Chapter Title: Introduction: Don’t Mention the War

Book Title: Traces of War

Book Subtitle: Interpreting Ethics and Trauma in Twentieth-Century French Writing
Book Author(s): COLIN DAVIS
Published by: Liverpool University Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1ps33bb.4

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 Introduction
Don’t Mention the War
Introduction

Between September 1939 and March 1941, the friends, lovers, fellow
writers and intellectuals Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir
saw little of each other. Sartre was mobilized at the beginning of the
Second World War, and then held for ten months as a prisoner of war.
During this period of painful separation they wrote to each other
prolifically, sometimes more than once a day, as Sartre’s Lettres au
Castor and Beauvoir’s Lettres à Sartre testify. Their posthumously
published correspondence during the long, anguished months of their
separation covers more than 500 pages of printed text. This is striking
in part for its sheer length. It is not as if they had nothing else to do,
and their correspondence was by no means their only written output for
the period. Sartre assiduously wrote in what would be published as his
Carnets de la drôle de guerre whilst working on his novel Le Sursis and
his philosophical magnum opus L’Etre et le néant; and Beauvoir also
kept a substantial journal, published as her Journal de guerre, and she
worked on her first novel L’Invitée. If nothing else, war was very good
for their productivity as writers, even if not everything they wrote at the
time was initially intended for publication.
Another striking feature of the correspondence between Sartre and
Beauvoir is how little it has to say about the war. It is not that they
had forgotten about it. Of course they hadn’t. It was the cause of their
separation, and it affected every aspect of their lives. But it was as
if it was too big to be seen, so totally present that it did not need to
be mentioned. It is (relatively) unspoken and (absolutely) ubiquitous,
ubiquitous because unspoken. The war was, according to Sartre at one

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2 Traces of War

point in his Carnets de la drôle de guerre, ‘insaisissable’.1 It is both

there and not there. As their contemporary and sometime friend Albert
Camus put it in his Carnets from the same period, ‘La guerre a éclaté.
Où est la guerre?’ (Œuvres complètes II, p. 884).
A central concern for the writers discussed in this book is how to
perceive, experience and recount the war, how to integrate it into an
intellectual and aesthetic project, when it is simultaneously elusive,
intangible and all-pervasive. In his celebrated essay ‘The Storyteller’,
Walter Benjamin touches on some of the key issues here when he
discusses the imminent end of the art of storytelling, precipitated in part
by the First World War. Benjamin describes how ‘men returned from
the battlefield grown silent – not richer, but poorer in communicable
experience’ (p. 362). Individual experience had been overwhelmed by
huge economic and mechanical forces, leaving the ‘tiny, fragile human
body’ (p. 362) with no story of its own to pass on to others. It is
nevertheless noticeable that this loss of experience is still to a meaningful
extent collective: it is shared even if it cannot be communicated through
stories. Although it was doubtless premature to announce the end
of storytelling, the particular problems associated with telling about
experience were exacerbated by the Second World War. The historian
Olivier Wieviorka contrasts the two world wars in this respect. The
first may have – as Benjamin argues – deepened the crisis of storytelling
because its survivors felt ‘poorer in communicable experience’. Even so,
in fact in France there soon developed a reasonably strong consensus
about how to tell the story of the war: France had been attacked by
imperial Germany, fought bravely to defend its territory and its values,
and emerged victorious and stronger thanks to the valiant efforts and
sacrifices of its soldiers (La Mémoire désunie, pp. 19–20). However
traumatic the experience and however difficult to tell the tale, a sense of
shared and shareable meaning nevertheless endured. The Second World
War was a different matter. Even today, no way has been found to unify
the competing strands of defeat and victory, abjection and heroism,
collaboration and resistance, complicity and dignity. As Wieviorka puts
it, ‘la mémoire de la Seconde Guerre mondiale apparaît, hier comme
aujourd’hui, comme une mémoire fragmentée, conflictuelle et politisée
qui sépare plutôt qu’elle ne rassemble’ (La Mémoire désunie, p. 23).

1 Sartre, Les Carnets de la drôle de guerre, p. 35. Future references to this

and other quoted works are given in the main text with short titles. Full details of
editions used are given in the Bibliography.

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 Introduction 3

One of the premises of this book is that the war is present even, and
perhaps especially, when it cannot be seen. I am concerned here with the
great generation of French writers and thinkers who all had in common
that they lived through the war, as combatants, prisoners, résistants and
sometimes as passive or active collaborators. The book does not attempt
to give a comprehensive overview or synthesis of the impact of the
Second World War on the writing and thought of those who experienced
it at first hand. Such a project would in all likelihood be interminable,
though scholars and critics have made important progress with some of
its key aspects. 2 I have chosen here to concentrate on a number of writers
– Sartre, Beauvoir, Delbo, Camus, Levinas, Ricœur, Althusser, Kofman,
Wiesel, Semprun – whom I admire, but who do not give grounds to
establish a consistent, unified story about the war and its lasting impact.
My aim here is to seek out some of the traces of war in their writing. The
guiding question is: What mark does war, and specifically the Second
World War, leave on their work? I am particularly interested in how the
war is present in their writing precisely when it is not the explicit topic.
How is it there when it is not there? The theoretical tool I develop to
explore this is what I call ‘traumatic hermeneutics’, which I introduce in
Chapter 2.
The book is divided into four sections. The first discusses some of the
ethical and hermeneutic issues which arise in trauma studies, as critics
have attempted to speak about and interpret the suffering of others. The
positions adopted in the two chapters of this section inform and underlie
the discussion through the rest of the book. The second section looks at
aspects of the work of perhaps the three best-known French intellectuals
who lived through the Occupation: Sartre, Beauvoir and Camus. The
third section considers three of France’s most important post-war philos-
ophers – Ricœur, Levinas and Althusser – all of whom spent most of the
war in German POW camps. And the final section discusses issues in
the texts of three survivor-witnesses: Semprun, Wiesel and Kofman. The
first of these was interned in Buchenwald for resistance activities, and
the second in Auschwitz because of his race. As a Jewish girl in Paris,
Kofman survived the war even though her father was deported and
murdered in Auschwitz; but recounting her memories of the Occupation
in a brief, poignant memoir was shortly followed by her suicide. In all

2 For an overview of some of the work done in this field, see Atack and Lloyd,
Introduction to Framing Narratives of the Second World War and Occupation in
France, 1939–2009, pp. 1–15.

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4 Traces of War

these cases, my concern is to suggest how the war is present in their

work, sometimes explicitly and sometimes as an occluded but no less
powerful influence on their thought and writing.
This book is concerned with traces of war rather than the war as a
theme or object of memory. Work in memory studies has accustomed
us to the insight that what a text or film represents overtly may not
be its only or its principal preoccupation. Important works such as
Michael Rothberg’s Multidirectional Memory and Max Silverman’s
Palimpsestic Memory show how the memory of one event may cover
or allude to others. Silverman describes how the relationship between
the past and the present may entail ‘a superimposition and interaction
of different temporal traces to constitute a sort of composite structure,
like a palimpsest, so that one layer of traces can be seen through, and
is transformed by, another’ (Palimpsestic Memory, p. 3). This is not
exactly the sense of traces which interests me here. Rather, I use the
word in a sense adapted from Levinas and Derrida to refer to a kind
of elusive sign which is effaced but still legible, if not ultimately intelli-
gible. 3 In ‘La Trace de l’autre’, Levinas describes how the trace signifies
outside any intention or project (p. 199). It is not so much the trace of
a retrievable meaning as an opening onto what he calls ‘l’absolument
Autre’ (p. 200). The trace does not point towards an occluded, forgotten
or repressed presence, but rather to the disruption of all presence and
identity through the encounter with otherness: ‘La trace est la présence
de ce qui, à proprement parler, n’a jamais été là, de ce qui est toujours
passé’ (p. 201). The trace is a sign which produces signification without
leading to or recalling a final signified. My suggestion, on this basis, is
that the traces of war in the works discussed in the current book do not
make of the Second World War their final, hidden meaning. Rather,
the war leaves traces insofar as it remains problematically absent,
unavailable to experience, representation or comprehension. It inflects
post-war writing precisely because it is invisible except in its barely
readable traces.
In theoretical terms, the book argues that the ethics of trauma studies
must also entail a hermeneutics, and that the paradoxical endeavour
to speak of that which is not there, to say the unsaid, is strengthened
once it accepts its position within the rich hermeneutic tradition. In
a nutshell, trauma studies has readily acknowledged and explored its

3 See for example Levinas, ‘La Trace de l’autre’, and Derrida, ‘Freud et la scène
de l’écriture’.

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 Introduction 5

indebtedness to psychoanalytical pioneers such as Freud and Lacan,

and to developments in cognitive psychology and neuroscience; but to
its detriment it has been less eager to embrace the long inheritance of
hermeneutics, brought to its most powerful expression in the twentieth
century in the work of Heidegger, Gadamer and Ricœur.
In this discussion, not mentioning the war may be as significant and
revealing as mentioning it. Not talking about something may be a way
of talking about it. To close this Introduction, I want to give a first
indication of what I mean by this by crossing the Channel from France
to the UK, to give a sketch of how talking about the war and not talking
about it are hermeneutically and psychologically confused.
Probably the best-known use of the phrase ‘Don’t mention the war’
occurs in the British situation comedy Fawlty Towers, written by and
starring John Cleese and Connie Booth. Only two series of Fawlty
Towers – a total of 12 episodes – were made, in 1975 and 1979. John
Cleese plays Basil Fawlty, the bad-tempered, misanthropic, probably
sociopathic proprietor of a small hotel in the seaside town of Torquay.
In the final episode of series one a group of Germans is staying in the
hotel. Their visit coincides with Fawlty receiving a number of severe,
accidental blows to the head which leave him concussed, and even more
out of control than usual. Escaping from his hospital bed, he returns to
his hotel and attends to two German couples waiting to order dinner.
As Fawlty desperately endeavours not to mention the war, he can talk of
nothing else, and takes what he believes to be the guests’ order for prawn
Goebbels, Hermann Goering and Colditz salad. One of the German
women becomes upset, leading another member of the group to ask
Fawlty to stop talking about the war. Fawlty retorts that the Germans
started it. ‘We did not start it,’ says the German man. ‘Yes you did,’
retorts Fawlty. ‘You invaded Poland’. ‘It’ can only mean the war here;
if there is an ‘it’, the ‘it’ must be the war. The war is the referent that
informs every utterance. Not mentioning the war turns out to be a way
of talking exclusively about the war.
The phrase ‘Don’t mention the war’ masquerades as good manners
because it keeps peace with our former enemies. At the same time, it also
carries a clear implication of moral superiority. In national memory, the
early years of the war were Britain’s finest hour. After the fall of France
in June 1940, the nation stood alone against Nazism, until Japan’s
ill-judged attack on Pearl Harbour and Germany’s ill-judged attack on
the Soviet Union. By not mentioning the war, we are silently asserting
that we are better than other nations: we didn’t capitulate, we didn’t

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6 Traces of War

collaborate. Basil Fawlty’s question ‘Who won the bloody war anyway?’
is clearly rhetorical. The British did, of course. But the British also pride
themselves on their manners. We don’t want to offend our defeated
enemies by reminding them that we are militarily and ethically better
than they. So not mentioning the war is our way of recalling it, and
feeling comfortably at home with ourselves in otherwise difficult times.
And yet, in enjoining himself and others not to mention the war, of
course Fawlty does mention the war. In fact, by insisting that he should
not talk about it, he does nothing but talk about it. The war turns out
to be the only thing worth discussing, the only thing Fawlty can discuss,
the secret or not-so-secret reference point to everything he says. The
sequence ends with Fawlty imitating Hitler and exaggeratedly goose
stepping out of the dining room.
This sequence from Fawlty Towers illustrates brilliantly how the war
is obsessively present precisely when and because Fawlty wants to say
nothing about it. The war intrudes as an absent presence which informs
and quietly (or not so quietly) inflects every utterance. Another aspect of
this absent presence of war can be shown through the example of Robb
Wilton. It is unlikely that many readers of this book will remember
or even have heard of Robb Wilton (1881–1957). He was a northern
comedian who worked in the music halls, and then in film and radio in
the 1930s and 1940s. He often played bumbling, amiable, officious but
ineffective characters. He is associated with the phrase ‘The day war
broke out’. Here is the beginning of one of his monologues, recorded in
1943:
The day war broke out, my missus looked at me and she said, ‘What good
are you?’
I said, ‘How d’y’ mean, what good am I?’
‘Well,’ she said, ‘you’re too old for the army, you couldn’t get into the
navy and they wouldn’t have you in the Air Force, so what good are you?’
I said, ‘I’ll do something!’
She said, ‘What?’
I said, ‘How do I know …? I’ll have to think.’
She said, ‘I don’t know how that’s going to help you, you’ve never done it
before, so what good are you?’4
The speaker goes on to describe his plan to join the Home Guard and
defeat Hitler if the occasion arises, all the while countering what he

4 The full monologue can be heard at <https://www.youtube.com/watch?

v=775DE0YkT3U> [accessed 11/08/2017].

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 Introduction 7

regards as the unreasonable scepticism of his wife. From the very first
line, the monologue raises the question of how public events are linked
to private relations. Neither we nor the narrator are initially sure how
the chronology of the anecdote, which takes place on the day war broke
out, relates to the wife’s taunting question: ‘What good are you?’ ‘How
d’y’ mean, what good am I?’, the narrator immediately replies. What
point is being made here? Is the suggestion that the husband is useless
related to the war, or are the war and his uselessness independent from
one another? In which respects is he no good? Perhaps he is no good as a
husband, and specifically as a lover. We might recall that much popular
British humour revolves around the male fear of sexual inadequacy.
So, at first, we cannot know whether the wife’s complaint about her
husband’s shortcomings is necessarily related to the outbreak of war, or
whether it represents a more general dissatisfaction. As the monologue
develops, it becomes clear that both are in fact the case: the war gives an
outlet for the wife’s sense of her husband’s underlying inadequacy. And
yet, the strange dignity of the monologue lies in the narrator’s knowledge
that he is both useless and willing to serve. How, his wife asks, will he
know if he comes across Hitler. ‘I’ve got a tongue in me ’ead, ’aven’t I?’,
replies her embattled but not yet fully exasperated husband.
The examples of Basil Fawlty and Robb Wilton show how the war can
be simultaneously everywhere and nowhere. It underlies every utterance,
especially when it is not explicitly named, but at the same time it does
not entirely explain the fundamental dynamics of what we see or hear.
There is always something else going on, some other cause of distress or
behavioural malfunction, something else that needs to be interpreted.
In this respect, the Second World War shares some of the characteristics
of trauma, and raises some of the same questions of understanding and
interpretation. How do we make sense of the suffering of others, when
its sources, causes and conditions are ambiguously present or all-too-
absent? How do we understand and speak about suffering which we
can recognize and acknowledge, but which is so far outside our own
experience that to discuss it seems almost improper? These are the
questions with which the first two chapters of this book are concerned.

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