Literary Research / Recherche littéraire, nos. 39-40, 2003

LR/RL

Literary Research/Recherche littéraire 20.39-40 (2003): 370-373

Allen Douglas, War, Memory, and the Politics of Humor. The Canard Enchaîné and Word War I. Berkeley: U of California P, 2002; 345 pp.; ISBN: 0520228766; LC call no.: D526.3.D68; $65.00

When Jean-Paul Sartre's Les Mouches was first performed in June 1943 at Charles Dullin's Théâtre de la Cité in occupied Paris, one of the dramatist's main goals was to counter the propaganda that told French men and women they were being punished for their sins and that all they could do was feel remorse for the errant ways that had got them into the terrible mess in which they now found themselves. It was against this background that theatregoers were asked to respond to the portrayal of the Argives as a people paralyzed by shame and remorse. (During the fifteen years that have elapsed since Agamemnon's murder, the usurper Aegisthus has devised a program of rituals, like the feast of the dead, to keep the population in a state of political lethargy and docility. The Argives have been rendered passive through a carefully cultivated collective depression and it will fall to Orestes to wake them from their bad dream, to let them know that freedom is theirs for the taking.) In 1943, then, in the context of the German Occupation, the play's message was relatively unambiguous. In 1947 and 1948, however, when Les Mouches was performed in postwar Germany, Sartre's condemnation of remorse as morally and politically sterile took on new connotations. At a time when German intellectuals and politicians were still trying to come to terms with their country's immediate past, Sartre's play was seen by many progressive Germans as a dangerous call to bury the past, to act as if it hadn't happened and get back as fast as possible to business as usual. The play's success in Berlin in 1948 was attributed by some to the fact that it appeared to dispense an all-embracing pardon, a general absolution for everything that had happened in Germany since the coming to [end page 370] power of the Nazis in 1933. Absolved from all responsibility, ordinary Germans were being told, according to the play's critics, that there was no need for them to open old wounds in an attempt to understand how the horrors of that period could have come about. In the ensuing debates one German academic, a certain Professor Steiniger, argued that it may well have been true that in the France of 1943 the occupying army had encouraged remorse as a means of gentle repression, but that in the Germany of 1948 the situation was quite different with unreformed Nazis desperately trying to repress any tendency to remorseful self-examination on the part of the German people. Sartre responded to the effect that it was necessary to distinguish guilt from responsibility, that in 1948 as in 1943 guilt and remorse did not, in themselves, offer an adequate way out of the historical predicament in which the Germans and the French respectively found themselves. If, on the other hand, a people might be persuaded to take collective responsibility for its actions, which in turn would involve understanding the nature and implications of those actions, then it was well on the way to freeing itself from the dead weight of the past without denying or forgetting its reality or its horror.

The story of these two early productions of Les Mouches is interesting because it brings into sharp relief some of the issues surrounding memory and its assimilation to history in times of war and postwar. And these are precisely the questions addressed by Allen Douglas in his engaging and informative study of the French satirical weekly, Le Canard Enchaîné, from its founding in 1915 through an extended postwar ending only in 1928: "Remember/forget is a fundamental duality when confronting the horrors of the past century. The weekly's strong (though not consistent) call for forgetting was not the abandonment of a moral imperative in favor of a kind of laziness. It was part of a larger attempt to escape from a cycle of madness…. Our first modern mass slaughter brought out our first modern mass commemorations and set the conditions for our politics of memory" (264-5). Taking his cue from Pierre Nora's Les Lieux de mémoire, Douglas explores the processes of memory making during and after the Great War in France as a site of social and political contestation illuminated by the Canard's ironic and polemical interventions. During the war, the weekly had sought to balance its pacifist and antimilitarist tendencies with its unstinting support for the front-line soldiers, the so-called poilus. In the years following the armistice, the balancing act grew even more difficult as the Canard continued to defend the veterans' honour while openly challenging the emerging official memory of 1914-18. As Henri Barbusse made clear in his 1919 novel, Clarté, memory and remembrance could be mobilized through rituals of commemoration (in some ways similar to those engineered by Sartre's Aegisthus) and [end page 371] deployed with the goal not of avoiding the repetition of evil but of promoting it. The co-opting of memory by the agents of official history making would remain a prime target for the Canard throughout the postwar period.

One of those agents was the Catholic Church which sought, through right-wing papers like La Croix, to sideline the poilus and their role in the war by attributing victory directly to divine intervention: "When a priest was quoted in the Echo de Paris as saying that 'Germany was broken against the rock of God,' the Canard answered that 'it was a shame that between Germany and the rock of God there were fifteen hundred thousand Frenchmen'" (135). Another was the French government and its civil service that attempted to erase or contain certain memories by rendering those soldiers permanently disfigured by their war injuries (the blessés de la face or, more popularly, the gueules cassées) invisible in official contexts. Thus, a circular from the Quai d'Orsay announcing a competition for positions in the Foreign Service was explicit in allowing applications from wounded veterans "on the express condition that facial lesions [be] superficial and have not left any apparent deformities" (138). For the Canard, such exclusions were not simply unjust and offensive, they amounted to an erasure of the text of war, imprinted in characters of horror on the bodies and faces of the front-line soldiers. Deglamourizing the war meant restoring that text, as well as reminding the reading public of the many "glorious" deaths attributable to accidents, officers' incompetence, and friendly fire. But all that had to be accomplished without succumbing to the morbid excesses of the cult of the fallen; after all, the Canard was irrepressibly oriented toward life and its affirmation, not toward death and the manipulation of its memory. Remember the war, honour the dead, but engage with the past honestly and unflinchingly in order to understand it and to avoid repeating its errors — such might have been the watchwords of the satirical weekly's politics of memory. (A corollary of this politics was a principle of respect for all the war dead and not just a few favourite sons. Attempts to glorify and commemorate writer-soldiers by the creation in 1928 of a "Fighting Writers Dead for France Square" were thus countered by the Canard with calls for a "Fighting-Lead-and-Zinc-Workers-Dead-in-the-War-Square, a Bus-Ticket-Collectors-Dead-in-the-War-Square, a Collectors-of-Direct,-Indirect-and-Assimilated-Taxes-Dead-in-the-War-Square" [149].)

The discourses singled out for special critique by the writers and cartoonists of the Canard might be subsumed under the general heading of "skull stuffing" (bourrage de crâne), a pernicious mix of "patriotic bombast and naively mendacious optimism" (8) that dominated the popular press then as now. According to Douglas, the Great War [end page 372] presented a historical opportunity for skull stuffing on a monumental scale: "the problem of truth and falsehood was far bigger than censorship, official lies, or patriotic propaganda. Something in the First World War defied honest expression. The combination of unprecedented horror and unprecedented national mobilization created an apparent emotional need for falsehood — one that was widely shared" (18-9). This is the context that gave birth to the Canard and in which the satirical weekly became in turn "France's most important discursive reaction to the gigantic butchery" (19). It is also the context in which the problem of memory is posed and which gives it its specific contours: "It would have to be a contested memory, one that wrestled with the gulf already opened between events and representations" (ibid.), a memory moulded by the gap between reality and discourse, experience and representation. In its radical critique of skull stuffing as discursive memory practice, the Canard emerges from Douglas's account as a trailblazer of satirical counter-discourse that will leave its mark on twentieth-century forms of oppositionality. (And here one could wish for a more expansive cultural vision that would tell us more, or at least speculate more generously, about the Canard's positioning as precursor and as contemporary, its place in a countercultural tradition. It would be intriguing, for example, to speculate on the weekly's (selective) affinities with an avant-garde running from Dada to the Situationists' practice of détournement, an oppositional tactic often remarkably similar to the semiotic hijacking described by Douglas. A common ancestor might be Jarry's Ubu, echoed in the pages of the Canard in the mindless bellicosity of a certain Mr. Hubu.)

As Allen Douglas points out, the Canard has many ideological rough edges and ambiguities bordering on contradiction: it abounds in racist, sexist and religious stereotypes and could by no stretch of the imagination be described as politically correct. However, among its many merits, not the least has been its ability, especially in times of war and postwar, to maintain its independence, free of advertisements, subsidies and donation campaigns, relying entirely on subscriptions and newsstand sales to reach a public willing to pay for its distinctive brand of ironic, irreverent critique. In our own time of war and postwar, in a context of frequently lamentable media coverage of current affairs in which skull stuffing has made a remarkable comeback, such an example can only be salutary.

Anthony Purdy

University of Western Ontario