French Literature

French Literature

I

INTRODUCTION

French Literature, literature written in the language of France from the late 11th century to the present day. Before this time, the written language of the French was Latin.

II

THE MEDIEVAL PERIOD

The first notable works in the French language were the chansons de geste, stories in verse, told or sung in the feudal courts by wandering minstrels (jongleurs or trouvères). They related the heroic deeds of Christian knights in the service of Charlemagne and other great leaders. The most famous epic of this kind is the early 12th-century Chanson de Roland.

Another important group of verse tales drew its inspiration from Celtic folklore, including the legends of the Holy Grail and the story of Tristan. Their best-known exponent was the late 12th-century poet Chrétien de Troyes, a skilled narrator of love and adventure, particularly popular in the female-dominated aristocratic courts he frequented. His contemporary Marie de France also drew on Celtic sources for the verse fictions she called Lais, although she also wrote animal fables on similar lines to those by the Greek writer Aesop.

At the end of the 12th century and the beginning of the 13th, another category of verse tale, the fabliau, became popular. These narratives are short, simple, down-to-earth, and often ironic, coarse, or irreverent. (Some of the same stories appear in The Canterbury Tales by the English author Geoffrey Chaucer.) More sophisticated in its satirical depiction of feudal society than the fabliaux is Le Roman de Renart (Reynard the Fox), a collection of tales by different, mostly unidentified, poets, completed probably between 1175 and 1205. Through the adventures of a number of animals, including Reynard the fox, this hugely popular work satirizes its world with varying degrees of wit and narrative skill.

Later in the 13th century a verse allegory, Le Roman de la Rose (The Romance of the Rose), achieved similar popularity. Guillaume de Lorris completed the first part, of some 4,000 lines, between 1230 and 1240, conceiving it as a piece in the tradition of courtly love. The poet dreams of a beautiful rose, in a garden full of allegorical figures, who either encourage or thwart him in his efforts to pluck it. The second part of the poem, of some 18,000 lines, completed by Jean de Meun between 1275 and 1280, is different in character, containing disquisitions on all aspects of medieval life: social, economic, political, and religious. Meun’s advocacy of nature as a guide to living was later elaborated by the 16th-century writer François Rabelais. The poem influenced many later writers, including the 14th-century poet-musician, Guillaume de Machaut, whose verse contains the same use of allegory, the moralizing, the dream device, the suffering lover, and the personification of love. Machaut’s technique, however, is considerably more innovative and assured.

By the 15th century poetry was increasingly a vehicle for personal lyrical expression, as in the graceful verses of Charles d’Orléans, its popularity enhanced by poetry contests with prizes awarded by the academies. The outstanding lyric poet of the period, François Villon, writes of his own ill-spent life with wit, exuberance, tenderness, and a profound sense of sin and mortality. His two best-known works, Le Petit Testament (1456) and Le Grand Testament (1461), both in the form of burlesque wills, show an easy inventiveness, particularly in their mastery of the ballade form, and a gift for conveying simple emotion.

Medieval theatre, again in verse, grew out of the liturgy and was, until the 13th century, performed by clerics. Mystery plays, on biblical subjects, survive from the 12th century, their authors unknown. Miracle plays, of divine intervention, survive from the 13th century, notably Jean Bodel’s Le Jeu de Saint Nicolas (The Play of Saint Nicolas), a comic invention of not entirely religious inspiration. There was, in fact, some secular theatre in the 13th century, exemplified by Adam de la Halle, whose Le Jeu de la Feuillée (The Play of the Greensward, c. 1275) is a comedy of ordinary people and whose Jeu de Robin et Marion (The Play of Robin and Marion, 1280) is a dramatized pastourelle with singing and dancing. During the 14th and 15th centuries there was increasing secularization of the theatre: mystery and miracle plays were acted by laymen—jongleurs, tradesmen, and even lawyers—and might be followed by the performance of a farce or sotie, poking fun at the foibles and vices of contemporary society and institutions. Of these, the anonymous Farce de Maître Pierre Pathelin (Master Pathelin’s Farce), written some time before 1469, is the best known, and anticipates the early farces of Molière.

Verse dominates medieval literature; prose is largely the province of historians. The late 12th-century Geoffroi de Villehardouin produced a readable, if rather dry, account of the Fourth Crusade. In the 14th century, the Histoire de Saint Louis (1309) by Jean de Joinville provides a livelier, more personal account of the Seventh Crusade and of his own relationship with Louis IX. Later in the century, Jean Froissart gives a vivid and historically important account of the Hundred Years’ War in his Chroniques. The Mémoires of Philippe de Comines, from the closing decade of the 15th century, provide an insider’s picture of contemporary political life, with personal views on government, taxation, and the obligations of the powerful. His intelligence and objectivity set him apart from much that seems to characterize the feudal mentality, and some of his opinions would not disgrace a modern statesman.

III

THE 16TH CENTURY

It was only at the beginning of the 16th century that French literature began to undergo the influence of the Italian Renaissance, which had reached its peak a century earlier. Following the Italian example, 16th-century French writers turned away from the Christian Middle Ages to pre-Christian Classical antiquity for inspiration, finding there both an attitude to life and learning centred on man rather than on God (humanism), and a wide range of literary masterpieces which they used to stimulate their own creative aspirations.

A

1500 to 1550

The influence of the Italian Renaissance was first of all felt at Lyon, the leading centre for printed books in France. The most prominent Lyon poet was Maurice Scève. His Délie (1544) is a sequence of 448 dizains (ten-line verses) expressing his love for a woman of ideal beauty and intellect. The self-imposed necessity of compressing thought and feeling into ten-line poems of ten syllables each makes Délie a challenge to the reader’s mental powers without diminishing the poem’s emotional charge. In this, Scève foreshadows certain 20th-century French poets, notably Paul Éluard. A quite different style, poignant and direct, characterizes the 3 elegies and 24 sonnets by another Lyon poet, Louise Labé, one of several successful women writers in this period, including Queen Margaret of Navarre, a Classical scholar as well as a successful writer of prose.

In Paris, Renaissance influences coexisted with the legacy of the Middle Ages. Clément Marot continued to use forms such as the ballade and the rondeau, but he also introduced the Petrarchan sonnet into France. Marot’s chief strength is in lighter verse, but his biblical translations such as Psaumes (Psalms, 1541-1543) made a substantial contribution to religious poetry in French. French literature at this time was also influenced by the Reformation. This began as a movement to reform the Catholic Church from within, by returning to the “pure” Christianity of the Gospels, much as secular authors had discovered a humanistic philosophy in the original texts of the classics. Later, when the movement came under the leadership of John Calvin, who opposed free inquiry, it alienated humanists as well as Catholics. Marot, who had revised the Psaumes with help from Calvin, later rejected Calvinism and returned to the Catholic fold.

Humanism and the spirit of the early Reformation meet in the writings of François Rabelais, whose Pantagruel (1532) and Gargantua (1534) have enjoyed worldwide popularity ever since their first publication. Rabelais’s heroes are two giants whose often fantastical adventures in a realistic contemporary setting parody the adventure stories of the Middle Ages. Rabelais’s work is an enthusiastic celebration of sensual pleasures and intellectual freedom, in which humanist ideas, for example on education and war, are expounded, and the corruption of the priesthood and obscurantism of theologians are mercilessly satirized. Rabelais is a comic realist, who uses real-life detail to evoke scenes whose tonality ranges from undisguised absurdity to frank obscenity.

B

1550 to 1600

The French Renaissance came to full flowering around the middle of the 16th century with the group of poets known as La Pléiade. In his Défense et Illustration de la Langue Française (In Defence and Praise of French as a Literary Language, 1549), their spokesman Joachim Du Bellay argued that French literature would rival and even surpass that of Italy if French authors were to follow the example of the Italians by enriching their language with Classical borrowings and expressing their own poetic ideas in Classical forms, as well as competing directly with them in the field of the Petrarchan sonnet. In his own masterpiece Les Regrets (1558) Du Bellay used the sonnet form to record his disillusionment with life in Rome and his nostalgia for France in tones of intense melancholy and bitter satire. Pierre de Ronsard, the greatest poet of the group, showed his mastery in transmuting Classical forms, themes, and myths into original French creations, in his Odes (1550-1552). He also attempted but never finished an epic poem La Franciade (The Epic of France) of which four books were published in 1572. His fame rests above all on three collections of love poetry, culminating in the bitter-sweet Sonnets pour Hélène (Sonnets for Helen, 1578).

Tragedy, which, next to epic, was perceived as the greatest challenge for a Renaissance poet, was first attempted by the Pléiade poet Étienne Jodelle in Cléopâtre Captive (1552), which is declamatory rather than dramatic. The Protestant Robert Garnier, on the other hand, achieved real tragic conflict and suspense with his tragedy Les Juives (The Jewish Women, 1583). His play drew much of its strength from its echoes of the religious conflict raging at the time. The Wars of Religion between Catholics and Protestants (known as Huguenots) lasted from 1562 to 1598. They dispelled the optimistic climate in which the idealism of the Pléiade had flourished. The conflict brought very different reactions from poets. Philippe Desportes wrote stylish love poetry as if nothing were happening around him (Premières Oeuvres, 1573) while Ronsard, though initially inspired to biting eloquence in the Discours des Misères de ce Temps (Discourse on the Wretchedness of Our Times, 1562), then turned away from the topic. The best poets were those inspired by the personal anguish caused by the wars. Most notable are Théodore Agrippa d’Aubigné in his often moving Printemps (Spring, written 1572; published 1874) and Jean de Sponde, whose Sonnets et Stances de la Mort (Sonnets and Stanzas on Death) and Sonnets d’Amour (Love Sonnets), both hardly known before the mid-20th century, show him to be probably the finest of the post-Pléiade poets.

The three books of Essais (1580-1588) by Michel de Montaigne cover almost every topic that ever aroused the author’s wide-ranging curiosity. Montaigne responded to the Renaissance with a unique blend of fascination and detachment. His essays purvey a new type of humanism based on clear-sighted acknowledgement of the weaknesses as well as the strengths of human beings. Montaigne’s delight in Renaissance learning is tempered by the conviction that human thought is in a continual state of flux and intellectual certainty is impossible. The true humanist is a pragmatist who judges everything by the light of observation and experience of life, beginning with his own life: the Essais are a unique form of autobiography. Among other things, this leads Montaigne to advocate religious tolerance and to urge that education should emphasize the acquisition of understanding rather than factual information. Montaigne’s characteristic scepticism is echoed in his digressive style and in the contradictions left in the text by his lifelong practice of adding new material but never deleting anything.

IV

THE 17TH CENTURY

This rich and varied period culminated in what has been called the “Classical Moment” (1660-1680), which saw the production of some of the most enduring masterpieces of French literature.

A

1600 to 1650

At the beginning of the 17th century, French literature had much in common with the Baroque painting of the time. It was personal, colourful, and dynamic, and used images for their immediate impact on the reader’s or spectator’s senses. Form was governed by the pressure of the emotional content. In lyric poetry, Saint-Amant and Théophile de Viau composed light-hearted fantasies, while Jean-Baptiste Chassignet and La Ceppède used deliberately shocking images in order to stimulate religious devotion. In the theatre, the tragicomedies of Alexandre Hardy and Jean de Rotrou dramatized conflicts of love and honour among high-born characters, and aimed at surprising and astonishing the spectator with violent action and lavish changes of scenery. Around 1630 a reaction set in, spearheaded by the poet François de Malherbe. It led to the simplification of poetic language, rigorous constraints on form and versification, and a preference for general and impersonal themes. These reforms proved popular in the aristocratic salons where poetry was looked upon as little more than a social accomplishment. In the theatre, they were reflected in a move from tragicomedy, with its reliance on external excitement, to tragedy, in which a unified and psychologically motivated plot focused the spectator’s undivided attention on the character and destiny of the hero. The leading writer of tragedies was Pierre Corneille, whose first outstanding success had been a tragicomedy, Le Cid (1637). In his tragedies Horace (1640), Polyeucte (1642), and Nicomède (1650), Corneille portrays the inner vulnerability of the hero as well as his strength of will. Although he is habitually called a “Classical” dramatist, Corneille’s early tragedies are still Baroque in their celebration of heroic individualism and their aim of exciting admiration (awe and wonder) rather than the pity and fear expected of Greek tragedy.

B

1650 to 1700

By the middle of the 17th century, authors and readers belonged to the same tightly knit society centred on Paris and the court, and literature’s principal focus was the life of the aristocracy and the upper-middle classes. Drama in particular flourished, with regular performances by three different companies until their forced merger to form the Comédie-Française in 1680. In tragedy, Pierre Corneille turned for his subject matter to the dynastic problems of absolute monarchy, as heroic individualism went out of fashion in the reign of Louis XIV. Other dramatists such as Thomas Corneille and Philippe Quinault became popular by writing sentimental drama in which the love affairs of contemporary nobles were flatteringly portrayed under the outward trappings of the tragic form. Jean-Baptiste Racine first rivalled, and then eclipsed, both Pierre Corneille and the sentimental dramatists, in a series of plays, produced between 1664 and 1677, which showed the traditional public image of great figures of history and myth undermined by their private passions. In contrast to most of his contemporaries (though Thomas Corneille had taken a step in this direction), Racine eliminated unnecessary complexity from his initial choice of subject matter which he then used as the basis for tightly constructed and suspense-laden plots. After the greatest of his tragedies, Phèdre (1677), Racine stopped writing for the public stage. Towards the end of his life, he wrote two plays for private performance, Esther (1689) and Athalie (1691), the second of which eventually entered the repertoire of the Comédie-Française.

Comedy at first relied on a traditional repertoire of farce and comedy of intrigue, with obvious indebtedness to Italian and Spanish theatre, with Pierre Scarron as the most successful dramatist. Scarron’s comedies were regularly performed by Molière (pseudonym of Jean-Baptiste Poquelin) who, as actor, director, and manager, as well as author, created what was effectively a new genre by fusing different comic registers, from farce to romantic comedy, in order to produce plays aimed, as he put it, to “faire rire les honnêtes gens” (“to make respectable people laugh”). Molière’s liking for satire caused him problems with the authorities: Le Tartuffe (1664), in which a confidence trickster pretends to be a man of piety, was banned for five years, and Dom Juan (1665), where the licentious and atheistical hero is a trickster who torments an entire society, was not played again until the 19th century.

In poetry, the focus on society favoured the genres of satire and the epistle. Their most versatile exponent was Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux (usually known simply as Boileau) who used them for a wide range of subjects from poetry to theology. Boileau’s L’Art Poétique (The Art of Poetry, 1674) is not a versified rule-book, but a poem about poetry written from the standpoint of a creative artist, in which the author praises the methods of his great contemporaries Molière and Racine. Personal lyricism was largely confined to religious poetry. St Jean de Brébeuf, Racan, and the poets whose works appeared in the Recueil de Poésies Chrétiennes et Diverses (Collection of Christian and Other Poems, 1671), edited by Jean de La Fontaine, express personal sentiments in harmonious post-Malherbian verse. La Fontaine himself was the most original poet of the entire century. His choice of a non-traditional genre, the fable, left him free to experiment with unconventional metrical forms and to revive obsolete but colourful linguistic usages in his creation of an imaginary world, in which the parallels between animal and human behaviour often have uncomfortable implications for the society in which he and his readers were living.

In prose, the multi-volume romances of Madelaine de Scudéry and La Calprenède, depicting the sentimental adventures of contemporary courtiers dressed up as Classical heroes and heroines, were replaced in popularity by the nouvelle (a short fictitious narrative), in which the interest was concentrated on one incident in the life of a single, lifelike character. In La Princesse de Clèves (1678), by Madame de La Fayette, the story of a triangular love affair that can only end unhappily, the nouvelle form was transformed to produce the finest real roman (novel) of the period. The tightly controlled plotting recalls Racine, and the psychological insight owes much to Madame de La Fayette’s friend François de La Rochefoucauld. La Rochefoucauld’s own Maximes (1665-1678) is a series of pithy aphorisms about social behaviour and the role of the subconscious mind in motivating human conduct. La Rochefoucauld’s pessimistic view of human nature recalls that of the Jansenists, a group of theologians within the Roman Catholic Church who were eventually declared to be heretics. They were defended by Blaise Pascal, whose Lettres Provinciales (1656-1657), attacked the Jesuits, their principal enemy, with fierce satire and comic verve, and sold more copies than any other work of the period. Pascal’s lasting monument has proved to be his Pensées (Thoughts on the Christian Religion, 1670), a collection of fragments ranging from a few words to several paragraphs in length, in which he dramatizes the problem of religious belief, often “talking through” issues in fictitious dialogues. In Les Caractères ou les Moeurs de ce Siècle (The Characters or the Morals of Our Times, 1688-1696) by Jean de La Bruyère, the focus shifts from the inner life of the individual to its outward expression in a society in which self-seeking individuals have lost their humanity and behave like machines in their unremitting pursuit of wealth and power.

It is customary to speak of the literature of this period as “Classical”, a term introduced only in the 19th century. Only Racine can be considered truly “Classical”, since only he successfully revived the authentic spirit of Classical antiquity: the Greek tragedies were a true source of inspiration to him alone among contemporary dramatists, and only he properly understood Aristotle’s definition of the tragic catharsis. “Classicism” in most people’s minds is associated with restraint, conformity to the three Classical unities in drama, and emphasis on perfection of form. Unfortunately, when codified by the Académie Française and influential theorists of the period like Jean Chapelain, l’Abbé François Hédelin d’Aubignac, and Père René Rapin, these principles hardened into a doctrine that was used to regulate standards of taste and literary practice, and which laid a dead hand on French literature until well into the following century.

V

THE 18TH CENTURY

The 18th century is a turning point between two worlds. Its literary taste often perpetuates the old canons of the previous century. Its thought, expressed both in philosophical writing and in fiction, is questioning, forward-looking, and sometimes revolutionary. Already, at the end of the previous century, some of these features were to be found in the works of François de Salignac de la Mothe-Fénelon, Bernard de Bovier de Fontenelle, and Pierre Bayle, who all challenged traditional beliefs and assumptions. This is the age known as the Enlightenment.

A

Theatre

The influence of the 17th century was felt most strongly in tragedy. The tragedies of Campistron and La Fosse resembled a sentimentalized Racine, and those of Crébillon père, Racine with the addition of gratuitous violence. Voltaire (pseudonym of François-Marie Arouët), despite his lifelong idolization of Racine, was the most successful innovator. He took local colour and crowd scenes from Shakespeare, and introduced Enlightenment themes into tragedy. Comedy was similarly inhibited by the example of Molière. Jean-François Regnard imitated Molière’s farcical side, Florent Dancourt and Alain-René Le Sage his social realism. Le Sage’s Turcaret (1709) recalls Molière’s Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme in its ridicule of a social climber, but anticipates the Enlightenment by its bitter satire of the corruption of the financial bureaucracy. The two most original comic dramatists of the 18th century were Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de Marivaux and Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais. Marivaux distanced himself from the Molière tradition by writing romantic comedies based on lovers’ misunderstandings, which were performed by the actors of the Comédie-Italienne (re-established in Paris since 1716) to whose style they were better suited than the Comédie-Française, which increasingly preferred the moralizing comédies larmoyantes (tear-jerkers) of authors like La Chaussée, which were comic only in having a happy ending. In the latter half of the century, Beaumarchais took on the mantle of Molière in combining all the elements of existing comic traditions. Beaumarchais was an open admirer of the Philosophes (see below), and in his Le Mariage de Figaro (1784), his hero Figaro represents the man of talent marginalized by a society in which birth counts for more than merit.

The greatest stranglehold on theatrical innovation in the 18th century was the traditional distinction between tragedy, which takes seriously the misfortunes of high-born figures, and comedy, in which the ridiculous figures are always middle class. To break this stranglehold, Denis Diderot invented a midway genre, the prose drame, a serious play in prose intended to portray the real dilemmas of middle-class characters. Diderot’s own drames were unsuccessful. The best example of the new form is Michel-Jean Sedaine’s Le Philosophe sans le Savoir (The Unwitting Philosopher, 1765), a well-made, genuinely suspenseful play that attacked the aristocratic prejudice against trade. Closer in date to the French Revolution, Louis-Sébastien Mercier introduced working-class characters into the drame and, in plays such as Le Déserteur (1782) and La Brouette du Vinaigrier (The Vinegar-Seller’s Cart, 1784), defended pacifism and made a plea for social equality, while Beaumarchais himself showed his approval for the form by using it for the third play of his Figaro trilogy, La Mère Coupable (The Guilty Mother, 1792). However, serious prose drama did not really become established until the 19th century with the work of Émile Augier and Dumas fils.

B

Prose Writing: The Philosophes

In France, the chief representatives of the Enlightenment were the Philosophes, writers who attacked abstract systems of philosophy and judged the worth of ideas by their social utility, dismissing the work of philosophers like Aristotle, Descartes, and (in their own day) Leibniz as harmful fictions, and promoting the empiricists Bacon, Locke, and Newton.

The Philosophes expressed their views in two ways: through treatises and pamphlets, and through the fictional forms of the novel and the short story. In his Lettres Philosophiques (Philosophical Letters, 1734), Voltaire criticizes superstition and intolerance in the name of deism (universal belief in a Supreme Being) and praises constitutional monarchy on the English model. The Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire Raisonné des Sciences, des Arts et des Métiers (Encyclopedia or General Dictionary of Sciences, Techniques, and Crafts, 1751-1772), principally edited by Diderot, and aimed at “changing people’s ingrained ways of thinking”, is not only a compilation of useful knowledge, but also a swingeing attack on superstition, intolerance, social inequality, and political tyranny. L’Esprit des Lois (The Spirit of Laws, 1748) by Charles Louis de Secondat de Montesquieu praised constitutional monarchy and attacked religious intolerance. Jean-Jacques Rousseau expounded the principles of democratic government on republican lines in Du Contrat Social (The Social Contract, 1762), and progressive views on education in Emile (1762). Like Montesquieu and Voltaire, he believed in a Supreme Being, as his Profession de Foi du Vicaire Savoyard (Profession of Faith of a Savoyard Curate), included in Emile, makes clear, whereas Claude-Adrien Helvétius, in De l’Esprit (On the Mind, 1758), and Paul Thiry D’Holbach, in his Système de la Nature (The System of Nature, 1770), were atheists and materialists whose attitude split the Philosophe movement.

The Philosophes’ use of fictional forms to propagate their ideas is illustrated early in the history of the Enlightenment by Montesquieu’s Lettres Persanes (1721), an epistolary novel in which Philosophe concerns are addressed through the observations of two fictitious Persian visitors to Paris, with some degree of individual characterization and a well-plotted narrative. Diderot’s Jacques le Fataliste et son Maître (James the Fatalist and His Master, 1796) is a comic novel that explores the problem of free will and determinism, while he uses the dialogue form in Le Neveu de Rameau (Rameau’s Nephew, c. 1761) for challenging discussion of ethical problems, and in Le Rêve de D’Alembert (D’Alembert’s Dream, 1769) for wide-ranging speculations on the concept of evolution that still have an astonishingly modern ring. All these works were published after his death. Most effective of all was Voltaire, who displayed his genius for caricature and satire in a series of stories, the most famous being Candide (1759), through which he created what was effectively a new genre, the conte philosophique (philosophical tale).

C

The Novel

In addition to its use as a vehicle for Philosophe propaganda, the 18th-century novel was popular in its own right, exploiting readers’ new-found curiosity about unfamiliar places and their taste for realistic description primarily for literary ends. Manon Lescaut (1731) by the Abbé Antoine-François Prévost is a story of romantic obsession and betrayal, in the setting of Parisian low life and the rigours of the newly established French colony at New Orleans, which ends in tragedy for the two lovers. Les Liaisons Dangereuses (Dangerous Acquaintances, 1782) by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, the masterpiece of the 18th-century epistolary novel, exposes the dangers of romantic love with a cynical detachment that many contemporary readers found immoral, although Charles Baudelaire in the 19th century declared it to be a highly moral book. In Rousseau’s La Nouvelle Héloïse (The New Heloïse, 1762), also in letter form, love is idealized. The novel describes a triangular relationship in which conjugal love triumphs over the temptations of an adulterous affair, set in the idyllic (and idealized) surroundings of the Swiss Alps. In Paul et Virginie (1787) by Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, set mainly on an exotic island in the Indian Ocean (Mauritius), idealized love turns to tragedy because even in a world so close to nature the heroine cannot dissociate love from the puritanical morality she has learnt in “civilized” France.

Rousseau also wrote two highly original autobiographical works, the Rêveries du Promeneur Solitaire (Musings of a Lonely Stroller, posthumously published 1782), ten introspective meditations on various phases of his life, and the Confessions (also posthumously published 1782), which combine self-revelation with self-justification. The Rêveries are written in a poetic style that overshadows the shallow lyricism of most of the verse of the period.

D

Poetry

Evariste de Parny wrote poetry in both verse and prose, the former conventional in style, the latter, notably in his Chansons Madécasses (Songs from Madagascar, 1778), passionate and committed in its anti-colonialism. The century did however produce, in André Chénier, one fine poet who wrote in verse. Chénier took his inspiration from Classical antiquity, but he saw the Classical past through modern eyes, and his rhythmic and metrical innovations broke with the rules of versification that French poetry had inherited from the 17th century. It is not surprising that the Romantics should have claimed him as a precursor (he published only two poems before his death in 1794, and the rest were not discovered and published until 1819, the year before Lamartine’s Méditations).

VI

THE 19TH CENTURY

This was a century of great literary activity, much of which is traditionally grouped into movements: Romanticism, Realism, Naturalism, Symbolism, and so forth. These labels can sometimes obscure a writer’s true originality.

A

1800 to 1820

In 1802 François René de Chateaubriand published Le Génie du Christianisme (The Genius of Christianity), an apology for Christianity, based largely on its emotional and aesthetic appeal. It contains, significantly, the short novel René about a melancholy youth who despairs of love and embraces nature: an early Romantic hero. Three other novels of the period, Delphine (1802), by Madame de Staël, Obermann (1804), by Étienne Senancour, and Adolphe (1816), by Constant de Rebeque, prefigure the Romantic hero: ineffectual, confessional, unhappy in love but comforted by nature. Two works of criticism by Madame de Staël challenge the old, classical conventions of literary taste. In De la Littérature (On Literature, 1800) and De l’Allemagne (On Germany, 1810) she argues that aesthetic judgements should be relative, not absolute, and should be made in the light of geographical and historical factors. Thus, she asserts, the passionate, imaginative literature of northern Europe is as valid as the imported Classicism of the Mediterranean: and moreover, it has a heart and soul.

B

1820 to 1850

B1

Poetry

Alphonse de Lamartine achieved immediate success with his Méditations Poétiques (Poetic Meditations) in 1820. The outpourings of a lovesick soul, with nature in attendance and God listening, were admirably conveyed in Lamartine’s harmonious verse. Victor Hugo, whom André Gide famously described as “our greatest poet, alas!”, exemplifies yet further the Romantic imagination: exotic settings, vast and colourful historical, biblical, and pagan subjects, philosophical musings, and personal outpourings about nature, love, death, and God. Even his late epic poem La Légende des Siècles (The Legend of the Centuries, 1859-1883), written long after the Romantic movement had died, remains exuberantly Romantic. The confessional aspect of Romantic poetry is well seen in Alfred de Musset, who describes gracefully and melodiously in Les Nuits (Nights, 1835-1837) the anguish of betrayed love and the lonely self-pity of the lover. Alfred de Vigny, with more dignity and restraint, conveys the spiritual isolation of a life of suffering in which God is remote and forbidding, love a betrayal, and nature no comfort. He reveals his feelings through symbolic figures, giving Les Destinées (The Fates, published posthumously 1864) great poetic nobility. Gérard de Nerval, pseudonym of Gérard Labrunie (1808-1855), also treated many of the great themes of Romantic poetry, but was to be taken up most enthusiastically by the 20th-century Surrealists for the enigmatic, dream-like images of poems like “El Desdichado”, from Les Chimères (Dreams, 1854).

These poets enjoyed the critical support of Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve, regarded by some as the founder of modern literary criticism in France. He thought the critic should be illuminating rather than dogmatic and should provide biographical information on all the writer’s formative influences.

B2

Theatre

The Romantic poets also wrote plays: Hugo’s Hernani (1830) causing a sensation with its defiant disregard of all the Classical conventions; it has a swashbuckling story, an outcast hero, and deliberate irregularities of versification. The Romantic aspiration to emulate Shakespeare, in his mingling of the sublime and the grotesque, only once comes anywhere near realization: Musset’s Lorenzaccio (1834, but first performed 1896) portrays a self-questioning anti-hero whose inability to act decisively has prompted comparisons with Hamlet. More popular were the historical prose-dramas of Alexandre Dumas père and the comedies of Eugène Scribe, in which good plotting and stagecraft were essential qualities.

B3

The Novel

The expansion of public education and the serialization of fiction in the press created a market. Hugo’s Notre Dame de Paris (The Hunchback of Notre Dame, 1831) and the historical novels of Alexandre Dumas père, like Le Comte de Monte-Cristo (The Count of Monte-Cristo, 1844-1845) and Les Trois Mousquetaires (The Three Musketeers, 1844), were very popular, as were the rustic fictions of George Sand. The public also had a taste for Gothic horror and romance, the genre in which Honoré de Balzac began writing, pseudonymously. Under his own name, he built the remarkable edifice of La Comédie Humaine (The Human Comedy), a collection of over 90 novels, with more than 2,000 recurring characters, aiming to represent all aspects of life and society. In his observation of character and minutely detailed descriptions he is a Realist, while his interest in the occult, occasional sensationalism, and sentimentality hint at the Romantic.

Stendhal (pseudonym of Henri Beyle) is unlike any of the popular novelists of this period. He is an ironic observer, whose characters are motivated by their self-interested passions as they pursue love, power, or happiness with engaging energy. Neither of his two great novels, Le Rouge et le Noir (The Red and the Black, 1830) and La Chartreuse de Parme (The Charterhouse of Parma, 1839), were properly appreciated until later in the 19th century.

C

1850 to 1890

C1

Poetry

For poetry, this was a period of enormous experimentation and change, with a perceptible shift of emphasis from content to form, expressed in the theory of “art for art’s sake”, and exemplified by Théophile Gautier in his collection Emaux et Camées (Enamels and Cameos, 1852), which comes near to achieving the effects of the plastic arts, paintings in words. Gautier’s advocacy of formal perfection and the pursuit of visual beauty attracted other poets, like Leconte de Lisle, Théodore de Banville, José Maria de Hérédia, Paul Verlaine, Charles Baudelaire, and Stéphane Mallarmé, who all contributed to the review Le Parnasse Contemporaine (Contemporary Parnassus), while not subscribing wholly to the Parnassian ideal. Verlaine, for example, had his own aesthetic code, in which the mysterious fleeting image (“la chose envolée”) and his liberation of verse from the old metrical conventions gave him something in common with the Symbolists, whom he later championed. Baudelaire, too, draws on many sources: Romantic in his morbid self-analysis, Parnassian in the classical perfection of his style, Symbolist in his exploitation of synaesthesia. His disturbing, musical verse is entirely original. Mallarmé and his young contemporary, Arthur Rimbaud, are labelled Symbolist, but go well beyond the readily interpreted symbol. They aimed to convey the inexpressible, in evocative language that bypasses conventional “meaning”. They experiment with the “colour” of individual sounds, the grouping of words on the page, free rhythmic patterns (vers libre), and the impact of sound rather than sense. Their poetry is difficult to read, but can be satisfying to experience; it is more akin to music than literature.

C2

Theatre

The popular comedies of Victorien Sardou, Eugène Labiche, and others flourished, as did a number of well-made but otherwise unmemorable plays. More interesting is the emergence of the modern, intimate domestic drama, not unlike the drame bourgeois that Diderot had tried, unsuccessfully, to introduce in the 18th century. The plays of Émile Augier deal with the problems that religion, politics, and financial speculation bring into the home. Alexandre Dumas fils treats the problem of social exclusion in Le Demi-Monde (1855) and Le Fils Naturel (The Bastard Son, 1858) and Henri Becque, in Les Corbeaux (The Crows, 1882), deals with exploitative creditors in grimly naturalistic detail. In such plays lies the germ of modern theatre. The Symbolist movement also had its dramatists, like Maurice Maeterlinck, whose Pelléas et Mélisande (1892) has a mysterious, fairy-tale quality, and Villiers de l’Isle Adam, whose Axël (1890) is Wagnerian in character.

C3

The Novel

The novelists of this period were interested in the realities of everyday life and the faithful portrayal of human character. Gustave Flaubert is a Realist in as much as he observes and documents truthfully. His first novel, Madame Bovary (1857), seemed to many female readers to be a true reflection of their own lives; others were scandalized by its realism, earning Flaubert a prosecution for offending public morals. He disliked the Realist label, believing that perfection of expression was the key to art. His conviction that “style is the very life-blood of a work” led to years of painstaking work on each novel: his output is small. Nor can it all be called Realist: Salammbô (1862), set in ancient Carthage, is an exotic historical fiction. Flaubert is above all a good storyteller and a great stylist.

The ambition to portray life as it really is was given pseudo-scientific justification by Émile Zola in his manifesto of Naturalism, Le Roman Expérimental (The Experimental Novel, 1880), in which he claims for the novelist the detached observation of the experimental scientist, though his Rougon-Macquart novels, tracing the effects of inherited alcoholism and madness in a family, are at their best when least scientific. Both L’Assommoir (The Gin Palace, 1887) and Germinal (1885) reveal descriptive powers of visionary brilliance. The brothers Edmond and Jules de Goncourt founded their own novels on scrupulous documentation, while lifting them out of the everyday by their impressionistic technique and mannered style. It is in the short stories of Guy de Maupassant that naturalistic style and content seem to blend perfectly: simple, realistic episodes are narrated dispassionately but movingly.

By the end of the 19th century novelists were looking to more than social realism for inspiration. Some, like Maurice Barrès, turned to religious or political idealism, others to a more profound psychological analysis. The novels of Joris Karl Huysmans describe a personal spiritual odyssey, from decadent aesthete to reclaimed Catholic. Among the most popular and prolific writers of the turn of the century was Anatole France, whose novels encompass a vast range of subjects and settings: contemporary, historical, political, satirical, and fantastic. Such diversity became increasingly common in the genre after this period.

VII

THE 20TH CENTURY

Twentieth-century French literature was characterized by the sheer volume of published material, its diversity, and its often revolutionary and influential nature. Scientific advances, psychoanalytic theory, and the spread of Marxism all contributed to the destruction of old certainties. The critical theories of Jacques Derrida and Jacques Lacan challenged the idea of literary authority: while their influence on the total creative output was small, they encouraged new attitudes to reading. Most influential, perhaps, was the work of the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss in formulating new theories of communication and thus encouraging change in the nature of narrative.

A

Poetry

Symbolist theory liberated poets from the constraints of traditional verse forms and privileged the subjective vision of the poet. Early 20th-century poets, like Emile Verhaeren, Jean Moréas, and Henri de Régnier, all initially embraced Symbolism, then abandoned it, Verhaeren for a violent lyricism that was almost Romantic, Moréas and Régnier for Classical forms and themes. Even Paul Valéry, although profoundly influenced by Mallarmé’s assertion that poetry should have the direct impact of music, preferred to cast his allusive images within the rigid framework of Classical versification. Only Guillaume Apollinaire built significantly on the Symbolist legacy, experimenting with poetry for the eye, in which he attempted some of the effects of the Cubist painters he championed, delighting in unusual verbal associations and dispensing with punctuation and often rhyme. Many of these techniques were further developed by later poets. In his use of unconscious association, Apollinaire’s work anticipated Surrealism, a movement that arose in the early 1920s, partly from the ashes of Dadaism (which briefly celebrated the disordered unconscious and proclaimed its hostility to art) and partly from the influence of psychoanalytic theories of the subconscious. The Surrealists tried to suppress, in the creative process, the operation of reason, with its contingent moral and aesthetic concerns, in favour of the unregulated images of the unconscious mind. André Breton was the autocratic leader of a group that included Paul Éluard and Louis Aragon, both of whom were far from disordered in their careful craftsmanship and mastery of metrical form. Both poets eventually abandoned the movement for the poetry of political commitment, joining poets like Robert Desnos, Pierre-Jean Jouve, and others as part of the intellectual resistance to the German Occupation in 1940-1944. Outside these movements, French poetry showed a great diversity of style and subject matter. For example, a mystical tradition may be observed, which linked poets like the Catholics Paul Claudel and Charles Péguy and the humanist Saint-John Perse: on all three, biblical and liturgical rhythms had a marked influence.

During World War II, the Resistance poets abandoned poetic theory and experimentation in their need to speak directly to the public. After the war, although some poets continued to use traditional themes and verse forms—René Char, Jules Supervielle, and Yves Bonnefoy, for example—others increasingly experimented with new verse forms, like the haiku-inspired poems of Philippe Jaccottet, the strangely spaced verse of Jean Daive, and the free-flowing word games of Marcelin Pleynet, all writing in the 1950s and 1960s. Pleynet, assistant managing editor of the avant-garde review Tel Quel (As Is), was part of a movement that sought to de-poeticize poetry and was more concerned with language as a system of signs, than as a conveyor of meaning. The poet and the poet’s emotions were effectively effaced by a lack of syntax, punctuation, and other guides to sense. The words on the page were the poem. Such poetry tended to be the preserve of a small group of intellectuals: it was not a popular genre. Among the poets of the 1970s and 1980s, there were examples of more reader-friendly poetry, although there was no great renaissance of traditional lyricism, except among poets like Jacques Prévert and the poet-musicians of the popular song, like Charles Trenet, Serge Gainsbourg, Jacques Brel, and others.

In the final decades of the 20th century, poets questioned the purpose and nature of poetry. A great deal of poetry was written, although the critic and novelist Julien Gracq (1910-2007) claimed cynically that there were not many poets to be found. Attitudes varied, however. Denis Roche, of the Tel Quel group, maintained that poetry was inadmissible, while Yves Bonnefoy advanced the view that poetry should be committed to genuine communication and to love for the world, to “that which is”. This was the theme of his later collections, like Ce qui fut sans lumière (What was in darkness, 1987) and Début et fin de la neige (Beginning and End of the Snow, 1991). Philippe Jaccottet, while accepting that “nobody today, for fear of being ridiculed, dares talk of inspiration or of the muse”, nevertheless sought constantly those moments of illumination that transfigure the natural world and put us in touch with something beyond. This was evident both in early collections, like L’Effraie (The Barn Owl, 1953), and in later works, like Pensées sous les nuages (Thoughts Below the Clouds, 1983). All the poets of the late 20th century shared an acute sense of the discipline of poetic endeavour, of the precision of the phrase, and, even at their most demanding of the reader, strove for what Bonnefoy called “a vague glimpse of that shimmering which is the essence of simple things”.

B

Theatre

Early 20th-century theatre was as much the creation of actor-directors as of dramatists. The Théâtre Libre of actor-director André Antoine had, until 1896, promoted Naturalist drama. Antoine went on to encourage Realist playwrights like Georges de Porto-Riche, Henri Bataille, and Henry Bernstein, who all wrote dramas of great psychological intensity, dealing with difficult personal relationships. At the Théâtre de l’Oeuvre, another actor-director, Aurélien Lugné-Poë, kept the Symbolist flame alive with plays by Maurice Maeterlinck and Paul Claudel, whose L’Annonce Faite à Marie (The Annunciation) appeared in 1912 and L’Otage (The Hostage) in 1914. Lugné-Poë’s innovations in staging, scenic design, and acting style were widely influential. Even more so was the work of Jacques Copeau at the Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier in Paris, who promoted good acting, innovative production, and most of the technical tricks that make for exciting theatre. From this theatrical nursery emerged playwrights like Jean Anouilh, a versatile and hugely successful author of both light and serious plays, often concerned with the loss of innocence in a corrupt world; Jean Cocteau, whose plays ranged from the tragic (La Machine Infernale/The Time Bomb, 1934) to the frivolously surreal (Les Mariés de la Tour Eiffel, 1921; The Eiffel Tower Wedding Party, 1924); and Jean Giraudoux, whose wit, imagination, poetic expression, and love of paradox often concealed deeply held views, as in his anti-war play, La Guerre de Troie n’Aura pas Lieu (1935; Tiger at the Gates, 1955). For all the modernity of their technique, these playwrights were strangely drawn to the Classical world, often reworking the old myths in a modern form.

Other serious playwrights, like Paul Raynal, tackled contemporary problems in a straightforward realistic way, while Henry de Montherlant, besides writing powerful historical dramas, explored the tensions created by religion. The commercial theatre’s great successes in the first half of the 20th century were undoubtedly in the genres of farce and light comedy, in which Georges Courteline, Georges Feydeau, Marcel Pagnol, and André Roussin all excelled.

In the 1940s, philosophy itself took to the stage, with the plays of the moralist-philosopher Albert Camus and the existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre. In Caligula (1945) and L’Etat de Siège (State of Siege, 1948), Camus explored the absurdity of the human predicament. A great admirer of the theatrical teaching of Jacques Copeau, he hoped to be able to harness modern dramatic techniques to the cause of ideas. In the event, Sartre was the more successful dramatist. In Les Mouches (1943; The Flies, 1947), Huis Clos (1944; No Exit, 1946), and Les Mains Sales (Dirty Hands, 1948) he variously tackled the problems of identity, freedom, responsibility, and political commitment, without losing sight of the drama.

Theatrical innovation did not end with Copeau. Antonin Artaud, influenced by what he saw as the dramatic power of Oriental theatre, conceived the Theatre of Cruelty, designed to shock the spectator into a recognition of humankind’s primitive ferocity. His own output was very small, but his influence was seen in dramatists like Jean Genet: in Les Bonnes (1947; The Maids, 1954) and Le Balcon (1960; The Balcony, produced earlier than the French version, in 1957), cruelty enshrined in ritual and masquerade, as advocated by Artaud, evoked a visceral response in the spectator. Genet’s plays also exhibited features of the Theatre of the Absurd, the generic term for drama that conveys the absurdity of the human condition in a correspondingly illogical—sometimes surreal—way. The masters of this genre were Eugène Ionesco, whose first play, La Cantatrice Chauve (1950; The Bald Prima Donna, 1956) defied all the conventions of realism in dialogue and characterization, and the francophone Irish writer, Samuel Beckett, who managed, in plays like En Attendant Godot (1953; Waiting for Godot, 1955), to pare down to its essence the pointlessness of existence, while making dramatic capital out of his characters’ pathetic efforts to invest life with some kind of meaning.

In the 1970s and 1980s, dramatists like Robert Pinget took up the Beckett legacy with successful plays for stage and radio. Novelists like Marguerite Duras and Nathalie Sarraute found success in the theatre, but the scene was dominated by directors, rather than writers. Ariane Mnouchkine, Robert Hossein, Patrice Chéreau, and Roger Planchon, among many stars in this constellation, blended political commitment with richly theatrical and innovative production techniques. A striking example was Mnouchkine’s epic production of Hélène Cixous’s L’Histoire Terrible mais Inachevée de Norodom Sihanouk, Roi de Cambodge (The Terrible but Unfinished Story of Norodom Sihanouk, King of Cambodia, 1985). Good, new dramatists started to emerge, some treating contemporary social issues like race, poverty, and exploitation (Bernard-Marie Koltès, for example, in Dans la Solitude des Champs de Coton/In the Solitude of the Cotton Fields, 1986), others exploring character and relationships, like the internationally successful Yasmina Reza (Art, 1994). There was no observable “school” in late 20th-century theatre—dramatists like Jean-Claude Grumberg (L’Atelier/The Workshop, 1979), Michel Vinaver (A la Renverse/Backwards, 1980), and Jean-Claude Brisville (Le Souper/The Supper, 1989) all worked differently, but there was a general return to the pleasures of dialogue and to a sense of theatre.

C

The Novel

At the beginning of the 20th century most people thought they knew what a novel was: until 1950, the traditional format, in which the reader is invited to share the lives and adventures of recognizable and realistic characters, operating in chronological time, was the preferred vehicle of most French novelists. The popularity of the genre was evident in the large number of romans-cycles (series of novels, tracing a character, family, or society through a particular period) published during this time. Georges Duhamel, Roger Martin du Gard, Romain Rolland, Jules Romains, and Henri Troyat all wrote successful cycles, chronicles of their times.

An exceptional example of the genre was Proust’s À la Recherche du Temps Perdu (1913-1927; Remembrance of Things Past, 1922-1931), which was infinitely more than a portrayal of the life of a man moving in a narrow society. The novels constituted a brilliant exploration of the nature of time, memory, reality, and the creative process. Marcel Proust started no movement, but his influence could be seen in works like Les Faux-Monnayeurs (1926; The Counterfeiters, 1955) by André Gide, in which a novel-within-a-novel told the very story that was yet to be written, and Sartre’s La Nausée (1938; Nausea, 1949), which tackled, on a more philosophical plane, the problem of truth and existence, reaching a Proustian conclusion about the ultimate reality being the work of art.

Even within the traditional framework of the novel, there was considerable diversity. Colette, in Chéri (1920) and Gigi (1945), painted the human heart realistically but with lyricism. Some writers escaped the realist formula: Le Grand Meaulnes by Alain-Fournier (1913) was a dream-like, poetic adventure; Gide’s Les Caves du Vatican (The Vatican Cellars, 1914), a Surrealistic romp; Cocteau, Giraudoux, Julien Gracq, Raymond Queneau, and others escaped into fantasy and poetry. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, in Vol de Nuit (1931; Night Flight, 1932), achieved a remarkable fusion of poetry, philosophy, and narrative excitement.

Narrative was, in many novels of the first half of the 20th century, a vehicle for other concerns: psychological analysis or spiritual conflict in the Georges Bernanos novel Journal d’un Curé de Campagne (1936; Diary of a Country Priest, 1937), Gide’s La Porte Étroite (1909; Strait is the Gate, 1924), and Thérèse Desqueyroux (1926) by François Mauriac; political or ethical problems in Les Beaux Quartiers (1936; Residential Quarter, 1938) by Louis Aragon and La Condition Humaine (1933; Man’s Fate, 1934) by André Malraux; the existential predicament in Camus’s L’Etranger (1942; The Outsider, 1946) and Sartre’s trilogy Les Chemins de la Liberté (The Paths of Freedom, 1945-1949); and feminist concerns in Les Belles Images (Pretty Pictures, 1966) and La Femme Rompue (1967; The Woman Destroyed, 1969) by Simone de Beauvoir. Whereas novelists like Montherlant found something to admire in humankind, when it was bold, brave, and very manly, as in Les Olympiques (1924), Louis Céline poured out his disgust with human nature in violent, colloquial lyricism in Voyage au Bout de la Nuit (1932; Journey to the End of Night, 1934). Henri Bosco, Jean Giono, and Henri Queffélec used the novel to celebrate the beauties of provincial France. Both World Wars I and II had their novelists, not only among those writers already cited, but also including Henri Barbusse, Roland Dorgelès, and Vercors (pseudonym of Jean Bruller), whose Le Silence de la Mer (The Silence of the Sea, 1942) was a Resistance classic. These are but examples of a rich and varied genre, to which should be added the name of Georges Simenon, who was a master of the psychological detective novel, and a writer of straight fiction with an acute perception of human nature.

The nouveau roman (new novel) of the 1950s and 1960s, exemplified by Michel Butor, Marguerite Duras, Alain Robbe-Grillet, and Nathalie Sarraute, did not mark the death of the traditional novel—subsequent successful French novelists, like Michel Tournier, remained within the tradition—but it did show the limits to which the genre might be pushed. The authoritarian author who named and described characters, ordered chronology, and demarcated the real and the imaginary was effaced. The passive reader had to wake up and work things out for himself or herself. Ambiguity, unease, and lack of resolution were the defining features of the nouveau roman. Philippe Sollers, co-founder of the critical review Tel Quel, went further: the text was not an expression of the author, but an independent linguistic adventure, to be experienced by the reader. His Drame (1965) was a text rather than a novel, and it is significant that Sollers’s later fiction became more traditional in format, suggesting that the theory was not very satisfying in practice. More amusing, perhaps, were the linguistic gymnastics of Georges Perec: in La Disparition (1969; A Void, 1994) the letter e was not used once.

From the 1950s, there was a marked increase in the number of successful women novelists, among whom Marguerite Yourcenar, author of the historical novel Mémoires d’Hadrien (1951; Memoirs of Hadrian, 1954), was the first woman to be elected to the Académie Française. Bonjour Tristesse (Good Morning Sadness, 1954) by Françoise Sagan won the Prix des Critiques, and Christiane Rochefort, Françoise Mallet-Joris, and Christine de Rivoire all enjoyed considerable public acclaim. Marguerite Duras and Nathalie Sarraute owed their reputations to more than the novelty of the nouveau roman: Duras’s work was filmed and Sarraute went on to write engaging satires of the novelist’s trade. In the more consciously feminist canon, Hélène Cixous, Monique Wittig, and Benoîte Groult all made noteworthy contributions.

By the late 20th century, there were recurring themes in the novel: life was arbitrary and incoherent, memory unreliable, experience fragmented. Claude Simon, winner of the 1985 Nobel Prize for Literature, reflected this in disrupted chronology and complex, multi-layered narrative, as in Les Géorgiques (The Georgics, 1981), in which he also used intertextuality (the use, rewriting, or subversion of existing texts), a popular modern technique. Georges Perec, in La Vie Mode d’Emploi (Life a User’s Manual, 1978), dealt with life’s incoherence by imposing an arbitrary, artificial order on his narrative, where numerical formulae dictated the book’s structure and constituted its only certainties. For Jean-Marie Le Clézio, language was humankind’s means of engaging with a mechanistic urban society: we rebel by dislocating it. This was admirably illustrated by typographical and narrative experiments in early works such as Le Procès-Verbal (The Statement, 1963). (In later works, celebrating simpler, more spiritual, primitive worlds, his tone became more lyrical.) Michel Tournier’s short stories, more ambiguous than his novels, demonstrated the multiplicity of interpretations open to a diversity of readers; the function of the author being to “present figures the reader cannot quite grasp”. Similarly, Robert Pinget teased the reader with ambiguities that were never resolved. There were plenty of novelists dealing more conventionally with contemporary social concerns—Hervé Guibert with AIDS, Annie Ernaux with the problems of gender, for example— but this ludic quality in language and narrative, even extending to hitherto traditional genres, such as the espionage, detective, and space adventure stories of writers like Jean Echenoz, particularly seemed to mark the late 20th century.

Contributed By:
Doraine Potts
Denys Potts

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