Allegories of the Purge: How Literature Responded to the Postwar Trials of Writers and Intellectuals in France (review)

REVIEWS PHILIP WATTS. Allegories ofthe Purge: How Literature Responded to the Postwar Trials of Writers and Intellectuals in France. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1998. vi + 222 pp. To even the most detached observer ofmodem and contemporary France, it is clear that the French are remarkably, even obsessively, preoccupied with their past. Nowhere is this tendency more evident than in their often morbid fascination with the "Dark Years" ofGerman Occupation during World War II and their legacy. This fascination, which historian Henry Rousso likened to a malady—the "Vichy Syndrome "—in the mid-1980s, has assumed many forms. Historical accounts of the Vichy years as well as novels and films on the period continue to pour out. More spectacularly, former Vichy functionaries like Maurice Papon have been tried and convicted ofcrimes against humanity. In 1994, former French President François Mitterrand went on French television to cool public passions following revelations ofhis own service to Vichy and ofhis postwar friendship with René Bousquet, the man generally credited with implementing the Final Solution in France. France's fascination/obsession with its Vichy past has also had a major impact on its literary and intellectual life. During the war, many ofthe nation's finest writers collaborated with Vichy and the Germans, publishing essays in collaborationist reviews like La Gerbe or the Nouvelle Revue Française, under the wartime editorship ofthe fascist Drieu la Rochelle. Other writers attempted to wait out the war in obscurity, while a significant number, especially Communists, became actively involved in the Resistance, mostly after the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. After Liberation, those who had collaborated were condemned by those who had not, and many collaborators were tried, convicted, and executed by the postwar Purge courts. Both the activities ofwriters and intellectuals during the war as well as the purge that followed have become the subject ofnumerous scholarly works on both sides ofthe Atlantic, and questionable activities ofwriters during the war, even when revealed in the last few years, continue to scandalize. For example, Laure Adler's revelations of Marguerite Duras's work for the Vichy authorites provoked controversy as recently as 1998. Of the books dealing with literary collaboration and especially the politics, literary and otherwise, ofthe Purge, one ofthe finest is Philip Watts's Allegories ofthe Purge. Watts offers excellent case studies ofthose who collaborated and were purged (two chapters are devoted to Louis-Ferdinand Céline, to which I shall return) and examines the politics and aesthetics—and the important links between the two—ofthose who either championed the Purge or condemned it primarily in the name ofartistic freedom. Among the most outspoken champions ofthe Purge was Jean-Paul Sartre, whose model of a committed, politically and socially responsible writing, presented especially What is Literature?, is in Watts's view inseparable from his pro-Purge stance. Another outspoken proponent ofthe Purge was the former surrealist and Communist poet Paul Éluard. During the war and following the Liberation, Éluard "wrote a set ofdarker, more foreboding poems [than his prewar works] dedicated to the purge which shatter the image of the gentle, humanist poet" (107). Frequently expressing concern in his poetry over whathe perceived to be the laxity ofthejudges, Éluard had come to see the poet as fulfilling the "sacred function" ofpurifying society "after the horror ofwar," thus preparing for the transition from Resistance to Revolution. In concise analyses of several poems, Watts links the "classicism" ofEluard's poetry to the need to purge (poetry thus becomes an "allegory ofthe purge") and shows how the reversal from Vol. 24 (2000): 171T ??? COHPAnATIST Resistance to Purge and Revolution is reflected in the poetry's structure through the frequent use ofthe trope ofchiasma, the figure of inversion. Among those discussed by Watts who ultimately came down against the Purge—apart, obviously, from the collaborators themselves—were Jean Paulhan and especially Maurice Blanchot. For Watts, Blanchot's work in the postwar years constitutes a thoroughgoing rebuttal ofSartre's call for an engaged, "responsible" literature. Blanchot champions "the absolute freedom ofthe writer," and his stance derives from a number ofconcerns which are aesthetic as well as philosophical and ethical in nature. First, literature is by definition the language of ambiguity...