Horror and Silence: on Pierre Cange in Vercors’ Fiction

Abstract

Vercors, who achieved fame thanks to his first novel, Le silence de la mer, published undercover in 1942, makes silence one of the main themes in his work. Silence, which is the paradoxical expression of what Vercors calls “la qualité d’homme”, appears in his work according to two ma-jor categories: on the one hand the proud and resilient silence of the protagonist of Silence de la mer or of Arnaud, the main character of the short story Le démenti, who loses his life for having maintained an ob-stinate silence in the hands of his torturers; on the other hand, the guilty and desperate shameful silence of those who had lost their own humanity when faced with the horror of the camps or had hoped to save their lives by collaborating with the enemy. This paper will examine three of Vercors’ texts, Les armes de la nuit (1946), La puissance du jour (1951) and Le tigre d’Anvers (1986), which have Pierre Cange as protagonist, a member of the Resistance, deported, who through his own experience is faced with the fundamental theme of silence.