French Literature: A Very Short Introduction (21 page)

As she becomes more of a pig, she finds her sexual appetite
increasing, and in the `beauty parlour' in which she works as a
masseuse (in fact, as a prostitute), her new sexual aggressiveness
attracts a more animalistic clientele, though her increasingly piglike skin, nose, and bristles eventually put an end to her domestic
and professional arrangements. As the protagonist recounts
her experiences in a naive way - actually, even less judgemental
than Candide - Darieussecq explores the ambivalences of male
attitudes towards sex as well as the corruption of the political
system. The author cleverly weaves together cultural references
and humour, even recalling the legend of the werewolf that was
Marie de France's focus in Bisclavret eight centuries before, when
the protagonist falls in love with a werewolf named Yvan (the
name seems deliberately chosen to recall the medieval Breton
repertory).

A critique of Western society

The final happy note of Truismes - the heroine has decided to
remain a pig because `it's more practical for living in the forest'
where she has found a mate, a boar who is `very beautiful and
very virile' - contrasts with an unrelentingly downbeat succes
de scandale that appeared eight years earlier and to which the
adjective `piggish' might well apply: Atomised (Les particules
elementaires,1998, published in the US as The Elementary
Particles) by Michel Houellebecq. One of the two protagonists
in fact sees himself in a dream `in the form of a young pig with
plump, smooth skin'. This third-person narrative is multi-tonal,
including an academic biographical account of one of its two protagonists, half-brothers, raised separately. One, the biologist
Michel, leads a virtually asexual life dedicated to genetic research,
while the other, Bruno, a lycee teacher of French literature, sees
sex as his only reason for living. Their different paths bring them
unhappiness and ruin the lives of any women who approach them.
And the narrative itself manages to make everything it touches
seem repulsive: science, religion, food, sex, friendship. The whole
account is threaded with portentous `scientific' statements about
the end of Christian belief and the advent of a deterministic,
materialist worldview. Michel's childhood girlfriend, who loves
him and whom he rebuffs in adolescence, is described as she
blossoms into the beauty that dooms her:

From the age of thirteen years onward, under the influence of
progesterone and estradiol secreted by her ovaries, fatty cushions
are deposited at the level of a girl's breasts and buttocks. These
organs, in the best of cases, acquire a full, harmonious, round
aspect.

The voices of the narrator and of each of the male protagonists,
who are given to long monologues on science, determinism,
religion, anthropology, and social values, all advance the view
that Western societies are in a state of advanced decay due to
the rise of sexual freedom and of individualism and the decline
of Christianity and of the family - in all of this 1974 is identified
as the annus horribilis. To the extent that he intersperses
long philosophical discourses with sexual details (Bruno, for
instance, masturbates in quite disruptive ways), Houllebecq's
work resembles Sade. On the other hand, it is very unclear what
message might be taken from this book, despite its relentless
didacticism. Yet Houellebecq is very much of his time in terms
of the broad cultural mood. Les particules elementaires appeared
two years before the `millennium', when a sense of foreboding
was widespread. The media had warned that a glitch in computer
code, the 'Y2K bug', would paralyse airports, banks, and even
household appliances. Meanwhile, fundamentalist religious movements, of many origins, were building up the aggressive
energy that led to elections of candidates from the Christian and
Islamic right, in their respective spheres of influence.

And a critique of the East

In contrast to Houellebecq's relentless misery with its implicit
appeal for an authoritarian reimposition of social values
in the hope of eliminating individual choice and collective
alienation, Amelie Nothomb (1967) at the same moment
published a novel with a joyous celebration of European
individualism and self-responsibility in the context of precisely
the type of paternalist system that, at times, Les particules
elementaires seems to value. In Fear and Trembling (Stupeur
et tremblements, 1999), she tells the first-person story of
Amelie, a Belgian born in Japan and fluent in Japanese, who
comes to work for a large Japanese corporation. The mood of
Nothomb's novel is entirely different from the dark, angular,
jarring spirit of Duras's Hiroshima mon amour, but it has in
common with that screenplay the portrayal of the relation
between civilizations in terms of individuals and their erotic
fascination for one another (we recall the refrain in Duras's
text, `You kill me. You do me good.'). In Nothomb's novel,
Amelie is obsessed with the beauty of the Japanese woman who
supervises her and who assigns increasingly demeaning tasks,
until the Belgian protagonist has no other responsibility than to
clean the male and female toilets of the forty-fourth floor of the
Yumimoto corporate headquarters. In Amelie's ironic pleasure
at the complete misuse of her talents as translator and business
strategist, the individual erotic attachment to the supervisor,
Fubuki Mori, and the broader cultural fascination - that is, the
fascination of Western cultures with the mysterious East -
cannot be separated. Therefore, descriptive passages reveal as
much about the education and desires of the narrator as about
their object, and in this one the allegorical turn is signalled by a
reference to one of the best-known passages in Pascal's Pensees:

Two meters before me, the spectacle of her face was captivating.
Her eyelids lowered on the numbers kept her from seeing that
I was studying her. She had the most beautiful nose in the world,
the Japanese nose, this inimitable nose, with the delicate nostrils,
that one can recognize among thousands. Not all Japanese have this
nose, but anyone who has this nose must be Japanese. If Cleopatra
had had this nose, the geography of the planet would have been all
shaken up.

The theme that will not go away:
the Second World War

The limits of the `francophone' but also the boundaries of
acceptable protagonists are challenged aggressively in Les
Bienveillantes (2006), winner not only of the prestigious Prix
Goncourt but also the Grand prix du roman from the Academie
Francaise. The author is Jonathan Littel, born in New York
in 1967 and a citizen of the United States at the time of the
publication (he subsequently also obtained French citizenship,
although he does not live in France). The oddity of an American
winning these prizes would no doubt have provoked controversy
in itself, but for an author of Jewish ancestry to write a novel
from the point of view of a Nazi SS officer, who himself assists
in killing Jews, was considered by many to be quite outrageous,
particularly because there is some effort to make the narrator
`sympathetic' when contrasted with more enthusiastic killers.
Maximilien Aue, the protagonist, in an account of how he wrote
his memoirs, mentions off-handedly a long-standing tendency to
vomit after meals and says that he prefers work to leisure because
work keeps him from thinking about the war (perhaps Littel's
study of Pascal in a French lycee brings this echo of comments
in the Pensees about keeping busy to avoid thinking about the
important things). Aue runs a lace-making factory, is a married
father of twins, and aims at outward bourgeois respectability to
cover his homosexuality and to make his shame from the war
fade away.

Littel's novel is highly conventional in its form, especially when
compared to the experimentation of the nouveau roman decades
before. It seems that one of the major creative efforts in recent
French novels is to conceive unusual protagonists whose firstperson narratives stretch various boundaries of identity, with
emphasis on national as well as sexual and racial identity.

There is no better representative of the movement for a world
literature' in French than J. M. G. (Jean-Marie Gustave) Le
Clezio, whose novel Ritournelle de lafaim (The refrain of hunger)
appeared in October 2008 just as the author became the latest
French-language writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. The
presentation speech given by a member of the selection committee
before the Swedish Academy began with this question:

Of what use are characters to a literary work? Roland Barthes
maintained that the most antiquated of all literary conventions was
the proper name - the Peter, Paul, and Anna who never existed but
whom we are expected to take seriously and feel concerned about
when we read novels.

Le Clezio began his writing career when this view prevailed, yet
from his very first novel, The Interrogation (Le Proces-verbal,
1963), has shown the world through the eyes of his protagonists,
who are often, like Adam Pollo of The Interrogation, outsiders
to the world that they so sharply observe. Le Clezio's narratives
concern a wide variety of places: Africa, in Desert (1980) and
Onitsha (1991); Mauritius - home of his ancestors - in The
Prospector (Le Chercheur d'or, 1985) and The Quarantine (La
Quarantaine, 1995); Palestine in Wandering Star (Etoile errante,
1996); and Latin America, in Ourania (2006). He shows an
immense ability to imagine the world from the point of view of
his many characters, but Le Clezio, in keeping with the trend
in French novels over the past decades, has moved from highly
experimental, often difficult to follow narratives, to more
straightforward stories.

Whereas in The Interrogation the main character, who is
sometimes also the narrator, is insane, Ritournelle de lafaim
follows Ethel, a fairly ordinary protagonist, from 1931, when she
is ten years old, until the end of the Second World War. But in
both of these novels, separated by 45 years, the characters are
connected in multiple ways to the world overseas. Adam Pollo
seems to have just returned from serving in the French army
during the Algerian Revolution, while Ethel's parents are from
Mauritius and her story begins with her favourite memory, a visit
with her beloved grand-uncle to the Colonial Exposition in 1931.
As the Nobel presentation notes, Le Clezio's work `belongs to the
tradition of the critique of civilisation, which on French ground
can be traced back to Chateaubriand, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre,
Diderot, and [...] Montaigne'. In this respect, Le Clezio is highly
representative both of his own time, a period of post-colonial
criticism and debates about national and linguistic identity. His
work is therefore a good place to enter into French literature, both
in its origins and in its persistent variations.

Endless encounters

As we have seen, the literary tradition in French both roots
texts in their original historical moment and allows them to
encounter one another across the centuries. Texts, in other
words, are a bit like the water lilies of Claude Monet's famous
series of paintings, the Nympheas (1906-27). The lilies are
rooted separately in the soil at the bottom of the pond but
drift on their stems so that the leaves and flowers shift and
touch on the water surface. Just as Le Clezio's work encounters
Bernardin's and Montaigne's across the space of hundreds of
years, so also Darrieussecq's depiction of the shifting boundary
between animality and humanity intersects with the Lais
of Marie de France, while Proust's novel frequently refers
to the writers of the 17th century. Houellebecq's work has
resemblances to the moralist tradition of Pascal and La Bruyere,
and Yves Bonnefoy weaves into his poetry echoes of Baudelaire.

Such encounters will certainly continue, and there will surely be
surprises to come as writers formerly separated by vast distances
find themselves in close proximity thanks to shifts in the book
trade that make it easy for a reader in Quebec to purchase a book
by a writer from Senegal or Algeria. France has also been in the
forefront of development of cultural resources on the internet.
The Bibliotheque Nationale de France makes tens of thousands
of books available online, while radio stations like France Culture
and France Inter make readings of literary texts and discussions of
literature available for download.

Just as important as the increased diffusion of French literary
culture is the widespread perception that French intellectual
culture is the single most significant alternative, at least among
Western nations, to the English-speaking world. For some people,
the notion of an `alternative' easily slides into the idea of an
`opposition', and thus implies hostility and struggle. For many
other people, including perhaps the readers of this book, the
French literary tradition offers a welcome new vantage point from
which to see the world, past and present. In a world threatened
by sameness, we have never had a greater need for the French
dference.