FR405 French Crime Fiction

1. FR405French Crime Fiction Lecture 8

2. Didier Daeninckx and the use of history – a ‘route’ to memory • Pierre Nora’s Les Lieux de mémoire: move from ‘traditional genre known as “history of France”’ and expose the artificiality of its ‘chronological and teleological continuity’ Pierre Nora, ‘Preface to the English-Language Edition’, in Realms of Memory, p. xix • […] a lieu de mémoireis any significant entity, whether material or non-material in nature, which by dint of human will or the work of time has become a symbolic element of the memorial heritage of any community (in this case, the French community). Quoted from Pierre Nora, ‘Preface to the English-Language Edition’, in Realms of Memory, p. xvii.

3. Versailles… • Hunting lodge • Royal residence and seat of power • Museum • Shift form power to heritage and from the monarchy to democracy • = multifaceted and multi-layered ‘site of memory’

4. Nora and colonial sites of memory • Quasi silence on colonialism, see Charles-Robert Ageron, ‘L’Exposition coloniale de 1931. Mythe républicain ou mythe impérial ?’ [in Pierre Nora (éd.), Les Lieux de mémoire (Paris: Gallimard, 1984), pp. 561-591] = a-critical ; colonial ideologybelongs to the past vs. Daeninckx’sCannibale

5. New sites of memory? • Deportation of Jewish children + 17 Oct demonstration live on in the present and define French-ness = sites of memory • Demonstration vs. our traditional understanding of Paris; French history = not a seamless narrative [Algerians, State terror, and Memory by Jim House and Neil MacMaster, 2006] • Place de la République: statue of Marianne; French Revolution (liberté, égalité, fraternité) and colonial ideology

6. Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen • French Revolution: shift from an absolutist political framework to a set of emancipative pronouncements • L’impossibilité qu’a un agrégat quelconque de s’ériger en une communauté définie sans recourir à un extra convoque à son bord la sainte et le héros: opération par laquelle une population se mue en un peuple. L’économiste, le sociologue, le démographe traitent de la première, scientifiquement, et c’est heureux. Un peuple, en revanche, c’est une affaire à la fois sulfureuse et plus fantasque : une question de mythes et de formes. Sont demandées une légende et une carte. Des ancêtres et des ennemis. Un peuple, c’est une population, plus des contours et des conteurs, Régis Debray, Éloge des frontières (2010), p. 63.

7. Daeninckx and postcolonial studies? • Postcolonial studies (1970s onwards): Edward Said, GayatriSpivak, HomiBhabha, and VY Mudimbe: critique of Western modernity – Enlightenment vs. colonialism? two-tier conception of humanity • Western modernity: to be read against the grain and contrapuntally (see Culture and Imperialism by Edward Said, 1993) = colonialism is one of the major counterpoints of cultural modernity,

8. Daeninckx and postcolonial studies? • L’Étranger (1942) by Albert Camus: existential novel but Meursault kills the nameless/faceless Arab – see colonial subconscious • Brouillard au pont de Tolbiac • Vs. Daeninckx: see young Algerian characters from the Nanterre bidonville // postcolonial characters – break with denial and amnesia = French collective responsibility

9. Maurice Papon • Cadin’s investigation into the murders of Roger and Bernard Thiraud provides a materialization of the missing link between different crimes and different histories. In "real," historical terms, the investigation into these double murders embodies what had, in fact, just come to the attention of the French public, Maurice Papon's double guilt-on the one hand, for his heretofore unknown role in the deportation of Jews during the Nazi occupation and, on the other hand, for his publicly knowable, but mostly ignored activities in the late stages of French colonialism, including especially his particular role in the October massacre. The fictional means that Daeninckx employs to capture the many sides of Papon's brilliant career indicates, however, that the novel's aim extends beyond the particular indictment of one, albeit central, figure: like all detective work, Cadin's fictional murder investigation proceeds metonymically by moving from clue to clue and thus brings into view a wide swath of postwar French life. By making the discovery of homologies between eras the point of the narrative, Daeninckx provokes an engagement with larger problems of French complicity. Beyond memory of the events of the Nazi genocide and Algerian War, and beyond even the various kinds of links that have come to relate them in collective memory, what is at stake is the question of responsibility, and particularly French responsibility. French discourses contemporary to the October massacre made links back to the Nazi genocide, but did so without evoking French complicity, which had not yet been thematized in historical or political texts. Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: The Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (2009), pp. 276-277.

10. Multidirectional Memory • Focus on Hannah Arendt, W. E. B. Du Bois, Aimé Césaire, Marguerite Duras, Jean Rouch, Leïla Sebbar, Michael Haneke, and Daeninckx etc. Exploration of ‘postmemory’ (Marianne Hirsch) to ‘capture the specific relation of children to the traumatic events experienced by their parents’ (ibid., p. 271) – see Michael Haneke’s Caché (2006) and LeïlaSebbar’sLa Seine était rouge. Paris, octobre 1961 (1999)