Search

In the novel two individuals from dissimilar spatio-cultural backgrounds alternate in first-person narration. The voices are Hannah’s, a 31-year-old American postdoctoral researcher, who comes to Paris to investigate the empirical history of French women during the German Occupation, and Tariq’s, a nineteen-year-old Moroccan runaway. Hannah engages Tariq to assist her with interviews of witnesses still alive and translations of the recorded testimonies that were hardly ever raised to public awareness. The two narrators share the non-committal starting position that is for the American based on her scholarly approach from overseas and for Tariq on his adventurous youth, as on his ignorance of Europe and French (colonial) history. The question how to acknowledge the visibilised is addressed on several narrative and generational levels: in the embedded stories told at different times by the witnesses, and in the explorers’ response to the accounts they are confronted with in their dislocated situation.

Not only are Birdsong, Evermore, and Another World concerned with the Great War and its impact on survivors as well as on following generations, but the three works share a common fascination for the traces of the war. Illustrating Faulkner’s claim that « the past isn’t dead, it isn’t even past », they explore the links between personal, traumatic memory, and the national, collective one. Taking as its starting point the presence in the three texts of one or several characters travelling to the battlefields years after the war to visit the cemeteries and monuments to the Missing, this paper will compare and contrast the three writers’ metasemiotic representations of these national emblems and analyze their function : do they contribute to constructing, or de-constructing the nation, itself an ideological construct ?