« Des grands malheurs, on peut parler en murmurant » : l’esthétique de la réticence dans Histoire d’une vie d’Aharon Appelfeld

• Main Author: Anne Prouteau
• Format: Article
• Language: fra
• Published: Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales 2014-05-01
• Series: Yod
• Subjects: The Story of a Life; Art of Silence; autobiographic style; after-war literature; Holocaust; Appelfeld Aharon (1932-)
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/yod/2165

‘‘I have never liked pathos and big words” avowed the writer in The Story of a Life. Indeed, even in the French translation, one can grasp Appelfeld’s mistrust in lyricism. This aesthetics consisting in a refusal of the grandiose, a systematic impoverishment of the rhetoric, a suspicion toward adjectives, corresponds to a testimonial ethics that refuses lavishness and melodramatism. Sometimes drawn towards silence, this aesthetics might correspond to an original loss of language and its slow recovery. Should we attempt to define this text—following Edgar Morin’s definition of L’Espèce humaine,―as a “masterpiece of literature freed from all forms of literature”? According to this definition, Appelfeld is part of a tradition born in the aftermath of the war. Yet, despite mistrusting literature, The Story of a Life, with its imaginary elements interleaved in an autobiographical story, could be seen as perfectly compatible with contemporary perspectives.