Memory and Metamorphosis in French Occupation Narratives

Id like to start with a few brief comments about French and British culture, French departments in British universities, and what connection any of this might have to World War Two. Despite obvious divergences, both France and Britain share a continuing fascination (some might say obsession) with the Second World War, which remains a vital cultural and psychological reference point today in a way that extends far beyond historical interest. Witness the ritualised commemorations of Dunkirk, the Blitz and D-Day performed in the UK and France in 2010, and the taboos that still inhibit frank discussion of painful episodes. In France, a striking example of the suppression of controversial or objectionable opinions which contradict official discourse is given by the prosecution and conviction by a court in Tulle in September 2008 of a revisionist blogger, charged with apologie de crimes de guerre and sentenced to five months imprisonment for having asserted that the infamous massacres of civilians committed by the SS division Das Reich in Tulle and Oradour in June 1944 were arguably legitimate reprisals for attacks on German soldiers by the maquis (specifically the communist-dominated FTP movement). When in my book on Collaboration and Resistance in Occupied France (2003) I cited the name of a minor civil servant in Toulouse, who had been denounced by a reputable archival historian as a flagrant example of a collaborationist turncoat masquerading after the liberation as a resister, I received an angry letter from his son rebutting this allegation, followed by a vast array of documents revealing how painful and complex this case actually was. Such examples perhaps show how French sensitivities differ significantly from ours, in that certain wounds in France are still unhealed. In terms of the cultural legacy of World War Two, the reference points between France and Britain tend not to overlap; only a very few French films, novels and memoirs tend to cross the Channel or Atlantic and survive to reach English-speaking readers in competent translations. One job of university French departments is evidently to help bridge such cultural gaps, that some may think have grown wider in recent decades despite the expansion of the EU in the political and economic domains; essentially by defending and
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promoting the advanced study of and research on French culture outside mainland France. One striking feature of Durham University in the early 1980s was the continuing presence of some older colleagues who had actually been in the armed forces during the Second World War. I would like to say that one of the most memorable cases was Louis Allen (1922-91), but then feel I should pause to ask: who remembers Louis Allen? Fortunately, institutional memory is longer than that of individuals. I was gratified to discover there is actually a university webpage devoted to Louis1, who as a graduate in French was recruited by the British army intelligence service in 1943 to learn Japanese, was posted to Burma in 1945, where he recognised that a Japanese document captured by a forward patrol was a vital operation order outlining the plans for a massive Japanese break-out across the Sittang River in the final stages of the war. This was a crucial intelligence coup, and he was mentioned in despatches. Subsequently, he joined Durham University French Department, published six books on the war in South-East Asia, and ended his career as reader in French, posthumously donating his archives to the University library. Such persisting, inter-generational, personal links seem to me an important reason for our continuing interest in the war and its aftermath, apart from questions of historical importance. In 2006, Prof. Margaret Atack of Leeds University and I were awarded a major AHRC grant to mount a research project investigating the historical and cultural significance of the hundreds of fictional or fictionalised narratives written in French between 1939 and 2009 about the experience of defeat, occupation and liberation. Our analysis of the corpus is available as an online database,2 and we are also authoring, editing or supervising four book-length studies of specific aspects of the literary response to World War Two in France. My aim tonight is to give you a sample of this work, concentrating on the themes of memory and transformation. The philosopher Paul Ricur has called human memory the matrix of history (2003: 106), the origin of all discourse on the past.
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http://www.dur.ac.uk/library/asc/collection_information/cldload/?collno=99 http://www.frame.leeds.ac.uk/database/

Without memories and their traces, history cannot be written. Putting it another way, you could say that history is what you can remember, as Sellar and Yeatman wrote in their classic parody of history textbooks, 1066 and All That. Among its multiple, overlapping meanings, in its overarching sense, as the evolution of the universe, history does not require any human consciousness or witnesses at all; when viewed eschatologically (the end of history), it may not involve any human agency. But for the purposes of this discussion, history is taken to mean the attempts of human societies to rediscover, record and interpret the traces of their past. In practice, this often means controlling, manipulating or contesting the memories shared by particular communities. Memory, history and fiction all function through narrative, as the neurologist Oliver Sacks shows when observing that patients suffering from amnesia effectively lose their life story, the inner narrative, whose continuity, whose sense construct their identity (1986: 105). Although physical and emotional trauma may cause amnesia, in afflictions like shell shock (PTSD), the link between an individuals memory and his identity is severed (Winter 2006: 52), as the sufferer is overwhelmed by uncontrollable, disabling memories, sometimes suffering hallucinations and paralysis, as emotional stress is converted into physical states. Thus if loss of memory means loss of personal identity, excess of memory may be equally disruptive and disturbing (writing about his experience of deportation to Buchenwald and post-war survival, the FrancoSpanish author Jorge Semprun speaks of the agonies of carnal memory, 1996: 303). Such imbalances of memory (too little, too much) can affect not only individuals, but also larger groups. While stable memory is a defining feature of individual consciousness and identity, memory is also a shared, social phenomenon, operating most evidently at the level of the family, small groups and communities. Hence the statement of Maurice Halbwachs (the famous theoretician of social memory who perished in Buchenwald): on ne se souvient pas tout seul (Ricoeur 2003: 148). Memory is axiomatically collective. Any memory shared with others, whether family members, work colleagues, or much larger groups, is likely to be subject to challenge and revision. Hence the argument put forward by Henry Rousso, in his celebrated study of post-war attempts in France to come to terms with the national humiliation of defeat, occupation and collaboration, entitled Le
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Syndrome de Vichy, that for decades French governments and statecontrolled media and organisms saw themselves as guardians of official memory, mandated to impede critical interpretations of the occupation that conflicted with their more consoling version. Novels written about the Second World War form one of the vectors of cultural memory analysed by historians like Rousso. Whatever their particular merits and differences, collectively such works contribute to a process of historical reflection about the destinies of individuals and nations. Given the massively humiliating and disruptive nature of Frances defeat and subsequent occupation by the Germans, it seems quite legitimate to see such cultural phenomena as helping to reshape and restore national identity and the myths which support it. Intentionally or otherwise, fictional narratives are vehicles for ideologies and shifting belief systems, apart from the pedagogic and experiential or testimonial functions which authors of war stories often stress more explicitly. It is misleading to assume that fiction writers are free of any ethical constraints regarding the limits of representation and truthfulness; it is also helpful, when contrasting historical and fictional narratives, to recall Susan R. Suleimans distinction (adumbrated in Crises of Memory and the Second World War, 2006) between factual truth (i.e. using only information and details that can be verified literally through documentary evidence) and truthfulness, in the sense of respecting past experience even when using imagined situations, of avoiding gross distortions and mendacity. Jonathan Littells Les Bienveillantes (winner of the 2006 prix Goncourt) notoriously challenges such ethical limits, not merely by adopting the tendentious perspective of an impenitent Nazi psychopath, but also by blending unsparing reportage of historical atrocities with equally excessive hallucinatory fantasies. Since there are important areas of the occupation which still fall outside the scope of historians, given a lack of verifiable evidence, novelists, film-makers or autobiographers may be the only significant source for retrieving memories and achieving understanding, when the absence of documentary records or legal constraints effectively make scholarly research impossible. For example, one unfortunate effect of the 1953 amnesty for collaborators in France was to make subsequent naming of them illegal, since their convictions were supposedly expunged from the historical record, in a sort of enforced amnesia. Despite the
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liberalisation of access to state archives after 1979, certain areas remain off limits. According to Sonia Combes polemical study Archives interdites, even employees of the Archives Nationales are forbidden access to Gestapo documents covering 1942-44. In fact, to my knowledge, no seriously documented studies exist of the French Gestapo, which had thousands of agents, or of the phenomenon of faux rsistants, whose proliferation in the post-liberation period is cited bitterly by innumerable genuine resisters. Nor does the obverse phenomenon, the conviction and imprisonment (or even execution) for alleged war crimes of hundreds of low-level resistance activists (often from the FTP) in the late 1940s and early 1950s, seem to have attracted much interest from historians. On the other hand, thriller writers like Didier Daeninckx and Jean-Pierre Perrin have attempted to fill these gaps in the historical record with fictional narratives, the former acknowledging inspiration from the complaint made by the resistance activist Roger Pannequin that the experience of many FTP resisters had been obliterated from history. In his voluminous book Postwar: a History of Europe since 1945, Tony Judt suggests that Every occupied country in Europe developed its own Vichy syndrome, and indeed that The first post-war Europe was built upon deliberate mis-memory upon forgetting as a way of life. Moreover, the distrust of short-term memory, the search for serviceable myths of anti-Fascism for a Germany of anti-Nazis, a France of Resisters or a Poland of victims was the most important invisible legacy of World War Two in Europe. [] Without such collective amnesia, Europes astonishing post-war recovery would not have been possible (2005: 61). To remain within the French context, however, the existence of thousands of post-war novels and autobiographical narratives, many of them critical of the conventional myths and stereotypes bolstered by the political class and media establishment, suggests an ongoing conflict between what Judt calls the forgetting necessary for civic health (2005: 829) and the need for individuals and the sub-groups to which they belong to bear witness to traumatic experiences and to retrieve memories crucial to their identity and recognition as survivors, combatants or spectators of overwhelming events. Those who write about deportation and the Holocaust in particular often affirm that memory is a curse, that certain memories or identities have to be obliterated as an immediate survival strategy, while
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subsequently striving to retrieve lost memories or identity as part of a therapeutic or historical process, often after lengthy periods of silence, which sometimes even cross generations (e.g. works by Adler, Gille, Semprun). If novels allow the retrieval of forgotten events, filling gaps in the historical record or contesting official memories, they also may target mis-remembering, both accidental and deliberate. Here again, the fictional and factual overlap: the faking or distortion of the record affects historical personages as much as imaginary ones. In comparison to the poignant literary accounts of loss and destitution written by survivors of deportation and their descendants, the actions of those who fabricate a fictitious past for themselves as Holocaust survivors or resistance heroes may seem particularly deluded or abject, since they appropriate and pervert others memories of suffering and sacrifice, usually for material gain and unmerited prestige. Countless genuine resisters complain in their memoirs that liberation France was overrun by faux rsistants, who often launched successful careers on the strength of their imaginary exploits. Thus the resistance hero Andr Devigny calls the immediate post-war period a paradis des imposteurs (1978: 329). Yet, as already noted, novelists and film-makers have been far more active than historians in reconstructing the trajectories of such individuals, perhaps because most skilfully covered their traces. In the novel La Lpre (1976), by the thriller-writing duo known as Boileau-Narcejac, an unassuming schoolteacher is hailed as a hero of the Resistance, after being arrested by the Milice (the paramilitary police established by the Vichy government in early 1943) on suspicion of assassinating a major collaborator. He is rescued by the maquis, wounded, and thereafter launched into a career as a deputy and junior minister, until the re-appearance of his alleged victim (whom in fact he had helped to flee the country) thirteen years later drives him to suicide as the burden of his past and likely revelation of his inglorious conduct become intolerable and inevitable. The protagonists spurious resistance past clings to his skin like leprosy, as does his alleged victims real collaborationist past, and brings the destruction of both. The collaborator is liquidated by the protagonists stepson, who is himself killed in action during the Algerian war before he can prevent his adoptive fathers suicide. A grim retributive justice is thereby inflicted on all three characters, including the member of the
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younger generation corrupted by his involvement in the dirty colonial war. Jean-Franois Deniaus Un hros trs discret (1989, perhaps better known through Jacques Audiards film version, released in 1996 as A Self-Made Hero) reverses the initial premiss of La Lpre, in that its hero Albert Dehousse has no direct involvement in either collaboration or resistance throughout the occupation, leading a sheltered existence as a linen salesman. The shock of discovering his mother is suspected of collaboration, while his wife and father-inlaw ran an escape network, leads him to abandon them, to flee to Paris, and by dint of patient research and inveigling his way into a veterans association, to fabricate a more appealing war record as a member of the Free French in London. A mixture of bluff, opportunism and talent for counterespionage lead him to become head of the French secret service in occupied Germany. Alberts imposture is based on lying by implication (his discretion about the past passes as false modesty). Unlike Boileau-Narcejacs lugubrious family melodrama, Deniau situates Alberts success in the wider social upheavals of the liberation, giving walk-on parts to real-life impostors like the gangster Joinovici and the serial killer Dr Petiot (both of whom acquired spurious resistance credentials), and thereby implying that Alberts pretence is typical rather than exceptional. Discussing Audiards film adaptation, Jill Forbes relates Alberts performance of heroism to the careers of the politicians Ronald Reagan and Franois Mitterrand: the actor-president, and the president whose switch from serving Vichy to the resistance caused some controversy when revealed in detail by Pierre Pans 1994 biography Une jeunesse franaise. The parallel with Mitterrand is actually rather tenuous, since his engagement in the resistance was sincere and well attested, although he notoriously elided the eighteen months he spent serving the Vichy regime in his memoirs and remained evasive about his long post-war association with Ren Bousquet, the police chief who facilitated mass deportations of Jews from France. However, Mitterrands transition from Vichy to resistance (and post-war obfuscations) were certainly typical of many civil servants in occupied France. Thousands were investigated and sometimes subjected to sanctions in the postliberation purges. Yet some officials directly involved in crimes against humanity escaped with either minor sanctions or unpunished (as the cases of Bousquet and Papon infamously demonstrate). Just
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how typical were such cases? What motivated such individuals? Yet again, such questions may prove unanswerable, other than through imaginary, invented scenarios. Michel Jacquet pursues a similar argument in Une Occupation trs romanesque, to the extent of investing French novels written about the occupation between 1945 and 1969 with a purpose that is both demystifying and cathartic. Whereas most post-war filmmakers validate the bland, patriotic consensus of universal resistance and national unity, novelists establish Un lot de libert insolemment exempt des contraintes morales et politiques accablant une socit referme sur ses blessures intimes et sur dinavouables secrets. [] si la perception du pass restitue par lHistoire se fonde sur un savoir critique et objectif, celle du roman tend esthtiser un vcu purement motionnel, la mmoire individuelle bouleversant le plus souvent les hirarchies et les restrictions mentales que la mmoire collective impose (2000: 7, 16). Collective or official memory (the highly selective and distorted recollection of the past favoured by elite social and political groups, usually to justify and reinforce their dominance in the present) is not of course synonymous with history as a genuinely objective and dispassionate form of knowledge or discourse; but in practice, they tend to overlap, as Roussos Syndrome de Vichy clearly demonstrates. Novels published about the occupation evidently use imaginary individuals and their dramas, but these individuals are generally presented as representative: typically, they stand for members of an anonymous, disenfranchised mass overlooked by historical accounts and commemorative ceremonies (at various times: soldiers and refugees during the debacle, deportees and victims of racial persecution, half-hearted Vichy supporters, women, members of the resistance accused of war crimes, French auxiliaries employed by the Gestapo, soldiers from French colonies). The date of publication of any novel dealing with controversial topics and neglected groups is of course crucial when measuring its contribution to revising judgements and perceptions. For example, two well-known French novels which significantly changed my perhaps nave understanding, as a youthful British reader, of key periods at the beginning and end of the war in France were Robert Merles Goncourt-prize winning Week-end
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Zuydcoote (1949) and Marcel Ayms Uranus (1948). Both use a naturalistic style to offer debunking accounts of, respectively: the Anglo-French evacuation at Dunkirk in May/June 1940 (depicting the complete collapse of morale and discipline in the French army); and the experience of liberation in a provincial French town in the final months of the war (showing the devastation caused by allied bombing, and the violent retribution against petty collaborators and intimidation of ordinary citizens undertaken by forces of resistance dominated by the Communist Party). Whereas commemorative ceremonies and media reports marking the seventieth anniversary of Dunkirk in 2010 continued the unbroken tradition in England of presenting the mass evacuation of over 300,000 British and French soldiers as a triumph of improvisation and patriotic solidarity, Merles novel helped establish the more jaundiced view held in France of the rout of the British Expeditionary Force and its abandonment of its French allies (Merle himself having been left on the beach to spend the rest of the war as a prisoner, along with thousands of his compatriots; for a more sceptical British historians account, see Ponting 1990). Both Merle and Aym engage their readers affectively and intellectually by creating a dramatic, plausible story that unfolds in a carefully documented and detailed socio-historical situation, is peopled by characters who are typical, ordinary soldiers and civilians, and clearly seeks to set the historical record straight: to demonstrate that, for many of those involved, Dunkirk and the liberation were not moments of triumph and relief, but a disastrous experience, mainly because of the incompetence, mendacity and betrayals of those in authority. Both novels also show the protagonists main adversaries to be, not the Germans, who here as in much French fiction about the war remain a threatening but distant force, but their compatriots (shown engaging in rape, torture, pillage and murder). In this sense, they contribute to representations of the Franco-French war (the term sometimes used to encapsulate the enduring, murderously violent clashes between rival factions in the polity since the French revolution). In the shorter term, the fact that authors challenging the official consensus in the late 1940s reached a wide audience (both Uranus and Week-end Zuydcoote were made into commercially successful films and have remained in print through subsequent decades) and obtained critical esteem,
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suggests one should not overestimate the cultural shift or subversive turn which Rousso locates a generation later in the early 1970s. The crises brought by war seem to demand, for most fiction writers, clear linear narratives stressing the authenticity, veracity and referentiality of what they represent; stylistic experimentation or the disruption of narrative structure would be unwelcome distractions from the historical drama to the aesthetic domain. Yet there are exceptions, where authors seek to explore not only the transforming effect of war on people, but also how narrative may be transformed as part of the process. My topic here, however, is not so much authors who engage in formal experimentation (whether this involves emphasising stylistic, rhetorical and poetic elements, or a solipsistic dissolution of inner and outer worlds and their conventional spatio-temporal boundaries, characteristics found in such well-known figures as Julien Gracq, Claude Simon or Marguerite Duras, all recently studied in this context by Yan Hamel), but another minority, who use devices associated with the fantastic or science fiction, and specifically various types of metamorphosis, in order to offer a less predictable perspective on World War Two. War, by its massively destructive nature, inevitably causes radical transformations, to people and other sentient beings, societies, landscapes and natural or man-made objects. Most chroniclers of warfare are aware of this phenomenon, though some strive to represent the effects of death, mutilation and desolation in memorable and unbearable detail. Such attempts to give aesthetic form to the horrific, alienating disturbance of normality (dismembered bodies, grotesque wounds, ravaged places) are what Samuel Hynes has called battlefield Gothic, because military service is a kind of exile from ones real life, a dislocation of the unfamiliar that the mind preserves as life in another world. In his Potique du rcit de guerre, Jean Kaempfer distinguishes the socalled classic war narrative, which adopts the rational, overarching perspective of the statesman or general, from the rcit de guerre moderne [qui] entend se soustraire tout modle, parce que lexprience extrme quil relate lui parat se refuser la raison (modern war narrative which aims to avoid all models, because the extreme experience which it relates seems to reject reason). Typically, the modern (i.e. nineteenth-century and later) narrative adopts the perspective of low-ranking individuals in a dehumanised
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universe, for whom events and experience become unintelligible. Such uncanny moments and defamiliarisation suggest that any war narrative can at times verge on the fantastic. But when the fantastic becomes the defining characteristic of a narrative, this is because such perceptual distortions and transformations of normal reality have become systematic. The fantastic invariably involves transformations that infringe the ontological categories and physical laws which govern the readers universe (inanimate objects like statues or dolls come to life, people acquire novel characteristics like invisibility, are able to travel through time, lose vital attributes like their soul, shadow or reflection, find themselves fissured into doubles and replicas, turn into monstrous hybrids, and so on). At first sight, texts centred on such disturbances of normality seem to belong to myth or allegory rather than fiction based on socio-historical observation. Yet what distinguishes the fantastic as a narrative genre (as opposed to fantasy works presenting entirely imaginary worlds) is that it depends precisely on the transformation of consensual reality, on the crossing of a threshold that separates the everyday world from something unexpected or impossible. As far as I know, relatively few fiction-writers have introduced fantastic elements into World War Two novels (Grasss The Tin Drum (1959) and Vonneguts Slaughterhouse Five (1969) are arguably the best-known examples). My aim here is to explore the use and effect of metamorphosis in two French writers fictional accounts of the Second World War. They are Ren Barjavel (191185) and Michel Tournier (b. 1924). Both authors lived through the German occupation of France, although only Barjavel saw active military service (in 1939-40), as a supply-corps corporal. Both are more interested in the survival strategies adopted by civilians (who are sometimes reluctant conscripts) in the Second World War than in depicting military combat, although in any case the traditional separation between combatants and civilians ceased to be meaningful during this period. Particularly in the final years of Nazi occupation and allied liberation, civilians fought in the Resistance, fell victim to bombing, or endured extreme hardship, conscription as slave workers, detention, summary execution as hostages, or deportation to concentration camps. While insisting on the material deprivation and moral and social collapse brought by defeat, both novelists have recourse to forms of escapism. Not in the sense of
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producing trivial entertainment, but rather of creating diverting narratives, which open up imaginary spaces apparently beyond the horrors of war; ultimately, however, war proves inescapable, and the authors impose a moral reckoning which finally obliterates the refuge provisionally offered by the fantastic. It seems likely that Ren Barjavel owed a great deal to Marcel Ayms Le Passe-Muraille (1943), even if he acknowledged a more explicit debt to the late nineteenth-century pioneers of science fiction, Verne and Wells. Like Marcel Aym, Barjavels wartime career is loosely associated with collaboration (in that he worked for the publisher Denol, whose other authors included some notorious anti-Semites). Neither Aym nor Barjavel show any sympathy for the political forces associated with resistance (i.e. Gaullism and communism). Indeed, unlike Aym, who rejected totalitarian systems of both right and left, Barjavels early novels contain fascistic echoes that suggest a certain compliance with the Vichy governments or even National Socialisms hostility to democratic republicanism and its supposed cultural decadence. For instance, his first novel Ravage (1943) invites interpretation as an allegory about the fall of France in 1940 and its possible rebirth. Barjavel describes how the sudden disappearance of electricity in 2052 leads to the collapse of western civilisation, which has become slavishly dependent on technology and an unjust social hierarchy. Most of the population perish rapidly from fire, famine, disease or strife amid apocalyptic scenes presented with grim relish. But Barjavels hero, the aptly named Franois Deschamps, hitherto a peasant misfit in a world divorced from nature, makes his way to south-east Provence, where his physical strength and resourcefulness allow him to establish a self-sufficient, agricultural community. Over the next century, he becomes an authoritarian patriarch, fathering 228 children and ruthlessly suppressing any attempts to restore written culture and industrial technology, until he is killed by the inventor of a steam engine. Ravage clearly echoes Marshal Ptains celebration of alleged rustic virtues and critique of perverted culture, although its environmentalist message is more immediately apparent and appealing to twenty-first century readers. Franois warns that the immense transformative power given by technology to certain individuals and corporations is simply un progrs acclr vers la mort (accelerating progress towards death).
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Barjavels second novel, Le Voyageur imprudent (1944), offers a more systematic account of the possibilities of time manipulation than Marcel Aym, while again stressing the perils of unregulated technological and scientific discoveries. Barjavel skilfully blends a naturalistic account of the miseries of war and occupation with characters and events that belong to fairy tales and science fiction. The grotesquely dehumanising reality of war is demonstrated by a striking example of battlefield Gothic in the first paragraph, when a soldier is discovered frozen to death in the latrines, his ears snapping off when his head is lifted. The following pages recount the struggle for survival of the mathematician Pierre Saint-Menoux, a reluctant conscript to a machine-gun company, who is himself on the point of freezing to death during the winter of 1940, when he literally stumbles through a doorway and encounters the physicist Nol Essaillon and his daughter Annette, belle comme une apparition (beautiful as an apparition). Thanks to SaintMenouxs scientific papers, Essaillon has invented a substance that allows him to manipulate time; he invites Saint-Menoux to join him in his investigations. Saint-Menoux is permitted to escape the horrors of the debacle by fast-forwarding through two years until February 1942; this acceleration to a pleasanter future is teasingly called la guerre-clair (i.e. Blitzkrieg). His brief experience of time travel, he thinks, makes him lger et puissant comme un demi-dieu, aussi diffrent de ses conducteurs que ceux-ci de leurs mules (light and powerful as a demi-god, as different from his drivers as they are from their mules). Yet he arrives in 1942 with les traits dun homme qui avait durement appris compter avec le rel (the look of a man who had learned the hard way to deal with reality). At this stage, at least, his supposed transformation is metaphorical and imaginary. In the remainder of the novel, however, time travel does indeed transform Saint-Menoux more literally, as he becomes the imprudent voyager of the title and learns too of the future transformation of humanity. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, short-term gratification (power, adventure, love, knowledge) is eventually followed by more horrific metamorphoses. Michel Tourniers novel Le Roi des aulnes (1970) also depicts a central character who is a social misfit or deviant and imagines it is his destiny to change the course of history through a series of transformations that link myth to the events of the Second World War in France and Nazi Germany. The title Le Roi des aulnes
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(variously translated into English as the Erl- or Alder-King or the Ogre) intentionally evokes Goethes famous ballad Erlknig (1782), which describes how a rider carrying his child on horseback through the forest at night loses the child to the sinister King of the Alders (or Elves). Though the childs terror may be purely imaginary, he dies nonetheless. Defining myth in his intellectual autobiography Le Vent Paraclet as une histoire fondamentale (fundamental history or story) which shapes the essence of humanity, Tournier attempts in his novel to blend the dcor of German Romanticism with a realistic account of how a French prisoner of war called Abel Tiffauges witnesses the collapse of the Third Reich in East Prussia, as he rises to a position of power in an SS training school known as a Napola. As the majority of adult German males are transferred into combat zones, Tiffauges progresses from digging ditches to driving a lorry and transporting supplies, eventually becoming an active recruiting agent for the school. Delighting in the intimate company of pubescent boys and in the folkloric symbolism and rituals of the SS, only in the final pages does Tiffauges become aware of the full horrors of Nazi genocide, when he rescues a Jewish child and carries him into the marshes, while the advancing Russians destroy the castle housing the Napola and its juvenile defenders. Colin Davis concedes that Le Roi des aulnes combines a selfregarding formalism with a closely documented realism, although within the narrative economy, the formalism is largely attributable to the characters over-interpretative mania (caused by psychic instability or ideological fanaticism) rather than Tourniers personal obsessions. Unsurprisingly, Tourniers paroxysmal naturalism includes some horrific incidents of battlefield Gothic during the concluding descriptions of the downfall of the Third Reich in East Prussia (such as the decapitation of a boy soldier caught by the back blast of a Panzerfaust, or the impalement of three boys on ceremonial swords, their blood forming a purple mantel on the immaculate snow). Squeamish or prudish readers may well find Tourniers protracted, erotically charged descriptions of such extreme bodily mutilation and transformation disturbing, and his protagonists preoccupation with his own and others physiological functions and excretions repugnant or obscene. Even if we reject Tiffaugess belief that he is inscribed in destiny, there is little doubt that he is endowed with a vision that
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transforms his and the readers perceptions of people, objects and events in disturbing and provocative ways. Some critics have claimed that Tournier has made Nazi iconography and anthropology too appealing (although a satirical undertone can often be detected, for instance in the account of Grings venery). Tourniers work, unlike Ayms and Barjavels, does offer a mythologised version of World War Two which could be said to transform our perception of the Third Reich and its collaborators. These writers revitalise a preChristian type of metamorphosis, particularly in their insistence on transformation as a collective process affecting the nation at war rather than just exceptional individuals. Their protagonists are neither mythical heroes nor Romantic or fin-de-sicle anti-heroes, but distinctly ordinary men confronted by the extraordinary circumstances of industrialised warfare and the mass transformation of humanity which they bring.
C.D. Lloyd 10.10 SOURCES CITED Primary Marcel Aym, 1943, Le Passe-Muraille Marcel Aym, 1948, Uranus Ren Barjavel, 1943, Ravage Ren Barjavel, 1944, Le Voyageur imprudent Boileau-Narcejac, 1976, La Lpre Didier Daeninckx, 1989, La Mort noublie personne Jean-Franois Deniau, 1989, Un hros trs discret Andr Devigny, 1978, Je fus ce condamn Jonathan Littell, 2006, Les Bienveillantes Robert Merle, 1949, Week-end Zuydcoote Jean-Pierre Perrin, 1999, Chiens et louves Jorge Semprun, 1996, Lcriture ou la vie Michel Tournier, 1970, Le Roi des aulnes Secondary S. Combe, 1994, Archives interdites C. Davis, 1988, Michel Tournier: Philosophy and Fiction S. Hynes, 1997, The Soldiers Tale: Bearing Witness to Modern War M. Jacquot, 2000, Ironie et drision dans le roman franais de 1945 nos jours M. Halbwachs, 1968, La Mmoire collective T. Judt, 2005, Postwar : a History of Europe since 1945 J. Kmpfer, 1998, Potique du rcit de guerre S. Petit, 1991, Michel Tourniers Metaphysical Fictions P. Ricur, 2003, La Mmoire, lhistoire, loubli H. Rousso, 1987, Le Syndrome de Vichy O. Sacks, 1986, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat W.C. Sellar & R.Y. Yeatman, 1930, 1066 and All That S.R. Suleiman, 2006, Crises of Memory and the Second World War J. Winter, 2006, Remembering War: the Great War between Memory and History http://www.frame.leeds.ac.uk/database/

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