Continuing the 20th century: from 1940 Writers continued to enjoy a leading place in cultural life, but the outstanding names were not mainly connected with imaginative literature. Their work was philosophical and critical and the movements with which they were associated extended beyond the field of literature as narrowly defined. Even within this field the nouveau roman (New Novel) was to challenge established conventions, and fiction no longer appeared to have a privileged place in literary culture. But, paradoxically, by asserting the primacy of the text as an object in itself, critics severed the last remaining links between its reality and the one it purported to describe, to conclude that all writing was essentially an exercise in the creation of a fictional "textual world." The German occupation and postwar France France's defeat by German troops in 1940, and the resultant division of the country, was experienced as a national humiliation, and all Frenchmen and Frenchwomen were confronted with an unavoidable choice. Some writers escaped the country to spend the remaining years of the war in exile or with the Free French Forces. Others, because of political options made during the previous decade, moved directly into collaboration. And still others, because of pacifism or a belief that art could remain aloof from politics, tried to carry on as individuals and as writers, ignoring the taint of passive collaboration with the occupying forces or the Vichy government. Jean Cocteau and Jean Giono were among those and later were criticized for their conduct. Giono in fact was briefly imprisoned, as was Louis-Ferdinand Celine, whose reputation was seriously damaged by his anti-Semitism. Several writers joined the military, as well as the intellectual, resistance. Andre Malraux served on many fronts and commanded a group of underground resistance fighters in World War II in France, confirming the image of the writer as a man of action; he was to serve as a minister under Charles de Gaulle in the postwar government and the Fifth Republic. The German attack on the Soviet Union in 1941 was decisive for the French Communist Party, which was to gain considerably through its organized opposition to Fascism. The events of the 1930s and '40s strengthened the conviction that intellectuals could not remain politically uncommitted; the war clarified choices and made them seem crucial for the individual. After 1945, Existentialism, depicting mankind alone in a godless universe, rationalized this view of individuals as free to determine themselves through such choices. Meanwhile, the occupation brought prestige and an attentive audience to writers who upheld the honour of their defeated country. The poetry of resistance reached a wide public, notably in the works of Paul Eluard and Louis Aragon. Both were Communists (Aragon was to become the country's "cultural commissar" after 1945) and had been associated with the Surrealist movement from the 1920s. They turned in the war years to writing poems in direct language, and their poems were often transmitted orally through the occupied zone. A flourishing clandestine press was able to issue some publications, including the newspaper Combat and the Editions de Minuit, which brought out as its first book the story Le Silence de la mer (1942) by Vercors (Jean-Marcel Bruller). With the additional stories later added to a collection under the same title, this is probably the literary work that most accurately evokes the atmosphere and the dilemmas of the time. Camus's fable La Peste (1947; The Plague), an allegory set in a city visited by the plague, gave a universal dimension to the treatment of these dilemmas. The war transformed the literary scene, eclipsing some writers and lending prestige to those who had made the fortunate political choices. During the occupation Sartre further elaborated his Existentialist philosophy in plays, such as Les Mouches (1943; "The Flies") and Huis-Clos (1944; No Exit, or In Camera) and expounded it in the treatise L'Etre et le neant (1943; Being and Nothingness). After the liberation, the writer and his ideas set the tone for a postwar generation that congregated in the cafes and cellar clubs of Saint-Germain-des-Pres. The myth of this disillusioned youth, its district of Paris, its innocence, its jazz clubs, and its worship of Sartre were captured in Boris Vian's L'Ecume des jours (1947). Sartre's reputation fluctuated widely during the 30 years from 1950 until his death: at times he was compared to Voltaire, and at other times he was dismissed as a senile fellow traveller. Until 1952 his name was linked with that of Camus, whose novel L'Etranger (1945; The Stranger, or The Outsider) expressed a vision similar to that of the early Sartre. But after their highly publicized break, Sartre moved toward the Existentialist Marxism of his Critique de la raison dialectique (1960; Search for a Method), and Camus toward a stoical humanism, his later fiction (La Chute, 1956; The Fall) showing evidence of his isolation, his creative unease, and his distress over France's war with Algeria. The conflicts submerged in the euphoria of liberation surfaced during the Cold War period and were intensified by the colonial wars of the 1950s. Sartre's lifelong companion, Simone de Beauvoir, vividly depicted the contrary attractions of Communism and the United States for French intellectuals in her novel Les Mandarins (1954; The Mandarins). However, her analysis of the feminine condition, Le Deuxieme Sexe (1949; The Second Sex), although reviled on its first appearance, was to be a more influential achievement, its themes being substantiated by her later autobiographical works. After Sartre's death she gave a moving account of his later years in La Ceremonie des adieux (1981; Adieux, A Farewell to Sartre), which was acknowledged as confirmation of their crucial role in intellectual life. The nouveau roman The literary event of 1954 was Bonjour tristesse. Published when its author, Francoise Sagan (pseudonym of Francoise Quoirez), was only 19, this novel of adolescent love was written with "classical" restraint and a tone of cynical disillusionment and showed the persistence of traditional form in fiction. The previous generation, caught up in politics, had experimented with Socialist Realism (for example, the novels of Roger Vailland), yet, while the 1950s seem in retrospect to have been dominated by concern with form, the novel-reading public remained largely untouched by those experiments. The Naturalist novel survived in the work of Henri Troyat and others, while its assumptions about the role of the author and the nature of fictional "reality" continued to be taken for granted by a host of novelists and their readers. On the other hand, these assumptions had long been challenged before the emergence of the nouveau roman (New Novel) in the work of Alain Robbe-Grillet, Claude Simon, Nathalie Sarraute, Michel Butor, and Marguerite Duras (pseudonym of Marguerite Donnadieu). What was new about these novelists, apart from the label applied to them, was their systematic rejection of the traditional framework of fiction--chronology, plot, character--and of the omniscient author. In place of these reassuring conventions, they offer texts that demand more of the reader, who is presented with compressed, repetitive, or only partially explained events from which to derive a meaning that will not, in any case, be definitive. In Robbe-Grillet's La Jalousie (1957; Jealousy), for example, the narrator's suspicions of his wife's infidelity are never confirmed or denied, but their obsessive quality is conveyed by the replacement of a chronological narrative with the insistent repetition of details or events. In Le Libera (1968) by Robert Pinget there is no single narrator, while in the later novels of Jean Cayrol the narrative emanates from the sea, a field, the desert. The nouveau roman was open to influence from works being written abroad (notably the work of William Faulkner) and from the cinema (Robbe-Grillet and Duras contributed to the nouvelle vague, or New Wave, style of filmmaking). But, by the time Robbe-Grillet's Pour un nouveau roman (Toward a New Novel) appeared in 1963, it was clear that the term covered a variety of approaches. In the same year, the Prix Theophraste Renaudot was awarded to Jean-Marie Le Clezio for Le Proces-verbal (The Interrogation), a novel welcomed partly because it was both "modern" and accessible. It was also heralded (prematurely) as offering an escape from the nouveau roman's overintellectuality. Experiments in theatre During the 1940s the theatre provided a forum for the veiled expression of political dilemmas through the dramatization of individual crises of conscience. The plays of Montherlant, Jean Anouilh, Giraudoux, and Sartre made this, surprisingly, an outstanding moment for the Parisian stage. A government policy to provide state financial aid after the war led to the encouragement of great drama in the provinces (the Avignon Festival started in 1947) and the establishment of remarkable and innovative theatre companies, such as the Theatre National Populaire and the Compagnie Jean-Louis Barrault-Madeleine Renaud. But, while the works they performed were inventive and intellectually stimulating, there was little change in the concept of theatre itself; this was a writer's theatre, the genre and the rules of stagecraft seemingly fixed within an agreed perception of what constituted "reality." Jarry, Cocteau, and others had attempted to extend this perception long before in works that had opened drama to the irrational, the surreal, and the influence of circus and music hall. Artaud's Le Theatre et son double (1938; The Theatre and Its Double) called for theatre that would shock its spectators into seeing the baseness of the real world. But it was only after the war, starting with plays staged in the Parisian fringe theatre, that the accepted notion of theatre and the primacy of the text were seriously challenged. While the plays of Anouilh and Sartre conveyed their intentions effectively from the printed page, those of Jean Genet, Eugene Ionesco, Arthur Adamov, and Samuel Beckett only revealed their full meaning in actual performance, the text often seeming flat, repetitive, or banal until brought to life on the stage. Though Genet's Les Bonnes (The Maids) appeared in 1947 and Ionesco's La Cantatrice chauve (The Bald Soprano) in 1949, public recognition of the new theatre did not come until 1953, with Roger Blin's production of Beckett's En attendant Godot (1952; Waiting for Godot). Originating in the fool of Shakespearean drama and the tramp of silent comedy, the characters of Vladimir and Estragon convey the absurdity and the tragedy of existence in an artistic context that resembles musical composition more than the classical "imitation of nature." Postwar poetry Developments in the novel and the theatre were easier to define than those in poetry, where the lack of a broad readership was, in itself, an encouragement to fragmentation. The works of Jacques Prevert and the songs of Georges Brassens and Jacques Brel did achieve the status of popular poetry; but, apart from Saint-John Perse, there was no major figure in the tradition of Claudel and Valery, and the poetry of the post-Surrealist generation appeared to have no clear formal or ideological direction. The mainstream of French poetry was represented by Rene Char, Pierre Emmanuel (pseudonym of Noel Mathieu), and Yves Bonnefoy. In contrast to the tendency to abstract and symbolic language that characterized their poetry, however, Francis Ponge in Le Parti pris des choses (1942) and later works used wordplay and devices to emphasize the act of writing, in prose poems centred on the impersonal description of objects. On the whole, the intellectual bourgeoisie that might have provided the audience for poetry looked to the written word for the expression of ideas and found aesthetic stimulation in the visual arts, especially the cinema. A younger generation, from the late 1960s, was more open to fantasy and the imagination, but impatient of formal discipline. The "do-it-yourself" poetry that appealed to this group's egalitarian instincts was as ephemeral as the little magazines in which it appeared during the 1970s, and the "crisis of verse" that Jacques Roubaud described in La Vieillesse d'Alexandre (1978) remained unresolved. Roubaud's own poetry, including Trente et un au cube (1973), looked to Japanese literature as the inspiration for work that was structured, yet free from the burden of European rhetoric. He was associated with the writers of OuLiPo (Ouvroir de Litterature Potentielle) who, inspired by Alfred Jarry and by Raymond Queneau, sought during the 1970s to escape from the vague "poeticism" of much contemporary free verse through the acceptance of rigorous formal constraints. Their fondness for wordplay and sometimes unbelievably demanding forms was illustrated in the works of Georges Perec. As well as poetry, Perec wrote novels, including La Disparition (1969), a text composed entirely without using the letter e, and La Vie mode d'emploi (1978), his most accessible work, built around the inhabitants of an apartment house. This renewal of interest in the playful aspects of literary composition was consistent with contemporary critical theory and was accompanied by a reassessment of some earlier literature, such as the poetry of the grands rhetoriqueurs. Queneau, most widely known as the author of Zazie dans le metro (1959; Zazie), was the most immediate predecessor with his stylistic demonstrations in Exercices de style (1947) and the 10 sonnets of Cent mille milliards de poemes (1961), which the reader was invited to rearrange in the hundred-thousand-billion ways indicated by the title. This unsolemn reaction to formlessness was clearly healthy, and the success of series devoted to the work of the more established poets showed that there was a readership even for quite demanding work, though that readership's social composition was less precisely defined and less coherent than it had been in earlier periods. The 1960s In the early 1960s, free of colonial entanglements, France enjoyed increasing stability and affluence while, despite le fast-food, le marketing, and le rock, French culture preserved an individual character and was defended against such transatlantic imports by Rene Etiemble in his polemic Parlez-vous franglais? (1964). The technocratic middle class, which benefitted most from the country's prosperity, was open to new ideas in science, and its materialist outlook found expression in Le Hasard et la necessite (1970; Chance and Necessity) by Jacques Monod. Monod, who won the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for 1965, rejected earlier ideologies, including religion, and drew on science for a view of the human place in the universe. The new technology seemed to promise endless growth and the erosion of class divisions. Perec, in Les Choses (1965), warned of the emptiness of this consumer society, while a bitter novel by Christiane Rochefort, Les Petits Enfants du siecle (1961), satirized the welfare state and revealed the drabness of life in a working-class housing complex. La Dentelliere (1974), by Pascal Laine, showed that the technocratic society had not abolished class differences and announced the next decade's concern for the position of women. The most significant developments seemed to be outside the field of imaginative literature: in the structural anthropology of Claude Levi-Strauss, the semiology of Roland Barthes, the neo-Freudian psychology of Jacques Lacan, and the philosophy of Michel Foucault or Jacques Derrida. Despite Time magazine's disparagement in 1969 of French culture, it can be argued that French writers, more than those of any other country, were making original contributions to almost every field of social science and the humanities. Their work transcended academic boundaries. Structuralism, reacting against the Phenomenology of Sartre, asserted the crucial importance of relationships between phenomena, while semiology analyzed systems of signs, notably language, through which one attributes meaning to the raw data of reality. The journal Tel Quel, edited by Philippe Sollers, was the focus for a theory of writing as a concept to be extended beyond the realm of literature. The New Criticism demanded more of the reader, who was to become an active participant in decoding the text, not a passive recipient. Critics emphasized context and variant readings, none of which was to be exclusively "correct." The text itself became the object of closer and closer scrutiny: a single line from a poem by Laforgue could give rise to five pages of exegesis in a critical journal. The New Critics despised the university establishment and met with opposition from it about the time of Barthes's Sur Racine (1963; "On Racine"). The educational system was rigid and outdated. A liberal university admissions policy was combined with a teaching method based largely on formal lectures, and the vast student body found itself with no say in the running of a system that seemed to be largely irrelevant to its needs. The events of 1968 During the student revolt in May 1968, streets, factories, schools, and universities became the stage for a spontaneous performance, the decor provided by posters and graffiti elevated to a popular art form. The theatre itself in the late 1960s and the 1970s moved still further away from the "writer's theatre" of earlier times, experimenting with audience participation and improvisation. Rock music and comic books flourished, and television, closely controlled by the government under de Gaulle, began to play an increasing role in cultural life; discussion programs and spin-offs from serials or adaptations were taking over from the press in guiding taste. The events of 1968 led to no conclusions, and the community's reaction emphasized continuity and conservatism. The academies, the literary prizes, the dominant publishing houses, and the university elite survived more or less intact. The most evident long-term benefit of the upheaval was the encouragement it gave to the feminist movement. The analysis begun by Simone de Beauvoir was taken up in a host of works, and the novels of Claire Etcherelli, Marie Cardinal, Chantal Chawaf, and Helene Cixous were among many that, in different ways, affirmed the value of feminine experience. Historians of both sexes were stimulated to reassess past roles of women, the family, and sexuality. The gains, by the 1980s, were enormous, though Marguerite Duras, whose novels had long emphasized the freeing of their women characters from a life-destroying social and domestic background, dissociated herself from some aspirations of the feminist movement, which she also found restricting. Literature after 1970 With no movement obviously set to replace the nouveau roman in fiction, there were dire predictions about the future of literary culture. Only Michel Tournier was generally agreed to be outstanding. Le Roi des Aulnes (1971) was an extraordinary combination of myth and parable, and Tournier's imagination, as well as his skillful narrative technique, were confirmed in Les Meteores (1975) and Gilles et Jeanne (1983). But critical acclaim for Tournier's work did not encourage imitation, and the most one could say of the novel up to the mid-1980s was that it exhibited a variety of tendencies, from post-nouveau roman experiments to traditional survivals. Between the two was work such as that of Pascal Bruckner and Didier Martin, who, like a number of their contemporaries, were open to an element of fantasy or wordplay with precedents in English rather than French fiction. The anarchism of 1968 encouraged this, as well as some satirical writing, and there was greater concern for minorities, the Third World, and regional cultures. But for many, the 1970s were politically frustrating and the economic recession brought an end to the complacency of the preceding period. The decade also saw the public for the first time coming fully to terms with the events of the German occupation, though the fashion for le retro (the retrospective) suggested an ambiguous and disturbing nostalgia that included the war years. The novels of Patrick Modiano used a fascination with the time to explore problems of identity and loyalty. The frustrations of the times may have added to the attraction of the historical novel. Marguerite Yourcenar (pseudonym of Marguerite de Crayencour), who in 1980 became the first woman elected to the Academie Francaise, had shown that the genre could appeal to more than escapism. Memoires d'Hadrien (1951; Memoirs of Hadrian) and L'Oeuvre au noir (1968; The Abyss) were portraits of men who overcame the limitations of their time, as well as rich evocations of the past. History proved able to accommodate a vast range of fiction, from popular romance (Jeanne Bourin's best-selling La Chambre des dames, 1979) and fictionalized biography, to the linguistic and narrative experiments of Claude Simon (Les Georgiques, 1981) and Pierre Guyotat (Le Livre, 1984) or the sensitive prose of Florence Delay (L'Insucces de la fete, 1980) and Christiane Singer (La Mort viennoise, 1978). It was sustained by the prestige of historiography: Michel Foucault's studies of sexuality and attitudes to death, and the social history associated with the journal Annales, edited by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, whose Montaillou (1975) was an international best-seller. There was a corresponding interest in biography and memoirs. The novelists Julien Green and Julien Gracq (pseudonym of Louis Poirier) were among several figures of an earlier generation who began to publish journals and memoirs rather than fiction. The public delighted in the stories of Marcel Pagnol's Provencal childhood, but also in Nathalie Sarraute's Enfance (1983; Childhood), and seemed increasingly prepared to come to terms with some technical innovations. Philippe Sollers's Femmes (1983) sold well, and the work of once highly controversial and "difficult" writers like Georges Bataille and Henri Michaux, though perhaps not widely read, was achieving a greater degree of acceptability. Detective fiction, a genre sometimes exploited by the nouveau roman, had an outstanding practitioner in Georges Simenon, who, during the 1970s, also turned to autobiography. The gangster novels of Albert Simonin made imaginative use of Parisian slang, but the chief attraction of the thriller for more "literary" writers was its form, which they, like a number of filmmakers, adopted as a framework for the investigation of questions of identity or moral and political dilemmas (for example, in Michel del Castillo's La Nuit du decret, 1981). The period after 1968 was one of adjustment to political, economic, and social changes, a fact also reflected in the number of novels concerned with the act of writing or the literary scene. Even from within the country, French culture at times appeared to be marginal and history to be "happening elsewhere" (as a character remarked in Alain Jouffroy's L'Indiscretion faite a Charlotte, 1980). An important contribution was made to cultural life by Francophone (French-speaking) writers from North Africa, sub-Saharan Africa, and the Caribbean. In France itself writers continued to assert regional identities, and conversely, other writers developed an awareness of neighbouring countries in Europe, which provided the setting for many novels. The nationalism of de Gaulle's time survived, but it was little reflected in literature. The controversies aroused by the nouveau roman and the New Criticism seemed less and less significant as their claims were absorbed into the mainstream of ideas. Distinctions between genres were eroded and the lines between fiction and nonfiction seemed increasingly irrelevant: from Les Mots (1963; Words) onward, the enterprise of Sartre's career, which had appeared primarily to encompass philosophy and politics, was understood as he had always understood it, as that of a writer first and foremost, constructing himself and his reality through the magic power of words. With Fragments d'un discours amoureux (1977), criticism and self-analysis became fiction and writing became an erotic act, destroying the illusion that the previous writings of Roland Barthes had been merely the dissection of other people's myths. The imagination no longer found itself limited to the elaboration of alternative worlds; it had an equal part to play in the creation of all meaning, and there was fiction and mythmaking in any use of language, not excluding its use by literary critics and literary historians. |