French Literature: A Very Short Introduction (19 page)

Vladimir and Estragon, called Didi and Gogo, were perhaps in the
same place the day before, waiting for the same person, together
or not, wondering whether or not to wait, looking for ways to
pass the time, and trying to decide what they will do the next day.
While waiting, to fill the time, they discuss hanging themselves
from the tree - Vladimir suggests that this would give them sexual
pleasure. After a ridiculous discussion about how they could do
this, they do nothing - doing nothing is the overarching principle.
At the end of each of the two acts, they decide to leave and the
stage directions indicate `They don't move' (Ils ne bougentpas).
In the midst of each act, another pair of characters shows up:
Pozzo and his servant or slave Lucky. The hint of the circus in the
clownish aspects of Vladimir and Estragon is reinforced by this
new pair, since the whip-wielding Pozzo seems to be a ringmaster
who can make his creature Lucky, whom he leads around on a
rope, perform stunts - at least in the first act. By the second act,
Pozzo is blind and does not remember anything that happened
on the previous encounter the day before. Lucky, who entertains
with a long, breathless, nonsensical speech in act I (suggesting,
perhaps, the uselessness of learning, or even of all human
achievement, including sport), is mute by act II.

In a text so enigmatic, so stripped down, the task of finding some
link between what happens on stage and the world of life and ideas
falls to the audience. Readers and critics have not tired of seizing
on the most minute aspects of the play as the basis for exegesis. The
most obvious issue is the meaning of `Godot' - is he `God, and, if so, what is the significance of the suffix, `-ot'? Is it a diminutive? Does
it indicate contempt? Towards the end of each act, a boy comes to
deliver the message that `Monsieur Godot' will not be coming on
this day but the next day instead. In each instance, the boy insists
that he has not come before. By following Godot's request that they
wait for him to come, have Vladimir and Estragon lost their ability
to act and locked themselves into a prison of waiting? Or does the
thought that Godot might someday come provide the only solace
that Vladimir and Estragon have? Otherwise what is there?

The play is full of little gems of dark humour in almost
epigrammatic forms that are hard to forget - whatever meaning we
might assign. Estragon says to Vladimir, `We always find something,
eh, Didi, to give us the impression that we exist?' (On trouve
toujours quelque chose, hein, Didi, pour nous donner l'impression
d'exister?). This is an extraordinary question, on the part of a
fictive character in a play. After all, the question of the characters'
existence is traditionally posed, if at all, by the audience, usually
in terms of questions such as `Is this character believable?, that
is, `Could such a character have existed?. This is the sort of thing
that was debated in the 17th century about Corneille's heroes and
heroines. Later, in regard to Beaumarchais's Figaro, the character
seems to be bursting out of his role, thrusting aside the hierarchy
to take a place that he merits by sheer excess of invention, activity,
and desire. In a way - and this was clearly on the minds of the royal
censors in the late 1770s - the danger was that Figaro, or his like,
would become excessively real and no longer simply be amusing
figures on stage but rather appear in the streets of Paris to demand
their rights. So to have a central character of a play, like Estragon,
so far from `heroic' in the evaluative sense, call attention to the
tenuousness of his own sense of existence is quite striking.

The collapse and reinvention of character

This is not atypical of the times. The notion of character, like so
many other concepts or practices of the literary tradition, was called into question quite energetically in the thirty years after the
Second World War. This happens in a myriad of ways and in many
genres. For instance, in lonesco's The Bald Soprano (La Cantatrice
chauve), the characters' identities collapse into a small set of
names. Monsieur Smith and Madame Smith discuss someone
named `Bobby Watson', or so it seems at first, since `Bobby Watson'
proliferates. Madame Smith says that she was not thinking of
Bobby Watson but rather:

I was thinking of his wife. She had the same name as he did, Bobby,
Bobby Watson. Since they had the same name, you couldn't tell
them apart when you saw them together. It was only after his death
that you could really tell which one was which.

(C'est a safemme que je pense. Elle s appelait comme lui, Bobby,
Bobby Watson. Comme ils avaient le mime nom, on ne pouvait pas
les distinguer l'un de l'autre quand on les voyait ensemble. Ce nest
qu'apres sa mort a lui, qu'on a pu vraiment savoir qui etait l'un et
qui etait l'autre.)

Superficially, this is a play that makes fun of the British middle class
and also of the French view of the British middle class. But it is also,
at the peak influence of French existentialism (with which lonesco is
not usually associated), a glimpse of a wider anxiety about personal
identity, and, in the passage quoted, of women's existence. If the
woman Bobby Watson could not be distinguished from her husband
Bobby Watson until after the latter's death, the reason may be given
in a book published, with great success, only a year before: Simone
de Beauvoir's The Second Sex (Le Deuxieme sexe,1949). De Beauvoir
(1908-86) reached a huge audience in this book that analyses the
cultural myths of womanhood in specific roles: the young girl, the
lesbian, the married woman, the mother, and so forth.

At the same time, in literary theory and criticism as well as in
political and social thought, the concept of persona or role or
agent or central narrative character became an object of much discussion and experimentation in the novel. This genre, which
had seemed to harden into a `classic' form at the end of the 19th
century, had for decades been under attack. Paul Valery, the poet
and philosopher of literature, had in 1923 taken the novel to
task for its lack of rigour, for its loose and baggy structure. In a
striking formula, he complained in regard to Proust that the novel
as genre had in common with dreams that they refused to take
any responsibility for their structure: `all their digressions belong'
(toes leurs ecarts leur appartiennent).

Novels about novels

Two years after Valery's stinging remark about the novel, Andre
Gide (1869-1951) wrote a novel about writing a novel, The
Counterfeiters (Les Faux-monnayeurs, 1925). The character
Edouard is writing a novel with the same title as Gide's novel, and
this title itself announces the criticism of the realist novel. This
structure of a text reflected within itself, as if a series of boxes
within boxes, is now widely known in French by a term of heraldic
origin, mise en abyme (literally, `placed in the chasm'). This critical
reflection of the text upon the text became common in the years
before the war and into the 1960s. In Nausea (La Nausee, 1938) by
Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-80), the first-person narrator, a historian,
reflects at length on the relation between writing and being, and
at the end of the narrative decides to stop writing history and to
write a novel instead - perhaps a novel something like the novel
we are holding.

These influential early examples of reflexivity in the novel are the
background to the major movement of formal experimentation
in what is called the nouveau roman ('new novel'), a term
popularized by Alain Robbe-Grillet in his 1963 essay For a New
Novel (Pour un nouveau roman). The term nouveau roman was
apparently first used to describe this kind of writing by Emile
Henriot in a negative review of Robbe-Grillet's novel La Jalousie
(Jealousy, 1957; the term jalousie also means a window blind). La Jalousie illustrates the ways in which the nouveau roman called
into question the notion of central character, along with many
other conventions attributed to the traditional novel.

La Jalousie is narrated by a nameless character. In fact, the verb
`narrate' may be misleading in this case, since the overall story is
never really told but may be pieced together by the reader from
what appear to be overlapping, sometimes repetitive, sometimes
contradictory, fragments that are more like description (they
are in the present tense) than storytelling. The persons named
in La Jalousie are A.... Franck, and the latter's wife Christiane.
Gradually it becomes clear that the narrator supposes a love affair
between A... and Franck. We can infer - from notations telling
us that four places have been set at the dinner table, but that
Christiane will not be coming, etc. - that this narrator is a jealous
husband. This text amply justifies the term ecole du regard ('school
of the gaze') which was also used to designate the nouveau roman.
Here is a typical passage:

In the banana plantation behind them, a trapezoidal section
stretches uphill where, because no clusters have yet been harvested
since the suckers were planted, the quincunxes are still perfectly
regular.

(Dans la bananeraie, derriere ew , une piece en forme de trapeze
s Wend vers l'amont, Bans laquelle, aucun regime n'ayant encore ete
recolte depuis la plantation des souches, la regularite des quinconces
est encore absolue.)

The objects and events described are deliberately banal: table
settings, the sound of a truck climbing an incline, the stain on the
wall from a crushed millipede, the windows, hands on a table.

Although the source of these descriptions is never named, it - or
rather, he, the husband - is not disembodied since there is heavy
insistence on the point of view, in the literal sense that certain things are visible or not given the distance, angle, and lighting
conditions specified in the text. The narrator's characteristics can
also be inferred from what he notices, from the terms and precision
of his description, from the obsessive return to certain moments
and to certain traits that he notices in A.... Yet, other than through
this effort at description of the physical world, we have no access
to the thoughts of any of the characters, only a series of clues. The
paradoxical situation of a central character who is both everywhere
and yet, explicitly, nowhere, shows the extreme effort to renew the
representation of the central persona, who is far from a'hero, yet
fundamental to the existence of the fiction itself.

Such inventive stretching of the category of the protagonist is
common among Robbe-Grillet's contemporaries. In Second
Thoughts (La Modification, 1957), a novel by Michel Butor (1926)
that appeared the same year as La Jalousie, the protagonist (who
is also the presumed narrator, as well as the presumed reader)
is simply `you' (vous - if we assume that the narrator and the
protagonist are the same person, the choice of the formal pronoun
adds another layer of strange distance from the self). At the outset
of the story, the effect is quite strong: `You've put your left foot
on the copper groove, and with your right shoulder you vainly
attempt to push the sliding door a bit more'. And in The Golden
Fruits (Les fruits d'or,1963) by Nathalie Sarraute (1900-99), the
continuity usually given to a novel by the protagonists is instead
assured by the topic of a multitude of conversations about a novel
also called Les fruits d'or - another mise en abyme like Gide's Les
Faux-monnayeurs.

At the same time, lyric poetry, which has often been in the
forefront of attempts to expand the concepts of character and
voice, pushed even further in complicating these components
of the text. In Yves Bonnefoy's On the Motion and Immobility of
Douve (Du mouvement et de l'immobilite de Douve, 1953), an `I'
sometimes addresses an entity named `Douve' (grammatically
feminine) who seems to have human features but also to become at times a landscape, an animal, and various other objects.
Lyric poetry has often displayed its characters situated in, and
particularized by, an environment, but Bonnefoy goes much
further. Douve seems to be aggressed by the places in which she is
located (and the choice of the pronoun `she' confers a humanness
that is not at all certain in this poem). By making up the proper
noun `Douve', Bonnefoy invites the reader to wonder which of the
meanings of the French noun douve is most pertinent: the moat
of a castle, a flowering plant (the Spearwort), a parasitic worm, or
a stave. The strong association of character with place unites the
lyric poetry of this period with other genres, such as the cinema.

Character and place

Often associated with the nouveau roman, Marguerite Duras
(born Marguerite Donnadieu in Indo-China, 1914; died in Paris
in 1996) wrote the scenario for the film Hiroshima mon amour
(directed by Alain Resnais, 1959) and published it separately as
a book in 1960. Writers in this period moved often from novel to
film and back - after her collaboration with Resnais, Duras herself
later directed a score of films, as did Robbe-Grillet after writing
the screenplay for Renais's Last Year at Marienbad (LAnnee
derniere a Marienbad, 1961). The screenplays, published in book
form, are scarcely distinguishable from many other novels of the
period that were not filmed nor even meant to be filmed, such as
Jealousy. As printed texts, these screenplays are clearly part of
French literature, and Hiroshima mon amour illustrates the close
relationship between the construction (or deconstruction) of a
main human character and the evocation of the destruction of
Hiroshima by an American nuclear bomb in 1945.

Just as the character of Hugo's Notre Dame de Paris is as much
the cathedral as the human character, Quasimodo, the bell-ringer,
who gives the cathedral a voice, so in Duras's screenplay the
nameless French actress who plays the role of a nurse in a film
about Hiroshima and the Japanese architect who becomes her lover exist almost exclusively to give voice to the experience of the
destruction of Hiroshima and the wartime occupation of the city
of Nevers in France. She tells the Japanese man a story that she
had never told anyone before about her love, as an adolescent,
for a German soldier. She and the soldier planned to marry, but
he was killed by the French resistance and she was punished by
her family, her head was shaved, and she was locked in a cold
cellar for months. When her family released her, she bicycled
to Paris during the night, and it was in Paris that she saw the
newspaper headline announcing the bombing of Hiroshima. He
tells her that she has seen nothing in Hiroshima: `You have seen
nothing in Hiroshima. Nothing' (Tunas rien vu a Hiroshima.
Rien). She insists `I have seen everything. Everything' (Jai tout
vu. Tout.). And this statement is accompanied in the screenplay
by filming directions for flashbacks to the hospital, to the
museum, to photographs of the city right after the bombing. The
unrepresentability of the destruction in language or in images
runs throughout the dialogue of the two lovers. Though the woman's experience in Nevers is easier to describe, it too is a taboo
subject at this time. The massive French collaboration with the
German occupying forces was a subject almost never mentioned
in French media until Marcel Ophuls's Le Chagrin et la pitie ten
years later.