicultural viewpoint is both
superficial and profound in equal measure, in a manner that a
monolingual could never reproduce. The playfulness of this stance is
fostered by the wealth of cultural material the multilingual has access
to and which he has to structure selectively to avoid inundating his
reader. The superficiality is a result of having to be knowingly and
ironically reductive in relation to some facts to enhance the desired
meaning of others. Gary’s writing is the most obvious example of this,
although it can also be detected in the approach of Kristof, Kundera
and Semprun.
Immigrant writers’ choice of metaphors and topoi to qualify
second language acquisition would seem unusual if there were not
surprising similarities of choice to be seen in very different writers.
These similarities occur often enough to suggest that, while second
language adoption is a truly unique experience for each individual,
there are underlying biological, cultural and intellectual givens that
can at times turn a second language adoption into an experience that
different individuals can have in common. These similarities, which
have been discussed at length in this study, add a new dimension of
meaning to French literature.
The phenomenon of literary immigration into the French
language in the twentieth century raises important questions about
cultural identities today. The hospitality of the French language fulfils
the need of these writers to reinvent themselves and challenge the
assumptions of cultural belonging as well as those of globalisation.
The singularity of every literary immigrant reinforces the
impossibility of making cultural assumptions, in fact it even
challenges the social need to make cultural assumptions.
The study of non-native writers is still, and probably always

will be, subject to political and cultural bias. Their work in their
adopted language triggers mixed feelings of suspicion and admiration
in both their country of origin and their country of election. We find it
hard to judge the authenticity or quality of their work. Are they simply
copying native authors? If they are not, why don’t they just write in
their mother tongue? Are they opportunists who know they will
benefit from the lack of established criteria for appreciating their
writing? There may at times be a grain of truth in all of these
suspicions. However, in addition to the argument of transition to the
new culture which, as this study has insisted throughout, is essential
for personal and literary survival, I propose that literary immigrants in
general refuse to be defined by political circumstances. Those
circumstances undoubtedly have had a strong, if not determining,
influence on their lives, but these writers fight against the reduction of
their individuality and their life choices to political circumstances. The
remarkable works of immigrant literature are the accomplishment and
outcome of that struggle.
In an age when new scientific discoveries tend to reinforce the
view that human possibilities are comprehensively genetically
defined, the achievements of non-native writers give hope that the
boundaries of possibility are still extensible. The decision to choose
French which these writers faithfully enact entails a wilful change of
perspective and ongoing linguistic labour. This exciting linguistic
adventure represents many challenges for the writers, from finding
their own subject matter that can be at home in the French language,
developing their aesthetics and style in French, to building flexible yet
sustainable overarching identities, encompassing old and new, past
and future; all of these in the context of the French language and
literature, and Francophone culture.
Gary, Kristof, Kundera and Semprun are exceptional writers.
Their works contain many perspectives and they cannot be defined
solely as immigrant fiction. However, by virtue of their choice of
French as a language of their writing, they also impart to the reader
the complexities of their negotiations of a linguistic and cultural
identity, unique in each case, which contributes to today’s
understanding of evolving European and modern nomadic literary
identities.
Appendix 1
Plot summaries (in chronological order of publication)
Romain Gary – La Danse de Gengis Cohn (1967)
Genghis Cohn is a dibbuk (demonic spirit) of a Jewish comedian haunting the

psyche of a former Nazi, Schatz, since Schatz killed him in 1943. He is also the
main narrator of the story. In a satirical tongue-in-cheek tone, Cohn describes his
relationship with Schatz as friendship, although it is obvious that he takes
pleasure in torturing Schatz and in making him appear deranged or strange in
front of others. However, he always stops short of pushing him completely over
the edge of sanity as Schatz’s disappearance would also mean his own death. The
symbiotic relationship between the two is complex, ambiguous and allegorical.
Schatz is now a police chief superintendant in the middle of a complex

investigation into a series of murders committed in the forêt de Geist. As we
discover, the culprits are Lily, the Baronne von Pritwitz who personifies
humanity and Florian, the gamekeeper who personifies Death. Lily has run away
from her aristocratic husband with the impotent Florian to cure her frigidity and
is in an eternal search for a man who can satisfy her sexually. Meeting Lily
awakens idealism in all men and every last one of them cannot seem to resist
trying to satisfy her. Florian kills them all after they have failed to perform, to
punish them for their arrogance. The trail of death they leave behind them mimics
the bloody history of civilisation.
When everyone descends upon the forêt de Geist to stop the murderous couple,
the narration becomes more uncertain and fragmented. At times Schatz regains
control of the dual relationship and we see events from his viewpoint. At times
both Schatz and Cohn unite in resisting being expelled from the psyche of the
author. Who contains whom is left deliberately ambiguous and reversible.
Cohn succeeds in finding Lily and Florian and witnesses crucial scenes of
Florian’s temporary powerlessness to distribute death and his irritation with
Lily’s immoderate desires and lack of memory. Cohn is still an incorrigible
idealist and loves Lily (humanity) despite everything she has done to him. His
last temptation is to be assimilated into the human race.
The novel ends with the author waking up having fainted during his visit to the
Warsaw ghetto monument and with the last vision of Cohn still following Lily
and Florian. Florian reassures Lily that Cohn is quite harmless.
Romain Gary – Europa (1972)
French ambassador in Rome, Jean Danthès, a very cultured European passionate

about Europe, art and beauty, feels under pressure in the manipulative world of
diplomacy. His inherent feelings of guilt and his unsatisfied aspirations
increasingly submerge him in a world where insomnia and hallucination freely
mix with reality and he is no longer able to tell them apart.
Twenty-five years ago Danthès abandoned his notorious lover, Malwina von
Leyden, after a car accident which left her paralysed, in order to pursue his
diplomatic career. Now Malwina is back in his life with her daughter, Erika, and
her husband, the Baron von Putz zu Sterne (affectionately known as “Putzi”), in
an attempt to destroy him. Malwina von Leyden is an adventuress who pretends
to have lived through the past centuries and is still able to freely travel back in
time. Now in a wheelchair, this former prostitute and madam who claims to have
powers of clairvoyance is obsessed with vengeance and schemes to use Erika to
seduce Danthès. Danthès indeed falls for Erika, but the true allegiance of all the
characters is ambiguous throughout the novel: whether Erika is truly and
innocently in love with Danthès or just skilfully deceiving him following her
mother’s plan; whether Malwina is manipulating Danthès’ destiny or whether he
is unduly paranoid; whether Malwina, Erika and the Baron are invented by
Danthès, or he by them, or whether they are all created and controlled by
somebody else; whether Malwina and Erika are one and the same person;
whether the responsibility for the car accident and the break-up of their
relationship lies with Malwina or Danthès.
The narration is interspersed with meditations on Europe. Old and malevolent

Malwina and apparently young and pure Erika represent for Danthès two
opposing facets of his beloved Europe whilst he sees the Baron as the symbol of
fate.
Erika is emotionally fragile, experiences occasional worrying memory lapses and

is scared of the temptation to disappear into the imaginary. Danthès seems to her
the only link she has with reality. Realising the danger that Erika faces in the
hands of her mother, Danthès, the Baron and le comte de Saint-Germain all think
of making an effort to save Erika, but do too little. When Erika discovers that
Danthès is her father and that during her lost hours when she thought she was
visiting the eighteenth century with Danthès, she was in fact voluntarily taking
part in orgies with two Nazi brutes (one from the East, the other from the West),
she withdraws from reality and drowns herself in the lake. By killing his
imaginary Erika, Danthès has deliberately brought his journey to an end and can
no longer hide his insanity from the outside world.
The narrator confirms at the end that Danthès’ and Europe’s destiny are in fact
insignificant and have not in any way altered the status quo of the universe.
APPENDIX 1 319
Jorge Semprun – L’Algarabie (1981)
The action takes place during a single day of 31st October 1975 in an imaginary
Second Paris Commune, a multicultural and multilingual community of warriors,
intellectuals, criminals and libertines, established through civil unrest in 1968 and
comprising most of the Left Bank in Paris. The narrative starts with the encounter
of the main character, Rafael Artigas, on his way to obtain an official identity
which would allow him to return to Spain, with three thugs whom he manages to
overcome. They find him again at the end of the day, and of the novel, to claim
his life.
In the interim, the main narrative unfolds: Perséphone, a daughter of the old
Spanish anarchist Eleuterio Ruiz elopes with one of the warlords in the
Commune, Joe Aresti, having found out that the man she is interested in, Artigas,
is her real father. The Spanish community perceives this to be an abduction and
unites in trying to rescue her. Yannick de Kerhuel, who arrives in the Commune
to work in Aresti’s brothel, is in turn kidnapped by the army of her former lover
Auguste le Mao. In order to avoid the war, the Spaniards decide to propose an
alliance to le Mao against Aresti and to abduct Yannick and exchange her for
Perséphone. With le Mao’s approval, Artigas and his friends abduct Yannick at
the moment when she is causing chaos in the Maoist camp with her subversive
eroticism. Perséphone agrees to return home when she finds out that Artigas is
dead and the exchange takes place the following day.
The secondary narrative concerns a young German researcher Anna-Lise who

arrived a month earlier to conduct an interview with Artigas. She becomes
Artigas’ lover and records copious tapes of Artigas telling her his life story.
When Artigas’ best friend and alter-ego, Carlos-Maria Bustamante, hears one of
Anna-Lise’s tapes, he realises that the strange memories which have haunted him
over the last two years are Artigas’ memories. This transmigration seems to be
occurring as an announcement of Artigas’ death, after which it is Anna-Lise and
Carlos-Maria who complete Artigas’ story.
The primary story of the three “abductions” and the final exchange, and the
secondary story of the transmigration of memories are accompanied by various
other narratives, digressions, memories and meditations and the stories of other
secondary characters such as Paula Negri, Maxime Lecoq and the policewoman
Rose Beude who spies on all the other characters and, together with Anna-Lise
and Carlos-Maria, completes the missing pieces of the narrative.
Jorge Semprun – La Montagne blanche (1986)
The novel centres on a gathering of the central character, playwright Juan Larrea,
his new partner, Nadine Feierabend, Juan’s best friend, the painter Antoine de
Stermaria, his wife Franca Castellani and the theatre director Karel Kepela, at the
house of the Stermarias in Normandy, to celebrate Franca’s 40th birthday which is
also the anniversary of Antoine and Juan’s first meeting on 25th April 1942.
All the characters live in France/Paris, but all have different European origins –
Antoine is of Prussian descendance and has grown up in Prague, Juan, the alter-
ego of the author, is Spanish, Nadine is a German Jew, Franca is Italian and Karel
is Czech. As they are all highly educated and cultured, their conversations,
thoughts and reminiscences are criss-crossed with varied complex references to
European culture and history.
The underlying tension of the evening is the affair that Juan and Franca have been
involved in for some time and which Antoine is starting to sense. There is also a
slight jealousy between Franca and the much younger Nadine who’s a newcomer
to the triangular relationship of Antoine, Juan and Franca.
Juan was in fact the first the meet and fall in love with Franca, but had to leave
her to return to his wife. Antoine does not know this.
All three male characters have a libertine past. Each male character has complex
emotional baggage which he brings to the evening: for Karel it is a turbulent
personal history due to unfounded political persecution in Prague, accompanied
by a recent betrayal by his lover Ottla and an unsettled libertine existence; for
Antoine it is his first sexual relationship which was an incestuous liaison with his
aunt who subsequently committed suicide; for Juan it is the experience of the
Second World War concentration camps.
Juan wakes up early next morning and drowns himself in the Seine, having
decided not to continue living with the memories of the concentration camps.
APPENDIX 1 321
Agota Kristof – The trilogy
1. Le Grand Cahier (1986)
Le Grand Cahier contains the diary of twin brothers whose mother left them in
the care of their grandmother in a small town at the beginning of a war. The
grandmother is a coarse and crude peasant woman who treats the twins in a very
rough manner, but nevertheless provides for them during very hard times. She
forces the twins to work to earn their keep. Shaped by the hard times, the twins
become quite physically and mentally strong, ruthless and self-sufficient.
Their diary keeps an account of their exploits: exercises of physical and mental
endurance and experimentation with begging, pretending to be blind and deaf,
fasting, cruelty, theatrical performance. They try to continue to educate
themselves after the school closes down, using their father’s dictionary and the
Bible they found at grandmothers. They also meet various other people who
suffer in different ways, amongst them: the daughter of a neighbour, Bec-de-
Lièvre, who begs and steals to survive and support her mother and is raped and
killed by the soldiers; the deserter whom they help; the cobbler who gives them
boots that they cannot afford and who is later deported.
When their mother comes back for them with their newborn step-sister, the twins
refuse to leave with her. At that moment a shell kills both their mother and step-
sister whom they bury in the garden. Later, the twins unearth and clean their two
skeletons and keep them in the attic. After the end of the war the twins pretend to
be seriously traumatised in order to be excused from having to attend school.
After the grandmother dies, the twins continue to live in her house.
When their father comes to ask them to help him cross the border which is very
near their house, they use him to enable one of them to escape abroad. Their
father is killed by the mines and one of the twins successfully crosses the border.
2. La Preuve (1988)
La Preuve continues the narrative of the brother who remained in the

grandmother’s house, whose name is Lucas. He is now fifteen years old and is
considered to be the village idiot. The novel starts with the police investigation of
the dead body of Lucas’ father found near the border, and then recounts Lucas’
depression during which he neglects his animals, house, garden and daily tasks,
does not leave the house and completely loses track of time. After a while he
partly recovers.
Lucas then befriends the owner of the bookshop, Victor, and his friend Peter, a
high-ranking party official. He also regularly brings food to the priest and plays
chess with him until the priest retires to the monastery due to his old age. On
New Years’ eve Lucas rescues a young woman called Yasmine with her
illegitimate child by her father, Mathias, whom she was attempting to drown.
Yasmine and Mathias start living with Lucas.
Looking for good books that have been forbidden by the regime, Lucas goes into
the public library and meets the thirty-five year old librarian Clara who is
severely traumatised by her husband’s execution for treason three years before.
Fascinated by her, he starts following her and spying on her, trying to help and
control her at the same time, and she slowly lets him into her life. When Lucas
discovers that she is having an affair with a married doctor, he confronts him and
threatens to kill him if he does not stop their relationship. The doctor
subsequently leaves town with his family and Lucas starts an affair with Clara.
He spends his days with Yasmina and Mathias and his nights with Clara. One day
Yasmina disappears. Lucas explains to Mathias that she has left for the city. He
then moves with Mathias to the bookshop he has bought from Victor, who in turn
leaves to live with his sister in the country. When the unrest starts, Clara leaves
for the capital to avenge her husband and does not return.
Peter brings Lucas the news that Victor has been imprisoned and subsequently
condemned to death for strangling his sister. He also gives Lucas Victor’s
manuscript which explains the course of events which led him to murder. This
manuscript describing the dependent relationship between siblings forms a self-
contained part of La Preuve.
When Mathias starts going to school, he is abused by other children because of

his physical deformity and outstanding intelligence, but refuses to fight back or
leave school. Feeling excluded and unloved by Lucas, he commits suicide at the
age of seven.
In the penultimate section of the book, the narrative for the first time comes back
to Claus who returns to the little town of his childhood. Peter who is now running
the bookshop recognises him, thinking that he is Lucas. Lucas had disappeared
APPENDIX 1 323
some time earlier, at the age of thirty, five years after Mathias’ death, when
Yasmine’s body was discovered in the river next to the grandmother’s house.
Following Lucas’ wishes, Peter hands over Lucas’ notebooks to his brother
Claus. They end with the story of Mathias’ death. Peter now cares for Clara who
has returned but is unable to do very much for herself. He also still keeps the
three skeletons in the house: that of the twin’s mother and step-sister, and
Mathias whom Lucas exhumed to be close to him.
The epilogue of La Preuve is a letter from the police to the embassy asking the
repatriation of the foreign national Claus T, aged fifty, who overstayed in the
country without an appropriate visa. The letter negates the existence of Lucas,
claims that the manuscript found in Claus’ possession was written by him and
confirms that the only non-fictional person the manuscript refers to is the
character of the grandmother.
3. Le Troisième Mensonge (1991)
Whilst in prison in his native town, Claus narrates the story of his childhood. He
was sent to the hospital at the age of four, at the beginning of the war, because of
his crippled leg, and stayed there for five years. He was cruel to other children
out of jealousy because they received letters and packages from their families
while his family never made contact with him. When the hospital was bombed,
Claus survived because his teacher protected him with her body and was killed in
his place. After the bombing, Claus pretended to be deaf and dumb in order not to
have to answer any questions. He was then taken into a little town and left in the
care of an old peasant woman whom he called “grandmother”. When she died,
the authorities forced him to give up her property to the state and wanted to find
someone else to take care of him as he was still only fifteen. This was when he
decided to leave. He crossed the border with another man, who was killed by a
mine. He then lied to the authorities of the new country, saying that the man he
tried to cross the border with was his father, that he was eighteen, three years
older than he actually was, and that his name was Claus. This is the first time we
find out that his real name is Lucas.
Claus, that is Lucas, then tells us how he returns to the country and the town
where he spent his childhood after forty years of living abroad, because he is
seriously ill and wants to die in his home town. He wants to find his brother, but
is not sure whether he really exists or is just a figment of his imagination. He is
arrested for hitting a man in a bar and as his visa has long expired, he is handed
over to his embassy for repatriation. At the embassy he feels severe heart pain
again and is taken to see a cardiologist who tells him that his heart is healthy and
that the pain he has been experiencing is due to his depression and anxiety. The
embassy official traces a man with the same name and surname, except that his
first name is spelt with a K instead of a C, Klaus T, who is a well-known poet.
Lucas goes to see where Klaus lives and recognises the house of his parents. He
decides to make an appointment to see him. His narrative ends as he dials Klaus’
telephone number.
In the second section of the book the narrator is Klaus. He receives the phone call
from his brother wanting them to meet, but rebuffs him, pretending that he does
not believe him. Lucas insists and manages to agree a brief meeting. Klaus knows
that the caller is his brother, but does not want to let him into his life after fifty
years of absence, afraid that his habits and tranquillity will be disturbed and that
Lucas’ return will reopen old wounds. Klaus lives with his old mother who is
abusive towards him, despite the fact that he dutifully takes care of her, and
constantly unfavourably compares him to his missing brother Lucas. During the
meeting with Lucas, Klaus again refuses to recognise him as his brother and lies
to him regarding his past and present life, saying that his brother Lucas and both
of his parents are dead. Lucas leaves his manuscript with Klaus for him to finish
it.
APPENDIX 1 325
Klaus continues Lucas’ manuscript and the reader finds out the other side of
Lucas’ story. At the beginning of the war the twins’ mother shot their father after
he announced that he was leaving the family for another woman with whom he
was going to have a child. During the incident Lucas was accidentally injured by
a stray bullet. A pregnant woman called Antonia volunteered to take care of
Klaus. At the age of eight Klaus confronts Antonia and finds out the truth about
the events: that his father is dead, his mother in a mental hospital, that his brother
was paralysed after the accident and is now in a hospital in another town where
they are hoping to cure him, and that Antonia is the woman for whom his father
wanted to leave their family.
Antonia and her parents take good care of Klaus for seven years. At one point
Antonia even attempts to find Lucas. The relationship between Klaus and his
half-sister, Antonia’s daughter Sarah, gets dangerously close to incest, at which
point Antonia lets Klaus return to live with his mother who has been released
from the hospital. Ridden by guilt, his mother is only interested in Lucas as she
thinks she has killed him, and treats Klaus badly. Klaus leaves school at fourteen
and goes into apprenticeship to become a typesetter. Sarah returns to see him
once, but he rebuffs her. He continues to live with his mother and later becomes a
published poet.
Two days after the meeting with Lucas, an embassy official informs Klaus that
Lucas has thrown himself under a train. Still refusing to acknowledge the family
relationship between them, Klaus nevertheless allows Lucas to be buried next to
their father and visits their graves daily. He believes their family will soon be
reunited, as when his mother dies, there will be no purpose for him to continue
living.
Agota Kristof – Hier (1995)
Tobias Horvath has been leading a monotonous and depressing existence as a

watch factory worker for the last ten years. In his spare time he writes. He hides
his family history from everyone. His mother Esther was a village prostitute, a
beggar and a thief. When Tobias found out that his school teacher Sandor, who
was also one of his mother’s clients, is his father, he stabbed them both and run
away to another country. In the new country he took on the name of Sandor
Lester, which he invented as a combination of his parents’ names.
Tobias meets a group of his compatriots with whom he starts to socialise.

Amongst them are Paul, his wife Kati and her sister Véra. When Paul and Kati go
on holiday, Véra commits suicide because she and Paul love each other. Paul
disappears shortly afterwards and Kati has to rebuild her life.
Tobias believes that a woman called Line whom he loves will soon appear in his
life and she does. Line starts working at the same factory and taking the same bus
journey to work. But it is not the imaginary Line, but a real Line – a legitimate
daughter of his father. He starts following and stalking her at first and then plucks
up the courage to talk to her; he finds out that she is married and has a child, and
also that he did not kill his parents. He never tells her that she is his half-sister.
Tobias and Line slowly start to get to know each other better and become fond of
each other. But Line tells him that she could never marry him because he is a
factory worker and a son of a prostitute. She wants to return to their home
country with her husband and daughter and invites Tobias to come back too. But
he does not want to leave and wants to keep Line with him as she has become his
sole reason for living. Line gets pregnant by her husband Koloman, but has an
abortion because Koloman thinks that the child was Tobias’. Line refuses to stay
with Tobias in the new country or to go back to their home country with him.
Realising that he has lost her, the only thing Tobias can do is to stab Koloman.
Tobias thinks he killed him, but Koloman survives the injuries and agrees not to
prosecute Tobias if Line lets him take care of their child after the divorce. Line
and her family then return to their home country.
The epilogue states that Tobias married his former girlfriend Yolande whom he
never loved and had two children by her: Line and Tobias. He continued working
at the factory, and stopped writing.
APPENDIX 1 327
Milan Kundera – La Lenteur (1995)
Two simultaneous stories, both located in a French chateau but with two
centuries between them, detail experiences of sexual seduction in the eighteenth
and twentieth centuries. The eighteenth-century narrative is based on Vivant
Denon’s short story Point de Lendemain which tells how Madame de T.
summons a young nobleman to her chamber and gives him an unforgettable
lesson in the art of seduction and the pleasures of love. In the morning her official
lover tells the young man that he was only used to deflect the suspicions of
Madame de T.’s husband and that Madame de T. is frigid – which contradicts the
young man’s experience. However the young man is able to rise above the
possibility that he has been used and ridiculed and to enjoy the memory of the
night spent with Madame de T.
Vincent, the twentieth-century counterpart of Denon’s nobleman, misses the

opportunity to seduce Julie, a young woman he meets, distracted by his desire to
be the centre of attention at a convention of entomologists. In the twentieth
century, public seduction enacted by media personalities such as Berck and
Duberques is more successful than private seduction, such as the encounter of
Vincent and Julie. At school Berck was in love with Immaculata whose rejection
he experienced as an unforgettable humiliation. Now that he is famous,
Immaculata develops an obsession for him, but Berck does not want her
anywhere near him as her presence reminds him of his past failure and makes him
feel ridiculed. Berck in turn rejects and insults Immaculata, and her sexual
relationship with her cameraman bears the brunt of this humiliation and becomes
a tortured and non-erotic dependence. Although Vincent considers himself to be
better than media personalities like Berck, whom he despises, his approach to his
personal life is solely guided by consideration of how his experiences will be
perceived by his friends, and his main concern is to glamorise them for their
benefit.
Denon’s nobleman and Vincent meet in the courtyard in the morning. Fearing the
ridicule of his peers, Vincent speeds off on his motorcycle in order to forget his
humiliating experience. The young nobleman, on the other hand, relives the
pleasures of the night whilst slowly travelling in his carriage. Their very different
approaches to life, opposing slowness to speed; memory to forgetting; pleasure to
humiliation; discretion to transparency, stand for the different social expectations
of the two different centuries.
Appendix 2
Biographical outlines
The main authors
Romain Gary (1914 - 1980)
Romain Gary was born to a Jewish family on 21st May 1914 in Vilnius
(then part of the Russian empire, today in Lithuania) as Roman
Kacew. Romain and his mother Nina Owczynska emigrated to France
in 1928 and settled in Nice. Gary went to school in Nice and then
studied Law in Paris.
He was naturalised in 1935 and served in the French army during the
Second World War. His diplomatic career (1945-1961) took him to
Sofia, Bern, Bolivia, Los Angeles and New York (UN). His first wife
was the English writer Lesley Blanch (1904-2007) and his second
wife was the American actress Jean Seberg (1938-1979).
His first book, L’Éducation européenne, appeared in 1945. He also

published novels under the pseudonyms Emile Ajar, Shatan Bogat and
Fosco Sinibaldi. He obtained the Goncourt prize for Les racines du
ciel in 1956. He was awarded a second Goncourt in 1975 for the novel
La vie devant soi, written under the pseudonym Emile Ajar. Since it is
impossible for the same author to receive the Goncourt twice, Paul
Pavlowich (Gary’s nephew, whom he used to throw the public off the
scent as to his authorship) refused the prize.
Apart from French, Gary was fluent in English, Russian and Polish.
He wrote Lady L, Talent Scout (Les Mangeurs d’étoiles), The Ski
Bum, The Gasp (Charge d’âme), Flight Direct to Allah (Les Têtes de
Stéphanie) and White Dog directly in English. He committed suicide
on 8th December 1980.
Agota Kristof (1935 - )
Agota Kristof was born on 30th October 1935 in Csikvand, Hungary.

When the Russian army invaded Hungary in November 1956, Kristof
left the country with her husband, who used to be her history teacher,
and her four-months-old daughter. They traveled to Vienna, with the
intention of emigrating to the United States, but the fear and
uncertainty of this long voyage convinced them to settle in French-
speaking Switzerland (Suisse Romande). She worked in a watch-
making factory where she slowly learnt the language of her adopted
country. She wrote her first play in French, Le Rat qui passe, in 1972
and completed her first novel Le Grand Cahier at the age of 51.
Published in 1986, Le Grand Cahier achieved great success, was
translated into many languages and awarded the title Livre Européen.
Her second husband was a Swiss photographer. She is now divorced
and lives in Neuchâtel. She was awarded the prestigious Swiss literary
prize Prix Gottfried Keller in 2001.
APPENDIX 2 331
Milan Kundera (1929 - )
Milan Kundera was born on 1st April 1929 in Brno in the family of
Ludvík Kundera, a well-known Czech musicologist and pianist. He
started studying literature and aesthetics in Prague, but transferred to
the Film Academy, where he first attended lectures in film direction
and then in script writing. In 1952 he was appointed lecturer in world
literature at the Film Academy. His first book, a collection of lyrical
poems, was published in 1953. He subsequently wrote several novels
and plays in Czech.
He joined the ruling Czechoslovak Communist Party in 1948 and was

expelled in 1950. He was then re-admitted in 1956 and expelled again
in 1970. As a consequence of his involvement in the “Prague Spring”,
he was dismissed from his teaching post and his books were
withdrawn from bookshops and libraries. In 1975, Milan Kundera and
his wife left Czechoslovakia for France. Kundera taught at the
University of Rennes until 1978 when he moved to Paris and taught at
the Ecole des Hautes Etudes.
In 1979 the Czech government took away his Czechoslovakian

citizenship in reaction to his Book of Laughter and Forgetting. He
obtained French citizenship in 1981.
In 1982 Kundera completed the novel The Unbearable Lightness of

Being (first published in Czech in Toronto, 1985, definitive French
edition 1987), which made him an internationally well-known author,
especially after it was turned into a film by Philip Kaufman in 1988.
La Lenteur, 1995, is the first work of fiction that Milan Kundera wrote
in French. He lives in Paris with his wife, Vera Hrabankova.
Jorge Semprun (1923 - )
Jorge Semprun was born on 10th December 1923 in Madrid into a

notable Republican family, the son of a Republican diplomat and
grandson of a prime minister of the king Alfonso XII. At the
beginning of the Spanish civil war in 1936 his family went into exile.
Semprun pursued his schooling in The Hague, then Paris, where he
studied philosophy at the Sorbonne. He joined the resistance
movement in 1941 and the Spanish communist party in 1942, and was
arrested by the Gestapo and deported to Buchenwald in 1943. He
came back to Paris in 1945. He worked as a translator for Unesco until
1952, and from 1953 until 1962 worked clandestinely for the Spanish
Communist Party against Franco’s regime, using the pseudonym
Federico Sanchez.
He published his first novel, Le Grand Voyage, about his experiences

in the concentration camps in 1963, and when he was excluded from
the Spanish Communist Party in 1964, he devoted himself fully to his
writing. In addition to novels, he has also written several screenplays,
among them the screenplay for Alain Resnais’ La Guerre est finie
(1966). He wrote most of his books in French except for the
Autobiographie de Federico Sanchez (1977), his account of his time
in the Spanish Communist Party.
From 1988 to 1991 he was Spanish Minister of Culture in the

government of Felipe Gonzalez. He has won numerous literary prizes
and was elected a member of the Académie Goncourt in 1996. He
lives in Paris.
APPENDIX 2 333
Other immigrants
Linguistic and literary immigrants into French
a. Europeans
Vassilis Alexakis (1943 - ) – novelist

Alexakis was born in Athens on 25th December 1943. In 1961 he
received a scholarship to study journalism in Lille. He returned to
Greece in 1964 to complete his military service. After the military
coup in Greece, he returned to Paris in 1968 where he worked as a
journalist and cartoonist. He published his first novel written in
French in 1974. He wrote his first novel in Greek in 1982. The same
year he directed his first film. He lives in Paris, in Athens and on the
island Tinos in Greece.
Samuel Beckett (1906 - 1989) – playwright

Beckett was born on 13th April 1906 in Foxrock near Dublin. He
moved to Paris in 1937. All his major works, and particularly during
the period 1945 –1957, were originally written in French. In 1969 he
was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature.
Giovanni Giacomo Casanova (1725 - 1798) – adventurer and writer

Casanova was born in Venice, Italy, probably on 5th April, 1725. He
spent most of his life almost continually on the move over the whole
of Europe until he finally settled in 1785 at the chateau of Dux in
Bohemia. There he worked as librarian until his death on 4th June
1798. During his adventurous life he performed various professions
including that of a churchman, musician, soldier, spy and diplomat,
but is mostly remembered as a notorious seducer of women. He wrote
a number of works, some of fiction, others on a variety of subjects
including politics and mathematics. His early works are mostly written
in Italian, but from 1780 he had an increasing predilection for writing
in French. Most of his literary fame rests upon the notorious
autobiography, Histoire de ma vie, written in Dux. Its first integral,
uncut edition appeared in 1960.
Michel del Castillo (1933 - ) – novelist

Del Castillo was born on 2nd August 1933 in Madrid to a Spanish
mother and French father. When the Spanish civil war broke out he
was taken into an orphanage in Barcelona and later left for France
with his mother. After surviving the Nazi camps, he returned to
France and started to write. His first novel was published in 1957. All
his published fictional work is written in French.
E. M. Cioran (1911 - 1995) – philosopher

Cioran was born in R inari (Rumania) on 8th April 1911, where his
father was a priest. He studied philosophy at the University in
Bucarest and graduated in 1932 with a thesis on Bergson. In 1933 he
received a scholarship to study in Germany. He returned to Romania
in 1936 where he taught philosophy at a high school in Bra ov until
1937. His first book in Romanian, Pe culmile disperarii (Sur les cimes
du désespoir) appeared in 1934. In 1937 he was awarded a scholarship
for a doctorate in France and moved to Paris where he was to spend
the rest of his life. He published another four books in Romanian
before deciding to switch to French in 1947. His first work in French,
Précis de décomposition, was published by Gallimard in 1949.
Mircea Eliade (1907 - 1986) – philosopher and historian of religions

Eliade was born in Bucharest where he studied philosophy. In 1928 he
sailed to Calcutta to study Sanskrit and Indian philosophy and lived
for six months in the hermitage in the Himalayas. It was at this time
that his analysis of the meaning of language, symbolism and systems
employed by various religious traditions began to evolve. Upon his
return to Bucharest in 1932 he successfully submitted his analysis of
Yoga as his doctoral thesis in the Philosophy department, and
subsequently remained at the university to teach history of religions
and Indian philosophy. After the Second World War, Eliade was
unable to remain in the newly communist Romania because of his
connections with the Romanian right-wing. In 1945 he moved to Paris
where his acquaintance with Georges Dumézil secured a post for him
at the École des Hautes Études teaching comparative religion. From
this time on almost all of Eliade’s scholarly works were written in
French. In 1958 he became the chairman of the History of Religions
department in Chicago. He stayed there until his death in 1986,
publishing scholarly works and writing largely unpublished fiction.
APPENDIX 2 335
Claude Esteban (1935 - ) – poet

Born in Paris to a French mother and Spanish father, Esteban has
published many poetry collections in French. He was also in charge of
a well-known poetry magazine, Argile (1974-1981), and the
Flammarion poetry collection (1984-1993) and has taught Spanish
literature at the Sorbonne. He has translated many works from Spanish
into French, including texts by Octavio Paz, Jorge Guillén and
Federico Garcia Lorca. He lives in Paris.
Julia Kristeva (1941 - ) – linguist, psychoanalyst and literary theorist

Born in Bulgaria in 1941, Kristeva obtained a doctorate in linguistics
at Sofia University before emigrating to Paris in 1966. She was an
important member of the radical “Tel Quel” group in the 60s and 70s
and become a practising psychoanalyst in 1979. Throughout her
multidisciplinary work, written in French, she is concerned with
radicalising the politics of language.
Juan Larrea (1895 - 1980) – poet and historian

Larrea was born in Bilbao in 1895. A librarian by profession, in 1919
Larrea, together with his fellow poet Gerardo Diego, came under the
influence of the Chilean Vincente Huidobro, a bilingual poet based in
Paris, who wrote in a Creationist or cubist style. In 1921 Larrea met
Huidobro in person in Madrid and in 1923 visited him in France. In
1924 at Huidobro’s apartment he met the Peruvian poet César Vallejo,
who became his closest friend. Larrea was already writing his poetry
almost solely in French since 1922, but in 1926 he moved
permanently to Paris in order to devote himself to poetry. He ceased to
write poetry in 1932. In 1939 he emigrated to America (Mexico, the
United States and then Argentina), and from 1956 worked as a history
lecturer at the Córdoba University in Argentina. He died in Córdoba in
1980. The first complete edition of his poems was published in 1969
in Turin (Italy).
Ghérasim Luca (1913 - 1994) – poet

Born in Bucarest in 1913 to a liberal Jewish family, Luca was in
contact with the French and German languages from an early age.
When the Second World War broke out he happened to be visiting
Paris. He managed to return to Romania and to survive the war there.
In 1952 he left Romania and settled in Paris. He wrote poetry in
Romanian and French and often performed. Troubled by the
resurgence of anti-Semitism and racism, Luca committed suicide in
January 1994.
Katalin Molnár (1951 - ) – poet

Born in Budapest on 3rd February 1951, Molnár studied French and
Hungarian language and literature at University of Budapest. She has
been living and working in Paris since 1979. She has published work
in French and Hungarian, both in Hungary and France.
Régine Robin (1939 -) – writer and academic

Born in Paris of Polish Jewish parents, Robin obtained a first degree
and doctorate in history at the University of Paris. Since 1982 she has
been teaching in the Sociology department at the University of
Quebec in Montreal. She writes fiction and theoretical works on
multiculturalism and other historical, linguistic and sociological
issues.
Tzvetan Todorov (1939 - ) – literary and cultural theorist

Born in Bulgaria and living in France since 1963, Todorov is the
director of research at the Centre National de la Recherche
Scientifique (CNRS) in Paris. He is the author of many books in
French on literary theory, history, politics and culture. He is married
to the writer Nancy Huston.
APPENDIX 2 337
b. Others
Jacques Derrida (1930 - 2004) – philosopher

Born in El Biar, a suburb of Algiers, to a Jewish family, Derrida
travelled to France for the first time in 1949. He subsequently
completed his education in France, but had to go back to Algeria
during the war for his military service. He felt that French was the
only language he could use, although it was not his language.
Julian Green or Julien Green (1900 - ) – novelist

Of American parentage, Green was born and brought up in Paris.
From 1919 he studied at University of Virginia where he started
writing his first stories in English in 1920. Upon his return to France
after attending the University, he first wanted to be a painter and
subsequently started to write in French. He has written most of his
fiction work in French, but has occasionally also written or translated
his work into English. In 1971, he became the first foreigner to be
accepted as a member of the Académie française.
Nancy Huston (1953 - ) – novelist

Huston was born in 1953 in Calgary (Canada). When she was fifteen,
her family moved to Boston. She studied in New York and came in
Paris in 1973, where she completed her M.A. with a thesis on swear
words under the supervision of Roland Barthes. She has remained in
Paris ever since. Despite not even having begun to learn French before
she left Canada, Huston chose French as her language of literary
expression. Since 1980, she has published many books of fiction in
French.
Sergio Kokis (1944 - ) – novelist and painter

Born in Rio de Janeiro on 6th May 1944, Kokis lived through a
tumultuous childhood and at the age of nine was sent to a correctional
institution as a vagrant. Nevertheless he pursued studies in art and
philosophy in Rio. From 1963, he participated in various illegal
political activities as well as in the paramilitary movements against the
dictatorship for which he was arrested and put on trial. He graduated
in philosophy in 1966 and was awarded a scholarship to go to France
where he completed an M.A. in psychology in 1969 at the University
of Strasbourg. He migrated to Canada in 1969, first to Gaspé, where
he found work at the psychiatric hospital. He moved to Montreal in

1970 where he completed his doctorate in clinical psychology in 1973.
He wrote his first novel in French, Le Pavillon des miroirs, in 1994.
He slowly moved away from the practice of psychology and since
May 1997 has devoted himself fully to painting and writing.
Joyce Mansour (1928 -1986) – poet

Of Egyptian descent, born in England and raised in Cairo, Mansour
was the only woman to be admitted into the French Surrealist
movement. She moved to Paris in 1953 and wrote her poetry in
French.
APPENDIX 2 339
Linguistic and literary immigrants into English
Moris Farhi (1935 - ) – writer and poet

Born in Ankara, Turkey. Although Turkish, Ladino and French are his
mother tongues, he mainly writes in English. He has been an active
campaigner through PEN, on behalf of persecuted writers.
Eva Hoffman (1945 - ) – editor and writer

Eva Hoffman’s Jewish parents survived the Holocaust in living in
hiding in Ukraine. She was born in Poland in 1945 and emigrated to
Vancouver, Canada with her parents in 1959. Having received a Ph.D.
in English and American Literature from Harvard in 1974, Eva
Hoffman has been a professor of literature and of creative writing at
several institutions and universities. She was also an editor and writer
at The New York Times from 1979-90. She has written on a variety of
cultural subjects. She currently lives in London.
Vladimir Nabokov (1899 - 1977) – novelist

Nabokov was born in St. Petersburg into a rich and cultured liberal
family, learning French and English from an early age. His family left
Russia in 1919, following the Bolshevik revolution. He studied Slavic
and Romance languages at Trinity College, Cambridge, obtaining an
honours degree in 1922. He then lived in Berlin and Paris, writing in
Russian. In 1940 he was forced to leave France for the United States.
There he taught in universities and switched to writing his fiction in
English. His first novel in English, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight,
written in Paris in 1938-1939, was published in the United States in
1941. He achieved fame with the novels written in his American
period which are considered his greatest works. In 1959 he moved to
Switzerland, where he died in 1977.
George Steiner (1929 -) – academic and literary theorist

Steiner was born in Paris into a family of Austrian Jews who fled
Vienna in 1924. He was taught French, German and English from an
early age. His family moved to the United States in 1940, Steiner
became a US citizen in 1944 and was educated at the Universities of
Paris, Chicago, Harvard, Oxford and Cambridge. He taught literature
at the Universities of Cambridge and Geneva. He lives in Cambridge,
England.
Appendix 3
Diagram of relationships in La Montagne blanche
Bibliography
Main literary works (novels) studied
Gary, Romain, La Danse de Gengis Cohn (Paris: Gallimard, 1967)

Gary, Romain, Europa (Paris: Gallimard, Folio, 1972)
Kristof, Agota, Le Grand Cahier, La Preuve, Le Troisième Mensonge
(Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1991)
Kristof, Agota, Hier (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1995)
Kundera, Milan, La Lenteur (Paris: Gallimard, 1995)
Semprun, Jorge, L’Algarabie (Paris: Fayard, 1981)
Semprun, Jorge, La Montagne blanche (Paris: Gallimard, Folio, 1986)
Translations into English of main literary works studied
Gary, Romain, The Dance Gengis Cohn, translated by the author with
the assistance of Camilla Sykes (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books,
1978)
Gary, Romain, Europa, translated by Barbara Bray and the author
(New York: Doubleday & Company Inc, 1978)
Kristof, Agota, The Notebook, translated by Alan Sheridan, The Proof,
translated by David Watson, The Third Lie, translated by Marc
Romano (New York: Grove Press, 1997)
Kristof, Agota, Yesterday, translated by David Watson (London:
Vintage, 1997)
Kundera, Milan, Slowness, translated by Linda Asher (London: Faber
and Faber, 1996)
Other literary works by literary immigrants studied
Ajar, Emile (Romain Gary), Gros-Câlin (Paris: Mercure de France,

1974)
Ajar, Emile (Romain Gary), Pseudo (Paris: Mercure de France, 1976)
Alexakis, Vassilis, La Langue maternelle (Paris: Fayard, 1995)
Alexakis, Vassilis, Paris-Athènes (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1989)
Brodsky, Joseph, “A Room and a Half”, Less than One: Selected
Essays (London: Viking, 1986)
Casanova, Giacomo, Icosaméron (Paris: François Bourin, 1988)
Casanova, Giacomo, Mon apprentissage à Paris (Paris: Rivages
Poche, 1998)
Castillo, Michel del, Le Crime des pères (Paris: Editions du Seuil,
1993)
Cioran, E. M., Cahiers 1957-1972 (Paris: Gallimard, 1997)
Cioran, E. M., Œuvres (Paris: Quarto Gallimard, 1995)
Esteban, Claude, Le Partage des mots (Paris: Gallimard, 1990)
Gary, Romain, Adieu Gary Cooper (Paris: Gallimard, 1969)
Gary, Romain, Clair de femme (Paris: Gallimard, 1977)
Gary, Romain, Les Clowns lyriques (Paris: Gallimard, 1979)
Gary, Romain, Éducation européene (Paris: Gallimard, 1956)
Gary, Romain, “Les Français libres”, Ode à l’homme qui fut la France
et autres textes sur le général de Gaulle (Paris: Gallimard, Folio,
2000)
Gary, Romain, Lady L (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1959)
Gary, Roman, La Nuit sera calme (Paris, Folio, 1974)
Gary, Romain, Pour Sganarelle, Recherche d‘un personnage et d’un
roman (Paris: Gallimard, 1965)
Gary, Romain, La Promesse de l’aube (Paris: Gallimard, 1960)
BIBLIOGRAPHY 345
Gary, Romain, La Tête coupable (Paris: Gallimard, 1968)

Gary, Romain, Tulipe (Paris: Gallimard, 1970)
Gary, Romain, Vie et mort d’Emile Ajar, Les œuvres complètes
d’Emile Ajar (Paris: Mercure de France, 1991)
Gary, Romain, White Dog (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2004)
Green, Julien, Le Langage et son double (Paris: Éditions du Seuil,
1987)
Hoffman, Eva, Lost in Translation, Life in a New Language (London:
Minerva, 1991)
Huston, Nancy, Nord perdu (Arles: Actes Sud, 1999)
Huston, Nancy, Tombeau de Romain Gary (Arles: Actes Sud, Babel,
1995)
Huston, Nancy, and Leïla Sebbar, Lettres parisiennes, Histoires d’exil
(Paris: Bernard Barrault, 1986)
Jabès, Edmond, Le Livre de l’hospitalité (Paris: Gallimard, 1991)
Kokis, Sergio, Errances (Québec: XYZ éditeur, 1996)
Kristof, Agota, L’Analphabète (Genève: Éditions Zoé, 2000)
Kristof, Agota, C’est égal (Paris: Seuil, 2005)
Kristof, Agota, “La Clé de l’ascenseur”, La Nouvelle Revue
Française, No 530 (Mars 1997), 25-38
Kristof, Agota, “Le Monstre”, La Nouvelle Revue Française, Nos
534-535 (Juillet-Août 1997), 6-36
Kristof, Agota, Où es-tu Mathias? (Genève: Éditions Zoé, 2005)
Kundera, Milan, L’Art du roman (Paris: Gallimard, 1986)
Kundera, Milan, Jacques et son maître, hommage à Denis Diderot
(Paris: Gallimard, 1981)
Kundera, Milan, L’Identité (Paris: Gallimard, 1997)
Kundera, Milan, L’Ignorance (Paris: Gallimard, 2003)
Kundera, Milan, L’Insoutenable Légèreté de l’être (Paris: Gallimard,

Folio, 1989)
Kundera, Milan, L’Immortalité (Paris: Gallimard, Folio, 1993)
Kundera, Milan, Le Livre du rire et de l’oubli (Paris: Gallimard, Folio,
1985)
Kundera, Milan, “Un Occident kidnappé”, Le Débat (Paris: Gallimard,
November 1983), No 27, 3-22
Kundera, Milan, “La ‘Parole’ de Milan Kundera refuse les interviews.
Il a cependant accepté de répondre au ‘Monde’ à sa manière, par
l’écriture”, Le Monde (www.lemonde.fr, 24 September 1993)
Kundera, Milan, Le Rideau (Paris: Gallimard, 2005)
Kundera, Milan, Les Testaments trahis (Paris: Gallimard, 1993)
Kundera, Milan, La Vie est ailleurs (Paris: Gallimard, Folio, 1973),
traduit de tchèque par François Kérel
Larrea, Juan, A Tooth for a Tooth (Lanham, MD: University Press of
America, 1987)
Larrea, Juan, Versión Celeste (Barcelona: Barral Editores, 1970)
Lê, Linda, Le Complexe de Caliban (Paris: Christian Bourgeois
Editeur, 2005)
Luca, Ghérasim, La Proie s’ombre (Paris: José Corti, 1991)
Mansour, Joyce, Prose et Poésie, Oeuvre complète (Arles: Actes Sud,
1991)
Molnár, Katalin, poèmesIncorrects et mauvaisChants chansTranscrits
(Paris: fourbis, 1995)
Nabokov, Vladimir, Bend Sinister (London: Penguin, 1974)
Nabokov, Vladimir, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (London:
Penguin Books, 1964)
Robin, Régine, La Québécoite (Montréal, XYZ, 1993)
Semprun, Jorge, Adieu, vive clarté… (Paris: Gallimard, 1998)
Semprun, Jorge, Autobiographie de Federico Sánchez, translated by
Claude and Carmen Durand (Paris: Edition du Seuil, 1978)
BIBLIOGRAPHY 347
Semprun, Jorge, La Deuxième Mort de Ramón Mercader (Paris:

Gallimard, 1969)
Semprun, Jorge, L’Écriture ou la vie (Paris: Gallimard, 1994)
Semprun, Jorge, L’Évanouissement (Paris: Gallimard, 1967)
Semprun, Jorge, Le Grand Voyage (Paris: Gallimard, 1963)
Semprun, Jorge, Mal et modernité, le travail dans l'histoire
(Castelnau-le-Lez: Climats, 1995)
Semprun, Jorge, Montand, la vie continue (Paris: Denoël, 1983)
Semprun, Jorge, Netchaïev est de retour (Paris: JC Lattès, 1987)
Semprun, Jorge, Quel beau dimanche! (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1980)
Semprun, Jorge, Les Sandales (www.lemonde.fr, 2001)
Sinibaldi, Fosco (Romain Gary), L’Homme à la colombe (Paris:
Gallimard, 1984)
Other literary works
Denon, Vivant, Point de lendemain (Paris: Gallimard, Folio classique,

1995)
Faulkner, William, Absalom, Absalom! (London: Vintage, 1995)
Gide, André, Paludes (Paris: Gallimard, 1920)
Moschus, Europa, edited with introduction and commentary by
Malcolm Campbell (Hildersheim: Olims-Weidmann, 1991)
Levi, Primo, The Search for Roots, A Personal Anthology
(Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Allen Lane, The Penguin Press, 2001)
Xingjian, Gao, Soul Mountain, translated from Chinese by Mabel Lee
(Sydney: HarperCollins, 2000)
Selected studies and articles on the authors
Romain Gary
Anissimov, Myriam, Romain Gary le caméléon (Paris: Denoël, 2004)

Blanch, Lesley, Romain, un regard particulier, translated from
English by Jean Lambert (Arles: Actes sud, 1998)
Boisen, Jørn, Un picaro métaphysique, Romain Gary et l’art du
roman (Odense: Odense University Press, 1996)
Hangouët, Jean-François and Paul Audi (eds.), Romain Gary (Paris:
Editions de l’Herne, 2005)
Larat, Fabrice, Romain Gary, Un itinéraire européen (Chêne-Bourg:
Edition Médecine et Hygiène, 1999)
Sacotte, Mireille (ed.), Romain Gary, écrivain – diplomate: colloque
du 2 février 2002 (Paris: Ministère des Affaires étrangères, 2003)
Sacotte, Mireille, Romain Gary et la pluralité des mondes (Paris:
Presses Universitaires de France, 2002)
Agota Kristof
Armel, Aliette, “Exercices de nihilisme”, Magazine littéraire, No 439

(February 2005), 92-97.
Bacholle, Michèle, Un passé contraignant: Double bind et
transculturation (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000)
Blaser, Françoise, “Agota Kristof, écrivain”, Passage, Magazine
culturel suisse, No 17 (autumn 1994), 34.
Bornand, Marie, “Agota Kristof, une écriture de l’exil”, Littérature
féminine en Suisse romande, Danielle Deltel and Catherine Verdonnet
(eds.), (Paris: Université Paris X, 1996), 133-165.
Durante, Erica, “Agota Kristof, du commencement à la fin de
l’écriture”, Recto/Verso, No 1
(www.revuerectoverso.com/spip.php?article19, June 2007).
BIBLIOGRAPHY 349
Kuhlman, Martha, “The Double Writing of Agota Kristof and the New
Europe”, Studies in Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. 27 No 1
(winter 2003), 123-140.
Petitpierre, Valérie, Agota Kristof: d’un exil l’autre (Genève: Editions
Zoé, 2000)
Sarrey-Strack, Colette, “Agota Kristof: écrivain étrangère de langue
française”, Lendemain, No 75/76 (1994), 183-190.
Savary, Philippe, “Auteur”, Le Matricule des Anges, No 14
(November 1995 - January 1996), 16-22.
Valenta, Eva Danielle, “Doubled selves and fractured childhoods: A
study of the récit d’enfance in Nathalie Sarraute, Agota Kristof and
Claude Esteban” (unpublished doctoral thesis, Cornell University,
1991)
Zand, Nicole, “Agota Kristof, ‘Le Grand Cahier’: Changer de peau”,
Le Monde (www.lemonde.fr, 12 September 1991)
Milan Kundera
Citati, Pietro, “La Joyeuse Froideur de Milan Kundera”, La Nouvelle

Revue française, 540 (janvier 1998), 84-96.
Clavel, André, “L'intransigeant amoureux de la France”, L’Express,
(livres.lexpress.fr/dossiers.asp/idC=6548/idR=4, 3 April 2003).
Cordle, Daniel, “States of Being not Being in States: Metaphysical
Border Crossing in the Work of Milan Kundera”, Displaced Persons,
Conditions of Exile in European Culture, Sharon Ouditt (ed.)
(Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), 128-137.
Draper, Marie-Ève, Libertinage et donjuanisme chez Kundera (Paris:
Les Éditions Balzac, 2002)
Le Grand, Eva, Kundera ou la mémoire du désir, (Paris: L’Harmattan;
Québec: XYZ éditeur, 1995)
Markovits, Benjamin, “Kiss me!”, London Review of Books, 20
February 2003, 16.
Maixent, Jocelyn, Le XVIIIe siècle de Milan Kundera (Paris: Presses

Universitaires de France, 1998)
Ricard, François, Le Dernier Après-midi d’Agnès, Essai sur l’œuvre
de Milan Kundera (Paris: Gallimard, 2003)
Jorge Semprun
Cortanze, Gérard de, Jorge Semprun, l’écriture de la vie (Paris:

Gallimard, 2004)
Davis, Colin, “Recalling the Past: Jorge Semprun’s La Montagne
blanche (1986)”, French Fiction in the Mitterrand Years, Colin Davis
and Elizabeth Fallaize (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 61-
82.
Nicoladzé, Françoise, La Deuxième Vie de Jorge Semprun (Castelnau-
le-lez: Éditions Climats, 1997)
Nicoladzé, Françoise, La Lecture et la vie (Paris: Gallimard, 2002)
Ortega, Marie-Linda, “La Littérature: une question d’accent”, Travaux
et Recherches de l’UMLV, Autour de Jorge Semprun, Numéro spécial
(Marne-la-Valée: Université de Marne-la-Valée, mai 2003), 21-31.
BIBLIOGRAPHY 351
General works
Europe
Astier, Colette and Claude de Grève (eds.), L'Europe, reflets

littéraires (Paris: Klincksieck, 1993)
Audi, Paul, L’Europe et son fantôme (Paris: Éditions Léo Scheer,
2003)
Bartillat, Christian de, and Alain Roba, Métamorphoses d’Europe,
trente siècles d’iconographie (Paris: Editions Bartillat, 2000)
Boccaccio, Giovanni, Famous women (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 2003)
Dawson, Christopher, Understanding Europe (London, New York:
Sheed and Ward, 1952)
Desbareille, Michèle Madonna (ed.), L’Europe, naissance d’une
utopie? (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1996)
Dubois, Claude-Gilbert (ed.), Utopie et utopies, L’imaginaire du
projet social européen (Bordeaux: Editions InterUniversitaires, 1994)
Garcia, Soledad (ed.), European Identity and the Search for
Legitimacy (London: Pinter Publishers, 1993)
Hay, Denys, Europe, The Emergence of an Idea (Edinburgh:
Hersant, Yves, and Fabienne Durand-Bogaert (eds.), Europes, de
l’antiquité au XXe siècle, anthologie critique et commentée (Paris:
Robert Laffont, 2000)
Husserl, Edmund, The Crisis of European Sciences and
Transcendental Phenomenology, translated by David Carr (Evanston:
Northwestern University, 1970)
Lukacs, John, Decline and Rise of Europe, a Study in Recent History
with Particular Emphasis on the Development of European
Consciousness (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press Publishers,
1965)
Nelson, Brian, David Roberts and Walter Veit (eds.), The Idea of
Europe, Problems of National and Transnational Identity (New York,
Oxford: Berg, 1992)
Pastoureau, Michel, and Jean-Claude Schmitt, Europe, mémoire et
emblèmes (Paris: Les éditions de l’Épargne, 1990)
Perrin, Michel (ed.), L’Idée d’Europe au fil de deux millénaires (Paris:
Centre d’histoire des idées, Université de Picardie Jules-Verne,
Beauchesne, 1994)
Rietbergen, Peter, Europe, a Cultural History (London: Routledge,
1998)
Rougemont, Denis de, L’Amour et l’Occident (Paris: Plon, 1972)
Rougemont, Denis de, Écrits sur l'Europe (Paris: Editions de la
Différence, 1994)
Rougemont, Denis de, Vingt-huit siècles d’Europe; la conscience
européenne à travers les textes, d’Hésiode à nos jours (Paris: Payot,
1961)
Valéry, Paul, History and Politics: The Collected Works of Paul
Valery, Vol. 10, translated by Denise Folliot and Jackson Mathews
(London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962)
Literary immigration
a) literary perspective:
Brincourt, André, Langue française terre d’accueil (Paris: Éditions du

Rocher, 1997)
Gauvin, Lise, L’Écrivain francophone à la croisée des langues,
Entretiens (Paris: Editions Karthala, 1997)
Glad, John (ed.), Literature in Exile (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 1990)
Jouanny, Robert, Singularités francophones (Paris: Presses
BIBLIOGRAPHY 353
Klosty Beaujour, Elizabeth, Alien Tongues, Bilingual Russian Writers

of the “First” Emigration (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989)
Popa-Liseanu Doina, “Bons baisers de l'étranger”, Actes du colloque
de L'Année francophone internationale 2001: Francophonie au pluriel
(www.ulaval.ca/afi/colloques/colloque2001/actes/textes/popa.htm, 19
May 2001)
Tucker, Martin (ed.), Literary Exile in the Twentieth Century; an
Analysis and Biographical Dictionary (New York, London:
Greenwood, 1991)
b) psychoanalytical perspective:
Amati Mehler, Jacqueline, Simona Argentieri and Jorge Canestri, The

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Index
Accent 32, 39, 182, 209 Brothers 43, 92, 99, 161, 182, 193, 203,
Ajar, Emile 53, 306, 329 204, 237, 241-286, 298, 301, 321-
Pseudo 47-48, 79, 80 325 (also see twins)
Alienation 29, 54, 132, 219, 242, 244, Bruckner, Pascal 98
260, 262, 280, 282 Buchenwald 11, 115, 191, 192, 303, 304,
Allegory (female) 13, 89, 90, 100, 101, 332 (also see concentration camps)
103, 110, 121, 144, 145, 151, 203 Canestri, Jorge 16, 17, 22, 23, 47, 48, 49,
Alexakis, Vassilis 27, 36, 37, 40-41, 45, 73, 117
52, 60, 74, 81, 100-101, 333 Casanova, Giacomo 128, 150, 153, 196-
Amati Mehler, Jacqueline 16, 17, 22, 23, 198, 208, 224, 238-240, 333
47, 48, 49, 73, 117 Castillo, Michel del 20, 30, 39, 77-78,
Apatride (stateless person) 66, 98 334
Argentieri, Simona 16, 17, 22, 23, 47, Chagall, Marc 285
48, 49, 73, 117 Christianity, Christian 102, 103, 104,
Audi, Paul 122, 124, 138-139, 143 116, 145, 150, 151, 152-153, 158,
Bachelard, Gaston 24, 191 215-216
Bartillat, Christian de 102, 103, 105, 108 Cioran, E. M. 24-25, 28, 41-42, 62, 66,
Bataille, Georges 155, 221, 222 84, 85, 128, 133, 134-135, 160-161,
Beckett, Samuel 11, 15, 26, 37, 41-42, 334
57, 63, 82, 84, 86, 181, 231, 236, Collective memory 94, 113-116, 161,
279, 333 185, 192, 292, 293
Belonging 17, 33, 59, 64, 65, 70, 75, 76, Commune 168-175, 177, 178, 180, 181,
78, 79, 80, 82, 83, 100, 103, 108, 183, 184, 319
119, 123, 124, 147, 160, 165, 192, Community 12, 13, 33, 66, 80, 82, 89,
194, 196, 211, 218, 233, 246, 251, 90, 106, 137, 143, 167, 168, 173,
303, 304, 305, 309, 310, 311, 315 174, 175, 178, 181, 185, 191, 192,
Ben Jelloun, Tahar 31, 95 194, 202, 225, 229, 230, 233, 236,
Betrayal 19, 37-40, 118, 121-123, 190, 237, 274, 300, 301, 311, 319
211, 221, 224, 307, 320 Concentration camps 11, 32, 92, 110,
Bion, Wilfred R. 22 111, 115, 123, 159, 169, 179, 181,
Bilingual, Bilingualism 11, 15-22, 26, 186, 200, 206, 293, 320, 332 (also
30, 31, 33, 37-38, 39, 46, 47, 49, 54- see Buchenwald)
61, 66, 168, 179, 181, 237, 285, 289, Cosmopolitanism 50, 51, 92-99, 158,
292, 306, 314, 353-354 192, 296, 302
Composite 18 Denon, Vivant 135, 158, 202, 212, 213,
Co-ordinated 18 214, 215, 218, 220, 221, 222, 223,
Blanch, Lesley 9, 35, 39, 66, 84, 329 224, 226, 229, 232, 233, 327
Border 57, 63, 72, 242, 248, 255, 265, Derrida, Jacques 95, 114, 186, 187, 188,
269, 270, 280, 321, 322, 324 191, 192, 193, 194, 217, 337
Brincourt, André 21, 30, 64, 74-75 Doubles, doubling 12, 14, 21, 36, 43, 53-
Brodsky, Joseph 30 54, 60, 61, 75, 108, 119, 187, 188,
Brotherhood 111, 179, 193, 194, 203, 235-308, 309, 310, 311, 314, 354
208, 235, 236, 261-262, 304 (also Eco, Umberto 157
see fraternity) Eliade, Mircea 67, 70, 73, 78, 334
Enlightenment 13, 93, 137, 139, 153, Fantasy 13, 41, 69, 76, 77, 138, 139,
154, 216, 239 167, 175, 184, 191, 195, 202, 203,
Esteban, Claude 35-36, 39, 40, 56-57, 208, 210, 221, 236, 238, 274, 288
62-63, 86, 285, 335 Father, father figure 23, 77, 78, 106, 138,
Europa 13, 89, 90, 99-109, 110, 111, 198, 199, 204, 239, 248, 250, 251,
112, 114, 115, 121, 122, 128, 129, 254, 257, 259, 262, 263, 269, 270,
131, 144, 150, 151, 156 272, 273, 277, 287, 288, 290, 299,
Abduction 99-109, 110, 112 300, 301, 305, 318, 319, 321, 322,
In Art 101-102, 105-106 324, 325, 326
Europe 8, 12, 13, 80, 81, 86, 89-165, Faulkner, William 184, 301
167, 168, 170, 172, 173, 209, 266, Foundling 76
281, 296, 318, 351-352 Fragmentation 54, 56, 59, 100, 113, 157,
Central 117-121, 229, 153-154, 304 176, 203, 213, 268, 310, 314, 317
Eastern 8, 10, 35, 58, 71, 86, 119, France 9, 10, 12, 23, 25, 35, 36, 37, 44,
120, 129, 154, 160, 161, 241, 253, 51, 52, 58, 59, 60, 68, 78, 85, 86, 87,
267, 268, 287, 306 89, 90, 110, 111, 114, 116, 121, 124,
European (the) 94, 95, 96, 102, 108, 111, 149, 152, 156, 157, 167, 169, 170,
112, 113-114, 117, 131, 133, 136, 174, 181, 209, 210, 223, 227, 228,
137, 138, 139, 143, 144, 145, 146, 229, 233, 244, 312
148, 152, 156, 160, 162, 163, 183, Fraternity, fraternal 13, 74, 79, 81, 96,
220 119, 145, 161, 170, 186, 191, 193,
European culture 7, 12, 14, 90, 94, 105, 194, 195, 225, 300, 307, 311 (also
109, 110, 111, 112, 113, 116, 117, see brotherhood)
121, 123, 131, 136, 139, 150, 151, Freedom 8, 11, 12, 13, 23, 24, 25, 27,
155, 156, 157, 159, 161, 172, 185, 29, 34, 37, 46, 50, 66, 71, 72, 82, 89,
281, 302, 311, 320 91, 95, 96, 98, 152, 153, 154, 163,
European history 93, 105, 110, 111, 116, 164, 165, 167, 168, 170, 175, 181,
120, 124, 126, 130, 143, 148, 160, 191, 196, 199, 202, 206, 215, 216,
164, 320 218, 224, 230, 233, 238, 253, 275,
European ideal 13, 93, 125, 126, 127, 309, 311, 313
132, 138, 156, 157 Friendship 13, 159, 167, 185-195, 202,
European identity 7, 11, 12, 13, 51, 52, 203, 204, 205, 207, 208, 213, 220,
80, 89, 90-92, 93, 94, 99, 100, 111, 224, 225, 235, 237, 260, 291, 293,
113, 117, 118, 119, 132, 146, 158, 301, 317
159, 162, 164, 165, 167, 233, 309, Freud, Sigmund 76, 305
311, 313, 316 Gary, Romain (also see Ajar, Emile)
European novel 159, 163, 164, 175, 177, Adieu Gary Cooper 141
191, 196, 229, 230, 232, 236, 276 La Danse de Gengis Cohn 8, 13, 90,
European spirit 109, 111, 112, 113, 107, 115, 116, 121-130, 132, 143,
123, 124, 145, 149, 151 150, 240, 317
Exile 32, 33, 38, 50, 56, 65, 70, 71, 72, Europa 8, 13, 90, 96, 97, 121, 122,
73, 74, 78, 114, 118, 176, 226, 228, 128, 130-155, 156, 157, 162, 240,
241, 260, 282, 283, 290, 292, 301, 318
306, 332 Lady L 35, 83, 329
Farhi, Moris 74, 339 La Nuit sera calme 83, 120, 257
Family romance 30, 39, 41, 66, 67, 69, Pour Sganarelle 161, 162, 163
75-82, 193, 242, 287, 288, 290, 305, Gide, André 33, 115
307, 311 Girard, René 204, 207, 300, 304
INDEX 365
Grinberg, León and Rebeca 22, 45, 72, 290-291, 292, 293, 294, 297, 298-
77, 298 305, 307, 308, 309, 310, 311, 314,
Green, Julien 18, 21, 28, 31, 38, 49, 50, 320, 325, 354
56, 63, 65, 83, 337 Inner reader 29, 39, 40, 41, 54, 59, 79,
Halbwachs, Maurice 192, 292 256-258, 276
Happiness 35, 124, 134, 159, 162, 200, Jabès, Edmond 96
215-219, 220, 224, 227 Janus 56, 285
Héritier, Françoise 142, 237, 251, 299- Kafka, Franz 81, 117-121, 171, 189,
300, 301, 304 204, 205, 206, 241, 267, 305
Hierarchisation of languages 15, 44, 54- Kant, Immanuel 73, 94-95
57, 289 Kitsch 129, 221, 225, 227, 228-229
Hispanicism 84, 181 Klosty Beaujour, Elizabeth 15, 16, 18,
Hospitality 12, 75, 94, 95, 96, 203, 312, 19, 21, 28, 31, 38, 46, 55
315 Kokis, Sergio 158, 337
Hoffman, Eva 19-20, 42, 217, 339 Kristeva, Julia 21, 24, 26, 65, 71, 73, 74,
Husserl, Edmund 110, 111-112, 117 80, 189, 289, 335
Huston, Nancy 20, 21, 22, 35, 39, 52, 53, Kristof, Agota
84, 209, 228, 306, 336, 337 The Trilogy 8, 9, 10, 14, 84, 235,
Idealism 64, 73, 74, 89, 91, 93, 126, 132, 240, 241-286, 287, 288, 292, 321-
151, 317 325
Idealist, idealistic 9, 73, 74, 92, 95, 100, Le Grand Cahier 8, 9, 241-248, 249,
111, 128, 132, 181, 317 250, 254, 259, 263, 264, 265, 267,
Ideal reader 182-185, 199 268, 269, 271, 272, 274, 277, 279,
Identity 11, 13, 39, 47, 50-54, 57, 65, 69, 280, 281, 321, 330
70, 74, 75, 76, 78, 80, 89, 94, 100, Hier 8, 10, 14, 240, 260, 283, 287-
102, 105, 107, 111, 112, 113, 115, 291, 326
117, 119, 132, 142, 150, 157, 158, La Preuve 8, 240, 242, 249-267,
162, 165, 167, 169, 171, 172, 177, 268, 270, 271, 279, 280, 281, 284,
179, 181, 182, 183, 186, 187, 188, 322-323
190, 192, 197, 202, 203, 205, 206, Le Troisième Mensonge 8, 240, 242,
209, 217, 228, 235, 236, 240, 242, 244, 257, 264, 267-286, 324-325
249, 250, 265, 269-271, 272, 275, Kundera, Milan
277, 280, 281, 282-285, 288, 291, L’Art du roman 93, 124, 138, 163,
292, 293, 297, 300, 302, 304, 305, 228, 229, 231
306, 308, 309, 313, 314, 315, 316, L’Identité 10, 227, 231
319 (also see European identity) L’Ignorance 10, 19, 58, 60, 68, 70,
Papers 51, 269, 312 71, 86-87, 227, 231, 266
Immigration 10, 12, 13, 14, 16, 17, 29, L’Insoutenable Légèreté de l’être
39, 46, 51, 58, 70, 72, 75, 85, 118, 10, 39, 118, 123, 171, 205, 220, 221,
158, 176, 196, 209, 227, 241, 269, 225, 227, 228
270, 272, 273, 274, 278, 280, 281, L’Immortalité 158, 159, 171, 212,
282, 283, 287, 289, 301, 310, 312, 224, 227, 231
313, 315, 352-353 Jacques et son maître 230, 231, 236
Impostor 35, 310, 314 La Lenteur 8, 10, 13, 133-134, 135,
Incest 12, 14, 37, 39, 76, 109, 111, 118, 158, 167, 211-233, 234, 240, 327,
119, 142, 148, 153, 185, 194, 196, 331
201, 205, 235-240, 241, 251-253, Le Livre du rire et de l’oubli 225,
255, 262, 264, 278-279, 286, 288, 228
Les Testaments trahis 10, 44, 45, 81, 28, 45-50, 51, 69, 77, 198, 279, 309,
159, 160, 164, 189-190, 191, 231, 313 (also see language adoption)
282 Turkish 74, 339
Language Larat, Fabrice 100, 120, 132
Adoption 11, 12, 13, 15, 16, 29, 34, Larrea, Juan 240, 305-307, 320, 335
35, 41, 54, 64, 72, 76, 77, 86, 162, Legitimacy 18, 36, 311, 312
165, 198, 217, 245, 286, 309, 314, Levi, Primo 169, 206
315 (also see language substitution) Libertinage 198-203, 216, 238
Arabic 181, 302 Libertine education 183, 198-199, 208,
Bulgarian 59, 60 220
Czech 10, 11, 34, 82, 84, 118, 134, Libertinism, libertine 12, 13, 64, 106,
205, 227, 228, 231, 331 107, 118, 119, 134, 152-155, 167,
English 8, 9, 10, 17, 18, 20, 21, 24, 168, 174, 177, 179, 180, 182, 183,
26, 27, 30, 31, 35, 38, 39, 41, 44, 50, 185, 191, 194, 195-198, 199, 200,
54, 63, 66, 74, 83, 85, 86, 105, 141, 201, 202, 203, 205, 206, 208, 209,
156, 225, 237, 279, 329, 337, 339, 210, 211-215, 216, 217, 218, 219,
343 220-221, 222, 223, 226, 229, 230,
French 7, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 232, 233, 235, 309, 310, 319, 320,
16, 17, 18, 20, 21, 23, 25, 26, 27-37, 354-355
40, 41, 42, 44, 50, 51, 52, 53, 55, 56, Linguistics, linguist 8, 15, 18, 45, 47,
59, 60, 61, 62-64, 65, 66, 75, 77, 82, 243, 335
83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 93, Luca, Ghérasim 34, 336
105, 113, 117, 118, 135, 150, 153, Maffesoli, Michel 44, 91
156, 165, 167, 168, 176, 179, 182, Magny, Claude-Edmonde 194, 195
186, 196, 197, 198, 203, 210, 211, Mannoni, Octave 26
223, 225, 227, 228, 229, 231, 232, Mansour, Joyce 23, 24, 26, 338
233, 234, 238, 240, 258, 260, 268, Mauzi, Robert 217-218, 219
278, 279, 284, 292, 294, 296, 297, Memory 13, 18, 24, 32, 38, 39, 65, 70,
302, 305, 306, 307, 308, 309, 310, 81, 111, 124, 143, 152, 182, 187,
311, 312, 313, 314, 315, 316, 333- 188, 192, 193, 201, 202, 204, 212,
336 213, 219, 220, 221-223, 227, 232,
German 43, 81, 156, 336, 339 254, 291, 292, 301, 317, 318, 327
Greek (ancient) 85 (also see collective memory)
Greek (modern) 36, 37, 302, 333 Molnár, Katalin 55-56, 336
Hungarian 30, 336 Montaigne, Michel de 186-187, 188,
Italian 16, 197, 291, 302, 333 189, 193, 271
Latin 85, 111, 114, 151, 157, 158, Moschus 103, 108
209 Mother tongue 7, 8, 12, 15, 16, 21, 22-
Lingua franca 114, 157, 158, 302 27, 28, 29, 31, 32, 36, 37, 38, 40, 42,
Polish 20, 74, 329 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 57,
Romanian 28, 334, 336 58, 60, 74, 77, 83, 86, 153, 156, 158,
Russian 31, 39, 54, 86, 237, 242, 162, 179, 198, 235, 237, 238, 242,
329, 339 246, 247, 248, 253, 259, 260, 261,
Spanish 22, 32, 33, 36, 39, 56, 57, 266, 278, 279, 284, 285, 288, 289,
68, 86, 176, 179, 181, 292, 294, 296, 294, 297, 302, 307, 308, 309, 310,
297, 302, 305, 335 (also Castilian 316
84, 188, 297) Mother tongue myth 25, 27, 64-70
Substitution (mother tongue) 12, 16, Mother, motherhood, mother figure 9,
INDEX 367
22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 35, 37, 40, 43, 73, 199, 213, 231, 235, 236, 276, 304
77, 78, 79, 83, 103, 104, 107, 108, (also see European novel)
117, 131, 132, 136, 142, 146, 157, Onfray, Michel 214, 215, 216, 230-231
162, 170, 171, 191, 237, 240, 241, Orphan 77, 179, 268, 275, 287, 334
247, 248, 250, 253, 255, 257, 258- Palante, Georges 224, 225, 228
261, 262, 266, 272, 273, 274, 276, Pícaro 163, 176, 177, 179, 260, 311
277, 278, 287, 288, 290, 293, 298, Picaresque 107, 175-180, 182, 185, 186
299, 307, 318, 321, 323, 324, 325, Persephone 106, 107, 108
326 Petitpierre, Valérie 243-244, 247, 249,
Multiculturalism, multicultural 12, 85, 250, 260, 274, 279, 280, 283, 284
86, 90, 109, 124, 155-158, 209, 304, Poem, poetry 23, 24, 34, 35, 54, 55, 103,
312, 315, 319, 336 104, 127, 128, 146, 273, 276, 288,
Multilingualism, multilingual 12, 15, 16, 305, 306
18, 19, 26, 30, 38, 44, 46, 48, 56, 70, Poet 23, 34, 96, 103, 193, 257, 271, 276,
85, 155-158, 179, 315, 319 303, 305, 306, 307, 324, 325, 335,
M’Uzan, Michel de 62, 256-257, 293 336, 338, 339
Mythology 107, 184, 244, 259 Polyglot, polyglottism
Nabokov, Vladimir 15, 26, 42, 43, 54, 12, 17, 20, 30, 31, 48, 54, 81, 87,
66, 237, 339 182, 245, 314
Name, naming 9, 18, 52, 53, 56, 69, 71, Polylingual, polylinguism 17, 18, 29, 48,
75, 78, 83, 103, 104, 114, 127, 128, 56, 57, 245, 314
131, 140, 141, 150, 168, 172, 176, Privacy, private 60, 68, 165, 176, 189,
180, 182, 186, 187, 204, 205, 206, 190, 192, 203, 210, 212, 221, 223-
207, 209, 210, 225, 244, 249, 250, 231, 242, 252, 253, 263, 309, 327
251, 255, 265, 267, 270, 271, 272, Pseudonym 9, 37, 77, 78, 240, 271, 306,
273, 275, 277, 280, 287, 302, 305, 329, 332 (also see name and
306, 322, 324, 326 (also see identity)
pseudonym and identity) Psychoanalysis, psychoanalytic 8, 15,
Narrator 48, 80, 96, 107, 131, 144, 162, 16, 24, 25, 26, 45, 46, 51, 72, 102,
173, 180, 181, 182-185, 188, 190, 117, 124, 236, 258, 293, 297, 353
196, 199, 220, 222, 224, 235, 246, Rank, Otto 305
250, 251, 260, 262, 263, 271, 272, Ricard, François 218, 226, 227, 228
275, 280, 283, 287, 307 Roba, Alain 102, 103, 105, 108
Nationalism 50, 90, 112, 149, 158 Robert, Marthe 76, 82, 204
Nationalist, nationalistic 50, 71, 87 Robin, Régine 26, 30, 53, 65-66, 69, 336
Naturalisation 18, 123-124, 329 Rougemont, Denis de 99, 100, 104, 111,
Nietzsche, Friedrich 122, 153, 193 237
Nomad, nomadic 8, 44, 46, 64-70, 72, Sacotte, Mireille 65, 122, 140, 141
73, 74, 76, 91, 108, 109, 123, 165, Said, Edward 50
167, 185, 210, 233, 238, 273-276, Scarpetta, Guy 155, 223
282, 298, 316 Sedentary 64, 65, 66, 73, 90, 95, 108,
Nostalgia, nostalgic 23, 27, 35, 43, 64- 109, 238, 273-276
70, 73, 74, 133, 134, 138, 154, 188, Seduction, seducer 114, 199, 200, 222,
221, 228, 238, 248, 253, 266, 274, 221, 224, 230, 232, 318, 327, 333
291, 308, 315 Self-translation 44, 82-83, 314 (also see
Novel (genre) 13, 76, 128, 135, 154, translation)
158-165, 176, 177, 180, 183, 196, Semprun, Jorge
Adieu, vive clarté … 32-33, 178
L’Algarabie 8, 14, 51, 52, 106, 107,

115, 167, 168-203, 210, 234, 240,
257, 269, 291-298, 301, 302, 306,
319
Autobiographie de Federico Sánchez
32
L’Évanouissement 192
La Montagne blanche 8, 13, 14, 90,
109-121, 145, 165, 167, 185, 186,
192, 203-211, 234, 240, 257, 292,
293, 298-307, 320, 341
Quel beau dimanche! 182
Netchaïev est de retour 303-304
Les Sandales 210
Simmel, Georg 72, 136
Soldini, Silvio
Burning in the Wind 10, 291
Sollers, Philippe 196, 202, 213-214, 217,
219, 232
Steiner, George 16, 113, 339
Switzerland 8, 9, 12, 82, 283, 287, 330,
339
Thomas, Chantal 197
Titian (Titiano Vecello) 101, 105
Todorov, Tzvetan 20, 34-35, 37, 39, 46,
54, 57-61, 295, 336
Translation 8, 10, 16, 17, 21, 22, 32, 36,
39, 41, 50, 53, 57, 59, 73, 74, 81, 82,
84, 95, 112, 114, 118, 157, 187, 192,
229, 232, 238, 244, 285, 295, 296,
330, 332, 335, 337, 343 (also see
self-translation)
Triangular desire 204, 207, 300, 303
Twins, twinhood 14, 43, 60, 106, 119,
235, 238, 240, 241-286, 288, 293,
300, 301, 302, 307, 308, 321-325
(also see brothers)
Utopia 12, 13, 35, 85, 89, 92, 94, 102,
113, 114, 157, 158, 165, 167-234,
235, 236, 238, 239, 244, 256, 274,
285, 293, 300, 307, 308, 309, 310,
311, 314
Vailland, Roger 211
Valéry, Paul 94, 113-114, 139, 150, 163
Veronese, Paolo 101, 105, 110
Winnicott, D.W. 26, 69
Zagajewski, Adam 74, 193, 292
Xingjian, Gao 244
Table of contents
Introduction 7
Chapter 1 : Language 15
1 Introduction 15
2 Typology of bilinguals 17
3 Bilinguals and monolinguals 19
4 The mother tongue 22
5 Choice of language, choice of French 27
6 Betrayal, pain and loss 37
7 The transition period 40
8 Successful substitution 45
9 Identity 50
10 Hierarchisation 54
11 Todorov’s experience 57
12 The perception of French 62
13 The nomadic impulse and the myths of home, nostalgia 64
and the mother tongue
14 Typology of migrants and foreigners 70
15 The family romance 75
16 Self-translation 82
17 Style in a new language 83
18 The reputation of languages 85
19 Conclusion 87
Chapter 2 : Europa 89
1 Introduction 89
2 European political identity 90
3 Cosmopolitanism 92
4 The myth 99
5 La Montagne blanche 109
Europe as an intersection of cultural references 109
Collective memory and hierarchy 113

The French topos of Europe 116
Kafka, Kundera and Central European cultural references 117
6 La princesse de légende (La Danse de Gengis Cohn) 121
Beauty and betrayal in European art 121
Cultural naturalisation 123
The myth of Lily and Florian 124
The aristocratic ideal of humanity 127
Europe or Europa as inspiration to art 128
7 Europa 130
Malwina and Erika 130
The image of the eighteenth century 132
Europe as a topos of the privileged classes 136
Europe as the creation of the European 139
Heritage and Art as the refuge of Europeans 145
The purposeful, non-cultural Europe 148
Beauty and female representation 150
Liberty and libertinism 152
8 Multiculturalism and multilingualism 155
9 Cultural heritage and the novel 158
10 Conclusion 165
Chapter 3 : Libertinism and Utopia 167

1 Introduction 167
2 L’Algarabie 168
Political Utopia 168
The picaresque 175
Etymology 180
The ideal reader and narrator 182
Friendship 185
Libertine writing and language 195
Libertinage 198
TABLE OF CONTENTS 371
4 La Lenteur 211
Literary libertinism 211
Happiness and maturity 215
Female libertines 220
An art of memory 221
A private Utopia 223
Literary heritage 231
5 Conclusion 233
Chapter 4 : Doubling and incest 235

1 Introduction 235
2 The Trilogy 241
3 Le Grand Cahier 241
Fusional twinhood 241
Rational linguistic exercises 245
Parental death 247
4 La Preuve 249
Individuation 249
Yasmine’s incest 251
Victor’s incest 251
A delusion of twinhood 254
The inner reader 256
Exclusion of the mother figure and the female principle 258
The homosexual aspect of brotherhood 261
Writing as a survival technique 262
The brother’s reappearance 265
5 Le Troisième Mensonge 267
Claus’ childhood: a new version of events 267
Claus’ negotiations of identity 269
The meeting of the twins and the revelation of “la chose” 271
Nomadic versus sedentary 273
The importance of writing 277
Motherhood and Klaus’ near-incest 278
Symmetrical twinhood 279
Important dates 281

The immigrant’s identity 282
Mirroring despair 285
6 Hier 287
7 L’Algarabie 291
Actual incest 298
Imaginary incest 300
Juan Larrea 305
9 Conclusion 307
Conclusion 309
Appendix 1 – Plot summaries 317

Romain Gary: La Danse de Gengis Cohn (1967) 317
Romain Gary: Europa (1972) 318
Jorge Semprun: L’Algarabie (1981) 319
Jorge Semprun : La Montagne blanche (1986) 320
Agota Kristof: 1. Le Grand Cahier (1986) 321
Agota Kristof: 2. La Preuve (1988) 322
Agota Kristof: 3. Le Troisième Mensonge (1991) 324
Agota Kristof: Hier 326
Milan Kundera: La Lenteur (1995) 327
Appendix 2 – Biographical outlines 329
Appendix 3 – Diagram of relationships in La Montagne blanche 341
Bibliography 343
Index 363
Table of contents 369

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European Literary Immigration

into the French Language

Etudes de langue et littérature françaises

Keith Busby, M.J. Freeman,

AMSTERDAM - NEW YORK, NY 2008

Emanuel Hoffmann Foundation, permanent loan to the Öffentliche

Maquette couverture / Cover design: Aart Jan Bergshoeff

The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of

Je me mis à concevoir l’homme comme une tentative révolutionnaire

Romain Gary, La Promesse de l’aube

Intense and complex migration patterns count among the

This positioning characterises their writing. These sharp observers of

translated into thirty-five languages. The thirty-year gestation period

at the moment suffering from what we might call the Beckett

fragile mastery to be preserved. Some of the phenomena associated

ideal of Europe often takes the form of a cosmopolitan community of

Chapter four focuses on the figures of doubling and incest

The immigrant writer’s relationship with French as his

process of language acquisition and its psycholinguistic implications.

Writing about that personal experience that is linguistic immigration

A striking aspect of this language revolution has been the emergence of

This new relationship with languages is heavily indebted to the

“imaginaire des langues”.6 This chapter will focus on analysing some

Bilingualism is both a social and individual phenomenon. As

There is also a general consensus that the number of years spent

allegiance again.9 Nor would there be enough enthusiasm if the first

La notion même de patrie, dans le sens noble et sentimental de ce mot, est

Bilinguals and monolinguals

Despite the various differences between bilinguals, some of

detailed account of the second language acquisition of a polyglot, in

I am becoming a living avatar of structuralist wisdom; I cannot help

Michel del Castillo, another literary immigrant into French,

The immensity of the loss experienced with this realisation

brain, the centre of emotions and creativity, is entirely anglophone.19

The mother tongue

Through the case studies in The Babel of the Unconscious, it becomes

the same experience of loss caused by migration, it can be easily

Mother tongue is thus linked to the entire range of individuals who

The Mango).23 On the face of it this poem bears no relation to the

space. For any individual to be able to successfully exploit the

On a social level, a writer who has adopted a new language is

Choice of language, choice of French

The decision to adopt another language is a very important

altogether more complex decision. Klosty Beaujour stresses that the

Je vous raconterai maintenant comment j’en suis venu à déserter ma langue

Despite Cioran’s natural predilection for expressing his thoughts in a

The decision to change language is usually made in the

— in the same way that a bilingual could never be a simple compound

Que l’écrivain se trouve au carrefour de plusieurs langues, polyglotte,

The fact that a writer finds himself at a crossroads between several

freer and a more indulgent regression, as can be seen in the work of

It is not possible to determine objectively why a bilingual uses one language

One cannot overestimate the importance of the decision a linguistic

Whatever the idiosyncratic solutions worked out by individual writers, (...)

It is this decision which defines the linguistic literary immigrant and it

The choice of a language in which to write obviously depends much less on

Semprun’s case is interesting in the light of this argument. All of his

chose de sensible, de charnel, donc – dans ce travail d’appropriation d’une

La boulangère du Boulevard Saint-Michel me chassait de la communauté,

It is for this venture – which was not purely intellectual, containing an

The young Semprun wanted to be able to reply to the baker

Semprun is a square in Paris. It is crucial for him to be involved in

J'ai préféré ma liberté à mes racines. La langue tchèque m'appelle: reviens à