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La marche vers le neutre : Leigh Fermor et l’opération Kreipe
Abstract
The legendary Kreipe operation during the Second World War became the object of a narrative by Patrick Leigh Fermor, Abducting a General, published in its entirety in 2014 only. The text relates the eighteen-day trek of the commando unit and their prisoner through the mountains of Crete to the south coast of the island, where a launch of the British Navy would pick them up. This article studies the tension that the narrative introduces between two temporalities: that induced by the progressive, linear unfolding of the military operation, on the one hand; that induced by the ‘moments’ of exchange between Leigh Fermor and Kreipe, on the other. This tension does not enable Abducting a General to establish a form of neutrality – political or ideological – between captor and captive; rather, the trek narrative is put in the service of a ‘neutral,’ or a kairos – two concepts I borrow from Roland Barthes–, which deconstructs the binary oppositions that structure meaning-production.
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