Philippe Claudel’s Brodeck as a Parody of the Fable, or the Holocaust Universalized Helena Duffy Royal Holloway, University of London, United Kingdom Holocaust Research Institute, Royal Holloway, Egham, TW20 0EX, United Kingdom,
[email protected] Helena Duffy is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Research Fellow, working at Royal Holloway, University of London. Affiliated to the Holocaust Research Institute, she is preparing the monograph Inventing the Infra-Novel: The Ethics of Holocaust Representations in French Postmodern Fiction. Prior to her present engagement, Duffy taught French language and literature at universities in the UK, Australia, France and Poland. Since completing her PhD, she has published widely on various aspects of contemporary French culture, such as non- native authors, Jonathan Littell’s Les Bienveillantes and French cinema. Her monograph World War II in Andreï Makine’s Historiographic Metafiction: No One Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Forgotten will be published in April 2018 by Brill. The research leading to these results has received funding from the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) of the European Union’s research and innovation program Horizon 2020, under grant agreement number 654786. This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis [Holocaust Studies] available on https://doi.org/10.1080/17504902.2018.1468669 Philippe Claudel’s Brodeck as a Parody of the Fable, or the Holocaust Universalized This article examines Philippe Claudel’s 2007 novel Brodeck (French title: Le Rapport de Brodeck) that allegorizes the Holocaust by parodying tropes and narrative structures characteristic to fairy tales and fables. While analyzing the author’s simultaneous inscription and subversion of the two ancient genres, I speculate about the possible reasons for his narrative choices and consider the meanings generated by his indirect representation of the Nazi genocide.