French Literature: A Very Short Introduction

by John D. Lyons

  The collapse and reinvention of character

  This is not atypical of the times. The notion of character, like so many other concepts or practices of the literary tradition, was called into question quite energetically in the thirty years after the Second World War. This happens in a myriad of ways and in many genres. For instance, in lonesco's The Bald Soprano (La Cantatrice chauve), the characters' identities collapse into a small set of names. Monsieur Smith and Madame Smith discuss someone named `Bobby Watson', or so it seems at first, since `Bobby Watson' proliferates. Madame Smith says that she was not thinking of Bobby Watson but rather:

  I was thinking of his wife. She had the same name as he did, Bobby, Bobby Watson. Since they had the same name, you couldn't tell them apart when you saw them together. It was only after his death that you could really tell which one was which.

  (C'est a safemme que je pense. Elle s appelait comme lui, Bobby, Bobby Watson. Comme ils avaient le mime nom, on ne pouvait pas les distinguer l'un de l'autre quand on les voyait ensemble. Ce nest qu'apres sa mort a lui, qu'on a pu vraiment savoir qui etait l'un et qui etait l'autre.)

  Superficially, this is a play that makes fun of the British middle class and also of the French view of the British middle class. But it is also, at the peak influence of French existentialism (with which lonesco is not usually associated), a glimpse of a wider anxiety about personal identity, and, in the passage quoted, of women's existence. If the woman Bobby Watson could not be distinguished from her husband Bobby Watson until after the latter's death, the reason may be given in a book published, with great success, only a year before: Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex (Le Deuxieme sexe,1949). De Beauvoir (1908-86) reached a huge audience in this book that analyses the cultural myths of womanhood in specific roles: the young girl, the lesbian, the married woman, the mother, and so forth.

  At the same time, in literary theory and criticism as well as in political and social thought, the concept of persona or role or agent or central narrative character became an object of much discussion and experimentation in the novel. This genre, which had seemed to harden into a `classic' form at the end of the 19th century, had for decades been under attack. Paul Valery, the poet and philosopher of literature, had in 1923 taken the novel to task for its lack of rigour, for its loose and baggy structure. In a striking formula, he complained in regard to Proust that the novel as genre had in common with dreams that they refused to take any responsibility for their structure: `all their digressions belong' (toes leurs ecarts leur appartiennent).

  Novels about novels

  Two years after Valery's stinging remark about the novel, Andre Gide (1869-1951) wrote a novel about writing a novel, The Counterfeiters (Les Faux-monnayeurs, 1925). The character Edouard is writing a novel with the same title as Gide's novel, and this title itself announces the criticism of the realist novel. This structure of a text reflected within itself, as if a series of boxes within boxes, is now widely known in French by a term of heraldic origin, mise en abyme (literally, `placed in the chasm'). This critical reflection of the text upon the text became common in the years before the war and into the 1960s. In Nausea (La Nausee, 1938) by Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-80), the first-person narrator, a historian, reflects at length on the relation between writing and being, and at the end of the narrative decides to stop writing history and to write a novel instead - perhaps a novel something like the novel we are holding.

  These influential early examples of reflexivity in the novel are the background to the major movement of formal experimentation in what is called the nouveau roman ('new novel'), a term popularized by Alain Robbe-Grillet in his 1963 essay For a New Novel (Pour un nouveau roman). The term nouveau roman was apparently first used to describe this kind of writing by Emile Henriot in a negative review of Robbe-Grillet's novel La Jalousie (Jealousy, 1957; the term jalousie also means a window blind). La Jalousie illustrates the ways in which the nouveau roman called into question the notion of central character, along with many other conventions attributed to the traditional novel.

  La Jalousie is narrated by a nameless character. In fact, the verb `narrate' may be misleading in this case, since the overall story is never really told but may be pieced together by the reader from what appear to be overlapping, sometimes repetitive, sometimes contradictory, fragments that are more like description (they are in the present tense) than storytelling. The persons named in La Jalousie are A.... Franck, and the latter's wife Christiane. Gradually it becomes clear that the narrator supposes a love affair between A... and Franck. We can infer - from notations telling us that four places have been set at the dinner table, but that Christiane will not be coming, etc. - that this narrator is a jealous husband. This text amply justifies the term ecole du regard ('school of the gaze') which was also used to designate the nouveau roman. Here is a typical passage:

  In the banana plantation behind them, a trapezoidal section stretches uphill where, because no clusters have yet been harvested since the suckers were planted, the quincunxes are still perfectly regular.

  (Dans la bananeraie, derriere ew , une piece en forme de trapeze s Wend vers l'amont, Bans laquelle, aucun regime n'ayant encore ete recolte depuis la plantation des souches, la regularite des quinconces est encore absolue.)

  The objects and events described are deliberately banal: table settings, the sound of a truck climbing an incline, the stain on the wall from a crushed millipede, the windows, hands on a table.

  Although the source of these descriptions is never named, it - or rather, he, the husband - is not disembodied since there is heavy insistence on the point of view, in the literal sense that certain things are visible or not given the distance, angle, and lighting conditions specified in the text. The narrator's characteristics can also be inferred from what he notices, from the terms and precision of his description, from the obsessive return to certain moments and to certain traits that he notices in A.... Yet, other than through this effort at description of the physical world, we have no access to the thoughts of any of the characters, only a series of clues. The paradoxical situation of a central character who is both everywhere and yet, explicitly, nowhere, shows the extreme effort to renew the representation of the central persona, who is far from a'hero, yet fundamental to the existence of the fiction itself.

  Such inventive stretching of the category of the protagonist is common among Robbe-Grillet's contemporaries. In Second Thoughts (La Modification, 1957), a novel by Michel Butor (1926) that appeared the same year as La Jalousie, the protagonist (who is also the presumed narrator, as well as the presumed reader) is simply `you' (vous - if we assume that the narrator and the protagonist are the same person, the choice of the formal pronoun adds another layer of strange distance from the self). At the outset of the story, the effect is quite strong: `You've put your left foot on the copper groove, and with your right shoulder you vainly attempt to push the sliding door a bit more'. And in The Golden Fruits (Les fruits d'or,1963) by Nathalie Sarraute (1900-99), the continuity usually given to a novel by the protagonists is instead assured by the topic of a multitude of conversations about a novel also called Les fruits d'or - another mise en abyme like Gide's Les Faux-monnayeurs.

  At the same time, lyric poetry, which has often been in the forefront of attempts to expand the concepts of character and voice, pushed even further in complicating these components of the text. In Yves Bonnefoy's On the Motion and Immobility of Douve (Du mouvement et de l'immobilite de Douve, 1953), an `I' sometimes addresses an entity named `Douve' (grammatically feminine) who seems to have human features but also to become at times a landscape, an animal, and various other objects. Lyric poetry has often displayed its characters situated in, and particularized by, an environment, but Bonnefoy goes much further. Douve seems to be aggressed by the places in which she is located (and the choice of the pronoun `she' confers a humanness that is not at all certain in this poem). By making up the proper noun `Douve', Bonnefoy invites the reader to wonder which of the meanings of
the French noun douve is most pertinent: the moat of a castle, a flowering plant (the Spearwort), a parasitic worm, or a stave. The strong association of character with place unites the lyric poetry of this period with other genres, such as the cinema.

  Character and place

  Often associated with the nouveau roman, Marguerite Duras (born Marguerite Donnadieu in Indo-China, 1914; died in Paris in 1996) wrote the scenario for the film Hiroshima mon amour (directed by Alain Resnais, 1959) and published it separately as a book in 1960. Writers in this period moved often from novel to film and back - after her collaboration with Resnais, Duras herself later directed a score of films, as did Robbe-Grillet after writing the screenplay for Renais's Last Year at Marienbad (LAnnee derniere a Marienbad, 1961). The screenplays, published in book form, are scarcely distinguishable from many other novels of the period that were not filmed nor even meant to be filmed, such as Jealousy. As printed texts, these screenplays are clearly part of French literature, and Hiroshima mon amour illustrates the close relationship between the construction (or deconstruction) of a main human character and the evocation of the destruction of Hiroshima by an American nuclear bomb in 1945.

  Just as the character of Hugo's Notre Dame de Paris is as much the cathedral as the human character, Quasimodo, the bell-ringer, who gives the cathedral a voice, so in Duras's screenplay the nameless French actress who plays the role of a nurse in a film about Hiroshima and the Japanese architect who becomes her lover exist almost exclusively to give voice to the experience of the destruction of Hiroshima and the wartime occupation of the city of Nevers in France. She tells the Japanese man a story that she had never told anyone before about her love, as an adolescent, for a German soldier. She and the soldier planned to marry, but he was killed by the French resistance and she was punished by her family, her head was shaved, and she was locked in a cold cellar for months. When her family released her, she bicycled to Paris during the night, and it was in Paris that she saw the newspaper headline announcing the bombing of Hiroshima. He tells her that she has seen nothing in Hiroshima: `You have seen nothing in Hiroshima. Nothing' (Tunas rien vu a Hiroshima. Rien). She insists `I have seen everything. Everything' (Jai tout vu. Tout.). And this statement is accompanied in the screenplay by filming directions for flashbacks to the hospital, to the museum, to photographs of the city right after the bombing. The unrepresentability of the destruction in language or in images runs throughout the dialogue of the two lovers. Though the woman's experience in Nevers is easier to describe, it too is a taboo subject at this time. The massive French collaboration with the German occupying forces was a subject almost never mentioned in French media until Marcel Ophuls's Le Chagrin et la pitie ten years later.

  16. A scene from Alain Resnais's film Hiroshima man amour (1959)

  Duras's characters are believable, yet opaque. They are what they say, and what they say is about love and destruction. The force of the screenplay is in large part the incantatory dialogue, which slides from apparently realistic conversation to something far from ordinary speech, like the actress's repeated utterance: `You kill me. You do me good' (Tu me tues. Tu mefais du bien), one of the most explicit voicings of an erotic view of war, colonialism, and the relation of cultures that is ubiquitous in Duras's work, and appears, indeed, in other novels and screenplays of the late 1950s, when France was gradually and painfully losing its colonies. At the end of the filmplay, Duras makes explicit the identification of the man and the woman with their cities. The French woman looks at her lover - the stage directions note `They look at each other without seeing' - and says `You are Hi-ro-shi-ma', to which he replies, `That is my name. Yes. [That is only as far as we have come still. And we will stay there forever.] And your name is Nevers. Ne-vers-in-Fran-ce' (Hi-ro-shi-ma. Nest ton nom.-Nest mon nom. Oui. [On en est la seulement encore. Et on en restera la pour toujours.] Ton nom a toi est Nevers. Ne-vers-en-Fran-ce). Duras here approaches the allegorical use of character most prominent in the Middle Ages and then glimpsed again in Bonnefoy's poetry.

  In the last two decades of the 20th century and the first decade of the 21st, the grand old men of the Second World War generation left the stage of French literature to a new cast of writers, with new concerns. The many novelists among these contemporaries generally leave behind the formal experimentation of the nouveau roman. Many of these authors, such as Antonine Maillet (1929), Maryse Conde (born Beaucolon, 1930), Helene Cixous (1937), Assia Djebar (Fatima-Zohra Imalayene,1936), Daniel Pennac (1944), Raphael Confiant (1951), Patrick Chamoiseau (1953), and Michel Houellebecq (Michel Houellebecq, born 1956, Michel Thomas, la Reunion), and Calixthe Beyala (1961), were, like their predecessors Marguerite Yourcenar (1903-87, born Marguerite Cleenewerck de Crayencour), Albert Camus (1913-60), Saint-John Perse (1887-1975), and Claude Simon (1913-2005), born outside of continental France - the French Metropole, or the `Hexagon', as it is often called. Others were born within the Hexagon: Annie Ernaux (1940), J. M. G. Le Clezio (1940), Didier Daeninckx (1949), Marie NDiaye (1967), and Marie Darrieussecq (1969).

  Francophone writers, or writers in French?

  Most of these authors have in common that they manifest a paradoxical shrinking and expansion of French literature. The France of the turn of the 21st century had lost a number of its colonies (Algeria, Indo-China, Morocco) but still sees its cultural sphere, its `soft power', grow, as the French are among the most outspoken in claiming to resist the influence of United States culture. For the last several decades, it has been common to describe some of these authors - for instance, Maillet, Conde, and Chamoiseau - as `francophone' writers, while others - such as Cixous, Houellebecq, and Camus - were never classified as such, though all of them were born outside European France. Who is, or what is, a `francophone' writer? And is there a `francophone literature'? According to the authoritative French dictionary, Le Tresor de la langue francaise, the term, which dates to 1932, simply means someone `who speaks French' ([Celui, celle] qui parle le francais), but in English-speaking universities the term has been used almost exclusively to designate writers from Africa, the Caribbean, and North America. It is undeniable that much of the vitality of today's literature in French comes from the recognition of such important writers as Leopold Sedar Senghor, Ousmane Sembene, Cheikh Hamidou Kane, and Birago Diop from Senegal; Ahmadou Kourouma from the Cote d'Ivoire; Driss Chraibi and Tahar Ben Jelloun from Morocco; Roger Dorsinville and Rene Depestre from Haiti; and many others who have in common both the French language and the experience or cultural memory of French colonial culture. But questions remain as to the conceptual framework within which such writers are to be situated.

  On 16 March 2007, the Parisian newspaper Le Monde published a manifesto entitled `For a "world-literature" in French' (Pour une `litterature-monde' en francais), signed by a group of 44 influential writers. In it, they declare that that year marked the `End of francophone [literature]. And [the] birth of a worldliterature in French' (Fin de la francophonie. Et naissance d'une litterature-monde en francais). There are different ways of looking at how such a distinguished group of `francophone' authors came to the point of announcing the end of the literature that had brought them to the attention of a wide public. One could say that the academic concept of `francophone literature' - conceived by its promoters primarily as a way of creating greater inclusiveness within the study of literature in French - had been such a great success that it outgrew its usefulness. One could also say that the concept of `francophone literature' collapsed under the weight of its own inconsistencies and incoherence. And, finally, one could say that the term seemed racist and insulting to many of the authors to whom it was applied. As Tahar Ben Jelloun (1944), the Paris-based Moroccan writer, has said:

  To be considered francophone is to be an alien, someone who comes from elsewhere and who is told to stay in an assigned place somewhat off to the side of `true' French writers [ecrivains frangais de souche].

  `La cave de ma memoire, le toit de ma maison sont des mots francais', in Pour o
ne litterature-monde, ed. Michel Le Bris and Jean Rouaud (Paris: Gallimard, 2007), P. 117.

  And these various explanations are not incompatible.

  There will always be reasons to sort literature into a multitude of categories, including the region in which a text is written; the period; the gender, class, race, religion, sexuality, or political affiliation of its author; the formal or generic characteristics of the text itself; the mode of diffusion or publication; and so forth. At the turn of the century, a major thematic consensus among writers in French is that the apparently stable categories of identity for individuals, nations, and other groups no longer can be taken for granted, including francophonie - not that boundaries and belonging are themselves outmoded, but that they have exploded exponentially and are now the source of endless variations of authorial and narratorial voices and of protagonists.

  A novel from history with a new voice

  Let us consider, for example, a very successful historical novel by a French author from Guadeloupe, Maryse Conde (1930) I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem (Moi, Tituba, sorciere noire de Salem, 1987), in which the protagonist and narrator is an African slave brought from Barbados to the colony of New England and tried as a witch in 1692. Orphaned as an infant and chased off the plantation to die in the forest, she is raised by an African woman healer to learn of herbal medicine and of communicating with the dead. Not a slave, for she was chased away rather than sold, she looks at life differently from her African compatriots, but she accepts to become a slave from love. She follows her husband when he is sold and sent from Barbados to Boston. The character Tituba is founded on a real person, about whom Conde gathered all she could from the archives of the witch trials of late 17th-century Massachusetts (Conde has given Tituba African ancestry, though this is not the prevailing view among historians). But in trying to give Tituba the biography that was never written - or rather, the autobiography that she never wrote or that did not survive - Conde clearly writes for a late-20th-century reader who will necessarily think in modern terms. Tituba uses the terms `racism' and `feminism' to describe outlooks and practices, the first to describe the world as it really was and the second to evoke an aspiration that Conde supposes women of the time must have felt. The character-narrator Tituba is a person of the imagination in more than one sense. She is not simply a version of an historical figure as Conde imagines her, but Tituba is also a character with the gift of imagination or vision to look forward to the future, a kind of Maryse Conde in reverse. As a wise woman, or `sorcerer', Tituba can see and communicate with the dead but also with those who are alive after her own death.