Reviewed by: Refiguring Les Années Noires: Literary Representations of the Nazi Occupation by Kathy Comfort Jason Earle Comfort, Kathy. Refiguring Les Années Noires: Literary Representations of the Nazi Occupation. Lexington, 2019. ISBN 978-1-4985-6160-0. Pp. 206. This study of seven literary memoirs of the German Occupation of France arrives at a propitious moment for revisiting key touchstones in the creation of the cultural memory of les années noires. Recent debates over Emmanuel Macron's 2018 declaration that Maréchal Philippe Pétain was a "great soldier" during World War I and pundit Éric Zemmour's much-publicized defense of the Vichy government's role in the deportation of Jews have yet again shown the Occupation to be an ongoing site of contentious memory, history, and commemoration. Comfort explores how the official public narrative on Vichy has long been challenged by literary authors writing against the grain of French national memory. The choice of writers studied is wide-ranging, including both often-cited names (Céline, Jean Cayrol, Charlotte Delbo, and Marguerite Duras) and lesser-known figures (Roma writer Matéo Maximoff and feminist journalist Évelyne Le Garrec). Moving largely chronologically from the 1950s to the 1980s, Comfort adopts Henry Rousso's influential model of the historical stages of the memory of Vichy (Unfinished Mourning, Repressions, Broken Mirrors, and Obsessions), situating authors within their period of publication. Casting a wide net with both authors and periods, Comfort admirably highlights members of groups who have been somewhat neglected in literary studies of Vichy. Indeed, perhaps the most valuable chapters in this volume are those dedicated to Maximoff's testimonial novel of Roma internment camps and Annie Guéhenno's memoir of her experiences as Resistance member and Gestapo prisoner. Here, Comfort's work demonstrates both the ways that certain groups (Roma and women resistance fighters, respectively) were targeted during the Occupation and how those groups' memories have been relegated to the margins in official retellings of the period. In all the chapters, Comfort proposes insightful close readings in crisp prose, foregrounding the central role of literary intertexts for her corpus. Proust's importance for the representation of memory emerges in particularly sharp relief in chapters on Céline, Guéhenno, and Delbo, supporting Comfort's [End Page 192] contention that these autobiographical texts should be read more as literary constructions than historical documents. For each chapter, Comfort engages with a different methodological approach to studying the literature of Vichy, from trauma studies and postmemory to folklore studies and testimonial writing. New students of the period will thus be introduced to several of the recent dominant trends in the field. While this wide scope is commendable, the book's breadth does at times suggest a deficiency in overall methodology. Without one clear approach, the reader is often left with the impression of seven individual studies, rather than a unified and coherent text. One also wonders if the book's argument concerning literature's specific role in the contestation of memory would have benefitted from a more sustained analytical discussion of the terms"memoir,""autofiction,"and"autobiographical novel,"employed throughout with little definitional distinction, as well as a more in-depth engagement with the historical context of the texts'publications. Still, this volume makes abundantly clear the knotted relationship between individual and group memory that continues to characterize France's Vichy syndrome. Jason Earle Sarah Lawrence College (NY) Copyright © 2019 American Association of Teachers of French
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Sep 1, 2019
Bernard Gazier 
Open Access
