The entire history illustrated in this volume by a sequence of “landmarks” is thus framed in a very precise way: it begins (in the Renaissance) with a strong focus on the formation of a “national” literary consciousness but ends with its dispersal into a much wider arena in the age when the category of “nation” starts to crack and dissolve. It is a compelling narrative that, like all linear stories of this type, should carry some provisos. It is, quite simply, too neat. A first caveat concerns the temporal framing of the narrative, what’s called “periodizaiton” and its basic unit of division and measurement—the century (a topic also touched on by David Coward). Ours is arranged as a succession of five centuries in the sense of each as the nicely rounded number of one hundred years. This notionally helpful, because tidy, division of historical time has rarely worked to anyone’s satisfaction other than the purveyors of certain kinds of textbooks. Thus we have the “long” sixteenth century and the “short” twentieth century to accommodate realities and interpretations that overflow or fall short of the magical round number. Even more important is the fact that the “century” as we understand it is itself a historical invention, late in that other invention, “millennial” time (it was not until the latter part of the second millennium that “century” came to mean one hundred years). In Shakespeare’s time “century” didn’t mean a hundred years; it meant a hundred of anything. When we come across, in English translation, Nostradamus’s sixteenth-century “Prophecies,” gathered as a collection of “centuries,” we might well be inclined to read this as reflecting prophecy on a grand scale, the epic sweep of apocalyptic vision across the expanse of “centuries” toward the End Time. In fact “centuries” here (a translation of cents) refers to the grouping of the prophecies in bundles of one hundred. As for the French term siècle, this didn’t originally mean a hundred years either. A derivative of the Latin saeculum, it signified an “age” (the sense of the term in Perrault’s encomium to Louis XIV). This, however, changed in the late seventeenth century. The older meaning of “age” remained, but the new more mathematical sense in the “age” of mathematics established itself. Perrault in fact was also instrumental in bringing about the semantic turn whereby, for a whole complex of reasons, the term eventually came to mean what it does today.
But, apart from the large quotient of both the arbitrary and the contingent in the shaping of the history as a set of numerically identical periods, there are other major shortcomings to the story. For example, just as “century” was a historical invention, so too was the image of the Renaissance as the origin of a postmedieval “modernity.” This was in fact an invention of the Renaissance itself, in many ways a self-promoting historical fiction and one that proved robustly durable. Even Sainte-Beuve, the greatest of the nineteenth-century French critics, claimed that French literature only properly “began” in the sixteenth century. There are of course problems with assigning the place of medieval literature in the scheme of things “French,” most notably the glorious flowering of Occitan troubadour poetry; it is not so much that Occitan became “French” as that Occitania became part of France through military conquest and political annexation by the French monarchy. But the picture of a “backward” medium aevum to be left behind in the name of a modernizing project was tendentious to a degree. It helped to secure a version of the Renaissance as providing both momentum for a form of “take-off” and a bedrock for a purposefully driven history. Secular modernity was intellectually designed to challenge the providentialist views of history sanctioned by theology, but that did not prevent it from installing its own teleology, the conception of history as governed by laws of ineluctability and sustained by a whole fable of “progress” whereby historical change is also felt to be improvement on the past. In the literary sphere this was most marked in the great quarrels and the argument advanced by the Moderns that what they stood for was not just different from, but superior to, the Ancients. It was a natural feature of the polemic running from the seventeenth century through nineteenth-century Romanticism to the self-advertisements of the twentieth-century avant-garde. But it was, and remains, also symptomatic of a wider cultural paradigm, an entire way of thinking conducted under the hoisted banner of the Modern.
There are, however, other ways of thinking, which capture what the mono-track linear history preferred by the myth of modernity leaves out. Raymond Williams sketched a model for cultural history incorporating literary history that is based on the tripartite schema he defined as the dominant, the emergent, and the residual. All cultural formations combine these three features, if in varying degrees. The myth of modernity always favors the dominant (winners’ history as “progress” story), while modernism would fall in love with the “emergent.” The “residual,” however, is what is left behind, discarded by the forward march of the modern, its sole function that of pasture for nostalgic reaction. A curious echo of some, but crucially only some, of this is to be found in a passage from Alfred de Musset’s Confession d’un enfant du siècle, with which Sarah Rocheville and Etienne Beaulieu conclude their account of the Romantic movement:
The life offered to the youths of that time was made up of three elements: behind them was a past that was never destroyed and which still stirred about its ruins, with all the fossils of the centuries of absolutism; in front of them was the dawn of a vast horizon, the first light of the future; and in between these two worlds … something similar to the Ocean which divides the old continent from the young America, something vague and floating, a stormy sea full of shipwrecks, crossed from time to time by some white sail or by some ship blowing heavy steam. In other words, the present century, which separates the past from the future, which is neither one nor the other and which resembles both at once, where one does not know, at every step, whether he is walking on a seed or on remains.
This is an instance of the notorious mal du siècle held to characterize a key dimension of Romantic sensibility and outlook. The moment between the forms of the residual and the horizon of the emergent is “dominant,” but as a moment of uncertainty and confusion, adrift on an ocean without a compass, a non-place (Musset here is an uninhibited mixer of metaphors) between seeds and remains. But there are other values that can attach to the residual (if not precisely to the cultural and literary remnants Musset has in mind), enabling us to approach the past in terms of what pseudo-providentialist accounts exclude. One form of the “residual” is as the trace of the might-have-beens of history and involves the thought that much of the story could have unfolded otherwise. This returns us to the intriguing possibilities offered by the counterfactual in history mentioned earlier in connection with the French seventeenth century and the absence of Shakespeare from its world of literary reference and influence. I would like to conclude this “introduction” with two further counterfactuals, if only to highlight the deep questions that remain when trying to “introduce” something as vast and complex as a “history” of French literature.
The first takes us back to the staple of “periodization,” the division of time into centuries. Apart from the latter being a relatively late historical invention, endowed moreover with adaptive flexibility (expandable to “long” and contractable to “short” as need arises), the entire temporal arrangement could have been different. The historian Daniel Milo has shown how the dating of chronology in the Christian era could have gone in a different direction, when disputes over how to date the Easter cycle led some Church figures to suggest dating the year 1 CE from the Passion rather than the Nativity, thus pushing everything “back” thirty-three years. This thirty-three-year delay would of course have had many consequences for where we delimit centuries, place literary movements, and locate authors. Proust, for example, situated “between two centuries,” would be wholly a nineteenth-century writer. The dwindling band still clinging to the view that French literature “begins” with the Renaissance in the sixteenth century would have a problem with dating the Renaissance itself. Then enrich the counterfactual by
mapping what would have been the case if the Republican calendar introduced in 1793 (and backdated to 1792) to celebrate the foundational character of the French Revolution had stuck. Between them, the sixth-century monks and the eighteenth-century revolutionaries would have ensured an outcome whereby year 1 would have been in 1759, Du côté de chez Swann would have appeared in 154, and this volume in 258.
The second example concerns the relationship between counterfactuals and the idea of history as turning points, forks in the road, those taken and those not but which might or could have been. It is represented here in the chapter on Rabelais by Raymond Geuss. I have spoken of literary history as the seeing of literary works in context, by which is meant primarily the (manifold) contexts to which they belong at the moment of their own production (genres, publics, mentalities, etc.). But there is another sense of “context” that matters to historical understanding, that of a writer’s or a work’s “posterity,” the futures of reading and rereading into which the work is sent out without any foreknowledge of the postbox to which it will be delivered. As David Coward notes, literary history is also a history of readings, the transformation of the successive environments in which works are read. Returning to Valéry’s example of the work written in 1612 interesting a reader in 1912, there is nothing here that guarantees that outcome. The work is not sent out into the future with a certificate of survival attached (nor, by the same token, of extinction). This imparts to literary history an element of haphazard convergences and disjunctions of taste and interest over time. In the standard literary histories (the ones that prefer tidiness to disorder), the posterity of the work, its historical afterlife, often comes out as a tale of “influence,” sometimes, moreover, converted into a strong causal account of literary-historical change. It is also a way of exercising imaginary control of the field, the principle of “influence” grasped as a kind of fathering process, granting a quasi-paternal authority over what comes after. The alternative to this lies in the sphere of imagining alternatives. This is intellectually risky and can easily degenerate into preference fantasies (the “if only” and “what if” that so often confuse the might-have-been with what we would like to have been). But in its more disciplined guises, counterfactual history may hold lessons for literary history. For Geuss, part of the point of reading Rabelais is not just to recover a literary past but also a set of possibilities for that past’s future, of which our present was but one. His closing reflections on Rabelais and his contemporaries as embodying at a historical crux or crossroads a now-lost or suspended alternative to the “main road to modernity,” the latter the one actually taken and the former a real but unrealized possibility, are then perhaps the best place to close an introduction that, while reproducing a “story,” signals an openness to other stories—of literary production, reception, reading—cast in multiple tenses of the imagination.
Introduction (2)
The Frenchness of French Literature
DAVID COWARD
The sixteenth century in France saw the emergence of a generation that for the first time conceived the idea of a national literary culture, open to the lessons of the past and to foreign influences but independent of them.
Of course, nothing comes from nothing. The Renaissance, which began in Italy in the fifteenth century and spread throughout Europe, was built on principles dating from classical antiquity when the territory occupied by imaginative literature was first laid out. The Greeks captured the tragic and comic perspectives on life by giving them a tangible form as actable plays. The rules of prosody provided a settled framework for the many varieties of the poetic impulse. Fables distilled moral lessons from short tales, while long, epic narratives extolled heroic values, denounced treachery, and provided object lessons in humankind’s duty to itself, to the collective, and to the gods. Themes and forms, together with the aesthetic principles that supported a hierarchy of disciplined configurations of the creative imagination, combined to enshrine the artistic ideals of truth, beauty, and usefulness in clearly understood ways and defined the best and worst of the human spirit.
The ancient world drifted slowly to a close that was marked finally by the breakup of the Roman Empire in the fifth century. There followed a “dark time” when written culture survived almost exclusively within the institutions of the Church. During this medium aevum, or “Middle Age,” which separated classical antiquity from modern times, the center of civilization moved slowly from the Mediterranean to northern Europe. After the millennium, a first renaissance in the twelfth century saw an upsurge of secular literary activity that, while reconnecting with modes and practices dimly remembered from older cultures, pursued its own evolving preoccupations against a background of shared ideals: courtly love, chivalric honor, and duty to God, king, and the feudal hierarchy. Lyric poetry, the lives of saints, warrior epics, and, later, theater, poetry, and magical romances slowly combined to define the vocation of literature, which is to tell us about human nature and the world we live in. By the end of the fifteenth century, literary forms had been, in broad terms, set. And ever since, each generation has inherited evolving codes and conventions that have given the word “literature” a moveable content and shaped the craft of writing. Poets inherited established poetic meters, storytellers learned lessons from epic and romance, and each generation of playwrights added something to the traditions of theater.
The modern age, marked by the introduction of printing, began around 1500. It did not signal a clean break with the past: it was merely a moment in the continuum of history. Yet it did mark a turning point, for it met a number of the preconditions essential to the very idea of a literature that was different from that of other nations and distinctively French.
The first of these is the Frenchness of France. During the Middle Ages, the patchwork of duchies, courts, and regions of what had been Gaul were brought under the authority of the area now known as the Ile de France. With time, France expanded to its “natural,” that is, more or less physical boundaries. But already, by the time Henri IV added Navarre to the kingdom in 1589, France had long had a strong sense of national identity. A leading European power, it was also mère des arts and in time grew confident enough to conceive the spread of French culture as a mission civilisatrice, its unique contribution to human progress.
That culture was shaped over time by the historical process. The French Church, alert to unorthodox tendencies, eliminated the Cathar heretics, resisted the Protestant Reformation, and remained, through its pastoral message and educational role, a conservative power that few French authors entirely escaped. The absolutist French state, validated by the Church’s support for the divine right of kings, also achieved a high degree of influence over cultural evolution. National unification had been rooted in the centralization of power, which, save for the brief prominence of Louis XIV’s Versailles, ensured that the nation’s affairs have been directed from Paris. This strong centripetal tradition has set much of the nation’s literary agenda. Decisions made in Paris by official institutions (notably the various French academies) together with the many passing querelles, affaires, guerres, schools, movements and “isms” that began in the capital and spread outward, aimed to make French culture as one and indivisible as the Revolution of 1789 set out to be.
Catholicism and the centralizing principle are defining features of Frenchness that have done much to shape the French psyche, language, and cultural assumptions in ways that have at times made France both highly civilized and insular. The public life of France has been rooted in the regularity, clarity, and harmony of its structures. French gardens, French thought, French town planning, French music and art reflect the orderliness of the French mind. Where the Anglo-Saxon tradition is drawn to empiricism, the French have an in-built taste for abstract thinking, that distillation of general ideas from the chaos of experience. It is this primacy of reason that has given the literature of France its philosophical cast, from the “universal” rules of classicism and the program of the
Enlightenment to the committed writings of the existentialists and the theories of the New Criticism of the twentieth century.
A History of Modern French Literature Page 3