A History of Modern French Literature

by Christopher Prendergast

  Thus, beyond the struggle with resistant or slippery idioms in French and English, when Beckett tried to push one language as far as he could, his work on the semantic and poetic resources of both languages was mediated by literary models. They were mostly four: Joyce, Proust, Leopardi, and Céline. From Joyce, Beckett learned that the temptation to work with several languages at once had to be resisted—he himself had indulged this game in his early work in English, and was painfully aware that Dream of Fair to Middling Women looked like a pastiche of Finnegans Wake. From Céline, whose Journey to the End of the Night was a major discovery for him, as it was for all the generation of writers and thinkers active in the thirties, including Leon Trotsky, Beckett learned that French could exploit its spoken, idiomatic, and demotic roots. From Proust and Leopardi, he learned that the philosophy of pessimism that he had embraced early on would not survive without adhering to a principle of formal brilliance and strict rhetorical organization. Thus when Beckett became a French writer during World War II, his solution was the paradoxical conflation of Proust and Céline, and from this pure oxymoron—the alliance of the vulgar speech emerging from the depths of the French Lumpenproletariat attracted by anti-Semitism and fascist values, and the entangled self-reflexive metaphors deploying social snobbism in its star-struck tropism for the higher classes—resulted a combination of opposites as workable to create a new poetic idiom as the tensions generated from similar ideological and stylistic contrasts by the mature W. B. Yeats.

  One has to be cautious when rehearsing the story of Beckett’s descent into minimalism thanks to a rigorous slimming cure brought about by the French language. If Beckett’s desire to write without style is attested, it has to be inscribed in a broader tradition; this is not so much that of the “theater of the absurd” (a term that characterizes better Ionesco, another bilingual author) but the new modernity ushered in by contemporary writers with whom Beckett is not so often associated, like Jean Genet, Jean Cayrol, Louis-René des Forêts, and Albert Camus. There was one exception, a French author whom Beckett recognized as an equal, an alter-ego, and also a close friend: Robert Pinget.

  We still have a lot to learn about the friendship between Beckett and Pinget. If we look at the opening paragraph of Mahu, or the Material, written before Pinget had met Beckett, the parallels with the Trilogy are striking, especially with its unreliable narrators like Molloy and the Unnamable: “This is the story I can’t make head or tail of it, somebody said: ‘You ought to write it down,’ I can’t remember who, perhaps it was me, I get everything mixed up, it’s true sometimes when I’m being introduced to someone I concentrate so much that I take on the same face as the person and the friend who is introducing us doesn’t know if it’s me or the other one, he just leaves me to sort it out for myself.” This novel was published in 1952 by Editions de Minuit, indeed one year after Molloy and Malone Dies, but also one year before The Unnamable.

  Other important French predecessors were Maurice Blanchot, Louis-René des Forêts, and Albert Camus. In the 1950s, Beckett read Blanchot avidly but considered him more as a gifted literary critic than as a novelist. We do not know much about his reading of des Forêts, whose experimental novel Le bavard had been published in 1946 to great acclaim. Like the narrator of The Unnamable, in this long novella, a voice is speaking and contradicting itself. It invents stories and denies them while flaunting their lack of style: “One will remember that with an ostentation that might pass for excessive modesty, I did not avoid underlining the deliberate sparseness of my form, and I was the first to present hypocritical regrets that a certain monotony was the inevitable price to pay for its honesty.” Bold metatextual games play with a fictional listener and sketch in advance the program of Beckett’s trilogy: “Do you imagine me endowed with any other organ than my tongue? Can I be identified with the owner of the right hand that is now writing these letters? How can one know this? Don’t wait until he denounces himself. Who wouldn’t, being in his place, prefer to remain anonymous?” Here, truly, the author vanishes in a flow of words. He survives thanks to the condition of language, no matter how desperate or absurd its statements may be.

  In order to avoid multiplying examples taken from the French writers of the times, I will argue that all these efforts correspond to a shift analyzed by Roland Barthes. Barthes’s Writing Degree Zero (1953) offers a good gloss on Beckett’s attempt to write in French without a style. Barthes’s point of departure was a revolution in literary language brought about by the French Revolution. By highlighting the profanities that marked the style of a revolutionary like Hébert, who never began a number of Le Père Duchêne without introducing the exclamations “fuck!” and “bugger!,” Barthes explains that such profanities do not mean anything in themselves but just signal a revolutionary situation. By dramatizing “beginnings,” the stylistic markers of popular anger flaunted by Hébert, and the revolutionary regicides, Barthes splices history and text under the banner of the absence of style. Writing, according to Barthes, cannot be reduced to style, since it allows any writer a freedom of expression even when confronted with dramatic historical situations. He distinguishes Literature, the field of the literary forms; Language, a social medium granted to all speakers; and Style, the writer’s singularity, a “fate” handed down by one’s body. Writing deploys itself against style and language by gaining freedom from biographical determinations and social negotiations. “Placed at the center of the problematics of literature, which cannot exist prior to it, writing is thus essentially the morality of form, the choice of that social area within which the writer elects to situate the Nature of his language.”

  Barthes began a critical dialogue with Jean-Paul Sartre’s dialectics of “engagement,” which echoes with Beckett’s personal tussle with Sartre and Beauvoir in Les temps modernes. Writing Degree Zero was published in 1947, just months after the publication of Sartre’s What Is Literature?. “What Is Writing?” asks Sartre’s first chapter, but it inverts its terms. Sartre defined writing as a collective response to historical situations; Barthes wrenches the term from humanistic existentialism and neo-Marxist dialectics to endow it with a new dynamism. Sartre had only two terms and relayed on the old form and content division: language communicates ideas, style gives ideas a means of expression. With three terms, Barthes escaped from this conceptual deadlock. Writing would be emancipated from a dilemma in which one had to choose between a private discourse and commitment. Defining writing as the “morality of form,” Barthes lends a moral and political weight to formal invention by highlighting the work of writers like Camus, Blanchot, Cayrol, or Queneau, all of whom are called “writers without Literature.”

  Thus Barthes’s point of departure was identical with that of Beckett, above all because of the latter’s friendship with Georges Duthuit. Duthuit was a close friend of the painter André Masson and of the writer Georges Bataille. Beckett, who became a friend of Bataille after the war, had belonged earlier to the same neo-surrealist avant-garde. The friendship with those artists and intellectuals forced Beckett to reengage with a surrealism that had changed during the war (if Beckett’s prewar position can be called “surrealist,” as Daniel Albright argues). After 1945, this changed. Beckett then evinced a dislike of André Breton, whose smugness during the war irked him, but he refused to join the ranks of Sartre’s friends, then all fellow-travelers in the French Communist Party. Beckett remained in a second avant-garde close to Duthuit, whose new journal, Transition, looked back to the previous avant-garde launched by Eugène Jolas after it had folded in 1938.

  Beckett reminisced over his avant-gardist past in June 1949: “Here in the loft I find an old copy of transition (1938), with a poem of mine, the wild youthful kind, which I had quite forgotten, and an article (also by me) on a young Irish poet (young then) who had just published a volume of poems in the same series as Echo’s Bones” (the title of his first collection of poems). Beyond nostalgia, there is a fear of repetition: could there be a new Revolution of the Word in the
context of a divided Europe marked by the cold war? Duthuit did not believe in the utopia of a universal language modeled on Joyce’s and Stein’s experiments. The names that appear in the first issues of the new Transition are those of Jean-Paul Sartre, Georges Bataille, René Char, Jean Wahl, Antonin Artaud, André Malraux, Maurice Nadeau, and Jean Genet. Transition discusses existentialism, Marxism, the return of a left-wing and humanist Catholicism, and the emergence of René Char and André du Bouchet.

  The first issue translates a passage from Sartre’s 1947 What Is Literature?, Sartre’s highly critical analysis of surrealism. However, it is introduced by a no less scathing essay by Duthuit, “Sartre’s Last Class.” Duthuit takes stock of the clash between Sartre and Breton and imagines an exchange of letters between Nietzsche and Louis-Ferdinand Céline; he then praises Jean Genet at the time of the scandal created by The Maids. Céline and Genet were read closely by Beckett at the time. Even if Beckett had expressed his admiration of the earlier writings by Sartre, such as Nausea, fundamentally, he followed Duthuit in his rejection of the concept of “committed” literature.

  In 1953, Barthes’s “degree zero of écriture” sketched a history of modernity moving from the Revolution to the nouveau roman via Flaubert and Mallarmé. Back then, modernity was equated with the nouveau roman: the degree zero was exemplified by its catalogs, its descriptive vertigo, its games with pseudo-objectivity that debunked a previous generation’s grandiloquence. Writers like Alain Robbe-Grillet, Albert Camus, or Maurice Blanchot embodied in their “neutral” styles a resistance to political rectitude or proletarian heroism. It was crucial to bypass the idea of a plurality of “styles”; what was lost for stylistics was gained at the level of an ethics of writing, which was how Barthes and Beckett fought their way out of Sartre’s neo-Hegelian dialectics.

  Earlier, Barthes had found in Camus’s famous present perfects in The Stranger a perfect “style-less style” announcing a new “writing degree zero.” With The Stranger, according to Barthes, Camus had launched a style of “indifference,” and this was to be the style of a new “absurd” because it was “flat and deep like a mirror.” Barthes’s review of The Stranger dates from 1944, and it explains why Beckett’s tramps have so much in common with Meursault. With The Stranger, Barthes argues, “we see the beginning of a new style, style of silence and silence of style, in which the voice of the artist—equally removed from sighs, blasphemy and gospels—is a white voice, the only voice that can fit our unredeemable distress.” Moreover, Barthes praised Camus’s ethical stance not because of his alleged moralism or antimoralism, but because this new way of writing alone could rise to the challenge of historical catastrophes. This style-less writing finds its resources in spoken French vernacular, and its predecessor was Céline. We find it in the famous opening of Voyage au bout de la nuit: “Ça a débuté comme ça. Moi, j’avais jamais rien dit. Rien.” This is not so far different from the first sentence of Camus’s Stranger: “Aujourd’hui, maman est morte. Ou peut-être hier, je ne sais pas.” Writing in this style-less style provided the only ethical position capable of responding to the dramas of World War II, of the Shoah, of serial betrayals among Resistance members, of the spreading use of torture in the Algerian war, of the grim face of Soviet communism, or of the deadend of French colonialism.

  Here was the site that Samuel Beckett chose to inhabit, not as a militant or a war veteran with his medal but as a French writer—a new threshold; it was a door that opened rather than shut, leading to a literary space from which he could go on as an always de-doubled and indefatigable ego scriptor: “… devant la porte qui s’ouvre sur mon histoire, ça m’étonnerait, ça va être moi, ça va être le silence, là où je suis, je ne sais pas, je ne le saurai jamais, dans le silence on ne sait pas, il faut continuer, je ne peux pas continuer, je vais continuer.” Or: “… before the door that opens on my story, that would surprise me, it will be I, it will be the silence, where I am, I don’t know, I’ll never know, in the silence you don’t know, you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.”

  WORKS CITED AND RECOMMENDED FURTHER READING

  Albright, Daniel. Beckett and Aesthetics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

  Barthes, Roland. Oeuvres complètes. Vol. 1, 1942–1965. Edited by Eric Marty. Paris: Seuil, 1993.

  ———. Writing Degree Zero (1953). Translated Annette Lavers and Colin Smith. New York: Noonday Press, 1968.

  Beckett, Samuel. Collected Poems. Edited by Sean Lawlor and John Pilling. London: Faber, 2012.

  ———. Comment c’est. Paris: Minuit, 1961.

  ———. How It Is. New York: Grove Press, 1964.

  ———. The Complete Short Prose, 1929–1989. Edited by S. E. Gontarski. New York: Grove Press, 1995.

  ———. Disjecta. London: Calder, 1983.

  ———. Dream of Fair to Middling Women. Dublin: Black Cat Press, 1992.

  ———. En attendant Godot / Waiting for Godot. New York: Grove Press, 1982.

  ———. Letters. Vol. 1, 1929–1940. Edited by Martha Fehsenfeld, Lois Overbeck, George Craig, and Daniel Gunn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.

  ———. Mercier and Camier. New York: Grove Press, 1975.

  ———. Nohow On: Company, Ill Seen Ill Said, Worstward Ho. London: Calder, 1989.

  ———. Three Novels. New York: Grove Press, 1991.

  Bolin, John. Beckett and the Modern Novel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.

  Camus, Albert. L’étranger. Paris: Gallimard, Folio, 2012.

  Casanova, Pascale. Samuel Beckett: Anatomy of a Literary Revolution. London: Verso, 2007.

  Céline, Louis-Ferdinand. Voyage au bout de la nuit. Paris: Gallimard, Folio, 1972.

  Connor, Steven. “‘Traduttore, traditore’: Samuel Beckett’s Translation of Mercier et Camier.” Journal of Beckett Studies 11–12 (December 1989): 27–46.

  Cronin, Anthony. Samuel Beckett: The Last Modernist. New York: Da Capo Press, 1999.

  Des Forêts, Louis-René. Le bavard. Paris: Gallimard, 1973.

  Duerfahrd, Lance. The Work of Poverty: Samuel Beckett’s Vagabonds and the Theater of Crisis. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2013.

  Duthuit, Georges, ed. Transition: Forty-eight. (Paris) 1 (January 1948).

  Eysteinsson, Astradur, and Vivian Liska, eds. Modernism, vol. 2. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2007.

  Fifield, Peter. Late Modernist Style in Samuel Beckett and Emmanuel Levinas. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.

  Gessner, Nikolaus. Die Unzulänglichkeit der Sprache: Eine Untersuchung über Formzerfall und Beziehungslosigkeit bei Samuel Beckett. Zurich: Juris, 1957.

  Gontarski, Stan E., ed. The Edinburgh Companion to Samuel Beckett and the Arts. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014.

  Knowlson, James. Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996.

  Mégevand, Martin. “Pinget Seen by Beckett, Beckett according to Pinget: The Unpublishable.” Journal of Beckett Studies 19, no. 1 (2010): 3–14.

  Miller, Tyrus. Late Modernism. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.

  Moore, George. Hail and Farewell. Edited by Richard Allen Cave. Gerrards Cross, UK: Colyn Smythe, 2003.

  Moorjani, Angela. “Whence Estragon?” Beckett Circle 32, no. 2 (Fall 2009): 7–8.

  Pilling, John. A Companion to “Dream of Fair to Middling Women.” Tallahassee, FL: Journal of Beckett Studies Books, 2004.

  Pinget, Robert. Mahu, or the Material. Translated by Alan Sheridan-Smith. London: Dalkey Archive, 2005.

  Djebar and the Birth of “Francophone” Literature

  NICHOLAS HARRISON

  In 2006, Assia Djebar was made a member of the Académie française, an institution founded in 1635 to promote and protect the French language. Its rules stipulate that there should be no more than forty Académiciens at a time, and it is an honor to join the ranks of “the immortals,” as members are known, and to become associated with some great writers, thinke
rs, and other distinguished figures, living and dead. But by its nature it is a conservative body, and it is not difficult to treat with irony. The list of writers not elected is impressive. Descartes, Molière, Diderot, Balzac, Flaubert, Proust, and Sartre all remained on the outside, even though they did not face certain disadvantages of birth that Djebar overcame in being chosen: since 1635 there have been more than seven hundred Académiciens, but she was only the fifth woman to gain entry, and she was the first member from France’s former North African colonies.

  In the Académie’s inauguration ceremony it is customary for the new member to make a speech, which is followed by a speech of welcome from another Académicien. In this instance, Pierre-Jean Rémy began by referring back to the inauguration of François Cheng, an essayist, poet, and novelist born in China in 1929, who moved to France as a young man and who, after writing initially in Chinese, began publishing in French in the late 1970s. Rémy said:

  When I pronounced my speech three years ago welcoming our fellow-member François Cheng, I remarked—and it was a euphemism—that he had arrived here from far away. You arrive here from at least as far, and perhaps further, although you have only crossed the Mediterranean. As an Algerian and a Muslim, and what is more a Muslim woman who was born at a time when women’s voices were usually silenced in your country, you started life—as a little girl born in Cherchell, about 100 miles from Algiers, between hills covered in vines and the sea—light-years away from the Académie, or so it may have seemed.