THIS WON THE Prix Goncourt in 2017. It is not a novel, precisely, but a récit, a narrative form familiar in the French literary tradition but elusive of definition, like novelle in the German literary tradition, I suppose.
It's a narrative, but not exactly fiction, and not exactly not fiction. It has no invented characters, so far as I can tell. All the characters actually existed, and what they say and do seems largely based on documents, to a large extent their own memoirs or testimony (at Nuremberg, say). Vuillard very occasionally slips into the sensoria of the historical actors in the way historical fiction usually does, as when Austrian Prime Minister Schuschnigg is awakened by his valet on the morning of March 11, 1938--
Il pose ses pieds par terre. Le parquet est froid. Il enfile ses mules. On lui annonce de vastes mouvements des troupes allemands.
[He puts his feet on the ground. The parquet floor is cold. He puts on his slippers. He is told of vast movements of German troops.]
--but typically he eschews such devices. The narration does not aim at being historically objective--it has an attitude, sometimes a bristling one--but Vuillard generally confines himself to documented facts.
The first and last chapters have to do with how the major German industrial concerns decided to go along with the Nazis (who promised stability, big spending on armaments, and the suppression of labor unions). The second chapter is about Edward Wood, Lord Halifax, the British government's pre-eminent advocate of appeasing Hitler, and his meeting Göring and Hitler himself before the war. The main part of the book, though, is about the Anschluss, the political union with Nazi Germany that Austria was bullied into, or succumbed to under the threat of military force, or rushed to embrace--Vuillard gives us evidence for all three of those possibilities.
I've wondered whether novelists use World War II settings for their fiction so frequently not only because WW II novels are popular, but also because the setting is a quick way of lending gravitas to a plot. Having World War II in the background instantly creates moral weight, significance. Civilization in the balance, fatal decisions, lives of millions at stake--World War II is one of those unusual actual historical events that rises to the plot stakes of a Marvel superhero movie, and those stakes give the fiction's characters' actions and decisions an epic scale.
Vuillard seems intentionally to go against the grain of all that, though. Everyone, even the political leaders--especially the political leaders, come to think of it--seems egotistical, shortsighted, petty, gaffe-prone. British response to the German troop movements is delayed because the German Ambassador won't leave a state dinner, instead keeping everyone listening to his tennis stories. The fearsome mechanized German military machine breaks down in the mountain passes, creating a bottleneck. There is lots of film footage of the Austrian crowds cheering Hitler, but it was all edited by Goebbels's team, so we have no idea how faithfully it records anything.
Someone occasionally makes a stand--Wilhelm Miklas, president of Austria, stalls a bit before consenting that several crucial state posts be filled by Nazi sympathizers--but just about everyone comes off as a bit shabby: weak, hypocritical, dishonest. No great heroes, no great villains. Even Hitler gets mistaken for a valet.
Vuillard so consistently undermines the usual epic tonality that I wondered, is that why he got the prize? Is he trying to break the paradigm, and succeeding? Not quite as interesting as Les Onze, but L'ordre du jour does show there is life in the old dog of historical fiction yet.
No comments:
Post a Comment