{"id":290376,"date":"2012-05-16T15:00:00","date_gmt":"2012-05-16T15:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wdev.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent-dev\/2012\/05\/16\/my-little-war\/"},"modified":"2018-04-16T16:11:38","modified_gmt":"2018-04-16T16:11:38","slug":"my-little-war","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2012\/05\/16\/my-little-war\/","title":{"rendered":"My Little War"},"content":{"rendered":"

The period between Flemish author Louis Paul Boon\u2019s birth in 1912 and the publication of his post-modern masterpiece Mijn kleine oorlog<\/em> (My Little War<\/em>) in 1947 saw Belgium ravaged by some of the worst wartime carnage that the European continent had experienced in centuries. Even as Hitler\u2019s advancing wehrmacht<\/em> sent 25% of the Belgian population fleeing over the French border, memories remained fresh of the brutal German occupation of 1914\u2014including its defining atrocity, the sacking of Leuven, during which the city\u2019s library of 300,000 medieval books was burned and the entire populace expelled. So to post-war Flemish readers, Boon\u2019s peculiarly brilliant novel appeared in the wake<\/em> of two large wars, challenging a literary orthodoxy that tried to make sense of these conflagrations.<\/p>\n

Mijn kleine oorlog<\/em> is decidedly not an anti-war novel\u2014at least, not in the sense of Remarque\u2019s All Quiet on the Western Front<\/em> or Zweig\u2019s The Case of Sergeant Grischa<\/em> or Rolland\u2019s Cl\u00e9rambault<\/em>, the sort of predecessors to which Boon is likely referring to when he writes to question the archetypal \u201cgreat writer\u201d who rises up to present the world with \u201chis Book About the Great War\u2014with capital letters.\u201d Instead, the volume might be described as an anti<\/i>-anti-war novel . . . if it even is a novel at all. A better description yet might be an anti<\/i>-anti-war sketchbook. For what Boon has done in thirty-three brief vignettes is collect snippets of overheard conversations, press reports, unsubstantiated rumors and \u201cpersonal\u201d experiences to generate a montage of the highly subjective experience of one ordinary laborer-turned-POW<\/span>-turned-writer during the Second World War. Yet even the volume\u2019s subjectively is overtly orchestrated; this is not Virginia Woolf or James Joyce trying to capture the subtle workings of the human mind, but rather an author reminding the reader that he is feigning to do so. In one noteworthy example, after referring to multiple characters as \u201cwhat\u2019s-his-name\u201d and \u201cwhat\u2019s-her-name,\u201d Boon suddenly pretends to have recalled one of their names: \u201cWhat\u2019s her name came too,\u201d he writes. \u201cWhat was her name again the one who was hit in the head with something the other day and died, who used to get so furious and denounce us as pro-German when we said the war would last five years . . . it was Mrs. Lammens!\u201d Of course, the reader recognizes that Boon has not achieved this recollection in the moment. Rather, Boon uses this device to mock his modernist forebears and to remind the reader of his own pretenses.<\/p>\n

In Boon\u2019s fictional universe, which occupies only a few small streets in a Belgian village, everything is true because nothing is true. For instance, Boon describes a fellow soldier pausing during a retreat through an abandoned dairy, with German gunners close on his heels, to rescue a goldfish from an overturned bowl. When Boon questions this \u201cwhat\u2019s-his-name,\u201d the infantryman replies, \u201cImagine you lived in that dairy, and got back after you\u2019d run away, wouldn\u2019t you be glad to see that your goldfish were still alive? Well?\u201d Lest we read too much into this tale of minor heroism, several sentences later, Boon announces: \u201cActually, I made those goldfish up, that\u2019s what stories are for.\u201d He then begins his next vignette with the caveat: \u201cBut this isn\u2019t made up . . .\u201d Who can really say? For an author who writes, \u201cthere\u2019s never any need to cook up any fantasy; the truth is fantastic enough,\u201d no moment in Mijn kleine oorlog<\/em> is ever definitively truth or definitively fantasy. Even the identification of the narrator, Boontje, with the author remains intentionally unclear. Boon writes that \u201cIf I\u2019ve usually said \u2018I\u2019 in this book, it was just a way of presenting things, what I really meant was \u2018you\u2019\u2014you, you poor man, exploited, scorned, spat upon, pacified with empty promises, who didn\u2019t have the courage to stand up for yourself . . .\u201d In the current age of Thomas Pynchon and \u201ctruthiness,\u201d we may take this approach for granted. To Boon\u2019s Flemish audience of 1947, blurring the lines between Truth and fiction in this speciously cavalier manner may have touched too close to home, and initial sales were disappointing. After all, as depicted by Boon, many Flemings played both sides during the occupation; distinguish the heroes of the Belgian Resistance from the collaborators and Black Shirts remains an unfinished process to this day.<\/p>\n

Critic Annie van den Oever has catalogued Boon\u2019s early influences, most notably Franz Kafka and the Femish poet and nationalist Paul van Ostaijen. According to van den Oever, Boon \u201csaw himself as a link in a chain\u201d of what she terms the \u201cgrotesque literary tradition\u201d\u2014those early twentieth century writers who broke open \u201cthe traditionally monologic novel.\u201d Thanks to Anne Visser and the Dalkey Archive, we have a translation of Annie van den Oever\u2019s seminal 2007 biography of Boon, Het leven zelf<\/em> (Life Itself<\/em>), which holds forth the promise of revealing this link to English-speaking audiences. Paul Vincent\u2019s translation, which follows the more popular Dutch second edition, is as clear and funny and nuanced as the original, and does an impressive job of conveying many of the text\u2019s linguistic jokes and puns into English. <\/p>\n

Despite its complex literary agenda\u2014or possibly on account of it\u2014My Little War<\/i> also stands out as a deeply moving, often unsettling work of fiction. Boon clearly recognizes that an author cannot challenge his readers\u2019 ideas unless he also engages their emotions. His motley crew of what\u2019s-his-names, including \u201cthe very good and very amusing and very ugly Albertine Spaens\u201d and the cigar-smoking turncoat shoe manufacturer Swaem and the tragic Canadian girl with a harelip, are drawn with such precision that one feels one can recognize one\u2019s own acquaintances in his depictions. In fact, Boon reflects near the end of the volume, \u201cThere are 36 people who think they\u2019re What\u2019s-his-name, and eleven gentlemen who give this particular writer angry looks whenever they walk by because they recognize themselves in Mr. Swaem\u2014although he had only a symbolic Mr. Swaem in mind.\u201d There lies the magic of Boon\u2019s technique: His falsehoods are more convincing than the truths of traditional fiction.<\/p>\n

In a section entitled \u201cSelf-Defense,\u201d Boon muses: \u201cI\u2019d like to suggest to my publisher that he set up an \u2018Everyone Write their Own Little War\u2019 contest\u2014\u201cFirst prize a pipe!\u201d (Note the allusion to Magritte\u2019s La trahison des images.<\/em>) To a significant degree, we now live in that world today: Anyone can\u2014and many authors do\u2014write their \u201cown little war\u201d narratives for the Internet. One can easily imagine Boon looking down upon us, smoking his own pipe and grinning.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The period between Flemish author Louis Paul Boon\u2019s birth in 1912 and the publication of his post-modern masterpiece Mijn kleine oorlog (My Little War) in 1947 saw Belgium ravaged by some of the worst wartime carnage that the European continent had experienced in centuries. Even as Hitler\u2019s advancing wehrmacht sent 25% of the Belgian population […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":292,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67486],"tags":[17496,5256,46896,29756,29746,29766],"class_list":["post-290376","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","tag-dalkey-archive-press","tag-dutch-literature","tag-jacob-appel","tag-louis-paul-boon","tag-my-little-war","tag-paul-vincent"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/290376","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/292"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=290376"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/290376\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":341276,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/290376\/revisions\/341276"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=290376"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=290376"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=290376"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}