A History of Modern French Literature Read online

  A History of Modern French Literature

  A History of Modern French Literature

  FROM THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY TO THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

  Edited by Christopher Prendergast

  Princeton University Press

  Princeton & Oxford

  Copyright © 2017 by Princeton University Press

  Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540

  In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TR

  press.princeton.edu

  All Rights Reserved

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Prendergast, Christopher, editor.

  Title: A history of modern French literature : from the sixteenth century to the twentieth century / edited by Christopher Prendergast.

  Description: Princeton, New Jersey : Princeton University Press, 2016. | Includes index.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016009876 | ISBN 9780691157726 (hardcover : alk. paper)

  Subjects: LCSH: French literature—History and criticism.

  Classification: LCC PQ103 .H57 2016 | DDC 840.9–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016009876

  British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

  This book has been composed in Janson Text LT Std

  Printed on acid-free paper. ∞

  Printed in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  CONTENTS

  List of Contributors, ix

  Introduction (1): Aims, Methods, Stories, 1

  CHRISTOPHER PRENDERGAST

  Introduction (2): The Frenchness of French Literature, 20

  DAVID COWARD

  Erasmus and the “First Renaissance” in France, 47

  EDWIN M. DUVAL

  Rabelais and the Low Road to Modernity, 71

  RAYMOND GEUSS

  Marguerite de Navarre: Renaissance Woman, 91

  WES WILLIAMS

  Ronsard: Poet Laureate, Public Intellectual, Cultural Creator, 113

  TIMOTHY J. REISS

  Du Bellay and La deffence et illustration de la langue françoyse, 137

  HASSAN MELEHY

  Montaigne: Philosophy before Philosophy, 155

  TIMOTHY HAMPTON

  Molière, Theater, and Modernity, 171

  CHRISTOPHER BRAIDER

  Racine, Phèdre, and the French Classical Stage, 190

  NICHOLAS PAIGE

  Lafayette: La Princesse de Clèves and the Conversational Culture of Seventeenth-Century Fiction, 212

  KATHERINE IBBETT

  From Moralists to Libertines, 229

  ERIC MÉCHOULAN

  Travel Narratives in the Seventeenth Century: La Fontaine and Cyrano de Bergerac, 250

  JUDITH SRIBNAI

  The Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns, 269

  LARRY F. NORMAN

  Voltaire’s Candide: Lessons of Enlightenment and the Search for Truth, 291

  NICHOLAS CRONK

  Disclosures of the Boudoir: The Novel in the Eighteenth Century, 312

  PIERRE SAINT-AMAND

  Women’s Voices in Enlightenment France, 330

  CATRIONA SETH

  Comedy in the Age of Reason, 351

  SUSAN MASLAN

  Diderot, Le neveu de Rameau, and the Figure of the Philosophe in Eighteenth-Century Paris, 371

  KATE E. TUNSTALL

  Rousseau’s First Person, 393

  JOANNA STALNAKER

  Realism, the Bildungsroman, and the Art of Self-Invention: Stendhal and Balzac, 414

  ALEKSANDAR STEVIĆ

  Hugo and Romantic Drama: The (K)night of the Red, 436

  SARAH ROCHEVILLE AND ETIENNE BEAULIEU

  Flaubert and Madame Bovary, 451

  PETER BROOKS

  Baudelaire, Verlaine, Rimbaud: Poetry, Consciousness, and Modernity, 470

  CLIVE SCOTT

  Mallarmé and Poetry: Stitching the Random, 495

  ROGER PEARSON

  Becoming Proust in Time, 514

  MICHAEL LUCEY

  Céline/Malraux: Politics and the Novel in the 1930s, 534

  STEVEN UNGAR

  Breton, Char, and Modern French Poetry, 554

  MARY ANN CAWS

  Césaire: Poetry and Politics, 575

  MARY GALLAGHER

  Sartre’s La Nausée and the Modern Novel, 595

  CHRISTOPHER PRENDERGAST

  Beckett’s French Contexts, 615

  JEAN-MICHEL RABATÉ

  Djebar and the Birth of “Francophone” Literature, 634

  NICHOLAS HARRISON

  Acknowledgments, 653

  Index, 655

  CONTRIBUTORS

  Etienne Beaulieu, Cégep de Drummondville, Canada

  Christopher Braider, University of Colorado–Boulder

  Peter Brooks, Princeton University

  Mary Ann Caws, City University of New York Graduate Center

  David Coward, University of Leeds

  Nicholas Cronk, University of Oxford

  Edwin M. Duval, Yale University

  Mary Gallagher, University College Dublin

  Raymond Geuss, Cambridge University

  Timothy Hampton, University of California–Berkeley

  Nicholas Harrison, King’s College London

  Katherine Ibbett, University College, London

  Michael Lucey, University of California–Berkeley

  Susan Maslan, University of California–Berkeley

  Eric Méchoulan, Université de Montréal

  Hassan Melehy, University of North Carolina

  Larry F. Norman, University of Chicago

  Nicholas Paige, University of California–Berkeley

  Roger Pearson, University of Oxford

  Christopher Prendergast, King’s College, Cambridge

  Jean-Michel Rabaté, University of Pennsylvania

  Timothy J. Reiss, New York University

  Sarah Rocheville, University of Sherbrooke, Canada

  Pierre Saint-Amand, Yale University

  Clive Scott, University of East Anglia

  Catriona Seth, University of Oxford

  Judith Sribnai, Université du Québec à Montréal

  Joanna Stalnaker, Columbia University

  Aleksandar Stević, King’s College, Cambridge

  Kate E. Tunstall, University of Oxford

  Steven Ungar, University of Iowa

  Wes Williams, University of Oxford

  Introduction (1)

  Aims, Methods, Stories

  CHRISTOPHER PRENDERGAST

  All the main terms of our title call for some clarification (“history,” “modern,” “French,” “literature”), and the introductory chapter that follows this one, by David Coward, is in part devoted to providing that. But, in explaining the basic aims of the book, it is also important to highlight what might otherwise go unnoticed, the normally anodyne indefinite article; it is in fact meant to do quite a lot of indicative work. The initial “a” has a dual purpose. It is designed, first, to avoid the imperiousness of the definite article and thus to mark the fact this is but a history, modestly taking its place as just one among many other English-language histories, with no claim whatsoever on being “definitive”; on the contrary, it is highly selective in its choice of authors and texts, and very specific in its mode of address. This in turn connects with a second purpose: the indefinite article is also meant to highlight a history that is primarily intended for a particular readership. In the sphere of scholarly publication, the general reader (or “common reader,” in the term made famous by Dr. Johnson in the ei
ghteenth century and Virginia Woolf in the twentieth) is often invoked, but less often actually or effectively addressed. We take the term seriously, while of course remaining cognizant of the fact that conditions of readership and reading have changed hugely since Virginia Woolf’s time, let alone Dr. Johnson’s. While we naturally hope the book will prove useful in the more specialized worlds of study inhabited by the student and the teacher, the readers we principally envision are those with an active but nonspecialist interest in French literature, whether read in the original or in translation, and on a spectrum from the sustained to the sporadic (one version of Woolf’s common reader is someone “guided” by “whatever odds or ends he can come by,” a nontrivial category when one bears in mind that a collection of Samuel Beckett texts goes under the title of Ends and Odds).

  This has various consequences for the book’s character as a history. The first concerns what it does not attempt: what is often referred to, unappetizingly, as “coverage,” the panoramic view that sweeps across centuries in the attempt to say something about everything. We too sweep across centuries (five of them), but more in the form of picking out selected “landmarks,” to resurrect the term used by Virginia Woolf’s contemporary, Lytton Strachey, in his Landmarks of French Literature, a book also written for the general reader, if from within the conditions and assumptions of another time and another world. One point of departure adopted for the direction of travel has been to work out from what is most likely to be familiar to our readership. There are dangers as well as advantages to this trajectory. The familiar will be for the most part what is historically closest, which in turn can color interests and expectations in ways that distort understanding of what is not close. One name for this is “presentism,” whereby we read history “backward,” approaching the past through the frame of the present or the more distant past through the frame of the recent past. In some respects, this is inevitable, a natural feature of the culture of reading, and in some cases it is even enabling as a check to imaginative inertia (what in his essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” T. S. Eliot described as the desirable practice of interpreting a past writer from a point of view that “will not find it preposterous that the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past”). Eliot’s contemporary, Paul Valéry famously claimed that a reader in 1912 taking pleasure in a work from 1612 is very largely a matter of chance, but one obvious source of the pleasure we take in the remoter past is viewing it through our own cultural spectacles (Valéry reading 1612 via his own historical location in 1912, for instance). The risk, however, is the loss of the historical sense as that which demands that we try to understand and appreciate the past (here the literary past) on its terms rather than our own, while remaining aware that we can never fully see the past from the point of view of the past. On the other hand, if the past is another country, it is not another planet, nor are its literary and other idioms, for us, an unintelligible babble. One of the implicit invitations of this book is for the reader to use the familiar as a steering device for journeys to places unknown or underexplored, while not confusing the ship’s wheel with the design of the ship itself or the nature of the places to which it takes us. Indeed the literature itself provides examples and models for just this approach, most notably the genre of travel writing, both documentary and fictional, from the Renaissance onward, a complex literary phenomenon at once freighted with the preconceptions (and prejudices) of the society in which it is produced, but also often urging its readers to try to see other cultures through other, indigenous, eyes (think Montaigne’s essay, “Des Cannibales” or Diderot’s Supplément au voyage de Bougainville).

  The balance of the familiar and the unfamiliar goes some way (but only some) to account for the content of this volume. All histories (including those that aim for “coverage”) are necessarily selective, but the principles governing our own inclusions, and hence, by necessary implication, the exclusions, need some further explaining. Where are Maurice Scève and Louise Labé, both important Renaissance poets, both also based in Lyons (and thus reflections of the fact that Paris was not, as became the case later, the only serious center of cultural life in the sixteenth century)? Where, for the nineteenth, is Nerval and, above all, the great wordsmith, Hugo (the poet; he is there in connection with nineteenth-century theater)? Or where indeed, for the twentieth, is Valéry? The list is indefinitely extendable; even a list of exclusions itself excludes. But the particular examples mentioned here are chosen to illustrate a specific and important issue for this history: the case of poetry. Access to the nature and history of the sound worlds of French verse, along with the character and evolution of its prosodic and rhythmic forms, is fundamental to understanding it as both poetry in general and French poetry in particular. But that is difficult, verging on impossible, without a degree of familiarity not only with French but also with French verse forms that we cannot reasonably assume on the part of most readers of this volume. This has heavily constrained the amount of space given over to poetry and determined a restriction of focus for the most part to what, historically speaking, are the two absolutely key moments or turning points.

  There is the sixteenth-century remodeling of poetry, under the influence of Petrarch (often posited as the first “modern” European poet) and the form of the Petrarchan sonnet. Edwin Duval’s contribution gives us some insight into the role of Clément Marot in the earlier chapter of this Renaissance story, while Hassan Melehy’s chapter sheds light on the later generation of “Pléiade” poets to which du Bellay belonged. The key figure, however, is Pierre de Ronsard, founder and leader of the Pléiade group. Timothy Reiss’s account of Ronsard’s multidimensional significance as poet and public intellectual includes the invention of a foundational prosody based on the use of the twelve-syllable alexandrine verse form later codified, naturalized, and perpetuated in a manner that was to dominate most of the subsequent history of French poetry. In fact, Ronsard’s own stance was marked by hesitation and fluctuation, given the image of the decasyllabic line as more fitting for the “heroic” register favored by the ruling elites. Furthermore, the novel uses to which the alexandrine was put by Ronsard in many ways reflects the exact opposite of the normative and hierarchical status this metrical form was to acquire; for Ronsard it was seen and used more as a binding, inclusive form, bringing together, in the very act of poetry, the natural, the human, and the divine in a spirit of “amity” beyond the contemporary experience of strife and civil war. It is, in short, a rich and complex story of shifting values and fluctuating practices.

  But where more extensive formal analysis of poetic language—and especially prosody—is concerned, the main focus here is directed to a moment more familiar by virtue of being closer to us in time, the nineteenth century, specifically the later nineteenth century and the constellation Baudelaire, Verlaine, Rimbaud, and Mallarmé. This is the moment of Mallarmé’s crise de vers, when the historical institution of French regular verse is, if not demolished (Mallarmé remained a staunch defender of the alexandrine even while recognizing that the days of its largely unquestioned hegemony were over), certainly challenged by the emergence of new forms developed to match new kinds of sensibility. Its most radical manifestations will be the prose poem and free verse, both of which will undergo further transformations in the twentieth century via Apollinaire, surrealism, and its aftermath (a glimpse of which is provided by Mary Ann Caws’s contribution on André Breton and René Char). The most extended engagements with the technical details of versification, prosody, syntax, typography, and page layout are in the chapters by Clive Scott and Roger Pearson. This is sometimes quite demanding, but the rewards are more than worth the effort of concentration required. There is also here an intentionally invoked line of continuity (Reiss highlights it) linking the modern period to early modern developments in the history of French poetry.

  More generally, the conversation about what’s in and what’s out can go on forever, and rightly
so (however explained and defended in any given case, it is simply impossible to avoid a whiff of the arbitrary, along with the difficulty of transcending mere personal preferences). The important thing in respect to this history of French literature is to avoid its conversation becoming another eruption of disputes over membership in the canon. This is not to suggest avoiding it, period. To the contrary, the issue remains real and pressing. In fact, it never goes away, and is indissolubly bound up with histories and relations of cultural power. On the other hand, discussion can all too readily congeal into empty sloganizing orchestrated by the dead hand of academic habit. The question for this particular volume is more what, for a specific purpose or audience, will best work by way of providing windows onto a history and historical understanding. That too is indefinitely debatable. Short of the comprehensive survey, which this is not and does not aspire to be, what will count as best serving those aims is something on which reasonable people can disagree. The list of inclusions will nevertheless to a very large extent look like a roll call of the usual canonical suspects, and, leaving to one side futile infighting over promotions and demotions, this does raise some basic questions of approach and method regarding what this history purports to be.

  A limited but useful distinction is sometimes drawn between “history of literature” and “literary history.” In its most developed form, this is a long story, with a number of theoretical complications that don’t belong here. A compacted version would describe history of literature as essentially processional, rather like the “kings and queens” model of history, with the great works paraded in regal succession—grand, colorful, arresting, but a parade lacking in historical “depth.” Literary history, on the other hand, is the child of a developing historical consciousness in Europe from the Enlightenment through Romanticism to positivism, one that is increasingly attuned to cultural relativities, deploys the methods of philological inquiry to reconstruct the past, and finally emerges as a fully constituted discipline. In France, this kind of scholarly inquiry began with the archival compilations of the Benedictines of Saint Maur in the eighteenth century, and then in the nineteenth century, via the critical journalism of Sainte-Beuve, eventually penetrated the university as a professional academic pursuit (the key figure in this connection was Gustave Lanson). The overarching category to emerge from these developments and that came to guide the literary-historical enterprise is “context,” the social and cultural settings in and from which literary works are produced, the minor as well as the major. Indeed, in the emergence, and then later the explicit formulation, of the new discipline, the “minor,” as barometer of a “context” comes to assume for literary-historical purposes a major role. A hierarchy of value is, if not abolished outright (that is a move that will be attempted much later, with only partial success), partly flattened toward the horizontal plane in order to get a sense of broader swathes of the historical time of “literature.”