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Terrain Vague: Indirect Representations of War

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Terrain Vague: Indirect Representations of War Hazel Martha Paton BA (Hons); Grad Dip Ed; Grad Dip Hum; Dip Mod Lang Research Master of Philosophy April 2014 Georges Simenon and the Terrain vague: Indirect Representations of War Statement of Originality The thesis contains no material which has been accepted for the award of any other degree or diploma in any university or other tertiary institution and, to the best of my knowledge and belief, contains no material previously published or written by another person, except where due reference has been made in the text. I give consent to the final version of my thesis being made available worldwide when deposited in the University’s Digital Repository, subject to the provisions of the Copyright Act 1968. Signed:________________________________________________________ Date: _________________________ © Hazel Paton 2 Acknowledgements I wish to thank my supervisors, Associate Professor Alistair Rolls and Doctor Jesper Gulddal Sorensen for their assistance and encouragement in the preparation of this thesis. Cover photograph taken by author at Châtel-Montagne, in the Allier department in central France. 3 Table of Contents Introduction a) Overview of thesis 6 b) Narrowing the focus 18 i. War remembrances from childhood 20 ii. War experiences as novels 21 iii. Empathetic war experiences 28 iv. War through filters of time, space, historical and geographical terrains vagues 29 Chapter One: Background and Methodology 34 a) The Golden Age of detective and crime genres 34 b) Change of Pace 40 c) Allegory 45 d) Hygiene and Épuration 51 e) Simenon’s Political Biases 54 f) Ambivalence about France and the United States 60 g) The oblique approach 62 h) Terrain vague i. Defining liminal spaces 63 ii. Simenon’s terrains vagues 71 iii. Silence as terrain vague 77 Chapter Two: Il pleut, bergère 82 a) Creating a real terrain vague 84 b) Historic montage 87 c) Multiple perspectives 89 d) Innocence vs awareness 93 e) Message of hope 96 f) Marianne 100 g) Rain as imagery for war 103 Chapter Three: La Neige était sale 112 a) Definition of noir 117 b) Location as ‘terrain vague’ 127 c) Badge of (dis)honour 131 d) Stages of decline 138 e) Nadir of degradation 141 f) Hope of redemption 143 g) Snow as a geographical terrain vague 144 Chapter Four: Maigret et le corps sans tête 149 a) Subliminal history 150 b) Politicisation of imagery 157 c) Narrative confession 162 d) Nettoyage 166 e) Marianne 172 f) Americanisation 177 g) Anomaly of ‘l’été de la Saint-Martin and war 179 Bibliography 184 4 Abstract This thesis examines works of Belgian-born author, Georges Simenon, in particular those published in the two decades from France’s 1939 declaration of war. Themes of occupation and war—especially as they relate to Paris—and political biases about Franco-American relationships are prevalent in these works. The approaches of contemporary authors and Simenon’s own serious writings, memoirs and correspondence are cross-referenced to show how he approaches these issues. In this way, the popular belief that Simenon ignored the existence of world conflict in all but a handful of novels will be shown to be misleading. By simultaneous production of the Maigret novels, typically seen as apolitical and dyssynchronous, and what he called his romans durs, Simenon sought to meet the needs of a wide variety of readers. The Maigrets perpetuated the Golden Age of crime fiction, where to a certain degree a detective maintained order in an indistinctly defined and nostalgic era into which world events did not consciously intrude. In the roman durs, which have been compared with Duhamel’s Série noire, a dysfunctional protagonist, unresolved storylines and pessimistic outcomes served as more realistic representations of the postwar period. In both of these formats, the author’s own opinion about contemporary and retrospective political and world events is expressed through the subliminal history of suburbs of Paris, the names of characters, symbols, allegory and a complex system of terrains vagues. Finally, novels from three different genres are discussed to show how Simenon’s recapture of weather conditions of the drôle de guerre and of his childhood experiences of German occupation in Liège add substance, imagery and occult meaning to his novels. In particular, a snowbound landscape blurs the boundaries between participants to isolate the issues of occupation and conflict in a work which can be read as a comment upon the morality of war. All create a subliminal space from which to negotiate an uncertain future. 5 Introduction “If the reader prefers, this book may be regarded as fiction. But there is always the chance that such a book of fiction may throw some light on what has been written as fact.” - Ernest Hemingway This research will focus primarily on the works of Georges Simenon. In particular, it will seek to position him in his specific historical context as a French- based writer whose work spans the periods before and after the Second World War. The approach taken will be comparative, seeking to tease out generic trends in French literary output before, during and immediately after the war. Simenon’s memoirs and semi-autobiographical writings will be used to show that despite his reputation for being apolitical, he in fact avidly followed French political events in all areas of the realm. As well, this research will demonstrate how he reflected this interest through imagery, the attitudes or speech of his protagonists and by his use of rhetorical questions put by the omniscient narrator to indicate points of view divergent to that of his principal characters. For Simenon, there was not simply one perspective from which to view world events. For the most part, Simenon’s biographers and literary critics are in agreement that his writings ignore or fail to mirror the political issues or world events of his time. While conceding that the author uses a World War II setting for two obvious novels, Le Train (1961) and Le Clan des Ostendais (1947), critics typically adjudge them simply novels that happened to appear in that context rather than as products of that specific era. His biographers, who include Fenton Bresler, Pierre Assouline, Stanley Eskin and Patrick Marnham, have sought to analyse the author himself in an attempt to understand what has been interpreted as his non-involvement with important issues. From this predominance of biographical readings of Simenon’s works, a mythology grew and was reinforced 6 that he was in fact apolitical and refused to engage in opinions regarding world events. This thesis will posit that the answer to Simenon’s worldview lies not in the author as a person, nor in what he had to say in interviews or memoirs, as he is in many ways an unreliable advocate for himself, but in his fiction. Of particular relevance are what he often referred to as the romans durs, which serve as a prototype for the later roman noir. His Maigret series, however, can be seen to present a more consistent and developing insight into his agenda. The selection of novels discussed will demonstrate an acute awareness of the contemporary world and a desire to rewrite the past and negotiate the future by allegorical representations. As such, his novels deserve a greater esteem in the literary spectrum. One of the strategies Simenon employs is his considered and powerful use of the terrain vague, which is defined and discussed at length in Chapter One. Briefly, this technique has many applications and the term, which will be used interchangeably with liminal space, is deemed for the purpose of the exercise to consist of several interconnected aspects. For scholars like Valerie Henitiuk (2007: 15-18) liminal spaces are crucial to any forays into comparative literature. As well as its urban studies concept as defined by Rubió (1995: 119), it will be considered in the sense of wasteland of crime as outlined by Andrea Goulet (2009). A third dimension will discuss Simenon’s practice of setting his novels within another time and place, as in Il pleut, bergère, to attain objectivity via both locational and temporal distance. Another way he added a degree of separation to his work was his practice of writing from a distance, for example, writing about Paris from the US; as a neutral country, Switzerland was the ultimate terrain vague from which to 7 write about politically charged subjects.1 Pierre Assouline (1997: 256) describes this practice thus: “Distance in space and time [are] necessary for the strange alchemical process he call[s] the decantation of memory”. This removal or dislocation can be seen as a means of obtaining the objectivity “necessary for successful allegory” (Rolls and Walker 2009: 201-203n). The complexity of this strategy and the many facets of the terrain vague, including the relationship between locale and writing location, is explored more fully in Chapter One to reflect how it is interpreted for the purposes of this thesis. Of interest here, given the increasing scholarly preoccupation with French crime and detective fiction (for example Mullen and O’Beirne 2000 and David Platten 2006: 44), is the opposition evident between these novels, with their ‘hard- boiled’ edge, and Simenon’s Maigret series, which are typically understood to function as counterpoints to the thrillers of Marcel Duhamel’s famous Série noire2 (which was inaugurated in 1945, and which consisted for the first three years entirely of Anglo-Saxon novels translated into French). Authors of the Golden Age of crime fiction are generally recognised by critics to have met the needs of their readership at the time by offering protagonists who restored order in a parallel universe—somewhere around the 1920s or 30s, but with the nostalgic stability and order of a pre-World War I world, where a perceived prelapsarian innocence reigned.
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