A History of Modern French Literature

by Christopher Prendergast

  GRANIA. Je ne peux te suivre. Je pense à toi, Diarmuid, nuit et jour, et mon désir me laisse sans force; je t’aime, Diarmuid, et les pommes que tu as trouvées dans cette vallée désolée ne sont-elles pas un signe que ma bouche est pour ta bouche?

  DIARMUID. Je ne puis t’écouter … nous trouverons un asile quelque part. Viens au jour. La caverne te fait peur et elle me fait peur aussi. Il y a du sang ici et une odeur de sang.

  (GRANIA. I cannot follow you. I think about you, Diarmuid, night and day, and desire leaves me exhausted; I love you, Diarmuid, and are not the apples that you found in this desolate valley a sign that my mouth is for your mouth?

  DIARMUID. I cannot listen to you. We will find an asylum somewhere. Come into the daylight. The cave frightens you, it frightens me too. There is blood here and a smell of blood.)

  Of course, Moore pokes fun at Yeats’s linguistic queasiness and literary pretention so as to parody the divided self of Irish writers. However, this detour via a different language shows Yeats’s wish to bend and shape an idiom that does not sound universal enough. Already, then, French was a medium that allowed one to write “without style,” even though one recognizes here all the mannerisms of late symbolist plays. If the Irish Grania and Diarmuid sound like Maurice Maeterlinck’s Pelléas and Mélisande, this stylistic parallel aims at healing the inner division of Irish modernists: they would blend Gaelic legends and European modernism while creating an idiom that could be understood by local peasants. This conflation explains the lasting success of plays like Synge’s Playboy of the Western World, with its synthetic and artificial brogue. The idea of Yeats, Lady Gregory, and George Moore’s translating from the French in order to launch a Celtic Revival was fanciful but not as absurd as it seems. What this linguistic nexus reserved for Yeats is another story, but it became a source of worry for the young Beckett.

  Beckett’s decision to write in French in order to write without style is not just the consequence of his voluntary exile to Paris in the late thirties; neither was it caused by the accident of war, and his forced stay in Roussillon in the forties. Beckett has followed a consistent literary program, a program anticipated by the Irish modernists. True, he deployed it more consistently, more rigorously, and over a longer period of time. It was formulated early, just after a stay of some two years in Paris, in Beckett’s aborted novel, Dream of Fair to Middling Women. Quoting a startling phrase (“Black diamond of pessimism”) coined by his friend Lucien (who was based on Jean Beaufret, a philosopher at the Ecole Normale Supérieure), Beckett’s alter-ego Belacqua finds in the expression a family resemblance with the gems of Racine and Malherbe before generalizing about the French language: “But the writing of, say, Racine or Malherbe, perpendicular, diamanté, is pitted, is it not, and sprigged with sparkles; the flints and pebbles are there, no end of humble tags and commonplaces. They have no style, they write without style, do they not, they give you the phrase, the sparkle, the precious margaret. Perhaps only the French can do it. Perhaps only the French language can give you the thing you want.” This fragment from Dream of Fair to Middling Women was excerpted in Disjecta in 1983, which testifies to its importance. What remains to be explained is the link between those verbal “diamonds”—in another context, one might be tempted to describe them as baroque metaphors—and the alleged absence of a style. It would take Beckett twenty more years to iron out the tensions or contradictions that this single passage contains.

  Beckett had the advantage of having learned French very young, and of having been thoroughly immersed in the Parisian milieu of the experimental avant-garde that had gathered around Joyce and Jolas’s Transition group as early as 1928. He witnessed the impact of Joyce’s creation of a synthetic and syncretic language into which more than seventy separate idioms would be fused. However, he could also perceive that the curious idiolect of the Wake remained fundamentally English, at least in its grammar; it could turn into a universal language capable of absorbing all other idioms only if you knew some English. Samuel Beckett appeared then as a belated Synge who did not have to go the Aran Islands, following Yeats’s suggestion, in order to forge a new Anglo-Irish idiom. Beckett found it in the street dialogues of French blue-collar workers drinking calvados in Parisian cafés, and then among the resilient French peasants of the Lubéron hills, when he and Suzanne were hiding from the Gestapo in Roussillon.

  These encounters with demotic and patois turned Beckett away from the classical models that he knew so well when he taught French literature at Trinity in 1930–31. At the time, his survey of French literature gave pride of place to Racine and also to the “modern classicism” presented by André Gide and the Nouvelle Revue Française as a response to the avant-garde. The classical models exerted their influence for a limited duration, until surrealism and the spirit of Transition proved stronger. A new awareness of the potentialities of the French language as a language to think and write in was provided by poetry, especially the poets Beckett translated into English: Eluard, Rimbaud, and Apollinaire. Beckett remained a poet even when writing prose or theatrical plays, and it was poetry that he first began writing directly in French when he settled for good in Paris after 1938. One observes a new spontaneity and fluency. Feeling finally at home in Paris, Beckett wrote several poems in French. If the themes are not new (Beckett is obsessed with a dead fiancée, the sadness of physical love, and a gnawing awareness of mortality), the style is less allusive, the language less “Joycean” than the earlier poems in English. Puns are rare, litanies more insistent.

  Beckett discovers a French lyrical voice that sings of loss, absence, and mourning. In “Ascension,” he hears the loud radio of neighbors commenting on a football match before remembering the blood gushing from the mouth of the loved one. “The Fly” meditates on windowpanes separating the poet from the outside world, generating a vertiginous Rimbaldian invocation of the sky and the sea tumbling together. In “Prayer,” silence provides a welcome shelter against fits of anxiety. Anxiety is never far off—it accompanies sexuality—but philosophy still offers some consolations. An untitled poem evokes the nominalist Roscelin, the master of Abélard, in the context of prostitution:

  être là sans mâchoires sans dents

  où s’en va le plaisir de perdre

  avec celui à peine inférieur

  de gagner

  et Roscelin et on attend

  adverbe oh petit cadeau

  (To be there without jaws without teeth / there goes the pleasure of losing / with the pleasure barely less / of winning / and Roscelin and we are waiting / adverb oh little gift)

  “Waiting,” is attendant, a participle or a gerund. With “on attend” echoing “en attendant,” the verb takes on an adverbial function; such an “adverb” will be used to modify all verbs, according to an ontology of time as perpetual deferral later elaborated in En attendant Godot. Here, we already guess that the subject’s condition is to wait, quite simply.

  This new idiom, colloquial French heard with a bilingual ear, will be the stuff of the postwar plays and fiction. When Beckett wrote Waiting for Godot as a diversion from the relentless probing of metatextual paradoxes in Molloy and Malone Dies, he created an instant French classic. This play is still today one of the most popular items of the French repertoire. Many details are recognizably local, in spite of the allegorical landscape. The very name “Godot,” that sounds so French and so funny, and that may or may not refer to God, can be spelled “Godo” (almost “Gogo”), which evokes the simple enjoyment of the commedia dell’ arte, praised by Beckett in his 1929 essay on Joyce, in which he mentions the Teatro dei Piccoli that brought to London and New York the traditions of that genre.

  To make sense of “Godot” as a French name, we must see the layers of allusions it conceals. A notebook containing the first draft of En attendant Godot, kept since 2006 at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, presents in the first draft from October 9, 1948, two old men, Lévy and Vladimir. When drafting the second act, Beckett changed Lév
y to “Estragon,” or “Gogo.” “Didi” comes from Vladimir, a Russian name that evokes Lenin. We are told early that without Vladimir, Gogo-Lévy would be only a “little heap of bones.” Beckett evokes the death camps and their freeing by Russian troops, and pays homage to his friend Alfred Péron, a Jew in the Resistance. It was Péron who brought Beckett to the partisans’ Gloria network. Péron died in Mauthausen in 1945; he had survived longer than most because he had been protected by a pimp named Polo, and Polo considered Péron a poet. Estragon presents himself as a “poet” first:

  VLADIMIR. You should have been a poet.

  ESTRAGON. I was. (Gesture towards his rags.) Isn’t that obvious?

  Angela Moorjani has argued that the yellow color of tarragon is an allusion to the yellow stars worn by Jews in Nazi-occupied countries. Through these two emblematic characters, Beckett presents a recent history marked by the Shoah and the emergence of Soviet communism. In such a context, waiting, this adverb accompanying all actions, may be tedious but not unbearable. It is the simple fact of survival in a context dominated by sporadic outbursts of blind and absurd violence:

  VLADIMIR. And they didn’t beat you?

  ESTRAGON. Beat me? Certainly they beat me.

  VLADIMIR. The same lot as usual?

  ESTRAGON. The same? I don’t know.

  Felicia McCarren has shown that one of the sources of the dialogues between Didi and Gogo, combining brotherly solicitude and bitter antagonism is the last sequence of Jean Renoir’s La grande illusion. In the 1937 film, two French prisoners manage to escape from a German jail during World War I, Maréchal (Jean Gabin) and Rosenthal (Marcel Dallo). One is tough guy from the suburbs while the second, from a rich Jewish family, cannot stand the strain of walking day and night. Maréchal and Rosenthal bicker, try to part ways, and then are reconciled; their solidarity allows them to survive in the end. Beckett could not have missed the resemblance between Rosenthal’s name and the name of an old friend from Dublin, Con Leventhal.

  Waiting for Godot breaks the tedium created by repetitive exchanges between Didi and Gogo when it introduces the second couple, Pozzo and Lucky. Pozzo orders Lucky to perform “thinking” for Vladimir and Estragon. Lucky’s speech is a hilarious rant that describes concentric circles, moving from considerations of God’s creation to an epileptic stutter verging on aphasia (“the skull alas the stones Cunard tennis … the stones … so calm … Cunard … unfinished …”) Thus Godot remains primarily a French text; the difference between “Cunard” in the English and Conard (connard) in the French is revealing: one can understand “Cunard” biographically (Nancy Cunard was a personal friend) whereas Conard is clearly an insult. The French text is more direct, bawdy, colloquial than its English equivalent. This divergence would tend to mark all the other texts subsequently written in the two languages.

  Curiously, it is in poetry that the balance of tones and voices works perfectly in both languages, even when the lyricism of the voice branches off in different directions. In an untitled French poem from the 1940s, the musical mode of expression recalls Verlaine or Eluard:

  je suis ce cours de sable qui glisse

  entre le galet et la dune

  la pluie d’été pleut sur ma vie

  sur moi ma vie qui me fuit me poursuit

  et finira le jour de son commencement

  The evocation of Ireland’s rainy summers shows the speaker doggedly walking along the beach in a soft fog. Beckett translates himself without any loss, even if it seemed impossible to keep the double meaning of je suis (“I am” and “I am following”) in English. His solution is elegant, testifying to an equal command of poetry in both languages:

  my way is in the sand flowing

  between the shingle and the dune

  the summer rain rains on my life on me my life harrying fleeting

  to its beginning to its end

  The poet leaves behind the divided subject of the first poems to turn into a Rilkean trace, a path one follows as the flow of time is sand dripping from the hourglass. Soon, however, the two versions diverge; here is the second stanza in French:

  cher instant je te vois

  dans ce rideau de brume qui recule

  où je n’aurai plus à fouler ces longs seuils mouvants

  et vivrai le temps d’une porte

  qui s’ouvre et se referme

  A literal translation would be: “dear instant I see you / through a curtain of receding mist / where I won’t have to tread those long quicksand thresholds …” Beckett’s version is different—and much better:

  my peace is there in the receding mist

  when I may cease from treading these long shifting thresholds

  and live the space of a door

  that opens and shuts.

  We are now treading the treacherous quicksand of comparative translation studies. The file is immense, and most bafflingly, yields no consistent rule. At times Beckett translates himself faithfully; at times he takes huge liberties—the most obvious case being Mercier and Camier from 1974, not at all identical with the French Mercier et Camier novel from 1946. In 1974, producing more a reduction than a translation, Beckett skips entire pages, condenses dialogue, renders the quest of the two old men less delirious, more subdued, more metaphysical. The first version abounded in grotesque details that have been erased. The scenes of love-making have been expunged; tantalizing hints about a homosexual relationship between the two old men have vanished. In many instances, Beckett does not bother to translate the profanities regularly uttered by Mercier; for instance we see: “Mercier used a nasty expression,” then: “He used another nasty expression.”

  Paradoxically, it is the English version that achieves what Beckett claims the French language can do: writing without style, erasing stylistic markers of physicality, incongruity, and intertextuality. We still have funny and bawdy exchanges between the characters, but the verbal glitter has come off. Steven Connor has analyzed the differences in great detail—what stands out is the enormity of the loss in the English version, which as a result appears weaker and more banal. The same is true of many titles: How It Is does not even attempt to render the obvious pun on commencer/comment c’est of Comment c’est, while The Lost Ones renounces the poetic echoes of Lamartine’s famous line condensed by Le dépeupleur.

  Often, it is a blank that marks a difficult spot, as we see in “Le calmant,” an early short story written directly in French, containing this startling sentence: “A moi maintenant le départ, la lutte et le retour peut-être, à ce viellard qui est moi ce soir, plus vieux que je ne le serai jamais. Me voici acculé à des futurs.” The English version skips the last sentence and has only: “For me now the setting forth, the struggle and perhaps the return, for the old man I am this evening, older than my father was, older than I shall ever be.” Could Beckett find no equivalent for what may be glossed as “I am forced to face futures” or “I have my back against my futures”? The density of the French, with the poetic echolalia of the three /u/ sounds, was deemed impossible to render—and thus skipped.

  One could multiply examples. Countless scholars of the growing field of translation studies have taken Beckett as a rare example of a bilingual author whose practice as a self-translator varies enormously from text to text, period to period, language to language. Indeed, Beckett came into his own as a French writer, and deployed all his talent there until he met a limit with “Worstward Ho.” If we take the masterpiece of the first French period, L’innommable (The Unnamable), it is easy to decide that the novel is stronger and more subtle in the French original. Here is a passage from the famous lyrical ending, culminating with the famous “I can’t go on, I’ll go on.” It comes in a long sentence of about three pages beginning with the image of a huge prison, ending with the theme of an endless flow of words that belong to no one in particular. Close to the beginning we find this:

  … quel halètement, c’est ça, des exclamations, ça fait continuer, ça retarde l’échéance, non, c’est le co
ntraire, je ne sais pas, repartir, dans cette immensité, dans cette obscurité, faire les movements de repartir, alors qu’on ne peut pas bouger, alors qu’on n’est jamais parti, on le con, faire les mouvements, quels mouvements, on ne peut pas bouger, on lance la voix, elle se perd dans les voûtes, elle appelle ça les voûtes, c’est peut-être le firmament, c’est peut-être l’abîme, ce sont des mots, elle parle d’une prison …

  Here is Beckett’s English version:

  … what breathlessness, that’s right, ejaculations, that helps you on, that puts off the fatal hour, no, the reverse, I don’t know, start again, in this immensity, this obscurity, go through the motions of starting again, you who can’t stir, you who never started, you the who, go through the motions, what motions, you can’t stir, you launch your voice, it dies away in the vault, perhaps it’s the abyss, those are words of a prison …

  Even if this satisfactory translation manages to add a sly joke on “ejaculations,” Beckett has to battle against the drift of French grammar, which makes an explicit feminine of the “voice”; hence the last segment is clearer in French (“elle parle” refers to the voice), whereas the English has to use a deictic (“those are words”). Meanwhile the unusual or punning “on le con” is rendered weakly by “you the who.” Beckett puns on “Oh le con!” a usual French insult. The bottomless stupidity ascribed to this neutral and anonymous subject pervades all language. Beckett chose to translate “on” by “you” instead of “one,” which creates an interesting inner dialogism, but misses the irony of the poetic echo between “on” and “con” (a more direct translation, and one that would have to wait until How It Is, would be “the cunt that one is.”) I highlight this tiny segment because it calls up an intractable problem of self-translation brought to Beckett by the later “Worstward Ho,” from the second trilogy, a dense text beginning like this: “On. Say on. Be said on. Somehow on. Till nohow on. Said nohow on.” Beckett tried hard to translate this text into French but failed, and concluded that the task was impossible: he could not find a French equivalent for the poetic and philosophical reversal of “On” into “No.” He had forgotten that his previous “on le con” provided a solution, at least if one modifies “on” into “non,” and admits that “cunt” (in a Joycean manner) turns into the semantic equivalent of “yes.”