Paul Morand: The Paradoxes of "Revision"

Abstract

For those who ponder the revisionism that took place among French intellectuals and writers in the 1950s regarding the split between Right and Left, Paul Morand's oeuvre offers a fruitful subject of study. This could seem illogical, for we are talking about a writer who does not consider himself an intellectual, and refused any revision on his own account when he was fired from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in September 1944, based on his choices and actions as a highlyplaced bureaucrat during World War II. The logical challenge (to speak about revisionism from the standpoint of an unrepentant radical) is also a challenge to logic, since Morand's positions -more complex than suggested at first glance, and thus richer-seem linked to paradox. The Dictionnaire Robert defines paradox as Opinion qui va h l'encontre de l'opinion communement admise. In fact, as a recalcitrant Vichyist, Paul Morand places himself against the current of the dominant historical doxa, and sometimes even against the Vichyist minority in which he enclosed himself. The dictionary adds; Etre, chose, fait qui heurt le bon sens. We see Morand in this second meaning, which clarifies itself in a third one on the level of logic: se dit d'une proposition qui est a la fois vraie et fausse. The paradox creates a closed circuit, a link between opposites. The reader is sent back to terms like antinomy, contradiction, sophistry. I will not attempt here to explore the vast domain of political involvement or non-involvement and interpretations thereof. I will also attempt not to follow in the footsteps of readers who have already made great headway in decoding Morand's texts, such as Jeffrey Mehlman. I will take care not to go down the roads of polemic or rehabilitation. My goal is not to take sides, but to detect a coherence in Morand's writing, from post-war novelist to aging diarist. In fact, his Journal inutile (1968-1976) provides a generic and chronologic counterpoint to the earlier writings, allowing one to measure how much Morand substitutes the division Vichy/Other for the Right/Left cleavage. It will gradually become apparent that the writer never stopped rehashing and recomposing directly, via the journal, or implicitly via his fictionthe era 1940-44. He did not revise this past, but looked at it again and revisited it, in order to demonstrate three points: 1) revision characterizes man and the world; 0 Board of Regents, University of Wisconsin System, 2003 SubStance # 102, Vol. 32, no. 3, 2003 43