The gaze as reconstruction of the event in La escritura o la vida of Jorge Semprún

Abstract

This article exposes the importance of the gaze in the novel La escritura o la vida [Literature or Life] by Jorge Semprún. After his stay in the Buchenwald concentration camp, Semprún begins a visual journey through the passages of horror and shame of extermination. Therefore, the article will show how the apparent ineffectiveness of the pain of the experience becomes a transit of recognition of the tragic to approach the past event. In this way, the word and silence articulate a movement translated into the act of writing from the figure of the witness. Here the gaze as the germ of memory and identity will be demonstrated, but also the absence of the gaze from the executioner and the criminal as the genesis of horror and the denial of the human.