Negotiating Space in Literary Representations of Holocaust Trauma: Jorge Semprún's Le grand voyage and Antonio Muñoz Molina's Sefarad

O'Donoghue, Samuel (2016) Negotiating Space in Literary Representations of Holocaust Trauma: Jorge Semprún's Le grand voyage and Antonio Muñoz Molina's Sefarad. Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, 93 (1). pp. 45-62. ISSN 1475-3839

Abstract

This article examines the representation of travel in two Holocaust narratives: Jorge Semprún's Le grand voyage (1963) and Antonio Muñoz Molina's Sefarad (2001). It argues that train journeys in these two texts function as a metaphor for the therapeutic process by which witnesses of a catastrophic event undertake a psychic journey back to the root of their trauma through the construction of a narrative. The centrality of trains and movement in these texts points to the necessity of negotiating space in order to work through trauma. While focusing specifically on the texts by Semprún and Muñoz Molina, this article seeks, more generally, to put the mobility turn of cultural studies in dialogue with trauma studies by establishing a link between trauma and space in representations of the Holocaust.