French Literature Anthology

309 Pages·2016·2.85 MB·English

French literature 1950–2000:
An Anthology

Edited by
Sharad Chandra
French literature 1950–2000:
An Anthology

Edited by
Sharad Chandra

1
Preface

Compiling this anthology has been a great delight for me in spite of the arduous
task of making selections—of authors and of excerpts, since in literature it is never easy
to decide whom to keep, whom to leave out; then, to use the excerpt from what work
which ones to leave out. Nevertheless, the choice had to be made. I have finally been able
to select, fifty–six authors which, in my view, score over others in merit, in literary
significance, as also in best illustrating the trends and tendencies of the period under
study. The number or length of the excerpt(s) is in no way, indicative of the literary
distinction of a particular author, rather of a characteristic trait or a singuliar peculiarity
of the work contributing to a current concept or introducing a new feature. A major
hurdle in the way was of locating and acquiring English translations of selected works—
since, in order to save time as well as to avoid complications of buying translation rights,
I decided to use only the existing translations. This limitation did slightly restrict my field
but has not, in any way, impaired the comprehensively of the presentation of French
literature from 1950 to the end of the century.
To make the anthology as complete as possible, interesting information on exotic
literary practices like ‘Oulipo’, names of French Nobel laureates, the long list of French
literary Prizes, and a chronology of Socio-political events of the period has been provided
in the Appendix.
Before closing I may add that since I have concentrated specifically on French
(and not Francophone) writers, and creative (not critical) literature I had to skip
immortals like Roland Barthes, E.M. Cioran, Levi-Strauss and many others, just as I had
to leave out most prominent and popular names like Leopold Senghor and Aime
Cesaire who have left a significant body of work behind. Senghor was even elected to
the Adademie francaise in 1963, yet is not referred to as a French, but a Senegalese poet.
Some very brilliant voices have emerged in the field of poetry as well as of fiction at the
cusp of the century, to treat whom justifiably would require a separate volume.
This anthology is not a manual or a reference book but a compendium to provide
its readers foretaste of a rich literature and stimulus to explore more of that territory. I do
hope it proves successful in its aim.

NOIDA March 23rd. 2014 Sharad Chandra

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Thanks & Acknowledgements

I am deeply indebted to Marielle Morin and Judith Oriol for their valuable
suggestions in the selection of the authors, and acknowledge, most sincerely, the
unfailing and untiring assistance accorded to me by each and every member of the AFD
(Alliance Francaise de Delhi) library in locating and acquiring the huge inventory of
books I needed to consult, in the absence of which, it would not have been possible to
put this anthology together. My grateful thanks to Mr. S. Padmnabhan, Assistant
Librarian of the Sahitya Akademi library for hunting out books not available elsewhere
with a rare sense of commitment.

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Contents

Preface 2
Thanks & Acknowledgments 3
Introduction 6

Jules Supervielle (1884 – 1960) 18
Francois Mauriac (1885-1970) 22
Louise Aragon (1887-1982) 26
Saint-John Perse (1887-1975) 32
Céline, Louis-Ferdinand (1894- 1961) 36
Jean Giono (1895-1970) 47
Albert Cohen (1895- 1981) 53
Henri De Montherlant (1896-1972) 58
Francis Ponge (1899-1988) 62
Henri Michaux (1899-1984) 67
Nathalie Sarraute (1900-1999) 73
Andre Malraux (1901-1976) 79
Michel Leiris (1901-1990) 82
Marguerite Yourcenar (1903-1990) 86
Jean Tardieu (1903-1995) 91
Georges Joseph Christian Simenon (1903 – 1989) 97
Raymond Queneau (1903-1976) 101
Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) 105
Samuel Beckett (1906-1989) 113
Jacques Prevert (1907-1977) 121
Rene Char (1907-1988) 128
Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986) 133
Jean Anouilh (1910-1987) 139
Julien Gracq (1910- 2007) 144
Jean Genet (1910-1986) 151
Eugene Ionesco (1912-1994) 155
Albert Camus (1913-1960) 166
Claude Simon (1913-2005) 171
Romain Gary (de son vrai nom Roman Kacew 1914-1980) 176
Marguerite Duras (1914-1996) 180
Alain Robbe-Grillet (1922-2008) 184
Yves Bonnefoy (Born 1923) 189
Andre Du Bouchet (1924-2003) 195
Michel Tournier (Born 1924) 199
Philippe Jacottet (Born 1925- ) 204
Michel Butor (1926--) 208
Jacques Dupin (1927-2012) 213
Jacques Reda (1929) 218
Michel Deguy (1930) 222
Jacques Roubaud (born 1932) 227
Françoise Sagan (1935 – 2004) 231
Georges Perec (1936-1982) 234

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Anne-Marie Albaich (1937) 241
Helen Cixous (1937) 247
Annie Ernaux (1940) 252
Jean-Marie Gustag Le Clezio (1940) 256
Tahar Ben Jelloun (1944) 261
Daniel Pennac (1944) 264
Patrick Modiano (1945) 267
Pierre Michon (born 28 March 1945) 271
Jean Echenoz (1947) 274
Bernard-Marie Koltes (1948-1989) 278
Amin Maalouf (1949) 281
Michel Houellebecq (1958) 285
Atiq Rahimi (1962) 290
Amelie Nothomp (1967) 295

Selected Bibliography for Further Reading
Authors’ Index

Appendices
A Note on the Oulipo 299
French Nobel Prize Laureates 301
Major literary prizes awarded in France 302
Important Socio-political, and Literary Dates 303

Acknowledgements & Permissions 308

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1
Introduction

I

The Background

Before the pessimism of the 1920s set in, a brief period of optimism (roughly
from 1890 to 1914) reigned in France which is popularly known as ‘the belle époque’. It
constituted an exhilarating period of economic prosperity and progress. People living
during this time were materially confident and culturally optimistic. Inventions like the
telephone, the automobile, the airplane, and the cinema enlivened and speeded up modern
life. Art of any genre prospered like never before. There was tremendous expansion in
literary output and the ever-faster pace of experimentation with new means of expression.
Both Marxism and Freudianism made a deep imprint on literature of the period, as on all
the arts. While the two world wars gravely lacerated France the technological revolution
confronted the current generation with an altogether new world. The result of such
profound socio-economic and political change led to a continuous questioning of all
moral, intellectual, and artistic traditions: from impressionism to Art Nouveau and
cubism, and from romantic to political and socio-critical literature.
The poems of Guillaume Apollinaire characteristically reflect the giddy dilation
of the times: society’s distaste for the outmoded styles like naturalism, and its enthusiasm
for the new and exciting, namely, the Eiffel Tower, cubism, the joyful life of cabarets and
music halls. He made bold experiments in form and style, eliminating punctuation and
juxtaposing seemingly unrelated images. Following his lead Alfred Jarry published the
extravagant farce of Ubu roi (1896; in English Ubu King, 1951) and Paul Claudel
challenged the established conventions of drama in his densely packed poetic plays.
Alain-Fournier’s novel, Le Grand meaulnes (1913; in English The Wanderer,1928) put
forth a poetic and mysterious denial of the limitations placed on the human imagination
by the realists and naturalists, and the philosopher Henri Bergson peremptorily rejected
the naturalist view that human destiny is shaped by predetermined factors and suggested
that people have free will and limitless creative energy.
The advent of war in 1914 destroyed this buoyancy of spirit and
engendered a vast body of literature in varying voices: pro-war rallying cries, expressions
of shock, sorrow, and sympathy; pacifist and journalistic description. In 1919, after the
armistice, began a period of philosophical, moral, and political stock-taking which in due
course, produced its own rich crop of essays and treatises. In the literary field it
generated even more radical tendencies. The Dada movement which had begun in a café
in Switzerland in 1916 had travelled to Paris by 1920, but by 1924 the poets around Paul
Eluard, Andre Breton, Louis Aragon, and Robert Desnos, heavily influenced by Sigmund
Freud’s notion of the unconscious, modified it into Surrealism. In literature and in the

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visual arts the surrealists tried to reveal the workings of the unconscious mind. They now
championed the writers—Arthur Rimbaud, Lautreamont, Baudelaire, and Raymond
Roussel—whom they previously saw as radical; and promoted an anti-bourgeois
philosophy, particularly with regards to sex and politics, which would later lead most of
them to join the communist party. Other writers associated with surrealism include Jean
Cocteau, Rene Crevel, Jacques Prevert, Jules Supervielle, Benjamin Peret, Philippe
Soupault, Pierre Reverdy, Antonin Artaud who revolutionized the theatre, Henri Michaux
and Rene Char. Symbolism continued to serve as an inspiration without stifling new
departures. Paul Claudel, notable as both dramatist and poet, injected a mystical
Catholicism into his masterpiece, Five Great Odes (1904-1910; Eng. trans., 1967). Paul
Valéry became famous for delicate poems that were at once meditative, musical, and rich
in imagery. Guillaume Apollinaire deliberately aimed for modernity in his poetry, which
was full of whimsical surprises. He not only coined the term surrealist but also produced
the first surrealist play, Les Mamelles des Tiresias in 1918 (Eng. The Breasts of
Tiresias,1961). Under the leadership of the movement's theorist, André Breton,
surrealism aimed for a complete revolution in poetry and the visual arts. It considered
exploration of the subconscious as the deepest source of poetry. A rejuvenator of poetic
imagination, surrealism launched, among others, the poet and novelist Louis Aragon,
although after 1930 he found more inspiration in his Marxist beliefs.
The surrealist movement continued to be a major force in experimental writing
until the Second World War. This technique was particularly well suited for poetry and
theatre although Breton, Aragon and Cocteau wrote longer prose works as well, such as
Breton's novel, Nadja (1928). While important poets like Saint-John Perse and Edmond
Jabes were heavily influenced by it, others like Georges Bataille created their own group
and reaction. The Swiss writer Blaise Cendras was close to Apollinaire, Pierre Reverdy,
Max Jacob and the artists, Chagall and Léger have similarities with both surrealism and
cubism. The Theatre in this period (1920s and 1930s) went through further changes and
in addition to producing plays by the French, Jean Giradoux, Jules Romains, Jean
Anouilh, and Jean-Paul Sartre, it also produced the works of the Greek and
Shakespearean theatre, and the plays by Luigi Pirandello, Anton Chekhov, and George
Bernard Shaw.
In the field of fiction there was a huge production during the inter-war years of
which two works stand out, Journey to the End of Night (Voyage au bout de la nuit,
1932) by Celine and Man’s Estate (La Condition humaine,1933) by Andre Malraux.
Journey to the End of Night is a loosely strung series of adventures in which the first-
person narrator, Bardamu, a doctor moves from the battlefields of the first World War to
Africa, the United States, and the impoverished Paris suburbs. He takes side with the
oppressed wherever he goes and directs a ready flow of bilious invective against generals,
colonial administrators, industrial bosses, and other figures of authority. Using an
elliptical, oral and slang-derived style to rail against the hypocrisies and moral lapses of
his generation Celine equips Bardamu with an ample diction that is at once colloquial and
learned with its high-flown literary allusions and low-life slang. Unlike Celine, Malraux’s
Man’s Estate is concerned with political choice and conflict. The scene is the aftermath
of the Chinese revolution and the seizure of power by Chiang-Kai-shek. The plot of the
novel traces the betrayal and defeat of the Communist insurgents in Shanghai and dwells

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at length on the motives and actions of individuals in the group where discussion, action,
introspection rapidly undercut. Malraux’s political agents are shrewd thinkers.
Among other novelists of the period who employed different formal techniques,
the name of Georges Bernanos stands out for his use of the journalistic form to further
psychological exploration. Psychological analysis was also central to Francois Mauriac's
novels, although Sartre saw him as representative of an outdated fatalism. Jules
Romain’s twenty-seven volume novel Les Hommes de bonne volonté (1932–1946),
Roger Martin du Gard’s eight-part novel cycle41 Les Thibault (1922–1940), and Marcel
Proust’s seven-part masterpiece À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time,
1913–1927) expanded on the ‘roman-fleuve’ model. Andre Gide continued to experiment
with the novel, and his most sophisticated exploration of the limits of the traditional
novel is found in The Counterfeiters (Les Faux Monnayeurs , 1929), a novel ostensibly
about a writer trying to write a novel. In the late 1930s, the works of Hemingway,
Faulkner and Dos Passos came to be translated into French, and their prose style made a
profound impact on the work of writers like Jean-Paul Sartre, Andre Malraux, and Albert
Camus.

II
Occupation and Post-war literature

France’s occupation by German troops in 1940 and the consequent division of the
country was experienced as a national humiliation, and all French citizens were
confronted with an unavoidable choice. In fact, the beginning of World War II forced a
new strain of French literature to emerge, where the writing mainly became a branch of
military and political activity of collaboration or resistance. Some writers escaped the
country to live in the safety of self-exile, some faithful to political options made during
the previous decade, moved directly into collaboration. Still others, out of pacifist
convictions 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 this last
group and later were criticized for their conduct. Jean Giono was briefly imprisoned, as
was Louis-Ferdinand Céline, whose reputation was seriously damaged by his anti-
Semitism. Several others, in marked contrast to the collaboration with the regime joined
the military –like André Malraux who served on many fronts and commanded a group of
underground Resistance fighters projecting the image of the writer as a man of action or
joined the ‘Resistance movement’ like Albert Camus, Pascal Pia, Rene Char and others.
At the end of the war, the French literary scene was dominated by existential
activity and the work of authors like Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre. Sartre aimed to
establish existentialist values as a replacement for the bankrupt values of pre-war France.
He explored issues of commitment in works like, Being and Nothingness (1943) and The
Age of Reason (1945). Albert Camus in his novel, The Outsider (L’Etranger,1942)
introduced his philosophy of the absurd: man's futile search for meaning, unity, and
clarity in the face of an unintelligible world devoid of God and eternal truths or values.

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Elaborating the same in his essay, The Myth of Sisyphus he poses a rhetorical question,
“Does the realization of the absurd require suicide?” and goes on to answer : “No. It
requires revolt.” Subsequently, he outlines several approaches to the absurd life
comparing in the final chapter, the absurdity of man's life with the situation of Sisyphus,
a figure of Greek mythology who was condemned to repeat forever the same meaningless
task of pushing a boulder up a mountain, only to see it roll down again, and concludes his
treatise with the memorable words, “The struggle itself [...] is enough to fill a man's
heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”
An important outcome of the Occupation was the emergence of a very attentive
audience to writers who upheld the honour of their defeated country. The Radio, then the
TV played an important role in building literary taste and development of literary
criticism. Broadcasts like, “Un livre des voix”, Lettres Ouvertes”, or Nuits Magnetiques”
on ‘France Culture’ won a faithful public. But it was the programme , “Apostrophe”
created much later—in 1975—by Bernard Pivot, which became a virtual institution. The
poetry of resistance reached a wide public, notably in the works of the Communist
activists, Paul Éluard and Louis Aragon, whose poems were often transmitted orally
through the occupied zone. A flourishing clandestine press included the newspaper
Combat and the Editions de Minuit, whose first book was Le Silence de la mer (1941;
The Silence of the Sea) by Vercors (real name, Jean-Marcel Bruller). Translated and
reprinted in Allied countries, Vercors’s short novel, like Aragon’s collection of poems Le
Crève-Coeur (Heartbreak, 1941) became an emblem of French resistance and was
instrumental in restoring French pride and prestige. Published at the end of the war,
Camus’s fable, La Peste (The Plague, 1947), an allegory of the Occupation, returned to
the issues of resistance and collaboration to present both a humane understanding of the
pressures and limits set by circumstance and a moral judgment that to fail to recognize
and fight evil is to become part of it.
The 1950s and 1960s were highly turbulent times in France. Despite a dynamic
economy (of the years 1950 -1980, “les trente glorieuses” or “30 Glorious Years”), the
country was torn by its colonial heritage (Vietnam and Indo-China, Algeria), by its
collective sense of guilt from the Vichy Regime, by its desire for renewed national
prestige (Gaulism), and by its conservative social tendencies in education and industry.
Inspired by the theatrical experiments in the early half of the century and by the horrors
of the war, the so-called avant-garde Parisian theater, known as the “New Theater” or
“Theatre of the Absurd” around the writers, Eugene Ionesco, Samuel Beckett, Jean
Genet, Arthur Adamov, and Fernando Arrabal refused simple explanations and
abandoned traditional characters, plots and staging. Other experiments in theatre involved
decentralization, regional theater, “popular theater” (designed to bring working classes to
the theater), and the theater heavily influenced by Bertolt Brecht, largely unknown in
France before 1954, and the productions of Arthur Adamov and Roger Planchon. Jean
Vilar who was also important in the creation of the T.N.P. or the “Theatre National
Populaire” started the Avignon festival in 1947.
The French novel from the 1950s onwards went through a similar
experimentation in the group of writers who wrote “the new novel” or “Nouveau roman”.
The “Nouveau roman” is mainly associated with Alain Robbe-Grillet, Marguerite Duras,
Robert Pinget, Michel Butor, Samuel Beckett, Nathalie Sarraute, and Claude Simon.
Although these authors have no common doctrine, all reject plot and verisimilitude as

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