‘Que peut la fiction?’ Storying the Unexperienced Experience in Jorge Semprun's Fiction

Abstract

<p>This article discusses the <b>ethical potential</b> of <b>fiction</b> as an artistic <b>storytelling</b> practice that facilitates the exchange of experiences by constructing a shared terrain of understanding between author and reader. <b>Buchenwald</b> survivor Jorge Semprun’s fiction is <b>ethically valuable </b>because it both facilitates the exchange of experiences and disrupts the communication of <b>experience</b> that lies beyond imagination. In <b><i>La Montagne blanche</i></b> (1986), <b>narrative</b> <b>doubles</b> defer the arrival of the experience of <b>death</b> so that what is exchanged is the experience <i>as unexperienced</i>, and the storytelling exchange itself becomes an art of survival after the <b>Holocaust</b>. </p>