Book Review: Vuillard, Order of the Day

 

Éric Vuillard. The Order of the Day, trans. Mark Polizzetti. New York: Other Press, 2018. pp. 84 ;  and London: Picador Press, 2018. pp. 129.

Éric Vuillart’s L’ordre du jour (Arles: Actes Sud, 2017) won the Prix Goncourt, France’s premier literary award, and has been praised again and again in its many translations. But, one may ask, to what genre does it belong, aside from the amorphous term novel, which by now means any work of fiction? Some say a récit, a kind of French mixture of brief narrative and essay, virtually a prose poem. Others see it a kind of sequence of brief impressionistic statements, with some historical facts, a few imaginary conversations and a meditation on “atmosphere” or “mood”.

It might also be seen as a mild Horatian satire (conversational and corrective) with touches of Lucanic satura (a mixture of incompatible elements, fragmented, farcical and mocking), with the Nazi bombast reduced to hot air, the aggressive poses of the military machine built up in defiance of the Versailles Treaty reduced to a comic opera series of breakdowns, confusion and internal misunderstandings, and the whole show of Anschluss stripped of its popularity and efficiency—but not of its anti-Jewish violence and public humiliations.

From the opening scene of German industrialists huffing and puffing their way up the steep stairs for a meeting with the newly-elected Nazi elite, on their way to taking power if only they could garner enough contributions from the these magnates, who are themselves  seen as rather ignorant snobs fearful of a Communist take-over of the Weimar Republic, all the way to another gathering of these captains of industry in the  idst of the war, now reduced to babbling old fools, who barely realize how much they have been bamboozled and manipulated into supporting a vicious thugocracy worse than anything they had imagined from the Soviet Union, and then, like old man Krupp, seeing visions of the enslaved, the dehumanized and the murdered Jews they worked to death in their factories.

If the restless Austrian mobs waiting their saviour and getting bored to tears by the failure of the Wehrmacht to roll into Vienna, the tanks and trucks of the German machine breaking down and losing their way, with their charismatic Leader seen through the fog of propaganda and anti-Semitism as something other than the bumbling idiot he was, the western nations, unable to rouse themselves from moral laxity and diplomatic stupidity, never realize until it is too late what a monster they have allowed to rise up in their midst. Meanwhile, the leaders of France, Britain, America, the whole lot of them, failed to come up to the basic standards of civilization and diplomacy, let alone common decency.

Published in 2017 and thus probably written a year or two before that, Vuillard’s short “novel” has an uncanny way of seeing the lies, conspiracy theories and duped millions who still in 2021 believe in Donald J. Trump. The words vomited out of Nazi mouths and spewed by their apologists in the 1930s and 1940s also come awfully close to those spouted forth by “your favorite president”, the calm genius” who believes in his own intuition rather than science, history or rationality, and the man who mesmerizes otherwise normal people into believing he is the only possible leader and saviour of the United States.

The whole pack of buffoons, then as now, and on either side, not only make a sorry picture of the grotesque and the preposterous, but the Fascist beasts perhaps could have been stopped, if only someone with authority and integrity had stood up with enough gumption and presence of mind to expose their idiocy. Comedians like Charlie Chaplin tried it in “The Great Dictator” as he spoofed Adenoid Hinkler, and before him the Three Stooges (Moe, Larry and Curly) in their 1940s knock-about farce “You Nazty Spy!" It was possible. In the 1950s Max Fergusson used his role as radio host on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation to knock the wind out of Joe McCarthy and his ridiculously named House Un-American Affairs Committee. Later, Walt Kelley’s American newspaper cartoon strip “Pogo” made an attempt, too, especially with his tagline, “We have met the enemy and he is us.” The trouble, alas, is that the nasties don’t have a sense of humour, and the self-proclaimed good guys are, well, they are too smugly self-righteous.