«La Plus Précieuse des marchandise, un conte» by Jean-Claude Grumberg: A Real Fake Tale, or How to Write a Shoah Story “Appropriately

Abstract

Jean-Claude Grumberg has maintained a very close link with the Shoah throughout his literary trajectory. In La plus précieuse des marchers. Un conte, the author imagines a story where wonder and realism merge. His narrative work consists of a two voiced tale and two stories, that of a storyteller in charge of telling a fiction, that of a narrator in charge of narrating a story that refers to a microhistory of the Shoah. The combination of two parallel stories, each one provided with a specific morphological structure, allows the author to overcome certain critical discourses on the literarization and fictionalization of the Shoah. In this article we will display the tale as a literary genre as valid as the romantic one for the literary transmission of the memory of the Shoah. To achieve this, and with the aim of addressing the internal workings of the story, we will fundamentally introduce a narratological perspective that will allow us to penetrate to the level of  the different narrative levels and the narrative voices of the tale.