French Literature: A Very Short Introduction

by John D. Lyons

  Breton's slim volume - Nadja is closer in size to a pamphlet than to most novels - does have at least one thing in common with Proust's sprawling work. Both authors consider the everyday world to be a source of great fascination and continue the progress of an ever greater inclusiveness in what can be deemed worthy of description and narration. For Proust, asparagus, diesel exhaust, and homosexual brothels figure alongside gothic churches and chamber music, while Breton found flea markets, film serials, and advertisements important to include in his text. Even more important is the role these authors give to involuntary mental processes in aesthetic creation. In a celebrated passage ofA la recherche du temps perdu, Proust's narrator Marcel attributes the rediscovery of the events of childhood to the unpremeditated flash of memory that occurs upon tasting a madeleine dipped in a cup of linden tea. This aesthetic of memoire involontaire is comparable to Breton's intention, as he stated it in Nadja, to tell of his life:

  to the extent that it is subject to chance events, from the smallest to the greatest, where reacting against my ordinary idea of existence, life leads me into an almost-forbidden world, the world of sudden connections, petrifying coincidences, reflexes heading off any other mental activity...

  An innovative novel from the right

  Not all great shifts in writing come out of manifestos and selfproclaimed movements. In terms of prose style, Journey to the End of Night (Voyage an bout de la nuit) by Louis-Ferdinand Celine (1894-1961, born Louis-Ferdinand Destouches) had great impact on the diction of novels in the decades following its publication in 1932. And in addition to its influence on style, it contributed to the deflation of the protagonist's claim to the status of `hero' in the noble sense. In this first-person novel, which begins with the First World War, the tough-talking, acerbic, working-class young narrator, Ferdinand Bardamu (the surname matches the author's and will be the name of the protagonist in Celine's subsequent novel, Death on the Installment Plan (La mort a credit, 1936) ), quickly decides that the war is a pointless butchery and gets himself hospitalized for mental illness, essentially for fear. He is, in short, anything but heroic, since the examples of heroism he sees around him seem to spring from lack of imagination or simple stupidity. Finding himself in a military hospital where the director's therapeutic idea is to infuse his patients with patriotic sentiments, Bardamu adapts by feigning compliance and even tells stories that become the basis for the recital of his `heroic' adventures at the Comedie Francaise. Wandering from Flanders to Paris, and then to West Africa, and from there to the United States, and finally back to Paris, where he becomes a medical doctor, Bardamu is a kind of Candide without the burden of an imposed philosophy. In fact, he is immune to almost every grand scheme of values, a precursor to the literature of the `absurd' that became a recognized trend twenty years later. He serves, like Voltaire's character, as a critical lens through which to denounce American capitalism and the French military and colonial classes, and literature itself as vehicle of heroism. There is something Pangloss-like about the psychiatrist crowing about the recognition his method has received -'I say that it is admirable that in this hospital that I direct has been formed under our very eyes, unforgettably, one of these sublime creative collaborations between the Poet and one of our heroes' (Je declare admirable que dans cet hopital queje dirige, it vienne se former sous nos yeux, inoubliablement, une de ces sublimes collaborations creatrices entre le Poete et l'un de nos heros!) - but Bardamu, who, after all, is narrator of this story, is the very first to see through all this hokum. Celine's narrator's corrosive, wordplay-filled descriptions achieve their goal of demystification by drowning the grandiose in the trivial or gross. Manhattan banks appear to him as hushed churches in which the tellers' windows are like the grills of confessionals, and only a few paragraphs later Bardamu describes the efforts of `rectal workers' (travailleurs rectaux) in a public toilet.

  Celine's use of slang and of the rhythms of popular, workingclass speech are matched with a kind of narrow-focus narrative sequencing that keeps Bardamu's attention fixed on small details, while provoking the reader to extract from all of this the ideological significance of this additive critique. In various ways, Celine's innovations had a strong impact both on his younger contemporaries, like Albert Camus (in LEtranger), and on much later writers such as Marie Darrieussecq (in Truismes). The huge and lasting fame of Journey to the End ofNight has not been diminished by Celine's anti-Semitism and subsequent ties to the pro-Nazi Vichy regime (he was, after the war, declared a'national disgrace'). However, the populist hero Bardamu, who had declared that `the war was everything we didn't understand' (la guerre en somme c'etait tout ce qu'on ne comprenaitpas), has remained much more alive for the reading public than the contemporary anti-war heroes of another First World War novel, Roger Martin du Gard's LEte 1914 (1936, part of the longer work Les Thibault, 1922-40), for which Martin du Gard won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1937. Perhaps, besides the inventiveness and the biting dark humour of Celine's work, this enduring success among anti-war novels is due to Bardamu's dead-pan cynicism, which seems closer to common perceptions of reality than the idealism of Martin du Gard's idealistic pacifist Jacques Thibault.

  The Second World War and the camps

  Although Celine continued to write after the Second World War, his fame depends essentially on Voyage an bout de la nuit and La mort a credit, because during and after the war, Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre began to occupy some of the same terrain of populist critique and to provide coherent philosophical contextualization for the scepticism and anger that rolled so unpredictably through Celine's work. The war itself, and the German camps, ended the lives of many authors and changed the lives of others. It helped to form lasting institutions like the publishing house Minuit ('Midnight'), which had published works clandestinely during the war before becoming a major post-war press. The war ended much that was playful and experimental in the entre-deux-guerres period, and Robert Desnos (1900-45, died of typhus in Theresienstadt) is probably the best example. Editor of the review La Revolution Surrealiste from 1924 to 1929, Desnos published abundantly, drawing on the popular culture of Paris and on pulp crime serials such as FantBmas.

  An illustration of the way ideas circulated as jokes within Surrealist circles is the character Rrose Selavy, who appears, among other places, in Desnos's 1939 book Rrose Se'lavy: oculisme de precision, poils et coups de pieds en toes genres (Precision Oculism, Complete Line of Whiskers and Kicks). It was the multimedia artist Marcel Duchamp who created `Rrose Selavy' in 1920 as an alter-ego. Duchamp was photographed in drag as `Rrose' by Man Ray, and then Desnos made `her' a character threaded through some of his poems, even as late as June 1944, just a year before his death. In `Springtime' (Printemps, June 1944), we see the formerly playful figure now remembered as belonging to the imagination of a former time, or of a time that may come again later, after the poet's death in the theatre of war.

  14. Marcel Duchamp as Rrose Selavy, c. 1920-1, in a photograph by Man Ray

  Printemps

  Springtime

  Published in the midst of the Second World War, The Stranger (L'Etranger, 1942) belongs to what the author, Albert Camus (1913-60), called his `cycle of the absurd' along with his essay The Myth ofSisyphus (Le Mythe de Sisyphe) and his play Caligula. A simple glimpse of the titles of the three works shows an emphasis on central characters who do not fit into positive heroic positions within their society but are outsiders, failures, monsters - or all these at once. French literature, at mid-century, was certainly itself not marginalized. The generation of authors who lived as adults during the Second World War produced six winners of the Nobel Prize in Literature (Francois Mauriac, 1952; Albert Camus, 1957; Saint-John Perse,196O; Jean-Paul Sartre, who refused the award, 1964; Samuel Beckett, 1969; Claude Simon, 1985). This was a time, clearly, when French writers had captured the attention of the world. In some ways, they were all either themselves outsiders (four of them born outside of European France) or wrote memorably about outsi
ders (Mauriac in Therese Desqueyroux,1927; Sartre in La Nausee, 1938).

  An unlikely hero

  The title of L'Etranger designates its protagonist Meursault, a young man of modest condition and education, who works in an office in Algiers, and who, for no particular reason, shoots and kills a young Arab. The story, told in simple language in the first person singular, shows Meursault gradually growing in awareness of his distance from the society around him. The text is not formally a diary, but seems to be written from time to time, sometimes to note what has just happened and at others to present what the protagonist plans to do. There is a rather affectless quality to Meursault, particularly at the outset, though perhaps it is not so much a lack of emotion per se as a lack of the conventional dramatization and expression of emotions in their usual social form. The first sentence offers a good example:

  Today, Mama died. Or maybe yesterday. I don't know. I got a telegram from the nursing home: `Mother deceased. Burial tomorrow. Respects: That doesn't mean anything. It might have been yesterday.

  (Anjourd'hui, maman est morte. Ou peut-titre bier, je ne sais pas. J'ai re(u an telegramme de l'asile: Mere decedee. Enterrement demain. Sentiments distingues.' Cela ne veut rien dire. C'etait peut-titre hier.)

  In the simple declarative sentences, there is much attention to detail and especially sensation, with little explanation. We see the world from Meursault's point of view, that of a kind of Candide, like Celine's Bardamu, without a philosophy to follow or to combat (Meursault's narrative does make one wonder what Voltaire's conte would have been like as a first-person narrative). Meursault enjoys swimming, smoking, sunbathing, and sex with his girlfriend Marie. At an outing at the beach, Meursault, playing the peacemaker, takes a revolver from a friend who is threatening to kill an Arab with whom he has had a run-in, but later Meursault uses the gun to shoot the Arab. His account gives no place to fear or hostility, but rather to the heat, the blazing brightness of the sun.

  The most remarkable moment of the novel is Meursault's discovery of himself just before his execution. Throughout the narrative, the protagonist-narrator seems to record what happens without thinking about it. There is such neutrality and such a lack of affect in his view of the world that he himself seems sometimes to be a person who is not there, almost a recording device. But his imprisonment and trial - he is tried for who he is rather than for the death of the Arab - make him aware of his difference from others, and in his revolt he becomes somebody, a self: `Even when you're in the dock, it is interesting to hear people talking about yourself' (Mime sur an bane d'accuse, it est toujours interessant d'entendreparler de soi). He discovers his existence within the `tender indifference of the world' (la tendre inderence du monde), and he concludes by hoping that there would be many spectators when he is guillotined and that they would greet him with shouts of hatred. A personage almost without characteristics finally conceives of himself in a heroic dimension.

  The drama of just waiting

  If Meursault becomes heroic only by affirming his status as outsider, Samuel Beckett's protagonists clearly occupy the outsider position from the start. Beckett (a truly bi-national and bi-lingual author, both Irish and French) differed, however, from Camus in distancing his characters from the everyday social world. Often, the unsympathetic central characters and their consciousness constitute the entire text, like the voice of The Unnameable, a novel (1953). The most accessible and best-known of Beckett's works is no doubt his two-act play Waitingfor Godot (1952), with its tragicomic tramps or clowns, a play that for some critics typifies the `theatre of the absurd', a term that was applied also to the plays of Beckett's contemporary Eugene Ionesco (1909-94), author of The Bald Soprano (La Cantatrice chauve, 1950) and The Chairs (Les chaises, 1952). Beckett manages the feat of making riveting drama out of two men waiting, in a bare landscape next to a tree, for the arrival of a certain `Godot' whom they have never met. Where does all this happen? Could these two characters simply be described as inhabiting the author's consciousness?

  15. Lucien Raimbourg and Pierre Latour in Samuel Beckett's En attendant Godot, a photograph from the 1956 Paris production by Roger Blin

  The whole work has about it an air of barrenness and desolation that is accentuated by the simplicity of the language. Beckett said that he wrote in a foreign tongue to `impoverish' and to `discipline' himself, so that there would be no style or poetry to the text. Whether or not this was Beckett's actual reason for writing in French rather than in English, the argument could be made that throughout history poetry distinguished itself from ordinary discourse precisely by the acceptance of linguistic constraints. For most of the millennium of French literature, lyric poetry has been written in fixed forms of verse length and rhyme scheme that `disciplined' the writer. In a similar vein, significant works like the medieval Roman de la Rose stripped away concrete secondary characteristics from its personae to concentrate both on what is most central to their story and what is most universal. Although the actors of Waitingfor Godot cannot easily be interpreted as allegorical abstractions - into terms like `hope', `despair', `reason', and so forth - their dialogue conveys a darkly comical version of human existence reduced to its most schematic.

  Vladimir and Estragon, called Didi and Gogo, were perhaps in the same place the day before, waiting for the same person, together or not, wondering whether or not to wait, looking for ways to pass the time, and trying to decide what they will do the next day. While waiting, to fill the time, they discuss hanging themselves from the tree - Vladimir suggests that this would give them sexual pleasure. After a ridiculous discussion about how they could do this, they do nothing - doing nothing is the overarching principle. At the end of each of the two acts, they decide to leave and the stage directions indicate `They don't move' (Ils ne bougentpas). In the midst of each act, another pair of characters shows up: Pozzo and his servant or slave Lucky. The hint of the circus in the clownish aspects of Vladimir and Estragon is reinforced by this new pair, since the whip-wielding Pozzo seems to be a ringmaster who can make his creature Lucky, whom he leads around on a rope, perform stunts - at least in the first act. By the second act, Pozzo is blind and does not remember anything that happened on the previous encounter the day before. Lucky, who entertains with a long, breathless, nonsensical speech in act I (suggesting, perhaps, the uselessness of learning, or even of all human achievement, including sport), is mute by act II.

  In a text so enigmatic, so stripped down, the task of finding some link between what happens on stage and the world of life and ideas falls to the audience. Readers and critics have not tired of seizing on the most minute aspects of the play as the basis for exegesis. The most obvious issue is the meaning of `Godot' - is he `God, and, if so, what is the significance of the suffix, `-ot'? Is it a diminutive? Does it indicate contempt? Towards the end of each act, a boy comes to deliver the message that `Monsieur Godot' will not be coming on this day but the next day instead. In each instance, the boy insists that he has not come before. By following Godot's request that they wait for him to come, have Vladimir and Estragon lost their ability to act and locked themselves into a prison of waiting? Or does the thought that Godot might someday come provide the only solace that Vladimir and Estragon have? Otherwise what is there?

  The play is full of little gems of dark humour in almost epigrammatic forms that are hard to forget - whatever meaning we might assign. Estragon says to Vladimir, `We always find something, eh, Didi, to give us the impression that we exist?' (On trouve toujours quelque chose, hein, Didi, pour nous donner l'impression d'exister?). This is an extraordinary question, on the part of a fictive character in a play. After all, the question of the characters' existence is traditionally posed, if at all, by the audience, usually in terms of questions such as `Is this character believable?, that is, `Could such a character have existed?. This is the sort of thing that was debated in the 17th century about Corneille's heroes and heroines. Later, in regard to Beaumarchais's Figaro, the character seems to be bursting out
of his role, thrusting aside the hierarchy to take a place that he merits by sheer excess of invention, activity, and desire. In a way - and this was clearly on the minds of the royal censors in the late 1770s - the danger was that Figaro, or his like, would become excessively real and no longer simply be amusing figures on stage but rather appear in the streets of Paris to demand their rights. So to have a central character of a play, like Estragon, so far from `heroic' in the evaluative sense, call attention to the tenuousness of his own sense of existence is quite striking.