HHhH
July 2012
In September 1945, just a few months after Hitler’s Third Reich was finally crushed out of existence, the astrophysicist Fred Hoyle went to the movies with a couple of mathematician mates in Cambridge. They watched a horror film called Dead of Night which has the creepy narrative quirk of ending exactly as it begins, so in theory never really ends. This seeded an idea in Hoyle: that the theory of the single origin of the universe – which Hoyle himself later named the Big Bang – might just be relying a little too heavily on the seductions of a very old story of beginnings. ‘It is deep within the psyche of most scientists,’ Hoyle said some years later, ‘to believe in the first page of Genesis.’ Hoyle and his colleagues went on to wonder whether the universe might not have something of the cyclical structure they’d seen in the film and came up with the Steady State theory.
Of course in using Dead of Night as a model, Hoyle only managed to replace one story with another to order his data. And while it turned out that the Steady State theory was eventually sidelined, Hoyle did give voice to the circular question most writers – whether they’re writing science, journalism, memoir or fiction – agonise over daily: does story shape reality or does reality shape story?
Today, in the age of big data, data journalism and the Dawkins-led scepticism of anything that even smells like the old obfuscations of mythological story, the pendulum seems to have swung toward a preference for the latter. Perhaps reality has no shape after all.
So what’s a lowly historical novelist like Laurent Binet to do then with his obsessive need to tell to the story of the famous Czech resistance plot, coordinated from London, to assassinate Hitler’s ‘Butcher of Prague’, Reinhard Heydrich? He writes a novel that is a novel only in the very loosest sense of the word.
HHhH (which stands for Himmler’s Hirn heisst Heydrich – the joke that ‘Himmler’s Brain is called Heydrich’) focuses on the tension between fabrication and reality and plays out a dual narrative. In one he gives an account of one data set – the fictions, historical records, museums, and documentary films – about the people and events of Operation Anthropoid and its awful aftermath. In the other he presents, perhaps even fabricates, his own overbearing self-consciousness about that account that at times results in the paralysis of storytelling.
Binet admits out loud that where he cannot find the objective truth in the sources he has fabricated events and details. He corrects himself when he discovers his mistakes. He frets over the possibility that he is wrong about the colour of Heydrich’s car, worries about anachronism and reproduces, almost tediously, what seem to be his own notes. What he rues most is that he might being belittling other ‘less important’ players in the story: ‘[F]or you to remember them I would have to turn them into characters’.
In the absence of an all-seeing eye, of an omnipresent time machine that would allow a total understanding of the assassination of Heydrich and it repercussions, Binet has written the only honest thing left to him: his own mediation of the available data. Perhaps the only way to really tell a story anymore, to go back to the beginning, to find ourselves as we started, calling on the invented muse to teach us how to say what has happened and dive on in knowing it will be wrong.
David Sornig