Content area
Full Text
This essay reads Annie Guéhenno's L'épreuveas a literary memoir. Guéhenno structures her memoir about her experiences in the French Resistance on key episodes from Marcel Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu. In this way, we are afforded access into Guéhenno's inner world as a young agent de liaison.
L'épreuve, Annie Guéhenno's first-person narrative chronicling her time as a Resistance member and prisoner of the Gestapo, is generally recognized as an important historical memoir of the Nazi Occupation of France, yet to date it has received scant attention as a literary work. I argue that L'épreuve is important both as an historical and literary work because it not only offers us invaluable insight into the way women prisoners of war were treated by the Nazi occupiers, but also is structured around literary allusions. In fact, Guéhenno's memoir illustrates Helmut Peitsch's observation that literature is "one of the media of memory [that cuts] through other forms and practices of remembering and [makes] these forms and practices of social memory its object of study" (xix). L'épreuve is an excellent example of literature as a medium of memory because from the outset Guéhenno, a student of French literature and art history at the Sorbonne before joining the Resistance, reconstructs her experience through the optic of literature: "J'ai cru quelque temps qu'il me fallait écrire ce récit comme une sorte de chant du souvenir. Je pensais à tous mes camarades morts. Des mots de Valéry chantaient en moi: Nos pensées sont pour eux le seul chemin du jour" (9). More importantly, perhaps, Guéhenno offers us insight into a Résistante's experience, an aspect of the Occupation that, until recently, was largely ignored. As Margaret Higonnet notes, "if we do not examine women's roles in the mobilization for war, resistance to war, and demobilization and recovery, we will understand the processes involved in war itself incompletely" (xxi).
While Guéhenno references a variety of authors ranging from Boileau to Valéry, by far the most frequent allusions are to Marcel Proust. When she became a member of the Resistance, she was studying the French literary canon and even then, her favourite author was Proust: "J'adorais Proust. Illiers, le Combray de la Recherche du temps perdu, le village des aubépines, de la Vivonne...