Semprun and Lukács
for a Marxist reading of le grand voyage
pp. 235-250
in: Ofelia Ferran, Gina Herrmann (eds), A critical companion to Jorge Semprún, Berlin, Springer, 2014Abstract
Since its publication in 1963, Le grand voyage has primarily been read as a compelling personal account of the experience of deportation to the Buchenwald concentration camp, characterized by "strategies of narrative breakdown and traumatic memory" (Ferrán, ""Cuanto más escribo'" 290). The author's 20 years of involvement with the Spanish Communist Party (PCE), as both a leading activist and an intellectual figure, have not generally been considered relevant to his literary aesthetics. Indeed, some of the most notorious commentators of his work explicitly rejected any direct connection between Semprun's political activity and his literary writing: Barbara Foley, in 1982, characterized Le grand voyage as an "irrealistic Holocaust novel," in direct opposition to "the realistic social novel" (348), and Ofelia Ferrán, in 2001, has made the case that "Le grand voyage is not a social realist novel at all" (""Cuanto más escribo'" 290).
