The Image of the Soldier in French Novels of the Twentieth and Twenty-first Centuries

Throughout the ages, myths have guided man’s physical and mental activities. Religion, artistic expression, literature, philosophy, rites of passage, social behaviors, discoveries, inventions, and dreams all reflect the “basic, magic ring of myth ” (Campbell 1973: 3). Common archetypal figures appear cross-culturally in various myths: among them are the hero called to adventure and the hero who refuses the call (Campbell 1973: 51, 59). In the case of the hero embracing the unknown enthusiastically, his adventure will be marked with moments of insight in which he will glimpse the transcendence of his mortal state. At his return, the hero will consider the telling of his exploits to be his noblest responsibility (Campbell 1973:190, 193). In Nation and Narration (1990), Homi Bhabha states that the myth of a unified nation also prevails in modern men’s minds: [the] large and liminal image of the nation... haunts the idea of the nation, the language of those who write of it and the lives of those who live it. It is an ambivalence that emerges from a growing awareness that, despite the certainty with which historians speak of the “origins ” of nation as a sign of the ‘modernity ’ of society, the cultural temporality of the nation inscribes a much more transitional social reality. (1990:1) Bhabha’s point is that social and cultural factors influence the actual nation, so that the myth of unification may not correspond to reality. To this end, fictional and non-fictional texts about war may be read as negotiations of the pedagogical (nationalist ideology) and the performative (process of articulation) in language (Bhabha 1990: 3). Three French novels about the First an