Once a month, written by Quebec writers, The Duty de littérature proposes to revisit works from the ancient and recent past of Quebec literature in light of current events. Discoveries? Rereadings? Different perspective? Your choice. An initiative of the Académie des lettres du Québec in collaboration with The Duty.
Despite the disgust it naturally provokes, war is often presented in such a way that it has an almost lyrical scope. It is given an epic breath and many films, for example, have demonstrated this since the beginning of cinema. The soothing speeches, despite their sobriety, as we could hear during the 80e The anniversary of the Normandy landings often avoid pointing out head-on what it means: the humiliations, the torture, the rape, the relentless fear, the famine, the loss of what is dear to people, that is to say their stolen or missing property, and the dead, of course the dead. We prefer to focus on those who, thanks to their courage, helped save civilization.
Obviously, in the case of the Second World War, which was celebrated as a major event last summer, the distinction between good and evil seems easy, even if there would be reason to discuss this rapid Manicheism at length. We obliterate what could have been done, what was known and what was deliberately kept quiet, not to mention the useless massacres, such as that of Dresden – and let’s not dwell on the nuclear explosions in Hiroshima and then Nagasaki, and their aftermath. Not to mention that the reasons for the explosion of the bombs on Japan were less about safeguarding civilization than about preparing for the Cold War against the USSR.
A Quebec novel dealing precisely with the Second World War, published shortly after it and largely forgotten today, Nine days of hatred, by Jean-Jules Richard, however, allows us to see that the boundary between what is right and wrong is not so clear. War appears as interminable as it is intolerable.
Considering the inexorable history of wars, one could even cynically ask whether they are not part of human culture. Sometimes one has the impression that they are presented as natural, in the same way that neoliberalism often seems to be perceived as a normal phenomenon, like the falling of leaves in autumn.
Ideology, as we all know, only exists in others. To the point that, in addition to the rare wars that we talk about (the one in Ukraine, the one in Gaza following the horrors of Hamas, which had well predicted, one might say obscenely, how the current government of Israel, well planted far to the right, would react), there are all those that we neglect, from Yemen to Burkina Faso, from Somalia to Sudan, not to mention, always, Syria. It is as if all this appeared predictable and ordinary.
War, right, has always existed. According to a BBC website, the year 2023 will have been the deadliest due to armed conflict since the Rwandan genocide in 1994. Clearly, despite the thurifers of ChatGPT, we are not really in a civilization of progress.
A spectacle without glory
We hardly hear much about Jean-Jules Richard (1911-1975) anymore, whose profile in some respects seems anachronistic today. Self-taught, living rather on the fringes of society, recalling from this point of view many writers from the United States of the same generation or the previous one, Richard published novels often presenting characters who were themselves on the fringes — like this Diary of a Hoboin 1965, where an androgynous individual appears who praises sexual freedom in all its forms.
Nine days of hate is his first novel and is set during the last year of the Second World War. It features French-Canadian soldiers who are in Western Europe at that time. Published in 1948, the novel appears as the dust of this war (in which Richard himself participated) is just beginning to settle. Each of the nine chapters corresponds to a particular day, in relative order, the first chapter taking place on June 6, 1944, the day of the Normandy landings. “Landing” is also the title of this first chapter. The following ones will go back a little in time before resuming a chronological order that will lead to the end of the war in Europe.
From the very first pages, the absurdity of the events is clearly expressed. When a soldier, in front of the bursting shells, says: “It’s beautiful, I’ve never seen anything more beautiful”, one cannot help but think of this delirious scene fromApocalypse Now (It’s the apocalypse) in which Lt. Col. Bill Kilgore (played by Robert Duvall) cheerfully states: “ I love the smell of napalm in the morning. “The hyperbolic destruction becomes a form of pyrotechnic phantasmagoria that monopolizes all the senses. Then comes the “symphony of detonations”, which makes audible what is presented in the manner of a spectacle since we are in the theater, facing a fantastic decor.
Yet it takes only a few pages for the representation to appear very misleading. The novel never ceases to recall the very physical dimension of war. When a soldier crashes to the ground to crawl, “the turnip greens lick his face like dog tongues.” In this world where things happen “under the nose of death,” these extras who are the simple soldiers “advance[nt] among the corpses.” Sometimes they break through and give the impression that they can command admiration, but the irony is quickly apparent: “You become a hero. A hero because you kill.” There is really nothing heroic in this world of men, this world that presents the worst in men, where the explosion of bombs “offers[e] holes as big as ignorance.”
The body uncovered
The misery soldiers experience often mirrors that experienced at home before going to war. It also intrudes into the social injustices that separate the common soldier from the officer, the latter being celebrated for exploits attributable to others. Propaganda demands victorious assaults in which common soldiers serve as cannon fodder while “the generals, miles behind, study the maps in detail,” sipping “their liquor in peace.”
Another cinematic reference: this time, it’s the squeaky one Paths of Glory (Paths of Glory), by Stanley Kubrick. The injustice experienced by individuals is often expressed through bodies. We think of this scene in Paris where women with their heads shaved are exhibited, one of the most abject and cowardly events of the post-war period (and how many collaborators will have participated, at least passively, if not with joy, in this collective session of humiliation?). Repeatedly, these scenes occur above all where the exhausted body, convulsively marked by fear, never ceases to appear in its banality.
These individuals, whom we would dare to imagine as chivalrous, saving Western civilization from Nazism, often wonder what they are doing there. The raw vision of corpses, often bloodied and mutilated bodies, provokes at certain moments the strange sensation for the protagonists of (re)discovering their own bodies, the sensation of muscles, nerves, veins — as if everything were, literally, on the surface of the skin. Which leads, paradoxically perhaps, to the recognition of a certain masculine eroticism that was rarely read at the time in Quebec literature: “You observe me. You admire me. Redheaded, handsome and brave, a sensual and warm force in my posture. You feel your affection for me growing.”
Eros and Thanatos come crashing down in the heart of the “dance of shells” from which the soldiers are trying to escape. Unsurprisingly, some of them, mere pawns in a war that will leave fifty million dead, will discover to what extent they have been manipulated and betrayed by their superiors.
It must be said that this big novel, which does not lack breath, is not always written very correctly and would have deserved a firmer editorial work. We read several times spelling mistakes, faulty turns of phrase, sometimes improper terms and metaphors which, in certain passages, seem shaky, if not pontifical. Despite everything, these sometimes astonishing formulations add to the impression of strangeness of being at the heart of the war, as if everything were falling apart before the reader.
A sense of discrepancy often imposes itself in the language itself, which embraces the incongruity of everything that war represents. We find ourselves in the midst of a carnage that appears all the more absurd because it occurs for the needs of an advance, sometimes, of barely a few meters of ground. The enemy “gnaws away at the terrain, morale and life,” affirms, in despair, one of these simple soldiers.
There are no just deaths, they are always scandalous, in one way or another. Some seem more scandalous than others. Wars, terrorist attacks (those that are talked about in the West as well as those that are not talked about or rarely) cause senseless deaths. Returning to a book like Nine days of hateborn of a war that was the consequence of the worst intolerance of the 20th centurye century with Nazism, but which was also the result of delusional theories on degeneration and the classification of “races” which appeared well before, also serves as a reminder of what sectarianism, intolerance and fanaticism can lead to.
There is no indication that the current political climate is free from the risks that existed and were clearly visible to those who wanted to see, what is called seeing, in the 1930s.