ABSTRACT
Insofar as the aim of this book has been, in Bourdieu’s words, the presentation and analysis of ‘[les] conditions sociales de la production et de la réception de l’œuvre d’art’ (‘the social conditions of the production and reception of a work of art’),1 it is already at an end. Whilst the initial impetus for its writing-and no doubt for most readers’ decision to buy it or borrow it from a library-was the popularity of Suite française in 2004, its project has been to situate Némirovsky’s œuvre in relation to the inter-war French literary fi eld which shaped it and which it helped to shape. Though inevitably received in our own time as an Occupation writer, and as a Holocaust writer, Némirovsky was fi rst and foremost a French novelist of the inter-war period, and it is only through an appreciation of the literary positions available to her in the 1920s and 1930s that we can fully understand her texts. Via the analyses I have presented in this book of the creation of Némirovsky’s literary reputation, of her literary beginnings, and of the Russian, Jewish, and French themes in her writing I have sought to investigate the relationships between the literary fi eld of inter-war France, Némirovsky’s trajectory though it, and the novels which resulted from her particular navigation of the literary environment. For Bourdieu, the space of possibilities constitutes ‘ce par quoi tout producteur culturel est irrémédiablement situé et daté en tant qu’il participe de la même problématique que l’ensemble de ses contemporains (au sens sociologique)’ [emphasis in original] (‘this is undoubtedly how any cultural producer is irremediably placed and dated in so far as he or she participates in the same problematic as the ensemble of his or her contemporaries (in the sociological sense)’).2 This does not mean of course that no writer can be read out of their time, nor indeed that we should not seek to establish relationships between writers across temporal divisions. As Bourdieu goes on to say, whilst Diderot evidently did not know anything about the nouveau roman, Jacques le fataliste might nonetheless be said to prefi gure Robbe-Grillet. Conversely, Némirovsky’s irreparable connection to the literary fi eld of the 1930s does not mean that she cannot be read in our own time. Of course it is both important and valuable to recognise Némirovsky’s identity as an Occupation writer, as a Holocaust writer, and as a literary success of the twenty-fi rst century. But we must not thereby
seek to repair, perhaps to put a patch over, her inter-war identity. We must understand that such readings are retrospective, and whilst this does not invalidate them per se, if we are to avoid misinterpretation, we must respect two crucial facts of chronology: fi rstly, that Némirovsky’s literary identity was defi ned to a signifi cant extent by the cultural environment of the 1920s and 1930s, and secondly, that her literary identity as an Occupation writer is limited to the period 1940-1942. Our discussion of Némirovsky would of course be incomplete without some consideration of her current reputation. Yet to read Suite française now is to read it out of its own time, or rather, it is to read it in a new time. This is a time when popular French literary fi ction of the 1930s is little known, when our understanding of the French experience of the Occupation is coloured by our knowledge of various forms of resistance largely dating from 1942-1944, and when the memorialisation of the Holocaust obeys its own logic in relation to current cultural and social imperatives.
