H-France List Archives

• Message-Id: <199604100104.CAA12267@listserv.rl.ac.uk>
• Date: Tue, 9 Apr 1996 17:50:40 -0700
• From: "Bertram M. Gordon" <bmgordon@ella.mills.edu>
• Subject: H-Fr - BOOK REVIEW - _Images of the Algerian War_

  From: mcarley@ccs.carleton.ca (Michael Carley)
  Subject: David Schalk reviews P. D. Dine, _Images of the Algerian War_
  Date: Tue, 9 Apr 96 18:04:51 EDT


  Philip Dine, _Images of the Algerian War: French Fiction and Film,
  1954-1992_  Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994.  ix + 267 pp.  Notes,
  bibliography, and index.  Cloth $55.00 US.  ISBN 0-19-815875-0.

  Reviewed by David L. Schalk, Vassar College,
  for H-France, April 1996

  It is a pleasure to recommend with the greatest enthusiasm this
  superb first book by a most talented young colleague, who teaches
  in the outstanding European Studies Programme at Loughborough
  University in the British Midlands.  The title reflects with absolute
  accuracy, though not with perfect symmetry, as will be explained
  below, what the book is about.  Professor Dine has for the first time
  in English--and indeed nothing so focused and systematic has yet
  been published in French--closely analyzed the extensive French
  literary and cinematic production dealing with the Algerian War,
  1954-1962.

                    The core of the book is a very sophisticated and
  historically informed analysis of fiction.  Professor Dine, whether he
  is discussing a brutal and militaristic work such as Jean Larteguy's
  _Les Centurions_(1960), or a more liberal and accommodating novel
  like Gilbert Cesbron's _Entre chiens et loups_ (1962), is enormously
  informative, firm in his commitment and conviction, but never
  strident.  It would be difficult to improve upon the formulation, in
  his introduction, of the vexed question of whether literature and film
  can have a political influence, in the case in question, whether
  French writers and film-makers were able "to exert a direct
  influence on the process of decolonization" (p. 14).

                    I would like to highlight four specific aspects of
  this thoroughly remarkable book.  First, Dine's discussion in chapter
  5 of novels written after the fact--not _temoignages_ published
  during the war--suggests that many of these are powerful works
  which deserve to be better known, perhaps in some cases translated
  into English.  Dine mentions that they contain certain parallels to
  the Vietnam war literature in the United States (p. 128).  I think
  that Tim O'Brien's _Going after Cacciato_ offers an eerily powerful
  reflection of some of the Algerian war novels which Dine discusses.
  But the lack of realism in these novels--written by conscripts in
  large measure, not members of elite combat units--is intriguing and
  disturbing.  Many of their protagonists meet violent death, and yet
  Dine points out that the Algerian war was for most conscripts--about
  2.4 million--"singularly lacking in danger" (p.132).

                    Second, Dine is persuasive in debunking the myth
  of the _pied-noirs_, the ethnic Europeans residing in pre-
  independence Algeria, of "their" land, their "abundant literature of
  nostalgia" (p. 165), and the related "myth of inter-communal
  harmony," of some kind of common Mediterranean humanity.  Dine
  treats critically, but fairly the general _pied-noir_ evasiveness,
  on such matters as their well-documented allegiance to the Vichy
  regime and their reluctance to fight for Free France during World
  War II.

                    Thirdly, Dine's analysis of sexual relations between
  colonizer and colonized, as portrayed so extensively in the literature
  of the Algerian war, is fascinating.  This near obsession existed
  despite, as Dine points out correctly, the almost total "historical
  absence of such inter-racial liaisons" (p. 191).  Bernard Tricot,
  President Charles de Gaulle's special advisor on Algerian affairs
  after 1958 and a French delegate during peace negotiations at Evian
  in 1962, points out in his recently published _Memoires_ (1994)
  that there were only 382 mixed marriages in Algeria between 1939
  and 1953!  Incidentally, those who are interested in
  Franco-Algerian relations, and more generally in Gaullism and politics
  and society of the early Fifth Republic, will find Tricot's book a
  marvellous source.

                    Finally, Dine is the first scholar to look at
  Algerian war novels _en bloc_.  By examining them as a genre, he
  discovered a large number of cases of veterans' suicide, which is
  painfully evocative to this American reader.  A conservative U. S.
  government estimate holds that by 1986 there had been 80,000
  suicides of Vietnam veterans, more than the 59,000 names on the
  walls of the war memorial in Washington, D.C.

                    To conclude, I would like to discuss
  briefly a regret and a suggestion.  First, the regret: this book
  would have been even more striking if the editors had found
  it financially possible to include stills from the films which Philip
  Dine discusses.  A telling example comes from another new book,
  which can be compared with Dine's in that it touches on some of the
  same topics, but with a very different approach.  The work in
  question is Kristen Ross, _Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and
  the Reordering of French Culture_  (1995).  In this
  writer's judgment, Ross's book often simply states the obvious
  in convoluted post-structuralist language, yet it does contain some
  brilliant insights, and certainly merits an extensive review on H-
  France, and in traditional published journals.  It benefits from a
  series of high-quality photographic reproductions, among them a
  beautiful photograph from the film made from Claire Etcherelli's
  extraordinary 1967 novel, _Elise ou la vraie vie_ (_Folio_ paperback).
  Ross's analysis of this relatively unknown masterpiece, probably the
  greatest single work of fiction dealing with the impact of
  the Algerian war on France, and on individual French women and
  men, is thin and insubstantial, whereas Dine's is a _tour de force_.

                    Turning now to my suggestion.  I would urge that
  part 3, "Filming the War Without a Name, 1954-1992," which comprises
  only 17 pages of condensed, though highly astute analysis, be
  expanded by Professor Dine into a second book.  Dine's point that
  French film-makers have not ignored the Algerian war as much as
  Benjamin Stora, Pascal Ory, and I have indicated in some of our
  writings, is convincing.  Dine notes that as of 1992 fifty feature
  films had been made in France on the Algerian war, a number that
  would certainly compare favorably to American productions dealing
  with undeclared U.S. war in southeast Asia.  One should multiply by
  four to account for the larger U.S. population, and I doubt very
  much that there have been two hundred feature-length films made
  in the United States about the Vietnam war.  Dine's discussion of
  Alain Resnais's 1963 film, _Muriel_, the "first work to lift the
  cinematic taboo on the French military's use of torture in Algeria"
  (p. 223), is especially brilliant.  It shows that Dine is as gifted for
  film analysis as he is in uncovering the ideological underpinnings
  and aesthetic strengths and weaknesses of the novels he examines
  in the first 212 pages of his book.  Hence, I hope that in a few
  years the author will give us a new work, finding ways, whether
  technically (type of film), thematically, by director, or by date, to
  organize his material, and bring those fifty films to life for his
  readers.  I would recommend that his publishers grant him leeway
  to include extensive illustrative materials, and I would suggest that
  the author add a new a section on films made for television.  For
  example, Benjamin Stora's evocative, often painful, and at the time
  highly controversial four-hour documentary, _Les Annees
  algeriennes_, first shown on _Antenne 2_ in the fall of
  1991, would alone merit a ten- or fifteen-page discussion.

                    This altogether remarkable book should be of
  great interest not only to historians of twentieth-century France, to
  students of literature and experts in the new field of "cultural
  studies," but also to the large number of American scholars
  struggling to come to new and more fruitful understandings of the
  equally long and equally divisive American "war without a
  name," and the resultant and still unhealed "Vietnam syndrome."

  David L. Schalk
  Vassar College
  schalk@vassar.edu

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