Falsos amigos parciales

Unlike the German literature studied in relation to victimhood in which expellees dominate the narrative, representations of conscripts in republican culture in the first decade after the end of the Algerian war are largely sidelined.117 _{They exist almost in the background of a} more dynamic story which they are not party to and, indeed, often cannot access. This difference in prominence comes from the different places the two groups have in their

113 _{Moeller, 'Germans as Victims?', p. 150; Aleida Assman, 'Erinnerung als Erregung. Wendepunkte der} deutschen Erinnerungsgeschichte', Wissenschaftskolleg Jahrbuch 1998/1999 (2000), cited in Ruth Wittlinger, 'Taboo or Tradition? The 'Germans as Victims' Theme in the Federal Republic until the mid-1990s', Bill Niven (ed.) Germans as Victims: Remembering the Past in Contemporary Germany (Basingstoke, 2006) p. 64.

114 _{Helmut Schmitz, 'The Birth of the Collective from the Spirit of Empathy: From the "Historian's Dispute"} to German Suffering', Bill Niven (ed.) Germans as Victims: Remembering the Past in Contemporary Germany (Basingstoke, 2006) p. 103.

115 _{Moeller, War Stories, p. 3.}

116 _{This is expanded upon in Chapter 2.} 117 _{Wittlinger, 'Taboo or Tradition?', p. 70.}

own national narratives; whilst the expellees are representative of the suffering inflicted upon the whole German nation as a result of the Nazi war machine and its aftermath, the French conscripts do not play a significant role in the decolonisation discourse and, indeed, if they were to figure too prominently, would be damaging to such a narrative.118 _{This will} become apparent in the analysis of three sources from the 1960s: Alain Resnais’s film Muriel, ou le temps d’un retour (1963), Jacques Démy’s film Les Parapluies de Cherbourg (1964) and George Perec’s short story, Quel petit vélo à guidon chromé au fond de la cour? (1966). Whilst there are many other novels and films from the 1960s which contain representations of the Algerian war, there are only three included here as the others do not contain representations of conscripts, only the professional army, further evidence that the conscript is not a dominant figure in republican representations of the Algerian war.119 _In contrast to representations of conscripts in the Franco-Prussian war, the would-be citizen soldier of the Algerian war does not take centre-stage.

Muriel is Resnais’s second collaboration with the writer Jean Cayrol, who scripted the 1955 documentary film Nuit et Broulliard on the Nazi concentration camps, and it followed on from the critical success of his 1961 film L’Année derrière à Marienbad.120 _{Set over a fortnight} in the coastal city of Boulogne, Muriel focuses on four characters, their deceits and their relationship with the past. Antiques dealer Hélène has invited her old flame Alphonse to stay. He brings with him Françoise who purports to be his niece but is, in actual fact, his young lover. Of the same generation as Françoise is Bernard, Hélène’s step-son who has recently returned from his tour of duty in Algeria. The film itself is intentionally muddled and confusing, fast-cutting between inanimate objects, upsetting chronology by switching between day and night and overlaying sound from one scene onto another. It is an uneasy film portraying abstruse and disturbed characters. In essence, it is very characteristic of the nouvelle vague style through its use of ‘repetition, circularity, return, refusal (or inability) to achieve closure, spiralling in on themselves, gaps, holes, blank spaces, aporias of all kinds,

118 _{Annette Seidal Arpaci, 'Lost in Translations? The Discourse of "German Suffering" and W. G. Sebald's}

Luftkreig und Literatur', Helmut Schmitz (ed.) A Nation of Victims? Representations of German Wartime Suffering from 1945 to the Present (Amsterdam, 2007) p. 161.

119 _{Thus among the absent are novels by Claire Etcherelli, Pierre Leulliette, Jean Pélégri, Jules Roy and Pierre-} Henri Simon, and the films, Cléo de 5 à 7, Le Combat dans l’Île and Le Petit Soldat.

120 _{Alain Resnais, Muriel, ou le temps d'un retour (France, 1963); Alain Resnais, Nuit et Broulliard (France, 1955);} Alain Resnais, L'Année derrière à Marieband (France, 1961). The first twenty-five or so pages of the September 1961 issue of Cahiers du cinéma, the film journal associated with the nouvelle vague movement (of which Resnais was on the periphery), were dedicated to L’Année derrière à Marieband. Muriel would garner a fifteen-page discussion. Cahiers du cinéma (no. 123, September 1961) and (no. 149, November 1963).

jumps and cuts.’121 _{Despite Muriel’s avant-garde quality, it gained much public exposure in} France, not only in the intellectual Les Temps modernes, but also through long reviews and discussions in Le Monde, L’Express and the entertainment magazine, Télérama.122

Jacques Démy’s Les Parapluies de Cherbourg looks and sounds a world apart from Muriel, and yet it utilises familiar tropes which support the republican decolonisation discourse: the agency-free victimhood of a conscript who is sidelined from the main story, a lack of origins of the war and a suggestion that the Vichy era is of far greater relevance to France than the troubles of a single soldier.123 _{Les Parapluies is an extravaganza of music and colour} in which every sentence is sung and brightly coloured dresses complement equally vibrant backdrops. The storyline is simplicity itself in comparison to the muddle of Resnais’s film. Geneviève and Guy are in the throes of young love when Guy is called up for military service in Algeria. Geneviève discovers after his departure that she is pregnant and, with some coordination from her mother, marries the older and considerably wealthier Roland Cassard who is willing to bring the child up as his own. Guy returns to Cherbourg, marries his aunt’s carer and the film ends some years later with a chance meeting between the two former lovers. In both Muriel and Les Parapluies the heroic citizen soldier is absent and in his place is a victimised conscript. This is represented in two ways: firstly, through their marginalisation from society upon return from war and, secondly, by undermining the significance of their experiences through reference to the Occupation period.

Muriel’s Bernard is a marginalised outsider on many levels. He leads an antagonistic relationship with his step-mother and is frequently seen leaving the house and being bewildered by the constant rotation of possessions and furniture (Hélène deals in antiques from the flat). He is out of work, seemingly of his own accord and has thus separated himself from society at a civil level since his return from military service. He rarely engages in conversation unless pushed and frequently seems detached from what he is saying. He lies to the other characters, telling Hélène that his non-existent fiancée Muriel is ill, only to immediately backtrack and say that she is not. He leaves Françoise one evening explaining

121 _{Lynn A. Higgins, New Novel, New Wave, New Politics: Fiction and the Representation of History in Postwar France} (London, 1996) p. 15.

122 _{Bernard Pingaud, ‘Clefs pour Muriel’, Les Temps modernes (no. 210, November 1963); Jean de Baroncelli,} ‘Au Festival de Venise : Accueil favorable pour “Muriel” d’Alain Resnais’, Le Monde (3 September 1963); Jean- Luc Godard, Pierre Kast, André-S. Labarthe, Henri Langois et Jacques Rivette, ‘Faut-il comprend Resnais ?’,

L’Express (3 October 1963); Claude-Jean Philippe, ‘Faut-il une clé pour comprendre Muriel ? Le nouveau film

d’Alain Resnais’, Télérama (13 October 1963).

that he is going to see a girl who he insinuates is his financée, only to be found by Hélène alone in a bar. Bernard films the world through his hand-held camera, recording scenes through windows in cafes and even in his own home when an argument breaks out; there is a pane of glass between him and the world.124 _{And yet, being on the outside and looking} in, Bernard is also the most perceptive character, seeing Alphonse for the fraud he is in terms of his tales of his life in Algeria (which is entirely fabricated) and his relationship with Françoise.

The only character in the film Bernard appears close to is his lover Marie-Do, who is not known to any of the other characters and also seems to know nothing of the mysterious Muriel. In one scene, he encourages Marie-Do to look at him through a kaleidoscope, the fragmentation of him through the lens serves to represent the fragmented nature of his character in relation to the rest of society. It is not until the scene following Marie-Do’s announcement that she is leaving Boulogne that we discover the true identity of Muriel. Over footage he shot on his hand-held camera when deployed in Algeria, Bernard narrates his participation in the torture of an Algerian prisoner, Muriel. The scene is reminiscent of a flashback, giving the viewer both ‘images of memory, the personal archive of the past…, [but also] images of history, the shared and recorded past.’125 _{Bernard is both an individual} and at the same time representative of ex-conscripts. The incident with Muriel is at once his own private experience yet also signifies the common experience of those involved in torture during the war. As the shot pans out to take in Bernard’s studio we see that he is actually talking to an older man, of Hélène’s generation. The shots of this conversation focus on each of the participants’ faces individually, exacerbating the divide between them; between France and the returning soldiers. Whilst the complicated back-story which involves Alphonse and Hélène, whose hearts, minds and memories are still in the Second World War, is in the process of being resolved by the end of the film, Bernard remains as he began: a traumatised victim on the edge of society.

Guy is only present at the beginning and end of Les Parapluies; as the plot moves on apace in Cherbourg, he is serving as a conscript in Algeria. His departure is a starkly bleak scene compared to the bright and jazzy mise-en-scène of the rest of the film, and his equally austere

124 _{I am indebted to Nicholas Shaw for this turn of phrase. Nicholas Shaw, The Pane of Glass Between Me and the}

World (Britain, 2009) http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xcg3gx_the-pane-of-glass-between-me-and-

th_shortfilms (accessed 23 June 2010).

return is compounded by the fact that it occurs immediately following Geneviève and Cassard’s vivid and joyful wedding scene. Guy is a victim of change. The only time he appears in the central part of the film during his military service is in a static black and white photograph, standing alone with a background that provides him no context. Upon his return he is alienated by the changing landscape of Cherbourg, which culminates in the replacement of Geneviève’s old umbrella shop with a store selling washing machines. The road name has changed from ‘la rue de notre amour’ to ‘la rue des regrets’. He is discarded by his true love and separated from his child. One reviewer described him as ‘plutôt passif’, in direct contrast to the bright and dynamic residents of Cherbourg of which he used to be a part.126 _{But he is more than passive; he is helpless, agency-less and a victim.}

Kirsten Ross has argued that French culture has drawn a relationship between decolonisation and modernisation which, in its dying days, ‘bolstered’ the claims of colonialism being a civilising mission and thus maintaining, ‘at the peak of the empire’s most barbarous behaviour’, its republican credentials.127 _{Geneviève’s pregnancy and the} transformation of the shop into one selling washing machines, a clear symbol of modernity and the consumerism of les trente glorieuses, are reflective of such a narrative. This notion of modernisation, of an inevitable progress, is evident in the decolonisation discourse.128 _In this environment, Guy has spent most of the film fighting for a cause that disappears before his very eyes whilst at the same time, being entirely removed from the modernisation engulfing his home town, making it unrecognisable upon his return. The social effect of his military service has been to move Guy away from the centre to the periphery of society. Furthermore, despite bearing witness to this change in his absence, Guy is totally incapable of comprehending the world around him and claims that nothing has changed; he is portrayed as psychologically traumatised by his unseen experiences in Algeria. When the film ends with Guy alongside his wife and child, his trauma is concealed by the apparent success of his civil duty as a father and provider, but it is not the happy ending of a true love story. Whilst Bernard is marginalised from civil society, without a job or a fiancée, Guy’s apparent integration is actually a front for his lost life.

Bernard is certainly not an heroic citizen soldier character; he is not the future of France and for the most part his existence is inconsequential to the other characters and their

126 _{Madeleine Chapsal, ‘Fanny à Cherbourg’, in L’Express (20 February 1964) p. 24.}

127 _{Kristin Ross, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture (London, 1995) p. 114.} 128 _{This theme of inevitability and modernisation will be developed further in Chapter 2, section 2.3b.}

storylines in the film. He is a victim of his traumatic experiences of war, as well as French society’s unsympathetic reaction to him upon his return. As such, Resnais’s film suggests a potential to present a radical challenge to the republican decolonisation discourse and the lack of a connection between Algeria and France. However, two aspects of the film prevent this being the case. Firstly, the Algerian war is represented as a timeless entity; it has neither origins nor conclusions, but exists only as a static memory of Bernard’s which has no wider context. As with the victimhood narrative attributed to post-war Germany, the failure to acknowledge the war’s origins avoids attributing any cause, and thus responsibility, for the war itself. Bernard’s memories do not interrupt the flow of the decolonisation discourse. His marginal place in society, in which he lacks agency, emphasises that he could not possibly interrupt such a course of history.

Secondly, Bernard’s victimhood is usurped by that of his step-mother. Hélène has suffered because of the collective trauma of the Vichy era, which is omnipresent in Muriel. The film is laced with Hélène and Alphonse’s memories of their wartime love affair; the mystery of the film centres on their conflicting recollections of the past.129 _{The Second World War is} present in the very fabric of the film, with the setting of Boulogne. The viewer is constantly reminded of the past conflict by the newly-built apartments upon the rubble of the destroyed port. Despite the name in the title being part of Bernard’s story, it is Hélène and Alphonse’s troubled affair of the past which bookends and dominates the film. In Muriel, all begins and ends with Vichy; there is no start or end to the Algerian war, no leaving and returning by Bernard and no wider consequence of his whole experience in terms of the films’ narrative. Vichy dominates. Resnais, rather than presenting a challenge to the republican narrative of the Algerian war, is party to the same trope as the historians noted in the introduction to this thesis; the Vichy era takes precedence over the Algerian war thus undermining, indeed denying in Muriel’s case, the latter’s importance and impact on the French Republic.130

Guy, like Muriel’s Bernard, is a victim alienated from the society in which he lives. Like Bernard, too, he is marginalised both by the film and in the film to avoid the Algerian war becoming too prominent a feature. The war itself is never seen, is never discussed and has no beginning or end beyond Guy’s involvement in it. A fundamental character of the story,

129 _{Naomi Greene, Landscapes of Loss: The National Past in Postwar French Cinema (Princeton, 1999) pp. 46-47.} 130 _{See Introduction, section I.IIb.}

Guy’s existence is barely commented upon in the central part of the film and his absence does not prevent the film’s narrative driving forwards. His loss of Geneviève and his child is the most evident example of his marginalisation but there is a further element which emphasises this and denies the significance of the Algerian war to France. Given that his absence in the film, the loss of both his way of life and his first child are all singularly due to his conscription into the French army, his aunt’s flippant contention that ‘“le régiment n’est pas la guerre”’ is indicative of the status young conscripts shipped off to Algeria had to the generation that lived through the Occupation.131 _{His part in the war, and the war} itself, is entirely undermined by the attitude of his aunt’s generation. The implication is clear: the post-Vichy era of modernisation and affluence is not to be interrupted by the unnecessary and unspoken troubles of those who had experienced ‘le régiment’ in Algeria. Two years after Démy’s hugely popular musical production, Georges Perec penned a ludic short story, Quel petit vélo à guidon chromé au fond de la cour?, as much a challenge to literary conventions as it was an amusing tale.132 _{Perec had just published his first novel, Les Choses,} which Max-Pol Fouchet, writing in Le Nouvel Observateur, picked for one of his top three books of 1965.133 _{He would go on to become a member of OuLiPo, a collective of writers} and mathematicians who were fascinated by the potential of language and wished to push the boundaries of literature, as their full title suggests: Ouvroir de littérature potentielle.134 _Under the influence of this group, Perec constructed what is probably the longest palindrome ever written, at over 5000 characters in length, but his penchant for inventiveness with language was already apparent in Quel petit vélo.135 _{It also effectively illustrates the rhetoric of} victimisation in the Algerian war context. The story follows the attempts by a group of Parisian intellectual chums to help a young conscript avoid being sent to Algeria in the closing months of the war. It is narrated by Perec whose friend, Henri Pollak, is a sergeant in the same regiment, as well as an intellectual; he leads ‘une double vie’.136

131 _{[“Military service isn’t war.”]}

132 _{Georges Perec, Quel petit vélo à guidon chromé au fond de la cour? (Paris, 1966). Perec even cites Démy’s film in} his story. p. 52.

133 _{Max-Pol Fouchet, ‘Les Trois livres qu’ils ont prefers en 1965’, Le Nouvel Observateur (29 December 1965).} 134 _{For an overview on Perec’s background and his works see Leonard R. Koos, 'Georges Perec: P or the} Puzzle of Fiction', Yale French Studies 75 (1988).

135 _{Georges Perec, 'Le Grand Palindrome', 1967 [accessed 18 June 2009]} http://home.urbanet.ch/urba7038/motscroises/lexique/palindrome.htm.

Perec is perhaps most famous for his lipogrammatic 1969 novel, La Disparition in which the letter ‘e’ is never used. He also won the Prix Médici in 1978 for his huge tome, La Vie Mode d’Employ: Romans.

The conscript they are attempting to save from deployment is a rather simple character. Karamanlis is a feckless private whose first action in the tale is to sob ‘comme un petit enfant’ and plead with Pollak to injure him sufficiently so that he is prevented from being sent to Algeria.137 _{Karamanlis is then left to the whim of the narrator and his friends. He is} given no further agency in the tale, indeed his ‘immédiat avenir’ is decided by a round of