Abjection, Derision and Power: Writing in the Voice of the Victim in Three French Postwar Texts

Alongside the well-known narratives of the mode rétro, which returned in the 1970s to the years of war and Occupation in France, there were texts that challenged simplistic notions of guilt and innocence through a virtuoso deployment of sarcasm and derision. Romain Gary’s La Danse de Gengis Cohn (1967), Albert Cohen’s Ô vous frères humains (1972) and Serge Gainsbourg’s album Rock Around the Bunker (1975) are all confronting the cruelty and abjection of a murderous anti-Semitism in intimate and disturbing ways. These are very different texts – a novel, an autofictional essay and an LP – but each one gives a powerful voice to the victim in these complex stories of hatred and fear. Derision enacts an aggressive dismantling of the stereotypes and tropes of the abject Other, exposing the vacuity of established pieties, the contradictions and hypocrisies at the heart of a rhetoric of superiority. Briefly situated in relation to earlier (Camus, Céline, Sartre) and later (Littell) narratives of derision relating to war and occupation centred on the perpetrator, a detailed critical and narrative analysis draws on Julia Kristeva’s analysis of abjection in order to identify what is at stake in these elaborate, stylised and unsettling texts where it is the abjected victim who is the subject of their own story.