Carried out by Dr Helena Duffy at Royal Holloway, University of London (RHUL), the project consisted in the investigation of contemporary Holocaust literature written in French. The undertaken research has revealed that many of the texts created between 1997 and 2017 fit the paradigm of the postmodern historical novel or, to use the term coined by Canadian theorist Linda Hutcheon, historiographic metafiction. This means that while dealing with historical subjects (World War II and the Holocaust), these novels metatextually question the possibility of narrating the past. They also show history to be a textual construct that is partial (in both senses of the term), fragmented, and politically positioned. Finally, in line with postmodernism’s alignment with dissident and progressive politics, and its programmatic attentiveness to groups marginalised by dominant historiographies, the novels under analysis draw the readers’ attention to less well-known aspects of the Holocaust, assume unusual perspectives, and question mainstream discourses on the past.
The eight novels constituting the corpus include Dora Bruder [The Search Warrant] by the Nobel Laureate Patrick Modiano, and the Prix Goncourt-winning Les Bienveillantes [The Kindly Ones] by Jonathan Littell and HHhH by Laurent Binet. The other texts are Pierre Assouline’s two untranslated texts, La Cliente and Lutetia, Soazig Aaron’s Le Non de Klara [Refusal], Philippe Claudel’s Le Rapport de Brodeck [Brodeck], Fabrice Humbert’s L’Origine de la violence [The Origin of Violence], and Yannick Haenel’s Jan Karski [Messenger].
The key achievements of the project lie in having identified an important new phenomenon in French literature, and in having discussed the ethical and epistemological implications arising from the deployment of postmodern narrative strategies in Holocaust-themed fiction. The potential conflict between these works’ thematics and aesthetics stems from the identification of postmodernism with unseriousness, parody, pastiche, irony, moral relativism, historical anachronism, or even Holocaust denial, and therefore its perceived inappropriateness to deal with the morally sensitive topic of the Jewish tragedy. The concerns raised by postmodern Holocaust fiction are amplified by the post-memorial and post-testimonial context in which this fiction is being created; in other words, some fear that in the absence of direct eye-witnesses of the Nazi genocide, fiction can easily distort the truth about these tragic events and desecrate the memory of the victims.
Consequently, the monograph and the articles produced in the context of the project question the ethical suitability of the use of postmodern narrative devices in retelling the Nazi genocide. Yet, aligning itself with Hutcheon’s overwhelmingly positive valorisation of postmodernism in general and of historiographic metafiction specifically, I contend that the French postmodern Holocaust novel self-consciously raises the very epistemological and ethical questions that are posed by all attempts at fictionalising the Jewish tragedy, especially using unconventional modes of representation. As well as being manifestly aware of its fictional status and of the responsibility it is bearing towards the memory of the victims of Nazi brutality, Holocaust historiographic metafiction adopts an overtly anachronistic perspective, rendering the past relevant to contemporary injustices and violences. It therefore forces its readers to interrogate their own position in regard to both the memory of the Holocaust and today’s political and social crises. Thus, with some exceptions, the research has positively evaluated the moral and epistemological import of the analysed novels, foregrounding the capacity of the analysed corpus for raising both Holocaust awareness and vital questions pertaining to the understanding and commemoration of the Holocaust in a post-testimonial era.
