French Literature: A Very Short Introduction

by John D. Lyons

  Moi, Tituba clearly exceeds any bounds of the `francophone' novel - it is not surprising, therefore, that Maryse Conde signed the 2007 manifesto. It is a work in French that does not represent a French-speaking culture but rather the English-speaking colonial world of the 17th century. Tituba, an English speaker, tells her story in French without any apology. The work often refers to other literary traditions; for instance, Hester, the heroine of Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter (1850) makes a surprising appearance as a friend and perhaps lover of Tituba. The other characters, good and bad, are British, American colonials, African slaves or Caribbean-born slaves of African and mixed European-African descent (like Tituba herself, a child born of her mother's rape by an English sailor on board the ship Christ the King), and Portuguese Jews.

  A consistent and very explicit aspect of Tituba's values and personality is her resistance to the appeal of vengeance, even in the face of repeated and extreme violence, such as the execution (the murder) of her mother for having resisted a plantation owner who attempted to rape her. Equally important is her refusal to accept the split into placative `happy slave' exterior self and cynical but `free' inner self - a stance adopted by her husband John Indian. Implicitly, Tituba conveys the view that this claim to inner `freedom' is itself a deformity that debases the person and prevents any real happiness.

  The metamorphosis of the heroine

  `Witch' is a term applied to women usually to insult or to threaten, but Conde has turned things around by making Tituba a real heroine, clearly implying approval of Tituba by the reader. A still more unlikely reframing of roles takes place in Marie Darieussecq's Pig Tales (1996 - the French title Truismes is a play on the word `truism' and the word truie, `sow'), where the narrator-heroine finds herself being transformed into a sow. Darieussecq (1969) has written something resembling Voltaire's conte philosophique and Kafka's `Metamorphosis' but with a voice that is unique in its self-deprecating naivete. While the feminist premise might seem rather obvious (i.e. that men both view and treat women like `sows' - one of the infinite number of insulting terms for women, particularly in terms of their sexuality), making the conceit unfold is a tour de force. To take the metaphor of the truie and literalize it into a fantasy set in a very realistic modern world is particularly difficult to do within a first-person narrative. Unlike Kafka's Gregor Samsa, whose definitive transformation into a cockroach has already occurred at the start of the story, Darieussecq's nameless young woman morphs into and out of her piggish form gradually, and the boundary line of her interactions with the male characters is also fluctuating and indistinct.

  As she becomes more of a pig, she finds her sexual appetite increasing, and in the `beauty parlour' in which she works as a masseuse (in fact, as a prostitute), her new sexual aggressiveness attracts a more animalistic clientele, though her increasingly piglike skin, nose, and bristles eventually put an end to her domestic and professional arrangements. As the protagonist recounts her experiences in a naive way - actually, even less judgemental than Candide - Darieussecq explores the ambivalences of male attitudes towards sex as well as the corruption of the political system. The author cleverly weaves together cultural references and humour, even recalling the legend of the werewolf that was Marie de France's focus in Bisclavret eight centuries before, when the protagonist falls in love with a werewolf named Yvan (the name seems deliberately chosen to recall the medieval Breton repertory).

  A critique of Western society

  The final happy note of Truismes - the heroine has decided to remain a pig because `it's more practical for living in the forest' where she has found a mate, a boar who is `very beautiful and very virile' - contrasts with an unrelentingly downbeat succes de scandale that appeared eight years earlier and to which the adjective `piggish' might well apply: Atomised (Les particules elementaires,1998, published in the US as The Elementary Particles) by Michel Houellebecq. One of the two protagonists in fact sees himself in a dream `in the form of a young pig with plump, smooth skin'. This third-person narrative is multi-tonal, including an academic biographical account of one of its two protagonists, half-brothers, raised separately. One, the biologist Michel, leads a virtually asexual life dedicated to genetic research, while the other, Bruno, a lycee teacher of French literature, sees sex as his only reason for living. Their different paths bring them unhappiness and ruin the lives of any women who approach them. And the narrative itself manages to make everything it touches seem repulsive: science, religion, food, sex, friendship. The whole account is threaded with portentous `scientific' statements about the end of Christian belief and the advent of a deterministic, materialist worldview. Michel's childhood girlfriend, who loves him and whom he rebuffs in adolescence, is described as she blossoms into the beauty that dooms her:

  From the age of thirteen years onward, under the influence of progesterone and estradiol secreted by her ovaries, fatty cushions are deposited at the level of a girl's breasts and buttocks. These organs, in the best of cases, acquire a full, harmonious, round aspect.

  The voices of the narrator and of each of the male protagonists, who are given to long monologues on science, determinism, religion, anthropology, and social values, all advance the view that Western societies are in a state of advanced decay due to the rise of sexual freedom and of individualism and the decline of Christianity and of the family - in all of this 1974 is identified as the annus horribilis. To the extent that he intersperses long philosophical discourses with sexual details (Bruno, for instance, masturbates in quite disruptive ways), Houllebecq's work resembles Sade. On the other hand, it is very unclear what message might be taken from this book, despite its relentless didacticism. Yet Houellebecq is very much of his time in terms of the broad cultural mood. Les particules elementaires appeared two years before the `millennium', when a sense of foreboding was widespread. The media had warned that a glitch in computer code, the 'Y2K bug', would paralyse airports, banks, and even household appliances. Meanwhile, fundamentalist religious movements, of many origins, were building up the aggressive energy that led to elections of candidates from the Christian and Islamic right, in their respective spheres of influence.

  And a critique of the East

  In contrast to Houellebecq's relentless misery with its implicit appeal for an authoritarian reimposition of social values in the hope of eliminating individual choice and collective alienation, Amelie Nothomb (1967) at the same moment published a novel with a joyous celebration of European individualism and self-responsibility in the context of precisely the type of paternalist system that, at times, Les particules elementaires seems to value. In Fear and Trembling (Stupeur et tremblements, 1999), she tells the first-person story of Amelie, a Belgian born in Japan and fluent in Japanese, who comes to work for a large Japanese corporation. The mood of Nothomb's novel is entirely different from the dark, angular, jarring spirit of Duras's Hiroshima mon amour, but it has in common with that screenplay the portrayal of the relation between civilizations in terms of individuals and their erotic fascination for one another (we recall the refrain in Duras's text, `You kill me. You do me good.'). In Nothomb's novel, Amelie is obsessed with the beauty of the Japanese woman who supervises her and who assigns increasingly demeaning tasks, until the Belgian protagonist has no other responsibility than to clean the male and female toilets of the forty-fourth floor of the Yumimoto corporate headquarters. In Amelie's ironic pleasure at the complete misuse of her talents as translator and business strategist, the individual erotic attachment to the supervisor, Fubuki Mori, and the broader cultural fascination - that is, the fascination of Western cultures with the mysterious East - cannot be separated. Therefore, descriptive passages reveal as much about the education and desires of the narrator as about their object, and in this one the allegorical turn is signalled by a reference to one of the best-known passages in Pascal's Pensees:

  Two meters before me, the spectacle of her face was captivating. Her eyelids lowered on the numbers kept her from seeing that I was
studying her. She had the most beautiful nose in the world, the Japanese nose, this inimitable nose, with the delicate nostrils, that one can recognize among thousands. Not all Japanese have this nose, but anyone who has this nose must be Japanese. If Cleopatra had had this nose, the geography of the planet would have been all shaken up.

  The theme that will not go away: the Second World War

  The limits of the `francophone' but also the boundaries of acceptable protagonists are challenged aggressively in Les Bienveillantes (2006), winner not only of the prestigious Prix Goncourt but also the Grand prix du roman from the Academie Francaise. The author is Jonathan Littel, born in New York in 1967 and a citizen of the United States at the time of the publication (he subsequently also obtained French citizenship, although he does not live in France). The oddity of an American winning these prizes would no doubt have provoked controversy in itself, but for an author of Jewish ancestry to write a novel from the point of view of a Nazi SS officer, who himself assists in killing Jews, was considered by many to be quite outrageous, particularly because there is some effort to make the narrator `sympathetic' when contrasted with more enthusiastic killers. Maximilien Aue, the protagonist, in an account of how he wrote his memoirs, mentions off-handedly a long-standing tendency to vomit after meals and says that he prefers work to leisure because work keeps him from thinking about the war (perhaps Littel's study of Pascal in a French lycee brings this echo of comments in the Pensees about keeping busy to avoid thinking about the important things). Aue runs a lace-making factory, is a married father of twins, and aims at outward bourgeois respectability to cover his homosexuality and to make his shame from the war fade away.

  Littel's novel is highly conventional in its form, especially when compared to the experimentation of the nouveau roman decades before. It seems that one of the major creative efforts in recent French novels is to conceive unusual protagonists whose firstperson narratives stretch various boundaries of identity, with emphasis on national as well as sexual and racial identity.

  There is no better representative of the movement for a world literature' in French than J. M. G. (Jean-Marie Gustave) Le Clezio, whose novel Ritournelle de lafaim (The refrain of hunger) appeared in October 2008 just as the author became the latest French-language writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. The presentation speech given by a member of the selection committee before the Swedish Academy began with this question:

  Of what use are characters to a literary work? Roland Barthes maintained that the most antiquated of all literary conventions was the proper name - the Peter, Paul, and Anna who never existed but whom we are expected to take seriously and feel concerned about when we read novels.

  Le Clezio began his writing career when this view prevailed, yet from his very first novel, The Interrogation (Le Proces-verbal, 1963), has shown the world through the eyes of his protagonists, who are often, like Adam Pollo of The Interrogation, outsiders to the world that they so sharply observe. Le Clezio's narratives concern a wide variety of places: Africa, in Desert (1980) and Onitsha (1991); Mauritius - home of his ancestors - in The Prospector (Le Chercheur d'or, 1985) and The Quarantine (La Quarantaine, 1995); Palestine in Wandering Star (Etoile errante, 1996); and Latin America, in Ourania (2006). He shows an immense ability to imagine the world from the point of view of his many characters, but Le Clezio, in keeping with the trend in French novels over the past decades, has moved from highly experimental, often difficult to follow narratives, to more straightforward stories.

  Whereas in The Interrogation the main character, who is sometimes also the narrator, is insane, Ritournelle de lafaim follows Ethel, a fairly ordinary protagonist, from 1931, when she is ten years old, until the end of the Second World War. But in both of these novels, separated by 45 years, the characters are connected in multiple ways to the world overseas. Adam Pollo seems to have just returned from serving in the French army during the Algerian Revolution, while Ethel's parents are from Mauritius and her story begins with her favourite memory, a visit with her beloved grand-uncle to the Colonial Exposition in 1931. As the Nobel presentation notes, Le Clezio's work `belongs to the tradition of the critique of civilisation, which on French ground can be traced back to Chateaubriand, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Diderot, and [...] Montaigne'. In this respect, Le Clezio is highly representative both of his own time, a period of post-colonial criticism and debates about national and linguistic identity. His work is therefore a good place to enter into French literature, both in its origins and in its persistent variations.

  Endless encounters

  As we have seen, the literary tradition in French both roots texts in their original historical moment and allows them to encounter one another across the centuries. Texts, in other words, are a bit like the water lilies of Claude Monet's famous series of paintings, the Nympheas (1906-27). The lilies are rooted separately in the soil at the bottom of the pond but drift on their stems so that the leaves and flowers shift and touch on the water surface. Just as Le Clezio's work encounters Bernardin's and Montaigne's across the space of hundreds of years, so also Darrieussecq's depiction of the shifting boundary between animality and humanity intersects with the Lais of Marie de France, while Proust's novel frequently refers to the writers of the 17th century. Houellebecq's work has resemblances to the moralist tradition of Pascal and La Bruyere, and Yves Bonnefoy weaves into his poetry echoes of Baudelaire.

  Such encounters will certainly continue, and there will surely be surprises to come as writers formerly separated by vast distances find themselves in close proximity thanks to shifts in the book trade that make it easy for a reader in Quebec to purchase a book by a writer from Senegal or Algeria. France has also been in the forefront of development of cultural resources on the internet. The Bibliotheque Nationale de France makes tens of thousands of books available online, while radio stations like France Culture and France Inter make readings of literary texts and discussions of literature available for download.

  Just as important as the increased diffusion of French literary culture is the widespread perception that French intellectual culture is the single most significant alternative, at least among Western nations, to the English-speaking world. For some people, the notion of an `alternative' easily slides into the idea of an `opposition', and thus implies hostility and struggle. For many other people, including perhaps the readers of this book, the French literary tradition offers a welcome new vantage point from which to see the world, past and present. In a world threatened by sameness, we have never had a greater need for the French dference.

  General

  Wendy Ayres-Bennett, A History of the French Language Through Texts (London: Routledge, 1996).

  Peter France (ed.), New Oxford Companion to Literature in French (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995).

  Denis Hollier (ed.),A New History ofFrench Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989).

  Colin Jones, The Cambridge Illustrated History ofFrance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

  Sarah Kay, Terence Cave, and Malcolm Bowie,A Short History of French Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).

  Eva Martin Sartori (ed.), The Feminist Encyclopedia ofFrench Literature (Westport, CT.: Greenwood Press, 1999).

  Sonya Stephens (ed.), A History of Women's Writing in France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

  Medieval and Renaissance

  Barbara K. Altman and Deborah McGrady (eds.), Christine de Pizan: A Casebook (New York: Routledge, 2003).

  Simon Gaunt, Retelling the Tale: An Introduction to French Medieval Literature (London: Duckworth, 2001).

  Sarah Kay, The chansons de geste in theAge ofRomance: Political Fictions (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995).

  Sarah Kay, The Troubadours: An Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

  Neil Kenny, An Introduction to Sixteenth-Century French Literature and Thought: Other Times, Other Places (London: Duckworth, 2008).

  R. J. Kne
cht, Renaissance Warrior and Patron: The Reign ofFrancis I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).

  Ullrich Langer, The Cambridge Companion to Montaigne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

  John Lyons and Mary McKinley, Critical Tales: New Studies of the Heptameron and Early Modern Culture (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993).

  Deborah McGrady, Controlling Readers: Guillaume de Machaut and His Late MedievalAudience (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007).

  Michael Randall, The Gargantuan Polity: On the Individual and the Community in the French Renaissance (Toronto and London: University of Toronto Press, 2008).

  Jane Taylor, The Poetry ofFrancois Villon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

  17th and 18th centuries

  Faith E. Beasley, Salons, History, and the Creation ofi7th-Century France (Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate Publishing, 2006).

  Jean-Claude Bonnet, Naissance du Pantheon: Essai sur le culte des Grands Hommes (Paris: Fayard,1998).