Richard J. Golsan the POETICS and PERILS OF

Memory of World War II in Contemporary French Fiction Richard J. Golsan THE POETICS AND PERILS OF FACTION: CONTEMPORARY FRENCH FICTION AND THE MEMORY OF WORLD WAR II n an essay published in the summer 2011 special issue of Le Débat entitled I“L’Histoire saisie par la fction,” the British historian Anthony Beevor describes and denounces the proliferation in contemporary culture of fctional works he labels “faction.” As Beevor describes them, these works include novels, flms, television shows, and other entertainments that take as their subject matter important historical events and offer up provocative mixtures of fact and fction that all too often not only distort history but in fact revise and falsify it, sometimes deliberately. As such, they mark a signifcant departure from earlier American variants of faction in works by the likes of Truman Capote in In Cold Blood, for example, or Norman Mailer in Armies of the Night. These earlier works offered highly imaginative “literary” accounts of current events happening at the time of writing and challenged less the borders between fction and history than they did those between literature and journalism.1 The dangers of contemporary faction as he defnes it are in Beevor’s view essentially twofold. First, given that the subject matter of much recent faction is the terrible traumas of the recent past (the Holocaust, the Cold War, the experience of totalitarianism), mixing fact and fction irresponsibly can give aid and comfort—not to say ammunition—to politically motivated forms of historical revisionism in the present. The word “faction” itself of course implies a parti pris, and sometimes an extreme political position. The second danger of faction, closely related to the frst, is that in a world that is becoming increasingly historically illiterate, works of faction can be quite persuasive in peddling what Beevor labels “counter-knowledge” (37), and not just to a small minority of fanatics looking for welcome confrmation of their extremist and historically dubious views. Depending on its entertainment value and degree of verisimilitude or plausibility, a work of faction might well take in a large and gullible public, promoting false understandings of the past that can prove politically problematic in the 1. For a recent discussion of American faction and the problems it raises, see Conolly and Haydar. The Romanic Review Volume 105 Numbers 1–2 © The Trustees of Columbia University 54 Richard J. Golsan present. Of course, in a world in which fction is routinely peddled as fact by governments in order to justify particular actions—who has forgotten Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction?—faction is merely one method of promoting historical untruths and manipulating and dumbing down the general public. And anything seems possible if, as the Spanish novelist Javier Cercas points out, surveys as recent as 2008 indicated that fully one-fourth of all English people believed that Winston Churchill was a fctional character and therefore never existed (5). As Beevor observes, although works of faction can and do focus on a wide range of historical events and traumas, the preferred subject matter of most of those works is World War II. Drawing on the American context, Beevor cites—critically—several flms, most notably Saving Private Ryan. While the British historian praises the opening sequence of Spielberg’s flm showing the Normandy landings as the most authentic battle scene ever flmed, the rest of the movie, he argues, descends into an endless recycling of Hollywood clichés that distort history while reassuring Americans today of their eternal innocence and goodness (36). This makes them—us—all the more dangerous in the world today, in Beevor’s view. As for the British context, from which he also draws examples, Beevor is sharply critical of the television series Cambridge Spies. In one episode, the Soviet mole Kim Philby learns from his superior in 1941 that the British government has decided not to warn the Soviets of the impending Nazi invasion. In point of fact, as Beevor notes, Churchill warned Stalin many times about the imminent Nazi threat, to no avail (35). What of the French context? This will be the subject of the remainder of this article. Let me note frst that while Beevor’s observations on faction in Le Débat offer an excellent general framework, they do not identify some of the most salient characteristics of French faction and the historical, moral, and ethical issues it raises. Nor do they offer insights into the historical and cultural circumstances specifc to France that in my view encouraged the spread of faction in that country. These issues as well as others will be addressed in what follows.2 I limit my discussion of faction in France to several recent French novels, as this is where the problems associated with faction are most evident. I use the term “novel” advisedly, however, because in some instances these works stretch traditionally accepted defnitions of the genre to the breaking point: 2. In his essay, Beevor also does not address the aesthetic implications of mixing historical fact and fction in contemporary faction. This is of course an enormous and complicated issue, and one that has been much discussed and analyzed in the French context and elsewhere. I will not attempt to address it here. Memory of World War II in Contemporary French Fiction 55 some of these so-called novels might more easily ft Philippe Lejeune’s minimal defnition of the autobiography, that is, a work in which the author’s name is identical to the names of the narrator and the protagonist (3–14). Others appear to be essentially works of popular history labeled as novels only because the writer of the work is known primarily as a novelist. Still others are hybrid texts, mixing purportedly factual documentary accounts of events with fctional imaginings and re-creations. In most cases, the intent is not simply to “tell a story,” but rather, implicitly or explicitly, to rival and indeed surpass the historian in getting at the “real” or “deep” historical truth of the event or events being portrayed. Claims along these lines have been made frequently either by the novelist himself or herself or by enthusiastic critics, or both. Finally, some of these novels—at least in the view of their authors—offer prototypes of the novel of the future, in which documentary evidence prepares the ground for so-called intuitive fctions that alone, it is claimed, will be able to truly reveal the past, once the victims and witnesses to that past are dead and gone. By its very defnition, “faction,” at least in Beevor’s use of the term, implies a basis in and representation of reality—of historical reality—and thus can be characterized as essentially “realist” in its approach. But in its more accepted or traditional sense, “faction” also means “partisan,” in that it generally refers to a specifc group with a specifc political agenda. In this sense, contemporary factional works resemble the earlier roman-à-thèse Susan Suleiman describes in her classic study Authoritarian Fictions: The Ideological Novel as a Literary Genre. Indeed, like the roman-à-thèse, factional novels are in my view fundamentally didactic: in some cases, to quote Suleiman, “The ‘correct’ interpretation of the story told is inscribed in Capital letters” (10), although in others, it is presented more subtly. Also, arguably, the factional novel, like the roman-à-thèse before it, fourishes in a time of political and cultural unrest and uncertainty, although the present situation is, it would seem, hardly comparable to the time of the Dreyfus Affair or the political, cultural, and social crises of the 1930s when romans-à-thèse were prevalent, if not predominant. Finally, as one might suspect, “faction” as Beevor defnes it is, like roman-à-thèse, a generally—although not exclusively—pejorative label. Works meeting this description often distort reality while championing ideology over art. In veering toward the propagandistic, they lose much, if not all, of their aesthetic potential and integrity. But there is one essential and indeed crucial difference between the earlier roman-à-thèse and the factional novel of today, and that is that the roman-à- thèse engages with the present, whereas factional works engage with the past. But not just any past. As is the case with faction more generally as described by Beevor, the factional novel in France engages with the crises and traumas of the twentieth century, and most frequently with World War II and the 56 Richard J. Golsan Holocaust. Moreover, the perspective of the writer is not one that could be directly associated with or be described as “characteristic” of the historical moment being written about. Rather, given the passage of time and the relative youthfulness of most of the novelists concerned—the so-called Third Generation of writers writing about the Occupation—it is fltered through and refracted by subsequent collective and personal memories as well as other historical traumas. This sort of refraction prompts legitimate as well as not-so- legitimate comparisons with the specifc historical moment being portrayed. And since the factional novel by defnition and in practice implies a political engagement or parti pris on the part of the novelist where the historical moment or event being depicted is concerned, the danger of anachronism looms large. Essentially, the past is judged in relation to perspectives and values of the present, that is, those of the writer. In some instances to be discussed, such anachronistic judgments on the part of the novelist played a major role in the controversy the novel in question provoked subsequent to its publication. In a pessimistic assessment of young French writers of faction published in Les Temps Modernes in 2010, Claude Lanzmann expands on the dangers of anachronism.

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