A History of Modern French Literature Read online

  Our venture might, on the face of it, look as if it conforms to the processional template of history of literature (this is, after all, the expression used in the book’s title) rather than to that of the context-reconstructing endeavors of literary history. In reality, however, it is a hybrid mix of the two, using the first (the great works) as a lever for entry into a variety of historically framed contextual worlds. The resurrection of Lytton Strachey’s term “landmarks” acquires its proper force in relation to this hybrid blend: the “mark” as mark of importance or distinction, designating membership of a canon, but also “mark” as that which marks the spot, the historical spot, landmarks as signposts for a historical mapping. To this end, we also routinely, though not exclusively, deploy a particular method: focus on a single author and even a single work, reading out from text to context and then back again, in a series of mutually informing feedback loops within which the known (and often much-loved) texts are allowed to “breathe” a history. This does not, however, entail a dogmatic commitment to the position whereby “close reading” is the only road or the royal road to literary-historical understanding. It merely reflects the pragmatic view that this method works well for the intended audience. In addition, what here counts as a context is flexible. In some cases, it is strictly literary, and often generic in focus. Thus, the account of Racine’s Phèdre takes us to some of the more general features of tragedy in the early modern period. The chapter on Voltaire’s Candide runs the discussion of its hero’s adventures and misadventures into the legacy of picaresque narrative and the history of eighteenth-century imaginative travel writing. The detailed analysis of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary is set in the context of ideas about literary “realism” and related developments in the history of the nineteenth-century novel, with a side glance at nineteenth-century painting. Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu is similarly contextualized in a surrounding literary world (including Gide and Colette). “Context,” however, can also be taken in nonliterary senses: for example, the Wars of Religion in connection with Rabelais and Montaigne; modern urban history in connection with Baudelaire; the economic and political crises of the 1930s in relation to Malraux and Céline.

  I have already used the word “glimpse” in connection with one of the contributions. The term could be generalized to encompass the whole book as a collection of glimpses, angled and partial snapshots (which, with variations of scale, is all history can ever be). On the other hand, it is not just an assortment of self-framing windows onto the French literary-historical world. Its unfolding describes, if in patchwork and fragmentary form, the arc of a story centered on the nexus of language, nation, and modernity. David Coward outlines this story in terms of “the idea of a national literary culture” built on and in turn reinforcing notions of “Frenchness.” The story begins in the Renaissance, crucially with du Bellay’s “defense” of a new form of linguistic self-consciousness and his affirmation of the literary prospects for French as a national language and as a modern literary language on a par with other languages both modern and ancient. The seventeenth century was to confer both political legitimacy and institutional authority on this new self-confidence, with Richelieu’s creation of the Académie française and then more broadly under Louis XIV in the context of the developing process of centralized state formation initiated in the sixteenth century by François I and Henri IV. It was also the moment when—notwithstanding the continuing power of the Church, the sonorously commanding tones of Bossuet’s orations, or the more radical defense of faith by the members of the Port-Royal group—the practices of literature and the expectations of the public came to embody a more distinctly “modern” look by virtue of a turn toward more secular interests: in science and philosophy; in moral psychology; in drama, both tragedy and comedy; and in the novel, with the whole notionally presided over by the rationally administering monarch and the worldly codes and manners of court and salon, even when the latter were ruthlessly dissected and exposed, whether in the comedies of Molière or the aphorisms of La Rochefoucauld.

  The modernizing impulse generated a turbulent dynamic of tradition and innovation, characterized by public disputes over governing values, norms, and models. With du Bellay’s polemic, we enter the age of the Quarrel, and its later offshoot, the Manifesto. To be sure, literary quarreling was not unknown in the Middle Ages, the most prominent the “querelle du Roman de la Rose,” with Christine de Pizan in the leading role as critic of the terms for the representation of women (more precisely “ladies”) in the later medieval romance. The paradigm of the modern quarrel was the seventeenth-century Querelle des anciens et des modernes, not least because of the institutional setting in which it was launched (the presentation on January 27, 1687, by the arch-modern, Charles Perrault of Le siècle de Louis le Grand, in the hallowed precincts of the Académie française). We may now see these disputes as self-advertising, transient blips on the surface of culture, the place where “public” discourse becomes mere publicity. But the quarrel in fact ran for decades, and if we have included a whole chapter on it, this is because the basic thrust of the case made by the Moderns (namely, that the modern equals the new) was to be the hallmark of all subsequent interventions of this type, the most noteworthy of which—also getting a chapter to itself—was the famous first night of Hugo’s play, Hernani, in 1830. Beneath the stridency, the bitterness, and the misunderstandings (paradoxically none were more “modern” than the Ancients, Boileau, and Racine), the importance of the quarrel consists in its being an index of an emergent literary self-consciousness. It was no wonder that there were intense debates and acute differences over how “literature” was to be defined and who was to take ownership of the definition. What was fundamentally at stake was the significance of literature as part of a modern national patrimony, what later would be viewed and fought over as the canon of the “national classics” (“our classic authors,” as Voltaire would put it).

  The attempt to build and secure the treasure house of the national classic would run and run, well into the nineteenth century, largely under the banner of “classicism,” an ideology in which the “classic” (as timeless great work) and “classical” as a set of literary and cultural values associated with the seventeenth century became fused in the rearguard enterprise of making historical time stand still or even go backward. There was however another, and altogether more influential, strain of literary self-consciousness underlying the polemical clash of opinion, one that pulled literature away from institutionalized centers of power, patronage, and control toward an ever greater sense of its own autonomy. This was partly a consequence of professionalization. In the seventeenth century, the idea of the professional literary “career” (as against the earlier image of the “amateur” associated in particular with Montaigne) was largely anchored in and governed by institutional settings. It would not, however, be long before being a professional was about the writer coming to operate more in the commercial networks of a modern market society, beginning in the publishers’ offices and coffeehouses of the eighteenth century and accelerating with the invention of new technologies of paper manufacture and printing, new outlets of distribution, and a huge expansion of the reading public. David Coward describes several of these developments in some detail. Their great nineteenth-century chronicler and diagnostician would be Balzac, above all in his novel Illusions perdues (one of the works discussed in the chapter on Stendhal and Balzac). But there was also another type of separation, geared less to moneymaking than to opposition, the writer as rebel and outsider. In the eighteenth century, Voltaire, master of the marketplace, was also the exile on the run from the authorities, as close as possible to the Swiss border in Ferney. After his death, he was belatedly folded back into the embrace of state and nation with the transfer of his remains to the Panthéon in 1791, his public funeral a statement on a grand scale, a spectacle repeated almost a century later with the funeral procession of that other exile from the reach of power, Victor Hugo (also a skillful
player in the literary marketplace, especially the heavily commercialized theater).

  Separation also meant what subsequently came to be understood as “alienation.” Rousseau is a key figure, his “solitary walker” and styles of first-personal meditation staging a new relation of non-belonging between interiority, self, and society; Beaumarchais’s Figaro speaks (out) in a manner virtually unthinkable in earlier periods; Diderot’s vagabond-beggar lives at the edge in more ways than one; the ultimate outsider, the incandescent Marquis de Sade, travels a trajectory from incarceration in the Bastille to confinement in the Charenton asylum. In the nineteenth century, Stendhal would use his heroes and their narratives to probe, expose, ironize, and finally reject accommodation with the social world. Baudelaire, Verlaine, and Rimbaud would use the medium of verse and prose poetry to introduce new kinds of edge, at the very margin of society (associated with the world of the Bohème, in reality a very different thing from its sentimental representations) and a new experience of edginess, captured in the nervous rhythms of a vagabond consciousness never anywhere at home. It would all come to a head as the militancy that characterizes the age of the Manifesto comes into outright conflict with the state, most dramatically in two famous nineteenth-century literary trials, of Baudelaire’s Les fleurs du mal and Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, both in 1857, on charges variously relating to obscenity, blasphemy, and insult to public decency. There had been trials aplenty in the eighteenth century—though more commonly imprisonment without trial—but these reflected more contests of belief, ideology, and opinion. With the nineteenth-century trials it was the very idea of “literature” and its proper tasks that was at stake. In his correspondence, Flaubert repeatedly states his loathing of the nineteenth century (Baudelaire called it the Age of the Undertaker), opposing to it an insistence on the unconditional autonomy of literature. Whence his dream of the “book about nothing,” the novel as pure aesthetic artifact held together only by the force of “style” and disaffiliated from both the demands of the marketplace and the imperatives of institutional belonging; literary art was in the process of becoming Art, self-conscious in the sense of being more and more about itself and hence internally self-supporting (the slogan “art for art’s sake” captured something of the spirit of this development).

  These challenges to both state and market in their exercise of cultural power had another effect, increasingly felt in the twentieth century: ever-increasing critical pressure on the idea of literature as the reflection of a self-sealing national identity and the expression of a unique and distinctive “Frenchness,” culminating (for now) in the twenty-first century with yet another manifesto, resurrecting Goethe’s cosmopolitan idea of Weltliteratur for the age of globalization—“pour une littérature-monde en français” [for a world literature in French], published in Le Monde in 2007. On the other hand, apart from the more self-absorbed periods of nation-state building buttressed by notions of France as the cultural center of Europe and of French as a lingua franca, there has nearly always been an international dimension to the history of French literature from the Renaissance onward (not the least irony here is the fact that this history begins with a figure—Erasmus—who was not French). If du Bellay’s literary nationalism is a pitch for the singularity of French, his argument for the cultivation of a national language and the growth of a national literature paradoxically required an international soil: France was playing catch-up, borrowing and assimilating from the ancients, but also from modern Italian (above all the exemplary “modern” European poet, Petrarch). The thought was that, initially inferior, French would learn from other languages and literary cultures, but through processes of ingestion and osmosis would emerge the other side as the superior language of Europe. But this also points to something more general about the French sixteenth century. It was the most seriously multilingual of the European literary Renaissances, from Marguerite de Navarre’s creative interaction with Boccaccio to Rabelais’s “polyglossia” and riotous play with idiolects of French along with multiple other languages, both real and invented.

  The seventeenth century is often seen, in these terms, as a hiatus, self-occupied with the projection of French monarchical aura and the creation of grand national-cultural institutions. But, while true to a very great extent, this is to accept the terms of the projection itself, often just kingly propaganda. In reality, the internationalist dimension of French literary and intellectual culture remained alive and well, for example, in the epistolary circuits of the Republic of Letters and the influence of both Italian and Spanish sources on the theatre (though not English ones). It is an intriguing exercise in counterfactual literary history (of which more later) to reflect on what might have been the case if Shakespeare had been read and absorbed in the seventeenth century. The “discovery” of Shakespeare had to await the eighteenth century, followed by his consecration as the Master by the nineteenth-century Romantics. The Enlightenment more generally was to develop a pronounced obsession with things English (Voltaire’s Lettres sur les Anglais will imply that England is everything that France is not but should be). It also expands hugely the genre of travel writing, often positing the “Other” as both reference and device in a running campaign of opposition to authority. This in turn fed into Romantic cosmopolitanism, an imaginative and actual border-crossing phenomenon on multiple axes from Europe to the Near East, North Africa, and North America, with, in the European context, a strong focus on Germany (Mme de Staël’s De l’Allemagne is a key text). This was a literary and cultural opening to the world with another quarrel as its background, mobilized to sustain the challenge of the Romantics to an increasingly threadbare conservative nationalism based on a claim to the eternal validity of a French seventeenth-century “classicism” at once idealized and petrified (Sainte-Beuve memorably described the work of one of its nineteenth-century spokesmen as a form of “transcendental chauvinism”). Resistance thus there was, and there would be more to come, especially when in the late nineteenth century nationalism moved further to the right. These were dangerously regressive forces, exploding into public life and discourse around the Dreyfus affair, with a literary politics that glorified a “classical” past alongside a politics of ethnicity, blood, and soil as an attempted check to the “rootless” cosmopolitanism of modernity (“cosmopolitan” had already become a code word in racist discourse).

  Boundary crossing was, however, unstoppable, creating internal fragmentation and placing great strain on any assumption of a stable relation between nation, state, and literature, and in particular the idea of a coherent and transmissible national literary culture (what Sainte-Beuve called the Tradition). In the late nineteenth century into the twentieth, this was to touch the very cornerstone of the tradition, the language itself. Mallarmé’s crise de vers is a key turning point—a “landmark” if ever there were one—and his own poetry, in both verse and prose, actively estranges language from the known and the predictable comforts of easy consumption. His was a practice of language designed to unsettle, as it notably did, many of the writers and intellectuals who would cluster around Action française and its ultranationalist offshoots, clinging desperately to fictions of seventeenth-century political and cultural order to ward off the threats of both “strangeness” and “foreignness”: for Charles Maurras, Mallarmé was “un-French,” while later Robert Brasillach accused him of having acted “against the French language.” Proust’s narrator in A la recherche du temps perdu remarks that “each great artist is the citizen of an unknown homeland which even he has forgotten,” and Proust himself, the prose writer whose work is deeply soaked in the history of French prose from the seventeenth century, claimed that “beautiful books are written in a kind of foreign language.” (Sydney Schiff, Proust’s friend and the translator of the last volume of the Recherche, described Proust’s style as “exotic and anti-classical,” one that it is “difficult to believe that any pure-bred Frenchman could have evolved.”) Breton and the surrealists took the modernist project o
f “making it strange” into an encounter of the language of poetry with the oneiric worlds of the unconscious, a place where the fabled French qualities of “clarity and “reason” no longer had purchase. From an entirely different direction, Céline (who hated Proust) launched an assault on the institution of “literary” writing by means of a radical use of demotic, creating in effect a style as anti-style. Camus, creator of the best-known “outsider” figure in twentieth-century French literature (along with the existentially dislocated hero of Sartre’s La nausée) also captures the “stranger” in the term of his title, L’étranger, injecting into the tradition of first-personal writing the estranging force of a kind of stylistic blankness (the “zero degree” style made famous by the critic-theoretician, Roland Barthes, which would become associated with the cool and flat tones of the nouveau roman).

  Camus’s title also carries a third meaning, the étranger as foreigner, the Frenchman situated—in terms that have proved endlessly controversial—on the shores of colonial North Africa. The opening of French literature, that is, of literature in French, to forms of foreignness, a locus beyond France and the nation-bound definitions and understandings of “Frenchness,” is where the story ends, in a terminus reflected through the work and example of three figures. There is the Irishman, Samuel Beckett, migrating inward to Paris from Dublin and into French from English (while also often acting as his own translator). Beckett interrogates and recasts the basic forms of both drama and novel around “where now?”—as questions about writing itself (an interrogation also at work in the experimental moves of the French novel from Maurice Blanchot to Alain Robbe-Grillet). As an Irishman writing in French, Beckett’s work also raises issues to do with the “identity” of (French) literature as well as other kinds of identity, existential and cultural. These too are issues for “francophone” culture beyond the shores of France itself, here represented by two key moments and two key writers: in the first instance, the writings of Aimé Césaire and their engagement with questions of colonialism, native land, and literary heritage; in the second, the novels of Assia Djebar as a window onto so-called “postcolonial” writing from the perspective of an Algerian woman whose family had roots in both Arab and Berber cultures. “Francophone” appears here within quotation marks for all the reasons stated and explored in the chapters on both Césaire and Djebar. A shorthand for this might be the curiously awkward terms (highlighted by Harrison) of Pierre-Jean Rémy’s welcoming address on Djebar’s admission to that august institution where in many ways much of the story of the relation between “literature” and “nation” begins—the Académie française.