After the Fall: War and Occupation in Irène Némirovsky's Suite française

Chapter 3. Epic Suffering

65 Chapter 3 Epic Suffering For a close paraphrase of Némirovsky’s perspective on private lives and collective destiny during the May–June 1940 debacle, we can cite one of Tempête en juin’s major protagonists, Philippe Péricand, the priest who takes on the task of accompanying a group of delinquants and orphans to safety in the southern provinces. As he assumes leadership of these youth just before setting out on the journey, he seeks to create a sense of unity and cohesion with the following words: Dieu seul . . . connaît le sort réservé à chacun de nous dans les jours qui vont suivre. Il est hélas infiniment probable que nous souffrirons tous dans notre coeur car les malheurs publics sont faits d’une multitude de malheurs privés, et c’est le seul cas où, pauvres ingrats aveugles que nous sommes, nous avons conscience de la solidarité qui nous lie, nous membres d’un même corps.1 Only God . . . knows what fate is in store for each of us in the days to come. It is, alas, extremely likely that we will all suffer in our hearts, for collective tragedies are made up of a multitude of individual ordeals, and that is the only case in which we poor, ungrateful, blind people are aware of the solidarity that binds us together as members of one same body. 1 Némirovsky, Suite française, 62–63; emphasis mine. 66   Epic Suffering Philippe’s words will soon prove ironically and tragically prophetic for his own plight, as he ends up suffering atrociously not only in his heart but in his body, savagely murdered by the very ones he hoped in every sense to save. On a broader scale, Némirovsky’s narrative of the debacle shows how France’s collective ordeal is composed of a multitude of individual tragedies and betrayals: for better or for worse, the various individual itineraries are, as Philippe observes, indeed intertwined into one variously shared public destiny. Solidarity and Satire of a House Divided Numerous passages of Tempête en juin, and in particular the striking similes that allow us to visualize the multitude of private tragedies converging into a common public disaster, provide a highly concrete figuration of Philippe’s eloquent abstraction. Far from simply “remembering” or “preserving” the past, Némirovsky’s narrative gives an epic dimension to the traumatic events that at the time remained fragmented and incoherent for those experiencing them. Hanna Diamond and Richard Vinen both stress that, with the collapse of France’s administrative and communicational infrastructure , the vast majority of people simply did not have the means to piece together any sort of global assessment of the rapidly evolving military and civilian debacle. People therefore had all the more reasons to focus on the urgent imperatives of their own situation.2 Unfettered by the constraints of immediate experience, Némirovsky’s narrative offers on the contrary a perspective far beyond the perceptions of any one individual swept up in the chaos. It is important to point out, however, that the resulting account of the event cannot really be considered as testimony, particularly since Némirovsky did not herself personally take part in the exodus but gleaned her information from various newspaper and eyewitness accounts:3 Suite fran- çaise is a literary composition that proves all the more valuable for pro2 Diamond, Fleeing Hitler, 29–31, 66, 68, and Richard Vinen, The Unfree French (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2006), 16. 3 Phipponnat and Liendhardt, La vie d’Irène Némirovsky, 341. Epic Suffering   67 viding a synthetic understanding that would otherwise be lacking. Only such an Olympian overview can reveal the pattern traced by the countless individual itineraries joining together to form a larger historical event. Here, as is often the case, Némirovsky composes a dramatic traveling shot of the throngs fleeing Paris, then provides a veritable epic catalog of vehicles and their contents, and finally places an epic simile at the end as if to recapitulate with added emphasis the full scope of the mass exodus: sans fin, par la route de Paris coulait un fleuve lent d’autos, de camions, de voitures de charretiers, de bicyclettes auquel se mêlaient les attelages des paysans qui abandonnaient leurs fermes et partaient vers le Sud en traînant derrière eux enfants et troupeaux. . . . Des gens couchaient [à Orl...