Nabil 1

Dina Nabil Abdel-

Rahman

World Literature

Spring 2015

War quakes in Irène Némirovsky's Suite

Française

Being one of the earliest fictional works written

about World War II, as assumed by many literary critics,

Suite Française is a posthumous work, written in 1942 by

Irène Némirovsky, a French writer of Russian - Jewish

origin. The novel had never been heard of before 2004,

which dates its publishing in French, and soon became a

worldly bestseller after being translated into English in

2006. Though it has been locked up for nearly sixty

years, Suite Française is regarded as a chief success

presented to the twenty first-century reader, because of

the interesting back story of its creation. The novel was

planned to be a "roman-fleuve" or a novel sequence of

five parts. However, in 1942, and after finishing only

two parts of the sequence, Némirovsky was arrested

according to Nazi laws during the German occupation of

France and sent to the Auschwitz where she passed away.

Her two novels were written in a microscopic handwriting

and kept with Denise Epstein, her elder daughter. Denis

never thought of reading that manuscript thinking it

could be a diary too heartbreaking to read. However,

Nabil 2deciding to donate her mother's papers to the French

archive, she discovered what the manuscript contains.

Depicting the first year of the German occupation, Suite

Française displays different contemplations about exile and

fear caused by war and its role in quaking social bases

from a modern and a contemporary perspectives.

Irène Némirovsky wrote Suite Française during the war,

that is to say the novel illustrates war catastrophes as

they were taking place around the author. The novel is

divided into three parts: Tempête en juin, or The Storm in June,

Dolce, or Sweet, and scratches of her diaries to plot the

rest of the sequence. Each of these parts could be read

separately, but also they intersect at some points. The

first part, named Tempête en juin, revolves around the story

of five Parisian groups in the great "Exodus" during the

first Paris bombing. "The Storm in June is not a story of

political tumult of the defeat, but a portrayal

remarkably well composed of varied behaviour and emotions

of morally very different characters" (my translation,

Grégoire 40). Their fates are traced as each group

decides to escape the bombing, seeking shelter in the

countryside or the outskirts. "What Némirovsky saw was

the behaviour of the French during the occupation and it

is her description of individuals of many socioeconomic

levels and political loyalties that is so compelling

today" (Weiss xi). Those levels intersect and are

intertwined: the Péricands, a bourgeois family, Gabriel

Nabil 3Corte, an author and a member of the privileged Academie

Française, and his mistress, Florence, M. Cobin, a mean

banker, the Michauds, a middle-class family, Charles

Langelet, a haughty collector of fine ceramics, and the

Sabaries, a farm family.

The second part, named Dolce focuses on the

Angelliers living in Bussy, which was occupied by the

Germans. A young wife, Lucile Angellier, whose unfaithful

husband was taken as a war prisoner, falls in love with,

Bruno von Falk, a refined German soldier. The last part

traces the destiny of some characters mentioned in

previous parts and also some future plans for writing the

rest of the sequence. This part enables the reader to

explore the author's mind, eventually having some sort of

metafiction. "The fact that the author of Suite Française was

deported to Auschwitz gave the book an Ann Frank type of

urgency" (mentioned in Weiss xi). Living at the same time

of German occupation authorizes information and facts

provided by the author. Tolstoy, for instance, wrote

about The French invasion of Russia in 1812, but about

half a century later in 1869 in his War and Peace. "The

only difference being that she [Némirovsky] had no way

back … [she works] upon burning lava" (Philipponnat 408).

Events, thus, are described so freshly, as the novel

delves into trauma and tumult the French people, as

individuals and as human beings, experience. "This is no

memoir; it is self-consciously a work of fiction" (Weiss

Nabil 4xiii) which presents a metaphor of human defeat in war

times without concentrating on a specific ethnic group.

It is war, no doubt, which is the common theme in

the two parts of the novel; however, Némirovsky ceases to

act as a mere recorder of events occurring around her. On

the contrary, she contemplates beyond events and horror

she saw with her own eyes, reshapes them in a rather

fictitious aroma and gives them explanations and builds

potential consequences. Along with horror, the earth

seemingly trembles; "the metaphor of the tremble of the

earth is hence excellent to depict the slump rupture

which knocked the French's life in May – June 1940"

(Hoffman 39). This earthquake, in this regard, implies

the kind of awakening, war causes to that nation. The

novel starts with the feeling of distrust between the

government and the French people who seems not to believe

what the government says, "bombs had fallen on Paris ...

Yet everyone remained calm. Even though the reports were

terrible, no one believed them ... “We don’t understand

what’s happening,” people said" (Némirovsky 3). It seems

a common phenomenon when a nation is at the verge of

defeat; the government starts either lying or hiding

truths. "The trauma before the first defeats goes very

wickedly... For example, the censorship succeeded in

displaying notifications of eight - days catastrophe …

during which the French were anesthetic by the silence of

the State’s major and the brain–stuffing press" (my

Nabil 5translation, Cremieux - Brilhac 542). It was, thus, a

catastrophe to discover that the masterpieces in the

Louver were not removed to a proper protected place in

Brittany.

Némirovsky does not only stop at laying the theme of

distrust between the individuals and the government, but

she also takes this distrust a step further. Young men

were envying those who were on the front; a perfect

example for this type is Hubert Péricand who feels

ashamed until he could flee to the front. The narrator

says:

He was lost in thought, vividly imagining

scenes of battle and victory. He was a Boy

Scout. He and his friends would form a group of

volunteers, sharpshooters who would defend

their country to the end... He and his friends:

a small group bound by honour and loyalty. They

would fight; they would fight all night long;

they would save their bombed-out, burning

Paris. What an exciting, wonderful life!

(Némirovsky )

Nevertheless, it was a great shock when he went there and

was faced with the disastrous situation in the

battlefield: no patrols, bridges are bombed, roads are

cut and no enough weapons. Despite his courage, he could

Nabil 6not stand fighting in an unequal battle, so he had to

retreat. The writer sheds light on the second generation

and its attitude towards the older generation embodied in

the government and family. Full of contempt and hatred

towards everybody around him, Hupert realizes that there

will be lies and fraud stories to be created in order to

hide the gloomy catastrophic truth about the war.

Being focused on the lives of the individuals, their

emotions and thoughts, Suite Française is crowded with scenes

about trauma, fear and uproar. The five groups presented

in the novel vary in the way they behave to such turmoil

according to their social strata. The conditions are the

same: lack of food, patrol, means of transportation and

shelter, but war profoundly contributes in revealing the

best or the worst in the human being. Charlotte Pericand,

the daughter –in - law, plays the role of the mother and

the father, takes care of the whole family, and shares

food with other people's children. However, because she

was extremely overloaded with responsibility, she

unintentionally forgot taking her old father – in- law

with her while escaping the bombing. As a "good

Frenchwoman", she endures news about the death of her

elder son Philippe, and finally could protect her family.

The mean M. Corbin favours taking his mistress in the car

to taking his faithful employees, the Michauds, who had

to escape Paris to Orleans on feet. M. Corbin eventually

has frequent quarrels with his mistress and finally

Nabil 7abandons her. On the other hand, the Michauds prove to be

the best example of a couple who survives the trauma side

by side though their son, Jean-Marie, was lost in war.

Greed and self-profit is displayed in Gabriel

Corte’s character; he is concerned only about who is

going to publish him after his publisher's flee to

England. Being haughty as part of the Academie Française,

Corte disgusts the miserable sight of the poor; the

narrator says: "Gabriel could see the face of an old

prostitute with painted eyes, messy orange hair ... She

stared at him long and hard while chewing on a bit of

bread. He … murmured “such hideous faces!” Overcome, he

turned round to face inside the car and closed his eyes"

(Némirovsky 38). Being an author, his attitude towards

mundane people does not give a proper image of the

genuine author who is supposed to empathize with people

about whom he writes. He regards food as a demarcation

between classes, so he does not accept any sort of food.

Not to mention, he turns into an uncivilized person even

cannibalistic in his procure for food; he never hesitates

in bribing the employees in the hotel to get a better

room and food which were never available. Money thus,

seems worthless as well as any social position, for war

stripped everyone of any sort of power. The irony in war

circumstances is that war brings together all oppositions

in one time and space. The rich meet the poor, they

either share or contempt each other, generations meet and

Nabil 8clash against each other. Thus, fake socioeconomic

borders which have long separated them are eliminated to

put all of them on one road to face one destiny.

The never-ending conflict between the poor and

the rich is lucidly illustrated in the Sabaries' village,

Bussy. The Viscountess de Montmort holds a mass in the

church asking the poor villagers to donate their savings

to the poor soldiers on the front. The whole scene is

very ironic for the moment the Viscountess gives her

speech, the German soldiers reside in her castle, and her

husband, the Mayor, was preparing a party on their

honour. When she gave that speech, the farmers' wives

were in rage, Cecile Sabarie says:

It’s hurtful to see you with your houses and

having everything you want and then to hear you

cry poverty. Come on, everyone knows you

villagers have everything. You hear me?

Everything! You think we don’t know you’re

getting all the meat? You buy up all the

coupons. Everybody knows it. You pay a hundred

for each meat coupon. If you’ve got money, you

want for nothing, that’s for sure, while we

poor people… (Némirovsky 197)

Hypocrisy, thus, is one of the dark stains the war

intends to reveal. War, by no means, is a dreadful

Nabil 9horrific period in the history of any nation, but it,

like an earthquake, shakes the society to the core,

provoking the best and the worst of it. For that reason,

Némirovsky calls the first part “Storm in June”, the

summer is the peak of heat which indicates the hardships

of war, but to be associated with a storm is another

indication of the turmoil imposed on people; not to

mention that the war, historically speaking took place in

June.

A calmer tone appears in the shift to the second

part, named Dolce. As it takes place ten moths later after

the invasion, in the spring, the part revolves around

love relationship between Lucile Angellier and the German

soldier residing in their house. The significance of

using the spring as the appropriate time for such a

relationship to sprout and bloom is a sagacious choice by

Némirovsky. This part provides much of contemplation on

war and the creation of the enemy. The writer evokes the

most dialectic question: "What is more important, the

individual or the society?" especially in war time. Bruno

says: "War is a collaborative act par excellence… We,

Germans, believe in the communal spirit … it comes before

everything" (224). It is true that the author shows the

German brutality in war during the village occupation,

such as changing French clock time to match the German

one, murdering the innocents, imprisoning men and

stealing savings of the villagers, but this is only a

Nabil 10superficial piece of the truth. Némirovsky delves deep

inside the German soldiers' psychology, as she shows the

human side of the enemies.

Despite the fact that they are invaders, German

soldiers suffer in a different way, as they have no will

of their own. Bruno says: "we look forward to our leave

so much! We count the days. We hope. And then we get

there and we realize we don't speak the same language any

more" (202). Four years ago, Bruno got married, and for

four years too, he has been a soldier, and could rarely

see his wife. He feels abandoned from the common sense of

time, "he has no age. He is as old as the most ancient

events on earth: Cain murdering Abel…Here I am locked up

in … a tomb in a country cemetery" (223). Though they

take thousand prisoners, soldiers are imprisoned too.

Soldiers have to obey the orders just like chess pieces,

and not to think too much about what is right or wrong,

otherwise obeying orders would be a tough matter. Bruno

says: "it is not our fault if we upset them sometimes,

we're just following orders; we're soldiers" (276).

Moreover, a soldier has to neglect any sense of self

interest, Bruno, for instance, was a musician, but war

and music do not go together. Eventually, the character

of the soldier ends up distorted; as he is deprived of

his family, real job and identity. Therefore, when the

Germans knew about canceling their vacation and new

Nabil 11plans, instead, for invading the Soviet Union, it was

like pushing them for committing suicide.

Not only does Némirovsky reveal the invaders'

psychology during war times, but she also focuses on the

invaded's psychology during occupation. Occupation is

different from war, for in occupation, the invaders stay

for a long time with the invaded, reside in their houses,

eat their food, kiss their children and play with them.

Despite the French’s preconceptions about the Germans as

cruel and heartless, this image, in due course, has

changed, for people start looking at them as normal human

beings. Lucile fell in a dilemma between being a good

French wife and falling in love with a German enemy. In

the most private moments of love between her and Bruno,

she cannot forget he is a foreigner. However, her

relationship with Bruno is not a mere love but a matter

of proofing her hazy existence. The narrator says: "This

friendship between herself and the German, this dark

secret, an entire universe hidden in the heart of the

hostile house… Finally she felt she was a human being,

proud and free. She wouldn’t allow anyone to intrude into

her personal world"( ). Through this relationship, she

could escape the shell of her mother- in – law's watching

eye and her husband's unfaithfulness. However, people's

watching eyes imposed her to use Bruno's love to her for

the sake of protecting the French farmers and their

savings.

Nabil 12

Delving inside the characters’ psyche necessitates a

whole-seen- eye perspective. Némirovsky, thus, employs a

third-person omniscient narrator, who thoroughly

penetrates the characters' inner feelings and provides a

rather panoramic view point of war scenes. "It's not a

historical novel in the usual sense, for it was written

at the very time the history it recounted was unfolding"

(Suleiman 9). However, it is a fictional work built on

factual bases. Thus, in "a story like this, strongly

anchored in history, the traditional marks (dates,

references to historical characters, and to precise

military periods) are nearly absent" (my translation,

Grégoire 38). Such a narrator provides the reader with a

broader view better than the one given by any of the busy

escaping characters. Though this narration seems

traditional, Némirovsky employs a modern technique to

suit fragmentation previously introduced, that is to say

stream of consciousness.

Madame Angellier, for instance, brings back her

memories with her imprisoned son, Gaston, as triggered by

the German soldier's footsteps, while she locked herself

in her room. The narrator says: "It was neither delirium

nor first signs of madness … she would remember certain

words her son had said, certain intonations in his voice

a gesture he made with his chubby little hands when he

was a baby" (Némirovsky 241). Nevertheless, this

Nabil 13technique is not restricted to trigger past memories but

also opens gates of imagining possible future events.

Madame Angellier imagines her son’s return, the narrator

says: "during these first moments, Lucile faded away and

Gaston belonged to her and her alone … She would make him

a good lunch, run his bath, tell him immediately about

his affairs: "You know I took good care of them. You

remember that piece of land you wanted … I bought it,

it's yours" (Némirovsky 243). Time ceases to be a solid

linear block, but it keeps moving forwards and backwards,

as if all events reach the zero point where all tenses

are on equal foot.

Asserting that time is non-linear the way it moves,

Némirovsky uses another technique to enhance this

fragmentation resulted in stream of consciousness.

Némirovsky uses a reversed Proustian memory or the

Proustian Madeleine. In Marcel Proust's, the French

novelist, À la recherche du temps perdu, the narrator's past

memories are provoked in the famous Madeleine scene,

"where one bite of the tea – soaked pastry sends Proust's

narrator into a reverie of flowing memories from his past

in Combray" (Mahar 205). Némirovsky turns this technique

upside down, for scenes of war along with shortage of

food call forth gastronomic commemoration. Gabriel Corte

loses his appetite at the visions of poor dirty people,

whom he calls "the ugliness, the vulgarity, the horrible

crudeness of these people!”. Therefore, he firstly

Nabil 14refused to eat sandwiches they had brought for the road,

he says: "I cannot eat…I don't think I could swallow a

single mouthful now. Did you see that horrible old woman

beside us with her birdcage and blood stained bandage?"

(Némirovsky 38) Then he recounts memories of best food,

"two years before, in Austria, he had eaten fresh trout

near a small river …Their flesh, beneath the bluish,

pearly skin, had been as pink as a small child's" (54).

Nevertheless, one has to be sceptical about those

memories, for "we bend the facts to suit our story"

(Lehrer 82). Corte, in order to reach the food image in

his mind, has to bribe hotel employees to get refined

food and room, not to mention he scorns people around him

and blocks his ears to protect his memory image from

getting disturbed by the reluctant sound of their

munching.

“Suite Française” as a title is not an original one

of the type for it was previously introduced as Französische

Suiten or French Suites, musical six suites composed by the

German musical composor Johann Sebastian Bach. The suite,

as defined in The Harvard Dictionary of Music, is "a series of

disparate instrumental movements with some element of

unity, most often to be performed as a single world"

(Randel 848). As a paratext, the title has sagacious

indication meant by no co-incidence. Némirovsky "wanted

to give it [her novel] a sonata form, or else make it

look like a symphony in four movements: slow followed by

Nabil 15a fugue; allegro in a different but similar tone; adagio,

and to end a series of quick dances" (Philipponnat 411-

412). However, this fragmentation, as a sign of modern

novel, is not scattered in the air, for those fragments

are unified by a common theme which is war and its

outcomes, and sometimes repetitive characters, such as

the Angellier and the Michauds combine the two parts.

Appendixes provided in the last part in her diaries

reveal other connections she intended to do, such as "the

murder of Bruno", the German soldier in Russia, which is

to be placed in part four, and so on.

Another literary implementation of the use of

"suite", as a musical form is in laying the polarity of

the individuality and collectivity. Némirovsky "compared

her characters to the instrumental solo in a symphony,

and the crowd scenes to the choruses that dive breadth

and contrast to the plot" (Philipponnat 413). Short lived

moments of love revealing stand in a stark contrast with

long lived months of fear. To enhance such contrast, the

rhythm of narration differs according to the scene. For

example, in the farewell meeting between Madeleine, the

farm girl and the injured Jean-Marie Michaud, whom she

took care of, she says: "But you're going away," she said

and finally, without the strength to hold back her tears,

she let them fall down her cheeks and said in a voice

choking with emotion, "I can't stand the thought of you

leaving, I can't" (Némirovsky 159). On the contrary, the

Nabil 16rhythm hastens in war scenes, Charlotte Péricand during

running "had no stockings, just red slippers on her bare

feet, but gritting her teeth, arms tight round the baby,

who wasn't crying but whose eyes were rolling wildly with

fear… the sky above seemed filled with countless planes

flying back and forth with their evil buzzing, like

hornets (87)."Here is the one unanimous meaning of the

war: Germans, French, Jews, men have only one mortal

enemy, the History that crushes them" (Philipponnat 413).

Hence, it seems very ironic as this polarity is embedded

within a novel whose title is similar to the German's

musical masterpiece.

Music, hence, is a common motif which appears

stylistically in the two parts through verifying the

rhythm of the narration. However, music appears as an

apparent motif which enables the characters to shatter

all borders between nations, cultures and languages.

Bruno was a musician before being a soldier. In the

famous piano scene, he plays the piano while Lucile

listens. Teaching her how to play and compose music, he

plays various musical pieces to melt the ice between her

as an invaded French woman, and him, as an invader German

soldier. Music also enables both of them to overcome

feeling of exile. "The theme of exile, which is rather an

"exterior" exile, on the road of the exodus… or

"interior" in the closed city, provokes miscommunication,

the withdrawal of the individual himself" (my

Nabil 17translation, Grégoire 45). Music connects Bruno with his

country and past life in Germany through relating the

pieces he plays with beautiful woods and meadows in

Germany. Similarly, music sustains him to overcome

feeling of miscommunication between him and Lucile. Music

is a common language among nations, for it breaks borders

and hostility, enemies bear within their hearts.

Therefore, after that scene, Lucile’s relationship with

Bruno develops to express mere love and passion.

Némirovsky was accused by many critics to be a

unique sort of an anti-Semitic writer; she was a Jew

herself, but never depicts Jews and their Jewish Question

in her novel. The novel "depicts not a single Jewish

character, while the author herself endured the

indignities of wearing the Jewish star" (Mahar 200).

However, this accusation is not accurate, for it was

noted that the actual persecution of the Jews in the

Vichy government did not start before 1941. Also,

Némirovsky does not look forward to being a Jewish

patriot. On the contrary and as previously stated, "this

novel is wholly focused on the way "ordinary French

people" responded to the first year of German occupation,

there was no real call to focus on Jews" (Suleiman 33).

Nevertheless, Némirovsky employs motifs strongly attached

to the Jewish history and wove them with the techniques

of the novel. The story of the "Exodus", found in the Old

Testament, is similarly employed through the frequent

Nabil 18repetition of the word "exodus" all over the novel.

Clémence Boulouque, the French critic and writer, calls

Suite Française "an intense story of exodus" (mentioned in

Grégoire 37). People, to some extent, are aware of their

destiny to migrate; the narrator says about Maurice

Michaud: "he knew there had been exoduses throughout

history. How many people had died on this land, dripping

with blood, fleeing the enemy, leaving cities in flames,

clutching their children to their hearts" (Némirovsky

44). "The exodus, in this book … is characterized by a

radical upheaval …of people's behaviour, judgments and

values: through the reflection of… the impression of

unreality which prevails within the spirit of the

majority" (my translation, Grégoire 37). Exodus along

with metaphors of earthquakes reveals a strong necessity

for change and new beginnings, as the society has

previously proved being socially and economically

cracked.

All in all, Suite Française is a posthumous work by the

Holocaust victim, Irène Némirovsky, which provides a

lava-like narrative of World War II. Stating that the

novel is not a memoir, the novel portrays the interior

psychological disputes within both the invaders and the

invaded. Therefore, third-person narration is the most

appropriate point of view, as it gives a panoramic vision

which suits war circumstances. Many techniques are

employed to enrich the narration, such as stream of

Nabil 19consciousness and musical rhythm. “Exodus” is a lucid

motif which accompanies all characters as they all escape

the bombing. Finally, though being accused of anti-

Semitism, Némirovsky presents characters as pure

individuals who would survive for all ages regardless

their ethnic or racial origins.

Works Cited:

Cremieux-Brilhac, Jean-Louis. Les Français de l'an 1940. (2

vol.). Vol.1. La guerre: oui ou non?. Gallimard. Paris.

1990.

Grégoire, Vincent. “Le « séisme » de mai-juin 1940 dans

"Suite française" d'Irène Némirovsky”. Dalhousie French

Studies. Vol. 96. Fall 2011. Dalhousie University.

Hoffmann, Stanley. “The Trauma of 1940: A Disaster and

its Traces”. Historical Reflections / Réflexions Historiques. Vol.

22, No. 1, The French Defeat of 1940: Reassessments.

Barghahn Books.Winter 1996.

Lehrer, Jonah. Proust Was a Neuroscientist. Houghton Mifflin

Harcourt, Sep 1, 2008. U.S.

Nabil 20

Mahar, Cheleen. Cuisine and Symbolic Capital: Food in Film and

Literature. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, May 11, 2010.

Némirovsky, Irène. Suite Française. Knopf Doubleday Press.

Philipponnat, Olivier. Patrick Lienhardt. The Life of Irène

Némirovsky. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. 2010.

Randel, Don Michael. The Harvard Dictionary of Music. Harvard

University Press.

Sulieman, Susan Rubin. "Irène Némirovsky and the

"Jewish Question" in Interwar France". Yale French Studies.

No. 121. Literature and History: Around "Suite

française" and "Les Bienveillantes". 2012. Yale

University.

Weiss, Jonathan M. Irène Némirovsky: Her Life and Works. 2007.

Stanford University Press. California.

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