SOURCE: Atack, Margaret. “Structures of Irony.” In Literature and the French Resistance: Cultural Politics and Narrative Forms, 1940-1950, pp. 208-31. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989.

In the following essay, Atack examines postwar French literature.

‘the Game of War and Chance’1

In L'Univers concentrationnaire (The Concentration Camp World), David Rousset places the concentration camps under the patronage of the modern masters of the grotesque, Jarry's Ubu, Kafka and Céline,² to present the incongruous juxtaposition of terror and bureaucratic order; but the discovery of the grotesque absurdity of this closed world is a key to survival, a sign of human resilience defying inhuman degradation. The post-war novel of the Occupation is paradoxically both less bleak and more pessimistic, burlesque or grotesque rather than tragic, as the incongruities of the human tragi-comedy are ironically highlighted by the narrator or by the structure of the narrative. All the novels of ambiguity accentuate...