Philippe Claudel’s Brodeck as a parody of the fable or the Holocaust universalized

ABSTRACT

This article examines Philippe Claudel’s 2007 novel Brodeck (French title: Le Rapport de Brodeck) that allegorizes the Holocaust by parodying tropes and narrative structures characteristic to fairy tales and fables. While analyzing the author’s simultaneous inscription and subversion of the two ancient genres, I speculate about the possible reasons for his narrative choices and consider the meanings generated by his indirect representation of the Nazi genocide. Considering the widespread view of the Holocaust as sacred and unique, the article problematizes the novel’s universalization of the Jewish tragedy, which Claudel achieves by drawing on genres shunning historical and geographical specificity, and aiming to convey timeless and universal truths.

KEYWORDS:

• Holocaust
• Philippe Claudel
• fable
• fairy tale
• parody
• animal rights

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Helena Duffy is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Research Fellow, working at Royal Holloway, University of London. Affiliated to the Holocaust Research Institute, she is currently completing a entitled monograph Inventing the Infranovel: The Ethics of Holocaust Representations in French Postmodern Fiction. Prior to her present engagement, Duffy taught French language and literature at universities in the UK, Australia, France and Poland. Since completing her PhD, she has published widely on various aspects of contemporary French culture, such as non-native authors, Jonathan Littell’s Les Bienveillantes and French cinema. Her monograph World War II in Andreï Makine’s Historiographic Metafiction: No One Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Forgotten has been recently published Brill.

ORCID

Helena Duffy http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6047-9952

Notes

1 “A novel about Treblinka is not a novel, or else it is not about Treblinka.”

2 Franklin, A Thousand Darknesses, 243.

3 Ibid., 242.

4 Ibid.

5 Franklin, “The Cabbalist in the Death Camp,” 83–7. Cf. Sicher, 6.

6 Schreiber, “Car cela devient une histoire,” 4.

7 Additionally, Heanel refuses to accept the end of the war to be the end of violence. Rather, for him, Nuremberg becomes the new Yalta, and 1945 the worst year in history. For an analysis of Haenel’s novel, see my article “The Ethics of Metawitnessing in Yannick Haenel’s Jan Karski.” For the criticism of Jan Karski, see Golsan, “L’Affaire Karski,” and for that of Les Bienveillantes, see Hutton, “Ethics, Aesthetics and the Subject of Judgment.”

8 White, “Historical Emplotment,” 51.

9 Sicher, The Holocaust Novel, XII.

10 Ibid.

11 Ibid., 4.

12 White, “Historical Emplotment,” 40.

13 Hutcheon, A Poetics, 10.

14 Sanyal, “A Soccer Match in Auschwitz,” 50.

15 Ibid., 53.

16 Ibid., 52.

17 Ibid.

18 Ibid., 53.

19 Brodeck won the Prix Goncourt des Lycéens (2007), the Prix des Libraires du Québec (2008), the Prix des Lecteurs – Le Livre de Poche (2009) and the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize (UK, 2010).

20 Larcenet, Le Rapport de Brodeck.

21 Grenaudier-Klijn, “Landscapes Do Not Lie,” 94–5.

22 Sanyal, “A Soccer Match in Auschwitz,” 48.

23 Barjonet, “La Troisième Génération.”

24 Greenhouse, “Interview.”

25 Ibid.

26 In his work, Claudel has addressed stigmatization of ex-convicts (Le Bruit de trousseaux, 2002), (I’ve Loved You So Long, 2008), the plight of immigrants (Monsieur Lihn and His Child, 2005) or mental illness (Before the Winter Chill, 2013).

27 Claudel, Brodeck, 47.

28 Grenaudier-Klijn, “Landscapes Do Not Lie,” 91; Drsková, “‘Composer son rien avec un morceau de tout’,” 192.

29 Claudel, Brodeck, 185.

30 Ibid., 186. The wording here has been slightly changed.

31 Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, 14. The wording here has been slightly changed.

32 Hilberg, “I Was Not There,” 17.

33 Grynberg, “Appropriating the Holocaust.” Quoted by Stone, Constructing the Holocaust, 185.

34 Stone, Constructing the Holocaust, 34–6.

35 Stone quotes Yehuda Bauer who observes that “Nazi ideology saw in the Jew the non-human antithesis of what is considered to be the human ideal,” Steven Katz who points out that the Germans’ “intention to murder the Jews in toto,” and Lucy Dawidowicz who speaks of the “differentiative intent of the murderers.” Ibid., 186–87.

36 Rosenberg, “Was the Holocaust Unique?” 156.

37 Quoted by Stone, Constructing the Holocaust, 186.

38 Howe, “Writing About the Holocaust,” 27.

39 Quoted by Stone, Constructing the Holocaust, 192.

40 Ibid.

41 Rosenfeld, The World Hitler Never Made, 17.

42 Ibid., 17–8.

43 De Koven Ezrahi, By Words Alone, 150.

44 Ibid.

45 Langer, The Holocaust and the Literary Imagination, 166.

46 Epstein, “Writing about the Holocaust,” 265–67.

47 Kokkola, Representing the Holocaust, 41–2; Matthews, Navigating the Kingdom of Night, 61–84.

48 Landwehr, “The Fairy Tale,” 154.

49 Ibid.

50 Ibid., 156.

51 Ibid., 157.

52 Codde, “Transmitted Holocaust Trauma,” 64.

53 Ibid., 67–9. Other examples of the use of fairy-tale structures in retelling the Holocaust are Judy Budnitz’s If I Told You Once (1999) or Louise Murphy’s The True Tale of Hansel and Gretel (2003).

54 Hunter, “Tales from Over There,” 60.

55 Claudel, Brodeck, 30.

56 James, “Ethnic Cleansers”; Foden, “On the Edge of the Unknown”; Nouchi, “Philippe Claudel”; Leménager, “Philippe Claudel.” Claudel himself has said: “I wanted to leave this village historically and geographically vague, as this novel is a parable of contemporary history.” Bisson, “Philippe Claudel.” My own translation. Emphasis added.

57 Hutcheon, A Poetics, 3.

58 Claudel, Brodeck, 16.

59 Ibid., 16.

60 Ibid., 64.

61 Ibid., 124.

62 Ibid., 7.

63 Sébastian Hogue observes similarities between Bilissi’s tale and Monsieur Lihn and His Child, whose eponymous protagonist deludes himself about having a baby granddaughter. Hogue suggests that Fédorine, Emélia and Poupchette are but a product of Brodeck’s imagination, which would undermine the protagonist’s narratorial reliability. Hogue, “Oublierou se souvenir?,” 92–3.

64 For Langer, the scene of the agony of M. Othon’s young son is “an imaginative mask” for historical situations such as the murder of the children of Zamość by Scherpe and Hantl in Auschwitz. Langer, The Holocaust and the Literary Imagination, 132–34. For Sanyal, the hallmarks of the Holocaust are “the disposal of bodies in mass graves, the stench of the crematoria, [and] the cold bureaucratic efficiency of the administration.” Sanyal, “Concentrationary Migrations,” 63. Conversely, for Sicher to read The Plague as an allegory of the Holocaust not only distorts the meaning of Camus’s novel but also underestimates the horror of Auschwitz. Sicher, The Holocaust Novel, 5.

65 Bornand, Témoignage et fiction, 131.

66 Langer, The Holocaust and the Literary Imagination, 134.

67 Sanyal, “Concentrationary Migrations,” 63. Levi himself compares the plague to the Holocaust when he likens the members of the Sonderkommando to corpse collectors, as portrayed in Alessandro Manzoni’s novel The Betrothed. Levi, “The Grey Zone,” 29.

68 Claudel, Brodeck, 223.

69 Ibid., 224.

70 Ibid., 226.

71 Other elements are overtly familiar and deliberately exaggerated figures, polarized characterization, or aphorisms. Grenaudier-Klijn, “Landscapes Do Not Lie,” 90.

72 Ashliman, Folk and Fairy Tales, 7.

73 Ibid.

74 Claudel, Brodeck, 33.

75 Ashliman, Folk and Fairy Tales, 7.

76 Ibid., 44.

77 Claudel, Brodeck, 157.

78 Ibid., 143.

79 Ibid., 45. It needs pointing out that this may be a reference to antisemitic prejudice, whose themes include the Jews’ using the blood of Christian children for baking matzos for Passover.

80 Cf. Blubeard’s Castle, Jack and the Beanstalk or Beauty and the Beast.

81 Claudel, Brodeck, 80.

82 Frost, Sex Drives, 154.

83 Ibid.

84 Claudel, Brodeck, 1.

85 Like other aspects of the concentrationary universe described by Claudel, this episode recalls Levi’s experience of thirst in Auschwitz. Levi confesses that, together with another prisoner, he drank water stagnating in a pipe without sharing it with their fellow inmates. Levi, “Shame,” 60–1.

86 Claudel, Brodeck, 11.

87 Ibid., 89.

88 Leys, From Guilt to Shame, 5. Cf. Bettelheim, Surviving and Other Essays, 297–98; Des Pres, The Survivor; Langer, Versions of Survival.

89 Hilberg, Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders; Penkower, The Jews Were Expendable; Cesarani, and Levine, Bystanders to the Holocaust.

90 Landwehr, “The Fairy Tale,” 158.

91 Ashliman, Folk and Fairy Tales, 6.

92 Grenaudier-Klijn, “Landscapes Do Not Lie,” 97.

93 Claudel, Brodeck, 173.

94 Wilson, The German Forest, 187–89. Wilson quotes German-language author Elias Canetti who stated that “the [German] army was more than just the army; it was the marching forest.”

95 Claudel, Brodeck, 164.

96 Ibid., 235.

97 Lefkovitz, “Aesop and Animal Fable,” 1.

98 Levi, “Shame,” 52; Spiegelman, Maus, 91.

99 For a discussion of Spiegelman’s use of animal imagery, see Kolář, “The Holocaust as a Comic Book,” 152–56.

100 DeKovenEzrahi, By Words Alone, 152.

101 See Michael Skau, Michael Carroll, and Donald Cassidy, “Jerzy Kosinski’s seems to The Painted Bird.”

102 Kolář, “A Strange Boy in a Strange Land,” 60.

103 Sax, The Animals in the Third Reich, 22.

104 Claudel, Brodeck, 51.

105 Levi, “Shame,” 56–7. These suicides include those of Jean Améry, Kosinski, Tadeusz Borowski or Paul Celan.

106 Ibid., 79.

107 Ibid., 332.

108 Ibid., 189.

109 Ibid., 194.

110 Ibid., 225.

111 Ibid., 211.

112 Lang, The Secretary, 84. Quoted by Patterson, The Eternal Treblinka, 102.

113 Claudel, Brodeck, 262.

114 Ibid., 207.

115 Ibid., 159.

116 Ibid., 20.

117 Claudel, Brodeck, 140.

118 Ibid., 46.

119 Ohnmeist seems to derive from the German words “ohne” (without) and “Meister” (master).

120 Still, Derrida and Other Animals, 74.

121 Ibid., 26.

122 Patterson observes similarities between the tube that was used in Bełżec, Sobibór and Treblinka to feed Jews into gas chambers and that are used in slaughterhouses. He notes that, like the guards at Sobibór and Treblinka who called the tube Himmelfahrtstrasse (Road to Heaven), an American food scientist calls the conveyor she designed to funnel animals their deaths “Stairway to Heaven.” Patterson, Eternal Treblinka, 112–13. For Levi, these dehumanizing practices were intended to show that “[t]hese are not Menschen, human beings, but animals.” Levi, “Useless Violence,” 89–90. At the level of language, the verb used to describe to the prisoners’ intake of food was “fressen,” which is used in relation to animals. Tyner, Genocide and the Geographical Imagination, 12.

123 Brodeck’s animalization largely mirrors Levi’s discussion of “useless violence,” which he exemplifies with the lack of spoons in Auschwitz. Without spoons “the daily soup could not be consumed in any other way than by lapping it up as dogs do.” Levi, “Useless Violence,” 91. Emphasis added.

124 Claudel, Brodeck, 30.

125 This is exemplified by the film Der Ewige Jude that opens with the image of a mass of swarming rats and the narrator’s explanation: “Just as the rat is the lowest of animals, the Jew is the lowest of human beings.” Quoted by Patterson, Eternal Treblinka, 48. Cf. Amon Goeth’s tirade in Schindler’s List, where the sadistic Nazi compares Helen Hirsch to a rat. MacMillan, “Dehumanization and the Achievement of Schindler’s List,” 325–6.

126 Stow, Jewish Dogs, VIII. Cf. Patterson, Eternal Treblinka, 44, 47.

127 Patterson invokes the case of Kurt Franz’s dog Barry in Treblinka, or the Jaworzno camp where similar commands were issued. Patterson, Eternal Treblinka, 123–4.

128 Claudel, Brodeck, 46.

129 Levi, “The Intellectual in Auschwitz,” 106.

130 Ibid., 115.

131 Hutcheon, A Poetics, 22–36.

132 Derrida, The Beast, 217.

133 Ibid., 102–3. Quoted by Still, Derrida and Other Animals, 5.

134 Ibid., 308.

135 Cf. Hogue, “Oublierou se souvenir?” 43–52.

136 The slaughter of the Anderer’s animals invokes the killing of Natalia Landauer’s dog.

137 Sanyal, “Introduction,” 14.

138 Hunter (Richardson), “In Search of the Final Solution,” 159–60.

139 De Angelis argues that while Spiegelman’s visual metaphor exposes the lie behind the artificial hierarchy established by the Germans, it “take[s] at face value the artificial hierarchy that virtually all cultures throughout history have established between humans and other species.” “Of Mice and Vermin,” 231.

140 Rudolf Höss was from a farming background and the commandant of Treblinka, Kurt Franz, had trained as a master butcher. MacDonald, “Pushing the Limits of Humanity?” 421–2.

141 Singer, “The Letter Writer,” 270.

142 In The Lives of Animals (1999) Elizabeth Costello, whose lectures also draw on the beast fable, compares the horrors of animals’ lives and deaths to the horrors of the Third Reich. Buettner, Holocaust Images, 109–10. For a discussion of Singer’s compassion towards animals, see Patterson, “This Boundless Slaughterhouse,” 169–200.

143 Davis, The Holocaust; Patterson, Eternal Treblinka; Sax, The Animals in the Third Reich; Sztybel, “Can Treatment of Animals Be Compared to the Holocaust?”,; Kalechovsky, Animal Suffering and the Holocaust; LaCapra, “Reopening the Question of the Human and the Animal.”

144 Quoted by De Angelis, “Of Mice and Vermin,” 235.

145 MacDonald, “Pushing the Limits of Humanity?” 418.

146 Derrida, “The Animal That Therefore I Am” 394–5.

147 Patterson, Eternal Treblinka, 27.

148 Quoted by De Angelis, “Of Mice and Vermin,” 244.

Additional information

Funding

The research leading to these results has received funding from the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) of the European Union's research and innovation program Horizon 2020 [grant number 654786].