Didier Daeninckx: Raconteur of History

Didier Daeninckx: Raconteur of History Donald Reid South Central Review, Volume 27, Numbers 1 & 2, Spring & Summer 2010, pp. 39-60 (Article) Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: 10.1353/scr.0.0085 For additional information about this article http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/scr/summary/v027/27.1-2.reid.html Access provided by Georgetown University Library (16 Oct 2013 09:57 GMT) DIDIER DAENINCKX: RACONTEUR OF HISTORY / REID 39 Didier Daeninckx: Raconteur of History Donald Reid, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Le roman noir constitutes a narrative structure of crazy moder- nity; it mixes past and present, permits the unveiling of the truth. We live in a society which doesn’t stop erasing everything and which exists in a sort of permanent present. But it is precisely the roman noir that says that the traces are of capital importance and that it is just because of this that they hide them from us.— Didier Daeninckx1 My engagement [. .] consists in saying: ‘This is what happened [. .] There are a lot of fault lines in history which must be looked at closely because they explain in part who we are, or what we could have been’.—Didier Daeninckx2 DIDIER DAENINCKX TELLS US OF listening to an interview with a writer. She was upset when told she was a raconteur des histoires, a story teller. Daeninckx thought to himself, “that’s the job, to tell stories,” and he chose this as the title of a collection of his stories.3 However, what of Daeninckx, raconteur d’Histoire, teller of History, an appellation he would probably reject if it were given him, and perhaps claim if denied him? Daeninckx says he is not an historian: “What I do is to take from all the social sci- ences a part of their methods and put one together [bricoler] for myself . It is not historical reconstitution, not an historical novel [roman en costume], but a will to give back the truth to fictional entities.”4 To use the words of one of Daeninckx’s detectives, he seeks to “put gangways [passerelles] of fiction between two blocks of reality.”5 These blocks often take the form of a present and an historical past. That past is invariably more powerful and alluring in its good (the soldiers’ opposition to the war in 1917 or the Communist neighborhood fraternity of the 1950s) or its bad (the Vichy regime or the French army during the Algerian War of Independence) than the tame world in which we read today, where drama comes from combats to recapture or rectify these more vivid pasts, too absent in the first case and ubiquitous in the second.6 Born in 1948, Daeninckx is of the generation that came of age in what Henry Rousso has termed the “obsessive phase” of the Vichy Syndrome and Daeninckx has himself played an important role in creating a gangway from this relation to the memory of the Occupation to a similar rela- © South Central Review 27.1 & 2 (Spring & Summer 2010): 39–60. 40 SOUTH CENTRAL REVIEW tionship to memory of the Algerian War. These obsessions are premised on the idea that there is a past hidden by those in power—and they seek to keep it hidden. Daeninckx began by devoting attention to the traditional left evil, the capitalist exercise of power in the workplace, but shifted his attention to the power which control over the past could give political figures, and secondarily, businessmen, as well as their need to hide the vices of pedophilia and Holocaust denial. One sees this change in the two versions of Mort au premier tour, which Daeninckx wrote in 1977 and 1997. While a long tradition of writers and critics have seen in fiction a way of revealing the otherwise hidden powers exercised by capital in individuals’ lives—and how recognition of this is the first step toward diminishing the legitimacy of this power and raising the consciousness of those it oppresses—Daeninckx is primarily concerned with revealing the power exercised through the policing of collective memory narratives, predicated on what is excluded, as well as on what is said. “A people without the memory” of what those in power want them to forget “is a defenseless people.”7 It is over this issue that Daeninckx has fought with certain ultra-leftists, who see the same memory he presents as a defense of the people, as defensive at best and as an impediment to revolution. These ultra-leftists are open to Holocaust denial because they see the omnipresence of the Holocaust in Western culture as insidiously trump- ing the evils of capitalism and therefore impeding the struggle against capitalism in the name of a much-vaunted but hollow and antiquated anti-fascism.8 MEDIA DIVERSIONS AND FAITS DIVERS While Daeninckx is concerned with events, groups, and interpretations marginalized or excluded in dominant collective memory narratives, he is interested as well in the efforts of the state and consumer capitalism to create a false reality which, if successful, risks becoming the only trace of the past which can be remembered. On the one hand, there is secret state funding of publications, whether La Révolution sociale of Communard Louise Michel, which Daeninckx presents as a way the police used to get information on anarchists,9 or Le Nouveau Candide, which offered a Gaullist counter to L’Express in the early Fifth Republic. Daeninckx’s bête noir Gilles Perrault not only wrote articles for Le Nouveau Candide, pre- senting the Gaullist version of events in an ostensibly independent voice, but, Daeninckx suggests, Perrault’s earlier Algerian War novels about the successes of a mysterious organization, La Main rouge, in destroy- ing networks supplying the FLN with arms, were intended to intimidate DIDIER DAENINCKX: RACONTEUR OF HISTORY / REID 41 suppliers of the FLN, and were the product of contacts between Perrault and the French secret service.10 In Le Mort au premier tour (1997), the state investigative service, Renseignements généraux, tries to infiltrate and write for both countercultural and neo-Nazi publications in order to turn them to their own purposes. A one-time anarchist radio station in On acheve bien les disc-jockeys has been taken over by the state to show that it is can promote freedom of speech (and to provide a place for the son of a minister in François Mitterrand’s government who has a radi- cal past).11 Itinéraire d’un salaud ordinaire traces the career of a police officer who participates in a number of state attempts to manipulate an ostensibly free media from the Occupation to the Fifth Republic. Television today, Daeninckx writes, has no place for social move- ments and strikes.12 And in a wealth of stories and novels, all of which, Daeninckx explains, are “variations on the end of industrial civiliza- tion,”13 he explores the fake realities of consumer capitalism.14 Drawn from the entertainment business, where the exploitation they require is hidden from view, these never seem as sinister as those involving the state. Play-back concerns the discovery by a ghostwriter of the hidden “ghostsinger” of a media star in the Lorraine, where deindustrialization, “the physical erasure of history,” has been so thorough as if to say “the industrial crime never took place.”15 Within contemporary periodicals, there is one element Daeninckx trusts: the faits divers, short news items. His detective Cadin collects faits divers16 and René Griffon, the detective in Le der des ders, affirms that “the last page of popular newspapers was favorably replacing a host [une barbée] of distinguished researchers.”17 Daeninckx characterizes a newspaper in Mort au premier tour (1997) as a place where the main stories stay the same and only the faits divers change.18 For Roland Barthes, “everything is given with the fait-divers; its circumstances, its causes, its past, its outcome; without duration and without context, it constitutes an immediate, total being which refers, formally at least, to nothing implicit [. .] It is its immanence which defines the fait-divers.”19 Daeninckx values this quality because the enclosed nature of the faits divers makes it difficult to incorporate into dominant media narratives. By the same token, he sees the faits divers as an entryway to the world as it really is and not how those in power wish to present it. GANGWAY OF FICTION This takes Daeninckx to “the wedding parties ever black [noces perpé- tuellement noires] of the novel and History.”20 “Back Street” tells the 42 SOUTH CENTRAL REVIEW story of a Frenchman in London who is researching a book on the French anarchist Jules Bonnet, presented as the driver for Sherlock Holmes who has an affair with Agatha Christie, and one suspects this is a genealogy Daeninckx the writer would like to claim.21 However, in the world in which he lives, Daeninckx turns to the polar, the detective novel, and the roman noir, the hard-boiled thriller, as his preferred modes of historical revelation. For Daeninckx, “the detective novel is always a novel that leans on the past, one always finds in them traces of the past. A detective is like an historian [. .] it’s that which interests me in the detective novel [. ]”22 However, unlike the detective story writer, the historian generally begins the narrative (if not always the research) with the past and carries a story forward. The investigator begins in the present—the appearance of a corpse—and only examines the past to answer questions raised in the present. Nor does the historian take the reader on dead-end paths. Yet, it is through exploration of impediments to the investigators’ work that efforts to hide the past and the nefarious reasons why are revealed; discovery of the perpetrator of the particular crime that launched the quest becomes secondary.

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