Historical Consciousness

Context is important. Without some background information, it would be hard to understand the true significance of Nemirovsky's Suite Francais. Yes, we would pick up that the novel occurs during the German Occupation of France in the Second World War, but we might not know the conditions in which Nemirovsky wrote - that she was persecuted against as a Jew, separated from her family, and killed in Auschwitz. This information makes her novel, which she wrote in the French countryside after fleeing the Occupation in Paris, more impressive and attention-grabbing than if it had been written twenty years after these events.

My art history course, Museums and Cultural Politics, just this week discussed issues relating to the presentation of background materials and historical context, what perspective is acknowledged, and how to present the information to a contemporary audience that might not have lived through the events. These issues come about because it is impossible to give a presentation that captures the sentiments and agendas of all groups involved, and everyone has his or her own memories of either living through the event, or how they encountered the event through oral stories, school education, and other media sources. Each memory queue is different, so the way we remember history, or our historical consciousness, is online anyone else's. While Nemirovsky could not accurately give perspectives from every type of person involved in the Occupation, she does supply a broad range of characters, and the fact that she wrote while the events took place provides a mimesis of contemporary events.

No doubt, writing this story during the War influenced how Nemirovsky portrayed her characters. As we discussed in class, perhaps she gave the Germans more humanity than she thought they deserved so that, if her drafts were found, she would not have been considered as anti-German as she probably was. I wonder if her abundant injection of natural imagery was deliberately meant as a respite from the chaotic and dismal war scene.

In his review of Nemirovsky's posthumous novel, Paul Gray mentions the parallels of Nemirovsky's opening line and the opening line of Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, a book set in the same time as Suite Francais, but written in the years following the war; both describe the noise sky scene. The difference is that Nemirovsky's line reflected what was happening right then, right there, while Pynchon's was a remembrance of previous years' events; effectively, this recollection was a part of Pynchon's memory queue and was how he recalled the war scene to be.

Because Nemirovsky was killed before she could finish her novel, we are unsure of how it would have turned out. I wonder how the events of the war would change the path of the book, and therefore her readers' historical consciousness of WWII, since our memory queues rely on materials and related information about past events. We can imply the general direction of her story based on potential directions for the remaining three sections of her suite - "3. Captivity; 4. Battles?; 5. Peace?" The question marks indicate that, as Gray puts it, "she was trying to write a historical novel while the outcome of that history remained unknown." Perhaps Nemirovsky's storyboard would have changed based on how the war unfolded. In turn, our historical consciousnesses would not be what the are at this moment if Nemirovsky had lived to finish her novel.