Past and Present in Jorge Semprun’s "L’écriture ou la vie"

Abstract

Being a survivor to the Buchenwald concentration camp may imply
the inability to tell this tragic experience. Semprun tries to go beyond this difficulty by writing L'écriture ou la vie. His trauma and the camp’s omnipresence determine a noncoincidence between interior and exterior time and the fragmentation of the text. Chronological linearity makes way for a labyrinthic time caractherized by a continuous change of present into past tense and by several flashbacks and metatextual digressions. The latter are also the indication that the elaboration process is underway and this suggests that art in itself makes the evolution possible.