Haunting Histories of Transgenerational Trauma in Lydie Salvayre’s La Compagnie des spectres (1997): A Taking Stock of ‘Madness’ and ‘Transmission’

Motherhood andmadness are recurring concerns in women’s writing in French. In LydieSalvayre’s La Compagnie des spectres (1997)the depiction of the mother as ‘madwoman’ takes centre stage in herlinguistically bold text. Whilst disturbed predecessors have appeared inwritings by Simone de Beauvoir, Marie Cardinal, Jacqueline Harpman, MarieDarrieussecq, and Marguerite Duras, amongst others, the text also belongs, inits treatment of the Holocaust and its traumatic legacies, to a corpus thatincludes writings by Georges Perec, Sylvie Germain, Nancy Huston, and Philippe Grimbert,to name a few. A deranged mother and her disturbed daughter are central to thestory, and have much to tell us, it would seem – about history and trauma,about contemporary society, and about the vicissitudes and complexities ofintimate relationships in less than favourable circumstances. This articleexamines theories of transgenerational transmission of trauma in La Compagnie des spectres, a fictionalwork in which history, legacy and trauma intersect. In the novel two seeminglyunreliable, unstable narrators highlight through their stories the challenges inarticulating and understanding legacies of heritage and loss. Their portraits raisequestions about the positioning, function, and reception of the ‘madwoman’ inthe text, and, indeed, beyond the text, where such a figure, as noted byFoucault and others, is often destined to carry projected, unbearable ‘madness’of and on behalf of others. Selected theoretical frameworks from psychology,psychoanalysis, and trauma studies underpin this analysis, which problematises readingsof transgenerational hauntings to account for moments where apparent insanitycould be understood as a legitimate response to an apparently ‘insane’ world.