A History of Modern French Literature

by Christopher Prendergast

  In 2002, Penguin Books published an entirely new translation of the novel, each of the seven volumes by a different translator, and the whole edited by Christopher Prendergast. That is the version quoted from here. (The Prisoner and The Fugitive were printed together as volume 5.) The title for the second volume became In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower. The final volume is called Finding Time Again.

  There are hefty standard biographies of Proust by Jean-Yves Tadié and William C. Carter, and a useful, slimmer, recent one by Adam Watt, Marcel Proust (London: Reaktion Books, 2013). See also William C. Carter, Proust in Love (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006). Watt’s The Cambridge Introduction to Marcel Proust (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011) is an excellent guide for further investigations. An eloquent overall assessment of Proust’s achievement can be found in Malcolm Bowie, Proust among the Stars (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998). John Sturrock translated a handy volume containing many of Proust’s other significant writings, Against Sainte-Beuve and Other Essays (London: Penguin, 1988). Those interested in the formally innovative features of Proust’s novel could profitably consult Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1980). For a recent study of Proust’s social and historical context, see Edward J. Hughes, Proust, Class, and Nation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). On the importance of the character of Albertine, see Jacques Dubois, Pour Albertine: Proust et le sens du social (Paris: Seuil, 1997). For a feel of the literary and artistic culture out of which Proust’s novel emerged, there is Roger Shattuck, The Banquet Years: The Origins of the Avant-Garde in France 1885 to World War I (New York: Vintage, 1968); or Jean-Michel Rabaté, 1913: The Cradle of Modernism (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007). Thinking about Proust and sexuality was energized by several landmark chapters in Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). This same aspect of Proust was studied in relation to a range of his contemporaries in Michael Lucey, Never Say I: The First Person and Sexuality in Colette, Gide, and Proust (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006). See also Elisabeth Ladenson, Proust’s Lesbianism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999).

  Céline/Malraux

  Politics and the Novel in the 1930s

  STEVEN UNGAR

  Revolutions do not make themselves, but neither do novels. So quipped André Malraux in a 1931 reply to the Marxist revolutionary and theorist Leon Trotsky, who had faulted Malraux’s 1928 novel, Les conquérants, for lacking a natural affinity between the author—“in spite of all he knows and understands”—and his heroine, the Revolution. To which Malraux retorted that his novel was above all an accusation of the human condition. The exchange discloses assumptions concerning what novels are and what they can—or even what they should—do. Trotsky criticized Malraux’s failure to recognize that the presence of Russian Bolsheviks stifled the “lava of revolution” among the Chinese masses. (Indeed, he titled his review “The Strangled Revolution.”) To which Malraux replied that by making the characters of Les conquérants into symbols, Trotsky had removed them from time and history. Novels are products of the historical moment in which they are written, but they neither express nor reflect that moment directly. The Trotsky-Malraux exchange surrounding Les conquérants points to the ideological scrutiny to which novels in France were subjected during the 1930s. One way of illuminating that relation between text and context, of exerting the pressures of the one on the other is to examine two works, Malraux’s La condition humaine and Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s Voyage au bout de la nuit; together they constitute a window onto the social situation of the French novel between October 1932 and December 1933.

  The 1930s in France have been described as a series of crises resulting from economic depression, unstable domestic rule, and autocratic regimes in Russia and in Germany that threatened the values of republican democracy. The historian Eugen Weber characterized the decade as hollow years, increasingly preoccupied, starting in 1933, by the inevitability of war with Nazi Germany. Media coverage of the period was still in large part a print enterprise. Even so, illustrated dailies and weeklies vied with newsreels screened for millions of viewers at movie theaters. Broadcast radio as a source of news and entertainment became a household staple only toward the end of the decade. Television was not yet a consumer product. Commercial programming of domestic and foreign “talkies” made cinema the primary form of mass entertainment.

  In February 1934, antigovernment demonstrations near the Place de la Concorde in Paris polarized ideological differences into opposing camps. Those on the left recast themselves as antifascists; those on the right called themselves anticommunists. The conflict extended to what Herman Lebovics described as wars over cultural identity waged in the name of the true France. Two years earlier, left-leaning writers, including André Breton, André Gide, and André Malraux, had joined the Association des écrivains et artistes révolutionnaires (AEAR), whose mission to defend culture aligned with efforts among French Communist Party members and fellow travelers to promote communism outside Soviet Russia. When French authorities allowed Trotsky to enter France at the Mediterranean fishing village of Cassis in July 1933, his presence was seen by conservatives as a prelude to revolutionary overthrow. Six months earlier, Hitler’s appointment as the German chancellor had heightened urgency among members of the AEAR and related leftist groups such as the Comité de vigilance des intellectuels antifascistes (CVIA). On the literary right, onetime supporters of the neoroyalist Action Française movement Robert Brasillach and Lucien Rebatet adopted a more strident tone in their articles for the anti-Semitic weekly Je suis partout.

  In 1930, prose fiction in France was under the sway of a novel and a patriarch. The former was Marcel Proust’s multivolume A la recherche du temps perdu; the latter was André Gide—and this despite the fact that Proust had died in 1922 before completing the Recherche and Gide had stopped writing fiction after Les faux-monnayeurs (1925). Novels by Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette, Romain Rolland, and Martin du Gard were read on both sides of the Atlantic. Prose narratives by surrealists André Breton, Louis Aragon, and Robert Desnos mixed fiction, autobiography, poetry, and essay. A year later, the Belgian-born Georges Simenon’s Pietr le Letton appeared as the first of more than one hundred crime novels featuring Inspector Jules Maigret. The same year, the twenty-six-year-old lycée instructor Jean-Paul Sartre began a “factum on contingency” that would be published in 1938 as a novel, La nausée, after his publisher, Gaston Gallimard, rejected the original title, Melancolia, that Sartre had proposed as a reference to a 1514 engraving by Albrecht Dürer. Nineteen-year-old Albert Camus was studying philosophy at the University of Algiers and about to join the Algerian Communist Party.

  Claims for Proust as a retrograde figure draw on literary debts ranging back in time from Gustave Flaubert’s 1869 L’éducation sentimentale and Charles Baudelaire’s 1857 Les fleurs du mal to the eighteenth-century memoirs of the Duc de Saint-Simon and seventeenth-century tragedies of Racine. These claims break down for Gide’s portraits of star-crossed couples in L’immoraliste (1901), La porte étroite (1909), and La symphonie pastorale (1919), all of which challenged social and moral conventions of the period. They also weaken in light of formal experiments and social critiques in Les caves du Vatican (1914) and Les faux-monnayeurs. Each in his own way, Proust and Gide had renewed the novel. Yet by 1930, their fiction no longer spoke to the politicized culture of the new decade. Neither fulfilled the mission of Sartre’s littérature engagée to write for one’s time. Where, then, might the novel go and what might it do?

  The Académie française was created in 1635 to compile a dictionary of grammar, rhetoric, and poetics intended to ensure the flourishing of the arts and sciences as expressions of a patrimoine (national heritage). By the mid-nineteenth century, an added measure of literary culture took the form of annual prizes such as the Prix Goncourt, awarded since 1903 by the Académie Goncourt for the best and most imaginative
prose work of the year. Proust won the Prix Goncourt in 1919 for A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs. Gide never did, but the statement accompanying the Nobel Prize in Literature awarded to him in 1947 referred to his “comprehensive and artistically significant writings, in which human problems and conditions have been presented with a fearless love of truth and keen psychological in sight.” In 1932, Céline’s Voyage au bout de la nuit, an early favorite, failed to win the Goncourt. A year later, André Malraux won it for La condition humaine, with unanimous support on a first ballot. Cultural wars indeed!

  The Prix Goncourt opens onto commercial-industrial dimensions of literary culture subject to vertical integration, ranging from the lofty status enjoyed by award-winning authors downward to the mundane practices of marketing and reception. Nowhere were these dimensions more visible in interwar France than in the Gallimard publishing house, whose assets in 1930 included the prestigious Collection Blanche of fiction and nonfiction titles as well as ZED Publications, an umbrella corporation created in 1928 to manage the illustrated weeklies Marianne, Détective, and Voilà. Where the latter two adopted tabloid strategies by spicing up reportage with features on sex, crime, and politics, the former billed itself as (France’s? Paris’s?) grand hebdomadaire littéraire illustré. The Editions de la Nouvelle Revue Française was created in 1911 to oversee production of La Nouvelle Revue Française (hereafter NRF), a literary monthly Gide had helped to found three years earlier. Within a decade, the Editions de la NRF became the Librairie Gallimard, under the management of publisher Gaston Gallimard. Thirty-six Goncourt and thirty-five Nobel laureates have established Gallimard’s reputation as France’s premier publisher.

  One author and one work in particular would prove to be problematical candidates for entry into the Gallimard pantheon. Published in October 1932, Voyage au bout de la nuit (hereafter Voyage) was a first novel by the medical doctor Louis Ferdinand Auguste Destouches (1894–1961). (The pen name “Céline” adopted by Destouches had been that of his maternal grandmother.) The fact that its author seemed to appear from nowhere heightened the shock waves that the Voyage’s publication produced in the Parisian literary establishment. Céline began as a literary marginal (outsider), but he was far from an unknown quantity. When Gallimard editors asked him to summarize the manuscript he submitted in April 1932, Céline described it almost apologetically, as less of a true novel than a kind of literary symphony in which he had tried to use words to obtain emotional effects more often associated with music. As for the plot, he added, it was simultaneously complex and simpleminded, somewhat derivative from opera as a grand fresco of lyrical populism: communism with a soul, mischievous and therefore alive.

  Gallimard editors already knew Céline on the basis of the manuscript of a play, L’église, they had rejected five years earlier after agreeing that its satirical vigor failed to compensate for a lack of continuity. Two years later, they cited the same defect when they turned down Céline’s biography of Dr. Philippe Ignaz Semmelweis (1818–65), a pioneer advocate of obstetric antisepsis on whom he had based the dissertation he had written in conjunction with his medical studies. While the Gallimard staff, including Malraux, debated the strengths and weaknesses of the Voyage, the upstart publisher Robert Denoël moved quickly after receiving a nine hundred–page manuscript with neither signature nor return address. Rumor had it that Denoël read the manuscript straight through over a single night before setting out to identify its reclusive author. Gallimard eventually agreed to take the novel on condition that Céline cut some passages and rework others. Denoël and his partner, Bernard Steele, resolved the matter in their favor by committing to a contract without changes.

  When Céline appeared in Denoël’s office, he explained that when Gallimard delayed its decision, he sent the manuscript to Denoël because he had been impressed by his handling of another first novel. Winner of the first Prix du Roman Populiste, Eugène Dabit’s L’Hôtel du Nord (1929) recounted day-to-day comings and goings among boarders at a residential hotel in a working-class neighborhood alongside the Canal Saint-Martin in Paris. Marcel Carné’s 1938 film adaptation, Hôtel du Nord, drew in part on Dabit’s novel. But it was mainly a box-office vehicle for movie stars Annabella and Jean-Pierre Aumont. Even the tart dialogues Henri Jeanson and Jean Aurenche wrote for newly added characters played by Louis Jouvet and Arletty failed to match Dabit’s portraits of poverty and abjection that Céline sought to emulate. Unlike Céline, Dabit was no literary outsider. Gallimard elders Gide and Roger Martin du Gard had encouraged him to pursue literary writing in the wake of art school and failed business ventures. In the NRF’s December 1932 issue, Dabit hailed the Voyage as a tragic work in which revolt stemmed from neither aesthetic discussions nor symbols, but instead as “un cri de protestation contre la condition humaine” (a cry of rage against the human condition). Whether intended or not, Dabit’s reference to the title of the novel whose “pre-original” version Malraux would serialize in the NRF between January and June 1933 was nothing less than prescient.

  Denoël sent proofs of the Voyage to literary journals in order to position it favorably for the Goncourt. Initial reviews in the daily and weekly press were mostly positive. Concerns over Céline’s use of nontraditional (“raw”) language confirmed that his novel left few readers indifferent. Ten days before the luncheon at which the Prix Goncourt was to be announced, academy members Jean Ajalbert and Lucien Descaves offered their congratulations to Céline. Despite these signs of early support, the Goncourt went instead to Gallimard author Guy Mazeline for his novel of more than five hundred pages, Les loups (The Wolves). The final tally was six votes for Les loups and four votes for the Voyage. Céline settled for the lesser Prix Renaudot as sales of his novel soared. The Voyage was clearly the novel of the year, and Céline’s literary career was launched. Yet what some took to calling the Goncourt affair was formative in light of subsequent rejections that hardened Céline against those he perceived as having rebuffed him. As in the photos of Goncourt candidates published in the December 9, 1932, issue of Gallimard’s Marianne with a blank space above Céline’s name, absence could serve as a determining presence (fig. 1).

  The distinctive tone of the Voyage resulted from Céline’s decision to cast the first-person account of narrator, Ferdinand Bardamu, in a mode of spoken French—Céline called it his petite musique—whose affective punch bordered on the visceral. For Raymond Queneau, the Voyage’s simulation of modern spoken French—“such as it is, such as it exists”—drew as much on syntax as on vocabulary. Céline’s achievement was the skill with which he passed from written French in classical and modern forms to a third French (Queneau’s emphasis) as it was actually spoken, although Zola was something of a predecessor in his use of working-class speech in the dialogues of L’assommoir and Germinal, as well as his matching of popular idioms and free indirect discourse. Celine’s move into demotic, however, was altogether more radical and systematic. A year later, Céline corroborated Queneau’s assessment when he wrote that nothing was more difficult than transposing the spoken language of everyday emotions into writing.

  Figure 1. Front page of Marianne, December 9, 1932, with Céline’s photo notably missing among the candidates for the Prix Goncourt.

  The skillful yoking of vision and living language appears in the very first sentence of the Voyage: “Ça a débuté comme ça,” to which Ralph Manheim’s translation as “Here’s how it started” does only partial justice. Of immediate interest is Céline’s colloquial take on the standard opening, il était une fois (once upon a time), associated with the fairy tale and crime fiction. The verb débuter (to start out) conveys a conversational usage less often associated with the standard infinitive commencer (start). In terms of sound, the infinitive buter (to bump, or, in gangster slang, to bump off) is audible in the second and third syllables. The framing of the sentence by the impersonal pronoun ça reinforces the primacy of speech over writing. The second sentence—“Moi, j’avais jamais rien dit” (I’d
never said a word)—extends the oral effect by eliding the negative particle n’ paired with the double negative jamais (never) and rien (nothing). Céline’s Bardamu initially presents himself as a type ordinaire (regular guy) who takes things (ça) as they come. The silence at its start elevates the Voyage into an explosive diatribe for which street French is a forceful means of expression. The novel’s final words—qu’on n’en parle plus, translatable as “let no more be said about it,” “that’s enough of that,” or “that’ll do”—make silence integral to an ending that falls short of narrative closure. Readers attentive to Céline’s skillful simulation of spoken (“street”) French may also have been taken (taken aback?) by the novel’s nihilist vision, whose ideological valence was hard to assess.

  The Voyage recounts Bardamu’s departures from and returns to Paris and its outskirts over a period of some fifteen years. His initial encounters with death as a soldier in battle are formative and traumatic: “You can be a virgin in horror the same as in sex.” Some thirty years before US Air Force Captain John Yossarian in Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 (1963), Bardamu realized that because the war into which he walked makes no sense, efforts to understand it should not deter the primal imperative to save one’s skin. The instinct to flee (foutre le camp) kicks in after Bardamu witnesses death at close range when a shell decapitates a cavalryman in his unit, leaving an opening at the top of his head, “with blood in it bubbling and glugging [qui mijotait en glouglous] like jam in a kettle.” Graphic descriptions of oozing blood and mangled flesh are essential to a strain of black humor that Céline directs toward proper and place names. The commander of Bardamu’s unit was a general whose name, des Entrayes, which is a homonym of entrailles (entrails, guts—or even embodied as Old Blood and Guts), expressed a base materialism concerned with bodily functions.