Dread, Desire and Destruction: The Historical Sublime in Erwin Mortier’s Marcel (1999)

Erwin Mortier’s novel Marcel (1999) addresses the still controversial topic of the Flemish collaboration with the Germans during the Second World War, and the way the Belgian state subsequently dealt with it. Told from the perspective of a grandchild of the guilty generation, Mortier’s novel has often been read as a narrative of emerging understanding and reconciliation. Seen through the prism of Amy Elias’s concept of the historical sublime, the novel in fact suggests that the truth about the past remains inaccessible, even as the child protagonist is driven by a powerful desire to unveil it. Through the use of extended metaphors of signification, concealment and revelation, working in tandem with a narrative of a frequently disturbing sexual awakening, Marcel presents the urge to unveil the truth in and of history as a blind and desperate quest that is doomed to destroy the object of its desire.