Polyphony of the concetrationary universe in “El largo viaje” by Jorge Semprún
Abstract
In this research we tackle the narrative mechanisms of the novel Le Grand Voyage (1963), written by Jorge Semprún as a vital closure of his experience in the Nazi’s concentration camp of Buchenwald. In this way, we identify two fundamental elements in the novel’s structure and which have an unavoidable functional dimension: the traps of memory and the secrecy in exile. Each of them, moreover, oriented towards continually distorting any single meaning or any irrevocable certainty. In other words, all the categories of the scriptures of the self correspond in this magnificent novel, but Semprún manages to go a step further. Its literary power lies in the construction of a memorial, autobiographical and different fictional storytelling, but turning said literary experience into a shared and polyphonic reality within the framework of the concentration experience. In short: the use of fragmentarity from the pole of speech issuance, as well as the use of the narrative collage technique, are not strictly Semprunian, as is natural. But they do stand out in this work for having a still modern configuration, marked by the historical vicissitudes of an entire European generation.
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References
BIBLIOGRAFÍA
SEMPRÚN, J. (1981). El largo viaje. Barcelona: Seix Barral.
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CÉSPEDES GALLEGO, J. (2012). La obra de Jorge Semprún. Claves de interpretación (vol. 1), Bern: Peter Lang.
FERNÁNDEZ, C. (2004). Estrategias de la memoria en la obra de Jorge Semprún. Historia, Antropología y fuentes orales: núm. 32, 67-89.
RAMOS GAY, I. (2017). Jorge Semprún, o la literatura contra la memoria. Estudios Humanísticos. Filología: núm. 39, 25-38.
TORRES RABASSA, G. (2015). Intertextualidad y dialogismo en la obra autobiográfica de Jorge Semprún: la escritura del yo como diálogo con el otro. Caracol: núm. 10, 118-149.
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