La Deuxième mort de Ramón Mercader

Jorge Semprún - Paris, Gallimard (Coll. Blanche), 1969, 432 p.

« Sous son activité de directeur adjoint d’une société espagnole de commerce, Ramón Mercader cache sa véritable identité et sa mission d’agent secret au service de l’U.R.S.S. Cible pour les uns, appât pour les autres, il est victime, à Amsterdam, d’un guet-apens et on le retrouve “suicidé” dans sa chambre tandis que les services de contre-espionnage soviétiques fabriquent un dossier destiné à le faire passer pour traître. À travers son héros – et son homonyme réel, qui fut l’assassin de Trotsky –, l’auteur évoque toute l’histoire du mouvement communiste de la guerre d’Espagne à la mort de Staline, et au XXe Congrès. Cette “matière” du livre, d’une extraordinaire richesse, est comme le sang noir qui irrigue le corps du roman d’espionnage. » (Présentation de l’éditeur)

MEDINA, Celso, « Jorge Semprún y Lewis Carroll : Un diálogo a través de la metáfora », Espéculo : Revista de Estudios Literarios, no 44 (mars-juin 2010), [En ligne]. +++ Article de revue

### Resumen

Ramón Mercader, el protagonista de La segunda muerte de Ramón Mercader (1978) , es un nombre ficcionado, pero que mantiene una relación de homonimia con otro Ramón Mercader : el asesino de Trotsky. De modo que presenciamos una relación resbaladiza entre lo real y lo ficcional. Tal vez en la onda postmoderna, Semprún está poniendo en evidencia el alto grado de semiotización que la modernidad impuso a la humanidad. El arte, intentando reflejar la ideología social, es simulacro.

• Medina, 2010, HTML ###

JOHNSON, Kathleen A., « The Framing of History : Jorge Semprún’s La Deuxième Mort de Ramón Mercader », French Forum, vol. 20, no 1 (janvier 1995), p. 77-90. +++ Article de revue

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• Johnson, 1995, PDF ###

SCHLUMBOHM, Dietrich, « Prousts Page sur Vermeer : Durchgesehene, erweiterte und verbesserte Auflage von Jorge Semprún », dans Andreas KABLITZ et Ulrich SCHULZ-BUSCHHAUS (dir.), Literarhistorische Begegnungen, Tübingen, Narr, 1993, p. 319-327. +++ Chapitre de collectif

ORTEGA, José, « Intriga, estructura y compromiso en La segunda muerte de Ramón Mercader, de Jorge Semprún », Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos : Revista Mensual de Cultura Hispanica, no 310 (avril 1976), p. 160-175. +++ Article de revue

MARTIN-ARTAJO, José, « La segunda muerte de Ramón Mercader de Jorge Semprún », Papeles de Son Armadans, no 62 (1971), p. 67-80. +++ Article de revue

REYNS-CHIKUMA, Christian, « Histor ludens : Six auteurs en quête de représentations historiques et traumatiques », thèse de doctorat, Department of French and Italian, University of Colorado, 1998, 419 f. +++ Thèse de doctorat / mémoire de maîtrise

### Abstract

In my dissertation, I explore the use of ludic theories in représentations of historical catastrophe. Ludics is a set of theories that see the text as a construction in process in which the readers are called to actively collaborate. I argue that the participation of the readers is even more necessary for holocaust literature since it calls for their “response-ability” not to forget, to respect the memory of the “Drowned and the Saved” and to avoid making “petrified history that would bury the living.”

In my first chapter, I deal with Maurice Blanchot’s work because it seems that his texts bring the problem of The Writing of Disaster into play the most radically. Nevertheless, I problematize his refusal of the narrative and visual representations of the holocaust through his “forgetting” to represent concretely the “Others” such as women and the colonized. In the second chapter, I show how Marguerite Duras’ work, through different means of representation and by representing concrete others, succeeded in appealing to and playing with different kinds of audiences. In the third chapter, I deal with a Belgian playwright of Jewish origin, René Kalisky, who succeeded in representing the irrepresentability of the nazi holocaust while making it more concrete by situating it in a contemporary, racist New York. In the fourth chapter, I study the work of the Franco-Spanish novelist, Jorge Semprún. I show how he playfully criticizes both the high modernist and the consumerist versions of historical narratives of traumatic events.

In my two last chapters, I focus on non-European historical topics, literary genres and heuristic methods. In my fifth chapter, using Ahmadou Kourouma’s work, I question the concept of “francophonie,” and the application of French and Western theories to non-European literature. I show that narrative is necessary for victimized communities such as the Mandingue of the Ivory Coast. In my last chapter, I analyze Oe Kenzaburo’s work, showing its evolution from its post-Hiroshima “engagement” through French influences, toward a Japanese committed ludism which playfully reveals both a cultural autonomy and an irreducibility to Western genre.

By inviting the participation of the reader, it also calls for his/her preparation for the negationism and other revisionisms, and for a way to avoid reading consumerist habits which tends to promote self-centered individualism and indifference.

La version PDF de la thèse est disponible pour les membres de communautés universitaires qui ont un abonnement institutionnel auprès de UMI - Proquest. ###

VERDEGAL CEREZO, Joan Manuel, « The French novel through Femina prizes, 1961-1970 : Literary and sociological study », thèse de doctorat, Universitat de Valencia, 1991, 502 f. +++ Thèse de doctorat / mémoire de maîtrise

### Abstract

The first chapter is introduced by a synopsis of the French Literary Prizes, their origins, evolution and rivalries. The second chapter is an historical review from the creation of Goncourt and Femina and other great prizes, the Grand Prix du Roman, Renaudot, Interallie and Medicis, until 1960. The third chapter goes directly into the chosen decade with historical environment and literary studies about ten award-winning novels : (1) 1961: Henri Thomas, Le Promontoire (Gallimard); (2) 1962: Yves Berger, Le Sud (Grasset); (3) 1963: Roger Vrigny, La nuit de Mougins (Gallimard); (4) 1964: Jean Blanzat, Le Faussaire (Gallimard); (5) 1965: Robert Pinget, Quelqu’un (Minuit); (6) 1966: Irene Monesi, Nature morte devant la fenêtre (Mercure de France); (7) 1967: Claire Etcherelli, Elise ou la vraie vie (Denoel); (8) 1968: Marguerite Yourcenar, L’oeuvre au noir (Gallimard); (9) 1969: Jorge Semprún, La deuxième mort de Ramón Mercader (Gallimard); and (10) 1970: Francois Nourissier, La Creve (Grasset).

The presentation of the Femina Committee appears in a fourth chapter with several statements obtained from some of the ladies who took part in the committee and an inquiry made as to those people who form the jury now, as well as the General Secretary. The mechanisms of voting and their opinions about literary matter are also explained. The fifth chapter shows a sociological view about the novel and its public, editorial politics, relationships between the critic and the prizes, besides the existence in the decade of two phenomena like the “Nouveau Roman” and “Mai 68”. This work concludes by revealing relations between the sociological aspects treated and the literary fact of Femina Prizes. Finally, a group of eight indices compliment the previous information. ###

JOHNSON, Kathleen Ann, « From History to Painting in Contemporary Fiction : Temporal and Spatial Models in Novels of Butor, Simon and Semprún », thèse de doctorat, University of California (Irvine), 1984, 236 f. +++ Thèse de doctorat / mémoire de maîtrise

### Abstract

Contemporary fiction manifests an increasingly self-conscious concern with revolutionizing the linear, temporal narrative model felt by many writers to restrict novelistic development and production. The French New Novel represents one such approach. New Novelists in general attempt to recuperate the temporal and experiential complexity lost in successive, chronological narrative through the spatialization of time. For Claude Simon, the novel is no longer to be recounted and read as a simple history but is modeled after and to be viewed as abstract painting. The simultaneous textual space of the novel is claimed to be more open to a plurality of potential orders and times as its diverse elements are linked by internal, formal rather than mimetic concerns.

This study proposes to open a needed critical perspective on both the terms and efficacity of these spatial models. Chapter One introduces the space/time problem through a reading of L’Emploi du Temps. The attempt and failure to reveal “lost” time through its spatialization leads to the need to complicate rather than simply apply spatial models. Simon’s La Route des Flandres demonstrates that narrative is a formal, not an epistemological activity and is thus open to question and experimentation. Le palace searches for a narrative principle which would successfully mediate between the anarchy of experience and the architecture of form. Pictorial models are introduced as alternatives, but the text itself resists and exceeds the limits imposed by these models.

Chapters Four and Five investigate the alternatives proposed by the Marxist Jorge Semprún for whom spatial models are a critique but an ineffective complication of linear narrative. In Le grand voyage, the attempt to narrate historical loss and negativity without suppression leads to the need to open temporal linearity from within by complicating space. La deuxième mort de Ramón Mercader explores this spatial complication by showing vision to be a complicated construct in which vision disrupts, complicates and is complicated by discourse.

This dissertation recognizes the tension between spatial and temporal models to be both interesting and productive and argues for a critical perspective which resists resolution in terms of either space or time. ###

CÉSPEDES GALLEGO, Jaime, « La segunda muerte de Ramón Mercader (1969) », La obra de Jorge Semprún : Claves de interpretación. Vol. 1 : Autobiografía y novela, Berne, Peter Lang (Perspectivas hispánicas), 2012, p. 157-164. +++ Monographie

VERDEGAL CEREZO, Joan Manuel, « Españolismo y antiestalinismo en Jorge Semprún, Semblante de un premio “Fémina” de 1969 », Anales de filología francesa, no 4 (1992), p. 159-167. +++ Article de revue

AMAR SÁNCHEZ, Ana María, « El arte de la política/ la política del arte : Semprún y Padura ante el asesinato de Trotsky », Cuadernos de literatura, vol. 18, no 35 (2014), p. 247-258. +++ Article de revue

### Resumen

El artículo analiza el entramado entre estética y política en relatos que giran en torno al acontecimiento histórico que fue la muerte de Trotsky : La segunda muerte de Ramón Mercader, de Jorge Semprún; El hombre que amaba a los perros, de Leonardo Padura; y la sección “La muerte de Trotsky referida por varios escritores cubanos, años después –o antes”, perteneciente a Tres tristes tigres de Cabrera Infante. A pesar de la diversidad de estéticas (distintas relaciones con la referencialidad y disímiles proyectos formales), los textos parecen tener coincidencias político-ideológicas y en todos el desencanto clausura las utopías políticas.

• Amar Sánchez, 2014, PDF ###