A History of Modern French Literature

by Christopher Prendergast

  It is while wandering in the night outside the village of Noirceur-sur-Lys (literally “blackness on the river Lily”) that Bardamu encounters another lost French soldier, Léon Robinson, who plans to surrender to the enemy rather than die in battle. The encounter is significant because, while Robinson and Bardamu survive the war, Robinson precedes Bardamu throughout the novel across France, Africa, the United States, and back to France into the figurative night of degradation and evil that ends with his sordid murder. The opening section of the Voyage also introduces the honorably discharged Bardamu to a Paris where the rich live together in adjoining neighborhoods that he likens to a wedge-shaped slice of urban cake with its tip at the Louvre and its outer edges between the Pont d’Auteuil and the Porte des Ternes. This, he concludes, is the good part of the city; “all the rest is shit.” It is to the latter that Bardamu is drawn in the second half of the Voyage. Wartime Paris is also where Bardamu meets Lola, a young American whose job as a volunteer is to provide local hospitals with apple fritters. Bardamu states that what first had attracted him to Lola was her American body, the sight of which inspired him on the spot to make a pilgrimage to the country of its origin. Believing more in her body than in her soul, he confesses shamelessly that it was in the immediate vicinity of Lola’s rear end that he received the message of a new world. Bardamu’s wish comes true, but the anonymity and poverty he witnesses in New York City and Detroit quickly disabuse him of his erotic-romantic assumptions.

  The long second half of the Voyage centers on the medical practice Bardamu sets up just outside the city limits of Paris. As in Detroit, the sky in Rancy (the place name contains the sound of the adjective rance, for “rancid)” is “a smoky soup that bathes the plain all the way to Levallois. Cast-off buildings bogged down in black muck. From a distance, the chimneys, big ones and little ones, look like the fat stakes that rise out of the muck by the seaside. And inside it’s us.” Episodes of day-to-day cruelty, greed, and pettiness harden the satirical tone of the first section toward the flat affect of resignation.

  As in postwar films noirs on both sides of the Atlantic, shady ventures and dubious decisions fashion a figurative night of moral decadence whose inevitable outcome in death is punctuated by rare moments of kindness and ephemeral community. One such moment occurs when Bardamu walks back to Rancy after seeking advice from a former teacher. Crossing to the Right Bank, he notices people on the rue Lepic in Montmartre lined up outside a butcher shop in front of which an enormous pig had been tied up with a rope. People twist the pig’s ears and poke it to make it squeal. The owner of the shop, who has planned the stunt to attract business brandishes a big knife and jokes around: “He couldn’t have had a better time at his daughter’s wedding.” The passage stages an urban moment in which onlookers and passersby revert to the kind of shared experience that they, their parents, or their grandparents might have experienced in a provincial past. It reinforces Céline’s treatment of working-class neighborhoods that retain occasional traces of rural (provincial) traditions. Urban landscapes are mainly oppressive spaces within which Céline depicts the daily lives of those for whom such episodes are brief respites from a daily grind whose causes they seldom have either the energy or the awareness to question.

  The Voyage ends with Robinson’s death by gunshot at the hands of his on-again off-again consort. The murder culminates a trajectory conveyed by the keywords voyage, bout, and nuit that the novel’s second half recounts as a catalog of misery that leaves survivors exhausted and indifferent. The final paragraph of the Voyage conveys this indifference through the verbal equivalent of an extreme long shot of a tugboat whose sounded whistle carries across river locks, bridges, other barges, the sky, and the countryside. Two years later, Jean Vigo would likewise end his fourth and final film, L’Atalante, with an overhead shot of a barge. By contrast, André Malraux begins La condition humaine with two questions—“Should he try to raise the mosquito-netting? Or should he strike it through?”—that, as in a cinematic close-up, convey the immediacy of an act for which his reader has no context whatsoever. The questions belong to a character named Tch’en Ta Erh. They introduce a seven-page passage describing his thoughts and sensations while carrying out an assassination. The sense of immediacy throughout the passage builds on the use of free indirect speech in sentences that seem to express Tch’en’s thoughts, so to speak, from within: “Oh, what a relief to fight, to fight enemies who defend themselves, enemies who are awake!”

  Tch’en is part of a cell involved in an ill-fated 1927 insurrection by dissident Chinese Communists intent on preventing Chiang Kai-shek from appropriating a revolutionary movement in the name of the Kuomintang (People’s Nationalist Party). Members of the cell see Chiang’s goals at odds with those of the Communist International (Comintern) dedicated to establishing Soviet republics around the world. Tch’en’s short-term mission is to obtain documents allowing the cell to intercept a shipment of three hundred rifles with which it would disarm the local police and arm their comrades opposed to Chiang. The questions at the start of the passage convey the complexity of motivations that drive Tch’en to kill. They show that the act he is about to commit is not only an order from his comrades, but a means of absolute self-possession. Unable to gauge the resistance of the flesh he is about to stab through a mosquito net, Tch’en presses the point of his dagger into his left arm. Despite the pain he feels, he is unsure that the arm he has stabbed is his own. When Tch’en kills his victim “with a blow that would have split a plank,” he is so immersed in the moment that he initially forgets to take the document he has been sent to obtain.

  Tch’en is often described as a terrorist, but it is more accurate to see him among a cell of intellectuals for whom the idea of violence in the cause of revolutionary activity is a basis of commonality. If his drive toward spectacular violence suggests a personal pathology leading to isolation and self-destruction, other members of the cell are isolated each in his or her own way. And as much as La condition humaine occurs mainly in the clearly defined setting of Shanghai in the early spring of 1927, the novel is often understood in abstract terms as a series of limit cases depicting the values in the cause for which an individual is willing to die. A decade before Sartre’s fictional Les chemins de la liberté (The Roads to Freedom) tetralogy, La condition humaine illustrates an existential literature of extreme situations in which the consequences of decisions and actions are immediate and often fatal.

  The isolation from the sensory world surrounding Tch’en illustrates a primary trait of what the narrator calls his humanity (“sa condition d’homme”). Yet this isolation also points to a condition of mortality to which all men and women are subject. This broader sense of the term condition echoes a passage from Blaise Pascal’s Pensées (1670): “Imagine a number of men in chains and all condemned to death: some of them each day are slaughtered in full view of the others; those who remain recognize their own condition in that of their fellow men, and, looking at each other with grief and without hope, wait for their turn. This is the image of the human condition.” If Pascal’s Pensées can be read as a defense of Christian faith, assertions for Malraux’s novel as an equivalent defense of revolutionary action founder on the basis of an alienation Malraux first illustrates when the cell’s leader, Kyo Gisors, fails to recognize his recorded voice the first time he hears it. Kyo is arguably Malraux’s most complex embodiment of the human condition understood as isolation. And this not only in terms of sensory alienation noted above, but even more in a commitment to revolutionary action that sets him apart from the Comintern leaders, whose orders to abstain from interfering with Chiang he disobeys, and from his wife, May, whose admission of a passing infidelity arouses jealousy in him that he had not foreseen.

  Much as Camus wrote La peste (1947) as a reply to visions of absurdity he had set forth in L’étranger and Le mythe de Sisyphe (1942 for both), La condition humaine depicts various ways that individuals contend with isolation in the face of death. Tch’en die
s by throwing himself under a car he believes is carrying Chiang Kai-Shek. Setting off a bomb he is carrying, he dies without learning that Chiang was not in the car. After Kyo is arrested and detained along with Katov to await execution, he commits suicide by taking a cyanide pellet he has been carrying. He and Tch’en die alone. Their deaths in physical isolation are tempered by a commitment to collective action that overrides the circumstances and obstacles they face on an individual basis. Katov gives his cyanide pellet away in order to ease the suffering of two comrades, knowing full well that he is about to be burned alive in the boiler of a locomotive. Hemmelrich, May, and Kyo’s father survive the insurrection as witnesses to the long revolution that has cost them a wife and child, a husband, and a son, respectively.

  In order to determine Malraux’s distinctive accomplishment in La condition humaine, it is helpful to specify what his novel is not. Although it evokes a recent historical moment, the novel is neither a fictionalized account of the 1927 Shanghai insurrection, a political fable, nor a novel of ideas. It is, to a limited degree, all of these. But first and foremost, La condition humaine is a novel that raises fundamental questions of identity and value in conjunction with a series of events in China whose outcome at least some readers of the novel could be expected to know. Where commentators have pondered the tragic perspective on life that these questions set forth, it is at least as important to account for their presentation in a narrative mode based in cinematic montage. Claude-Edmonde Magny argues convincingly that Malraux replaces classic continuity of plot by juxtaposing “scenes” that pass without transition from one to the other in a series of flashes comparable to the projection of slides. The effect transforms verbal passages into shots and sequences whose traces the eye follows more readily and more quickly than the mind.

  Much as juxtaposition-based montage inscribes individual shots and sequences within the dynamic force of a larger continuity, Malraux’s verbal montage juxtaposes passages of isolation and solidarity among characters swept up in the force of circumstance. The model of cinematic montage has direct bearing on Malraux’s efforts to challenge traditional treatments of fictional protagonists. Lucien Goldmann situates La condition humaine near the midpoint of a transition from Les conquérants and La voie royale (1930) to L’espoir (1938)—that is, between novels with a problematic hero and the novel more or less without individual characters. The proximity of this verbal juxtaposition to filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein’s model of oppositional montage is supported by the fact that Eisenstein and Malraux collaborated on a rough screenplay of La condition humaine in response to a commission from a state agency. The project was abandoned in 1934 after Soviet officials withdrew support from a film whose Trotskyist vision of permanent revolution they likely saw at odds with government policies under Josef Stalin.

  In line with Malraux’s efforts to approximate techniques of oppositional montage in his fictional prose, La condition humaine can be understood as a series of verbal close-ups, extreme close-ups, and reverse tracking shots leading to action sequences of various lengths and intensities. Magny notes that the point of narrating from multiple points of view is less to tell the story of the failed Communist insurrection in Shanghai than to confront the reader with a certain total vision of the human condition through shots and sequences disclosing conditions that threaten the ability of collective action to end shared suffering: “The book’s scenes are always described from the point of view of one or another of the characters: the author does not appear; the camera is always in the consciousness of a particular person, and the transitions from close-up to long shot are regulated by the oscillations of that person’s attention.”

  Among the insurrectionist cell’s protagonists Tch’en, Kyo, and Katov, none fulfills the requirements to be what critics later call an antihero. The fact that Malraux depicts all three in the mode of the problematic hero depends less on their character traits as individuals than on their shared efforts to overcome a human condition of isolation in the face of mortality. Kyo dies not simply because the self-centered “Baron” Clappique fails to warn him of his imminent arrest or because he is despondent over his wife’s infidelity. Instead, he fashions his fate by disobeying orders from Comintern representatives whom he believes compromise the revolutionary activity to which he and his comrades are committed. Kyo’s refusal of Comintern discipline and Tch’en’s fanaticism qualify as tragic on the basis of the limited choices available to them. A full decade before Sartre’s novels and essays engage a literature of extreme situations, Malraux tempers his critique of capitalism with portraits of individuals forced by circumstance to make life-and-death decisions affecting others as well as themselves.

  Malraux’s treatment of these decisions is inseparable from a cinematic mode of presentation that seemingly locates the reader within an action as it occurs. As an experiment in novelistic technique, La condition humaine explores the verbal equivalent of cinematic crosscuts expressing an existential aesthetic in a narrative that is always told from someone’s point of view (Magny’s emphasis). Starting with the novel’s first passage, the turn to cinematic montage approximates the direct apprehension of experience for which moving pictures provide a viable alternative to prose fiction. Over a longer duration, this turn extends to literary experimentation in modernist modes, such as Guillaume Apollinaire’s efforts to evoke a series of simultaneous conversations overhead at a Left Bank café in his 1913 poem “Lundi rue Christine.” But whereas Apollinaire’s transcriptions approximate a sense of presence and immediacy, they have none of the urgency inherent in Tch’en’s mission.

  Pondering an equivalent cinematic turn in Céline’s efforts to mobilize the living language of spoken French yields results that are more anecdotal than aesthetic. In 1934, Céline traveled to Los Angeles to speak with Hollywood producers about a film adaptation of the Voyage. Nothing came of his efforts. In 1981, film director Bertrand Tavernier combined Jim Thompson’s 1964 crime novel, Pop. 1280, with elements of Céline’s account of Bardamu in Africa. The result was Coup de torchon (A Clean Slate), which Tavernier relocated to French West Africa during a period more or less coincidental with the September 1938 Munich agreements by which Hitler annexed portions of Czechoslovakia known as Sudetenland and the outbreak of World War II. Beyond details of plot and geographic setting, the Voyage’s dark worldview was a good match for the hard-boiled American crime fiction by Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler on which Thompson drew.

  The assimilation of cinematic technique in La condition humaine is Malraux’s prelude to Espoir: Sierra de Teruel, the film he shot in Spain between August 1938 and January 1939 as a supplement to his 1937 novel, L’espoir. The progression aligned with an affinity for film that Malraux characterized in a 1936 speech as encompassing the totality of a civilization: comic with Charlie Chaplin in capitalist countries, tragic with Eisenstein in communist countries, and potentially warriorlike in fascist countries. Visual parallels for Céline’s Voyage point instead to late medieval and early Renaissance paintings by Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Brueghel the Elder. Where the former’s Garden of Earthly Delights (1490–1510?) traces a trajectory from earthly paradise to damnation and exile, the latter’s depiction of a peasant festival in The Fight between Carnaval and Lent (1559) recalls the Voyage’s rue Lepic episode. Both paintings fill their respective formats of landscape and street scene with multiple actions, which Bosch compresses from the panels of Brueghel’s triptych to a single wide-angle take. Both contain details of grotesque physicality for which numerous passages in Céline’s novel provide verbal expression.

  Do all novels turn out to be political novels? Even though they do not, the question underlies the 1931 Trotsky-Malraux exchange surrounding Les conquérants as well as leftist critiques prompted by the Voyage and La condition humaine. Bardamu’s description of the geographic slice of “good Paris” surrounded by the rest of the city discloses class differences without mentioning them explicitly. But it fails to accommodate revolutionary missions
for culture in general, and the novel in particular. Trotsky wrote that the Voyage’s dissidence needed to be resolved in a second book in which the artist would either make peace with the darkness or perceive the dawn. Writing in the French Communist Party daily, L’Humanité, Paul Nizan praised the novel’s sinister tableau of despair for which death was the only possible outcome. But because it lacked the revolution that explained the misery it merely described, the Voyage could lead anywhere: “among us, against us, or nowhere.” Céline, Nizan concluded, was not “one of us.” Georges Bataille resumed the Voyage as an account of a man’s relations with his own death before noting that Céline’s pitiless vision of moral decline marked a preliminary phase leading to a new fraternal consciousness among urban and ex-urban masses. His remarks on La condition humaine focused on its depiction of revolutionary activity as a state of excitation among intellectuals removed from the working class, which was destined to vegetate and die without understanding the causes of its misery. In sum, neither novel included the progression from thought to action among workers for which heightened consciousness of class was a necessary prerequisite.

  In 1934, Walter Benjamin assessed what he termed the present social situation of the French writer in conjunction with fiction, essays, and journalism by turn-of-the-century figures Maurice Barrès and Charles Maurras, both of whom were associated with the neoroyalist Action Française movement. Where Benjamin’s usage of the term “present” targeted the contemporary historical moment, its pairing with the adjective “social” referred to the kind of real-world engagement with the historical present that German sociologist Jürgen Habermas has referred to in conjunction with the public sphere. Much like Bataille, Trotsky, and Nizan before him, Benjamin took Céline’s failure to explain the causes of suffering among the Lumpenproletariat as a missed opportunity. Qualifying as “treacherous” Eugène Dabit’s characterization of the Voyage as a cry of rage, Benjamin noted, “So far so good. Were it not for the fact that the essence of revolutionary training and experience is to recognize the class structure of the masses and to exploit it.” In sum, what many considered the success of the Voyage as a roman populiste represented less of an advance for the proletarian novel than a retreat on the part of bourgeois aesthetics.