Literature and History: Around 'Suite française' and 'Les Bienveillantes' ed. by Richard J. Golsan and Philip Watts (review)

The extraordinary commercial success of Suite française in 2004 and Les Bienveillantes in 2006 has produced a new chapter in the study of the war years in France. This Yale French Studies issue focuses on the way important historiographical questions are raised by these and other writings of Ire`ne Némirovsky and Jonathan Littell, which have renewed interest in the relation between history and literature, possibly running the risk of treating Suite française, written 1941-42, as a twenty-first century novel, but highlighting the extent to which analysis of these texts has become inseparable from their reception. Questions of anti-Semitism and sympathy for right-wing views have been raised about Némirovsky and her work; Susan Suleiman establishes the importance of the first half of the century for Jewish immigration into France in any discussion of these issues, and through a close reading of a 1937 short story suggests a critical stance towards assimilation, while Nathan Bracher identifies in Némirovsky's wartime short stories a thematic emphasis on a shared humanity quite contrary to the ideology of Vichy. Lynn Higgins reads David Golder (1929) with Julien Duvivier's film adaptation (1931) to elucidate the importance of class, immigration, and family dynamic, particularly of mother and daughters, and David Carroll situates Suite française in its social and personal context to underline its critical perspective on attitudes to the defeat and Occupation, as well as a thematics of endurance. The articles on Les Bienveillantes raise issues of the representative status of the central character Maximilien Aue, for example the correlation between history and individual psyche (Samuel Moyn), or the tension between evil and banality in the novel's defiant opening assertion of a fraternal bond between narrator and reader (Liran Razinsky). This theme and the structure of similarity and difference are also central to Marc Dambre's close reading of the opening paragraphs, elucidating the way the novel situates itself in relation to French literature and to literariness. The power of literature to colour the historical record is the starting point for Antoine Compagnon's discussion of the treatment of historically attested and purely fictional characters, and the manner in which they are constructed to resist historical understanding. Philip Watts argues that Littell's appropriation of Greek tragedy places to the fore questions of the relation of literary form to the representation of atrocities past and present, and Richard Golsan offers a detailed reading of the references in the text to the work of Edgar Rice Burroughs, and what the historical inconsistencies and distortions in these references reveal of the implied politics of the text concerning Nazism and Western culture. Stephen Ungar explores Littell's analysis of the extreme-Right Belgian political leader Léon Degrelle in Le Sec et l'humide as a key text on the road to the creation of the figure of Aue. The quality of the articles and the ambitious sweep of the analyses make for an impressive volume. It also contains interesting contextual material on Némirovsky: an interview with Olivier Rubinstein about the publication of Suite française, and correspondence from 1932-33 relating to the possible publication of L'Affaire Courilof in the United States. It closes with an English translation of Némirovsky's first short story.