L'homme n'est qu'un animal mythologique.

—Michel Tournier¹

Myth, says Michel Tournier, is ‘une histoire fondamentale’, and humanity is defined by its capacity to mythologise, its receptivity ‘au bruissement d'histoires, au kaléidoscope d'images’ which it perceives from cradle to grave. Myth unites story, history and the urge to express some basic truth about humanity. Like Tournier, Marcel Aymé (1902–1967) was a compelling storyteller, whose fictions pleasingly combine the fabulist's art with moral and historical reflexion on his age. With their richly atmospheric evocation of period and place, their grimly humorous depiction of the attempt to hold on to values and identity in a world where the collapse of order and annihilation have become the norm, the works which Aymé wrote about the Second World War illustrate his creative talents at their best. In addition, novels like Le Chemin des écoliers (1946), Uranus (1948) and the story ‘Traversée de Paris’ (1946) have a documentary interest and a strong narrative line which have drawn film-makers as much as readers. Cinematic adaptations of these texts by, respectively, Michel Boisrond (1959), Claude Berri (1990) and Claude Autant-Lara (1956), not only continue to gain Aymé a wider popular audience but also help sustain the never-ending process of interpretation of the Occupation, which is itself a significant phenomenon of post-war French culture. In this respect, one need only recall the latest controversy about President Mitterrand's wartime record as a decorated Vichy turncoat, or the conviction of Paul Touvier earlier in 1994 for crimes against humanity, in a trial that had effectively been drawn out for half a century. For the purposes of this brief discussion of Aymé's literary contribution to the debate, I shall concentrate on the 20,000-word story ‘Traversée de Paris’, together with Autant-Lara's film version, retitled La Traversée de Paris or Pig Across Paris in some English versions.²

K. K. Ruthven suggests that myths contain ‘para-history’, that is what people believe or hope happened in the past. Moreover, ‘to be preoccupied with myth reveals a yearning for order in the midst of upheavals and fragmentariness’.³ While myths as cosmological allegories, esoteric philosophy, eschatological systems, or the devious attempts of the bourgeoisie (as anatomised by Barthes) to maintain cultural hegemony by making ideology into nature, need not concern us here, more useful is the notion of the foundation myth outlined by Henry Tudor, which seeks to (re)explain past events in order to justify and reinforce the authority of those holding power or influence in the present. Myths in this sense may be garbled history, but the shaping of their narrative serves an eminently practical purpose, of effecting or upholding social and political cohesion. Thus, as Tudor observes, there is nothing primitive, rudimentary, or merely literary about myth.⁴ Consequently, it is as legitimate and fruitful to talk about myth in the context of modern historical events like the Second World War as it is regarding ancient theogonies, medieval legend, or the metamorphoses wrought by the artistic imagination.

Myths are not untruths (except in popular parlance), but rather attempts to locate truths in convenient fictions. Insofar as irony depends on a perceived gap between semblance and reality, along with a position of sceptical detachment on the part of the ironist (and those who share his perspective), one could argue that myth is fundamentally ironic, at least in the historiographical sense which is attached to it in this discussion. To talk, for instance, of the myths of the Occupation and Liberation of France in 1940–44, is to acknowledge that one has seen through them, while perhaps recognising their necessity. The excessively naive or cynical belief that history is either absolute truth or complete bunk can be replaced by a more ironic awareness that historical meaning is constantly constructed and reconstructed, as much by the observer as by the events he records. Ironic detachment can of course easily degenerate into smug condescension. The Times published a leading article on 27 August 1994, entitled ‘La Libération: Paris has been reliving a healing national myth’. The quaint use of the Gallic term and the personification of Paris show the anonymous editorialist lapsing into the clichéd evocation of mythic forces, of which he (or she) was perhaps unaware. The writer goes on to argue that the Parisians ‘Dancing until dawn yesterday on the Place de la Concorde’ were possessed with the mythic spirit summoned up fifty years before by General de Gaulle's famous celebration of ‘la France éternelle’ in the act of self-liberation. That the liberation of Paris was actually due to Allied military dominance and to the restraint of General von Choltitz, rather than to heroic French freedom fighters, was conveniently omitted in the attempt to restore national unity. (A glance at Angus Calder's skilful anatomisation of The Myth of the Blitz (London: Jonathan Cape, 1991) serves as a salutory reminder that the British have no reason to be complacently superior in this domain.)

The novelist who takes his material from historical and social reality can hardly avoid presenting the official version of history in an ironic light in his fiction. For Marcel Aymé's characters, patriotism and honesty are dangerously outmoded values, at least as conventionally accepted. ‘Traversée de Paris’ recounts the attempt by two small-time black-marketeers to smuggle the carcass of a pig across occupied Paris, on foot, in the winter of 1942–43. Central issues in the story are how identity and social responsibility are defined. The reversals and moral ambiguities of Aymé's plot constantly rehearse and ironise some of the key myths of Occupation existence. The film is more overtly comic, attenuating the characters' existential rage in favour of more entertaining, farcical business, and widening out the story's account of period detail. Apart from its conclusion, however, the film remains faithful to Aymé in spirit and tone, matching his verbal shafts in the excellent script of Aurenche and Bost and the memorable central performances by Bourvil and Jean Gabin. In this respect, it is unique among the cinematic adaptations of Aymé's works, which are mostly undistinguished dilutions of his stories.

An early biographer of Aymé, Jean Cathelin, observed that the writer set out in his pre-war essay Silhouette du scandale (1938), stimulated by the repercussions of the Stavisky affair, to ‘décrypter les mythes de la société contemporaine’. At the same time, myth decoded may mean myth reenacted in a new form; hence perhaps the ‘renouveau de littérature mythique et symbolique’ in the decade after 1940.⁵ Before pursuing this analysis, it would be helpful to recall some of the central myths of Occupation. Unsurprisingly, the founding myth is not that of the débâcle of 1940 or of Pétain the saviour, but that of Resistance, often referred to as ‘résistancilisme’. Obvious literary examples which help elaborate such a myth are Vercors's Le Silence de la mer, Vailland's Drôle de jeu, and, in more allegorical mode, Sartre's Les Mouches and Camus's La Peste. Michel Tournier, to quote him again, exemplifies a common post-1968 urge to demystify the notion of ‘résistancialisme’, when he asserts that ‘En vérité Résistance n'est devenue un phénomène d'ampleur nationale qu'après le départ des Allemands. […] Les authentiques résistants furent souvent noyés, submergés, écœures par l'explosion du mythe de la Résistance après la Libération’.⁶ According to Tournier, Marcel Ophuls's celebrated documentary film Le Chagrin et la pitié, shown in French cinemas in 1971, helped re-establish a more truthful view of the Occupation. The historian Henry Rousso, author of Le Syndrome de Vichy, a fascinating historiographical study of post-war representations of the Occupation, which he sees as reflecting a national, collective neurosis, reiterates Tournier's critique, albeit more subtly.⁷ The film certainly enraged the official guardians of memory, whether of left or right, by its insistence on collaboration or compliance with the enemy as the norm, rather than Resistance, but its own partiality runs the risk of replacing the myth of ‘résistancialisme’ with a new one of universal cowardice and abjection.

Rousso sees Autant-Lara's film of ‘La Traversée de Paris’ as an anticipatory gesture of iconoclastic defiance: ‘A sa manière, le film est une première pierre lancée dans le jardin des mythes naissants’.⁸ In fact, Aymé and Autant-Lara subvert the myth of Resistance, not by frontal assault, but by omission. The heroic resister (a central figure in a novel like Kessel's L'Armée des ombres (1943) and the Melville film which followed the book a generation later in 1969) is replaced by his mercenary counterpart, the profiteer. In one scene in the film (not found in Aymé's story), a young woman shelters Gabin and Bourvil from a German patrol in the hallway of her tenement, on the ingenuous assumption that they are Resistance members on the run. While the sardonic Grandgil plays her along, the hapless Martin soon betrays their real profession. But the idea of fresh pork proves as seductive to the girl as that of ‘parachutage’; while Gabin is as ever willing to offer her ‘une petite côtelette’ as a reward, Bourvil with his petty crook's code of honour refuses to share booty which doesn't belong to him. The message, then, is that even if the French are not united in Resistance, they share the same greed and urge for gain; the virtuous pose of the girl and Martin is undercut by the reality of their behaviour and by Grandgil's more knowing opportunism.

Aymé and Autant-Lara may seem simply to have replaced ‘résistancialisme’ with an early version of the more heretical outlook typical of the so-called ‘mode rétro’ of the 1970s and 1980s. Alan Morris characterises ‘résistancialisme’ as depending on four propositions:⁹ that there were few real collaborators; that the vast majority of the population were patriotic; that the real interests of France were pursued by an élite of freedom fighters; that de Gaulle led and personified the Resistance. What is significant about the ‘mode rétro’, on the other hand, is not merely that it blurs these categories (implicitly rehabilitating collaboration, say, by equating it with Resistance as an option dictated by chance rather than choice: the theme of Louis Malle's well-known-film, Lacombe Lucien), but also that it makes heresy fashionable; an equivocal nostalgia for period detail and mores replaces condemnation. It is certainly true that Aymé's writings about the Occupation reject the Gaullist legend. While he marginalises Resistance, and dismisses de Gaulle as a dictator, ‘venu de l'autre rive de la Manche se faire le geôlier de la nation’,¹⁰ he portrays most French people as self-interested opportunists, reserving his strongest scorn for those who hypocritically adopt ideological allegiances in order to dominate and exploit the uncommitted. Nevertheless, there is nothing nostalgic about the novels and stories written during and just after the war; the world they depict is a bleak one, of deprivation, fear and imminent catastrophe. At the same time, Aymé's fictional universe is sharply delineated and his ironies, however subversive of the official line, point to clear-cut moral options. He is remote from the obsessive cataloguing of period bric-à-brac and oneiric interaction of fact and fancy which one founds in the novels of Patrick Modiano, who is usually held to be the best current practitioner of the ‘mode rétro’.

Jean Dutourd writes in his novel Au bon beurre, ou dix ans de la vie d'un crémier (1952) that ‘Au-dessus de la politique, il y avait les affaires’.¹¹ Aymé shares this perception. In ‘Traversée de Paris’, survival has become a matter of business. Martin trades in black-market meat, Grandgil in paintings, while in the film version the Germans are shown trading off the lives of hostages to pay for Resistance incursions. In any case, politics is only another form of business. In Uranus, the double-dealing of the Communist Party includes the protection of the gross profiteer Monglat, at the expense of lesser fry like the café-owner Léopold or the collaborator Loin. In Le Chemin des écoliers, the protagonist Michaud eventually learns to reject his outmoded humane values and becomes a successful black-marketeer, having followed in the footsteps of his sixteen-year-old son Antoine. More is at stake here than cynical adaptation to changed social conditions. As Dutourd observes in a later passage of his novel, all substance has become illusory under the Occupation, as the ersatz replaces the real:

Les lames de rasoir ne coupaient pas, le savon était une pierre ou du sable, le dentifrice du plâtre, le café de l'orge, le cuir du papier, la toile de la fibre de bois. On était entouré d'apparences, on se mouvait dans des mirages, la vie réelle n'était pas plus véridique que des accessoires de théâtre: poulets de carton, bouteilles d'eau teintée, sabres en fer-blanc.¹²

Instead of giving the illusion of reality, the novel chronicles the reality of illusion.

Dutourd's characters tend to remain odious stereotypes; when Marshal Pétain appears, he is no longer a saviour but a sort of grotesque doll. Aymé is more successful at taking us beyond caricature and engaging us with the inner world of his central characters The public or political arena is held at a distance, at least in ‘Traversée de Paris’. Is there however a mythologisation or metaphysic of daily living? Like Dutourd's observer, Aymé's Martin (the name of the common man, which is given to many of the protagonists of the author's stories) is aware at times of the flimsiness of his surroundings. Entering a café, its sordid appearance makes him think of ‘un décor de théâtre d'un réalisme indiscret’ (VP, 51). This mise en abyme teasingly reverses the customary referential gesture towards an extra-textual reality: here the world of theatrical illusion again invades the everyday. That the other principal character, Grandgil, is a painter adds of course to the possibilities of such ironic manipulations.

Novelists and film-makers may in practice be better equipped than historians to track down and convey the determinants of ordinary life, which leave few official traces. In this context, the ambiguities of attentisme and the black economy fall into that area between fact and fiction which readily invites the elaboration of new myths.¹³ Are such marginal figures as the profiteer and wide boy despicable exploiters of others' needs or rather lovable rogues untrammelled by hypocritical convention? When, as the historian Roderick Kedward observes, up to half the food supply was channelled through the black market, it is actually misleading to call them marginal. In Le Chemin des écoliers, the black-marketeering school-boy Antoine controls his circumstances far more effectively than the supposedly dominant adults who surround him. The control of the food supply determines the survival of social bonds as much as that of individuals; as Aymé observes in the allegorical story, ‘La Bonne Peinture’, ‘c'est par le ventre qu'on commence à se sentir avec les autres’ (VP, 188). In an extensive study of Trafics et crimes sous l'Occupation, Jacques Delarue argues that the black market, far from reflecting the spirit of French enterprise or rebelliousness, was in fact largely controlled by the Germans.¹⁴ Goods in short supply were often channelled through bureaux d'achat offering higher prices than official ones; these ‘officines allemandes’ were nominally run by French middlemen, who were often convicted felons and Gestapo agents. He cites the extraordinary success of such notorious profiteers as the Russian Szkolnikoff (murdered in June 1945) and the Romanian Joinovici (who was finally incarcerated in 1947).

In effect, a clandestine secondary economy was set up, which outstripped the official one in some sectors such as the leather trade. At the same time, those outside the system suffered increasing hardship. In 1943, the official daily food ration was 1,500 calories—1,000 below the basic requirement; infantile mortality rose by 50 per cent and deaths from tuberculosis by nearly 100 per cent during the Occupation. One of the great merits of Aymé's storytelling is to reveal the practical consequences of such bare facts; he prefers concrete detail and caustic humour to false pity or overblown rhetoric. Most of the characters in ‘Traversée de Paris’ are at the very bottom of the economic ladder, and remote from the large-scale profiteers found in real life or Aymé's other works. The chain of supply and demand portrayed in the story excludes the Germans (unlike Autant-Lara's adaptation, as will be seen). Aymé is less interested in the morality of the black market than in its effect on the behaviour of his characters. Both Grandgil and Martin are offered a sort of freedom in their clandestine venture, which ultimately neither is willing or able to accept. Violence is finally perpetrated by the enraged Martin when he resolves the enigma of Grandgil's identity and kills him; after this cathartic act, he is content to be taken off to prison, having refused the temptations offered by his mysterious partner. In the film, on the other hand, the final act is determined from without by the intrusion of the Germans.

The action of ‘Traversée de Paris’ is motivated partly by the topography of the characters' nocturnal odyssey, and partly by the clash of their antagonistic personalities. Reversal of fortunes and characters is a constant device, reflecting both the upheaval of Occupation and the author's fondness for surprising his readers. In the opening sentence, we read: ‘La victime, déjà dépecée, gisait dans un coin de la cave sous des torchons de grosse toile’ (VP, 27). The false drama of butchery carried out by the quaking grocer Jamblier and the arrival of Martin who resembles ‘un inspecteur de police’ (28), might lead us to assume the existence of a crime worthy of Dr Petiot (the infamous mass murderer of the Occupation) or his acolytes, the ‘faux policiers’ of the rue Lauriston, particularly if we recall the atrocious murders and scenes of cannibalism which Aymé laconically recounts in Le Chemin des écoliers. The victim of course is a pig, whose 100-kilo carcass is to be transported eight kilometres from the rue Poliveau (near the Jardin des Plantes, in the 5ème) to the rue Caulaincourt in Montmartre. These addresses locate the story in a real Paris, whose streets and monuments are carefully indicated to mark the stages of the journey. But the travellers, weighed down by their heavy suitcases, also move across a landscape as equivocal as their business. (Autant-Lara's film was shot entirely on studio sets, without location work, and presents a Paris both realistic and stylised in its obvious markers of Occupation life.)

In the café on the Boulevard de la Bastille where they first meet, Martin and Grandgil contemplate the sunset over the canal. The narrator notes that ‘la lumière du soir durcissait les lignes et les plans’, whereas for Martin, ‘cette agonie lucide du crépuscule’ is a gloomy and chilling symbol of life's shortcomings (32–33); he assumes erroneously that Grandgil shares this perspective. Only towards the end of the story are we shown the urban landscape painting in Grandgil's studio which recalls the opening sunset scene (68). The correspondence which Grandgil finds thus differs radically from Martin's; the painter attempts to possess and dominate the landscape, just as he comes to dominate Martin and finally draws his portrait after he has fallen asleep in exhaustion. Yet Grandgil is not particularly successful in his ventures as a highbrow artist, which he signs with his real name Gilouin. Martin is more impressed by the lurid, erotic drawings which Grandgil exchanges for commodities in the neighbourhood (‘Avant-hier, pour une femme à poil, j'ai eu un jambon’, 67). While Grandgil's commercial art is thus equated with their commerce of the pig (and Grandgil himself is constantly described as having ‘de petits yeux de porc’ and resembling a ‘bélier’), his true vocation leaves him more vulnerable, for in it he surrenders ‘cette ironie un peu distante où le peintre semblait trouver son équilibre le plus sûr’ (69). Overhearing Grandgil boasting contemptuously on the telephone about his black-market exploits (‘Ce sont les mous qui font les durs’, 71), the humiliated and envious Martin attacks Grandgil's ‘proper’ paintings and kills him in the ensuing struggle. After delivering the pig, however, Martin is arrested by the police who have discovered his portrait, incriminatingly signed with the date, in the artist's studio.

Three perspectives run parallel in the story and create its ironic manner: the small-minded survival skills of Martin, the born loser whose judgement invariably falls short of the facts; the ironic pose of Grandgil, who admits to being a painter but proves to be as effective as a petty gangster, and whose insouciance is matched by considerable practical skill; and the judgements of the reader, for whom ‘Traversée de Paris’ is an evocation of occupied Paris as well as a clash of conflicting protagonists. While Martin constantly betrays his flaws and weaknesses in words and deeds to his companion (for instance, his common-law wife Mariette has just left him; Grandgil tells him patronisingly that given her advanced years she'll soon be back), Grandgil witholds his true identity behind his taciturn detachment, while also proving far more effective as a man of action. Typically, Martin assumes that Grandgil is a down-at-heel housepainter. The reader, noting the ‘insolente ironie’ of Grandgil's gaze (31), is unlikely to share this hasty supposition. Consequently, as Grandgil increasingly dominates the situation, both Martin and reader are driven to reinterpret his character, and to question Martin's own ethic, which clings on to a dubious notion of honesty even in flagrantly illegal dealings.

Until the final revelation of Grandgil's true identity, his actions constantly speak louder than Martin's words, despite the latter's naive belief in his own adroitness and experience. When a customer in the first café aggressively denounces the pair as ‘poulets’, policemen or agents provocateurs, Martin protests ineffectually while Grandgil pushes the belligerent man out of the way. On discovering the treasure trove of foodstuffs which Jamblier is hoarding in his cellar, Grandgil extorts 5,000 francs from the grocer instead of the 450 which Martin was content with. The carcass itself is worth 15,000 francs, but Martin refuses Grandgil's suggestion that they dispose of it themselves. Both Jamblier and Martin affect indignation at Grandgil's ‘duplicité monstrueuse’ (42), although the narrator points out the paradox of their convenient expectation of honesty in criminal dealings. Martin attempts to explain Grandgil's extorsion on his own moral terms, as a legitimate desire to receive a better reward for the risks they are taking (whereas it is more probably gratuitous bravado). Nonetheless, ‘Martin, lui, ne voyait rien d'immoral ni de scandaleux dans le trafic clandestin et ses bénéfices réputés exorbitants. Le vol et l'illégalité étaient à ses yeux choses distinctes’ (VP, 45). Grandgil himself imagines that he has captured ‘le personnage moral de Martin’ in his sketch of him, and revealed ‘ce qu'est l'honnêteté d'un homme: un sentiment de fidélité à soi-même, commandé par l'estime qu'il a de sa propre image, telle que la lui renovie le miroir de la vie sociale’ (70).

Grandgil considers himself above this ‘moyenne honorable’ (70); the artist shapes his own image by playing at the role of gangster or contemptor of humanity, while also recording an image of others and their world in his paintings. When they enter another café half-way through their journey, Grandgil intimidates the surly owner and his repulsive wife (who are illegally employing a Jewish girl), with a denunciatory (and anti-Semitic) tirade. He also insults the covetous clients who are measuring up the suitcases with their ‘yeux de demi-affamés’ (51): ‘Foutez-moi le camp, salauds de pauvres […] Allez aboyer contre le marché noir’ (53). The ‘salauds de pauvres’, which the film made famous, and the gold teeth which his disdainful laugh reveals, evidently confirm his status as an antipathetic character, yet also demonstrate a rejection of the myth of solidarity. The weak are in effect shown as envious, contemptible and deserving of being crushed; their complaints rarely lead to action. That both Aymé and Autant-Lara were men of right-wing views, whose non-alignment with Resistance virtues got them into trouble at the Liberation, doubtless helps explain the venom of ‘Traversée de Paris’ in this area.

Nevertheless, the dandyish Grandgil is eventually disposed of by his partner, and a more conventional moral order thereby restored. The opening sunset is further replicated by the blood spreading over his defaced painting of the Boulevard de la Bastille: both the artist and his demonstration of aesthetic superiority have been eradicated. Although art is in a sense avenged when the portrait betrays Martin as the likely killer, Martin in any case is content to surrender to the law since he cannot tolerate the thought of others perceiving him as a murderer. His final act is to drop the envelope containing Grandgil's 5,000 francs in the street, in the hope that a passer-by will post it back to Jamblier. The story concludes: ‘Jamais il n'avait eu une foi aussi entière en la vertu de ses semblables’ (79). There are, it seems, no winners. Both Grandgil and Martin have failed to survive their enterprise, either practically or morally. As a result, the reader is likely once again to regard Martin's faith as entirely misplaced and to draw a more radically pessimistic conclusion.

The ending of ‘Traversée de Paris’ is not altogether satisfactory. The conclusion of Autant-Lara's film is quite different. Aymé nihilistically rejects the morality of the detached artist as much as that of the common man; both are defeated by their own weaknesses rather than circumstance. The film, on the other hand, relies on circumstance (that is, the intrusion of the Germans, whom Aymé largely excludes from his story other than as passing figures). Whereas Aymé's story is more powerful and coherent in relying on ethic rather than event, as far as plot and character are concerned the violent outcome still seems rather contrived. Martin's capacity to kill has been established by recollections of his stabbing a Turkish soldier in the Dardanelles during the First War. Nevertheless, when he attempts to attack Grandgil earlier in the evening, his more powerful companion repels him effortlessly, just as he floors an inquisitive policeman with one blow.

It is the betrayal of Grandgil's double identity, the last of several betrayals of their odyssey, which enrages Martin and which also removes the artist's shield of protective irony. The demands of symbolism over-ride those of verisimilitude, in other words. One could in fact argue that Grandgil has a triple identity, as apprentice gangster, commercial painter, and the budding highbrow artist Gilouin. It is the last who is sacrificed. Similarly, there are three conclusions offered, if one fuses Aymé's story with Autant-Lara's film. This is because the director's wishes were eventually overruled by his producer, who demanded that a supposedly happy ending be grafted on to his existing dénouement.¹⁵ In effect, the murder of the pig replaces that of Grandgil; in Aurenche and Bost's script, Martin (now teasingly christened Marcel, though he is called Eugène in the story) plays the accordion in the opening sequence to conceal the fracas caused as Jamblier (played by Louis de Funès) and his family chase the luckless swine round the cellar before finally succeeding in slaughtering it. Aymé's ironies of identity are to a large extent replaced by such farcical albeit macabre interludes. In a later scene, Gabin and Bourvil are joined by a retinue of famished dogs which, like the howling wolves in the Jardin des Plantes, are drawn by the smell of the meat and only dissuaded when bribed with a sample from the suitcase.

Finally, Gabin and Bourvil are arrested as they attempt to deliver the suitcases. A German officer recognises Grandgil and has him released, while the less fortunate Martin is driven off with a lorryload of French hostages. What follows this grim reversal was described by Claude Mauriac as ‘Une fin postiche, anodine et qui sonne faux’. Brief shots of the Liberation, victory parades and the playing of the Marseillaise denote the end of the war (sarcastically echoing the opening shots of German triumph). We move to the post-war Gare de Lyon and discover a wealthy Grandgil boarding a train, assisted by a railway porter, who turns out to be Martin, a survivor after all but still the eternal ‘porteur de valises’. Yet survival hardly betokens optimism. Other reviewers noted that whereas Aymé chose to chastise Grandgil's amoralism, Autant-Lara's production shows him to be a ‘gentil collaborateur’. Claude Mauriac observed that ‘Il fallait aux auteurs le visage humain et sympathique de Gabin pour faire passer l'odieux de certaines de ses paroles et de quelques-uns de ses actes’.¹⁶ (Jean Gabin in fact often played the sort of virtuous gangster whose morality Aymé mocked in his story; in addition, he was one of the few major showbusiness figures of the period not to have been compromised under the Occupation.)

Be that as it may, it is hard to avoid concluding that the ironic configurations of both story and film produce a grimly bleak representation of the Occupation. Pierre Ajame asserts that the film is ‘un chef-d'œuvre de méchanceté’; not only do Aymé and Autant-Lara deride the patriotic myths of Resistance and national solidarity, but they demonstrate that ‘L'amitié est une blague, la culture un élément de troc, le dévouement une bêtise, l'héroïsme une foutaise, l'amour une escroquerie’.¹⁷ Yet are ‘Traversée de Paris’ and La Traversée de Paris really such destructive, nihilistic exercises in derisive debunking? Their very popularity tends to indicate that this is an overstatement. Both writer and director achieve a comic complicity with their audience, as they subvert the false heroism of official propaganda and the cynical anti-heroism of the black-marketeer. The truth may be unpalatable or intangible, yet the reader and spectator are enabled to observe one possible version of it from an ironic perspective, where recognition and detachment become fully compatible.

Notes

1. M. Tournier, Le Vent Paraclet (Paris: Gallimard, Folio, 1977), pp. 188, 191.

2. References to ‘Traversée de Paris’ in my text are taken from Le Vin de Paris (Paris: Gallimard 1947) and abbreviated as VP. For the script of the film, see L'Avant-scéne cinéma, 66 (January 1967).

3. K. K. Ruthven, Myth (London: Methuen, 1976), p. 82.

4. H. Tudor, Political Myth (London: Pall Mall Press, 1972).

5. J. Cathelin, Marcel Aymé, ou le paysan de Paris (Paris: Nouvelles Editions Debresse, 1958), p. 170, 211.

6. Tournier, pp. 79–80.

7. See H. Rousso, Le Syndrome de Vichy de 1944 à nos jours (Paris: Seuil, 1990), pp. 127ff. See also G. Kantin and G. Manceron, eds, Les Echos de la mémoire: tabous et enseignement de la Seconde Guerre Mondiale (Paris: Le Monde-Editions, 1991), and E. Conan and H. Rousso, Vichy: un passé qui ne passe pas (Paris: Fayard, 1994).

8. Rousso, p. 262.

9. A. Morris, Collaboration and Resistance Reviewed: Writers and the Mode Rétro in Post-Gaullist France (New York: Berg, 1992).

10. M. Aymé, Vagabondages, ed. M. Lecureur (Besançon: La Manufacture, 1992), p. 315. For a fuller discussion, see C. Lloyd, Marcel Aymé: ‘Uranus’ and ‘La Tête des autres’ (Glasgow: University of Glasgow French and German Publications, 1994).

11. J. Dutourd, Au bon beurre (Paris: Le Livre de poche, 1958), p. 179.

12. Dutourd, p. 214.

13. H. R. Kedward writes: ‘there can be no simple conclusion about the French day-to-day existence under the Occupation, and no single answer to the question of whether or not the severity of the Nazi presence was directly reflected in daily behaviour’. Occupied France: Collaboration and Resistance 1940–1944 (London: Blackwell, 1985), p.14. See also J. Tosh, The Pursuit of History, 2nd ed. (London: Longman, 1991).

14. J. Delarue, Trafics et crimes sous l'Occupation (Paris: Fayard, 1968).

15. See M. Lecureur, ‘Claude Autant-Lara nous a parlé de Marcel Aymé’, Cahiers Marcel Aymé, 1 (1982), pp.134–35.

16. Quoted in L'Avant-scène cinéma, p. 47.

17. L'Avant-scène cinèma, p. 47.