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Jim Beggs
ENGL – Prof. Slater

A Return to the Wartime Gothic: Philippe Claudel’s By A Slow River

Philippe Claudel’s novel By a Slow Rivercuriously deals with France during and

after World War I. Why would a novel published in 2003 deal with a small early

twentieth-century French town? Why would Knopf publish a translation of Claudel’s

French novel in 2006? American taste for a novel like Claudel’s comes from the United

State’s entanglement in World War I and military conflicts at the start of the twentieth

century. Because of the nature of the First World War, the gothic literary mode became a

fairly common convention among war writers. Much of Robert Graves’s anti-war poetry

contains gothic language in its employment of the macabre. Even non-fictional accounts

that Paul Fussell labels as myth making contain even more blatantly gothic elements such

as apparitions and monstrous soldiers.

The employment of the gothic mode communicates popular attitudes about

particular wars and therefore becomes a surprisingly popular form in war literature. Not

a single scene in By A Slow River takes place on a battlefield. The war rages near

enough Claudel’s unnamed village to regularly rattle the windows on homes, and the

characters cannot avoid its influence. Paul Fussell pointed out Alexander Haig’s lack of

concern over individual soldiers’ welfares, and that attitude has influenced the characters

and made death preferable over life. The degenerated material conditions of people’s

lives contribute to the culture that promotes death. Claudel most obviously depicts the

effect of World War I on individual’s psychology. On another level, he uses Gothic

literary elements to make a statement about war after World War I as well. The control of
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the press was important to the states involved in the war effort in order to influence

public opinion to remain in favor of the war effort. Ideas such as “truth” become more

malleable in war time when the necessity of supporting the state’s war effort becomes

important to the economic interests of people who disseminate information. In such a

condition, truth and justice become vulgar parodies of the virtues they supposedly

represent. Claudel illustrated the queer environment of war through the shady characters

of the judge and the prosecutor and the ambiguous resolution of the novel.

The initial gothic writers focused on the decay of buildings, unsavory elements of

society and the broad theme of imprisonment. The unusualness of warfare used gothic in

a different way from how early writers used it. The development of the gothic genre over

time accounted for the difference in uses. According to Devendra Varma, the gothic

genre experienced its efflorescence in the 1790s, around the time that Jane Austen wrote

Northanger Abbey. After the efflorescence, the predominantly gothic works came to an

end around the period that Mary Shelley published Frankenstein Charles Maturin

published Melmoth the Wanderer. Part of the reason the gothic declined during the

period was the anxiety over reading fanciful texts such as gothic novels. Journalists,

politicians, and clergy worried that reading gothic texts could make people dissatisfied

with their station in life and actually foment rebellion against the state. The iconoclastic

aesthetics of the Romantics became an important issue (St. Clair 12). The Gordon Riots

in the early 1790 andthe French and American revolutions gave English society a

legitimate concern about the welfare of the state. The political anxiety combined with a

fatigue over the glut of gothic literature led to a shift of literary critical perspective. With

the appearance of novelists such asJane Austen, literary critics valued her apparent moral

sense, realistic characters, and realistic plotlines. Major critical criteria for the next
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century would be verisimilitude in character and plot with a particular emphasis on

psychological realism.

Under pressure from critics, the gothic genre kind of went underground. It

survived in the literature of the Brontes and the sensation novelists such as Wilkie

Collins. With Collins, the privilege of the rational over the irrational of the gothic

continued to grow and the wane of the genre continued. The genre lay relatively dormant

until the period of the FirstWorld War when something unusual happened. In response to

the aestheticism of the late nineteenth century, the generation of the Great War sought a

realistic expression for the misery of the war. To reproduce the conditions of war, the

gothic became a method of realism. The landscapes of war in film and literature were

barren wastelands filled with corpses. English society fractured along the lines of home

and front, hero and coward, and patriot and enemy. Poets such as Robert Graves, perhaps

only unconsciously wrote in the gothic mode. Fussell cited the cemetery bombardment in

All Quiet on the Western Front as an example of the gothic in fiction (196). In producing

a historical novel, Philippe Claudel employed similar gothic elements of the

contemporary artists, but produces a more general statement about human society.

Under the shadow of war, the glimmering concepts of truth, beauty, the value of life

become meaningless. Men invert the traditional values and evils become virtues.

Warfare engendered Gothic literature. Michael Sadleir documented the

iconoclastic origins of the Gothic in different wars--in the French and Industrial

Revolutions (173). The settings of ruins were “a parable of the victory of nature over

man’s handiwork” and “the triumph of chaos over order”(176). The impulses make sense

as reactions to formalism and reserve. Different excesses become valuable in Gothic--the

evil of villains, the innocence of heroes, and the resistance to authority. Frederick

Sassoon’s pacifism and criticism of the First World War became resistance when the
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authorities placed him in a mental hospital. The villains of By a Slow Riverexemplify the

excess of evil of wartime political leaders. Judge Mierck intends that the two soldiers

will confess to the murder of the 10 year-old girl. The first soldier confesses even though

he cannot correctly identify the manner in which he supposedly murdered the girl. As a

deserter, he understands the law will kill him for one reason or another. The second

soldier confesses only under the coercion of torture.

Men frequently imprisoned women in Gothic novels. Often the men were suitors

or other patriarchal figures who sought to control the women. Imprisonment became a

common theme in Gothic literature. The sense of imprisonment became even wider in

Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey. As Michael Sadleirstates, Austen points out the ways

in which Catherine Morland has failed to become a Gothic heroine: her father has not

imprisoned her and her mother did not die during childbirth. General Tilney ejects her

from Northanger Abbey rather than imprison her as he might have imprisoned his wife.

Catherine Morland remains free of the shackles of men such as General Tilney and her

father. Instead, Austen includes an impassioned defense of the novel and women’s

literature against histories. Austen makes readers aware of a more subtle imprisonment

of women through patriarchy in society and literature. The sense of imprisonment came

into war literature through the experience of trenches (Fussell 51).

Philippe Claudel wrote a novel set during and after World War I, so the choice to

emulate the writers of the era was appropriate. In Writing After War, John Limon notes

the different forms writers utilized in writing about wars. Homer’s Iliadglorifies war as

one mankind’s most heroic pursuits. Paul Fussell carefully documented in The Great War

and Modern Memory the changes in tone between early World War I poems and later

World War I poems. A greater sense of innocence characterized the early literature, while

the later literature lamented the loss of that innocence, or even mocked the idea of
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innocence. I argue that the gothic became a realistic mode for the reproduction of the

war in literature. Death and decay confronted the soldier regularly engaged in the war

effort and communicating that confrontation became important to war writers. Glenn

Wilkinson noted the repeated denial of death in newspaper depictions of the war. “The

increasing cultural denial of death encouraged the depiction of warfare as an activity

which held few deadly consequences” (26). The purpose of contemporary war writers

and Philipe Claudel was to draw attention back to the presence of death and danger in

war. The gothic rhetorical mode provided the resources for the expression of the war

writers. Claudel’s criticism draws attention to the ways that contemporary media present

a certain sanitary image of war: the military forbade media from photographing military

coffins returning to the United States and minimizing the public appearance of examples

of torture, such as the Abu Ghraib photographs.

Robert Graves’s “A Dead Boche” exemplified the gothic mode and the focus on

the presence of death that became common among war writers. The reproduction of the

war’s imagery became important for the verisimilitude of a novel set during World War I,

such as By A Slow River. The second stanza describes the ghastly corpse of a dead

German:

Propped, against a shattered trunk

In a great mess of things unclean,

Sat a dead Boche; he scowled and stunk

With clothes and face a sodden green,

Big-bellied, spectacled, crop-haired,

Dribbling black blood from nose and beard. (150)

Graves identified his rhetorical intent in the first stanza: to dispel the notions of the

nobility and fame of warfare. He presented the image of the dead Boche as a “cure for
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lust and blood.” Graves deliberately used “lust” in a more obsolete sense to engage

readers familiar with the chivalric pro-war language. The meaning more appropriate

seemed along the lines of “appetite or desire,” rather than strictly sexual appetite or

desire. Graves emphasized the dirtiness of the scene in which the body appeared. The

scowl suggested the German died unhappy and the singular stench of human

decomposition wafted from the body to the poem’s speaker. The only movement in the

scene was the blood which dribbled from the body’s mouth and beard. Graves offered a

decidedly un-heroic portrait of death on the battlefield.

An idea that seemed particularly influential upon Claudel’s novel was how war

writers collapsed the differences between death and life. The presence of life or the lack

of it at times became a question rather than a clear distinction. The opening lines of “It’s

a Queer Time” suggest the frenzy of warfare leads to soldier’s queer experience of being

unable to tell whether they were alive or dead in a given moment: “It’s hard to know if

you’re alive or dead / When steel and fire go roaring through your head” (127). A touch

of doubt accompanies the survivor’s question in “The Survivor Comes Home.” “Am I

alive and the rest / Dead, all dead?” (171). The lack of security and comfort the speaker

should feel disappointed him. Instead, the omnipresence of death, which dripped from

the twigs and boughs haunted the speaker. The soldiers became a kind of living dead,

occupying the space between two relatively clear states of being. In Paths of Glory

(1957) Stanley Kubrick tried to reproduce the otherworldly feeling of being unable to

make sense of a battlefield situation due to the speed and apparent randomness of it. As

the soldiers charged to take the ant hill, shells exploded and bodies fell. The director

struck a particularly brutal tone when he depicted a direct hit from a shell that blew a
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body to smithereens. All of these elements informed the imagery and themes of By a

Slow River.

The pages of By a Slow Riverdrip in death and gore, much like the landscape in

“The Survivor Comes Home.” As Limon wrote of As I Lay Dying, Claudel’s narrative is

a “satiety of everything that the coffin is supposed to hide or withstand” (122). Not

surprisingly, in All Quiet on the Western Front shells unearth coffins and bodies explode

in Paths of Glory. Claudel’s police man narrator described his process of narration as an

evisceration: “I have to cut open the belly of the mystery and stick my hands deep inside,

even if none of that will change a thing” (3). His prophecy turned out to be true, his

narrative failed to solve the central mystery of the plot: who murdered Morning Glory?

He described the denizens of “V” as “shadows,” which played on the image of the

original title “The Gray Souls.” The description also played on the status of the

characters--are they alive or dead, do they exist in a kind of purgatory? Their lives were

cyclical and undergo repetition on a daily and longer term basis. The presence of the

river resembled the classical entry point between the world of the living and the dead--the

river Styx.

Claudel repeatedly used grotesque imagery throughout the novel, employing a

common element of gothic and war narratives. The narrator characterized the characters

of the novel as both physically and morally grotesque. The prosecutor Destinat, who

inmates nicknamed “the Bloodsucker,” engaged in his role as prosecutor with a callous

indifference. He held men’s lives in his hands. The narrator did not view Destinat as

cruel. Rather than try a flesh and blood human being, “he defended an idea, simply an

idea: his own idea of good and evil.” Unfortunately, human souls were “grey” rather than

“black and white” and “evil and good.” The Judge’s physical description typified the
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corpulent, rotting bodies of the living in V: “His belly told the tale, sagging down well

beyond his waist, so did his skin, scored with broken veins as through all the Burgundies

he’d drunk were waiting in line to be flushed out” (7). The Judge’s body stood as a site

of excess consumption. The expulsive mechanisms of his body failed to keep up with the

consumption. The owner of the Rebillon with his mouthful of rotting teeth, Berfuche the

cop with his pig ears, and Crusty the court clerk with nasty eczema completethe early

physical descriptions of the novel.

Judge Mierck’s callous indifference appeared even cruelerthan Destinat’s. At the

scene of the young girl’s murder, he ate eggs and discarded the shells near the corpse.

Given Graves’s description of a corpse and my own experiences around them, I think it

takes a special kind of person to eat a slimy soft boiled egg in the presence of a murdered

child. Claudel suggested some deeper meaning around the eggs. The Judge himself

considered the eggs he ate more than mere eggs. He called them “little worlds” (11). The

egg represented the possibility for new life, but the judge consumed it. Combined with

the constant description of Judge Mierck with a smear of egg yolk along the length of his

moustache, the Judge came to resemble Goya’s “Cronus Devouring His Children.”

How the figures of law and order, Judge Mierck, and Colonel Matziev treated the

two prisoners blamed for the murder of Morning Glory deserves greater attention in an

examination of Claudel’s use of the gothic. During the imprisonment of the two men, the

fearless soldier named Rifolon hanged himself in a closet using his pants. Louisette

related the scene to the narrator and said that the man’s body smiled, as if he had gotten

one over on the authorities who sought to scapegoat him. The Judge framed the act as

confirmation of the man’s guilt. The man knew that the only real alternative was to be

sent back to the front, where he’d probably die a more horrible death. Le Floc did not

give up as easy.
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Rather than deal with the complications of a trial, the Colonel ordered Despiaux

to tie Le Floc to a tree in the courtyard in order to “jog his memory” (132). Despiaux

objected to the freezing temperature outside, but ultimately gave in to the orders. The

Colonel and the Judge dined in the warmth for hours as Le Floc suffered in exposure to

the elements. After they enjoy their meal, the Judge and Colonel strip Le Floc naked and

return to enjoy crepes and brandy. The Colonel returned to the howling Le Floc and

poured a pitcher of water of him. The use of water in torture alludes to the effective

tactic of waterboarding. The water would also make the cold more unbearable to Le

Floc. Claudel painted the scene in very provocative terms. Despiauxcould barely contain

his emotions while relating the scene to the narrator. The narrator could imagine Mierck

and Matziev: “Standing with their noses against the windowpane, their asses turned to the

fire . . . Taking in the same scene as they chatted about hare hunting, astronomy, or

bookbinding” (135). The cruelty of authority figures comes through as it did in the

sections that introduced “the Bloodsucker” Destinat.

Claudel starkly contrasted the bodies of Mierck and Matziev and Le Floc. Mierck

and Matziev stuffed with food and drink enjoy the warmth while Le Floc’s body had red

blotches and the tips of his fingers and toes turned black from frostbite. After he

confessed to the murder, Despiaux wrapped him, took him inside, and got him a drink,

but he could not drink. At that point his fate was sealed and everyone considered him an

non-entity. The contrast between the corpulent bodies of Mierck and Matziev and the

corpse-like body of Le Floc contributed to the shock of the scene. The dead-alive Le

Floc, a soldier himself, recalled the earlier confusion over life and death present in the

poetry of Robert Graves.

Despite the shocking ending, Terrence Rafferty labeled the By a Slow River

“curiously undisturbing” in the NY Times Book Review. The narrator’s murder of his
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own infant son caps off the brutality built up through the narrative. It was the ultimate

provocative scene of the novel. The specter of the narrator’s dying and dead wife

haunted him near the end of the wife and only explains on the most basic level his

justification for murdering his son. The narrator saw the killing of the child as somehow

tipping the scales of justice. The child would grow and tell the “lie” that his mother had

died in child brith, “when in fact he killed you in order to live” (192). With little fanfare

or premeditation, he picked up a pillow and smothered the baby. The doctor who

confirmed the death said nothing. “He shut his bag and he turned to me. We faced each

other, a long time. He knew. I knew he did, but he said nothing. He left me alone with

the little body” (193). The townspeople seem to know that justice is a sham, yet they

revere the authority and defer to them. The narrator was a police officer and earlier

admitted to helping a friend’s son avoid legal trouble. The legal system, which

supposedly comes from the moral foundation of a civilization, rather than upholdsthose

morals becomes a farcical results-oriented show that betrays the values it claims to

uphold.

The “queer” upside down world of Philippe Claudel’s By a Slow River is the

world of the First World Warand the literary gothic. Results become favored over morals

in times of war. Claudel writes about this attitude: “Either you arrest the culprit or you

arrest somebody you say is the culprit. . . Either way, it’s the same so far as the

population is concerned. The only loser on the deal is the guy who’s arrested; but when

all is said and done, who cares what he thinks?” (120). The important aspect of waging a

war is to win. The number of soldiers lost while charging into machine gun fire at the

Battle of the Somme is not important as the ultimate result. Fresh recruits nurtured on the

chivalric language of war literature from the home front might not have realized that ugly
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death might be their ultimate fate. States had an interest in maintaining public support for

the war to keep military ranks full and ensure that the money needed for the war would

be available. War poets like Robert Graves sought to draw attention to the omnipresence

of death in war and the ugliness of war. In By a Slow River, Philippe Claudel adopted

the conventions of the poets like Robert Graves for his novel set during the Great War.

Claudel’s depiction of civilians in close proximity to the fighting reveals the depravity of

human nature and the corruption inherit in the legal system and power relationships.
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Works Cited

Austen, Jane. Northanger Abbey. NY: EP Dutton, 1922.

Claudel, Philippe. By a Slow River. NY: Knopf, 2006.

Fussell, Paul. The Great War and Modern Memory. NY: Oxford UP, 2000.

Graves, Robert. “A Dead Boche.” Walter. 150.

--. “It’s a Queer Time.” Walter. 127.

--. “The Survivor Comes Home.” Walter 171-2.

Limon, John. Writing After War. NY: Oxford UP, 1994.

Paths of Glory. Dir. Stanley Kubrick. MGM, 1957.

Rafferty, Terrence. Rev. of By a Slow River, by Philippe Claudel. Sunday NYT Book

Review. 2 July 2006. 4 Dec. 2008.

<http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/02/books/review/02rafferty.html?ex=1309492

800&en=b73a9705b11d4e51&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss>

Sadleir, Michael. Things Past. London: Constable, 1944.

St. Clair, William. The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period. NY: Cambridge UP,

2004.

Varma, Devendra. The Gothic Flame. NY: Russell, 1966.

Walter, George. The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry. NY: Penguin, 2006.

Wilkinson, Glenn R. “Literary Images of Vicarious Warfare: British Newspapers and the

Origin of the First World War, 1899-1914.” The Literature of the Great War

Reconsidered. Eds. Patrick J. Quinn and Steven Trout. 24-36.