French Literature: A Very Short Introduction (20 page)

16. A scene from Alain Resnais's film Hiroshima man amour (1959)

Duras's characters are believable, yet opaque. They are what they
say, and what they say is about love and destruction. The force
of the screenplay is in large part the incantatory dialogue, which
slides from apparently realistic conversation to something far
from ordinary speech, like the actress's repeated utterance: `You
kill me. You do me good' (Tu me tues. Tu mefais du bien), one of
the most explicit voicings of an erotic view of war, colonialism,
and the relation of cultures that is ubiquitous in Duras's work, and
appears, indeed, in other novels and screenplays of the late 1950s,
when France was gradually and painfully losing its colonies. At the
end of the filmplay, Duras makes explicit the identification of the
man and the woman with their cities. The French woman looks
at her lover - the stage directions note `They look at each other
without seeing' - and says `You are Hi-ro-shi-ma', to which he
replies, `That is my name. Yes. [That is only as far as we have come
still. And we will stay there forever.] And your name is Nevers.
Ne-vers-in-Fran-ce' (Hi-ro-shi-ma. Nest ton nom.-Nest mon
nom. Oui. [On en est la seulement encore. Et on en restera la pour
toujours.] Ton nom a toi est Nevers. Ne-vers-en-Fran-ce). Duras
here approaches the allegorical use of character most prominent
in the Middle Ages and then glimpsed again in Bonnefoy's poetry.

In the last two decades of the 20th century and the first decade of
the 21st, the grand old men of the Second World War generation
left the stage of French literature to a new cast of writers, with
new concerns. The many novelists among these contemporaries
generally leave behind the formal experimentation of the nouveau
roman. Many of these authors, such as Antonine Maillet (1929),
Maryse Conde (born Beaucolon, 1930), Helene Cixous (1937),
Assia Djebar (Fatima-Zohra Imalayene,1936), Daniel Pennac
(1944), Raphael Confiant (1951), Patrick Chamoiseau (1953),
and Michel Houellebecq (Michel Houellebecq, born 1956, Michel
Thomas, la Reunion), and Calixthe Beyala (1961), were, like their
predecessors Marguerite Yourcenar (1903-87, born Marguerite
Cleenewerck de Crayencour), Albert Camus (1913-60), Saint-John
Perse (1887-1975), and Claude Simon (1913-2005), born outside of
continental France - the French Metropole, or the `Hexagon', as it is
often called. Others were born within the Hexagon: Annie Ernaux
(1940), J. M. G. Le Clezio (1940), Didier Daeninckx (1949),
Marie NDiaye (1967), and Marie Darrieussecq (1969).

Francophone writers, or writers in French?

Most of these authors have in common that they manifest a
paradoxical shrinking and expansion of French literature. The
France of the turn of the 21st century had lost a number of its colonies (Algeria, Indo-China, Morocco) but still sees its cultural
sphere, its `soft power', grow, as the French are among the most
outspoken in claiming to resist the influence of United States
culture. For the last several decades, it has been common to
describe some of these authors - for instance, Maillet, Conde, and
Chamoiseau - as `francophone' writers, while others - such as
Cixous, Houellebecq, and Camus - were never classified as such,
though all of them were born outside European France. Who is,
or what is, a `francophone' writer? And is there a `francophone
literature'? According to the authoritative French dictionary, Le
Tresor de la langue francaise, the term, which dates to 1932, simply
means someone `who speaks French' ([Celui, celle] qui parle le
francais), but in English-speaking universities the term has been
used almost exclusively to designate writers from Africa, the
Caribbean, and North America. It is undeniable that much of the
vitality of today's literature in French comes from the recognition
of such important writers as Leopold Sedar Senghor, Ousmane
Sembene, Cheikh Hamidou Kane, and Birago Diop from Senegal;
Ahmadou Kourouma from the Cote d'Ivoire; Driss Chraibi and
Tahar Ben Jelloun from Morocco; Roger Dorsinville and Rene
Depestre from Haiti; and many others who have in common both
the French language and the experience or cultural memory of
French colonial culture. But questions remain as to the conceptual
framework within which such writers are to be situated.

On 16 March 2007, the Parisian newspaper Le Monde published
a manifesto entitled `For a "world-literature" in French' (Pour
une `litterature-monde' en francais), signed by a group of 44
influential writers. In it, they declare that that year marked the
`End of francophone [literature]. And [the] birth of a worldliterature in French' (Fin de la francophonie. Et naissance d'une
litterature-monde en francais). There are different ways of looking
at how such a distinguished group of `francophone' authors came
to the point of announcing the end of the literature that had
brought them to the attention of a wide public. One could say that
the academic concept of `francophone literature' - conceived by its promoters primarily as a way of creating greater inclusiveness
within the study of literature in French - had been such a great
success that it outgrew its usefulness. One could also say that the
concept of `francophone literature' collapsed under the weight of
its own inconsistencies and incoherence. And, finally, one could
say that the term seemed racist and insulting to many of the
authors to whom it was applied. As Tahar Ben Jelloun (1944),
the Paris-based Moroccan writer, has said:

To be considered francophone is to be an alien, someone who comes
from elsewhere and who is told to stay in an assigned place somewhat
off to the side of `true' French writers [ecrivains frangais de souche].

`La cave de ma memoire, le toit de ma maison sont des mots
francais', in Pour one litterature-monde, ed. Michel Le Bris and
Jean Rouaud (Paris: Gallimard, 2007), P. 117.

And these various explanations are not incompatible.

There will always be reasons to sort literature into a multitude
of categories, including the region in which a text is written; the
period; the gender, class, race, religion, sexuality, or political
affiliation of its author; the formal or generic characteristics of the
text itself; the mode of diffusion or publication; and so forth. At
the turn of the century, a major thematic consensus among writers
in French is that the apparently stable categories of identity for
individuals, nations, and other groups no longer can be taken
for granted, including francophonie - not that boundaries and
belonging are themselves outmoded, but that they have exploded
exponentially and are now the source of endless variations of
authorial and narratorial voices and of protagonists.

A novel from history with a new voice

Let us consider, for example, a very successful historical novel
by a French author from Guadeloupe, Maryse Conde (1930) I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem (Moi, Tituba, sorciere noire de
Salem, 1987), in which the protagonist and narrator is an African
slave brought from Barbados to the colony of New England and
tried as a witch in 1692. Orphaned as an infant and chased off
the plantation to die in the forest, she is raised by an African
woman healer to learn of herbal medicine and of communicating
with the dead. Not a slave, for she was chased away rather than
sold, she looks at life differently from her African compatriots,
but she accepts to become a slave from love. She follows her
husband when he is sold and sent from Barbados to Boston. The
character Tituba is founded on a real person, about whom Conde
gathered all she could from the archives of the witch trials of late
17th-century Massachusetts (Conde has given Tituba African
ancestry, though this is not the prevailing view among historians).
But in trying to give Tituba the biography that was never written -
or rather, the autobiography that she never wrote or that did not
survive - Conde clearly writes for a late-20th-century reader who
will necessarily think in modern terms. Tituba uses the terms
`racism' and `feminism' to describe outlooks and practices, the first
to describe the world as it really was and the second to evoke an
aspiration that Conde supposes women of the time must have felt.
The character-narrator Tituba is a person of the imagination in
more than one sense. She is not simply a version of an historical
figure as Conde imagines her, but Tituba is also a character with
the gift of imagination or vision to look forward to the future, a
kind of Maryse Conde in reverse. As a wise woman, or `sorcerer',
Tituba can see and communicate with the dead but also with
those who are alive after her own death.

Moi, Tituba clearly exceeds any bounds of the `francophone'
novel - it is not surprising, therefore, that Maryse Conde signed
the 2007 manifesto. It is a work in French that does not represent
a French-speaking culture but rather the English-speaking
colonial world of the 17th century. Tituba, an English speaker,
tells her story in French without any apology. The work often
refers to other literary traditions; for instance, Hester, the heroine of Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter (1850) makes a
surprising appearance as a friend and perhaps lover of Tituba. The
other characters, good and bad, are British, American colonials,
African slaves or Caribbean-born slaves of African and mixed
European-African descent (like Tituba herself, a child born of her
mother's rape by an English sailor on board the ship Christ the
King), and Portuguese Jews.

A consistent and very explicit aspect of Tituba's values and
personality is her resistance to the appeal of vengeance, even in
the face of repeated and extreme violence, such as the execution
(the murder) of her mother for having resisted a plantation owner
who attempted to rape her. Equally important is her refusal to
accept the split into placative `happy slave' exterior self and cynical
but `free' inner self - a stance adopted by her husband John
Indian. Implicitly, Tituba conveys the view that this claim to inner
`freedom' is itself a deformity that debases the person and prevents
any real happiness.

The metamorphosis of the heroine

`Witch' is a term applied to women usually to insult or to threaten,
but Conde has turned things around by making Tituba a real
heroine, clearly implying approval of Tituba by the reader.
A still more unlikely reframing of roles takes place in Marie
Darieussecq's Pig Tales (1996 - the French title Truismes is a
play on the word `truism' and the word truie, `sow'), where the
narrator-heroine finds herself being transformed into a sow.
Darieussecq (1969) has written something resembling Voltaire's
conte philosophique and Kafka's `Metamorphosis' but with a voice
that is unique in its self-deprecating naivete. While the feminist
premise might seem rather obvious (i.e. that men both view and
treat women like `sows' - one of the infinite number of insulting
terms for women, particularly in terms of their sexuality), making
the conceit unfold is a tour de force. To take the metaphor of the
truie and literalize it into a fantasy set in a very realistic modern world is particularly difficult to do within a first-person narrative.
Unlike Kafka's Gregor Samsa, whose definitive transformation
into a cockroach has already occurred at the start of the story,
Darieussecq's nameless young woman morphs into and out of her
piggish form gradually, and the boundary line of her interactions
with the male characters is also fluctuating and indistinct.