From Meurtres pour memoire to Missak: Literature and historiography in dialogue

Didier Daeninckx has devoted many novels to the history and memory of the Occupation. This article explores the relationship between his fiction and historiographical frameworks with reference to Meurtres pour memoire, contrasted with Missak published 25 years later. After discussion of 1980s historiography of the Occupation and the Algerian War, it looks particularly at narrative structure and the thematics of order (both obedience and orderly documentation), seeking to establish the differences in the ways these two novels historicise the past, and the historiographical differences in their approach to guilt, knowledge and interpretation.