SOURCE: Gabriel, Barbara. “The Wounds of Memory: Mavis Gallant's ‘Baum, Gabriel (1935- ),’ National Trauma, and Postwar French Cinema.” Essays on Canadian Writing, no. 80 (fall 2003): 189-216.

In the following essay, Gabriel uses the tropes of French cinema and national trauma in order to explore issues of memory and history in Gallant's “Baum, Gabriel, 1935-( ).”

… I already am quite rich with significant dates.

—Sigmund Freud, letter to Wilhelm Fliess, 30 May 1896

While history and memory have long been seen as central to the fictional landscape of Mavis Gallant, what has largely been overlooked is the extent to which their twinning is reflected in seismic shifts in the field of historiography itself. The growing interest in the writing of collective memory provides one important index of this new turn within a constellation of concerns that becomes even more complex when it is folded into the problems posed by national trauma. Nearly all...