Paths to Contemporary French Literature

Volume 1

John Taylor

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351323147
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Although the great French novelists of the last two centuries are widely read in America, there is a widespread notion that little of importance has happened in French literature since the heyday of Sartre, Camus, and the nouveau roman. Some might argue that even well read Americans are ignorant about what is happening in European literature generally. Certainly, there has never been so few translations of foreign books in the United States, or so little coverage of foreign writers. Curious American readers need new, up-to-date information and analyses about what is happening elsewhere. Paths to Contemporary French Literature is a stimulating and much-needed guide to the major currents of one of the world's great literatures.

This critical panorama of contemporary French literature introduces English-language readers to over fifty important writers and poets, many of whom are still little known outside of France. Emphasizing authors who are admired by their peers (as opposed to those with overnight reputations), John Taylor offers a compelling insider's view. The pioneering essays included in this book offer incisive analyses of the ideas motivating current writing and delve into a writer's or poet's entire output. Although some names may be familiar (Marguerite Duras, Hulbne Cixous, Philippe Jaccottet, Henri Michaux), the reader obtains fresh reappraisals of their seminal work. Especially noteworthy, however, are Taylor's lively introductions to many other key writers who either have not yet crossed the English Channel, let alone the Atlantic. Combating the notion that French literature is overtly intellectual, inaccessible, or interested only in formal experimentation, Taylor shows that many French writers are instead acutely inquisitive about the outside world, shrewd observers of reality, even very funny.

Although not conceived as a reference book, the volume possesses some qualities of a reference work: a good bibliography, reliable dates and biographical facts. Paths to Contemporary French Literature will be of interest to students of French literature and culture, literary scholars, and readers of contemporary fiction and poetry.

Part 1

The Art of Strolling

From Serendipity to Metaphysics

Jacques Réda

In France, Jacques Réda’s writings are passed back and forth between friends with the enthusiastic secret sharing that one associates with fan clubs. Membership requirements in this case include an affection for the alexandrine, the line in which he writes nearly all his verse, and a taste for precise, sometimes speculative, sometimes tenderly ironic prose capable of countless emotional and visual effects. As Réda himself once remarked of the equally dazzling writings of Charles-Albert Cingria, “here, it’s language itself that sees, that enables one to see, that takes the reader for a delectable stroll.”

“Stroll,” “strolling”—these are favorite words of the author of Recommandations aux promeneurs (1988), Le Sens de la marche (1990), and Aller aux mirabelles (1991). Réda has become proverbial for his open-eyed, ruminative strolls through sundry arrondissements of Paris, through train stations (in which he hesitates to buy the ticket for which he came or changes his destination at the last minute) and also through sleepy provincial towns at which he has arrived, from Paris, on his antiquated Vélo-Solex motorbike, having earlier lost his way several times, mistaken a road sign and puttered on to a tollway or a national highway full of menacing, mud-splattering lorries, and generally fallen prey to a variety of mishaps. Réda’s writings also celebrate “the astonishing existence of others,” as he puts it in Aller aux mirabelles, as well as the small, significant things of life which give him pause during his peregrinations, such as cherry plums, those “big, blond, shiny, smooth pearls spotted with a few reddish freckles, and underneath their shininess the pulp is dense like a chunk of mashed sun.”

Réda’s cherry plums also symbolize his childhood during the 1930s in the town of Lunéville, located in the Lorraine region. In Aller aux mirabelles, he returns to his hometown (after “six years of absence, of broken promises”) for a long weekend, and the result is an interconnected series of anecdotes, character sketches and musings on aging, provincial life, family life and—just once or twice—writing. Born in 1929, the narrator has decided to take stock once again; in all his books, the oddity suddenly come across or the moment strangely experienced typically provoke instantaneous summings-up. One often catches strains of melancholy beneath the flawless music, however, for the poet is engaged from the outset with the passing of time and the certitude of death.

In Aller aux mirabelles, this intimist, discretely introspective quality can be discerned in the vivid cameos of old acquaintances encountered in the street, usually on their way into or out of favorite bistros. The eighty-eight-year-old Auguste, for example, is a former cobbler and neighbor who has “triumphed” in the grocery business. Auguste does not recognize the narrator at first, but when Réda explains who he is, the old man’s eyes light up: “Ah, Jacques, I had trouble figuring out who you were. You’ve aged.” Some vignettes poignantly capture the essence of entire lifetimes, such as when overheard piano notes remind Réda of a town-hall employee, Henri, and a piano teacher, Émilienne, who waited forty years before getting married. The radiant Henri, who had until then lived frugally, immediately savored the abundance and refinements of Émilienne’s cooking; everywhere friends complimented him on his “healthy looks”; but then, “plunged into this euphoria, he kicked the bucket at the end of a year.” Other passages end, not in incisive twists, but in emotional inconclusiveness, inviting one’s meditation. Sometimes Réda focuses ever more closely on, say, a face, then unexpectedly evokes the entire picture. Talking to Marie, the good-hearted aunt with whom he stays, he describes how a silence falls between them, how she smiles softly to herself, how she finally turns back to him, her eyes twinkling; and in the meantime, he notes, night has fallen.

Moving leitmotivs give structure and continuity to this charming book, which also constitutes a lively and accurate panorama of la France profonde. There are the cherry plums, of course. (Réda eventually goes out to pick some, much in the same emotion that Robert Frost picks apples in “After Apple-Picking”; and the verse coda concluding the book is also distantly reminiscent of Frost, if not in its prosody, then in its homespun philosophizing.) Another recurrent image is a bakery. In an early scene, the narrator spots one, disappointed that there is not even a “silhouette” of a child skipping back home with his loaf. Later, Réda recalls meeting for the last time his beloved cousin, Pascal (who killed himself), “between the shadow of the intersection and the golden light of a loaf of bread.” Finally, near the end of his stay, Réda goes out to buy a baguette, then walks away “alone with my bread, like the child whom I would have liked to spot when I arrived.” Loaf in hand, he has at last resolved to approach the street that he has been avoiding all along: the street in which he was born. And this long-postponed search for the tangible proof of his origins is naturally the most poignant image of all, in a book containing many.

* * *

Although Réda calls his writing a littérature baladeuse, he is no travel writer. He is not looking for the oddity. He is not really searching to capture the spirit of a place, whether in France or abroad, with the possible exception of his unforgettable evocations of drafty Parisian train stations in Châteaux des courants d’air (1986). Réda’s peregrinations through humdrum provincial towns, drab faubourgs and outlying arrondissements of the capital instead seek to verify whether the small but significant things of life can still be found beneath the harsh surface—what he call the “ruins”—of twentieth-century reality. Réda is a serendipitist, a virtuoso when it comes to finding genuineness in unexpected places—often, in fact, not far from home. Through his tongue-in-cheek humor, typically aimed at his own foibles and faux-pas, he invites us to contemplate what, in so short a life, is essential. He shows us time and again that each of our acts, even the slightest ones, can ultimately contribute to the richness of experience.

In Affranchissons-nous (1990), his delightful takeoff on Borges, Réda extols for instance the pleasures of going well out of one’s way to mail letters in a favorite branch of the post office. Despising canceling machines and finding present-day commemorative stamps “distressingly mediocre,” the author suggests how one can nonetheless arrange stamps attractively on an envelope, “taking advantage of their chromatic harmonies or contrasts.” “If one desires a more intense, even gaudily colored, composition,” he adds, “the common 90-, 70-, 50-, 30-, 20-, 15-, 10- and 5-centime stamps (that is, lilac, dark-blue, violet, orange, light-green, bright-pink, blood-red, dark-green) lend themselves to many extravagant juxtapositions.” (Alas, these denominations no longer exist!)

A charming, Thurberish ingenuousness characterizes such prose texts, which usually adopt the open-ended form of an autobiographical essay. The first-person narrators, who are sometimes divided, in mid-tale, into a “realist” and an alter-ego “daydreamer,” are forever making wrong turns, losing their way, or getting entangled in funny-sad imbroglios, such as when (in Recommandations aux promeneurs) the daydreamer forgets to stamp his round-trip ticket upon leaving the Barcelona train station, an oversight causing a succession of panic-ridden misadventures.

At the same time, Réda’s writing illustrates what he himself observes about the poetry of William Wordsworth, to whose Lake Country he makes a pilgrimage in Le Sens de la marche: “that note of high, grave, lyric sentimentality through which, effortlessly, a metaphysical profundity also resounds.” Poetry lovers will find echoes of Wordsworth, Robert Frost, C. P. Cavafy and many others, as well as homages to Ovid and Lucretius. Réda is likewise one of the most engaging and knowledgeable French critics of jazz (see L’Improviste, une lecture du jazz, 1990), and this influence too is visible, especially in his suburban poems: the quirky, amusing enjambments; the exuberance with which a learnèd clang of kitsch is heard amidst the sedate music of classical meters. In Hors les murs (1982), for example, symétrique is eccentrically half-rhymed with patraque, and autobus with rasibus. Réda masterfully blends humor, nostalgia, extremely precise descriptions, touches of erudition, and even pensive cosmological reflections; many poems portray him peering at the clouds or into the starry night and pondering man’s significance: “Beneath two depths of sleep and oblivion / the earth turns, and closes, and reopens its blue eye. / Our natural state is one of absence in this darkness” (Retour au calme, 1989). As the poet Jean-Michel Maulpoix remarks in his insightful, closely argued study, Jacques Réda, le désastre et la merveille (1986), “an entire book should be devoted to Réda’s skies, ever present, observed, described, illuminated or summarized—usually with the simple brushstroke of an oriental painter.”

Yet for all their wittiness, Réda’s chronicles, so refreshingly evocative of the overlooked details of the outside world, simultaneously chart the more somber ruminations and sudden illuminations of a soul sensitive to the ephemerality of life, to the fleetingness of time, to the inevitability of death, and to touching, unexpected manifestations of human dignity. Often his discoveries are tempered with a clear-sighted melancholy. As he puts it in L’Herbe des talus (1984), “by the age of ten I was already old. Much later, in turn, I grew younger. Yet I have been left with the disenchantment always brought on by precocious experiences.” Thus Réda’s wanderlust only appears to lead him outward. It is, in fact, every inward that he is heading.

* * *

For nearly a decade, Réda’s books have been my livres de chevet—“bedside books” that I dip into whenever I need to refuel my enthusiasm for examining the world, for experiencing the fullness of passing moments, for loving life. He is indisputably one of the most invigorating French writers, a contemplator full of whimsical yet arresting speculations, a widely and deeply read man whose work tenders friendship to all sorts of past poets (as well as to modest craftsmen, erudite wine merchants and passing girls with sea-gray eyes), a dauntless explorer of the overlooked thing (whether it be a listless cloud, an antiquated shop sign, a lackluster postcard or an odd cigarette brand), an obstinate describer of the nondescript urban feature (such as bland boulevards, faceless side streets, shrubby embankments, obsolete train tracks or burgeoning anonymous high-rises), and a virtuoso stylist whose emotions range from melancholy to grumpiness, from derision to self-derision, from gentleness to cosmological awe, from spiritual anxiety to childlike candor. In brief, Mark Treharne’s lively and engaging translation (1996) of Les Ruines de Paris deserves a vast celebration—accompanied, why not, by “a plate of raw ham and some Riesling in a heavy glass.”

Originally published in French in 1977, The Ruins of Paris gathers prose poems in which blow heady gusts of personal and literary freedom. Réda overturns the stodgy, the robot-like, the overly rational, and extols the confusion; and he deftly restores a bit of structure to whatever chaos he otherwise hazards upon. As his train pulls through the Parisian suburbs at dawn, for instance, he peers out upon “a jumbled wreckage of wooden planks and cranes, piles of car bodies and gardens with individualistic potting sheds, underpants on the line, small fires that have been choking in their own smoke since the day before.” Yet “amid this disarray,” he assures us, “a pattern of secret lives will rally.” Then he spies one such life: a young woman walking up a boulevard with a heavy suitcase. “She stops for a second,” observes Réda, “and … utterly unconscious of her beauty, forgetful of the overcast day that is floating by her like her fate, she watches the train as it disappears.”

Réda indeed pinpoints the miracles in the modern mess. Like Thoreau, he surveys his “own particular imperial territory” and takes note when two cherry trees start to fruit “behind a corrugated iron fence” near the rue des Bons-Enfants and the rue du Plaisir. (The street names, all copied scrupulously from the originals, can be intriguingly meaningful, such as the above, or significantly banal.) Time and again, he finds “the world in its deafness … obstinately jubilant”; and such observations stave off, or relativize, morbid introspection. “The sole aim of the world is to glory in itself unceasingly,” he proclaims, “and to glorify us too, even amid our despair.” Our duty as humans, these prose poems consequently suggest, is to try to approach—to restore our cognizance of—the manifold riddles of existence. Or, as Réda sums it up more drolly in a text devoted to the popular quarter of Belleville: “My occasional pauses in such places initiate me, but into what I couldn’t exactly say.”

In many of these prose poems, an intriguing tension arises between the man’s volition to grasp the world rationally and the utter unknowableness of what he perceives or experiences. Coming across an unsuspected orchard between houses on the rue Marcelle, Réda deciphers as best as he can “the esoteric design of posts, branches and stones.” Yet his dominant impression is that of a “voice repeating you see and nothing more than that.” Such key phrases as “you see” are polysemous, and Réda will pun discreetly, lifting a weary expression from the colloquial idiom and setting it down in a context that makes it burst open with significance, rather like the “bubbling cool milk” he imagines emanating from “acacia blossoms.” “The blossoms,” incidentally cautions this poet who relishes extravagant similes yet who also strives—like Francis Ponge—to give common things their full due, “smell like haylofts from a summer of raining downpours … like Senior Service cigarettes, the neck of a young girl and camomile—in short, they smell first and foremost like acacias.” In another prose poem, he takes the train to Champagne, a region he has already observed many times. But he discovers himself to be “increasingly wide-eyed.” “My gaze,” he spécifies, “is passionately fixed on these easily recognized signs that have not changed but remain as fresh as the ones I am discovering simultaneously, like this small hump-back bridge with neither road nor stream. In fact there is nothing that is not a reason for surprise, or rather for stupefaction.” Réda marvels, all the while confessing to his bewilderment. This modesty, both physical and metaphysical, is just one of the lessons that can be learned from a man whose avowed mentors include Jean Follain, Charles-Albert Cingria, Robert Frost, Jorge Luis Borges and countless other writers with a metaphysical bent of mind. How many contemporary authors begin a public reading, as Réda always does, by reciting homages—selected from the two volumes of his Reconnaissances (1985, 1992)—devoted to the poets whom he admires?

His wistful peregrinations must sometimes overcome disconsolateness, however, a threatening feeling laden with spiritual and perhaps—it is a subtle leitmotiv here—amorous doubts. “Despair does not exist for a walking man,” he declares resolutely in his opening piece (whose title, “The Stealthy Footsteps of the Heretic,” invokes a typical attitude); and from the onset the poet desires to get out of himself and into the world, in this case the outlying arrondissements of the capital and its outskirts. (In the second section of The Ruins of Paris, provincial stopovers are scrutinized with equal incisiveness and delight.) Nearly all urban districts charted by him will appear “exotic” to a connoisseur of merely the center of Paris; no mention is made of the Latin Quarter, Saint-Germain-des-Prés, the Louvre area, the Ile Saint-Louis or the Ile de la Cité. In fact, some proverbially dull, unsightly or sleazy areas resemble, literally, “jungles” in this liberated (and liberating) prose. For a poet who seems never to have stopped imagining like a child, “tigers and boas are rife in the raging thickets” near the demolition ramp in the rue Gazan and “emus, giraffes even, would scarcely come as a surprise” in the “suburban savannah” that he is looking out upon while sitting on a wall and waiting for Bus No. 195. Réda is jesting of course; but he is also provoking fresh looks.

His use of the word “explode” and its synonyms is a revealing stylistic tic, and Réda boldly translates many perceptions with exuberant verbal combustibles. Walking at dusk through a wintry public garden, for instance, he notes that “lightning would be less of a shock than this explosion of unending silence.” Later on, the sky explodes “like a mountain, splashing the rooftops and the cobbles with the blue of its living gaze.” Synesthesia comes naturally to him (even as it can appear over-deliberate in some French Surrealist poetry); in “That Unfindable Something,” one of his funniest texts, which depicts the absentminded writer running Saturday errands (and forgetting the meat and shoes he is supposed to buy for his children), he encounters his friend and fellow poet Jean Grosjean in a tin-soldier shop. Their conversation is interrupted by “the angelus … as it ripples in sheets of liquid gold from the towers of Saint-Sulpice.” This is not the only instance in which sound is transformed into a shimmering substance.

For postwar French poets of similar philosophical sensibilities, “light” metaphorically expresses an attribute of Being into which one aspires to merge; yet Réda—who remains down to earth as willfully as he keeps his head in the clouds—tellingly prepares himself for transcendence by first distinguishing colors. “I stumble into benches and small bushes,” he confesses, “because my gaze is utterly absorbed by a sky as incomprehensible as the approach of love. Its almost faded color is not definable: a really dark turquoise perhaps, the deep condensation of a light that elud...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• Part 1 The Art of Strolling
• Part 2 Remembering Childhood
• Part 3 Love and Love’s Language
• Part 4 After Surviving
• Part 5 Telling of Storytelling
• Part 6 Beyond the Self
• Bibliography
• Index