ABSTRACT
The plot of the film Hiroshima Mon Amour unfolds in Hiroshima during the summer of 1957. Emanuelle Riva, who played the Frenchwoman in the film, revealed in an interview a fascinating detail. Cathy Caruth proposes that Hiroshima Mon Amour is "a story of a telling". Her argument is that the film asks how we avoid the necessary betrayal of the particular past by its understanding. For the Frenchwoman "Hiroshima", rather than the event that brought suffering upon the Japanese, is the event which spelled the end to France's suffering. Thus, Caruth claims, the woman's own inner dynamic movement towards sanity functions as a form of betrayal. In order to be "reasonable", in order to recover, she must stop her mad clinging to the memory of her dead lover. As Caruth has mentioned, the very question presumes a distinction between the time of the living and the time of the dead.
