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. He notes frst that the retroactive application of a contemporary, and in Lanzmann’s view, sentimental morality and moralism not only risks distorting history inadvertently but gives some writers license to do so deliberately. Moreover, in their moralistic zeal these writers present as “new,” as a kind of journalistic scoop, historical information that is already well known, but an increasingly ignorant public is taken in and scandalized by it nonetheless. For Lanzmann, these practices are to be condemned along with the writers themselves, although the latter are also, as Lanzmann writes, to “be pitied.” These younger writers live in “obscure times, without guideposts or expectations, without a decipherable future, lacking in any cause that could inspire confdence, enthusiasm, and total commitment” (1). They therefore turn to the past for meaning or a cause to embrace. Apparently—for Lanzmann at least—the current circumstances in their uncertainty and absence of promising horizons are not that far removed from the historical crises Suleiman describes as helping to spawn the roman-à-thèse. In some ways, Lanzmann’s diagnosis of the plight of young writers of faction about World War II in contemporary France echoes Beevor’s more general assessment of an uninspiring present provoking a rearward gaze. Except that, for Beevor, it is the relative safety and security of our current situation that inspires feelings of nostalgia for those more challenging times. Beevor writes: “We are living today in a post-military society, in a safe and secure milieu where personal risks and moral decisions no longer have any place” (30). For the older, now disappearing generation of those who experienced the war frsthand, the memory of it inspires commemorations and other memorial Memory of World War II in Contemporary French Fiction 57 activities. But for younger generations spared the diffculties, hardships, and moral quandaries of the confict, the memory of the war raises existential questions about how they would have acted and what choices they would have made had they been confronted with the diffcult and even terrible decisions the confict imposed.3 Hence their fascination, their “nostalgia” for a war they did not experience. And for younger novelists, to write about it, to project their values and their morality onto it and into it, is one way to be part of it, to relive it. Unlike Lanzmann and Beevor, Antoine Compagnon attributes the rise of faction not to cultural malaise or nostalgia for a more challenging and bracing past, but to circumstances specifc to French institutions and their impact on French intellectual life over the last decade or so. According to Compagnon, “The state of uncertainty that prevails today in all the disciplines associated with the humanities as well as the social sciences” has been brought about by what he describes as “brutal mutations in the organization of higher education in France” (64). These changes have made it such that researchers “no longer know who can, and must, speak about any subject” (69). And fction writers, Compagnon continues, fnd themselves in the same boat, lacking sure and reliable reference points as well. But this also means that they are essentially free to write as historians, or in the place thereof, and the problem becomes less one of historical documentation than of literary ethics: What constitutes a legitimate and responsible representation of the past? The burden of the novelist, Compagnon adds, is especially heavy when he or she is writing about a topic as freighted with ethical and moral issues as the Holocaust. In his extraordinary recent book, La Dernière Catastrophe: L’Histoire, le présent, le contemporain, Henry Rousso does not address the issue of faction directly. But his refections on contemporary history and the way that history is perceived in the “presentist” age go a long way toward explaining the context out of which faction emerges and to which it responds. It also more rigorously defnes the cultural and historical climate alluded to by Lanzmann and Beevor above. For Rousso, the presence, the immediacy of World War II in contemporary culture cannot be conceived of either as a form of refuge from a troubled present or as the object of nostalgia for a time when moral choices were clear and sharp and had direct consequences in our lives. Rather, the trauma of World War II—like the trauma of World War I before it—created unprecedented
3. As if to confrm Beevor’s observation about the younger generation’s need to relive (reimagine) the confict and the quandaries it posed, in 2013 Pierre Bayard published Aurais-je été resistant ou bourreau? in which he imagines his life as if he had lived during the Occupation and the dire choices he would have confronted. 58 Richard J. Golsan circumstances in which any sense of continuity with the past was broken, and faith in a promising and open future was shattered as well. According to Rousso, these circumstances created an intense focus on the present, on “contemporariness,” but also one in which “an investment in memory as opposed to history refected a desire to relive the past in the present rather than observe it at a distance” (200).4 One consequence of this mind-set in France in the late 1980s and 1990s was, Rousso argues, the impulse to retroactively defne the crimes of the past in legal terms and to judge and make amends for them in the present. The outcome was, of course, the trials for crimes against humanity of the Nazi Klaus Barbie and Vichy offcials Paul Touvier and Maurice Papon. I will return briefy to the French trials for crimes against humanity and specifcally to their connection with faction in my conclusion. But frst, it is important to look more closely at some representative works of faction that conform in different ways and to different degrees with the description or defnition of faction articulated thus far. The three principal works I discuss briefy here are Jonathan Littell’s Les Bienveillantes, Yannick Haenel’s Jan Karski, and Laurent Binet’s HHhH. To a greater or lesser degree, all three novels have been critical and commercial successes in France and abroad. Littell’s Les Bienveillantes and Haenel’s Jan Karski have also sparked considerable controversy on historical, ethical, and moral grounds. Taking Anthony Beevor’s remarks on faction as my starting point, I would like to briefy assess precisely how and in what ways the three novels in question constitute works of faction. As I hope to show, the term “faction” in the French context is perhaps more elastic, but no less problematic, than it is in other national contexts. Let me begin with Les Bienveillantes. Not long after Gallimard published Littell’s massive novel dealing with the wartime experiences of SS offcer Dr. Maximilien Aue in the fall of 2006, favorable critics such as Pierre Nora praised the work for its overall historical accuracy and detail. More importantly, Nora added:
It seems to me that one of the accomplishments of the novel on the level of collective memory is to have re-inserted the phenomenon
4. In “Infnite Mischief? History and Literature Once Again,” Carol Gluck’s analysis of the current predicament echoes Rousso’s (and also Lanzmann’s) except that for Gluck, the uncertainty of the present and future breeds a kind of “literal mindedness” where the past is concerned: the repository of “truth” and “all there is to cling to [the past] had better be anchored, solid, not melting into air” (130). Gluck’s analysis forms part of a discussion of the three novels discussed in some detail in this article: Littell’s Les Bienveillantes, Haenel’s Jan Karski, and Binet’s HHhH. Memory of World War II in Contemporary French Fiction 59
of extermination into the much larger phenomenon of the war itself. And since, at least in France up until now the Shoah has been “de-historicized,” [the novelist] has performed a service for the public conscience in replacing it in the broader context of the war, [that is], in shifting the center of gravity from Auschwitz alone to the entirety of the confict. (36–37)
According to Nora, then, for the myopic and “Vichy-centric” French, in serving collective memory in the way that it does, Les Bienveillantes also, in effect, offers an important, indeed crucial, history lesson. This explains Nora’s claim that the publication of the novel constituted an extraordinary literary and historical event (Littell and Nora 25). Although not as enthusiastic about Les Bienveillantes as history as is Nora, Claude Lanzmann proclaimed that the novel contains “not one error” in historical terms and praised its “fawless erudition” (qtd. in Binet, “The Missing Pages”). Both in an interview with Littell and in his essay on faction under discussion here, Anthony Beevor also praised the novel as a “valuable complement to history.” It is, he added, decidedly not a work of “faction” but rather a work of “great literary quality whose courage takes the breath away” (Beevor and Littell 87). Despite Beevor’s assertion that Littell’s novel cannot be categorized as faction, it is worth pointing out that Les Bienveillantes constantly engages in one of the practices Beevor decries in the genre, which is to put words in the mouths of historical fgures that they never in fact uttered. In Littell’s novel, the list of historical fgures for whom the novelist acts as a “ventriloquist,” to use Lanzmann’s expression (“Lanzmann juge Les Bienveillantes”), includes Eichmann, Himmler, Bormann, Speer, and briefy, Hitler himself. Moreover, as Laurent Binet has noted, Les Bienveillantes is not entirely devoid of historical errors, as, for example, in the date it gives for Reinhard Heydrich’s wounding in Prague (“The Missing Pages”).5 And as Henry Rousso points out in his comments on the novel, while Littell constantly cites the classic works on Nazism and the Holocaust by Hannah Arendt, Raul Hilberg, Daniel Goldhagen, and Christopher Browning, he makes no mention of, and is perhaps unfamiliar with, more recent work dealing specifcally with the history and nature of Nazi violence (“A-t-on encore besoin” 18). When it was published in Germany, some critics of the novel made the same point (Theweleit 27, 31). But the main diffculty with Les Bienveillantes, and in my view what qualifes it ultimately as faction, is an attribute of the novel only alluded to briefy by Beevor in his discussion of faction, and ignored by Claude Lanzmann, in his
5. Aue reports in Les Bienveillantes that Heydrich was wounded in Prague on 29 May 1942 (212), but in fact he was wounded on 27 May and died on 4 June. 60 Richard J. Golsan critical remarks, noted above. This is the novel’s tendency to recycle clichés and myths associated with Nazism, and also problematic assessments of it, primarily in the depiction of the protagonist himself. Max Aue may not be a “normal Nazi”—he is, after all, a literary creation—but he is deliberately quite representative of the SS elite in his education, his culture, and his cruelty. Moreover, as Samuel Moyn has observed, he is a Nazi Zelig, or an intelligent and cynical Forrest Gump, who is present at and participates in every crucial moment or event associated with the history of the Nazi war effort, from Babi Yar to Stalingrad to Auschwitz to Hitler’s bunker at the fall of Berlin, all described in great detail. But in part in seeking to make him a kind of latter- day hero of Greek tragedy, Littell also makes his protagonist the murderer of his mother and stepfather, à la Orestes. And for good measure, in keeping with 1970’s mode rétro depictions of Nazi sadomasochism and perversion in flms like The Night Porter and The Damned, Aue brutally strangles his lover Mihaï with a mop handle after shattering his nose with a head butt, and also sleeps with his sister and apparently fellates the likes of Robert Brasillach. In the section of the novel entitled Gigue, he repeatedly abuses himself physically and sexually. But why does the admittedly extreme characterization of the protagonist end up steering the novel toward faction? Laurent Binet has written that, despite the claim of some critics that Maximilien Aue is “the mirror of his age,” he more accurately characterizes our age in his postmodern nihilism, his detachment, his amorality, and his morose sadism (“The Missing Pages”). If this is the case, he is fundamentally an anachronism in the novel, which, given his absolute centrality in Les Bienveillantes, calls the work’s historicity into question. From another perspective, given Aue’s larger-than-life implausibility, not to mention the extremes of his perversions or the fact that he is shot in the head in Stalingrad, why should one trust his veracity and his judiciousness in presenting historical realities? And, as Susan Suleiman notes, there is also the problem of the “memory hole” in the novel: How is it that Max remembers in minute detail every aspect and event of the war, but has absolutely no recollection of the murder of his mother and stepfather? (“Quand le bourreau” 43). Finally, how seriously are we to take his claims at the outset and throughout the novel that he is our “human brother”? And if this is diffcult to imagine, let alone accept—many critics have rejected it outright—what should we make of his claims that the crimes of Nazism are very comparable to French crimes in Algeria and American crimes in Vietnam? Or that the latter are even quantifably worse, if one takes into account the fact that the ratio of Vietnamese dead to American soldiers killed, or Algerians to French colonial troops, is greater than the ratio of Nazism’s victims to Germans? Here Aue’s not-so-subtle revisionism reveals itself, and for those familiar with the work of some Holocaust deniers (Roger Garaudy in France in the mid-1990s, for Memory of World War II in Contemporary French Fiction 61
example), the strategy of comparing other historical horrors with enormous numbers of dead to “contextualize”—read diminish—Nazi crimes is quite familiar. If we buy into Aue’s claims and accept the credibility of the “witness” himself, we are accepting highly problematic historical generalizations and distortions his person embodies and his assertions enunciate. One could argue, of course, that reading Les Bienveillantes as a comprehensive historical reassessment of the meaning and implications of Nazism, as I have done here, misses the point. Rather, some critics argue, the novel is better understood as a kind of historical (and psychological) case study of the bourreau, the torturer, and the Nazi torturer in particular. In an interview with Nora, Littell himself alludes to his fascination with bourreaux, and his encounters with real-life examples while doing humanitarian work and serving as a reporter in Bosnia and Chechnya (Littell and Nora 26–27). He adds that since the Eichmann trial, or at least since the release of the miniseries Holocaust, the vast majority of refections and writing on the Holocaust have focused primarily on the victims of the crime and not the perpetrators. By way of confrming this, Littell observes that in the United States, for example, there are Holocaust Studies and World War II Studies but no National-Socialist Studies (43). But even if one narrows the critical focus on Les Bienveillantes to the historical viability and accuracy of the portrait of the bourreau, problems associated with faction as discussed thus far, as well as others, emerge. Most obviously, there is Aue’s very credibility as a person, as a human being. Are most real-life torturers as extreme, as “larger than life” as Aue? Second, in his own comments on his fctional creation, Littell has observed that he himself could have become Aue had he been born in Germany at the same time as his protagonist.6 This implies an extraordinarily intimate, retroactive understanding of the past, and of a different national culture, that is surely anachronistic. When, by contrast, Flaubert stated “Madame Bovary, c’est moi,” he was, after all, talking about his own culture and his own times. Finally, there is a lack of critical distance between the writer and his character and the narrator and the bourreau that calls the objectivity of the portrait of the torturer into question. As Ruth Franklin has noted, Littell, in his own comments in interviews about Max Aue, has referred to his creation as “quite a decent guy” (38). Whether one agrees or not with this admittedly surprising claim, for Franklin, at least, it confrms that Littell is completely seduced by his own fctional creation, that he has “surrendered to him” and is therefore incapable of thinking his character through or of objectively gaging
6. On NPR on 8 March 2009, Littell stated: “The basic idea is, what would I have become had I been born in Germany in 1913 instead of an American boy in America in 1967?” He made a similar statement earlier in Le Figaro (qtd. in Franklin). 62 Richard J. Golsan the implications of his actions.7 Approaching the problem differently, Julia Kristeva comes to much the same conclusion. By his very intelligence and culture, she argues, Aue seduces the reader, contaminating him like a virus. And because, Kristeva continues, there is no distance between the narrator and the torturer that Aue is, there is no remove in the novel from “the anti- Semitic and nihilistic universe” in which Aue resides. So rather than view and comprehend the world of the torturer from the outside, the reader is ultimately drawn into it and is therefore incapable of grasping its real meaning and causes.
*** When Yannick Haenel’s Jan Karski was frst published in the fall of 2009, it initially failed to produce the freworks Littell’s novel had generated three years earlier. But within a few months, in early 2010, Haenel’s novel became the subject of a prolonged and acrimonious debate when Claude Lanzmann denounced the novel and accused the novelist of plagiarism, of falsifying history, and of defaming the real-life Polish resistance hero whose story it purports to tell and whose name serves as the title of the work. Lanzmann was soon joined in his criticisms by the Holocaust historian Annette Wieviorka and the Polish president of the Friends of Jan Karski, among others. Why these attacks, and, more importantly for my purposes here, what justifes the label “faction” being applied to Haenel’s novel? Jan Karski is a hybrid text consisting of three distinct parts. Part one, which supposedly justifes Lanzmann’s claim of plagiarism, is an account of Karski’s testimony in Lanzmann’s flm Shoah in which Haenel quotes directly from the documentary. The fact that Haenel did not get the flmmaker’s permission for these quotations constituted plagiarism in Lanzmann’s view. The second part of the novel consists of a recap or summary of the real-life Karski’s wartime memoir, Story of a Secret State, published in the United States in 1944. It is part three of Jan Karski, which Haenel later described as an “intuitive fction” (qtd. in Golsan, “L’Affaire Jan Karski” 185) and which purports to describe Karski’s innermost reactions to his wartime experiences, that angered his critics most. More specifcally, most critics were particularly outraged by the fctional account of Karski’s July 1943 visit with Franklin D. Roosevelt. In that interview, the Polish resistance fghter describes to the American president not only the state of affairs in occupied Poland but also, especially, what was happening to Jews in Hitler’s Europe, little known at the time.
7. Franklin invokes Flaubert’s statement “Madame Bovary, c’est moi” to underscore the difference between Flaubert’s objective portrayal of his character and Littell’s surrender to his protagonist. Memory of World War II in Contemporary French Fiction 63
In the novel, in response to Karski’s harrowing account of what he knew and what he had seen with his own eyes, Roosevelt suppresses yawns and stares distractedly and admiringly at his young secretary’s legs (Haenel, Jan Karski 125). Roosevelt’s apparent indifference and disdain horrify Karski, who decides that Roosevelt is passively accepting the destruction of European Jewry, that he is “digesting it” (125) between yawns. Haenel’s protagonist then bitterly refects on Allied anti-Semitism, which he sees as ultimately complicit in the Nazi project, and secretly sharing the Nazis’ desire to be done with the Jews once and for all. As Haenel’s Karski observes, “Happily for the English, happily for the Americans, Hitler did not expel European Jews, he exterminated them” (131). For good measure, Haenel’s protagonist claims as well that Roosevelt also disdains him as a Pole, because the vast majority of Poles are Catholic, and Roosevelt and his ilk disdain Catholics almost as much as they do Jews. Ruminating on subsequent events later in the novel, Haenel’s Karski also concludes that the Nuremberg trials were conceived as a means of whitewashing the Allies for their wartime crimes, and that these trials were “carefully orchestrated by the Americans” (166). As for the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, they constituted nothing more than “the continuation of the barbarism by the self-styled ‘free world’” (153). Any possible historical justifcation for these events is blithely overlooked and goes unstated by Haenel’s protagonist. Even if one possesses only a basic historical understanding of World War II and its aftermath, it is easy to see why Haenel’s account and interpretation of the war and its implications in Jan Karski generated the hostile reactions that it did. In the novel, distortion bleeds into scandalous revisionism: the Allies were complicit in the Holocaust in numerous ways, and the demise of Nazism and the Axis only paved the way for a new barbarous global order, perhaps worse than what preceded it in its hypocrisy in pretending to be something other than what it was—and is. For Haenel’s Karski, all cats in the night of history are gray, or better yet, black. As for the fctional account of Karski’s meeting with Roosevelt, it borders on the ludicrous, or worse. There was no young secretary baring attractive legs in the meeting to begin with, and, as he revealed in his 1944 memoir and later, the real Karski left the room with increased respect for Roosevelt and the conviction that he did care, and a great deal, about what Karski had said of the fate of Europe’s Jews. In real life, not only did Roosevelt set up subsequent meetings for Karski with American Jewish leaders and others, he took other supportive initiatives as well. Moreover, Roosevelt’s sympathy and support for Europe’s persecuted Jews was not only the result of the horrors Karski recounted. As Gerhard Weinberg states, already after his reelection in 1936, Roosevelt took signifcant steps to ease immigration restrictions on Jews persecuted by the Nazis. As a result, Weinberg writes, “the United States accepted about twice 64 Richard J. Golsan as many Jewish refugees as the rest of the world put together, about 200,000 out of 300,000” (480). In interviews published with the novelist at the height of the controversy surrounding Jan Karski, Yannick Haenel stated that he had been inspired to write his novel as homage to the real Jan Karski after witnessing the latter’s moving testimony in Shoah. For readers of Haenel’s novel, it is diffcult to see how this tribute is intended, in that not only are Karski’s real views on history distorted and manipulated but, as Lanzmann states, Karski is turned into a fairly one-dimensional catastrophist, bent on accusing and denouncing the entire world for the destruction of European Jewry while refusing to acknowledge crucial historical realities and distinctions (Jan Karski de Yannick Haenel 5). If, then, Haenel’s homage claims ring false, what is the point, what is the reason for writing a novel like Jan Karski? In an essay published in 2011 entitled Le Sens du calme, Haenel acknowledged a strong link and an almost shared identity between the novelist and his creation in stating that the fctional voice of Jan Karski is essentially his own, that understanding where that fctional voice comes from requires understanding who the novelist himself is. Haenel’s observation in Le Sens du calme suggests two things, in my view. First, despite the historical pretensions of the novelist, in Jan Karski the fctional hero gives voice to more contemporary views that ultimately refect more on the present than the past. As Haenel’s critics have pointed out, these include a pronounced and ubiquitous anti-Americanism that recalls less French or European wartime perspectives during World War II than it does the recent explosion of anti-Americanism, especially in France following George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq. If this is the case, then Jan Karski, like Les Bienveillantes, is essentially anachronistic in outlook, and problematically and perhaps dangerously so. The second observation concerns the fundamental characteristics of much faction writing in France, and that is the very personal engagement, and indeed identifcation, of the novelist with his fctional hero. This has already been discussed in the case of Jonathan Littell and Maximilien Aue. In the case of Haenel and Karski, the same problem emerges and is exacerbated by the fact that, as he stated in a television interview in January 2010, Haenel deliberately chose to represent Karski in extreme terms: Haenel’s Karski is un Karski révolté. He is not the persuasive and charismatic messenger chosen by the Polish government in exile to best represent its interests to American offcials but rather, as Lanzmann put it succinctly and brutally, a “pleurnichard et véhément procureur,” a “whining and overbearing prosecutor” (Jan Karski 4), whose rage engulfs history and world events and overwhelms the novel itself. In giving free rein to his character’s—his own?—moral outrage in this fashion, Haenel, like Littell, allows himself to be seduced by his fctional creation. Memory of World War II in Contemporary French Fiction 65
Except that in Jan Karski, that creation proves to be not simply a problematic and dubious witness, but a falsifer of history.
***
At frst glance, there are apparent similarities between Laurent Binet’s novel and those of Littell and Haenel. Like Littell, Binet chooses as one of his principal subjects, if not his principal subject, a Nazi torturer, except that in this instance it is the real Nazi leader Reinhard Heydrich, known as “Hitler’s Hangman.” And like Haenel’s novel, HHhH is a kind of “intuitive fction,” to use Haenel’s expression, in that it combines historical documents and research as a basis for imagining its “characters’” thoughts and feelings. But the similarities end here. First, while engaging morally, ethically, and historically with his characters, Binet avoids the pitfalls of “over-engagement”: neither is he seduced by them, nor does he project overmuch his own judgments retrospectively into them, turning them into the mouthpieces of his views. In fact, if anything, Binet is overly scrupulous in this regard, intervening in the narrative frequently—some critics argue too frequently—to reestablish a critical distance between himself and his “characters” and to underscore the degree to which the novelist must be on guard precisely so as not to falsify history in narrating it dramatically and effectively, that is, as “fction.” Another crucial difference between HHhH on one hand and Les Bienveillantes and Jan Karski on the other as representative works of faction is that whereas Littell’s and Haenel’s novels are essentially judgments, indeed condemnations of the past, Binet’s novel is a tribute to its inspirational qualities for those living in the present. Alongside Binet’s harrowing, indeed horrifying account of Heydrich and the crimes and abuses of Nazism, the reader also fnds moving accounts of the courage and sacrifce of the Czech and Slovak resistance fghters Gabčik and Kubiš, who succeeded in assassinating him. As Binet acknowledges near the end of HHhH, his novel is an imperfect, indeed “awkward” effort to pay homage not only to Heydrich’s killers but also to the nameless people who helped them, as well as to all those, unknown and unrecognized, who fought against Nazism. Binet writes: “I tremble with guilt at the thought of those hundreds, those thousands, whom I have allowed to die in anonymity. But I want to believe that people exist even if we don’t speak of them” (438). It should be noted that in its fundamental historical and moral optimism, HHhH differs not only from the novels of Littell and Haenel, but also from other recent French novels that ft the parameters of faction laid out here. Fabrice Humbert’s 2009 novel, L’Origine de la violence, for example, concludes that “the European nation” itself died with the betrayal of the Jews and will never recover. Dan Franck’s 2012 novel, Les Champs de bataille, 66 Richard J. Golsan which deals with the betrayal and arrest of Jean Moulin, revises history by implying that Moulin died as a result of a conspiracy of right-wing résistants, and not because of René Hardy alone, and concludes with a clear parallel between Nazi wartime repression and French police repression of immigrant peoples and people of color today. Moreover, in the novel’s preface, the novelist informs the reader that the lesson to be learned from the “novel” is that “la droite et la gauche dessinent des horizons incomparables—the left and right draw horizons that cannot be compared” (12). These horizons are apparently immutable, timeless, and so history becomes nothing more than a catalogue of demonstrations, of variations on a theme. By way of concluding, it is worth stressing that Dan Franck’s novel about Jean Moulin takes the form of an imaginary third criminal investigation of René Hardy conducted by a character identifed simple as le juge (the judge). Indeed, the novel is divided into a series of “instructions” of interrogations of the accused by the novel’s protagonist. In conceiving and organizing his novel in this fashion, Franck makes explicit what most of the works of faction discussed here imply: like the trials for crimes against humanity of the 1980s and 1990s, in today’s présentisme the urge remains strong not to distance the past as “history” but to relive it—to judge and condemn it—as memory. Could faction, then, be an outgrowth of, or even the successor to, the trials themselves? While this approach has its appeal and seems reasonable in several instances described here, it does not appear to account for a novel like HHhH, which judges history less to condemn it than to discover positive lessons in it for the present. But while the outcomes of the trials for crimes against humanity frustrated and disappointed many, it should not be forgotten that ideally they were intended to provide a form of closure to the troubled past of Vichy and the Holocaust, and to provide some measure of redemption for the victims. Arguably—in novel form—this is precisely what HHhH seeks to accomplish, and to the degree that it succeeds, it also underscores literature’s potential to affect catharsis, to offer redemption for the past, and to move beyond it. If this is the case, then Binet’s HHhH gives faction a good name.
Texas A&M University
Works Cited Bayard, Pierre. Aurais-je été résistant ou bourreau? Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 2013. Beevor, Anthony. “La Fiction et les faits. Les Périls de la ‘faction.’” Le Débat 165 (2011): 26–40. Beevor, Anthony, and Jonathan Littell. “Du bon usage romanesque de l’histoire.” Le Débat 165 (2011): 86–100. Memory of World War II in Contemporary French Fiction 67
Binet, Laurent. HHhH. Paris: Grasset, 2009. ———. “The Missing Pages of Laurent Binet’s HHhH.” The Millions, 16 Apr. 2012.
Suleiman, Susan Rubin. Authoritarian Fictions: The Ideological Novel as Literary Genre. New York: Columbia UP, 1983. ———. “Quand le bourreau devient le témoin: réflexions sur Les Bienveillantes de Jonathan Littell.” L’Exception et la France contemporaine: Histoire, imaginaire, littérature. Ed. M. Dambre and R. J. Golsan. Paris: PSN, 2010. 31–44. Theweleit, Klaus. “On the German Reaction to Jonathan Littell’s Les Bienveillantes.” New German Critique 36.1 (2009): 21–34. Weinberg, Gerhard. “The Allies and the Holocaust.” The Holocaust in History: The Known, the Unknown, and the Reexamined. Ed. Michael Berenbaum and A. J. Peck. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1998. 480–91.