Writing Fiction, Making History:
Historical Narrative and the
Process of Creating History
Christine Berberich
Where there is no narrative, there is no history.
Benedetto Croce (qtd in White 1987: 28)
How do we learn ‘history’? When do ‘memories’ become ‘history’ and, as such, change from something that is individual, personal, to something that is a collective property, part of general knowledge or a history curriculum? These are questions that have occupied historians for decades; but they are also issues that have been dealt with in literature over many years, and increasingly so from the 1990s onwards. Particularly noteworthy in this context is the rise of historiographical metafiction that self-consciously problematises the very processes of history writing and that has highlighted a certain overlap between the writing of history and the writing of fiction. Linda Hutcheon has pointed out the seemingly paradoxical juxtaposition of the ‘self-reflexive and the historically grounded’ (Hutcheon 2003: 2) in postmodern historical fiction that distinguishes itself through an obsession ‘with the question of how we can come to know the past today’ (2003: 44). This chapter offers an assessment of historiographical thinking and its potentially very close links to the processes of fiction writing. It briefly introduces key figures involved in the debate – such as Hayden White and Linda Hutcheon – and then offers a more detailed reading of the historiographical theories proposed by the Dutch historian Frank Ankersmit. The chapter concludes with a detailed discussion of two recent examples of ‘factional/fictional’ writing on the Holocaust and its aftermath – Patrick Modiano’s The Search Warrant of 1997 (first English translation 2000) and Laurent Binet’s novel HHhH of 2009 (first English translation 2012). The Holocaust, as will be shown, further challenges theories of historiography and narrative as it still is an emotionally and ethically highly charged topic with historians, critics and writers alike walking a fine and closely observed line between pushing the boundaries of scholarship on the one hand, and being accused of dealing with a sensitive topic in an unethical manner on the other. Both Modiano and Binet, I shall argue, do indeed push the boundaries of conventional writing on the events of the Shoah by producing highly self-reflexive pieces of work that continuously question their respective research, their motivation for writing, and their narrative strategies.
To start with, however, I would like to briefly look at a novel that is not a historical one per se – but one that admirably serves to highlight the inherent problems involved in teaching, writing and interpreting history. Julian Barnes’s England England of 1998 ostensibly focuses on nation building and the creation of national identity. Yet it starts with its protagonist Martha Cochrane recalling her history lessons as a series of rhythmic chants, learnt by heart and recited endlessly in class:
55BC (clap clap) Roman Invasion
1066 (clap clap) Battle of Hastings
1215 (clap clap) Magna Carta
1512 (clap clap) Henry the Eighth (clap clap)
Defender of Faith (clap clap)
[. . .]
1940 (clap clap) Battle of Britain
1973 (clap clap) Treaty of Rome (Barnes 1998: 11)
This rhyme has inscribed itself deeply into her memory and, many years later, the adult Martha ponders that it was, in particular, its combination of rhyming and clapping that made it easier to memorise the historical dates and events in the rhyme. Ultimately, though, these history lessons, with their straightforward ‘date/event’ approach, were a failure. They admittedly taught her, and seemingly indelibly so, important ‘facts’ – but the rhythmic intonation when reciting them did not leave time to query, or space to think what these dates and events actually represent. For Martha, this becomes an issue years later, when she realises that she and her Spanish flatmate have ‘different’ versions of history about Sir Francis Drake: for Martha, still intoning her school-learnt ‘date/event’ rhymes, he was a hero and a gentleman; for her Spanish friend, he was ‘a pirate’. Martha realises that ‘one person’s plundering privateer might be another person’s pirate’ (Barnes 1998: 7), and that history writing, by extension, depends on circumstances, on background, on cultural and political outlooks. Barnes’s novel thus reflects the very questions that historians had, at that point, been debating for some time: how should historical events be represented? How should they be taught?
According to the historian Hayden White, there are ‘three basic kinds of historical representation – the annals, the chronicle, and the history proper’ (White 1987: 4) – the annals presenting a year-by-year account of events, the chronicle the attempt of a ‘story’ about events, and the ‘history proper’ an additional measured narrative and, importantly, interpretation of the events depicted. For White, both annals and chronicle can only ever offer an incomplete account of history as they fail ‘to attain to full narrativity of the events of which they treat’ (1987: 4). Similarly, Peter Gay has commented that ‘Historical narration without analysis is trivial, historical analysis without narration is incomplete’ (Gay 1974: 189). Comments such as these suggest that successful history writing needs to involve a narrative that interprets the depicted events for the reader. According to White, ‘History proper’ can only ever be achieved through a combination of annals, chronology and respectful handling of sources – and an additional narrative component, an attempt to provide the mere facts and events with a ‘structure, an order of meaning, that they do not possess as mere sequence’ (White 1987: 5).
However, history, to White, does generally not happen like a story (see White 1987: 4) and while the narrative of any historical discourse ‘transforms . . . a list of historical events that would otherwise be only a chronicle’ into a story, this transformation can only be achieved through inserting potentially problematic ‘story elements’ (1987: 43). The result is, according to White, that ‘any historical object can sustain a number of equally plausible descriptions or narratives of its processes’ (1987: 76). This very attempt to structure historical events and turn them into a more graspable narrative invests them, inevitably, with a personal interpretation. Turning historical events into ‘stories’ narrativises them and blurs the line between the idea of history as a strictly fact-based ‘science’ on the one hand, and ‘narrative’, often associated with the creative, the fictional, on the other. If we refer back to the example from Barnes’s England England, we can see that Martha learns the mere ‘annals’ in school, a chronological listing of important dates and events. The different approaches to Sir Francis Drake that she and her friend argue over represent the chronicle – the attempt to narrativise a historical figure or event. What is consequently required, in order to fully engage with history, is the critical narrative assessment of the ‘facts’ and ‘historical evidence’, the interpretative evaluation of various sources; a version that, in the case of the Drake example, takes in both sides of the story and allows for the fact that the national hero actually also was a plundering privateer.
While White has been among the forerunners in academic debate about the link between history writing and narrative, the following discussion will focus on the work of the Flemish historian and philosopher Frank Ankersmit whose work not only responds to White’s but takes it further. In groundbreaking works such as The Reality Effect in the Writing of History (1989), History and Tropology: The Rise and Fall of the Metaphor (1994) and Historical Representation (2001), Ankersmit has extended White’s debate on the importance of narrative in the writing of history to the point of actively challenging traditional conceptions of history writing. Ankersmit’s provocative statement ‘the past is how we represent it’ (Ankersmit 1988: 222) serves as a thought-provoking opening for this debate: it challenges long-held beliefs that history is objective, impartial and always providing a detached overview and, instead, focuses on the fact that the past can be – and is – manipulated through the very narrative used to depict it: the historian’s background, political outlook or social engagements will, inevitably, colour his or her presentation of historical events. Meticulous research of what there is of historical evidence is still a given, and established ‘facts’ are scrupulously adhered to; but the accompanying narrative, the evaluation of them, is more subjective, and openly acknowledges that. For Ankersmit, this is best summed up with the term ‘narrative substance’:
[a] set of statements that together embody the representation of the past that is proposed in the historical narrative in question. Thus, the statements of an historical narrative not only describe the past: they also individuate, or define, the nature of such a narrative substance. (Ankersmit 1988: 219)
This brings the individual into the writing of history: history writing becomes more subjective and personalised, which, ultimately, leads to not just one, overarching metanarrative of the past but a variety of narratives, a variety of pasts. Not the historical truth but historical truths that can, and do, contradict each other and that do, in the process, engage in dialogue with each other. For Ankersmit, ‘historical representations are not so much contradicted by historical reality itself but by other historical representations’ (Ankersmit 1988: 222) – which leads us back, neatly, to the various interpretations of Sir Francis Drake in Julian Barnes’s England England: different sides of the same story.
But while we might consider these statements and ideas logical and seemingly commonsensical, they also harbour inherent dangers. As Ankersmit himself points out in his article ‘Historiography and Postmodernism’, ‘we no longer have any texts, any past, but just interpretations of them’ (Ankersmit 1989: 137). For some critics, this might be seen as opening the past up to an ever-increasing variety of interpretations which might, ultimately, lead to a side-lining of the ‘real’ events reminiscent of Baudrillard’s postmodern hyperreality. Pre-empting this critique, the postmodern literary theorist Linda Hutcheon points out that ‘it is not that representation now dominates or effaces the referent, but rather that it now self-consciously acknowledges its existence as representation – that is, as interpreting (indeed as creating) its referent, not as offering direct and immediate access to it’ (Hutcheon 2003: 32). Hutcheon thus acknowledges the possibility of various accounts and interpretations of the same historical events, and for Ankersmit it is this very diversity of historical narrative and interpretation that enriches historiography. In line with postmodern thought that rejects one overarching truth or metanarrative in favour of many different truths and narratives, Ankersmit, too, finds that ‘historical interpretations of the past first become recognizable, they first acquire their identity, through the contrast with other interpretations; they are what they are only on the basis of what they are not’ (Ankersmit 1989: 142). The historical researcher, consequently, offers his or her own interpretation of a past event based on historical sources and evidence and by carefully comparing and contrasting alternative narratives of the same events. In this approach to history, ‘the past’, a seemingly stable entity, becomes destabilised and is no longer a firm referent because, as Ankersmit points out, we can ‘never test our conclusions by comparing the elected text with “the past” itself’ (Ankersmit 1990: 281). The past is gone; all that is left are competing narratives of it.
What some historians welcome and celebrate, others find disturbing and problematic, however. Some readers and critics might still persevere that this approach to history writing harbours some problems: and even Ankersmit himself is quick to query what we should do if ‘we have two or more historical texts on roughly the same historical topic and we wish to decide between them’ (Ankersmit 1990: 281). What are readers supposed to base their judgements on? Can a convincing historical narrative not simply ‘seduce’ its readers and potentially, and very dangerously, mislead through a blatant misinterpretation of the past?
This potential for misinterpretation has been particularly hotly debated in the context of Holocaust historiography, scholarship and narrative. The deeply traumatic events of the Shoah are still within living memory and, as such, need to be covered ethically and sensitively in order to avoid upsetting survivors and their families or relatives of victims. For years, leading historians such as Berel Lang, Saul Friedlander, James E. Young and many others have argued over the ‘correct’ way of depicting the history of the Holocaust – which also, incidentally, extends into fictional engagement with the events of the Shoah. Berel Lang, one of the most outspoken critics of narrative engagement with the Holocaust in any form or shape (which, for him, includes over-narrativisation of historical accounts), refers to ‘the Holocaust’s special representational status’ (Lang 1995: 85) as an event that defies all attempts to suitably describe, let alone narrate it. For him, only a very detached and objective stating of ‘facts’ is appropriate when talking about the Holocaust. Other historians and critics, by contrast, emphasise the role of personal memory in writing on the Shoah. Both groups of scholars speak out against more creative, or even fictional narratives of the Holocaust, fearing that they might open the door for Holocaust deniers. Ankersmit himself is acutely aware that
writing about the Holocaust requires tact and a talent for knowing when and how to avoid the pitfalls of the inappropriate. Each discussion of the Holocaust is in danger of getting involved in a vicious circle where misunderstanding and immorality mutually suggest and reinforce each other. (Ankersmit 1997: 62)
Nevertheless, he also warns that a traditional historical discourse is not effective in writing about the Holocaust. He explains that
history, and the discourse of history aim at describing and explaining the past. . . . The historian typically realizes this aim by reducing what was initially strange, alien and incomprehensible in the past to what was known to us already. (Ankersmit 1997: 63)
In the case of the Shoah, however, there is no ‘already well-known and well-established pattern of human behaviour from which we can derive the Holocaust’ (Ankersmit 1997: 63): in an event so outside of what is deemed ‘normal human behaviour’, traditional modes of description fail and, in the words of Saul Friedlander, the ‘limits of representation’ are reached (see Friedlander 1992a). In the words of Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel (otherwise a staunch supporter of the need for personal memory in Holocaust historiography), this results in the need to ‘invent a new language’ (Wiesel 2008: viii–ix).
For Ankersmit, these ‘limits of representation’ are particularly problematic because, in his opinion, historians have constructed ‘complex linguistic signs . . . for relating words to things in the case of . . . specific part[s] of the past’ (Ankersmit 1990: 282). The examples he lists include ‘“the Industrial Revolution” or “the Cold War”’ (1990: 280), terms that have been developed out of historical interpretation with hindsight, ‘semantic convention[s] proposed by the historian . . . for connecting things with words’ (1990: 282). We could add here that these ‘linguistic signs’ or ‘semantic conventions’ were introduced in order to make a historical period or series of interlinking events more graspable; adding a label to something makes it more tangible, easier to talk about and compartmentalise. It almost becomes a code that, ‘in historical narrative . . . tend[s] to act as a “substitute” or “replacement” for (part of) the past itself’ (1990: 290). Add to this list of semantic conventions the term ‘the Holocaust’, however, and we immediately see the danger inherent to this ‘codification’ of the past. According to the Israeli political sociologist Ronit Lentin, ‘“holocaust”, with capital H . . . [is a euphemism], standing for something that one does not want to hear mentioned’ (Lentin 2004: 6). For Lentin, this kind of code ‘does not help us remember the Shoah and its victims, but rather erases that memory, as do other representations . . . but also history itself’ (2004: 6). What is required, consequently, are new forms of engagement with the events of the Holocaust that do not aim to provide the ‘bigger picture’, the grand, overarching historical metanarrative, but that, instead, focus on the smaller scale, the more personal, offering a variety of perspectives and assessments.
For Friedlander, the success of such new forms of representation lies in the fact that they ‘test implicit boundaries and . . . raise not only aesthetic and intellectual problems, but moral issues, too’ (Friedlander 1992b: 2). For Ankersmit, one such way forward could be the narrativist approach to history writing: the clear recognition that ‘the historians’ narrative had its foundations in the results of historical research’ and their honest acknowledgement that ‘these results had to be integrated in some way or other into a historical text’ (Ankersmit 2000: 292). This is where, for Ankersmit, there is a clear link between history writing and postmodern literary theory, and especially the work of critics such as Linda Hutcheon. In The Politics of Postmodernism, Hutcheon points out that in postmodern historiographic writing,
the narrativization of past events is not hidden; the events no longer seem to speak for themselves, but are shown to be consciously composed into a narrative, whose constructed – not found – order is imposed upon them, often overtly by the narrating figure. (Hutcheon 2003: 63)
Hutcheon refers to this kind of writing as ‘historiographic metafiction’ and explains that it does not only represent ‘just a world of fiction, however self-consciously presented as a constructed one, but also a world of public experience’ (Hutcheon 2003: 34). Progressive historians and postmodern literary critics alike thus stress the importance of self-reflexive (history) writing that highlights the very problematics involved in the writing process and where ‘writing history’ comes close to ‘making history’ – to structuring the past into a narrative that is aware of its own constructed narrativity.
In recent fiction writing on the Second World War, the Holocaust and their aftermaths, this is a particularly prominent trend. The best-known writer in this tradition is probably W. G. Sebald with his genre-defying accounts of exile and emigration, with his attempts to create and perpetuate memories of those who would have remained name- and faceless in the ‘bigger picture’ of and ‘grand-narrative’ approach to history. Sebald’s intricate narratives that avoid direct speech in favour of multi-levelled indirect speech show up the difficulty inherent in constructing historical narratives when the witnesses of history can no longer speak out for themselves. Another example is Jonathan Littell’s hugely controversial Les Bienveillantes of 2006 (published in English as The Kindly Ones in 2009). Littell’s novel offers nearly a thousand pages of fictionalised narrative from the perspective of an SS perpetrator that is, however, deeply steeped in meticulous historical research, often referencing specific texts of established Holocaust historiography, such as, for instance, Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men. Littell’s novel pushes the boundaries of traditional Holocaust writing through its unflinching, graphic accounts of violence and its seemingly unapologetic perpetrator-narrator whose repeated claims that ‘I am a man like other men, I am a man like you. I tell you, I am just like you’ (Littell 2009: 24) immediately alienate the reader. Yet, simultaneously, they also serve to, in the words of Emily Miller Budick, ‘hold up a dark, distorted, and yet frighteningly revealing mirror to the field of Holocaust studies itself’ (Budick 2015: 15). Texts such as The Kindly Ones thus further the field of Holocaust studies by providing new, albeit very challenging, insights, offering new perspectives and, in particular, by making readers question their own motivations behind reading such texts.
The following debate, however, will focus on two different texts: Patrick Modiano’s The Search Warrant and Laurent Binet’s HHhH. Both texts deal with the Holocaust and its aftermath – but in an indirect way. Rather than focusing on the ‘bigger picture’ of the Final Solution, or perpetuating images of camps and persecution that have almost become ‘staples’ in Holocaust writing, both authors focus on the small scale, on, in Ankersmit’s words, ‘micro-stories’ that stand out through their ‘anecdotal character’ (Ankersmit 1988: 227ff.). Modiano’s narrative opens with the reproduction of a missing person notice found in a copy of Paris Soir from 31 December 1941 that seeks information on the disappearance of fifteen-year-old Dora Bruder. The unnamed first-person narrator makes it clear that, ever since first setting eyes on this notice it has stayed with and preoccupied him, interweaving with his own life and, ultimately, resulting in an increasingly obsessive search to find out more information about Dora Bruder who, the final pages of the book reveal, was deported from the detention camp of Drancy to Auschwitz on 18 September 1942, and who perished there. HHhH, by contrast, focuses on a similarly obsessive search: Laurent Binet’s self-confessed aim in writing his novel is to provide a history of the often-overlooked heroes of Czechoslovak resistance, Jozef Gabčík and Jan Kubiš, who assassinated the Reich Protektor Reinhard Heydrich in Prague in 1942. However, during the course of the account, Heydrich, the ‘Blonde Beast’, the ‘Butcher of Prague’, increasingly takes over the narrative. Binet explains that ‘Heydrich is the target, not the protagonist’ but simultaneously admits that ‘in literary terms Heydrich is a wonderful character’ (Binet 2012: ch. 88). Binet thus problematises the actual scope of his book: he wants to write a historical narrative, and not a novel. In fact, he starts his account with a condemnation of ‘the veneer of fiction’ (Binet 2012: ch. 1) but also shows his awareness of the narrativity of history: ‘The story, I mean. History’ (Binet 2012: ch. 2). The word ‘story’ is thus shown to be an integral and vital component of the word ‘history’ itself – no official history without the multifarious stories that make it up. Both texts are admirable examples of historiographical metafiction, and both authors make it very clear from the outset of their accounts that the historical events they are trying to piece together have affected them personally – that they are trying to base their narratives on historical evidence painstakingly pieced together but that this evidence, inevitably, will be affected by their subjective interpretation of it. Importantly, their self-reflexive agonising over their respective research and writing strategies forms an integral part of their narratives that highlights the problems involved in any form of history writing and that suggests, ultimately, that history writing equates history making.
Modiano’s search for the history of Dora Bruder is one deeply steeped in his contemporary Paris where he obsessively walks the same neighbourhoods she would have spent parts of her life in, and where he tries to find traces of her in former residences or schools. This approach to history might be useful in the case of a famous person, somebody who has entered the official historical discourse: blue plaques on houses, for instance, announce to the world which famous resident once used to live there, and how long for; streets might be renamed in historical hindsight to honour birthplaces of national heroes. Not so, however, in the case of a perfectly ordinary person who has not entered the history books. Modiano ponders that Dora Bruder and her parents ‘are the sort of people who leave few traces. Virtually anonymous’ (Modiano 2014: 23). He is again and again confronted with a dearth of evidence about Dora: school registers have disappeared, or he is confronted with bureaucratic red tape that refuses him access because he is not a family member. Modiano’s response is pragmatic:
It takes time for what has been erased to resurface. Traces survive in registers, and nobody knows where these registers are hidden, and who has custody of them, and whether or not their custodians are willing to let you see them. Or perhaps they have simply forgotten that such registers exist. (Modiano 2014: 9)
‘Patience’ and ‘persistence’ thus become the key words for the historical researcher and the writer of historical narratives who both want to unearth previously unknown truths about the past – ‘It took me four years to discover her exact date of birth’, Modiano writes, and ‘I am a patient man’ (Modiano 2014: 10).
His attempts to situate Dora Bruder within the topography of wartime occupied Paris have a further dimension: the locations of where she lived are real, are tangible, they are places that he can access, and they thus juxtapose his lack of knowledge in other respects. In Modiano’s words, ‘such topographical precision contrasts with what we shall never know about their life – this blank, this mute block of the unknown’ (Modiano 2014: 23). His search for details about Dora Bruder’s life thus becomes a detective’s quest for historical jigsaw pieces – but, in this case, a jigsaw that cannot ever be complete. Certain elements, certain facts, will always remain missing, having been lost, irrevocably. Modiano asks ‘How can one know?’ (2014: 18), or repeatedly admits, ‘I don’t know’ (2014: 36, 78, 82), ‘I have no means of knowing’ (2014: 19), ‘we have no idea’ (2014: 83) and ‘I am reduced to conjecture’ (2014: 36), thus acknowledging the fact that, no matter how hard he tries, he will never know for certain what exactly happened in Dora’s life. Historical evidence can clearly tell a part of a story. But it can never fill all the gaps.
Laurent Binet’s HHhH is similarly punctured by his personal frustration of not being able to know the exact order of events and all the facts connected to the historical events he wants to present. ‘I haven’t been able to find out’, he points out early on in his novel (Binet 2012: ch. 23), and he repeatedly admits, ‘I don’t know’ (2012: chs 34, 84, 140) and ‘I have been talking rubbish’ (2012: ch. 35). Interestingly, HHhH is also presented to the reader without traditional pagination but consisting, instead, of 257 chapters, some of them comprising just a few words or lines, others spanning several pages. The lack of page numbers and the seemingly idiosyncratic ‘chapterisation’ (for want of another word) might thus be a subliminal message from Binet that historical chronology is not straightforward and ‘naturally’ given, as might be assumed, but always a result of careful (read here: subjective) construction. And although he tries to offer a reasonably straightforward narrative account of the events leading up to Heydrich’s assassination, his narrative is interspersed with retrospective insertions, seemingly unnecessary tangents and self-reflexive accounts on the benefit of historical hindsight and the problem of ascertaining historical ‘facts’.
In his quest to provide a factually accurate account of not only the assassination but the run-up to it, Binet, like Modiano, tries to situate himself in the location where the events took place: he lives and researches in Prague, he repeatedly returns to the City during the course of writing his book. Like Modiano, whose claim, ‘I had long been familiar with the area around the Boulevard Ornano [where the Bruder family lived when Dora disappeared in December 1941]’ (Modiano 2014: 3) starts The Search Warrant, Binet likewise opens his narrative with the statement ‘I know Prague well’ (Binet 2012: ch. 1). Yet, in the long run, these certainties do not help to fill all the gaps in his knowledge. Cities change over the years; new research findings lead to his revisiting Prague with ‘new eyes’, discovering new evidence in streets or buildings he had previously not noticed. Yet both Modiano and Binet use their respective topographical knowledge to imbue their narratives with a sense of realism, of certainty to assure their readers that, although they might not know all the facts, they do, at least, know the locations of their described events well.
For Binet, ‘realism’ plays an important part in historical writing. Early on in his account, he triumphantly announces that ‘the good thing about writing a true story is that you don’t have to worry about giving an impression of realism’ (Binet 2012: ch. 20). What this means is that, in the initial stages of writing his account, he still believes that the very ‘facts’ he presents also convey a sense of reality, that they do, effectively, speak for themselves. Yet, in the course of his research, Binet begins to realise that historical ‘certainties’ are open to subjectivity and interpretation and thus shift and change in meaning. One pertinent example for this is his repeated reference to Heydrich’s ‘black Mercedes’ (2012: chs 6, 44, 108) which he has also seen on display in Prague’s Army Museum (2012: ch. 8). During his research, however, he comes across two historical novels on the assassination – David Chacko’s Like a Man and Alan Burgess’s Seven Men at Daybreak – that both claim the colour of the Mercedes was green. What might, effectively, be an entirely irrelevant historical detail becomes an obsession for Binet who ‘suddenly . . . start[s] questioning’ himself (2012: ch. 155). His research-based certainty – ‘But this Mercedes – it was black, I’m sure. Not only in the army museum at Prague . . . but also in the numerous photos that I checked’ (2012: ch. 155) – is suddenly confronted with differing historical interpretations: both Chacko and Burgess, historical novelists just like Binet himself, have interpreted the historical evidence differently, or unearthed a historical source unknown to Binet that specifies the colour as green rather than black. As Ankersmit points out, ‘Texts are all we have and we can only compare texts with texts’ (Ankersmit 1990: 281) – but this can bring with it its very own problems if texts differ substantially in content. In Binet’s case, this constant and obsessive comparison with other historical texts and assessment of personal interpretations of evidence complicates his own research and his commitment to providing a fact-based, realist, dispassionate account of the assassination of Heydrich; effectively, it also hampers his account’s progression and highlights that, at some point, he will have to make a decision as to how to depict the Mercedes: black or green.
This seemingly insignificant detail, however, is, in fact, part of a larger discussion as to the differences between historical and fictional writing, the different styles and narrative registers required. Binet consistently blurs the line between the two genres he tries to straddle – producing a straightforward historical account one moment (‘It’s July 31, 1941, and we are present at the Birth of the Final Solution’ (Binet 2012: ch. 108)), and a highly narrativised and imagined one the next (‘That scene . . . is perfectly believable and totally made up’ (2012: ch. 91)). His initial belief that ‘to begin with, this seemed a simple enough story to tell’ (2012: ch. 175) begins to waver.
Throughout HHhH, there are distinct and very different narrative registers that clearly seem to reflect Hayden White’s differentiation of history writing into annals, chronology and history proper. The ‘annals’ are represented through a number of quasi-paratextual insertions: a speech by Hitler about the Sudetenland from 26 September 1938 (Binet 2012: ch. 61); a proclamation made by him from 16 March 1939 (2012: ch. 86); the verbatim authorisation for the Final Solution of 31 July 1941 (2012: ch. 108); an ‘article appearing in the specialist magazine Gymnastics and Physical Education’ (2012: ch. 110); and a press release issued by the Czech press agency from 27 September 1941 (2012: ch. 114) among others. These text fragments convey mere facts and/or dates, without any kind of elaboration. In some cases, Binet offers a brief explanatory sentence – which could be seen as an attempt at a chronicle, providing a brief explication for these inclusions: when quoting from a programme for a musical soirée that Heydrich himself had written, he contextualises this programme and highlights the poor style it is written in (2012: ch. 209).
However, things become problematic for Binet when trying to attempt the ‘history proper’, the assessment, evaluation and narrativisation of real historical events. At those points, his narrative register changes completely – he builds suspense, language becomes flowery. Chapter 105 ends with Heydrich’s plane crash behind enemy lines in Russia; the following chapter starts with the evocative words ‘Himmler looks like someone’s just smacked him in the face. The blood rises to his cheeks and he feels his brain swell inside his skull’ (Binet 2012: ch. 106). Gone are Binet’s declaration about factuality and realism – the assumption that Himmler turned purple is pure conjecture on his part. Yet, in the obsessively self-reflexive manner of his writing, Binet immediately confronts his own slip in style in the following chapter that sees his girlfriend chastise him for ‘making [things] up’ (2012: ch. 107). His response to her criticism is worth quoting in full as it illustrates the problems faced by writers of history but also those of ‘factual’ fiction:
I have been boring her for years with my theories about the puerile, ridiculous nature of novelistic invention, and she’s right, I suppose, not to let me get away with this skull thing. I thought I’d decided to avoid this kind of stuff, which has, a priori, no virtue other than giving a bit of colour to the story, and which is rather ugly. And even if there are clues to Himmler’s panicked reaction, I can’t really be sure of the symptoms of this panic: perhaps he went red (that’s how I imagine it), but then again, perhaps he turned white. This is quite a serious problem. (Binet 2012: ch. 107)
Binet juxtaposes his commitment to ‘factuality’ with his – in his opinion, lamentable – inability to refrain from producing a captivating story (read here: a story with fictionalised elements and elaborate language). Although he labels his own conjecture – the red face, the swelling brain of Himmler – as ‘ugly’, he knows that, ultimately, they help to create suspense.
Binet’s obsessive preoccupation with his own writing style might, in the long run, simply irritate those readers who expect a more straightforward, factual account of events surrounding the assassination of Heydrich. In fact, the critic Leyla Sanai, writing in The Independent, complained that ‘his interjections [obstruct] the flow of a mesmerizing true story’ (Sanai 2012). But it is these very interjections that add value to Binet’s account and elevate it from a mere historical narrative to a text problematising the nature of history writing: what is the best language to use? Is there such a thing as a straightforwardly historical discourse? In The Politics of Postmodernism, Hutcheon points out the ‘overt self-consciousness about language and (his)story’ (Hutcheon 2003: 6) to be found in postmodern historiographical metafiction, and this obsession with language and its effects can be seen clearly in Binet’s dedication of another full page to his attempts to resolve the dilemma about his depiction of Himmler’s face: ‘The next day, I delete the sentence. Unfortunately, that creates an emptiness that I don’t like. . . . I feel obliged to replace the deleted sentence with another, more prudent one’ (Binet 2012: ch. 107). My emphasis here is on the word ‘prudent’, which highlights Binet’s acute awareness (and fear?) of the fact that these more fictionalised passages in his text might detract from its overall factuality. Yet they are, in my reading, a confirmation of Hutcheon’s claim that self-reflexive historical fiction that involves the author’s actual writing process ‘focuses attention on the act of imposing order on that past, of encoding strategies of meaning making through representation’ (Hutcheon 2003: 63). For Binet, it is an important component of the actual story to highlight Himmler’s shock at Heydrich’s crash. A sentence such as ‘Himmler was upset’ does not do justice to how Binet himself imagined the scene. As he cannot know the exact facts of this moment, his ‘tyrannic imagination’, as he terms it (Binet 2012: ch. 107), takes over – and, after much deliberation, he retypes the words ‘The blood rises to his cheeks and he feels his brain swell inside his skull’ (2012: ch. 107). In some cases, only imaginative elaboration can bring historical moments to life.
Binet’s narrative slowly builds towards the actual assassination of Heydrich, an event he looks towards with considerable trepidation. Once again, he is aware that over-narrativisation of the event can ruin his account. Early on, he confides:
that night, I dreamed that I wrote the chapter about the assassination, and it began: ‘A black Mercedes slid along the road like a snake.’ That’s when I understood that I had to start writing the rest of the story, because the rest of the story had to converge at this crucial episode. By pursuing the chain of causality back into infinity, I allowed myself to keep delaying the moment when I must face the novel’s bravura moment, its scene of scenes. (Binet 2012: ch. 46)
This quote is noteworthy for a number of reasons: it highlights Binet’s obsessive preoccupation with his topic that even pursues him into his dreams. It illustrates the fact that, like most researchers, he is prone to delay the actual writing in the quest for yet more – and often only tangible – information: ‘Everything I read takes me farther and farther away from the curve in Holešovice Street’ (Binet 2012: ch. 215). But, importantly, it also shows a linguistic slip as this is one of the few instances when Binet openly refers to his book as a ‘novel’ rather than a historical and purely factual account. These fictional additions and stylistic elaborations increase as the novel works towards its climax – the day of the assassination.
Chapter 206 sees yet another shift in narrative register to include evocative language such as ‘the moment is getting closer, I can feel it. The Mercedes is on its way. It’s coming . . . I hear the engine of the Mercedes as it glides along the road’ (Binet 2012: ch. 206), comments that are echoed repeatedly later on: ‘Heydrich’s Mercedes snakes along the thread of its knotted destiny’ (2012: ch. 215); ‘A black Mercedes glides along the road – I can see it’ (2012: ch. 215). Binet knows that this is the crucial scene of his novel, depicting an event that was witnessed by many bystanders and that has already attracted many rival accounts. For him, the black (or dark green?) Mercedes serves as a metaphor to build suspense, to guide his reader towards this all-important moment.
The closer Binet gets to the events of the assassination, the more he slips into an overtly fictionalised narrative. Gone is the mere listing of historical events. Instead he utilises a variety of narrative ploys in order to build and maintain suspense; the ‘gliding’ or ‘snaking’ Mercedes is just one of them. The actual moment of the assassination is a case in point. After meticulously setting the scene in the preceding chapters – Gabčík and Kubiš waiting initially in vain and increasingly anxious in their designated spots, Heydrich’s Mercedes actually speeding (rather than ‘snaking’) along the road – he opens a new chapter with the melodramatic words ‘He fires and nothing happens’, which are immediately followed by ‘I can’t resist cheap literary effects’ (Binet 2012: ch. 218). This sentence shows, in Hutcheon’s words, ‘postmodern fiction in its paradoxical confrontation of self-consciously fictive and resolutely historical representation’ (Hutcheon 2003: 63): Gabčík did, indeed, fire and his English-made Sten gun really did jam. These are the ‘resolutely historical facts’. But Binet’s narrative register is anything but purely factual; instead he uses language often found in sensation fiction, keeping his readers on tenterhooks. This is representative of what Hutcheon refers to as the habitual crossing of ‘the borders between high art and mass and popular culture and those between the discourses of art and the discourse of the world (especially history)’ (Hutcheon 2003: 33). Binet’s language fluctuates between traditional historical detachment and deeply personal attachment; it merges the official propaganda language of Nazi speeches with the sensationalist language of a penny dreadful. The result is a carefully constructed narrative that manages to convey many different angles, perspectives, assessments and interpretations all at once.
The biggest problem for both Binet and Modiano appears to be the fact that they cannot ask their historical characters for authentication or verification of their respective narratives. Binet, for instance, notes on several occasions: ‘I would pay dearly to feel what they felt then’ (Binet 2012: ch. 206) and ‘If only I could have been inside his head at this precise instant. I am absolutely convinced I would have enough material to fill hundreds of pages. But I wasn’t, and I don’t have the faintest idea what he felt’ (2012: ch. 218). Merging historical facts with his own creative interpretations, however, allows him certain liberties: in what is by far the longest and most openly narrativised chapter in his book (2012: ch. 222) he imagines himself, in turn, in the heads of Gabčík, Kubiš and Heydrich during the actual moments of the assassination. And while these presented ‘thoughts’ might not correspond to a historical reality we will never know about, they at least offer one possible interpretation of events.
Modiano, by contrast, ends his narrative on this very note of historical uncertainty, on the very ‘not knowing’ of the precise movements of Dora Bruder prior to her deportation. His final paragraph reflects:
I shall never know how she spent her days, where she hid, in whose company she passed the winter months of her first escape, or the few weeks of spring when she escaped for the second time. That is her secret. A poor and precious secret which not even the executioners, the decrees, the occupying authorities, the Dépôt, the barracks, the camps, history, time – everything that corrupts and destroys you – have been able to take away from her. (Modiano 2014: 137)
Unlike Binet, Modiano does not imagine, nor interpret. Instead, though, he ends on a typically postmodern open-ended note that rejects all notion of omniscient narration and final closure. He recounts the ‘facts’ as he unearths them; he philosophises about his search processes; he offers interpretations of the few facts he finds. But where he finds ‘nothing’, he does not invent, or elaborate. Instead, just as Binet in other instances, he occasionally tries to merge his own life with that of his historical character. He compares his own teenage attempts at running away to those of Dora Bruder decades earlier (see Modiano 2014: 52) in order to provide a potential explanation for Dora’s act, and professes that he feels ‘haunted’ by her:
ever since, the Paris wherein I have tried to retrace her steps has remained as silent and deserted as it was on that day. I walk through empty streets. For me, they are always empty, even at dusk, during the rush-hour, when the crowds are hurrying towards the mouths of the metro. I think of her in spite of myself, sensing an echo of her presence in this neighbourhood or that. (Modiano 2014: 137)
His obsessive search for details about Dora’s largely unchronicled life leads him to see clues and hints of her existence wherever he looks. But it also leaves him feeling empty and dissatisfied, aware that his search has only been partially successful and that Dora is one of all too many forgotten victims of history who do not have a memorial to their suffering.
What both authors ultimately do is push the boundaries of existing Holocaust writing – both fictional and historical – in that they both offer highly personalised and partly fictionalised accounts of events that did not affect them personally when they happened and that they have no familial connection to. Their challenges to the genre of postmodern historiographical metafiction lies in their constant blurring of the fine line between fact and fiction – which, in the eyes of Holocaust scholars, is a potentially dangerous thing. Importantly, for both authors, writing their texts has become a mission. Modiano declares: ‘In writing this book I am sending out signals’ (Modiano 2014: 37) – signals, perhaps, for other writers to imaginatively create histories for those people who did not survive the horrors of the Holocaust to speak for themselves; signals to his readers to come forward should they have historical information they previously considered unimportant. Binet, in turn, philosophises:
I hope I can be forgiven. I hope they can forgive me. I am doing all of this for them. I had to start up the black Mercedes – that wasn’t easy. I had to put everything into place, take care of the preparations. I had to spin the web of this adventure, erect the gallows of the Resistance, cover death’s hideous iron fist in the sumptuous velvet glove of the struggle. (Binet 2012: ch. 206)
The historical facts, for him, are at the heart of his narrative, his aim is to do justice to the often overlooked heroes Gabčík and Kubiš. But he realises that his means of creating a ‘monument’ to his heroes are different from a purely historical account, that, for him, the way towards depicting their story, the very writing processes and narrative elaborations, is part of the journey. Both authors thus engage with, as Hayden White terms it, ‘the problem of the relation between narrative discourse and historical representation’, openly acknowledging the fact that ‘narrative is not merely a neutral discursive form that may or may not be used to represent real events in their aspect as developmental processes but rather [a form that] entails ontological and epistemic choices’ (White 1987: ix). In the process, both The Search Warrant and HHhH highlight the, in Hutcheon’s words, ‘uneasy and problematising tension that provokes an investigation of how we make meaning in culture, how we “de-doxify” the systems of meaning (and representation) by which we know our culture and ourselves’ (Hutcheon 2003: 18). Both Modiano’s and Binet’s texts – be they called ‘novels’, or ‘faction’, ‘documentary fiction’ or ‘historiographic metafiction’ – challenge the ways we perceive the past, how we often assume the past to be a coherent entity. They highlight the fact that narratives of the past are always constructed and, as such, coloured by personal opinion, personal choices, personal agendas. They highlight not only the processes of meaning making, but the very processes of making history, or rather, making histories: not one coherent metanarrative of the past, but a series of possible micro-stories of a myriad of pasts.
With the final words of this chapter I would like to return to the work of Frank Ankersmit who emphasises that what we have left of the past are a plethora of clues – to be found in museums, in archives, in private attics, in excavations; to be discovered in ancient buildings, in personal correspondences, in photo albums. But these clues ‘do not provide us with an experience of the past itself’; rather, they ‘enable us to formulate hypotheses with regard to what the past has actually been like’. Importantly, these clues provide an ‘experiential basis for constructions of the past but not for a re-construction of the past (as it actually has been)’ (Ankersmit 1996: 48). The work of the historian – or, as in the case of the two texts under discussion here, the postmodern historical novelist – is to use the clues the past has left us and weave them into a ‘plausible hypothesis’ (1996: 48), into one possible interpretation of the events of the past. In the process, these different interpretations, or ‘micro-stories’ of the past (1996: 51) contribute to a wider, and, in the long run, more comprehensive understanding of the past.
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