To whom do secrets belong? To whom are they revealed and from whom are they concealed? For Derrida, the “‘secret of secrecy’ is not a matter of knowing because the secret is there for no-one: A secret doesn't belong, it can never be said to be at home or in its place” (Derrida film, 2002). However, individuals and collectives, the ones who inherit, harbor or disclose secrets, have a profound need for belonging. The “secret of secrecy” constitutes, therefore, the mystery of what is means to be fully human. Derrida first articulates this idea in The Gift of Death (1992), a study of religion, reason and responsibility, and continues to develop it in conversation with philosopher Maurizio Ferraris in A Taste for the Secret (1997). In The Gift of Death, Derrida re-narrates the story of the sacrifice of Isaac to uncover an original constitutive trauma, a secret that humans inherit, which imposes a violence at the origin of all discourse. The absolute "secret" that "has to do with not-belonging" and "the sharing of what is not shared" is integral to memory and storytelling (Derrida and Ferraris 58-59). When Derrida writes about le secret in French, the word contains polysemic meaning for both the object as secret, hidden, confidential and the concept and practice of secrecy, keeping things unknowable. But what happens when the unknowable or unknown becomes known? This panel will explore the inevitable trauma associated with secrets and the self in French language literature within the liminality of the private and public.

The leitmotif of secrecy attends themes fundamental to a wide array of fields including philosophy (Derrida, Kierkegaard, Levinas, Heidegger), political theory (Eva Horn, The Secret War, 2013; Rahul Sagar, Secrets and Leaks, 2013; Lawrence Quill, Secrets and Democracy, 2014), psychoanalysis (Freud; Lacan; Esther Rashkin, Family Secrets and the Psychoanalysis of Narrative, 1992, and Unspeakable Secrets, 2008), ethnography (Christopher N. Poulos, Accidental Ethnography, 2009), anthropology (Michael Taussig, Defacement, 1999; Graham M. Jones, “Secrecy,” 2014; Katherine Verdery, My Life as a Spy, 2018) and gender studies (Linda S Kauffman, American Feminist Thought at Century's End, 1993; Katharine Park, Secrets Of Women, 2010), as well as topics including gendered stereotypes (women as secret or failing to keep secrets), silence (shame, what cannot be spoken, le non-dit, le refoulement) and trust (trauma, memory, confidentiality) that all relate to literary theory. While literary scholars like Homi Bhabha, David Morley, Frank Kermode and Rosemary Marangoly George, among others, have examined secrecy-adjacent themes in literature, the topic remains understudied within contemporary French and Francophone literature and this panel will, therefore, contribute important scholarship to the field.

Recent MLA conventions have featured few panels on French and Francophone literature and none on the relevant and far-reaching topic of secrecy and its effects in 20th- and 21st-century literature in the French-speaking world. This panel highlights the importance and prevalence of secrets and secrecy within the field, examining the repercussions of private trauma, family secrets, collective secrecy and willful amnesia. It is our hope to facilitate an extended conversation on the secrets we hold, said or unsaid, known or unknown, in stories told by authors of French expression as they relate to both the private and the public. As Annette Kuhn observes in Acts of Memory and Imagination (2002), secrets are key to narrative and identity: “Secrets, in fact, are a necessary condition of the stories we are prompted by memory to tell about our lives” (2). In creating narrative, we create meaning and in so doing reinforce our own humanity. Creating narratives, and in the process delineating between the spoken and the unspoken, what will be brought to light and what must remain secret, remains an integral part of what it means to be human.

Our panel will present four papers of twelve minutes each with a strictly enforced time limit to allow for an engaging, productive discussion. Beginning with a study on individual trauma, our first paper, entitled “A Secret on the Surface: Hiroshima mon amour by Marguerite Duras,” by NYU doctoral candidate Nicholas Estournel, offers a visceral reading of the skin as both the site of the protagonist’s shameful past secret and site of recovery of memory and self once her secret is revealed to her lover. Next, our dialogue moves from the personal to the familial in “(M)others and (M)otherhood: Secrets and Selfhood in Nelly Arcan, Eva Ionesco, and Camille Laurens,” presented by Associate Professor of French at Auburn University Adrienne Angelo, in a discussion of traumatic family secrets in life writing. Building on the idea of intergenerational trauma, Professor Katherine Roseau at Mercer University investigates postmemory of the Holocaust in her paper “Faire l’enquête sans trace et dans le non-dit: Second- and Third-Generation Holocaust Survivors Do Microhistory in Fiction, History, and In-Between.” Roseau touches on works by Patrick Modiano, Agnès Desarthe and Ivan Jablonka to hypothesize on the crossing of boundaries of history and literature in microhistory to allow both literary writers and historians to find themselves within the familial silence. Finally, encompassing both the familial and the societal to analyze a collective silencing of the past, co-organizers and PhD candidates at the CUNY Graduate Center Antoinette Williams-Tutt (presider) and Lisa Karakaya examine familial silence, aphasia and what cannot be admitted in “Silencing the Past: Collective Amnesia in Le ciel de Bay City by Catherine Mavrikakis.” In our studies of these consequential French and Francophone texts, we plan to stimulate meaningful conversation among scholars in our field on the importance of the narrative representation of secrets and secrecy and their resonance within the human condition.