Van Kelly
Van Kelly specializes in contemporary French and Francophone literature, film, and culture. His teaching and research focus on the conjuncture of self-expression and self-crafting with questions of history and ideology (liberation and resistance, human rights, immigration, social and political thought, utopias and dystopias, urban spaces). In addition to works on classical moralists and philosophers Pascal and Descartes, he has published essays on the epic genre, on writers René Char, Jorge Semprún, J.-M. G. Le Clézio, René Daumal, Ghérasim Luca, Jude Stéfan, Jean Echenoz, and Laurent Binet, and on filmmakers Abel Gance, Bertrand Tavernier, and Agnès Varda. Increasingly, his work focuses on modern French-speaking Africa, especially Senegal, and on writers and filmmakers across the Francophone spectrum who address transitions from empire to postcolony, urban and cultural ecologies, and well-being.
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Semprun’s broad reach right and left relates directly to his narrative technique. From Le grand voyage onward, he develops an interlocking-ring narration, based on successive flashbacks and flashforwards, where multiple strands of his ethical remembering touch and intertwine, which include, in Part One, Chapters Two and Four of L’écriture ou la vie, extended developments on Kant, Goethe, Blum, Heidegger, Brecht, and the sociologist Maurice Halbwachs. These writerly memory loops with their tangents define Semprun’s ethical crux, which he revisits in Le retour de Carola Neher, performed in 1995 at Weimar. The play expands to include genocides in ex-Yugoslavia, via coincidence with the term “Muslim” or “musulman,” referring to exhausted prisoners on verge of extinction in the Nazi camps. By revisiting his memory sites, Semprun works through to the camps’ wider dimensions.
Semprun conspicuously incorporates repressed Jewish memory in L’écriture ou la vie and Le retour de Carola Neher: Auschwitz evacuees in the Little Camp, testimony on the gas chambers by the Sonderkommando escapee, a Yiddish poem on death and survivorship. But Semprun’s works, beyond the Vichy Syndrome, activate a different memory network as well, the critique of Soviet Communism and of the West’s “propagation du grand mensonge sur les réalités ténébreuses de la société stalinienne” (Goulag 19). Semprun’s intellectual itinerary or loop has two major nexuses. One encompasses WWII, the Resistance, and deportation to the Nazi camps. The other, intersecting only partially with the war, links with the history of Communism from 1917 through 1989. Two deadly universes developed in parallel, each with its rationale for choosing radical evil. As the Bosnian Muslim of Le retour de Carola Neher shows, other nexuses are still possible.
Semprun’s broad reach right and left relates directly to his narrative technique. From Le grand voyage onward, he develops an interlocking-ring narration, based on successive flashbacks and flashforwards, where multiple strands of his ethical remembering touch and intertwine, which include, in Part One, Chapters Two and Four of L’écriture ou la vie, extended developments on Kant, Goethe, Blum, Heidegger, Brecht, and the sociologist Maurice Halbwachs. These writerly memory loops with their tangents define Semprun’s ethical crux, which he revisits in Le retour de Carola Neher, performed in 1995 at Weimar. The play expands to include genocides in ex-Yugoslavia, via coincidence with the term “Muslim” or “musulman,” referring to exhausted prisoners on verge of extinction in the Nazi camps. By revisiting his memory sites, Semprun works through to the camps’ wider dimensions.
Semprun conspicuously incorporates repressed Jewish memory in L’écriture ou la vie and Le retour de Carola Neher: Auschwitz evacuees in the Little Camp, testimony on the gas chambers by the Sonderkommando escapee, a Yiddish poem on death and survivorship. But Semprun’s works, beyond the Vichy Syndrome, activate a different memory network as well, the critique of Soviet Communism and of the West’s “propagation du grand mensonge sur les réalités ténébreuses de la société stalinienne” (Goulag 19). Semprun’s intellectual itinerary or loop has two major nexuses. One encompasses WWII, the Resistance, and deportation to the Nazi camps. The other, intersecting only partially with the war, links with the history of Communism from 1917 through 1989. Two deadly universes developed in parallel, each with its rationale for choosing radical evil. As the Bosnian Muslim of Le retour de Carola Neher shows, other nexuses are still possible.
In the 1938 version of J'accuse!, Jean Diaz had a gaze that could not sever ties to the recent past, since the outbreak of yet another war in the 1930s threatened to be more catastrophic. His only hope for recovery was that, thanks to the imposing return of the dead, the bellicose political configuration necessitating Gance’s version of pacifism would not actually realize its potential for war. Gance’s successive versions of his great film on WWI, like the two versions of Alain’s Mars ou La guerre jugée and numerous related "propos," echo the interwar debates between French pacifist factions studied by historians Norman Ingram and Antoine Prost, but exhibit a preoccupation with peace that events did not resolve. Tavernier, on the other hand, reminds us that the memory of the twentieth century and its mass violence is inextricably bound not just to WWII but to the hecatomb with which our modernity, and its descent into the maëlstrom, disastrously began.
There is a major contrast between Poussin's attitude of artistic retreat from the spheres of influence and power, exemplified in his dyptych of heroic landscapes, "Paysage avec les cendres de Phocion" and "Les funérailles de Phocion," a tragic political story imitated from Plutarch's Parallel Lives, about the vicissitudes and perils of public life and service, and Descartes's masked step onto a center stage he never abandoned intellectually and professionally, despite his self-chosen exile ever farther north in Queen Christina's hyperborean realm. Descartes sought the center from the margins, in order to recolonize it once he had reformed it through his teachings, which have their futuristic as well as their pragmatic side. Through his science (whether in the physics of Le Monde and the Principes de la philosophie, in the various treatises contemporaneous to the Discours, or in the physiology that founds his psychology in Les Passions de l'‚me), he surpasses the prudential humanism of the moraliste classique. Descartes's provisional morality facilitates the search for both scientific and moral truth, and anything that aids this search is defined as the good life, as sagesse. The provisional morality but even more so the method allow him to attempt a wholesale rationalization of human constructive thought and endeavor. As such, Descartes's life work must be considered profoundly utopian, especially given the systematic, exhaustive nature of his philosophical program.
In 1640-1642, Poussin, too, in retuerning to Paris briefly, obeyed the sirens' call to invest the center, but having found it irremediably dystopian, he escaped to adopt finally the margins, ack in Rome, a city of beautiful ruins where a balance between history, fortune, and the individual will was a feasible aspiration. Poussin's itinerary constitutes, at most, the sort of psychological utopia which the utopian critic Kumar (1991) refers to as eupsychia, a region of personal well-being or, in a classicistic context, a prudential retreat from the public life in order to lessen one's exposure to catastrophe and the reversals of chance. The sort of posthumous commemoration that Poussin contrives for Phocion does not create a basis for social reform or aspirations. Instead, the painter seeks through remembrance, criticism, and discreet artistic rectification of the past, to find a code that would allow the individual to understand, and perhaps cope with similar vicissitudes in his own times and in his own limited circle of acquaintances. Despite the apparent ease that suffuses Poussin's urban sites, he is much less utopian than dystopian in vision. In terms of one of his related works, Landscape with Diogenes, Poussin resembles the philosopher who, just outside the polity, discovers the truth of life--follow nature, cup your hands to drink from the stream, abandon the artifice and contention of public life. Behind him lies Athens, beautiful but for a different reason than Rome, because it is an intact symbol of the public life. The cynic, who has already throw down his drinking bowl, rejects at least momentarily the urban center for the sylvan margin. If Poussin aspired to build a utopia, it must have been a painterly one like this, where, as in the gardens of Tivoli, one might withdraw not as a reformer but as an erstwhile observer.
This model of expenditure persists well beyond Resistance and Liberation, into Char's very last poems, which "Riches de larmes (Eloge d'une Soupçonnée, 1988) exemplifies. In "Riche de larmes" is Char produces, in a sense, his own eulogy. By imagining a new dawn, the poet exhibits the force or conflagration that drove the best of his poetry. The rising dawn has burned off some of the vapors and mists of regret that darken much of "Riche de larmes," and the poem becomes a last resistance against the elegiac temptation, a final attempt to work through grief and against melancholy. The sunrise that closes "Riche de larmes" is an answer to the despairing questions that we found at the beginning and midpoint of the poem. The final sunrise in the poem is victory of sorts, even if it is precarious and endangered. As Char writes in "A une sérénité crispée," "Je suis l'imbécile des cendres bien froides mais qui croit un tison quelque part survivant." While the reversal is not as explosive as the youthful awakening to immensity that closes the pre-World War II poem "Donnerbach Mühle," the final site in "Riche de larmes" lights and softly magnifies poetic values which Char strived throughout his career to establish. The poet cannot accept unreservedly the death mask of elegy proper, even in life's waning moments. Instead he chooses to offer us, at the last moment, this burn or sunrise.