French Literature: A Very Short Introduction

by John D. Lyons

  A variant of Hugo's double man, the stroller is exquisitely attuned to time, and especially to the vanished past and to the dissonance of near misses. He lives vividly both in the Parisian present and in the past and the elsewhere. In `The Swan' (Le Cygne, dedicated to Victor Hugo, 1860), Baudelaire builds his poem around another chance encounter in a Paris undergoing the colossal transformations that Haussmann carried out between 1853 and 1870 and that created the city of wide boulevards and standardized building heights that we know today. In the process, most of medieval Paris disappeared, thus endowing the vestiges of the Middle Ages with a new, nostalgic, value.

  A une passante

  To a Woman Passing By

  In `The Swan', Baudelaire creates a deft mosaic of different moments, especially three: the present, in which he is crossing the newly constructed Place du Carrousel between the Tuileries and the Louvre; a past moment when there had been a menagerie in that place; and the imagined moment in Greek antiquity when the Trojan prince Hector's widow Andromache, become the slave of Pyrrhus, bends over the cenotaph of her heroic husband.

  Translated by Geoffrey Wagner, Selected Poems of Charles Baudelaire (New York: Grove Press, 1974)

  10. Maxime Lalanne (1827-86), `Demolition work for the construction of the Boulevard Saint-Germain, a scene from Haussmann's renovations of Paris

  Baudelaire assembles these moments along the thematic axis of absence: in crossing the Carrousel, he sees that the menagerie is no longer there. In that menagerie, a swan had escaped from its cage, and vainly sought water from the dry pavement. The poet imagines the swan remembering the lost lake of its youth and then imagines Andromache remembering Hector. The last three quatrains of the poem evoke a myriad of others who have lost something, and specifically those who have lost a place, like the `emaciated and tubercular Negress ... seeking... the missing palm trees of proud Africa'. The stroller is thus the guise in which the city poet can multiply his experience of narrative characters, for he identifies himself with each in turn: Andromache, the swan, the African woman, and perhaps even with the dying hero of the Song of Roland: An old memory blows a horn with full force'.

  The endless change that seemed to Baudelaire to be the only constant of Paris accelerated a decade after Le Cygne. The FrancoPrussian War of 1870-1 ended the Second Empire and brought the insurrection known as the Paris Commune and its bloody suppression. Paris almost tripled its surface area in the second half of the century, and the continued development of the rail network centred on the capital brought more workers.

  it. Claude Monet, La Gare Saint-Lazare (1877)

  One side of this change is reflected in the naturalist novels of Emile Zola (1840-1902) with their attention to the gritty underside of this prosperous period, the heyday of the French colonial empire. These include LAssommoir (1877) and La Bete humaine (1890), both about the ravages of alcoholism in workingclass families. But in reaction to naturalism in the novel and theatre came Symbolism, which found in Baudelaire its harbinger and in Stephane Mallarme its greatest exponent. Much of his poetry, in appearance frivolous and occasional (for instance, a series on women's fans, on a coiffure, etc.), concerns death and memorialization, particularly monuments to poets. With Ronsard and Hugo, Mallarme is probably the poet who most vigorously championed the power of language itself to challenge death. Mallarme's protagonists are therefore most often poets, celebrated in a series of sonnet `tombs' such as Le Tombeau d'Edgar Poe (1876), but in time Mallarme reached the highest point of abstraction with a protagonist named, simply, Igitur (Latin, `therefore') in a posthumous prose text dating from around 1870, Igitur, ou lafolie d'Elbehnon. The hero finishes in the tomb after challenging Nothingness with a roll of the dice: `The character, who, believing in the existence of the Absolute alone, imagines himself everywhere in a dream [...] finds action unnecessary' (Le personnage qui, croyant a l'existence du seulAbsolu, s'imagine etre partout dans un rive [. ..] trouve l'acte inutile). This text may be the earliest form of the great hermetic poem that Mallarme published almost thirty years later, in which we seem to encounter once again Igitur's roll of the dice: A Roll ofDice Will Never Abolish Chance (Un coup de des jamais n'abolira le hasard, 1897). In its graphic disposition, apparently spattered across the page in different fonts and type sizes, this is one of the most inventive texts in all of French literature, and it was crucially important for the following century.

  12. A page of Stephan Mallarme's poem, Un coup de des jamais n'abolira le hasard (1897)

  The world of Proust's novel

  The heady metaphysical aspirations of Mallarme's spare lyric, which seem at times ready to leave language and the printed page behind, appear at first to have little in common with the roman fleuve, the immense, onward-streaming novel that marks the emphatic beginning of the 20th century, In Search ofLost Time (A la recherche du temps perdu, 1913-27) by Marcel Proust (1871-1922). Yet these two authors of the belle epoque (a name given after the First World War to the preceding period of peace from the end of the Franco-Prussion War in 1870 until 1914) have in common an intellectual adventurousness nourished by the philosophical movements of the time. It is tempting to consider Proust's novel as a Bildungsroman (or as a variant thereof, the Kunstlerroman - the education of the artist), but one in which the usual linearity of that form has yielded to an extremely complex interplay of moments of experience and later moments of interpretation. This complexity is augmented by length, competing editions based on different opinions concerning the proper use of posthumous material, and different English translations with different titles. A la recherche du temps perdu, which in the current French Pleaide edition runs (with extensive notes) to more than 7,000 pages, is comprised of seven titled sub-novels. The first of these (published at the author's expense in 1913), Swann's Way (Du cote de chez Swann), contains the further subsections Combray, Swann in Love (Un amour de Swann), and Noms de pays: le nom. The last of the seven sub-novels, Le temps retrouve, was published in 1927, five years after Proust's death. The novel - A la recherche du temps perdu - in terms of the chronological range covered stretches from these childhood memories of Combray, at the earliest, to the post-war Paris scenes of the last novel in the series, The Past Recaptured (Le temps retrouve, literally `time refound').

  Combray, the very first section, opens with the narrator's account of going to sleep and waking - the startling first sentence is `For a long time, I went to bed early' (Longtemps, je me suis couche de bonne heure). The reader has no way of knowing who is making this statement - and, in fact, the given name of the protagonist is mentioned only rarely throughout the seven narratives that make up the work as a whole - but it becomes clear very quickly that there is something very capacious and mysterious about this `I'. Having fallen asleep while reading, he writes, he would sometimes wake a halfhour later still thinking about the book he was reading. But these thoughts often took a peculiar form: `it seemed to me that I was the thing the book was about: a church, a quartet, the rivalry between Francois I and Charles V' (il me semblait que j etais moi-meme cc dontparlait l'ouvrage: une eglise, un quatuor, la rivalite de Francois ler et de Charles-Quint). For several pages, the narrator pursues this investigation into the contents of the mind at its awakening, with comments on the identification of the thinking subject with a series of radically heterogeneous objects. The fact that the mind does not at first see them as objects but simply as part of itself is, for the reader, most striking. The narrator continues by tracing the phases of disengagement as the thinker rejoins the world of wakefulness and can no longer understand the dream thoughts that at first seemed so innocently obvious.

  These opening pages of the novel, with the radical questioning of the boundaries of the self, have roots with a deep hold on the tradition of French literature. Montaigne, in a famous passage of the Essais, recounted his experience of returning to consciousness after a fall in the chapter `On Practice' (De l'exercitation), as did Rousseau in one of his Reveries of the Solitary Walker (Reveries du promeneur solitai
re). Descartes, in his Discourse on Method (Discours de la methode, 1637) had also tried stripping the consciousness of the self back to the simple awareness of being that precedes any actual knowledge of the qualities of that thinking self. In Proust's day, this Cartesian questioning had been given a new currency by the teachings of Franz Brentano and his two brilliant students, Edmund Husserl and Sigmund Freud. And Proust was certainly aware of the work of Henri Bergson, whose writings on the awareness of time have been frequently compared with Proust's work. Though Proust probably reached his interest in the phenomenology of the waking self independently, it is hard to deny that he brought a new vigour and concreteness to the exploration of consciousness, sensation, and memory.

  He also gave a new prominence to childhood. The opening meditation on going to bed and waking leads into an account of the bedtime ritual during family summer vacations in Combray. To distract the child from the anguished separation from his mother that bedtime entailed, his family would let him project a magic lantern display onto the walls of his room, where Golo, the hero of the legendary tale represented by the images, exhibits the ability to morph himself according to the object on which he is projected - door knob, curtains, walls: `Gob's body itself... dealt with any material obstacle, with any bothersome object that it encountered, by taking it as its skeleton, incorporating it, even the doorknob' (Le corps de Golo lui-meme... s'arrangeait de tout obstacle materiel, de tout objet genant qu'il rencontrait en be prenant comme ossature et en se be rendant interieur, fut-ce be bouton de la porte...). Thus Marcel's ability, as the adult narrator, to imagine his waking self as a church or as the rivalry between the king and the emperor is prefigured in the child's experience of the hero's image in the lantern display as it transcends times and places in order to be himself. While Freud was, by another approach, teaching the long-term impact of childhood experience, Proust knit together childhood and adulthood in this persistence of narrative patterns and in the ability of people to identify - and to identify with - the protagonist's role.

  This ability appears in the narrator's account of Swann, an adult friend of young Marcel's family, a Parisian who, like Marcel's parents, has a country house in Combray. As a child, Marcel dreads Swann's arrival for dinner parties because this means that his bedtime ritual will be perturbed, his mother will be occupied with her duties as hostess. In short, Swann appears as the cause of the terrible suffering due to the absence of the loved one. As an adult, however, Marcel sees that Swann would have known better than anyone what that suffering was like, for he suffered also from his love for Odette de Crecy. This treatment of Swann is simply an example of Marcel's characteristic plasticity as narrator - but also as protagonist - to focus on a wide range of people, of whom he discovers different aspects as he grows older. The fascination that appears in the early realization that 'Golo' could be himself but also a doorknob is the force that gives value to the subsequent realizations that people, attitudes, actions, and places that at first seemed entirely distinct and incompatible are, in fact, united. For instance, the paths in Combray that lead towards Swann's house (that is, that go du cote de chez Swann) seem at first to be entirely opposite those that go towards the chateau de Guermantes, and Swann and the aristocratic Guermantes family seem quite separate, but they are later shown to be connected. However, as even his perception of the spatial organization shows, the narrator's greatest talent is in creating unforgettable people. So that any reader ofA la recherche du temps perdu is likely to carry around a mental repertory with characters such as Francoise the cook, Tante Leonie, Baron Charlus, Saint-Loup, Albertine, Elstir the painter, and so forth. These all flow out of the moi of the narrator himself, who becomes a super-character and the repository of the entire world that he recounts. Among the most moving pages of the novel are in the concluding section, Le temps retrouve, where he realizes that the past is not gone because it still lives in him.

  The heritage of Mallarme

  Proust's contemporary Paul Valery (1871-1945) was of a radically different aesthetic temperament. In contrast to the former's lengthy novel with its notoriously long and involved sentences (some spreading over several pages), Valery's texts, both in prose and verse, are all very spare. Among the more unusual protagonists of French literature is his Monsieur Teste, the hero of a series of texts - one could call them prose poems or essays - in which Valery explores his intellect in the form of an alter-ego, whose name evokes both `head' (tete, or teste in older French) and `text' (texte). Likewise in his verse poems, Valery represents a self, a moi, that borders on the metaphysical. The closest heir of Mallarme, and the last great Symbolist poet, Valery's single greatest poetic achievement is The Graveyard by the Sea (Le Cimetiere marin,1920). Like much contemporary painting (one might think of Kandinsky), this verse poem in 24 stanzas evokes an event or scene that is then distilled to its essence, so much so that the physical incident is scarcely glimpsed. In The Graveyard by the Sea, the poet seems to describe an epiphany that he has during hours of thought while looking out at the Mediterranean from a cemetery. The question that he ponders is the relation between body, mind, and time (themes that run throughout the Teste texts also), with a concluding acceptance of the body and the demands and pleasures of physical life. More immediately accessible is the brief poem `The Footsteps' (Les Pas), published a year after The Graveyard.

  Les Pas

  The Footsteps

  Translated by David Paul

  `The Footsteps' gives a very good idea of the way Valery plays on the threshold of the physical and the metaphysical in much of his poetry. The poem is addressed to a pure person'. Is this a woman or a spirit? Is the `divine shadow' literally divine, or is this hyperbole? Are the footsteps meant to be actual footsteps, or are they the metric feet of the poem itself? Or are the pas the poet's heartbeats (he says that his heart is nothing other than these pas), which he can hear because all is silent around him? And when those pas cease, it seems that the poet, as well as the poem, will come to an end. These are the kinds of questions that Valery's poems provoke and that create opportunities for patient meditation, which for Valery was a distinct superiority of poetry over the 19th-century novel.

  Surrealism

  Valery's acquaintance Andre Breton also reacted against the novel as genre, and Nadja (1928; revised edition 1962) is one alternative that he proposed. Breton's work is significant because of his role as leader of the Surrealists, a movement that reflected the continentwide hunger for something new to replace both 19th-century literature and art and also the social order that had led to the butchery of the First World War. French Surrealism appears in the context of such other movements as Italian Futurism (already launched before the war but with its major impact in the decades thereafter), British Vorticism, Soviet Constructivism, the German Bauhaus, and Swiss and French Dadaism. Andre Breton was the author of the two Surrealist Manifestos (in 1924 and in 1929), thus becoming the public leader of the most significant of these movements (by `movement' here is meant a group of writers who designate themselves as such and advocate a set of aesthetic and social doctrines). Breton advocated giving priority to the imaginative life and considered the `real' life as most people know it to be only a pale reflection of the much more real (surreel, `above real') life that was to be achieved upon the overthrow of narrowly rationalist forms of thought and the rejection of the limited options of adult life. In such a limited, ordinary person, dominated by practical concerns:

  All his gestures will be paltry, all his ideas narrow. He will only consider, in what happens to him and can happen to him, only the links to a mass of similar events, events in which he did not participate, missed events.

  (Toes ses gestes manqueront d'ampleur; toutes ses idees, d'envergure. Il ne se representera, de ce qui lui arrive et pent lui arriver, que ce qui relie cet evenment a unefoule d'evenements semblables, evenements auxquels it n'a pas pris part, evenements manques.)

  The life of the imagination, which most of us have lost, is cruelly rich in possib
ilities. In an apostrophe, Breton exclaims, `Dear imagination, what I love above all about you is that you do not forgive' (Chere imagination, ce que j aime surtout en toi, c'est que to ne pardonnes pas). The world of imagination, for Breton, is not in the elaborate and carefully wrought creations of the novelists and poets of the tradition but, instead, in the everyday world that surrounds us without our noticing it. Breton was an early and enthusiastic reader of Sigmund Freud (as one can see from the term `missed events' - coined on the model of the French term for what we call the lapsus or `Freudian slip', an acte manque), an admirer of Alfred Jarry's Ubu Roi (1896) and of Lautreamont's Chants de Maldoror (printed in 1868 but little known until the 1920s), and he promoted the concept of `automatic writing' (ecriture automatique), first practised in the collection of poetic prose Magnetic Fields (Les Champs magnetiques, 1919, with Philippe Soupault), as a way of breaking out of traditional forms and rationalist thinking.

  13. `Les yeux de fougere', photographic montage illustration for Andre Breton's Nadja (1928)

  Given Breton's preference for writing that eschewed any form of premeditation, moral censorship, and respect of traditional genres, it is not surprising that he assigned great weight to the creative role of chance in life. This is illustrated in his text Nadja, which is sometimes called a'novel', though Breton fulminated against the tradition of the novel and stated that it was simply the record of real events, centred on his chance encounter with a young woman who called herself Nadja (though she made it clear that this was not her real name). He perceived in Nadja various parapsychological powers, and in answer to his question `Who are you?', she answers, `I am the wandering soul' (Je suis l'&me errante). He meets her several times, often by chance, and as they wander through Paris, each place becomes heavy with half-explained significance, suggesting that Nadja, at least, has had a previous existence in some of these locations. They dine in the Place Dauphine and later find themselves, by chance, in a cafe named'Le Dauphin'; Breton explains that he had often been identified with the sea-mammal of the same name, the dolphin. Breton's respect for the reality of these Parisian places can be seen in the 48 photographs that are integrated into the text, some of them reproducing drawings made by Nadja, but most representing locations such as the Hotel des Grands Hommes in the Place du Pantheon, Place Dauphine, the Humanite bookstore, the Saint-Ouen flea market, and so forth. These photographs ostensibly serve to avoid the lengthy descriptions that are so much a part of 19th-century realist and naturalist novels, but, since Breton does also describe things and people in words, they seem to have another purpose, or at least the effect, of preserving objects that have an almost talismanic importance for the author.