Jorge Semprun's The Long Voyage, also known as The Cattle Truck, is a heartbreaking account of Semprun's deportation and incarceration in Buchenwald concentration camp. A passage stood out to me in which Semprun playfully toys with the idea of memories and the state in which memories exist for the narrator. Memory itself is rooted within the text, and in Semprun’s real-life journey, as a pivotal theme throughout. I want to explore the ideas raised around Semprun’s descriptions of memory in this passage:
‘He’d like to evoke the memories we have in common. They’re serious memories, like the vineyards. Solid memories.'
Semprun is referring to memories as being both ‘solid’ and ‘serious’, which is casting them as something which cannot change, exists in a fixed state, and is honest and sincere. However, this extract from the text occurs when the narrator is in conversation with the 'guy from Semur' in the boxcar. This brings in an element of irony into the text as it is later revealed that the 'guy from Semur' is fictional and an object of his imagination, thus meaning the memories of the vineyards that they discuss are also fictional. These memories which are described as ‘solid’ and ‘serious’ become neither ‘solid’ nor ‘serious’ upon learning of the fictional element in this part of the text. The incorporation of fiction means that the memories can no longer be read as honest and sincere – as suggested by the word ‘serious’ – as Semprun is writing a lie into his story. Memories also can no longer be read as ‘solid’ here as the nature of fiction and lies demand an altercation in the truth. Semprun had to include fiction and lies in his text in order to enable him to tell the truth, possibly to make the unbelievable experiences that exist in Holocaust testimony more believable.
If one is to bring in the context of memory in Semprun’s real-life story, it is important to note that he had a complex relationship with his memories. After his time in the camp, he had to deliberately forget his experiences for sixteen years before he could write them down. Then in his text, he discusses feeling both inside and outside the experiences simultaneously. In this reading, memories are not linear in existence, and they are not fixed in time as solid states. Instead, they are malleable and flexible and exist in one’s future and past all at once – both inside and out. They can be forgotten, repressed and pushed aside, and they can be dug back up again and revived.
Thus, I read these descriptions of memory as a form of irony. Semprun may have included these descriptions at the start of the text to show that he once believed memories existed as ‘solid’ and ‘serious’, but his journey, or voyage, taught him how trauma can drastically affect the way memories exist in the mind of a person. For Semprun, the importance of rearranging these memories was a coping mechanism for the trauma he endured, relying solely on the memories not being ‘solid’ or ‘serious’, but being malleable enough to deliberately repress and then one day bring back up when he was ready to face them.
