Cycles of Violence and Fictions of the ‘Grey Zone’ in Jérôme Ferrari’s Où j’ai laissé mon âme Violence and the ‘Grey Zone’ in Ferrari’s Où j’ai laissé mon âme

This article considers Jérôme Ferrari’s 2010 novel Où j’ai laissé mon âme to examine the currency of the ‘grey zone’ in recent memory studies. I argue that the proliferation of comparative and transnational accounts of remembrance has coincided with a re-examination of memorial ethics, which has called into question the productivity of victim-identification and produced approaches that seek to accommodate moral complexity. Ferrari’s novel follows a parallel ambition in relating the transformation of a former fighter of the French Resistance into a perpetrator of colonial violence during the Algerian War of Independence. The moral ‘grey zone’ — a notion derived from Primo Levi’s Holocaust testimony — offers an appealing way of grappling with such an unsettling of ethical positions across situations of extreme historical violence. However, Ferrari’s text also demonstrates that the concept is vulnerable to misappropriations, which present the continuous circulation of victim- and perpetrator-positions as quasi-inevitable and flatten the ethical terrain on which violence plays out. Ultimately, Où j’ai laissé mon âme invites its reader to understand the ‘grey zone’ as a deliberately deceptive form of fiction, highlighting links between remembrance and representation and suggesting the need to approach history itself with a literary-critical eye.