March 2004
·
9 Reads
·
1 Citation
South Central Review
South Central Review 21.1 (2004) 82-93 As Susan Suleiman reminds us, France's current controversies concerning the Occupation years are not due to a neglect of memory and history—on the contrary, it is more a thorny question of sorting through a proliferation of competing accounts describing those tragic years. The "Aubrac affair" is an eloquent example given the complex historiographical, ethical, and ideological questions it has provoked. In her comments on this episode, Suleiman offers a hypothesis that strikes me as an unconsidered key to unraveling significant aspects of these confusing and painful debates: that the parties involved may have greatly underestimated the role of unconscious (and semiconscious) narrative desire in the reconstruction and interpretation of the historical events of 1943. In addition to the litany of examples identified by Suleiman from the Libération roundtable, the rhetorical choices in a number of the Aubracs' written accounts reflect this impulse as well. In his introduction to a brief history of the war effort, Raymond Aubrac refers to the Resistance as "a unique chapter in the history of France." The metaphor thus works off of an episodic narrative division. He goes on to describe this particular chapter of history as one which "opens with a crushing defeat, closes with full participation in a triumphant victory, and passes through incredible shifts of fortune between the two." This mirrors the heroic narrative structure Suleiman describes as its outline follows the same mixture of individual and collective heroism, the same Manichean opposition of patriots who eventually vanquish the villains. Lucie Aubrac makes an even more explicit reference to literary devices in her famous memoir, Ils partiront dans l'ivresse (Outwitting the Gestapo). "Because of my deep involvement in the underground war, keeping a diary was out of the question," she writes. "That, however, is the form I want my narrative to take. It covers nine months—from May 1943 to February 1944 . . ." In so doing, she obeys the fiction writer's strategy of making use of a genre that reproduces the impression of historical immediacy, of factual chronology in lived time. For instance, André Malraux, who did not witness the events in question but long let it be understood that he might have, employed this technique for his fictional account of the Shanghai uprising in La Condition humaine (Man's Fate, 1933). In the case of the Aubracs, novice writers who are not necessarily fully conscious of the influence form exerts on content, one wonders to what extent they unknowingly followed familiar narrative structures to mold, sift through, and even "arrange" the raw material with which memory had provided them. This phenomenon of narrative desire is, of course, not to be understood in a purely negative light. On the contrary, it can provide legitimate coherence. For example, to turn to one of the historical experts invited to the Aubrac roundtable, one can even characterize Henry Rousso's descriptive paradigm in The Vichy Syndrome as sketching out a four-act narrative play in its well-known sequence of incomplete mourning, repression, the return of the repressed, and obsession. This takes nothing away from the judiciousness of the stages and pattern it identifies—Rousso's analysis constitutes to my mind the most significant interpretation of social memory's evolution in contemporary France over the past five decades—but perhaps this clear structure has helped improve the work's intelligibility to scholars from a variety of different fields. Another virtue of Suleiman's hypothesis is that it can potentially account as well for ways in which some of France's most respected (intellectually and deontologically) historians were led into fairly aggressive lines of questioning during the Libération roundtable. While this still consists in essence of the same operation, there is perhaps a slight shift since on this side of the equation the activity is (at least initially) that of a reader. We are closer to something like what Wolfgang Iser has termed in reader response theory "filling in the textual blanks," i.e., those gaps in a text which require an interpretive act on the part of the reader, an act which supplies meaning and thus allows the reader to move forward with...