SOURCE: Atack, Margaret. “Structures of Irony.” In Literature and the French Resistance: Cultural Politics and Narrative Forms, 1940-1950, pp. 208-31. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989.

[In the following essay, Atack examines postwar French literature.]

‘THE GAME OF WAR AND CHANCE’¹

In L'Univers concentrationnaire (The Concentration Camp World), David Rousset places the concentration camps under the patronage of the modern masters of the grotesque, Jarry's Ubu, Kafka and Céline,² to present the incongruous juxtaposition of terror and bureaucratic order; but the discovery of the grotesque absurdity of this closed world is a key to survival, a sign of human resilience defying inhuman degradation. The post-war novel of the Occupation is paradoxically both less bleak and more pessimistic, burlesque or grotesque rather than tragic, as the incongruities of the human tragi-comedy are ironically highlighted by the narrator or by the structure of the narrative. All the novels of ambiguity accentuate to a greater or lesser extent the incoherence of the times, its failure to be accommodated within clear moral categories. The kaleidoscope of opinions and actions in Les Epées and La Culbute are reduced to appearing no more than absurd posturings as the main characters at the centre move between pro-Resistance, pro-Vichy and pro-German groups, cynically playing their part in each and being enthusiastically welcomed by all. In Uranus and Mon Village à l'heure allemande the presence in the narrative of a multiplicity of positions and attitudes inextricably linking political differences and personality clashes has a major role here, and combines with the episodic structure to create a disjointed effect, emphasising contingency at the expense of causality.

In Les Forêts de la nuit the role of the contingent is particularly important, taking the form of a primary disparity between intention and result which is the major theme of the Liberation scenes, but also structures minor episodes in the course of the novel. The fate of the letters Hélène de Balansun writes to Jean de Lavoncourt is a case in point. They all pass through many hands and most of them, for a variety of reasons ranging from fear of arrest to perverse bad temper, are destroyed. Two actually reach Spain, but Jean has already left for London when the second arrives and the man who has agreed to forward letters is arrested. So the letter not only fails to reach Jean, but ends up in the hands of a local concierge ‘who had it translated by her daughter's lover, a journalist, and kept it carefully as a model of love literature’.³ The irony of this passage is operating at several levels and can be categorised according to Robert Scholes's useful definitions of the diachronic and synchronic modes of narrative irony.⁴ The diachronic mode, the disappointment of the protagonist's expectations, underlies the intentionally humorous manner in which the various letters fall by the wayside and frustrate Hélène's hope of communicating with Jean.⁵ The fate of the final letter illustrates the synchronic mode, the disparity between the two codes; a letter inscribed within the code of interpersonal communication (involving both an intimate relationship and separation)⁶ is reinscribed as an anthology piece within a literary code. As such it is a paradigm for the content of synchronic irony in the post-war novel, particularly, as will be seen, in relation to the Resistance: divorced from its original intention and context, it is turned into pure spectacle.

On the great day of the Liberation in Paris and Saint-Clar, expectations and intentions also fail to be realised, for its import lay in ‘the gap between what should have been and what in fact was’.⁷ The conflicts and moral confusions of the Occupation years concord to turn what should have been the culmination of the fight against the Germans and the beginning of a new era into an empty spectacle, the parochialism of which is particularly underlined in Saint-Clar: ‘After the monstrous constraints of the Occupation years, after being plunged for so long in mud, blood and stupidity, one was entitled to expect a magnificent leap, exemplary punishments, ritual murder of the real culprits, the undamming of the lustral waters of joy and hope.’ Instead they were treated to ‘a speech in the good old electoral tradition and the farce of the head shaving’.⁸ All that counts is the appearance of solidarity, in mass demonstrations of righteousness, and the narrative accumulates the incongruities which prove the point. Anyone who is prepared to fight is welcomed on the Parisian barricades and Philippe Arréguy, who has been hiding from the ‘Gestapo française’ since Francis's murder, reappears and joins the FFI for the love of a battle. In Saint-Clar too, the demonstrations of patriotic fervour at the public humiliation of its sacrificial victims like Cécile Delahaye have very shallow roots: ‘Stupidity and hatred surged through this well fed, happy crowd of Saint Clar who had never suffered, for whom the war had been a Golconda and the Germans a blessing.’⁹ The irony of these scenes belonging to the synchronic mode resides in the disparity between two moral codes; on the one hand the mass demonstrations of pro-Resistance anti-German feeling, on the other that constituted by the denunciations of the observers—Gérard Delahaye in Paris, Jacques Costellot in Saint-Clar, and the narrator—which underline it as a spectacular morality play for the benefit of the participants' consciences and manipulated by those orchestrating it. For Gérard, an abbé on a barricade is an actor overplaying his part of the ‘curé combattant’,¹⁰ while the ‘lynching’ of a German corpse demonstrates that the darker aspects of the forests of the night are uncomfortably close. Jacques feels similar revulsion and disgust at the scenes in Saint-Clar. It falls to the narrator to highlight the absurdities arising from the public expression of Resistance fraternity on the part of those jockeying for political power, and especially Darricade, trying to outmanoeuvre the Socialists and Communists and remain on the right side of public opinion; avoiding any mention of the dead Francis because of the compromising expression of alliance with the bourgeoisie that might imply; publicly embracing le capitaine Figeac, the head of the local maquis,¹¹ whose prestige he sees as a personal threat. Figeac himself looks forward to the reimposition of a proper military hierarchy; he did not enjoy his subordinate role in the maquis, in a brigade commanded by a twenty-year-old Spaniard, nor the deplorable Resistance habit of being addressed in the intimate ‘tu’ form. One could multiply the examples, from the burlesque episodes of Fernande's public denunciations of Darricade's amoral behaviour during the Occupation, or M. de Balansun's discomfiture on realising the parade of young men he is smartly saluting is led by a well-known local tearaway, to his tragic intuitive realisation of the truth of Francis's death and its futility. As he oscillates between despair at this certainty and hope he may be wrong, his recurring phrase ‘Francis has died for nothing’ encapsulates the major theme of the novel, that the upheaval of the war has also been pointless, a temporary disturbance within the senseless human order.

A WORLD IN CHAOS

The conclusions drawn by Les Forêts de la nuit go far beyond the confines of one small town in south-west France. It is explicitly stated that the Occupation has drawn Saint-Clar into the wider conflict: ‘The town was directly involved in History (…) Its destiny was linked to that of the entire planet, and it was vaguely (obscurément) aware of the fact.’¹² That the novel is seeking to elucidate a truth about the Occupation which is not a purely local truth is, however, primarily borne by the structuration of the characters, which is dependent on producing the gamut of possible figures—collaboration, Resistance, indifference, profiteer, support for Vichy and le Maréchal, occupying forces (pro-Nazi and anti-Nazi). In other words, the novel presents a political and social cross-section which enables Saint-Clar to be both a particular town in the south-west close to the demarcation line and typical of France as a whole.¹³ This exemplary typicality which is the basis for the generalising comments in the text also surfaces at the time of the Liberation, in relation to the disappointing return to the status quo which characterised the celebrations: ‘But was Saint-Clar perhaps an exceptional town in France? Would we perhaps, also, soon learn that the greatness and sacrifice of a handful of the French had easily redeemed the spineless behaviour of the pallid, weary mass? Would it perhaps be fitting to wait for a few days, a few months, to see the true face of the country form and shine forth once more?’¹⁴ But nothing in the post-war section of the Epilogues either contradicts the pessimistic judgements made, or restricts them to the particular circumstances and conditions prevailing in Saint-Clar.

A similar political and social cross-section conferring typicality on the events and conflicts of the novel is found in Mon Village à l'heure allemande and Uranus. Jumainville is described as ‘just a typical French village, no more, no less’.¹⁵ Georges Brassens comments in his 1965 preface to Banlieue sud-est: ‘Most French towns were in the same boat at the time, and the book became universal. It was a tourist guide through our adolescence for all of us’,¹⁶ which is fully confirmed by the range of characters and events and by the frequent general descriptions of ‘the youth of the Occupation’. Even the extremely small cast of main characters in Les Chiens de paille which is, furthermore, set in an isolated part of the north-western coast of France, includes a Communist, a Gaullist, a collaborator and a black marketeer, fulfilling the function of metonymically representing France and thus supporting the general comments of the detached observer Constant. La Culbute and Les Epées also ensure that the attitudes and actions of the main protagonist-narrator are not read as purely personal idiosyncracies by relating his vision of the world to the general state of France.¹⁷ The tripartite structure most clearly in evidence in La Peste—the particular setting and events constituting the ‘narrative real’, which metonymically relates to the general situation of France under the Occupation, and in turn supports wider considerations of the nature of existence in the world—is in fact a characteristic feature of the novel of ambiguity.

The social and political chaos of the Occupation and its aftermath is often echoing that of the world, or is shown to have universal implications for the nature of human endeavour, and this ensures the thematic coherence of the different levels. The impossibility of effecting a transition to peace after the war is also frequently emphasised. The planet Uranus of whose bleak desolation Watrin dreams, corresponding to the devastation of Blémont after the bombing, articulates the descriptions of the town with wider, quasi-metaphysical considerations. In La Culbute and Les Epées it is the absurdity of life which is exemplified in the grotesque farce of the Occupation, and particularly in any attitude of moral seriousness, whereas La Peste and L'Education européenne, equally concerned to demonstrate the limitations of human endeavour in the face of the absurd, highlight the moral qualities of that endeavour as the true source of human dignity. What is emerging from all these novels is not a local but a universal truth.¹⁸

Both the novels of unity and the novels of ambiguity operate within a moral framework, but the relation of the ethical to the narrative event is very different in each. In Resistance fiction the relation is one of continuity: the perception of the war as a cultural event means that the transcendent values of humanism which are being defended form both the context and the purpose of the events of the narrative, whereas in the post-war novel, although the values of justice, fraternity, reason, and of right and wrong are still present, the narrative event is in contradiction with the ethical, which is variously encoded by these very events as unrealisable, inappropriate, or belonging to the past. But if it is not the event which produces the ethical reading of the world, then the major question is where the latter comes from. In the novels of irresponsibility (La Culbute, Les Epées and to a certain extent Banlieue sud-est), deliberate transgression constitutes the identity of the main characters, and this sustains the presence of the ethical. The knowledge that the world is flouting what are presented as previously acceptable moral categories is borne in Uranus by the educators (Archambaud, one of the main characters, in his role as father, Didier a local teacher) who have to prepare the younger generation for contemporary reality, though their observations are subordinated to those of the ‘super-educator’ of the text, le professeur Watrin. For Mon Village à l'heure allemande the relation between ethics and the world is hypothetical, unresolved, consisting in the interrogations of what the future will bring—‘a human jungle or a return to beauty, truth and all the tralala’.¹⁹Les Forêts de la nuit encodes justice and purity as unrealisable in the repeated use of the past conditional ‘should have’, which functions as an unfulfilled imperative. Janek of L'Education européene and Rieux of La Peste both transmit what they have learnt through experience: the disparity between human aspirations to justice, meaning and truth and the reality of the human condition.

In every case, the structural disparity between the ‘narrative real’ and the extradiegetic commentary means that what will emerge as the knowledge to be transmitted is not inherent in individual actions or events, but is centred on the figure of the narrator or those who assume the narrator's function as observers or instructors. The novels of ambiguity are no less didactic than the novels of unity, but the fact that knowledge is structured hierarchically, belonging to the narrator and his surrogates rather than the characters, to the observer rather than the observed, means that the reader is now invited to share the narrator's view of the spectacle of the human comedy.

THE NARRATOR AND THE HIDDEN GOD

Francis Jeanson devotes a section of his famous review of L'Homme révolté: ‘Albert Camus ou l'âme révoltée’ (Albert Camus or the soul in revolt) to La Peste which he describes as ‘a transcendental chronicle’: ‘La Peste related events seen from on high, by a subjectivity outside the situation which was not living them itself and was content to look on.’²⁰ Camus protested strongly at this interpretation, as the narator Rieux is one of the main actors of the drama of the plague and the evolution from L'Etranger to La Peste ‘was a movement towards solidarity and participation’.²¹ But Jeanson is surely right to insist that the impersonal style of narration cannot be dismissed as being of no matter, and that the narrator and the doctor are different textual figures, situated at different levels of the narrative.²² As extradiegetic narrator of the plague Rieux enjoys the omniscience characteristic of the subject of the énonciation in relation to the events and characters being narrated, stemming from his superior knowledge and moral authority, for the narration of the plague is governed by the message it is to produce, that the disease is only a symptom revealing a capricious creation hostile to men. And it is to this that Jeanson takes exception: ‘For anyone looking on from on high, the agitation of people down on the earth's surface could well appear pretty meaningless.’²³ The all-encompassing vision inherent in Rieux's position as narrator is also embodied diegetically, when the character Rieux installs himself on the terrace, firstly with Tarrou, but finally alone, and it is from a position of dominance above the town that he decides to write his chronicle.

This ‘view from above’ is found in all the novels of ambiguity, establishing the structural coherence of the three levels of the narrative, for they all seek to deduce a moral lesson from the particular events of the Occupation which they narrate. Though the modalities vary, from a sombre realisation of the absurd contingency of existence, as in La Peste, to a now lighthearted, now vituperative presentation of the absurdities of life, the marriage of technique and metaphysics which Jeanson described as a ‘resolutely absurdist stylistic procedure’²⁴ could apply to them all. The epilogue of L'Education européenne ends with Janek Twardowski rising to a position of absolute ascendancy over the events he has lived, by means of an image giving an unwittingly literal interpretation of ‘agitation on the earth's surface’. He is now the sub-lieutenant Twardowski, revisiting the forest hideouts and recalling the past, and specifically the last moments of his friend Dobranski, when Janek promised, though convinced of its futility, to finish the novel Dobranski had wanted to write. Inserted into this dialogue is an image of columns of tiny, busy ants, each dragging a small blade of grass, each impelled by the great importance of their difficult task. As Janek was convinced that men would not heed the message of the book to mend their ways, so ants now crawl straight over the copy of L'Education européenne which lieutenant Twardowski has placed on the ground. The distance between Janek and the ants is then transformed into that between Janek-narrator and men in a final vision of creation itself: ‘The world where men suffer and die is the same one where ants suffer and die: a cruel incomprehensible world, where the only thing that counts is to carry ever further an absurd twig (…) without ever stopping to rest or to ask why. …’²⁵ The superior knowledge underpinning the authority of the narrator is revealed in both La Peste and L'Education européenne to lie in the recognition of the limitations of human endeavour, a truth which informs the narration of events and of which the majority of characters are ignorant. A similar disparity in knowledge lies at the heart of the irony in all the novels of ambiguity, which operates primarily with the narrator displaying his knowledge at the characters' expense. Of course in practice this cannot be separated from the content of that knowledge, that human actions are taking place in a world of lost or unattainable values; incapable of fulfilling their own expectations, they can only demonstrate the validity of the narrator's.

There are many variations on this common schema. I shall concentrate here on Uranus, Les Chiens de paille and Les Forêts de la nuit, which exemplify the absurdist implications of the ‘view from above’ within a traditionally realist form, before turning to the novels of irresponsibility where the irony extends to the very mode of writing.

Watrin and Archambaud are the two major sources of moral commentary on the social and human experience of the Liberation period as it is presented in Uranus. Archambaud consistently underlines the manner in which all pay lip-service to the Resistance, whose prestige is backed up by the military terror of the FFI. The jockeying for power between the Communists and the Socialists, each trying to exploit their Resistance credentials, is shown to reinforce the simplistic equation between the Resistance and moral purity which overrides all other considerations. In this sense too, Blémont exemplifies France: ‘Going beyond the town's limits, Archambaud considered the question at the level of the département, then at the level of the entire nation. The hypocrites now numbered millions. In all the provinces of France, in the villages, in the large towns and the small towns, he saw two-faced people proliferating.’²⁶ The end of the Occupation has produced a complete about-turn which is aiming to efface the past, and specifically the support for Vichy and the Maréchal, in line with the new morality. Preparing for the celebrations to welcome home the town's prisoners, Archambaud recalls the Maréchal's visit to Blémont. The same crowd is now going to applaud the insults which he expects the speakers to heap on Pétain; but there is no suggestion that the ‘grande clameur de tendresse (great noise of affection)’²⁷ which had greeted Pétain was itself in any way forced: there is nothing inherently hypocritical about public manifestations or political opinions. Archambaud is articulating the socio-political thesis of the book, that the criminalisation of support for Vichy by the politicians²⁸ has installed a general fear dictating public obeisance of the new morality, precisely because support for the Maréchal was universal and sincere. (And it is worth opening a lengthy parenthesis here to note how common, not to say banal, is the scenario of ‘the crowds welcoming de Gaulle after having welcomed Pétain’, from the post-war novel to Le Chagrin et la pitié and beyond, in critical and imaginative writing. As with Uranus, there is always an anti-'résistantialisme'—or even, it might occasionally be recognised, anti-Resistance—axe to grind, which has a certain ironic charm, given the frequency of the statements on collaborationist turncoats and sudden espousal of less compromising causes as Germany's star wanes, in the clandestine Resistance press.)

Watrin completely agrees with Archambaud on his analysis of contemporary manners but puts a very different gloss on it; since the bombardment of Blémont he has been transported in dreams to the bleak horror of the planet Uranus where he experiences the anguish of the absence of all hope, and the Earth now appears to him in a different light. From these interplanetary heights the rich diversity of all forms of life is a source of poetry and wonder:

One cannot conceive of anything finer or gentler than men. No, Archambaud, don't say anything. I know. But their wars, their concentration camps, their works of justice, I see them as impishness and ebullient behaviour. Don't they have songs for suffering? Don't talk to me of selfishness or hypocrisy. The selfishness of man is as adorable as that of a butterfly or a squirrel.²⁹

This zoological vision of the planet excludes a moral attitude to social, political and moral conflicts which are inscribed within the natural order of things.

The narrator espouses the points of view of both his surrogate observers. There is never any suggestion that Archambaud's analysis or reason for indignation are either unreliable or criticisable. The case of Watrin is more complex. He is a rather burlesque figure, both in his lyrically effusive manner and the somewhat ridiculous exaggeration that the human jungle is as much a source of wonder as any other, which is in direct contradiction to the Archambaud position and also refuted by some of the scenes of the novel. The identification of the ruins of Blémont and the planet Uranus is strong enough for the alternative reading of the Earth as source of despair and anguish to be sustained. Where Archambaud and Watrin agree is that men are far more complex creatures than political and intellectual systems of thought, which deal in moral abstractions, allow. Throughout the novel the Communist Jourdan is a particular butt for irony, in the caricaturally limited nature of the fixed ideas and stereotypes of good and evil he is shown to believe in.

Archambaud's perception of an absurd attempt to engineer a national volte-face also relies on a disparity between human experience and simplistic ideas imposed from elsewhere, and his interest leads directly into the substance of the narrative: ‘He watched for the difficulties such a situation could create in everyday life, and the moral or psychological abnormalities which resulted.’³⁰ Concentrating on the social and personal aspects of daily life under the Liberation, the narrative ironies, conveying variously amusement or indignation, present life in Blémont as an ultimately meaningless variety of clashes and conflicts, or an unsustainable morality play imposed by a powerful few. The very choice of the central situation illustrates this. Because of the shortage of accommodation, the Archambaud family (father, mother and Marie-Anne their daughter) has to house Watrin and the Gaigneux family (parents and four children). Into this household comes Maxime Loin, whom Archambaud discovers one night hiding from the FFI and agrees to shelter. All the possibilities afforded by such a situation are exploited—arguments in the kitchen between the two wives; amorous intrigues involving Loin, Gaigneux, Marie-Anne and Mme Archambaud; the need to keep Loin's presence from Gaigneux and Jourdan, a frequent visitor. And there are innumerable examples of particular remarks, or episodes which, displaying all the extravagances of a farce to amuse rather than engage the emotions, exemplify Watrin's indulgence towards the endearing habits and the resilience of the human animal whom it is impossible to take seriously however seriously he takes himself. One example would be characterisation of Léopold, the larger-than-life alcoholic café proprietor, who is the only true enthusiast for Racine in the classes which now have to be held in his café and who finally turns his hand to composing alexandrines, but in inappropriate contemporary slang. On the other hand, that Léopold is shot by gendarmes who come to arrest him acting on the orders of those protecting Monglat is not given the same tonality at all. Nor is the public beating-up of Gallien, a Maréchaliste ex-prisoner of war, at the welcoming ceremony at the station. Only Watrin goes forward to help him-Archambaud cannot find the courage to join him, and a doctor refuses to see to him. Watrin is finally escorted away by the police, leaving the wounded man on the ground as the speeches continue: ‘“Delivered from its enemies, from all its enemies, a young, ardent France, led by an elite whose intelligence, vision and humanity are the admiration of the whole world …” proclaimed the speaker.’³¹ If, as Jean Cathelin argues, Aymé is concerned to present ‘part of the recent history of France which greatly resembles the Shakespearian definition of life: “A tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury”’,³² he achieves it as much as anything through the distancing effect of this farcical juxtaposition of characters and incidents.

None of the characters is in overall control in Uranus. The Communists think they are, politically, but in fact they are manipulated by Monglat as he uses his powerful friends in Paris. Only the narrator and the reader are aware of the foibles and the private dramas of all the characters, of the true facts behind the sequence of events. The same is even more true of Les Forêts de la nuit. The ignorance of the characters, each of whom has only partial knowledge of the events of the novel and the motivations of those concerned, is a major factor sustaining the importance of contingency, one of the bases for the technique of incongruous juxtaposition which is fully exploited, both to underline their ignorance and make a mockery of their actions and hopes which are always necessarily off target. By the end of the novel little can be taken at face value. Mme Costellot's mention of the efforts she made to intervene on Francis's behalf with von Brackner and the German authorities, Darricade's rise to fame with the image of Francis the Resistance martyr in tow, have ironic depths by virtue of the reader's superior knowledge. In all this the narrator is very evident—in the generalising scenes looking down on the town and its inhabitants, in the characterisation which, as in Uranus, is constituted by the thoughts of the characters and the narrator's judgements, and particularly in the Liberation scenes, where the disappointment that the events do not match what should have been is to be located in the extradiegetic discourse of the énonciation.

The narration of the Occupation years in Les Forêts de la nuit is constituted to a great extent by political and personal clashes between the French and within the Resistance, and therefore the hopes expressed on the great Liberation day, for a ‘purifying wind (souffle)’, a ‘magnificent leap’ which would change the face of France, appear virtually from nowhere, just as the working-class masses, the maquisards and the FFI do. The only Resistance character committed to the fight against social injustice was le Mohican, but he equally underlined the class differences opposing him to Francis, and the provisional nature of their common cause, and predicted, after an extremely sarcastic description of the defeat of the Germans and the nation in unison celebrating its victory with freedom restored: ‘It will all just be starting.’³³ His judgement is fully confirmed—indeed, operates as a virtual annonce—by the Liberation scenes where the mass celebrations are at the same time the proof that nothing has changed. For the voice enunciating the judgement on these scenes, the possibility of change is already past, they are excluding what should have happened. But in the past of the novel which has been enunciated, everything tends to precisely the cynical victory being described. In other words, this is one of the ‘moments de décrochage’ (literally ‘unhooking’), in Claude Duchet's terms, revealing the hors-texte, by which he means the implicit knowledge and codes of the text³⁴ which is constituted here by the Resistance discourse of heroism, grandeur and social renewal. With a mechanism recalling Drôle de jeu, this discourse is deliberately set aside in the Avertissement: ‘Many books, since the end of the war, have shown and celebrated those whose fight saved honour and contributed to victory. I would have added nothing to these works’, and the diegetic development specifically disproves it. This reveals the historical gap between the énonciation, which is post-Occupation, and the énoncé, for in all novels where the final battles for Liberation and the immediate post-Liberation period form the conclusion to the narrative,³⁵ the Occupation is thereby produced as an historically dated phenomenon, belonging to the time of the énoncé. From the point of view of the analysis of the temporal structures of the narrative levels, Resistance and Occupation could be said to occupy a similar position to that of the pre-war history in the Resistance novels, where questions or predictions concerning the future can also be classed as ignorant or knowledgeable in relation to later narrative developments which constitute the historical present of the énonciation. In Les Forêts de la nuit irony is the major expression of the tension between the énoncé and the énonciation, proving that human and social reality will defeat the Resistance coding of it as potentially noble, and also operating at the expense of the town's inhabitants who collectively exemplify, in greater or lesser degrees of stupidity and selfishness, the limitations of human endeavour.

Drieu la Rochelle composed Les Chiens de paille about the same time as his article ‘Bilan’, summing up his achievements and failures at the NRF,³⁶ and the political thesis of the novel is very similar to the arguments set out there, that the world is entering a new phase in its history in the battle between the two empires of America and Russia, and France is prevented by its own decadence, which Vichy has proved incapable of countering, from saving itself from foreign occupation. The political activists in the country are all hitched to the bandwagon of one or another foreign power. In the article, however, Drieu comes down firmly on the side of Hitler as the only man in a position to safeguard Europe against foreign domination—England is seen as no more than a puppet of the United States—and specifically against Russia which is identified as the greatest threat. In the novel Germany does not enjoy this prestige, and the collaborator Bardy represents just one of several options alongside the Gaullist Préault, the Communist Salis, and Cormont, the believer in ‘the wretched and derisory myth of “France standing alone”’.³⁷ The intrigues between these various characters, especially for the control of a secret arms depot, is narrated from Constant's point of view, who is both character and commentator on the cast of characters. He is further set apart from the other characters both on the level of characterisation—he is the adventurer with a truly global knowledge of the cultures of the world and all possible experiences, and who is now going beyond adventurism—and through his metaphysical interest in Eastern, Christian and Nietzchean philosophies which underlies the political perception of the upheavals taking place in the world as constituting yet another clash between decadence and barbarity to engender a new world order. The figure of the traitor is again central here, linking the metaphysical, the political and finally the diegetic as Constant, deciding that Cormont on the one hand and the internationalists on the other are locked in a static battle beyond which they cannot progress, takes on the role of Judas to sacrifice the Christ-like figure of Cormont and accomplish the destiny of France.

The distance between humanity and Constant, who variously espouses the point of view of the gods, of God and of non-being which is beyond any individual creator, is more pertinent than the differences opposing the various factions. As in the other novels of ambiguity, the ‘view from above’ accompanies the absence of any figure of the enemy. Gaullists and collaborators, for example, are marked by resemblance, not difference;³⁸ men are creatures governed by passions which enslave them for they fail to recognise the futile nature of their passions, of all existence, which would save them.³⁹ But if Constant if omniscient, he is certainly not omnipotent and is himself at the mercy of the extradiegetic narrator who is as elusive as any hidden God, appearing primarily to deliver the thunderbolt of the final paragraph, in the shape of an English plane which drops a bomb on the house where Constant is about to blow up Cormont, Susini the black marketeer and himself.⁴⁰ The historical gap between énonciation and énoncé is also revealed. Constant reflects that the divisions and conflicts opposing Gaullists and Communists, Gaullists and Gaullists, Gaullists, Communists and collaborators, form a kind of dance whose rules are understood and respected by all, but which would still erupt into violent explosions: ‘which break with all half-measures. (…) But France, in 1942, had not yet reached that point; deaths by violence were still only counted in tens.’⁴¹

Jeanson accused Camus of writing a metaphysical novel which should have been called ‘the human condition’: ‘The real scene is not this town, but the world; and the real characters were not those men and women of Oran but all humanity, not that disease but absolute Evil’,⁴² a statement which, allowing for the different metaphysical content, might have been made of any of the novels under consideration here. In La Peste evil in the world is both alien to man and elided with the human condition. In the other novels of ambiguity, it is the nature of man himself which explains the irrational absurd world which confronts the individual. Both perspectives reveal the ahistorical character of the ‘view from above’, of the heights from which the narrative subject, excentric to the world, can thereby seize it as a totality: the particular conditions under the Occupation are a manifestation of the infernal cycle of human action in the world,⁴³ which is thus intimately bound up with the essentialist view of human nature: ‘Men were always the same’,⁴⁴ reflects Rieux. The unbridgeable gap between the realities of the Occupation and straightforward moral judgements of right and wrong is underpinned by the absolute knowledge that value cannot be produced by action in the world. The common thread linking these novels is that the world is inauthentic.

If irony can generally be said to reside in a discrepancy between a statement and contextual information,⁴⁵ then the latter is revealed in the whole range of narrative ironies deployed at the expense of characters who rely on their actions being meaningful or on being able to behave in accordance with well-defined codes of behaviour. But this can be further refined. Robert Scholes isolates three kinds of irony in narrative, two of which⁴⁶ are extremely pertinent here: the irony that needs ‘no authoritative discourse to focus it but draws upon simple principles of value and a clear social consensus’,⁴⁷ and the irony that is ‘controllable only at the price of introducing a highly coercive and manipulative discourse’.⁴⁸ Both kinds are to be found in the novels of ambiguity, the former presenting the spectacle of the Occupation and Liberation as an enactment of the well-known adage: ‘Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose’ (the more things change, the more they stay the same), the latter directed at any discourse which asserts that value can be grounded in man's action in the world, and primarily at Resistance discourse whose central value is man himself. We have already see the manner in which this refutation operates in Les Forêts de la nuit. Uranus is concerned to demonstrate that any social renewal produced by a Communist-Socialist dominated Resistance is a moral sham, not least because the ideas which inspire it are insubstantial abstract doctrines bearing no relation to reality. Les Chiens de paille seeks to demonstrate the hollow nature of all transcendence in that it is always a sign of decadence. France is said to have entered a phase of decadence and is thus in this latest battle realigning the forces of civilisation and barbarity, re-enacting the destiny of the Jews overrun by foreign troops. Political and metaphysical theses converge at this point, for in spite of the general language, and its anti-semitism, it is Resistance discourse which is being pinpointed, and particularly its concern with the absolute and the universal:

The Jews were now only intellectuals and men of letters, not even men of letters, but kinds of priests, frenetic monks, vain, hideous, grotesque, and who, in the middle of Greek philosophers and athletes, of Roman aristocrats and soldiers, continued to make speeches about the supremacy of Jewish genius, naturally a ‘purely intellectual’, entirely spiritual supremacy! Having had their arses kicked and kicked again, they spoke of the supremacy of their arses over the boot that was doing the kicking.⁴⁹

It is here that a connection can perhaps be established between the novels of ambiguity and the crisis of humanism which becomes so insistent by the end of the war, for what is denied by the overriding vision of the superior narrative viewpoint is the possibility of transcendence. Human actions in the world, caught in the realm of the contingent and the relative, cannot fulfil aspirations to the absolute, whereas in the Resistance fiction action in the world undeniably founds the values of humanism, and there is an unbroken continuity between the narrative event and the values it incarnates. The impossibility of transcendence takes two forms in the novels of ambiguity. The first could be called the tragic mode, registering the crisis of values but not completely rejecting them as such. Vercors and Camus both illustrate this.⁵⁰ The more usual form lies in the convergence between the knowledge of the meaninglessness of human existence, and the socio-political thesis on the nature of Resistance morality (or more accurately, of ‘résistantialisme’) which is accordingly seen as inappropriate. Both concord in the use of irony to demonstrate absurdity, and in the appeal to the hidden God.

Lucien Goldmann, whose work Le Dieu caché⁵¹ is being explicitly recalled here, shows that the figure of the hidden God, both present and absent, is essential to the seventeenth-century ‘tragic consciousness’, the perception of the divorce between the absolute values of God and the impossibility of realising them in the world. Jeanson brings out the importance of the ever-absent, ever-present God in Camus's work: ‘Camus is certainly not an atheist, but a passive antideist. He does not deny God's existence (because he accuses him of injustice), (…) all he wants is to challenge him’,⁵² and Sartre talks of man in Camus's world of eternal injustice, demanding meaning from a God who is eternally silent.⁵³ Camus himself has Rieux refer to God ‘in that sky where he says nothing’.⁵⁴ In this, as in so many other ways, La Peste is typical of the post-war novel of the Occupation, for they all use references to God, a signal that human action is being judged in reference to a transcendent absolute. But rather than the impassive, silent interlocutor of Camus's man in revolt, God is merely a figure in the cosmology, an ironic or anguished observer mirroring the stance of the God-like narrator.⁵⁵

In spite of the importance of this particular vision du monde for a realisation of the loss of value in human existence, to agree with Jeanson that La Peste—and by extension any of these novels—is really (and therefore only) a metaphysical novel would be tantamount to saying the ‘narrative real’ can be effaced from the text. On the contrary, the frequency of the mechanism of the character-turned-author should alert us to the very specific structures of these novels. Edwin Moses writes: ‘To have an external narrator tell the story of an enclosed city which is a symbol of the whole world would be ridiculous on the face of it: it would make the narrator into God.’⁵⁶ However much the identification of Rieux as narrator fudges the presence of an implicit, non-individualised narrator, however much Rieux enjoys a God-like omniscience, Moses is making an essential point⁵⁷ that Rieux as narrator is structurally tied to the diegetic development of the plague. In these novels, action in the world—which is the diegetic development of the Occupation and Liberation periods—is constitutive of the knowledge of the text, that no action can found value, and it is the function of the narrator, who is both of this world and not of it, to realise the contradiction.⁵⁸

‘In the country of the Ironic, Omniscience itself appears absurd’: thus Scholes sums up his third category of irony,⁵⁹ that of the self-conscious narrative consistently using the ironic mode to draw attention to its own artifices. It is perhaps not surprising that a constant juggling with the énonciation and the énoncé is most apparent in novels such as La Culbute, Les Epées and Banlieue sud-est which portray the Occupation years as a grandiose melodrama of contradictory scripts earnestly acted out by a large cast of ham actors,⁶⁰ where the narrator emerges primarily as script-writer extraordinaire. Gone is the absolute assurance of La Peste and L'Education européenne, where the seriousness of the account of the character-narrator is never questioned. In none of these novels is the perception of the absurdity of life, of which the Occupation is a particularly acute manifestation, at all in doubt; what is destroyed in La Culbute, Les Epées and Banlieue sud-est is the possibility of the narrative detachment from that realisation which sustains the ‘view from above’, and therefore the implicit assumption that the project of writing is not itself subordinated to the order of the absurd.

The suicide letter of the young François Sanders in the first chapter of Les Epées serves as a paradigm of the kind of shifts deployed to signal the literary status of the writing. After a portrait of himself and his family he continues: ‘I think nothing has been forgotten. I have just reread what I have written. It is a very good piece of homework and I think I would get a high mark if the subject of the essay had been: what are your thoughts on the eve of your suicide? Express them in the most touching way you can, in a letter to a stranger. Make a plan.’⁶¹ All the irony resides in the clash of two incompatible kinds of writing—part of a narrative development marking the precocious cynicism and authority of this fifteen-year-old fourth-former, or a no less cynical parody of essay writing and its bellelettristic pretentions—and the concomitant doubt as to how the preceding pages should have been read. Similarly, the Stendhalien footnotes,⁶² the café Lafcadio situate the narration within a tradition of literary irony, and also, by these ironic signals of the presence of the narrator, place to the fore the irredemiably literary nature of the narrative event and its relation to the narration.

Banlieue sud-est uses a whole range of devices to call attention to the narrative: imitation of documents, ironic headlines used particularly for the generalising images typical of the ‘view from above’,⁶³ footnotes, descriptive passages striking a deliberately false lyrical note and parodying the designation ‘literature’,⁶⁴ the appearance of M. René Fallet, firstly as character,⁶⁵ and, in the final pages, as author.⁶⁶ Moreover, the first chapter of the novel has a most ambiguous status. Given that the second chapter begins with the main character suddenly waking up, it could be read as his extravagant dreams; narrated by a disembodied ‘I’, each paragraph describes a different identity, ‘I am the bloke who possesses love’, ‘I am a large rock in the forest of Fontainebleau’, ‘I am a woman.’ But it would be more in keeping with a narrative which refuses to take its own narration seriously to read it as an amusing display of the omniscience and omnipotence of the narrator who, outside diegetic time, is truly outside time: ‘I am the master of the universe. I am immortal’,⁶⁷ for whom literally anything is possible: ‘I am the greatest cycling champion the Earth has ever seen. Same as for the “Love-Me”; here, I say “I win”, and it's done’.⁶⁸ and who, in the very accumulation of narrative identities, in fact has none.

If the ironic devices in Banlieue sud-est and Les Epées are concerned above all to recall that there is no transcendence of the written, this is an even more central concern of La Culbute, which sustains a constant tension between the will to omnipotence of the self as narrator and his subordination to elements beyond his control, between freedom and destiny.⁶⁹ Bearing particularly on writing and signification, La Culbute can therefore be placed in a long tradition of reflection, from Jacques le Fataliste to Djinn, on the nature of narrative, its tendencies to absolute contingency and absolute necessity, and its relation to reality. Georges Renaut realises that, as far as writing is concerned, omnipotence is on the side of necessity: by adopting the handle ‘de la Motte’, having a card printed with his new name, he is his own creation.⁷⁰ The project of the diary is to subordinate the formlessness of existence to necessity, and it is in this light that one can understand his letters of denunciation, which are so many attempts to write other people into his narrative. M. Fouilloux in the flat upstairs is arrested, Renaut having denounced him for listening to English radio, and he hears the family acting out the scene he has written for them (Fouilloux's brave words as he is taken from his family, his wife's cries of ‘My husband, my husband’); unbeknownst to them, others are players in the film he is directing. His superiority lies in his knowledge: ‘I am acting in My Life (…) A realist film, made by destiny.’⁷¹ But he is constantly in danger of falling into the void of absolute freedom: ‘And I am also acting in a second story (…) a fantasy film. I do not know its title—I am looking in vain for the director's team and the producer.’⁷² His drama does not lie in trying to choose the ordered laws of narrative over reality, but in a veritable crisis of signification. For the world of reality and objects is also ruled by the tyranny of signs:

It is not life which imitates life, just like that, gratuitously. Art is needed as an intermediary. Life imitates the imitation that art creates of life. We have heard the sound effects people on the radio substituting spoons for the sea too often (…) and we no longer know, always supposing they exist, what natural sounds are like. The bed and the lift are play-acting at imitating life, they are making theatre with life, they are sound effects. We can suspect them of being as cruel as men.⁷³

It is also governed by their anarchic proliferation. There are so many images labelled ‘Laval’ circulating in the world that the question ‘who is Laval?’ becomes particularly hard to answer: ‘Is Laval the man smiling nicely at Hitler or the man saving France by the sweat of his brow?’⁷⁴ and, as with Pétain, Churchill or Hitler, the possibility of affixing value of unique truth to one image rather than another is undermined by the very indeterminacy of the sign which cannot be fixed to one original essence. From that point of view, however, they resist the order and logic of narrative: ‘They have lost their being. Having acted so much they have produced too many individuals under their own skin and they are no more than a haunted stage. Mystery, nasty mystery. How then can history be written?’⁷⁵ A similar disparity underlies his reactions to the enigmatic phrases of the English radio; at first he celebrates their freedom and opacity, and then realises they might be obeying a logic, encoding his own death sentence. His project to impose his own script (although he is often tempted by the total freedom, and nihilation, of signification) is constantly threatened by the fear of being written into someone else's ‘film’.

The insistence in La Culbute on the irremediable facticity of human existence can thus be said to echo the impossibility of transcendence characteristic of the other novels of ambiguity. Similarly the narrative games and strategies in Banlieue sud-est, Les Epées and La Culbute around the omniscience of the narrator-author also serve to construct this figure as both diegetic and extradiegetic, recalling La Peste and L'Education européenne, and it is here that one can elucidate the essential ambiguity at the heart of the structures of irony, an ambiguity which might be summed up as variations on the famous phrase ‘loser takes all’. Georges Renaut, for example, goes to the rendezvous which he fears contains the hidden sentence of death, but his diary remains, permanently inscribing his disappearance within the order of the narrative: like the narrator of Banlieue sud-est, on the level of the énonciation Georges Renaut is indestructible. In all these novels, however painful the knowledge, however dramatic the defeat which recognition of the futility of action in the world entails, it is nonetheless the key to narrative survival.

Notes

1. ‘Le jeu de la guerre et du hasard’, La Culbute, p.11.

2. Paris, 1971, pp.10-11, p.43.

3. Les Forêts, p. 151.

4. Semiotics and Interpretation, New Haven and London, p.75.

5. This passage is preparing for the episode when Hélène sends her last letter to Jean breaking off the relationship. ‘That kind of letter always arrives’, she reflects (p.230). And it does, provoking Jean's suicide. Given the difficulties of communication as proved by these earlier letters, one could say that her expectations are ironically fulfilled.

6. One of Hélène's other letters is given in full on pp.149-50 and serves as an illustration of the type.

7. P.475.

8. P.469.

9. Ibid.

10. P.450.

11. ‘“Le baiser de Lamourette” était de rigueur cejour-là’, comments the narrator. p.456.

12. P.307.

13. It also relies on the classic Paris/province opposition of the provincial novel.

14. P.476.

15. P.18.

16. P.8.

17. See La Culbute, p.103, pp. 195-6 and Les Epées, p.100.

18. ‘Truth’ here being used in the sense of what the narrative presents as true.

19. P.309.

20. Les Temps modernes, vol.7, no.79, mai 1952, p.2072.

21. ‘Lettre au directeur des Temps modernes’, Les Temps modernes, vol.8, no.82, août 1952, p.321.

22. See in the same volume, ‘Pour tout vous dire …’, p.355.

23. ‘Albert Camus ou l'âme révoltée’, pp.2073-4

24. ‘Albert Camus ou l'âme révoltée’, p.2073. S.B. John also comments on the importance of the omniscient narrator in post-war fiction, in ‘The Ambiguous Invader’.

25. P.175 (1946).

26. P.35.

27. P.319.

28. Antagonism to political parties being itself a Vichy theme, that Pétain appealed directly to the French, and not as a politician. There is no mention in Uranus of a similar guilt generated by support for Laval. Nor any hint that a pro-Vichy attitude might have conceivably been misplaced. On the contrary, the ‘bouclier’ theme is extended to include collaboration, when Archambaud debates whether to shelter Loin the fascist: ‘He did not feel any sense of solidarity with this man and resented him having seen collaboration as a means of subjugating France, whereas for Archambaud himself it was a means of defence’(p.42).

29. P.236.

30. P.36.

31. P.340.

32. Marcel Aymé ou la paysan de Paris, p.119.

33. P.36. And his views are echoed, from the other side of the political fence, by the ‘Resister’ Darricade: ‘For Darricade, the real fight had begun at dawn that day’ (p.459).

34. ‘Le hors-texte reste plus ou moins perceptible tout au long de la chaîne narrative, notamment aux moments de décrochage entre discours et récit, entre énonciation et énoncé, entre le je et le on, entre la parole rapportée et son support textuel’, ‘Réflexions sur les rapports du roman et de la société’, Roman et société, p.71.

35. A variation on this occurs in Le Chemin des écoliers, by Marcel Aymé, which does end during the Occupation, but where the post-war fates of many of the characters are given in footnotes. The time of the énonciation is again post-Occupation.

36. NRF, janvier-juin 1943, pp.103-11. In the Preface to Les Chiens de paille, he says the novel was written in the spring of 1943.

37. P.186.

38. P.39.

39. P.53.

40. Thus confirming the quotations placed as an epigraph, on the absolute indifference of creation towards men.

41. Pp.193-4 Emphasis added.

42. ‘Albert Camus ou l'âme révoltée’, p.2073.

43. Cf. Les Forêts, the scenes of the crowd jeering at Balansun and Cécile ‘were exactly the same as the hallucinating images of pogroms in Nazi Germany, which the French newspapers were publishing in 39-40’ (p.469). Emphasis added.

44. P.1473.

45. Helmut Bonheim, The Narrative Modes, Cambridge, 1982, p.156.

46. The third will be discussed later in this chapter.

47. Semiotics and Interpretation, p.86.

48. Ibid.

49. Pp.149-150.

50. Vercors, for example, writes of the degradation imposed by the Nazis, and also, in Les Lettres françaises, denounces the failure of the épuration (i.e. the failure to reject those in Resistance eyes guilty of collaboration) as immoral (‘La Gangrène’, LF, no.39, 30 janvier 1945, p.1.

51. Paris, 1955.

52. Jeanson, ‘Albert Camus ou l'âme révoltée’, p.2085.

53. Sartre, ‘Réponse à Albert Camus’, p.346.

54. P.1323.

55. See particularly Les Chiens de paille, pp. 34-5; Uranus, p.195.

56. ‘Functional Complexity: the Narrative Techniques of The Plague’, Modern Fiction Studies, vol.20, no.3, autumn 1974, p.423.

57. Although he does discuss Rieux as sole narrator, and is therefore confusing Rieux, extradiegetic narrator of the plague, and the extradiegetic narrator of the text, who is responsible for example for the substitution plague/Occupation (which Moses does not discuss at all).

58. A good example at the level of narrative description would be Watrin's reaction to Gaigneux's defence of the extremely unsavoury Rochard, who has landed Léopold in prison: ‘The professor gave him a smile that was both discouraged and amused’ (p.161), ‘discouraged’ in so far as Watrin is genuinely hoping Gaigneux will help obtain Léopold's release; ‘amused’ by yet another picturesque example of the human ‘jungle’.

59. Semiotics and Interpretation, p.86.

60. Echoes of which occur in other novels. Cf. p.396 above, re the abbé on the barricades.

61. P.13.

62. P.104: ‘C'est un milicien qui parle’; p.106: ‘C'est une âme sans idéal qui parle.’

63. ‘PANORAMIQUE’ (p.340), ‘FIN DU PANORAMIQUE’ (p.341), ‘REPRISE DU PANORAMIQUE’ (p.347), ‘RE-FIN DU PANORAMIQUE’ (p.351).

64. Pp.127-9.

65. Pp.284-5.

66. Pp.381-2.

67. P.12.

68. Ibid.

69. P.19.

70. P.15.

71. P.77.

72. Ibid.

73. P.19.

74. P.121. Jean Duffy makes a not dissimilar point in relation to Claude Simon's novel La Corde raide, in ‘The Subversion of Historical Representation in Claude Simon’, French Studies, Volume XVI No.4 October 1987, pp.422-3.

75. P.122.