A History of Modern French Literature

From the Sixteenth Century to the Twentieth Century

Christopher Prendergast

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781400885046
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: French Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

An accessible and authoritative new history of French literature, written by a highly distinguished transatlantic group of scholars This book provides an engaging, accessible, and exciting new history of French literature from the Renaissance through the twentieth century, from Rabelais and Marguerite de Navarre to Samuel Beckett and Assia Djebar. Christopher Prendergast, one of today's most distinguished authorities on French literature, has gathered a transatlantic group of more than thirty leading scholars who provide original essays on carefully selected writers, works, and topics that open a window onto key chapters of French literary history. The book begins in the sixteenth century with the formation of a modern national literary consciousness, and ends in the late twentieth century with the idea of the "national" coming increasingly into question as inherited meanings of "French" and "Frenchness" expand beyond the geographical limits of mainland France.

• Provides an exciting new account of French literary history from the Renaissance to the end of the twentieth century
• Features more than thirty original essays on key writers, works, and topics, written by a distinguished transatlantic group of scholars
• Includes an introduction and index

The contributors include Etienne Beaulieu, Christopher Braider, Peter Brooks, Mary Ann Caws, David Coward, Nicholas Cronk, Edwin M. Duval, Mary Gallagher, Raymond Geuss, Timothy Hampton, Nicholas Harrison, Katherine Ibbett, Michael Lucey, Susan Maslan, Eric Méchoulan, Hassan Melehy, Larry F. Norman, Nicholas Paige, Roger Pearson, Christopher Prendergast, Jean-Michel Rabaté, Timothy J. Reiss, Sarah Rocheville, Pierre Saint-Amand, Clive Scott, Catriona Seth, Judith Sribnai, Joanna Stalnaker, Aleksandar Stevi?, Kate E. Tunstall, Steven Ungar, and Wes Williams.

Introduction (1)

Aims, Methods, Stories

CHRISTOPHER PRENDERGAST

All the main terms of our title call for some clarification (“history,” “modern,” “French,” “literature”), and the introductory chapter that follows this one, by David Coward, is in part devoted to providing that. But, in explaining the basic aims of the book, it is also important to highlight what might otherwise go unnoticed, the normally anodyne indefinite article; it is in fact meant to do quite a lot of indicative work. The initial “a” has a dual purpose. It is designed, first, to avoid the imperiousness of the definite article and thus to mark the fact this is but a history, modestly taking its place as just one among many other English-language histories, with no claim whatsoever on being “definitive”; on the contrary, it is highly selective in its choice of authors and texts, and very specific in its mode of address. This in turn connects with a second purpose: the indefinite article is also meant to highlight a history that is primarily intended for a particular readership. In the sphere of scholarly publication, the general reader (or “common reader,” in the term made famous by Dr. Johnson in the eighteenth century and Virginia Woolf in the twentieth) is often invoked, but less often actually or effectively addressed. We take the term seriously, while of course remaining cognizant of the fact that conditions of readership and reading have changed hugely since Virginia Woolf’s time, let alone Dr. Johnson’s. While we naturally hope the book will prove useful in the more specialized worlds of study inhabited by the student and the teacher, the readers we principally envision are those with an active but nonspecialist interest in French literature, whether read in the original or in translation, and on a spectrum from the sustained to the sporadic (one version of Woolf’s common reader is someone “guided” by “whatever odds or ends he can come by,” a nontrivial category when one bears in mind that a collection of Samuel Beckett texts goes under the title of Ends and Odds).

This has various consequences for the book’s character as a history. The first concerns what it does not attempt: what is often referred to, unappetizingly, as “coverage,” the panoramic view that sweeps across centuries in the attempt to say something about everything. We too sweep across centuries (five of them), but more in the form of picking out selected “landmarks,” to resurrect the term used by Virginia Woolf’s contemporary, Lytton Strachey, in his Landmarks of French Literature, a book also written for the general reader, if from within the conditions and assumptions of another time and another world. One point of departure adopted for the direction of travel has been to work out from what is most likely to be familiar to our readership. There are dangers as well as advantages to this trajectory. The familiar will be for the most part what is historically closest, which in turn can color interests and expectations in ways that distort understanding of what is not close. One name for this is “presentism,” whereby we read history “backward,” approaching the past through the frame of the present or the more distant past through the frame of the recent past. In some respects, this is inevitable, a natural feature of the culture of reading, and in some cases it is even enabling as a check to imaginative inertia (what in his essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” T. S. Eliot described as the desirable practice of interpreting a past writer from a point of view that “will not find it preposterous that the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past”). Eliot’s contemporary, Paul Valéry famously claimed that a reader in 1912 taking pleasure in a work from 1612 is very largely a matter of chance, but one obvious source of the pleasure we take in the remoter past is viewing it through our own cultural spectacles (Valéry reading 1612 via his own historical location in 1912, for instance). The risk, however, is the loss of the historical sense as that which demands that we try to understand and appreciate the past (here the literary past) on its terms rather than our own, while remaining aware that we can never fully see the past from the point of view of the past. On the other hand, if the past is another country, it is not another planet, nor are its literary and other idioms, for us, an unintelligible babble. One of the implicit invitations of this book is for the reader to use the familiar as a steering device for journeys to places unknown or underexplored, while not confusing the ship’s wheel with the design of the ship itself or the nature of the places to which it takes us. Indeed the literature itself provides examples and models for just this approach, most notably the genre of travel writing, both documentary and fictional, from the Renaissance onward, a complex literary phenomenon at once freighted with the preconceptions (and prejudices) of the society in which it is produced, but also often urging its readers to try to see other cultures through other, indigenous, eyes (think Montaigne’s essay, “Des Cannibales” or Diderot’s Supplément au voyage de Bougainville).

The balance of the familiar and the unfamiliar goes some way (but only some) to account for the content of this volume. All histories (including those that aim for “coverage”) are necessarily selective, but the principles governing our own inclusions, and hence, by necessary implication, the exclusions, need some further explaining. Where are Maurice Scève and Louise Labé, both important Renaissance poets, both also based in Lyons (and thus reflections of the fact that Paris was not, as became the case later, the only serious center of cultural life in the sixteenth century)? Where, for the nineteenth, is Nerval and, above all, the great wordsmith, Hugo (the poet; he is there in connection with nineteenth-century theater)? Or where indeed, for the twentieth, is Valéry? The list is indefinitely extendable; even a list of exclusions itself excludes. But the particular examples mentioned here are chosen to illustrate a specific and important issue for this history: the case of poetry. Access to the nature and history of the sound worlds of French verse, along with the character and evolution of its prosodic and rhythmic forms, is fundamental to understanding it as both poetry in general and French poetry in particular. But that is difficult, verging on impossible, without a degree of familiarity not only with French but also with French verse forms that we cannot reasonably assume on the part of most readers of this volume. This has heavily constrained the amount of space given over to poetry and determined a restriction of focus for the most part to what, historically speaking, are the two absolutely key moments or turning points.

There is the sixteenth-century remodeling of poetry, under the influence of Petrarch (often posited as the first “modern” European poet) and the form of the Petrarchan sonnet. Edwin Duval’s contribution gives us some insight into the role of Clément Marot in the earlier chapter of this Renaissance story, while Hassan Melehy’s chapter sheds light on the later generation of “Pléiade” poets to which du Bellay belonged. The key figure, however, is Pierre de Ronsard, founder and leader of the Pléiade group. Timothy Reiss’s account of Ronsard’s multidimensional significance as poet and public intellectual includes the invention of a foundational prosody based on the use of the twelve-syllable alexandrine verse form later codified, naturalized, and perpetuated in a manner that was to dominate most of the subsequent history of French poetry. In fact, Ronsard’s own stance was marked by hesitation and fluctuation, given the image of the decasyllabic line as more fitting for the “heroic” register favored by the ruling elites. Furthermore, the novel uses to which the alexandrine was put by Ronsard in many ways reflects the exact opposite of the normative and hierarchical status this metrical form was to acquire; for Ronsard it was seen and used more as a binding, inclusive form, bringing together, in the very act of poetry, the natural, the human, and the divine in a spirit of “amity” beyond the contemporary experience of strife and civil war. It is, in short, a rich and complex story of shifting values and fluctuating practices.

But where more extensive formal analysis of poetic language—and especially prosody—is concerned, the main focus here is directed to a moment more familiar by virtue of being closer to us in time, the nineteenth century, specifically the later nineteenth century and the constellation Baudelaire, Verlaine, Rimbaud, and Mallarmé. This is the moment of Mallarmé’s crise de vers, when the historical institution of French regular verse is, if not demolished (Mallarmé remained a staunch defender of the alexandrine even while recognizing that the days of its largely unquestioned hegemony were over), certainly challenged by the emergence of new forms developed to match new kinds of sensibility. Its most radical manifestations will be the prose poem and free verse, both of which will undergo further transformations in the twentieth century via Apollinaire, surrealism, and its aftermath (a glimpse of which is provided by Mary Ann Caws’s contribution on André Breton and René Char). The most extended engagements with the technical details of versification, prosody, syntax, typography, and page layout are in the chapters by Clive Scott and Roger Pearson. This is sometimes quite demanding, but the rewards are more than worth the effort of concentration required. There is also here an intentionally invoked line of continuity (Reiss highlights it) linking the modern period to early modern developments in the history of French poetry.

More generally, the conversation about what’s in and what’s out can go on forever, and rightly so (however explained and defended in any given case, it is simply impossible to avoid a whiff of the arbitrary, along with the difficulty of transcending mere personal preferences). The important thing in respect to this history of French literature is to avoid its conversation becoming another eruption of disputes over membership in the canon. This is not to suggest avoiding it, period. To the contrary, the issue remains real and pressing. In fact, it never goes away, and is indissolubly bound up with histories and relations of cultural power. On the other hand, discussion can all too readily congeal into empty sloganizing orchestrated by the dead hand of academic habit. The question for this particular volume is more what, for a specific purpose or audience, will best work by way of providing windows onto a history and historical understanding. That too is indefinitely debatable. Short of the comprehensive survey, which this is not and does not aspire to be, what will count as best serving those aims is something on which reasonable people can disagree. The list of inclusions will nevertheless to a very large extent look like a roll call of the usual canonical suspects, and, leaving to one side futile infighting over promotions and demotions, this does raise some basic questions of approach and method regarding what this history purports to be.

A limited but useful distinction is sometimes drawn between “history of literature” and “literary history.” In its most developed form, this is a long story, with a number of theoretical complications that don’t belong here. A compacted version would describe history of literature as essentially processional, rather like the “kings and queens” model of history, with the great works paraded in regal succession—grand, colorful, arresting, but a parade lacking in historical “depth.” Literary history, on the other hand, is the child of a developing historical consciousness in Europe from the Enlightenment through Romanticism to positivism, one that is increasingly attuned to cultural relativities, deploys the methods of philological inquiry to reconstruct the past, and finally emerges as a fully constituted discipline. In France, this kind of scholarly inquiry began with the archival compilations of the Benedictines of Saint Maur in the eighteenth century, and then in the nineteenth century, via the critical journalism of Sainte-Beuve, eventually penetrated the university as a professional academic pursuit (the key figure in this connection was Gustave Lanson). The overarching category to emerge from these developments and that came to guide the literary-historical enterprise is “context,” the social and cultural settings in and from which literary works are produced, the minor as well as the major. Indeed, in the emergence, and then later the explicit formulation, of the new discipline, the “minor,” as barometer of a “context” comes to assume for literary-historical purposes a major role. A hierarchy of value is, if not abolished outright (that is a move that will be attempted much later, with only partial success), partly flattened toward the horizontal plane in order to get a sense of broader swathes of the historical time of “literature.”

Our venture might, on the face of it, look as if it conforms to the processional template of history of literature (this is, after all, the expression used in the book’s title) rather than to that of the context-reconstructing endeavors of literary history. In reality, however, it is a hybrid mix of the two, using the first (the great works) as a lever for entry into a variety of historically framed contextual worlds. The resurrection of Lytton Strachey’s term “landmarks” acquires its proper force in relation to this hybrid blend: the “mark” as mark of importance or distinction, designating membership of a canon, but also “mark” as that which marks the spot, the historical spot, landmarks as signposts for a historical mapping. To this end, we also routinely, though not exclusively, deploy a particular method: focus on a single author and even a single work, reading out from text to context and then back again, in a series of mutually informing feedback loops within which the known (and often much-loved) texts are allowed to “breathe” a history. This does not, however, entail a dogmatic commitment to the position whereby “close reading” is the only road or the royal road to literary-historical understanding. It merely reflects the pragmatic view that this method works well for the intended audience. In addition, what here counts as a context is flexible. In some cases, it is strictly literary, and often generic in focus. Thus, the account of Racine’s Phèdre takes us to some of the more general features of tragedy in the early modern period. The chapter on Voltaire’s Candide runs the discussion of its hero’s adventures and misadventures into the legacy of picaresque narrative and the history of eighteenth-century imaginative travel writing. The detailed analysis of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary is set in the context of ideas about literary “realism” and related developments in the history of the nineteenth-century novel, with a side glance at nineteenth-century painting. Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu is similarly contextualized in a surrounding literary world (including Gide and Colette). “Context,” however, can also be taken in nonliterary senses: for example, the Wars of Religion in connection with Rabelais and Montaigne; modern urban history in connection with Baudelaire; the economic and political crises of the 1930s in relation to Malraux and Céline.

I have already used the word “glimpse” in connection with one of the contributions. The term could be generalized to encompass the whole book as a collection of glimpses, angled and partial snapshots (which, with variations of scale, is all history can ever be). On the other hand, it is not just an assortment of self-framing windows onto the French literary-historical world. Its unfolding describes, if in patchwork and fragmentary form, the arc of a story centered on the nexus of language, nation, and modernity. David Coward outlines this story in terms of “the idea of a national literary culture” built on and in turn reinforcing notions of “Frenchness.” The story begins in the Renaissance, crucially with du Bellay’s “defense” of a new form of linguistic self-consciousness and his affirmation of the literary prospects for French as a national language and as a modern literary language on a par with other languages both modern and ancient. The seventeenth century was to confer both political legitimacy and institutional authority on this new self-confidence, with Richelieu’s creation of the Académie française and then more broadly under Louis XIV in the context of the developing process of centralized state formation initiated in the sixteenth century by François I and Henri IV. It was also the moment when—notwithstanding the continuing power of the Church, the sonorously commanding tones of Bossuet’s orations, or the more radical defense of faith by the members of the Port-Royal group—the practices of literature and the expectations of the public came to embody a more distinctly “modern” look by virtue of a turn toward more secular interests: in science and philosophy; in moral psychology; in drama, both tragedy and comedy; and in the novel, with the whole notionally presided over by the rationally administering monarch and the worldly codes and manners of court and salon, even when the latter were ruthlessly dissected and exposed, whether in the comedies of Molière or the aphorisms of La Rochefoucauld.

The modernizing impulse generated a turbulent dynamic of tradition and innovation, characterized by public disputes over governing values, norms, and models. With du Bellay’s polemic, we enter the age of the Quarrel, and its later offshoot, the Manifesto. To be sure, literary quarreling was not unknown in the Middle Ages, the most prominent the “querelle du Roman de la Rose,” with Christine de Pizan in the leading role as critic of the terms for the representation of women (more precisely “ladies”) in the later medieval romance. The paradigm of the modern quarrel was the seventeenth-century Querelle des anciens et des modernes, not least because of the institutional setting in which it was launched (the presentation on January 27, 1687, by the arch-modern, Charles Perrault of Le siècle de Louis le Grand, in the hallowed precincts of the Académie française). We may now see these disputes as self-advertising, transient blips on the surface of culture, the place where “public” discourse becomes mere publicity. But the quarrel in fact ran for decades, and if we have included a whole chapter on it, this is because the basic thrust of the case made by the Moderns (namely, that the modern equals the new) was to be the hallmark of all subsequent interventions of this type, the most noteworthy of which—also getting a chapter to itself—was the famous first night of Hugo’s play, Hernani, in 1830. Beneath the stridency, the bitterness, and the misunderstandings (paradoxically none were more “modern” than the Ancients, Boileau, and Racine), the importance of the quarrel consists in its being an index of an emergent literary self-consciousness. It was no wonder that there were intense debates and acute differences over how “literature” was to be defined and who was to take ownership of the definition. What was fundamentally at stake was the significance of literature as part of a modern national patrimony, what later would be viewed and fought over as the canon of the “national classics” (“our classic authors,” as Voltaire would put it).

The attempt to build and secure the treasure house of the national classic would run and run, well into the nineteenth century, largely under the banner of “classicism,” an ideology in which the “classic” (as timeless great work) and “classical” as a set of literary and cultural values associated with the seventeenth century became fused in the rearguard enterprise of making historical time stand still or even go backward. There was however another, and altogether more influential, strain of literary self-consciousness underlying the polemical clash of opinion, one that pulled literature away from institutionalized centers of power, patronage, and control toward an ever greater sense of its own autonomy. This was partly a consequence of professionalization. In the seventeenth century, the idea of the professional literary “career” (as against the earlier image of the “amateur” associated in particular with Montaigne) was largely anchored in and governed by institutional settings. It would not, however, be long before being a professional was about the writer coming to operate more in the commercial networks of a modern market society, beginning in the publishers’ offices and coffeehouses of the eighteenth century and accelerating with the invention of new technologies of paper manufacture and printing, new outlets of distribution, and a huge expansion of the reading public. David Coward describes several of these developments in some detail. Their great nineteenth-century chronicler and diagnostician would be Balzac, above all in his novel Illusions perdues (one of the works discussed in the chapter on Stendhal and Balzac). But there was also another type of separation, geared less to moneymaking than to opposition, the writer as rebel and outsider. In the eighteenth century, Voltaire, master of the marketplace, was also the exile on the run from the authorities, as close as possible to the Swiss border in Ferney. After his death, he was belatedly...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• Introduction (1): Aims, Methods, Stories
• Introduction (2): The Frenchness of French Literature
• Erasmus and the “First Renaissance” in France
• Rabelais and the Low Road to Modernity
• Marguerite de Navarre: Renaissance Woman
• Ronsard: Poet Laureate, Public Intellectual, Cultural Creator
• Du Bellay and La deffence et illustration de la langue françoyse
• Montaigne: Philosophy before Philosophy
• Molière, Theater, and Modernity
• Racine, Phèdre, and the French Classical Stage
• Lafayette: La Princesse de Clèves and the Conversational Culture of Seventeenth-Century Fiction
• From Moralists to Libertines
• Travel Narratives in the Seventeenth Century: La Fontaine and Cyrano de Bergerac
• The Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns
• Voltaire’s Candide: Lessons of Enlightenment and the Search for Truth
• Disclosures of the Boudoir: The Novel in the Eighteenth Century
• Women’s Voices in Enlightenment France
• Comedy in the Age of Reason
• Diderot, Le neveu de Rameau, and the Figure of the Philosophe in Eighteenth-Century Paris
• Rousseau’s First Person
• Realism, the Bildungsroman, and the Art of Self-Invention: Stendhal and Balzac
• Hugo and Romantic Drama: The (K)night of the Red
• Flaubert and Madame Bovary
• Baudelaire, Verlaine, Rimbaud: Poetry, Consciousness, and Modernity
• Mallarmé and Poetry: Stitching the Random
• Becoming Proust in Time
• Céline/Malraux: Politics and the Novel in the 1930s
• Breton, Char, and Modern French Poetry
• Césaire: Poetry and Politics
• Sartre’s La Nausée and the Modern Novel
• Beckett’s French Contexts
• Djebar and the Birth of “Francophone” Literature
• Acknowledgments
• Index