A History of Modern French Literature
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Along similar lines, Benjamin saw La condition humaine as symptomatic of the political education and social situation of left-leaning European literary intellectuals. After noting that the failed insurrection in Shanghai was the backdrop for a depiction of individual efforts at revolutionary activity, he took Malraux to task for not having cell members realize that making cause with the workers was not the same as acting as proletarians. The lesson of Malraux’s novel, he concluded, was that the insurrection failed because Kyo and Tch’en acted less from class consciousness than from a sense of tragic isolation that Benjamin attributed to the social situation of the intellectual.
Bataille and Benjamin’s critiques of the Voyage and La condition humaine restate the high expectations imposed by the militant left on prose fiction. The treatment of politics in both novels is inseparable from formal innovations such as Céline’s “street” French and Malraux’s experimentation with cinematic techniques. In the Voyage, this treatment includes not only depictions of war, colonialism, capitalism, and the grinding misery of urban and ex-urban populations, but also Céline’s use of vernacular French, whose revolutionary potential Trotsky immediately acknowledged. The tragic vision that Malraux situates among members of the revolutionary cell betrayed from above by the Comintern is likewise inseparable from the multiple points of view approximating cinematic or oppositional montage.
Malraux’s embrace of montage aligns with Eisenstein’s sense of montage in two distinct ways: first, as a powerful technique that arouse the senses and emotions of the viewer; and second, as a basic principle of making something greater than the sum of individual frames projected on screen. Eisenstein’s evolving views on montage as technique and principle are driven by the prescriptive concerns of agitprop filmmaking to impel viewers to entertain doctrines related to social change. Moreover, his casting of montage in terms of dialectic extends toward the dynamic of social change his filmmaking was meant to advance. Similar claims can be made for Malraux’s efforts to approximate techniques of cinematic montage in the form of fictional narration. Céline’s innovative use of spoken French in the Voyage reverts to the long history of oral traditions at a remove from the image-based nature of cinema as an advanced mass medium of the historical and ideological present. The techniques of montage throughout La condition humaine posit parallels between the transformative nature of Eisenstein’s oppositional montage noted above and—even more—processes of social change for which the failed Shanghai insurrection of 1927 was an object lesson. Finally, Malraux’s efforts at novelistic montage marked a key phase in his intellectual trajectory toward visual cultures of cinema and the world history of graphic and plastic arts that would increasingly preoccupy him by the end of the same decade. Montage thus serves as a measure of Malraux’s deviation from literary modernism that, as in Apollinaire’s “Lundi rue Christine,” sought to approximate unmediated experience and the speed of emergent audio-visual technologies, to committed practices that directed these technologies toward activism and social change.
In 1938, Céline wrote the first of his notorious anti-Semitic pamphlets, Bagatelles pour un massacre, which resolved Trotsky’s question concerning dissonance in the Voyage in a way Trotsky would have been unlikely to endorse. Malraux was in Spain completing Sierra de Teruel in support of Republicans. The 1932–33 moment in France when the potential for direct denunciation and critique toward revolutionary change served as a prime measure of novels such as the Voyage and La condition humaine yielded to works of lesser scope. Winner of the 1938 Prix Goncourt, Henri Troyat’s L’araigne reverted to psychological drama in a family setting at a remove from novelistic visions of social struggle and revolutionary change. As a symptom or document of its historical moment, L’araigne relocated prose fiction within the fatalism following the March 1938 demise of the leftist coalition Popular Front government and the Munich agreements six months later, the 1939–40 drôle de guerre (phony war), and the 1940–44 Vichy regime under German military control that followed all too quickly. The moment when Trotsky, Nizan, Bataille, and Benjamin had placed the promise and the burden of revolutionary change on the Voyage and La condition humaine had passed, resulting in the figurative equivalent of a military retreat.
WORKS CITED AND RECOMMENDED FURTHER READING
For French editions of the two works discussed in this chapter, see Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Voyage au bout de la nuit (1932) (Paris: Gallimard “Folio,” 1972); and André Malraux, La condition humaine (1933) (Paris: Gallimard “Folio,” 1972). Cited passages from the Voyage and La condition humaine are from Ralph Manheim, trans., Journey to the End of Night (New York: New Directions, 1983); and Haakon M. Chevalier, trans., Man’s Fate (New York: Vintage, 1990).
Helpful overviews of France during the 1930s include Eugen Weber, The Hollow Years: France in the 1930s (New York: Norton, 1994), Herman Lebovics, True France: The Wars over Cultural Identity, 1900–1945 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), and Dudley Andrew and Steven Ungar, Popular Front Paris and the Poetics of Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005). Julia Kristeva’s entry on Céline in Lawrence D. Kritzman, ed., The Columbia History of Twentieth-Century French Thought (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006) updates the analyses in her The Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982). See also Raymond Queneau, “Written in 1937,” in Letters, Numbers, Forms (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007). Claude-Edmonde Magny, “Malraux the Fascinator,” in Malraux: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. R.W.B. Lewis (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1964) engages the major theses of Magny’s The Age of the American Novel: The Film Aesthetic of Fiction between the Wars (New York: Ungar, 1972). On La condition humaine, see also W. M. Frohock, “The Power and the Glory,” in André Malraux and the Tragic Imagination (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1952); Lucien Goldmann, Toward a Sociology of the Novel (London: Routledge, Chapman, and Hall, 1975); and Douglas Collins, “Terrorists Ask No Questions,” in A New History of French Literature, ed. Denis Hollier et al. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987). Trotsky’s “Céline and Poincaré: Novelist and Politician” and “The Strangled Revolution: André Malraux’s Les conquérants” are reprinted in Leon Trotsky on Literature and Art, ed. Paul N. Siegel, ed. (New York: Pathfinder, 1970). Malraux’s “Reply to Trotsky” appears in Lewis, André Malraux, and Walter Benjamin’s “The Present Social Situation of the French Writer” is in his Selected Writings, vol. 2 (1927–1934) (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999). Georges Bataille’s texts on the novels by Céline and Malraux, first published in La Critique sociale, are reprinted in volume one of his Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 1970). Paul Nizan’s review of the Voyage appeared in the December 9, 1932, issue of L’Humanité. See also David Bordwell, The Cinema of Eisenstein (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993).
Breton, Char, and Modern French Poetry
MARY ANN CAWS
André Breton and René Char are key figures in the history of twentieth-century French poetry, above all in relation to the movement—surrealism—that was to issue from predecessors such as Pierre Reverdy, Alfred Jarry, the group around Dada, and crucially Guillaume Apollinaire (who first coined the term “surrealist”). Further back in time, but no less powerfully formative, stand Lautréamont (“rediscovered” by Breton) and Rimbaud (a foundational inspiration for Char). Breton was the (often dictatorial) leader of the movement. His habit of excommunicating dissidents earned him the title “Pope of Surrealism,” but he was nevertheless the leading light in the sense of being at the forefront, in both polemic and literary practice, of the surrealist project to change radically the ways in which the mind frees itself from rational baggage and correspondingly to alter the very grounds of vision. Char’s relation to surrealism, on the other hand, was a more temporary and contingent affair, that of the disciple deeply—and abidingly—invested in disrupting poetic convention and renewing vision. But he was also the disciple who eventually
rebels and strikes out on his own. This was partly a matter of historical location: Breton (1896–1966) belongs essentially to the period of the 1920s and the 1930s; Char (1907–88) to the time of the Second World War and the French Resistance. But there were also differences of temperament and outlook. Char had a much stronger commitment to returning poetry, via its renewed forms, to the sights and rhythms of the natural world; geographical location also mattered here (Breton was based in Paris, Char for the most part in his native Provence).
Breton’s best-known work in the English-speaking world is probably Nadja, first published in 1928. The history of this quite extraordinary encounter, told in a quite extraordinary way, is the only work of Breton’s that he rewrote: the revised Nadja was published in 1962, a mark of its importance for him and for the reader of surrealist writing. “Who am I,” it begins, and continues with a meditation on that and related topics, for the discovery of Nadja at the beginning and the turn away from her to X at the end compose an all-engaging tale of an impossible relationship, of unreason and reason, of a couple wandering through Paris, and finally, of a narrator then moving on to someone else less mysterious. The person of Nadja is haunting (“tell me whom I haunt”) to the point that many subsequent would-be Nadjas have existed. In itself, the tale gives the lie, in a sense, to the original goal of surrealism, which, in Breton’s formulation, wanted to celebrate “the art of the crazed” as well as the art of the child. That it should then have, in a practical sense, come to grief when its leader and its very incarnation found, by some operation of the marvelous, a genuine madwoman in the street, whom he considered first mesmerizing and then boring, has a tragic irony to it. Nadja, who ended in an asylum in the Vaucluse (providing a case for Breton’s attack on such institutions, which actually create the crazies, he said), initiates a discovery of self-knowledge in all its terribleness.
The real Nadja not only existed, as Léona-Camille-Ghislaine Del-court (usually abbreviated to “D”), born in 1902, but her many letters to Breton indeed exist also, with their drawings, some of which are displayed in the novel. Between October 22, 1926, and February 1927, she wrote Breton twenty-seven letters and pneumatiques, those little blue missives that used to be sent across Paris. (One of the peculiarities of the Breton/Char confrontation that is examined in this chapter is the singular fact that in the copy of Nadja that Breton had given to René Char were two of Nadja’s drawings and a letter. That is one of those totally unexpected objective chances. Nadja’s reception was prepared by the prepublication in the avant-garde journal transition, of the final letter to Breton’s daughter, Aube, and here called “Ecusette de Noireuil,” to whom he writes: “I hope you will be MADLY loved,” the French translated by transition’s editor, Eugène Jolas. Breton was initially attracted by Nadja’s fragility and her strangeness—her makeup was not quite completely put on, and she was accustomed to inhabiting several hotels, living partly on her earnings as a prostitute. They spent a night together, in a hotel of Saint-Germain-en-Laye, but Breton was already becoming bored. The reader may find herself on the side of Nadja, when the foreseen breakup takes place. Nadja always knew the encounter was marked by “the impossible” and always claimed that Breton—whom she had indeed madly loved—had something gigantic to accomplish, as she points out in her letter of November 30, 1926: “You will use me and I will do my best to help you to do something great.” He did, and she did, giving him the basis for this all-powerful book. She took me for a god, said Breton, and for the sun.
The importance of the experience for Breton is that the saccade (shock) that served to jumpstart his theory of “convulsive beauty” not only ends the book Nadja, but transfigures itself into the first chapter of L’amour fou (Mad Love). Mad Love, says Marguerite Bonnet, is above all the presence of a voice, the frequent lyric repetitions serving as a “signal of intensity” in his writing-speaking here. The excitement of the madness of passion permeates the entire enterprise of surrealism, despite the irony of the real case. To impassion the dailiness of life by the expectation of the unexpected: that goal remains, from the initial dynamism of the young movement, displayed in the 1924 Pas perdus (Lost Steps) (named after a train station waiting room and the walking up and down of the one waiting), through the later lyric expanse of Breton’s writing and thinking. Surrealism concerns, above all, the power of the imagination. “The imaginary is what tends to become real” (“Il y aura une fois …” [Once upon a time there will be …], in Le revolver aux cheveux blancs [The White-Haired Revolver, 1932] but published for the first time in 1930, in the first number of Surréalisme au service de la révolution [Surrealism in the Service of the Revolution]). This places surrealism in the realm of the magical and of the dream as well as the everyday, in those merging perceptions, and so it was to remain as a hinge between them, a “swinging door.”
Now the integration of the disparate objects and incidents around the poet—the one who is at the center of the dream vision—comes with the attention paid to the unexpected and, precisely, the expectation that it will occur. In surrealism, as Breton conceived of it, the state of expectation, the “état d’attente” is of prime importance. It is here that the linguistic takes over, and those “lever words”—the mots-leviers—can guide the imaginer or dreamer straight to the facts that slide us into the marvelous, while those faits-glissades or “slippery facts” or, at the most surprising best, can plunge us into it: those faits-précipices or “cliff-facts.” And exactly here is where the imaginary becomes the real, and we perceive that heart of things that holds out the thread to the one who might know how to grasp it.
The crucial conclusion of the poem “Vigilance”—that poem of keeping watch that begins with the appearance of the Tour Saint-Jacques swaying—reads in gloriously optimistic fashion:
Je ne touche plus que le coeur des choses je tiens le fil.
(I touch only the heart of things I hold the thread.)
This is a vision, leading to the work of art, that is based on an interior and not an exterior model: “man the dreamer at the heart of things.” To take up that thread at the center of things is to find it more than what threads things and experiences together: it is a “fil conducteur,” a conducting wire that fuses the object with the eye, placing the seer at the center of it all. Perceiver and perceived are joined.
And yet the exterior world mattered intensely, with its objects and persons you might—and certainly would—come across. Thus the importance of experiences such as those of the sculptor Alberto Giacometti and Breton in their wandering together in the Marché aux Puces, the flea market. Two objects they encountered that day inspired their interpretations: the metal mask found by Giacometti, and then a wooden spoon found by Breton, whose handle rests on a little shoe. The former they imagined to relate to a mask protecting the eyes from shrapnel during the war, and the latter served as a response (illustrating the notion of the “marvelous”) to Breton’s former idea of an ashtray in gray glass in the form of Cinderella’s slipper, thus answering a hidden desire. So in these interpretations, death and desire, Thanatos and Eros, meet in the flea market.
Surrealism, as Breton theorizes it—and who else ever did it with such assurance?—is above all a matter of merging such opposites, having them flow one into the other as in the scientific experiment of communicating vessels. Whence the importance of the volume so titled: Les vases communicants (The Communicating Vessels, 1932), is not only influenced by the writings of Freud—a letter from whom is included therein—but is full of dream recounting and interpretation. Alas, Freud himself was more than skeptical about the surrealists’ appropriation of his theory of dreams. The all-important centralizing, and for a while, crucial, matter of automatic writing, meant to show how writing could be released from conscious thought, revealing the hidden and therefore more valuable unconscious musings, was at the center of surrealist theory, even in the first Surrealist Manifesto. Take, for example, the text scribbled down by Philippe Soupault and Breton called Le poisson solu
ble (The Soluble Fish), in which you can actually see the speed at which the two writers penned their words. But later, it was found to be a catastrophe, quite like the meetings and correspondence of Freud and Breton.
Already in the Dada movement, binaries were conjoined, so, according to Tristan Tzara, the yes and the no would meet on the street corner. In surrealism, and in its writings and actions, night and day would be merged like swinging doors, “les portes battantes,” and the irrational would be as fully privileged as the rational. This was initially the inspiration for that hyped-up presentation of automatic writing, which was to release our tightly strapped-in reasoning minds into a fully free world of imagining. A catastrophe, Breton was to say of it at one point later, but it served its purpose early on, and in its extreme popularization later, when latter-day surrealisants would meet in cafés here and there and try to channel the marvelous.
But in the heyday of surrealism, Robert Desnos would undertake his dream trances, and—until they were found to be menacing, and indeed, they led to fistfights, it seems—they were something to be transcribed (like the erotic fantasies of the same period) and welcomed as manifestations of the marvelous. For a while, there seemed to be a working correlation between poetry, as we think of it and read it, and the idea of spontaneous or automatic transcription. Just to take a few examples of the kind of instantaneous “discovery” yielded by that concept, we might consider these passages, in which the repetition and the wanderings of the imagination are recognizable.