SOURCE: Birkett, Jennifer, and James Kearns. “Changing Forms and Subjects.” In A Guide to French Literature: From Early Modern to Postmodern, pp. 200-75. New York: St. Martin's, 1997.

[In the following essay, Birkett and Kearns provide a detailed history of modern French literature, including an overview of novels, plays, and poetry.]

I THE NOVEL

1914-39: NEW IDEAS AND FORMS

The most profound challenge to the Naturalist legacy in the novel came from Marcel Proust (1871-1922) in À la recherche du temps perdu (published 1913-27). All of Proust's early work was in one form or another a preparation for this novel, which he began writing in July 1909.¹ Reading Ruskin had confirmed his sense of the over-riding importance of art; translating him had reinforced the apprenticeship of writing also evident in his pastiches of the style of major French writers.² In the fragments of Jean Santeuil, he described the pleasure derived from identifying elements common to sensations in the past and present. In Contre Sainte-Beuve, what began as an attack on the biographical approach to literary history developed into a series of autobiographical texts in which essential characters and themes of À la recherche were developed towards their final form. Just as the critical work extended into episodes of fiction, the novel incorporated across its length an analysis of the nature of literature, ending with the narrator's discovery of the means to write the novel which Proust was drawing to a close.

The search for lost time is the search for the permanence and coherence of human identity.³ Predicated on the essential truth announced at the outset that ‘nous ne sommes pas un tout matériellement constitué, identique pour tout le monde’ [‘we are not a materially-constituted whole, identical for everyone’], but that ‘notre personnalité sociale est une création de la pensée des autres’ [‘our social personality is the creation of the thoughts of others’], it is a lifelong journey through the damage which the passage of time inflicts on knowledge of the self and others. Fashionable upper-class Parisian society of the Third Republic is the arena for the meaningless and inauthentic action whose false values and empty rituals replace knowledge in a world subjected to time. Extending Flaubert's ironic deconstruction in L'Éducation sentimentale of Balzac's energised city, Proust shows characters and events as reference points for rituals of social acceptance or exclusion which are vicious and intensely comic at the same time. The Dreyfus Affair is an ‘erreur mondaine’ [‘social gaffe’] through which Madame Verdurin loses ground in the social race; the First World War demonstrates the stupidity of the baron de Charlus's conversation. History is refracted through, and reduced to, the shifting and ephemeral anecdotes of society gossip.

If time condemns social aspirations and relationships to a meaningless formalism, it is no less destructive of love. Since time renders knowledge of the self and others impossible, love in À la recherche is a doubly sterile delusion of power, a projection of imagination and desire onto others which always carries the seeds of its own destruction. Each major relationship (Swann with Odette, the narrator with Albertine, Charlus with Morel and so on) repeats the same infernal sado-masochistic sequence of pain inflicted and endured, of a desire for mastery which fuels jealousy and provokes lies and silence.

Only at the end of the novel does the narrator realise that the experience of society and love, worthless in itself, finds its necessity in art. Real without being imprisoned in time, ideal without being devoid of reality, the sensations experienced in the Guermantes courtyard convene past and present in what the narrator describes as time in the pure state, abolishing contingency and the fear of death. The lessons of the madeleine and Martinville steeples episodes in Combray can at last take their true place in this self-discovery and in the literary project which flows from it, in the synthesis of sensation and memory in which the necessary relationship between past and present may be demonstrated. Metaphor and simile, which annul restrictions of time and space and fuse abstract thought and physical sensation in a single association, provide an essential linguistic counterpart to this victory over the negative effects of time.

Proust's novel is a compendium of fictional models, its whole extending far beyond the sum of their parts: realist (its sociohistorical analysis); psychological (its involvement of the reader in the narrator's introspective response to experience); developmental (the narrator's sentimental education from childhood to middle-age); confessional (first-person revelation of a life); Wagnerian (its length, and the strategic role of themes and symbols linked by the leitmotif technique). It offers an extended history of its own creation as the narrator eventually abandons the example of the false artists and aesthetes (Swann, Charlus) for the lessons of the true (Vinteuil, Elstir, Bergotte) and, in the novel's circular structure, decides at the end of Le Temps retrouvé to write the history of a narrator becoming a writer. Each volume reproduces the same sequence of the aspiration to an ideal world of essential terms followed by the confrontation of this ideal with the reality of experience. The repeated failure of this confrontation brings the narrator to the very brink of defeat—from which victory is snatched in the closing moments of the quest. At the centre of this vast cycle, the Proustian narrator moves between the multiple levels of past and present experience, reflecting on the nature of narrative in ways which have offered subsequent writers enormous potential to extend the means of fiction.

The work of André Gide (1869-1951) is dominated by the conflict between the desire for authenticity and the moral, intellectual and social systems which oppose it.⁴ Following the death of his father in 1880, Gide was raised by his mother and his Scottish governess in an intense Protestant austerity. In the mid-1890s he undertook two journeys to North Africa, during which he experienced what he felt to be a spiritual rebirth through the discovery of his homosexuality, the life of the senses and openness to experience. These discoveries intensified the conflict between self-denial and desire for experience with which he had struggled throughout adolescence. In the course of his life this conflict between the temptation and the fear of desire, between submission and resistance to authority, took many forms and Gide used the act of writing to analyse its contradictions critically and thereby deliver himself from them. Each of his books, he said, carried within itself its own contradiction.

In Gide's récits, a first-person narrator confronts with varying degrees of lucidity and self-deception the consequences of an ethical choice taken to destructive limits. In L'Immoraliste (1902) Michel sacrifices his wife to his theory of immoralism. Formulated five years earlier in Les Nourritures terrestres, this philosophy of disponibilité and of freedom from external moral constraints had as its object the search for God, deemed the source of all experience. In L'Immoraliste, it has become a self-serving cult of force and independence which leaves the narrator with anguish and doubt. La Porte étroite (1909) re-enacts the destructive outcome of Les Cahiers d'André Walter (1891), Gide's first published work. Alissa's mystical ideal of virtue and self-sacrifice in the name of a silent God lead to desperate solitude and ultimate tragedy. In La Symphonie pastorale (1919), the pastor's deception of self and others leads Gertrude to the fatal despair of the knowledge of sin without the knowledge of forgiveness; her death highlights the dangers of the pastor's self-interested interpretation of the Scriptures, choosing between a religion of law and one of love. In these récits, the use of the first-person narrator paradoxically achieves what Gide called the height of objectivity, because without authorial intervention, the narrator, recounting experience in her or his diary and letters, unwittingly betrays the self-deception and sophistry which kill. For this reason Gide referred to his récits as ‘ironic’ books. The difficulty of self-knowledge implies a permanently critical, ironic mode of writing.

This ironic mode found its fullest development in Gide's soties, a term taken from the medieval popular comic play in which actors masqueraded as fools. Paludes (1895), his satire on Symbolist attitudes to the relationship between art and life, and Le Prométhée mal enchaîné (1899), his modernised version of the Greek myth in which Prometheus discovers immoralism, illustrate its possibilities but its most powerful demonstration comes in Les Caves du Vatican (1913), an hilarious spoof adventure story of an alleged abduction of the Pope and his replacement by an imposter. Composed at the height of the Catholic revival, this ferocious satire of uncritical allegiance to systems of belief centres on the Vatican cellars, underground passages which link the residences of the true and fake Popes and so serve as a metaphor for the unfathomable distinctions between appearance and reality and for the threat of the counterfeit in every area of experience, from Protos's disguised crooks to Lafcadio's false acte gratuit. As in his récits, Gide in Les Caves makes the problematics of writing central to the burlesque escapades. Autonomous pantomime characters, shifting narrative points of view, a decentralised and open-ended plot structure, a profusion of coincidences and word-play represented Gide's most sustained subversion to date of the nineteenth century's practice of the realist and psychological novel.

In this respect it was an essential preparation for Les Faux-Monnayeurs (1926). This was the only one of his texts which Gide described as a novel, for he tried to fulfil there the encyclopaedic ambition of Balzac and Zola to depict modern society (which Gide saw as threatened by inauthenticity at every level) while showing at the same time the conflict between the reality of this society and our representation of it. In Les Faux-Monnayeurs, the moral focus of the récit and the narrative innovations of the sotie are combined and multiplied. The threat of the counterfeit provides unity across the range of characters and themes (Bernard and the family, the Oliver/Édouard couple and homosexuality, Passavant and writing) while the narrative system unpacks realist conventions of linear time, fixed characters, absolute knowledge and closed structure. The multiple narrative points of view created by these procedures are themselves displaced by the mise en abyme technique which shows Édouard writing Les Faux-Monnayeurs and keeping a diary, the Journal des Faux-Monnayeurs, and an ‘author’ intervening in the text to judge his characters, as does Gide himself.

Gide was also the most prominent founder member in 1909 of the Nouvelle Revue Française, which became, particularly from 1919, when Jacques Rivière (1886-1925) took over as director, one of modern France's most famous literary reviews. Despite the review's commitment to independence from political programmes, Gide was passionately involved with some of the central moral and political issues of his time and ours—homosexuality (Corydon, 1924), the failures of colonisation (Voyage au Congo and Retour du Chad, 1927-8) and those of Stalinism (Retour de l'URSS, 1936). His experimentation with new narrative practices, though complex and somewhat contrived, his use of narrative to work through the contradictions and potential dangers of intellectual systems, his continued reflection on the nature of autobiographical writing in the diary he kept throughout his life, all stemmed from his sense of the importance of self-knowledge at a time when the systems of thought which had underpinned the literature of the nineteenth century were losing credibility. For these reasons, his work makes an essential contribution to the development of twentieth-century sensibility.

THE GREAT WAR AND ITS AFTERMATH

The work of Proust and Gide provided from the 1920s two of the most important models of the implications for narrative practice of the re-examination of that positivist ambition which for much of the nineteenth century had given literature coherence and direction. By then, however, these issues had been engulfed by the catastrophic devastation of the Great War (1914-18).

The sense that the entire European cultural tradition had been dishonoured by the war was widely felt; Paul Valéry expressed it powerfully in his famous essay of 1919, La Crise de l'esprit.⁵ Despite the unprecedented scale of the slaughter, certain writers found it possible to view the war positively, transforming it into a nostalgic ideal of heroic comradeship and purification through sacrifice. But at the other end of the cultural spectrum, one faction of the avant-garde saw it as the justification of its contempt for the culture responsible for the industrialised carnage in the trenches, and an opportunity to unite the European avant-garde in the great task of destroying through derision the rationalist tradition on which bourgeois language and culture was based. This faction formed the Dada movement in Zurich in February 1916. Its main activity however took place from 1920 in Paris where its leading figure, Tristan Tzara (1896-1963), linked up with the French pre- and post-war avant-gardes and, in particular, with the Littérature group, created in 1919 by André Breton (1896-1966), Louis Aragon (1897-1982) and Philippe Soupault (1897-1990) and quickly reinforced by Paul Éluard (1895-1952) and Benjamin Péret (1899-1959). Together they channelled Dada's provocative and nihilistic agitation in the direction of the Surrealist programme of literary and political revolution.

The wave of euphoric nationalist and revanchist sentiment which greeted the declaration of hostilities in August 1914 was soon confronted by the atrocious facts of the trench warfare into which the conflict settled from its first winter. Public ignorance of the realities of modern warfare, and the divorce between these realities and the official propaganda emanating from incompetent and deceitful military and political authorities, created, for writers seeking to describe authentically the experience of the trenches, the problem of finding words for what was unprecedented, and literally unspeakable. Though there were some reference points in the French novel tradition to help them—the description of the battle of Waterloo in Stendhal's La Chartreuse de Parme, that of the battle of Sedan in Zola's La Débâcle, for example—the sheer scale and horror of the carnage called for new types of description of death, mutilation and survival and a wider range of linguistic registers, incorporating dialect, slang and obscenity. Limited points of view and episodic, disjointed sequences of events displaced the purposeful actions of linear narratives, which were inappropriate for the sudden catastrophes visited upon soldiers unable to comprehend the forces that a modern technological civilisation had unleashed upon them.

The two most famous novels of the Great War, Le Feu (1916) by Henri Barbusse (1873-1935) and Les Croix de bois (1919) by Roland Dorgelès (1886-1973), offered different responses to the chaos. Despite the censorship to which its initial serialisation in a left-wing review was subjected, Le Feu outraged conservatives, but its strong fusion of documentary realism and pacifist, internationalist vision of a society of equality and brotherhood made it a huge critical and commercial success.⁶Les Croix de bois recounted the fear, suffering and will to survive which marked day-to-day life in the trenches, where horror was displaced by moments of intense release and humour. Unlike Le Feu, Les Croix de bois contained little political analysis or vision and this distinction between the two novels also characterised the post-war directions taken by the authors. Both before and after joining the Parti Communiste Français (PCF) in 1923, Barbusse played a leading role in efforts to create a collective revolutionary consciousness among intellectuals, notably through the reviews Clarté and Monde, of which he was the founding editor (in 1919 and 1928 respectively), and through his contribution to the debate on proletarian and popular literature.⁷ In Le Réveil des morts (1923), Dorgelès vented his sense of outrage that the society which had survived the war was failing in its moral obligations to the war dead. Having done so, he turned to writing travel literature and escapist, nostalgic chronicles of an idealised and carefree bohemian life in pre-war Montmartre.

THE INTER-WAR YEARS

In the novel the end of the war triggered a wide range of responses. Not surprisingly, anti-war sentiment was prominent among them, while the implications of the war for religious faith, spiritual values or cultural and intellectual issues of the sort raised by Valéry in ‘Crise de l'Esprit’ also became important themes. At the same time, other novelists responded to a powerful public need to draw a veil over 1914-18, and this led to a sharp increase in the production and consumption of thrillers and of travel and adventure novels. Exotic geographical, historical and social locations had in any case long since been the staple diet of popular and escapist fiction. In the post-war euphoria of the années folles, the adventure novels of Pierre Benoît (1886-1962) achieved huge sales.⁸

On another level, novelists whose work came into the imprecise and wide-ranging category of the poetic novel again took up pre-war criticisms of what were considered to be the artificial and superficial observation and organisation of external reality in Naturalist fiction. The 1920s novels of Jean Giraudoux (1882-1944) contained sequences of loosely-related episodes which showed the poetic sensibility's subjective transformation of everyday life. This formula, in which the mechanisms of prose poetry and fiction collaborated within the narrative structure, was a focus for much discussion of narrative theory during this period.

The most important group of novels referred to at that time under the term ‘poetic novel’ was that of the regional roman rustique, which tapped into a demand for something more profound than the conventional pastoral of rural local colour. The desire to escape modern urban industrial society through a return to the values of a mythical France profonde reflected the wish to re-establish contact with more stable rhythms associated with the ancestral relationship between people and land, far removed from the brutal contingencies of modern history. André Chamson (1900-83), with his historical novels of the Cévennes (published 1925-8), and Maurice Genevoix (1890-1980), with Raboliot (1925), were important figures in this development, but it was in the work of the Swiss francophone novelist Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz (1878-1947) and that of Jean Giono (1895-1970) that the regional novel briefly appeared central to the intellectual and formal developments taking place in the novel of the period.

In Ramuz a lyrical and mystical vision of the mysterious forces in nature which both threaten and enhance those in contact with them was expressed in distinctive verbal rhythms and syntactic disjunctions. In a cycle of novels known as the Pan trilogy (published 1929-30), Giono created a myth of rural life in which the ancestral gestures and rhythms of day-to-day experience confront the mysterious forces of nature. In Le Grand Troupeau (1931) he returned to his loathing of war. As is indicated by the metaphor of the flock contained in the title, the novel contrasts apocalyptic scenes of soldiers led like lambs to the slaughter with descriptions of the cyclical continuities and force of life within peasant society. The interwoven themes and images of war and land bring to the surface the relationship between anxiety about the nature of modern experience and the values for which the regional novel of the 1920s was the vehicle. Nevertheless, the novel retains a guarded optimism that the force of life exemplified in peasant society will overcome even as violent an assault on its values as that of the Great War.⁹

It was no coincidence that in 1931 Giono returned to the theme of war or that he depicted it then as an essentially totalitarian phenomenon. After an initial rush of war novels of the ‘lived experience’ type, the Great War began to serve as a metaphor for the post-war world it had engendered. An early case in point is that of Le Diable au corps (1923), in which Raymond Radiguet (1903-23) showed, through an affair between an adolescent and a young woman whose husband was fighting at the front, the premature cynicism of an adolescent growing up in the exceptional situation created by the war. The youth's calm amoralism and the negative portrayal of the female characters created a huge succès de scandale at a time in the early 1920s when ‘official’ accounts of the war were stressing heroism, self-sacrifice and just revenge.¹⁰

As the 1920s progressed, the growing impact of the ideological systems of Communism and National Socialism drew intellectuals in every sphere towards contemporary historical and political issues. The publication of La Trahison des clercs (1927), in which Julien Benda (1867-1956) denounced what he considered this betrayal of the intellectual's responsibility for detached speculative thought, and the reaction his work provoked, crystallised this trend. Any hopes Benda might have had of convincing his fellow-intellectuals of the need to withdraw to some ivory tower of pure ideas were ended by the economic and political crisis triggered by the Wall Street Crash in 1929. The Great Depression and its political consequences created for many writers the sense of living after one war and on the verge of another, and refocused their interest on the nature of modern history and its origins in the Great War.

The Great War is the first of the four locations in which Louis-Ferdinand Céline (1894-1961) situated his Voyage au bout de la nuit (1932), in which modern life is depicted as a sinister farce played out initially in the military context of war and later in the economic and social context of peace. In this radically pessimistic variation on Robinson Crusoe, dehumanising victimisation exercised by a ruling elite is the general law in all four locations (trenches and military hospital, African colonies, American factories, Parisian suburbs) down whose long, dark night the protagonists, Barmadu and Robinson, wander. In his second novel, Mort à crédit (1936), the death is that of the petite bourgeoisie to which the narrator's family belongs, while the credit is that of the new technological economy which is the source of its ruin. The novel recounts the narrator's hopeless childhood and adolescence, spent in growing conflicts with his family. This second novel took further than the first Céline's efforts to inject into the literary tradition the energy and authenticity of popular spoken French and slang and his experimentation with expressive, stylised punctuation. The scandalous nature of the themes and language in both novels, and the predominantly socio-political readings they encouraged, notably in view of Céline's notorious pro-fascist sympathies immediately before and during the Second World War, were originally the basis of his reputation. Later, nouveau roman experimentation in the 1950s and 1960s helped to promote awareness of his subtle and complex reworking of the Proustian legacy in the French novel.¹¹

The ironic reversal of the values of the Great War from heroism to farce is also present in the work of Pierre Drieu la Rochelle (1893-1945). Leading the charge at the battle of Charleroi in October 1914, Drieu had apparently experienced a mystical, purifying vision of the union of intellect and action, after which life in post-war Paris appeared as one of cultural and political decline. In the title story of his collection La Comédie de Charleroi (1934), heroism has become a ‘comédie’, farcically ill-adapted to the forms of modern warfare, which reduced heroes to cannon-fodder, and irrelevant to the post-war world order, in which the USA and the Soviet Union were replacing the old European empires. In the story, a middle-aged narrator speaking at an unspecified time in the 1930s tells of his return to the battlefield in 1919, in the course of which he had recounted the 1914 battle to the mother of his fallen comrade. Through the interplay between these three narrative moments, Drieu shows how the war prefigures the unviable, divided society created in Europe by the advanced industrialised civilisation of the post-war years. As the collection was appearing, Drieu was finding his own solution to the problems it raised: the fascist riots of February 1934 precipitated his conversion to the fascist cause. The intellectual itinerary of the fascist is the subject of his novel Gilles (1939).¹²

Les Thibault (1922-40) by Martin du Gard illustrates a different aspect of the impact on fiction of the retrospective assessment of the Great War. Planned in 1920 as a modern version of the classical chronicle of the lives of two antithetical brothers, the cycle traces the development of Jacques and Antoine Thibault in relation to the pre-war values of their authoritarian father. The final volume, L'Été 1914 (1936), marks the eruption of modern history, in the form of the declaration of war, into the private destinies of the brothers. Within a conventional naturalist technique, Martin du Gard presented an analysis of human relationships deepened by his study of Freudian descriptions of sexuality, and by what Camus called a ‘shared misery’, in which the subject is both limited and empowered by its recognition of the force of collective realities.¹³ As such, he appears in histories of French literature as a transitional figure between the nineteenth-century Naturalist and the mid-twentieth-century existentialist novels.

The nature of collective experience is central to the other major novel cycle of the inter-war period, the 27-volume Les Hommes de bonne volonté (published 1932-46), in which Jules Romains tried to integrate the theories of unanimist collective realities developed in his pre-war poetry (see above, p. 181) with an account of history in the making, based on the realist model.¹⁴ The two volumes (15 and 16) which deal with the battle of Verdun are thematically and structurally central. They illustrate unanimist principles in the sense that the sum of the limited and distorted individual narrative points of view before and during the battle is less than the whole, transcendent overview of their collective relationships. The cycle of novels strikes an uneasy balance between fatalistic submission to contingent, uncontrollable forces and faith in the possibility of individual action which might channel these forces in directions beneficial to the collectivity.

By the mid-1930s one of the clearest signs of the heightened awareness of the novel's engagement with modern history was that of the complex, difficult relationship between the Surrealists and the French Communist Party.¹⁵ By that time Aragon was the sole survivor in the Party of those members of the group who had joined in 1927, and his support for the theory of socialist realism alienated them still further. Aragon used the term to describe Antoine Bloyé (1933), the first novel by his fellow Communist Paul Nizan (1905-40). Whereas Aragon considered socialist realism to be the means to bring together the political and cultural levels of revolutionary struggle, Breton thought it a sterile dogma indicative of the Party's subservience to Stalinist cultural orthodoxy. In Pour un réalisme socialiste (1935), Aragon claimed that the Surrealists had sought to submit Marxism to Freudian theory without regard to socio-economic conditions. But like Breton (in Nadja, 1928), he was the author of a classic Surrealist prose text.¹⁶ In Le Paysan de Paris (1926), a narrator creates from chance encounters and observations triggered during visits to the Passage de l'Opéra, scheduled for demolition, and the Buttes-Chaumont gardens, a collage of dialogues, memories, inventories and newspaper cuttings which reinvent the city as an adventure of the imagination. With his conversion to socialist realism, Aragon did not, however, simply abandon the effort to create a new type of novel which Le Paysan de Paris had represented.

During the 1930s Aragon published Les Cloches de Bâle (1934) and Les Beaux Quartiers (1936), the first two of a cycle of novels which would be called Le Monde réel. Les Cloches de Bâle shows the condition of three women in French society between 1897 and 1912 (the latter being the date of the Basle Congress of European Socialists, which gave the novel its title). Diane de Nettencourt is a high-class prostitute whose life illustrates the corruption, duplicity and waste inherent in the bourgeois capitalist system. Clara is the emerging proletariat and Catherine represents that sector of the bourgeoisie that tried and failed to rebel against its class through social and political education. In contrast, the epilogue introduces the German militant Clara Zetkin as a model of the new emancipated political woman. In Les Beaux Quartiers, the classical fictional device of two brothers following opposing paths, one towards wealth and power, the other towards left-wing political commitment, is used to represent pre-war Paris, its Belle Epoque decadence and its political agitation. The novels have a political objective absent from Le Paysan de Paris but draw on a variety of narrative forms and tones already present in Aragon's work of the 1920s.¹⁷

The other essential figure of French socialist realism, the militant novelist and journalist Paul Nizan, had already established his Communist credentials with his attacks on colonialism in Aden Arabie (1931) and on the idealist philosophical tradition of the French university system in Les Chiens de garde (1932) when he published Antoine Bloyé (1933).¹⁸ This novel recounts the life of a railwayman who betrays his working-class origins in favour of integration with the petty bourgoisie and pays, through alienation and solitude, the price of his lack of political lucidity. His life is analysed by his son, compassionate towards his politically uneducated and manipulated father but aware, as a committed Communist, of the ideological mechanisms which have led him to betray his class. This problem of the complexities and self-deceptions of political commitment, and the consequent need for lucid self-criticism, is taken further in La Conspiration (1938), Nizan's most accomplished novel.¹⁹ He broke with the French Communist Party in September 1939 following the signing of the German—Soviet non-aggression pact and was, as a result, denigrated as a traitor by the Party (and, in particular, by Aragon).

The commitment to socialist realism created difficulties for Communist novelists working within a culture which had not yet carried out its own revolution and whose reading public was therefore from the Marxist point of view an accomplice to the forms of sophistry and mystification by which the ruling class maintained its position. The need to show the development of the proletarian class consciousness from which revolution would spring, to analyse the economic and historical factors which produced the situation in which characters found themselves, and to show how the forces of reaction worked from mysterious centres of power to frustrate the emergence of a revolutionary situation—all these created difficult issues of narrative technique in a culture in which pre- (or counter-) revolutionary narrative traditions were so strongly established.

It is hardly surprising, given the pressure of circumstances, that Aragon and Nizan made use of mechanisms readily available in the French nineteenth-century realist tradition, even though it represented the triumph of the bourgeois ideology to which they were opposed. These mechanisms included the use of the Balzacian omniscient narrator, able to relate individual action to the wider socio-historical context; the description of places and objects onto which a Marxist perspective of economic determinism might be grafted; the creation of characters as types representative of class commitments; and the representation of the city and its streets and buildings as signs of the social organisation enacted there. As a result, Aragon and Nizan were attacked for relaying a revolutionary message through conservative narrative techniques, and the seriousness with which they struggled with the issues of narrative technique and the interest of the solutions they brought were overlooked.²⁰ Only from the mid-1950s did different historical circumstances make it possible to consider these issues from new perspectives. These included Aragon's own fiction from 1956, and Nizan's rehabilitation, begun in 1960 with the famous preface by Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-80) to a new edition of Aden Arabie and extended by the rediscovery of Chiens de garde in the student upheavals of May 1968.

In addition to their political novels, Nizan and Aragon were essential figures in the controversies which in the course of the 1930s increasingly polarised French intellectuals. If, at the beginning of the decade, the ‘spirit of 1930’ was for many of the younger generation of intellectuals still a largely-unfocused rejection of contemporary political and social structures, by the mid-1930s polarisation had taken place on political lines. The choice appeared clear between the communist/socialist rapprochement, which led in 1936 to the election of the Popular Front government under Léon Blum, and the conservative Right, which aligned itself with the fascist opposition to this development. The outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936 was a defining moment in this process of polarisation in the period leading up the Second World War.²¹

The work and political activity of André Malraux (1901-70) was directly involved with these events and the issues they raised.²² Like Gide in the Congo, Malraux had discovered in the Far East the decline of European culture, and in the alien gaze of the colonised he saw reflected the crisis of Western bourgeois individualism (La Tentation de l'Occident, 1926). With the death of God there was no universal human nature created in His image and likeness. There was only the human condition, the tragic state of being in an unstable world. With no prospect of an afterlife, the choice was either to reconcile oneself to living in a meaningless world of atomised subjectivities or to struggle to create new meanings through revolt against the tragic vision of human destiny.

For those who chose struggle, the historical situation in which they did so made available a further choice between individual and collective action. In Malraux's novels the characters who act seek either to project into the world the values of self-realisation or to submit these values to a collective discipline which will transform political and social reality for the group with which they identify. The tensions between the two forms of action, between what Malraux presents as the anarchist urge to be and the communist urge to do, underpin the structure as well as the ideological and ontological debates which the novels enact. In La Condition humaine (1933), the representatives of both types of action within the revolutionary community engaged in the Communist uprising in Shanghai in April 1927 are doomed in advance, victims of the political expediency of the Communist International in Moscow, which sacrifices them to its own wider strategy of class alliances with bourgeois parties. In this situation the dichotomy between being and doing is transcended only negatively, in the faith in the value of martyrdom, and the belief in the right to choose how one dies, which unite the two groups.

The vision of hope, tragic in La Condition humaine, is epic in L'Espoir (1937), in keeping with the fact that in 1937 the outcome of the Spanish Civil War was still uncertain. Between the anarchists whose commitment to a personal ethic of immediate and absolute freedom leads only to the lyrical illusions of the initial phase of the conflict (Part I), and the Communists whose collective discipline and organisation, however important strategically, threaten the ideals for which the war is being waged, certain characters (Manuel, Magnin, Garcia, Scali) represent in different forms the ambition to produce effective military and political action which embodies an idealism of liberty and fraternity.

For Catholic novelists the essential issue during this period was not the death of God but the mystery of His existence. In the work of François Mauriac (1885-1970), the certainties and doubts of modern Catholic faith and, in particular, the difficult relationship between free will and divine knowledge, underpin the theory and practice of fiction.²³

With Le Baiser au lépreux (1922), a tragic allegory of marital incompatibility whose conflict between creative and destructive dynamics can be resolved only in self-sacrifice, the essential themes, types and settings of Mauriac's fiction are in place. In Thérèse Desqueyroux (1927), Mauriac explored technical and ontological issues involved in the relationship between author and character. On the one hand, Thérèse extends the movement towards the greater psychological indeterminism of characters which Mauriac (like Gide before him, notably in Les Caves du Vatican) had seen as the legacy of Dostoievsky and the Russian novel, and which might express what Mauriac thought of as the illogicality of life. On the other, she inherits the Jansenist predestination which imprisoned Phèdre in a logic of destructive action. In the stifling, claustrophobic physical and moral landscape of the materialistic provincial society in which much of Mauriac's fiction is set, her solitary confinement, real and symbolic, concentrates the tensions of her struggle to find, within the narrow range of freedoms created for her by Mauriac's subtle, flexible use of narrative point of view, her essential but indefinable self in the face of the destiny which drives her to destroy herself and others.

In a sequel, La Fin de la nuit (1935), Mauriac attempted to write the happy ending of her redemption but stopped short because, as he put it in his preface, he was unable to see the priest who would receive Thérèse's confession. The Communist Nizan saw this as the resistance and protest of the novelist against the theologian, proof that the aesthetic demands of Mauriac's system of characterisation blocked the religious apologetics and that this impasse devalued his fiction and theology. The existentialist Sartre saw it as an example of Mauriac's bad faith, denying freedom to his characters to create themselves, through his authorial omniscience, and disguising this denial by means of the ambiguities of his narrative point of view.

Georges Bernanos (1888-1948), unlike Mauriac, sided with the traditionalists against the modernists in the controversies which divided the Catholic Church in the 1920s, and, more than Mauriac, he drew for his fiction on themes central to the Catholic revival at the turn of the century. He stressed the metaphysical reality and power of evil, the need for a militant faith with which to sustain the relentless struggle against it and the importance of willed submission of the self to God's hidden purposes. In Journal d'un curé de campagne (1936) the curé of Ambricourt keeps a diary which recounts his own version of Christ's agony on the Way of the Cross. Like Christ, he experiences the anguish of physical and moral suffering through a series of struggles against multiple forms of darkness (his own illness, the incomprehension of the villagers, loneliness, the temptation of suicide). In this novel, thematic elements and stylistic features present from the beginning in Bernanos's fiction (the importance of childhood, the relationship between natural and supernatural, and between physical and spiritual) achieved a new depth through the use of the first-person diary form, both because of the confrontation it permitted between the priest's experience and the trials of his faith, and through its erasures and omissions, which suggest the priest's anguish at the invisibility of God.²⁴

Despite their holding different viewpoints, both Mauriac and Bernanos found in the reality of faith a firm framework within which to explore the limitations of nineteenth-century models of the psychology of individualism. In exploring the complexity and difficulty of faith, they confirmed their own commitment to this individualism. One result of this was that both distanced themselves (albeit in different ways and to different degrees) from what they saw as the failure of the Catholic Church to dissociate itself from fascism. This relationship between Christian commitment and the craft of fiction was one manifestation of the growing recognition by intellectuals during the 1930s of the need to break down the barriers between action, writing and professional or confessional philosophy.

Benda and Nizan had taken prominent parts in this debate but in the final years of the inter-war period it was Sartre, versed in the German philosophical tradition from Kant to Heidegger and a committed atheist, who produced in La Nausée (1938) the most wide-ranging attack on the philosophical system which underpinned the French novel.²⁵ In a world which the lack of religious faith leaves bereft of inherent structure and necessity, the relationships in which we invest meanings—those between words and objects, objects and people, body and mind, past and present—prove to be no more than reassuring conventions designed to keep at bay the arbitrary nature of existence. The narrator, Roquentin, experiences a series of panic attacks at his discovery of existence without meaning or necessity, until he finally understands, listening to the jazz song ‘Some of these Days’, that art exists in a radically different form from that of other objects. Whereas objects simply exist, brutish and shapeless, art is; human creativity can set up a model of a coherent, necessary world, simply by practising variations of form, on a theme of its own choice. Existence precedes essence, but art brings both together. The philosophy of existentialism, of which Sartre was, from the publication of La Nausée, the best known representative, required the individual to recognise and accept the terrible but empowering freedom of contingency. The outbreak of the Second World War in September 1939 would give a dramatic new relevance to existentialism's ambition to fuse writing, thought and action in the world.

AFTER 1939: COMMITMENTS AND INTERROGATIONS

In May 1940, the German army swept through Northern Europe, reaching Paris on 14 June. The invasion brought an end to the eight months of phoney war which had followed the declaration of hostilities on 3 September 1939. It triggered a mass French exodus southwards during the summer of 1940 and, in association with these dramatic events, a substantial literature of primarily documentary interest.²⁶ Following the armistice, the literature of collaboration returned to simple explanations already familiar from the débâcle of 70 years earlier. Crushing military defeat was no more than France deserved for the decadence of the pre-war years. The experience was an opportunity for self-appraisal and renewal or for a return to the supposedly essential virtues of traditional, rural France.

Among the most famous literary figures associated at the time with the Vichy regime, collaboration took different forms and involved various levels of commitment. La Solstice de juin (1941) by Henry de Montherlant (1896-1972) contained themes which supported collaborationist ideology, but in his own life Montherlant placed the lucidity and independence of the creative writer above collaboration. Drieu la Rochelle became the editor of Gallimard's prestigious pre-war literary journal the Nouvelle Revue Française, which published during the period 1940-3 a mixture of pro-Vichy polemic and ostensibly apolitical literary criticism. Céline produced a series of ferocious anti-Semitic pamphlets. The journalist Lucien Rebatet (1903-72) was Céline's equal in anti-Semitism and wrote a violently anti-Republican account of the final years of the Third Republic, Les Décombres (1942). But it was Robert Brasillach (1909-45), as editor of the fascist Je suis partout, who most consistently promoted the fascist cause and who, along with Drieu, paid the heaviest price when the liberation of Paris in August 1944 ushered in the épuration, the purges of collaborators, real or invented. Montherlant was investigated but simply forbidden to publish for a year. Céline fled into exile in Denmark. Rebatet, condemned to death in 1946, was reprieved and, in the course of the six years he spent in prison, wrote Les Deux Étendards, a novel on his sentimental education into cynicism and disillusionment. Drieu committed suicide and Brasillach was executed by firing squad after a trial which became a focus for the post-war debate on the responsibilities of the writer.

The literature of resistance grew slowly at first in a country divided (until November 1942) between the Northern, occupied zone and the Southern, ‘free’ zone administered from Vichy.²⁷ For the reasons we shall see, poetry was the exception. In fiction, the emergence of Resistance sentiment achieved a significant break-through with the creation in 1941 of the clandestine Éditions de Minuit, whose editor, Vercors (pseudonym of Jean Bruller, 1902-91), wrote and published the collection's first novel, Le Silence de la mer (1942).²⁸ In the novel, silence is the most powerful form of passive resistance to the occupier and the most eloquent expression of the victory of French humanist values over a hateful ideology. Silence thwarts the efforts of the francophile German officer von Ebrennac to blur the distinctions between friend and enemy and forces him to face the evidence of his self-deception.²⁹

In the area of active resistance, Pilote de guerre (1942) by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (1900-44) showed the efficacy in the context of war of the intellectual and spiritual humanism developed in the adventure of aviation, with its heightened awareness of the interdependence of the individual and collective and of the contrasting beauties of earth and sky. These themes were already in evidence in his pre-war novels (notably Courrier Sud, 1928, and Vol de nuit, 1931).³⁰ In Drôle de jeu (1945), Roger Vailland (1907-65) created one of the major novels of the Occupation years, with its analysis of the nature of Resistance and language in occupied Paris.³¹

Under the Occupation, literature was primarily one branch of the political and military activity of collaboration or resistance. With the liberation of Paris and the end of the war it returned to its more specialised forms of intervention in the cultural domain. The immediate post-war period was dominated by the existentialist sensibility (see above, pp. 190-2), in which concepts such as commitment, responsibility and situation, erasing the boundaries between philosophy, literature and action, had acquired enormous prestige through the Resistance effort. The publication of L'Être et le néant (1943) and L'Âge de raison and Le Sursis (both 1945), the first two volumes of his intended trilogy of novels Les Chemins de la liberté, and the first performances of his plays Les Mouches (1943) and Huis Clos (1945), made Sartre a paradigm of this sensibility. No sooner was Paris liberated than he began working to establish in the cultural domain the existentialist values which he hoped would prevent a return to the bankrupt values of the pre-war Third Republic he had attacked in La Nausée.³² He set about founding a literary review, Les Temps Modernes, whose first issue appeared in October 1945 and in which he outlined the theory of littérature engagée, which he then revised and expanded in Qu'est-ce que la littérature? (1947).

Within the theory of littérature engagée the relationship between commitment and literature, between political and aesthetic freedom, remained a difficult issue, but as the post-war period settled into Cold War confrontation between the United States and Soviet Union, the search for a third way between the two blocs led Sartre to engage his theories of situation, choice and action on behalf of the Rassemblement Démocratique Révolutionnaire (RDR) launched in 1948. His departure from the group in October 1949 was a clear sign of the dissensions undermining the unity of purpose which the Resistance effort had encouraged. Another was his disagreement with Camus following the publication of the latter's L'Homme révolté (1951).

As the author of L'Étranger, Le Mythe de Sisyphe (both 1942) and La Peste (1947), and as a journalist who had worked in the Resistance movement, Albert Camus was a major figure in the post-war literary debate. Since he too rejected the prospect of an afterlife and believed that the only certainty was death, the essential issue was how one lived with this knowledge. Awaiting death in his cell, Meursault (L'Étranger) discovers through his confrontation with the priest the meaning of the absurd and with it the knowledge of the significance of the present when it is emptied of that form of resignation which is hope for the future.³³ In La Peste, this lesson acquired on the individual level takes collective form through the allegorisation of the experience of the Occupation. Faced with the moral and metaphysical absurdity of arbitrary, unjustified suffering, the only choice is between solitude and solidarity, and the only solution is revolt. The journalist Rambert initially refuses solidarity, only to discover through his experience of a child's death the obligation of collective resistance. Putting into practice Camus's own reformulation (in L'Homme révolté) of the Cartesian cogito ergo sum, ‘I revolt, therefore I am’, he joins Rieux and Tarrou in their ethics of service. Human happiness, the goal of ethics in a world without God, is a ceaseless struggle against the forces of the plague and cannot be achieved alone.

Transposed into the political philosophy of L'Homme révolté, the two fundamental values of revolt—happiness and freedom—placed Camus at odds with Marxism's commitment to scientific models of historical materialism, which for Camus led inevitably to political and intellectual terrorism. The result was a public dispute with Sartre, more closely identified with the Communist cause, and the relative decline of Camus's reputation in literary, intellectual and academic circles in which Communist sympathies were still powerful. When this dominant position of Marxist thought began itself to be called into question, notably from the late 1970s, Camus's critical fortune enjoyed a strong revival. The critical and commercial acclaim which greeted the publication in 1994 of Le Premier Homme, the strongly autobiographical novel on which Camus was working in the year prior to his death, powerfully re-affirmed this revival.

Sartre's withdrawal from the RDR and his break with Camus confirmed that the sense of common purpose which had brought writers together during the Occupation was being eroded by their post-war dissensions in the political sphere. At the same time, the legend of the French Resistance was serving as an important source of legitimacy for the coalition of left-of-centre parties in government during the Fourth Republic (1946-58) and for de Gaulle, who was returned to power in May 1958 to resolve the Algerian conflict. Significantly, certain major texts intended to project the forms of the prise de conscience that occupation and resistance had produced were not completed. Sartre had intended Les Chemins de la liberté to provide a more collective destination for the escape from contingency than Roquentin's Proustian idealisation of art in La Nausée, but though the third volume, La Mort dans l'âme, appeared in 1949, the fourth and final volume, La Dernière Chance, remained unfinished. In the face of the difficulties encountered in determining a practice of the novel which would reconcile existentialist freedom and Marxist theory, Sartre's faith in littérature engagée declined in favour of more direct political commitments and a critique of literature which led him towards autobiographical writing (Les Mots, 1953). Similarly, Malraux failed to complete Le Combat avec l'ange and Aragon rewrote Les Communistes, publishing the definitive version only in 1967.

Committed writing remained a powerful idea among the left-wing intellectuals from whom the Resistance movement had drawn its main support. But with the emergence of the Cold War, writers on the political Left were increasingly faced with the choice between responsibility for a general commitment to humanist values on the one hand and allegiance to a particular party line on the other. Communist writers were expected to adhere to an increasingly intransigent Stalinist orthodoxy of socialist realism which left unresolved the difficult problem of the relationship between from and content in literature. Though several major novelists practised forms of socialist realism in the early post-war period (notably Roger Vailland and Pierre Courtade³⁴), the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 and the beginnings of de-Stalinisation in the Soviet Union further weakened its credibility.

The legend of the French Resistance was relayed through a wide range of popular cultural forms until the late 1960s—until, that is, the first post-war generation reached maturity and de Gaulle, baffled by the events of May 1968 and defeated in the referendum of April 1969, withdrew from political life. In the novel, however, this myth of the Resistance as national unity, heroism and self-sacrifice was challenged from an early stage after the end of hostilities. The novels of Roger Nimier (1925-61), Les Épées (1948) and Le Hussard bleu (1950), proposed a distinctly unheroic reality of collaboration and offered a sardonic, disillusioned commentary on the humanist commitment of much writing of the immediate post-war period. Marcel Aymé (1902-67) in Uranus (1949), set at the time of the Liberation, presents the Resistance ideal as an official discourse to which lip-service must be paid in order to stay healthy at a time when the country is embroiled in vicious settlings of political scores and when the Resistance groups are now rivals for power. In Au bon beurre (1952), Jean Dutourd (b. 1920) ridicules the opportunistic switching of allegiances as supporters of Vichy and Pétain seek to establish Resistance credentials with which to turn the épuration to their own advantage. In these texts the universal humanist ideal central to the Resistance message confronts the sordid realities of the années noires.³⁵

The most radical challenge in fiction to the dominant humanist ideal of the post-war years, however, came in the work of Samuel Beckett (1906-90).³⁶ Growing up as a Protestant in Dublin was an early experience of life at the edges of a world in change. This was reinforced from 1928 by his move to Paris where he made contact with the brilliant, cosmopolitan avant-garde gravitating around James Joyce and fostering wide-ranging literary experimentation. In Beckett this was filtered through his readings of literary and philosophical tradition (most notably Dante, Proust, Joyce, Descartes, Pascal, Sartre, Wittgenstein). He began writing short stories, poems, essays, translations, and produced his first novel, Murphy (1938), which went largely unnoticed in the immediate pre-war context. His wartime experience in the Resistance confronted him with the bankruptcy of the ideals which European culture claimed to uphold and in 1943, whilst in hiding, he wrote his last novel in English, Watt, a comic investigation of the ‘meaning of unmeaning’ which would dominate his subsequent work.

In the immediate post-war years Beckett's writing flowered in an extraordinarily productive period which included Mercier et Camier (1946, published 1970), his trilogy of novels, Molloy, Malone meurt and L'Innommable (1948-9, published 1951-3), and, for the theatre, En attendant Godot (1948, performed 1952). In Molloy, two monologues recount two symmetrical searches, Molloy's for his mother, Moran's for Molloy. Both peter out in atrophy and the impossibility of discovering the source of meaning and being. The text makes the same forward journey towards an ending which may or may not be merely another false departure. Imprisoned in the chain of being whose law is unexplained suffering and in the arbitrary, self-contained system of language whose relationship to the world is a mystery, the desire for silence and urge to speak are all that remain. In Malone meurt, Malone invents absurd doubles so as to sustain a flow of words with which to keep the game in motion on the unlikely chance that some break through the barrier of language into meaning will occur. In L'Innommable, the first-person narrator dismisses all previous selves and their pointless searches, and struggles on through new and increasingly grotesque incarnations in which words, emptied of their traditional claim to narrate and invent, are voices in the mind, saturating the silence yet without belonging to the self. Beckett's trilogy conveyed in unique depth the philosophical and literary interrogations of modern experience and, in doing so, facilitated the wide-ranging challenge to the novel tradition emerging in the 1950s as existentialism's relationship with literature began to lose credibility.

NEW NOVEL COMMITMENTS

Existentialism's influence waned as dissension increased among writers associated with it, as did the public desire to draw a veil over the bitter divisions of the Occupation and épuration. Emphasis in the novel moved away from political and ethical commitments towards concerns about language and narrative technique. These had been central issues in the work of Proust and Gide and were a significant legacy of French translations of the Russian novel, but the political crisis from 1930 had made them appear less urgent than engagement with the ideological divisions with which Europe was confronted. In practice, however, novelists with a political, religious or philosophical position to convey were led more, not less, to address questions of narrative technique. Céline had explored the use of fractured narratives and innovative language and syntax. The novels of the socialist Aragon and of the fascist Drieu la Rochelle had illustrated ways in which an apparently unproblematic representation of perceived truths about the world may be undermined by the language of fiction with which they are represented.

The 1930s had also seen the discovery by French writers of a whole series of major American novels in translation, beginning in 1931 with Faulkner's Sanctuary and continuing with the works of Hemingway, Dos Passos, Steinbeck and Caldwell. The techniques associated with these novels—simultaneity of action, narrative fragmentation and impersonality, and the assimilation of forms of popular culture such as the cinema and the detective novel—whether seen as symptoms of the alienation of modern civilisation or of the freedom enjoyed in a culture unfettered by literary traditions, were gradually assimilated into French narrative practice. Malraux's L'Espoir, with its rapid shifts of narrative focus, is a well-known case in point. Sartre considered Dos Passos's U.S.A. a model for the integration of history and fiction and adopted in Les Chemins de la liberté certain of its technical features, such as the simultaneous presentation of events. In L'Étranger, Camus used narrative procedures derived in part from Hemingway to show that the model of psychological interiority used by the prosecuting counsel to secure the death penalty for Mersault entirely failed to explain Mersault's action.

Wider intellectual developments in science and philosophy had also undermined the positivist relationship between consciousness and the world from which nineteenth-century realism had derived its mimetic ambition. The phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty, with its emphasis on the subjectivity of perception and representation, was providing an alternative philosophical context for fiction to that of the German philosophy on which existentialism had drawn. By the early 1950s a substantial body of narrative theory and practice operating within a changing intellectual framework was available to novelists hostile to the concept of existentialist littérature engagée and ready to embark on a new phase of experimentation.

By the end of the decade, this experimentation had achieved a collective status in what was by then known as the nouveau roman.³⁷ The term was adopted as a means of grouping together novelists whose writing during the 1950s appeared to share a determination to work out in the practice of fiction the implications of the cultural and intellectual changes which had taken place in the period 1930-50. As is frequently the case with literary labels, the term referred more to a series of shared objections to traditional forms of the novel than to any common programme of writing. The new novelists rejected the plots, characters, linear chronologies and omniscient narrators of the nineteenth-century tradition, which had expressed that century's belief in a knowable, representable world of which man was the centre and purpose. From this perspective the existentialist committed novel was no more than the latest form of this outmoded anthropomorphism and was dismissed in favour of a commitment to explore, from within, the theoretical and practical issues involved in the production of fiction from the raw materials of impressions, perceptions and feelings. Characters, far from denoting real people in a real world, were the supports on which to hang the exploration of mental states and the production of language. The nouveau roman sought to forge a new relationship between writer and reader on the basis of their complicity in the adventure of writing, an adventure in which the creation of narrative becomes in a self-referential way the subject of narrative.

Not surprisingly, this radical departure from a literary tradition in which the novel was expected to enact serious ethical or political dilemmas judged to be central to the human condition was initially attacked as antihumanist or dismissed as a self-indulgent game. The new novelists (notably Robbe-Grillet in Pour un nouveau roman, 1963) responded that to oblige the human mind to recognise that the world has no inherent meaning or stability on which to base identity, knowledge or absolute moral values, to free it from complacent acceptance of the comfortable falsehoods it prefers to these difficult truths, was a profoundly political act and more authentically humanist (in the widest sense of dealing with the reality of human experience) than the committed literature to which it was opposed.

In the early novels of Alain Robbe-Grillet (b. 1922), a narrator's eye charts the material world in meticulous detail, either investing it with obsessions or desires or travelling across its impenetrable surface.³⁸ The traditional role of description—that of establishing relationships between an observer and a meaningful universe—is dispensed with in texts which at the same time rework some of the novel's most stereotypical genres and myths (the detective story and the Oedipus myth in Les Gommes of 1953, the novel of adultery and the colonial novel in La Jalousie of 1957). In Dans le labyrinthe (1959) a complex network of narrative paths and passages link three labyrinths, those of an anonymous town, a delirious character's mind, and an author's creation of a text. At specific junctions in the text the reader is moved from one labyrinth to another and continually obliged to re-establish bearings as the signposts operative at one narrative level (the soldier's fear and alienation in his efforts to deliver his parcel) suddenly stop working in another (the text's foregrounding of its own manoeuvres). From La Maison de rendezvous (1965) Robbe-Grillet's novels combine and interrogate the fictions triggered by the most powerful collective myths (sadomasochistic eroticism, political revolution, secret agencies), cultural objects (paintings, poems, musical arrangements), mathematical figures (triangles, circles). Within each text the construction of meaning is provisional, frustrating the reader's search for reassuring fictions with which to counter the anxieties and unintelligibilities of modern experience.

The work of Michel Butor (b. 1926) represents in even wider terms this continual exploration of the nature of writing. Beginning with novels, each of which explored new forms of fiction's internal architectures, and with literary criticism distinguished by its cosmopolitan range, Butor's writing extended into other forms of aesthetic and cultural production (including music, painting, utopian philosophy, ethnography, dreams), each relationship a new exploration of language's capacity to produce and organise text. In his first four novels, he focused on the nature of fictional time and space.³⁹ In Passage de Milan (1954), which reconstitutes twelve hours in the lives of the inhabitants of a Parisian block of flats, the simultaneity of chronology and architecture structures the narrative. In Emploi du temps (1956), the narrator keeps a diary in an attempt to understand the physical and psychological geography of a city which threatens to envelop him in its labyrinthine streets and multiple layers of time between present and legendary past. La Modification (1957) explores the mechanisms of second-person narration and the relationship between internal and chronological time. In Degrés (1960), the attempt to recount the hour of a school lesson forces the narrator to face up to the extent to which experience evades language and to the consequential need to invent the real.

On her own admission, the entire work of Nathalie Sarraute (b. 1900) was present in embryonic form in her first novel, Tropismes, published in 1939 but largely unknown until its second edition (1957).⁴⁰ Tropism is the response of an organism, especially a plant, to an external stimulus and Sarraute used the term as a metaphor for the intense, pre-verbal psychological activity situated on the edge of consciousness and of which the family unit is the most common and most powerful trigger. In Sarraute, the family is the theatre for the ceaseless movement of advance and retreat produced when two centres of tropistic life enter into contact with each other. In each novel Sarraute takes up the challenge to create a verbal form for these indefinable movements, an internal ‘sub-conversation’ which negotiates with that public, social discourse whose polite, formulaic platitudes are designed to neutralise its complex, elusive and potentially explosive energies. These negotiations do not produce characters or plots of the type the traditional psychological novel displayed, nor the laws of an essential self grounded in involuntary memory on behalf of which Proust had challenged the earlier practice of the psychological novel. Instead they reveal a new type of psychological material, with the invention of a language for the basic, instinctive urges of attack and defence, embrace and rejection, which constitute the power struggles in which human beings are ceaselessly engaged.

The publication of Moderato cantabile (1958) drew Marguerite Duras (1914-96) into brief and provisional association with the nouveau roman group, for the novel marked a break with the more traditional forms of characterisation through which her earlier work had represented woman's struggle against the confinements of patriarchal society.⁴¹ The experiment was the vehicle for a more radical refusal of such authoritarianism. The piercing cry which interrupts the music lesson in Moderato cantabile triggers a series of encounters between Anne Desbaresdes and Chauvin which, through the imaginary reconstruction of the murder in the café, lead Anne gradually to destroy her conformist, externally imposed social self in order to attain an absolute form of freedom and self-knowledge. Le Ravissement de Lol V. Stein (1964) takes the formal experimentation and, with it, the understanding of woman's emancipation a stage further. Abandoned by her fiancé for another woman, the heroine is so entranced by the power of the love she feels between them that she experiences abandonment as a form of liberation. Released from the prison of her socially-defined role as member of a couple into a new and creative loss of identity, she is free to share as observer in the mystical, total power of lovers' passion.⁴² The loss of identity, the breakdown into fragmented states of mind which this self-effacement produces, is expressed through the silences or gaps which frustrate meaning and narration but in which the narrative voice seeks to translate the unknown of female experience.

The novels of Claude Simon (b. 1913) show the continual search for narrative procedures able to describe the inscription in the present of the multiple forms of memory (personal experience, family archive, collective history) and the ways in which the language which effects this fusion of present and past time in turn generates and structures the production of narration.⁴³ Thematic elements common to the sequence of novels embrace the major themes of modern writing (the nature of time, the presence and displacement of desire, the awareness of death), but with each novel, Simon deepens his analysis of their role in the operations of the mind and in the processes of writing itself. A brief comparison between, for example, Malraux's L'Espoir and Simon's Le Palace, in which an experience of the Spanish Civil War forms the common narrative base, demonstrates the extent to which Simon's fiction abandons the existentialist values sustaining that of Malraux in favour of a fatalistic initiation into the lack of human control over cycles of history repeating themselves regardless.

Simon's central work, Histoire (1967), draws together the strands of the exploration of the past contained in the earlier novels. Through the description of a collection of postcards sent by the narrator's father to his mother and the evocation of a twenty-four hour period in the narrator's life, the text constructs a complex collage of language in which the tension is sustained between representation of human feeling in search of an ever-elusive autobiography and the capacity of language to produce text through its own material, non-representational associations.⁴⁴ Hence Simon's departure from the traditional conventions (chapters, paragraphs, punctuation), which served to organise works of fiction but are quite inadequate to address these operations of the mind and language.

The sustained analysis of universal themes of fiction gives Simon's work an epic range and power lacking in other members of the new novelists group. His increasingly radical reflection on the act of writing has taken his work beyond fiction in the accepted sense, beyond representation of the events of personal or collective memory to the play of language itself, as it defers satisfaction of the aspiration to stable definition and meaning. Instead, the text is structured on the basis of internal formal design, in a manner related to the modern painting with which Simon is so familiar.

The unpredictable exploits and failings of memory are also an important element of the work of Robert Pinget (b. 1919) for they combine to generate narrative sequences which unfold, miscarry, return, lead in other directions or nowhere, scraps of conversation in which the act of speech is as central as the content.⁴⁵ In L'Inquisitoire (1962), a half-deaf servant is interrogated about his masters, and the wanderings through the labyrinth of his memory, prompted by the questioning, lead to no resolution of the enigma but to a reconstruction of the process of story-telling. Pinget's increasingly refined exploration of the nature of narrative voices bears the mark of his friendship and collaboration with Beckett. Claude Ollier (b. 1922) used some of the most familiar narrative forms (the colonial novel in Mise en scène, 1958; science fiction in La Vie sur Epsilon, 1972) to undermine the description in traditional fiction of the narrator's relationship to the world and to the act of writing.⁴⁶ Claude Mauriac (1914-96, son of François Mauriac), whose critical texts L'Alittérature contemporaine (1958) and De la littérature à l'alittérature (1969) made him one of the most informed commentators on contemporary writing, built on his study of Proust (Proust par lui-même, 1953) to show the nature of subjective time through the structure of fiction itself, notably in Le Dîner en ville (1959) and La Marquise sortit à cinq heures (1961). The eleven volumes of his memoirs, Le Temps immobile (1974-91) constitute a vast reflection on the nature of sensation and memory.

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Public perception of the ‘new novelists’ as a coherent group continued through the 1960s and 1970s but their work increasingly diverged. Simon (Les Géorgiques, 1981) and Sarraute (Disent les imbéciles, 1978) continued to produce work of major importance by extending the intellectual and formal parameters established in their work of the 1950s. With Mobile (1962) and 6 810 000 litres d'eau par seconde (1965), Butor abandoned the novel in favour of freer forms of textual production. Robbe-Grillet and Duras turned increasingly to film-making and the possibilities it offered for the creative interplay of their written and filmic texts.⁴⁷ But quite apart from the intrinsic value and interest of their work, the impact of the original group of new novelists in an increasingly mediatised French literary and educational environment has been significant. Their active and productive relationships with the institutions of literary criticism and the teaching of literature in higher education both in France and abroad has ensured a wide circulation of their commitment to a more creative role for the reader in the practice of fiction and encouraged the fundamental reappraisal of the work of earlier novelists which has taken place since the 1950s, notably under the impulse of the nouvelle critique with which the nouveau roman was initially associated.

As the ‘new novelists’ pursued their different practices of fiction, other experimental writing parallel to theirs created an analogous group identity. In November 1960, a group of writers and mathematicians committed to research into literary forms with the potential to generate new types of writing formed Oulipo (the Ouvroir de littérature potentielle).⁴⁸ Its most important member was Raymond Queneau (1903-76), its (subsequently) most important recruit Georges Perec (1936-82). In 1959, when he achieved the huge success of Zazie dans le métro, a modern Parisian version of Alice in Wonderland, Queneau had been a major literary figure for nearly thirty years. In 1933 he had published his first novel, Le Chiendent, which he began as an attempt to translate Descartes's Discours de la méthode into spoken French. This attempt to end the linguistic divorce between academic philosophy and the language of the streets was another example of the ambition to transform philosophy from a theory of knowledge into a committed analysis of existence and was contemporaneous with Céline's radical extension of narrative language. In addition, its playful yet serious combination of mathematical constraints against which to construct fiction—the text consists of 91 (7 × 13) sections—made it a precursor of Oulipo experimentation, which in 1960, as Le Chiendent had already done in 1933, sought to reject the twin legacies of Jarry's ‘science of imaginary solutions’ (which he called pataphysics) and Surrealism's automatic writing.

The Oulipo writers did not of course discover the idea that formal constraints stimulate rather than obstruct creative writing but they took it to far greater lengths than before. Their arbitrary phonetic, syntactic and alphabetical restrictions made enormous demands on the writer's ingenuity and had two main effects: first, to reaffirm the capacity of language to create texts from within its own operations and thereby shape our perceptions of reality; secondly, to free the writer from the obligation to create politically or philosophically committed literature, which for the Oulipo group was a far more alienating constraint. Perec's La Disparition (1969) is a novel written without a single ‘e’, the most common letter in French, while the same vowel is the only one used in Les Revenentes (1972). His La Vie mode d'emploi (1978) is an astonishing construction based on a mathematical puzzle known as the Magic Square, thought to have been first used by Dürer, the German Renaissance painter and engraver, of which Perec used a specially-adapted form.⁴⁹ Though such fiendish ingenuity is not in itself inherently literary, Perec combined it with an exceptional knowledge of a wide range of writing, and a powerful desire to explore the anguish of the human condition.

Perec's first novel, Les Choses (1965), was subtitled ‘une histoire des années soixante’ [‘a story/history of the 60s’], a study of the consumer ideology which for a young Parisian bourgeois couple, Jérôme and Sylvie, replaces political commitment as the form of their relationship to society. They fail to get involved in the central political issue of their youth, the Algerian War, and instead define themselves in relation to the objects of bourgeois desire as they appear in the advertisements in L'Express magazine. Les Choses is closely related to Barthes's study of social signs in Mythologies for it shows the way in which the most everyday objects are invested with meaning and participate in an economy of signs. Perec does not condemn consumer society (though with the advantage of the hindsight provided by the events of May 1968 it was widely believed that he had done so) but encourages the reader to recognise the form of its manipulations, something Jérôme and Sylvie fail to do. Les Choses was followed by two entirely different works, the hilarious Quel petit vélo à guidon chromé au fond de la cour? (1966) and the dark Un homme qui dort (1967), by the period of involvement with Oulipo and its formal and linguistic acrobatics, and by the post-Oulipo writing of his final years.

The unity within the diversity of these and other Perec texts is located at a deeper level, in the autobiographical condition of the writing, but it must already be obvious that with Perec this relationship is exceptionally complex. In W ou le souvenir d'enfance (1975) he stated that his writing was born out of the horror of the war in which his father was killed in 1940 and the concentration camp into which his mother disappeared in 1943. Dedicated to the ‘E’ which disappeared from La Disparition and to the homophonous ‘eux’ of his lost parents, it explores the relationship between autobiography and literary reconstruction, which has itself become a significant development in the contemporary novel. The oblique fragments of a remembered and imagined relationship with his parents are forms of his inner need to address the personal grief of their loss and the universal grief of the holocaust through writing, the decisive sign of presence in the world. This association of personal anguish and passion for the creative power of language gives Perec's work a depth and range which make him one of the essential literary figures of the century.

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By the late 1960s, just as the nouveau roman had established itself as the French novel's official avant-garde, taught on university syllabuses as the culmination of the experimental, self-referential tradition of fiction going back to Proust and Gide and representing what now appeared to be the central twentieth-century trend, it was caught in a crossfire of new developments: on the one hand, a return to story-telling and myth-making; on the other, more radical forms of experimentation. The commercial and critical acclaim which greeted the rewriting and re-siting of the Robinson Crusoe story by Michel Tournier (b. 1924) in Vendredi ou les limbes du Pacifique (1967), resulted from Tournier's use of a very familiar narrative to produce a powerful contemporary criticism of Western society's consumer culture and express a renewed aspiration to alternative forms of spirituality.⁵⁰ The re-working of the literary and philosophical traditions of Defoe's novel through contemporary theories of the material imagination and structuralist analysis of myth met a demand for the novel of ideas which for those unsympathetic to nouveau roman experimentation had been unanswered since the passing of the existentialist novel.

In his subsequent writing, Tournier continued to develop his interest in the German metaphysical tradition, which he had studied in Tübingen after the Second World War, exploring the themes of the ogre (Le Roi des aulnes, 1970), twinship (Les Météores, 1975), the Magi (Gaspar, Melchior et Balthazar, 1980), Gilles de Rais and Joan of Arc (Gilles et Jeanne, 1983) and exile (La Goutte d'or, 1986). Tournier described these narratives of quest and initiation by ordeal as a ‘mystic Naturalism’. On the one hand, he makes full use of nineteenth-century narrative procedures (description, character, plot). On the other, this Naturalism serves texts which, though historically located (Le Roi des aulnes, for example, set in 1938-44, reworks allegorically some of the most sinister episodes of the Second World War), present themselves as re-narrations of a timeless story, in which the novelist explores alternative forms of sexuality and social organisation.

Other forms of rejection of the technocratic direction of Western culture can be found in the work of Jean-Marie Le Clézio (b. 1940), notably in L'Extase matérielle (1967), La Guerre (1970) and Désert (1980).⁵¹ His characters share an intense commitment to the value of life and to reconciliation with the self and the natural world, continually threatened by the destructive elements of modern, technocratic civilisation. In La Guerre, the aggression of modern cities induces panic and a desperate nostalgia for an ideal, lost world in which to experience a purifying calm. It is the world from which Lalla, the heroine of Désert, is exiled to Marseilles, whose wretched squalor fails to extinguish the light and purity of her desert origins, to which she eventually returns. To the spiritual light of such communion with the elements of the natural environment corresponds the author's intense observation of the world and a prose style of diversity and virtuosity with which to inscribe its depth of meaning for a public increasingly insecure about the implications of technological advance.

Tournier's use of intertexuality and Le Clézio's poetic description of detail may be said to participate, albeit tangentially, in experimental forms of writing with which in the 1950s and 1960s the nouveau roman was identified. In contrast, Patrick Grainville (b. 1947), associated with Tournier and Le Clézio in the use his fiction makes of myth, is well known for his contempt for the nouveau roman, which he dismissed as introverted and self-seeking.⁵² His best known novel, Les Flamboyants (1974), links up with neo-Romantic primitivism and its myth of Africa, seen as the repository of ancient and more authentic force and physicality lost to the degenerate rationalism of Western, Christian culture. In Grainville's work, this otherwise well-worn literary theme is renewed by the sheer drive of his language. In its excess and vitality it evokes the transformative energies of the erotic imagination which are released when the individual makes contact, beyond the constraints of modern experience, with the submerged but still vital forces of earlier cultures.

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Another and more explicit opposition, from within, to the official modernism of the nouveau roman was forming in the late 1960s around the review Tel quel, founded in 1960 as an extension of the anti-existentialist context to which the nouveau roman had contributed. By the end of the decade, the roman tel quel had taken nouveau roman experimentation a stage further and replaced the production of fiction with the production of text. For over twenty years, Tel quel was the essential focus for the discussion of experimental writing and its relationship to radical contemporary literary, psychoanalytic and political theory.

It was in his fourth novel, Drame (1964), that Philippe Sollers extended the nouveau roman's deconstruction of traditional fictional forms.⁵³ The text alternates first-person and third-person segments of poetic prose in which a divided subject observes and narrates the production of narrative, and its relationship to the mysterious experience of identity, language and engagement with the world. The conventional linearity of narrative is abandoned for the spatial configurations of the chessboard, whose sixty-four squares are represented in the sixty-four segments of text. Compensating for this loss of sequence, on which narrative representation was traditionally based, is the freedom to explore the power of language to generate text. The political and cultural crisis of May 1968 encouraged the Tel quel group to situate the act of writing in relation to the revolutionary project (Théorie d'ensemble 1968), and to explore the link between literary and political avant-gardes in a variety of ways throughout the early 1970s. Sollers's Nombres (1968) staged in its text an opposition between what Tel quel saw as the productive, dynamic language of the Chinese ideogram and its domesticated Western counterpart, at a time when Mao's Cultural Revolution and the American crisis in Vietnam had given this opposition a powerful political reality. Lois (1972) and H (1973) continued this experimentation with the material nature of language. By the second half of the 1970s, however, Tel quel had broken with Marxism and was turning again to America, since 1945 the most important initiator of avant-garde practices in the arts.

From his intense involvement for over a decade with theoretical and practical issues relating to the nature of the avant-garde, Sollers finally concluded that the avant-garde in advanced Western societies had failed to effect social transformation and that its organic relationship to the dominant culture would prevent it from ever doing so. His conclusion marked the end of a tradition, which can be traced back to the first-generation Romantics, of the writer seeking to achieve transformation of the world through the revolutionary literary act. In 1983, the year in which Tel quel was dissolved, Sollers published Femmes, an American journalist's narration of erotic experience, the rise of feminism and the cosmopolitan extensions of mediatised cultural happenings. Within weeks, the enfant terrible of post-war French writing was up there on the bestseller lists.

MAY 1968: STRUCTURES IN THE STREETS

In many respects Tel quel was the post-war equivalent of Surrealism's pre-war attempt to bring together literary and political change. This explicit effort at convergence was only one of the forms in which the events of May 1968 impacted on French writing. Though these events failed to achieve direct political transformation of French society (the legislative elections of June 1968 returned the largest-ever Gaullist majority), they played the crucial role of bringing to the surface underlying tensions in many areas of French private and public life, with far-reaching consequences for literature.

One such consequence, the raising of feminist consciousness, is discussed in detail below (see pp. 276-93). Another was the revision of the official history of the war period which accompanied the end of the Gaullist phase of the Fifth Republic. Huge amounts of historical material began to appear which shed light on the hitherto hidden realities of the années noires.⁵⁴ For novelists who belonged to the generation born during or immediately after the war, this historical revisionism was intimately related to a search for the self: these hidden realities were those of their own parents' experience of war and Occupation, which official history had silenced.

This search made the work of Patrick Modiano (b. 1945) one of the most significant examples of 1970s writing.⁵⁵ Driven by his own cosmopolitan Franco-Jewish background to go in search of origins and to explore the collective memory, real or imaginary, of the Occupation, and by his profession to locate himself in relation to his predecessors in the novel, Modiano wrote a trilogy of novels (La Place de l'Étoile, 1968; La Ronde de nuit, 1969; Les Boulevards de ceinture, 1972) which show characters moving through a shadowy world of false names, false papers and blurred identities, biographical and moral. Marginal, stateless people slip in and out of roles of collaboration, black marketeering and Resistance as much by accident as by design (a theme also prominent in the film scenario Modiano wrote with Louis Malle for Lacombe Lucien, 1974). Villa triste (1975) inaugurated a new phase of his writing in which echoes of the Occupation period remain but in which the emphasis shifts to a more general quest in search of lost time. It is of course the Proustian theme but without the Proustian revelation of the transcendent significance of art. Building on the fragility of memory's lost traces and false trails, Modiano creates novels in which the conventions of detective fiction, autobiography and the psychological portrait are set against each other in ways which reflect the hesitations of the modern subject in the face of the unfathomable reality of experience.

The events of May 1968 themselves became the subject or context of fiction. Through them, the question of the literary mediation of specific political and social events was now raised in terms of the wide-ranging developments in French fiction since the 1950s.⁵⁶ Pascal Lainé (b. 1942) was a teacher in a lycée technique during the events and in his second novel, L'Irrévolution, he shows a teacher's efforts to communicate to working-class children in a small provincial town the revolutionary spirit and project of May 68. Their refusal to be enlisted in the political programme of this representative of a class-based culture foreign to their own obliges the teacher to recognise the inauthenticity of his political discourse, his collaboration with a system he claims to despise and, by extension, the failure of a revolution which the participants had no interest in realising. He discovers his own existentialist bad faith in a post-existentialist age in which humanist solutions of the type proposed by Sartre or Camus seem no longer credible. The working-class children are victims of the historical division in French society between those who participate in the dominant culture and those who are controlled or marginalised by it, a division increased by post-war consumerism. The novel placed in the context of May 1968 questions already raised in B. comme Barrabas (1967) about the difficulty of self-knowledge and the ambiguities of narration. In La Dentellière (1974), Lainé extended his analysis of the failed experiment in class communication by showing the doomed relationship between Pomme, a passive, silent drudge in a hairdressing salon, and Aiméry, a privileged student of the École des Chartes, who undertakes to mould her in terms of the cultural stereotypes of femininity within which male image-makers imprison women. His inability to gain purchase on Pomme's unfathomable, inarticulate self is mirrored in the very visible and highly self-conscious shifts of narrative tone and viewpoint which confront the reader with the artificial nature of the construction of identity through language. In subsequent texts Lainé continued this exploration of narrative practices by re-working literary models (Queneau, Proust, the eighteenth-century libertine novel).

Novelists of wide-ranging ideological and narrative commitments responded to the events in one form or another in their fiction. The neo-Romantic libertarian agenda of May 1968 was expressed in Duras's Détruire, dit-elle (1969), in which a conventional bourgeois married woman discovers revolt and freedom from the conventions and fears of her class. In Sarraute's Vous les entendez? (1972) the events provided a wider theatre for the generation gap, which is encapsulated in the contrasting reactions of seriousness and laughter between a father and his children to an objet d'art the father is proud to own. At the other extreme of narrative practice, the traditional novelist J.-L. Curtis (1917-95), in L'Horizon dérobé (1979), showed young people disillusioned with the society of their parents, participating in the events as a final youthful fling before taking their allotted place in this society. The humanist convictions of Robert Merle (b. 1908) are seen in Derrière la vitre (1970), in which, in the Arts Faculty of Nanterre, where the events of May 1968 began, a new generation of would-be revolutionaries dream of an alternative fraternal society.

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The French novel since 1980 can be seen as pursuing the engagement with post-war social and cultural change which the events of May 1968 had so dramatically brought to the surface. The problematical relationship between writing, knowledge and history appears to underpin its most significant trends.⁵⁷ New narrative domains have developed from widely differing points of origin. The particular importance of women's writing, and of francophone literature, will be considered in more detail below. Both are renewing French narrative's themes and forms. The growth of gay writing, itself stimulated by the changes in attitudes to sexuality which followed 1968, was reinforced by the AIDS crisis—most notably in À l'ami qui ne m'a pas sauvé la vie (1990) by Hervé Guibert (1955-91).⁵⁸

Alongside these very visible general signs of the changing narrative field, there were in the course of the 1980s some revealing individual developments. We have already seen Sollers drawing a line in 1983 through the avant-garde and, by implication, through the writer's relationship to the world with which the avant-garde project had been associated. In 1984, Duras's L'Amant became the publishing event of the year, achieving sales usually associated with the bestseller thriller or adventure market. It did so because it brought together an author who was one of the historical figures of French post-war writing, a series of contemporary literary, political and cultural issues (the search for female self-knowledge and self-representation, woman's relationship to eroticism and to political change, the colonial experience, the nature of autobiography), and a literary form which told an apparently simple story without abandoning, the subtleties of characterisation and of motivation associated with Duras's work. The media's ability to package literature delivered a huge commercial success reinforced on the critical level by the award of the Goncourt prize for the outstanding French novel of the year. Not surprisingly, the screen adaptation followed. In 1985, Claude Simon was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature and thereby received consecration for his continued exploration of the problem of narrative and of the individual's difficult relationship to history, so powerfully renewed in Les Géorgiques. These and other examples suggest that the distinction between ‘serious’ and ‘mass’ fictional forms has to some extent been eroded and that the forms and implications of the experimentation introduced in the post-war period have become assimilated by the reading practices of a wider public.

The 1980s saw the emergence of a number of novelists who, when taken together with Modiano, might be said to have best expressed both the dominant modern sense of the subject deprived of presence and universality of meaning and the conscious decision to open literature to the contemporary culture of popular and mass art forms. Jean Echenoz (b. 1956) weaves together narrative models drawn from the forms of popular fiction (detective and spy novels, science fiction and comic strips) in exuberant, at times hilarious, narratives (notably Cherokee, 1983; Lac, 1989; Nous trois, 1992), but the proliferating adventures and comic-book characters reproduce the incoherence of a world in which the subject seems to have lost control over events. Daniel Pennac (b. 1944) is best known for his four-part cycle of novels (Au bonheur des ogres, 1985; La Fée carabine, 1987; La Petite Marchande de prose, 1989; Monsieur Malaussène, 1995) in which we find the same narrative energy, naive characterisation and use of popular forms as in Echenoz but with a slightly more optimistic sense that despite the mendacity and inauthenticity of the world, despite the multiplicity of false trails in modern experience, the possibility of creating meaning and ethical purposes survives. This sense permeates Pennac's superb essay on the pleasures of reading, Comme un roman, which was a huge commercial and critical success on its publication in 1992. Sébastien Japrisot (b. 1935) is a good example of the genre writer (exponent of the detective novel such as Piège pour Cendrillon, 1965, which plays with the conventions of the genre) who has emerged as a major novelist, particularly with Un long dimanche de fiançailles (1991), a quest narrative on the themes of war and memory.

In a postmodern age deprived of universality, the novel may be adopting less heroic stances and more self-reflective irony. And it seems possible that this general trend has been to some extent reinforced by the socio-political context of recent years, in which the socialist project which triumphed in the presidential and legislative election victories in 1981 has been forced from 1983 to face the economic realities of internationalised money markets and in 1986-8 to accept ‘cohabitation’ with the conservative political parties. In politics and literature, confrontation with the realities of the modern world was in the 1980s a difficult narrative. Be that as it may, the re-invigoration of narrative through its extension into mass forms—the detective novel in particular—offers a potentially powerful source of renewal.

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The path through some of the major trends in French post-war fiction leads us to the threshold of a new century, in which the creation of fictions is likely to be subjected to conditions quite different from anything experienced so far. The French novel, particularly since the Revolution, has to some extent always been technology-driven, so it is certain that the mediatisation of Western culture and the revolution in information technology on which it is now embarked will transform the means and modes of fiction. Some of the implications are already evident; for example, the demise of the concept and practice of the avant-garde as it evolved in the early stage of the nineteenth century out of the cultural developments associated with the Revolution. The literary and cultural space which this classical avant-garde occupied has, like every other public space, been occupied by the media, whose capacity to transform all cultural products into spectacle was seen in the extraordinary impact of the televised book programme Apostrophes, France's most popular television programme between 1975 and 1990.⁵⁹ Just where the information superhighway will take the novel, where the Internet's transformations of narrative's themes, forms and modes of production will leave the tradition established by the writers discussed above, in what forms it will generate reassessment of the history of the French novel traced here, is of course a matter of conjecture. The narration of the relationship of world and subject will continue but in forms which remain to be seen.

II POETRY AND ITS PURPOSES

POETRY OF THE NEW, 1914-39

In the closing years of the century, reaction to the Symbolist movement in poetry most frequently involved a return to the modern, urban world. Its increasingly complex, fragmented reality was a source of both excitement and anxiety.⁶⁰ The very elements which offered the hope of renewal also frustrated the self's aspiration to stability and unity. In the poetry of Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918), a rootless cosmopolitan background reinforced a sense of fragmented identity. On the one hand, this created an elusive search for the self expressed in tender melancholy or nostalgic melody. On the other, it encouraged an aggressive commitment to the new, particularly from 1904, when Apollinaire's contacts with avant-garde painters and poets gave him a pivotal role in the efforts to create verbal and visual forms appropriate to the new century, and to the new world that scientific and technological change was creating.⁶¹

The dominant feature of Alcools, a selection of his poetry written between 1898 and 1913, is a multi-directional lyricism which weaves together the self's search for meaning in mythical, mysterious landscapes of Symbolist inspiration and in the associations and discontinuities of modern urban experience. The dominant theme is that of the journey, which may be in time or space, through personal or collective memory, and may be liberating adventure or aimless wandering. Such thematic links between the poems emphasise the range of voices used. Lost love is evoked with haunting simplicity in ‘Le Pont Mirabeau’, in which the poignant refrain softens the transitions between pain and resignation. ‘La Chanson du Mal-Aimé’ retains the range and intimacy of the private feelings of desire, anger and pain in a vast historical and mythological epic in which the disconnections between episodes are balanced by the formal continuities of rhyme scheme, strophic structures and repetitions. In ‘Zone’, the industrial landscape at the edge of the city, where the poet wanders between sensations and memories, and the combination of free verse and rhyme or assonance, denote the tensions between familiarity and insecurity which characterise the modern city. The proliferation of ready-made sights and sounds simultaneously invites and frustrates personal revelation. As in the Cubist painting of Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) and Georges Braque (1882-1963), who sought to represent the complete structure of the object and its relationship of volume and space by juxtaposing different views of it in interlocking planes, in ‘Zone’ the use of the historic present tense, which displays past and present in a single moment, and of abrupt shifts between first-person and second-person pronouns produces an interplay of fragmented, discontinuous selves in a modern collage of human feelings.

The poems of Calligrammes (1918) form a diary of the poet's immediate pre-war days, the mobilisation and his experience of the war. The title of the volume refers to the picture poems, in which the typographical phrase mimes the visual form of the object represented. Mallarmé's Coup de dés, republished in 1914, had made such experimentation topical but Apollinaire's picture poems had other terms of reference in Cubist painting, on which he had already published Les Peintres cubistes (1913), and in the work of Sonia and Robert Delaunay (1884-1979 and 1885-1941 respectively), which he had baptised Orphism in 1913.⁶² Words take on a pictorial function through graphic arrangements and multiple typographies and the poet draws heavily on the sound patterning of alliteration, assonance, onomatopoeia and repetition to extend the forms by which meaning is produced in ways analogous to Cubist collage. In ‘Lundi rue Christine’, the juxtaposed fragments of conversation create montage effects reinforced by links of sound and theme. In the visually more conventional poems, Apollinaire exploits the expressive potential of the relationships between free and traditional verse and draws on all the resources of vocabulary, sound and rhythm to represent the real experience of war in its modern and mythical dimensions. In the final sequence, the more experimental forms become less frequent, the tone more measured. The final poem, ‘La Jolie Rousse’, takes stock of the journey accomplished and pleads for tolerance for the avant-garde poet searching for a new language.

Apollinaire's support for Orphism was only one of the productive exchanges between literature and painting in which the Delaunays were involved and which were central to definitions of modernism in the immediate pre-war period. The catalogue of the 1913 Berlin exhibition in which Robert Delaunay showed ten of his Windows series contained the first published version of Apollinaire's poem ‘Les Fenêtres’, republished five years later in Calligrammes. Delaunay then produced a simultaneist poem-painting on Rimbaud's Alchimie du verbe (1914). In 1913, Sonia Delaunay illustrated the six-foot-long folding sheet of twelve panels which contained La Prose du Transsibérien by Blaise Cendrars (1887-1961).⁶³ Labelled the ‘first simultaneous book’, it recounts in free verse the multiple forms of the modern world and their relationship to the journey of memory. With Cendrars, as with Apollinaire, the formal invention is not gratuitous. Its abrupt shifts of tone, rhythm and voice produced by the accelerating rhythms of real and imagined journeys register the poet's efforts to synchronise external stimuli and inner world and the excitement and anguish created by a confrontation from which only provisional stability can be achieved.

Among the group of writers and painters who, along with Apollinaire and Cendrars, worked side by side in Montmartre in the immediate pre-war years, Pierre Reverdy (1889-1960) and Max Jacob (1876-1944) made, in quite different terms, major contributions to the poetic theory and practice of modernity. For Reverdy, poetry was to be found ‘dans ce qui n'est pas’ [‘in that which is not’],⁶⁴ in a solitary, often anguished exploration of everyday experience. Confined within the walls of a room or the limits of a garden, the poet looks for meaning and purpose in the diffuse and shifting presence of reality. In poems such as those in Ardoises sur le toit (1918), fragments of language combine the suggestive power of images with that of unusual and seemingly random typographical arrangements to create a quiet but profound tension between aspiration and disappointment. Jacob's prose poems of Le Cornet à dés (1916), on the other hand, are verbal pyrotechnics. Contemporary political and artistic topics, the poet's memories, reading, verbal games, pastiches of literary genres and tones, all crackle in the associative logic of language. Both poets were associated with contemporary developments in painting. Jacob described his work as Cubist realism.⁶⁵ Reverdy's essay ‘Sur le cubisme’, published in the newly founded avant-garde review Nord-Sud (1917), provided a theoretical framework for analogies between Cubist painting and literature.⁶⁶

Essential features of what came to be seen as the modern spirit of French poetry were therefore in place before the outbreak of the First World War. The war's impact on poetry was as profound as it was on the novel but less direct. There was no French equivalent of the great flowering of English war poetry. Among the three poets who had sought in the pre-war period to open the poetic to the new and the everyday, Apollinaire was alone in doing so in the context of the war itself.

In some ways, the most important poetry written during the war was that of a poet who wrote by disengaging himself from contemporary events. In 1919 Paul Valéry described the First World War as the failure of European culture, yet he wrote his major poetical work, ‘La Jeune Parque’, at the very time the world seemed to be going up in flames.⁶⁷ He had embarked on the poem in 1912, when, encouraged to revise his early work for publication, he had returned to writing poetry after a twenty-year absence. In the early 1890s he had published poems in Symbolist reviews, and frequented Mallarmé, whom he worshipped, but he gave up literature after the spiritual crisis he experienced during the night of 4-5 October 1892. Its upshot was his decision to focus on the power of the mind to observe thought and feeling in action rather than to make these thoughts and feelings the object of literature. It gave him an intellectual method through which to recover from what he considered to be the destructive effects of thoughts, feelings and images on his sense of self. The critical writing which resulted has made him one of the foremost French intellectuals of the century, while the poetry written after his long silence is one of the most profound reflections on the nature of poetic language itself.

The subject of ‘La Jeune Parque’ (1917), a dramatic monologue of over 500 lines, is the self-questioning consciousness as it feels its way through a night-long struggle with conflicting experience and aspiration (sensuality and abstraction, desire and memory) towards the dawn light of harmonious self-knowledge. The complex thematic modulations, as Valéry called them, are themselves reinforced by the formal constraints derived from his commitment to classical prosody. Hostile to many early twentieth-century manifestations of the modern (Freudism, Marxism, feminism, Cubism, Surrealism), he rejected such recent developments in French prosody as free verse in favour of the classical alexandrine, whose rigour and expressive potential of sound patterning combine in the poem as both creative process and drama of the intellect. The poems of Charmes (1922) maintain the intellectual ambition in a wide range of forms and registers of exceptional technical virtuosity. The most famous poem of the collection, ‘Le Cimetière marin’, originated according to the poet in purely formal considerations (the expressive potential of the ten-syllable line, its use in six-line stanzas themselves organised in terms of thematic contrasts), around which he modulated the movements of the mind in its dialogue between light and darkness and its ultimate celebration of life.

Such commitments and procedures could hardly have been more removed from those of the Surrealist movement which dominated French poetry of the inter-war years. The revulsion felt by certain writers at the slaughter of the First World War strengthened the ambition to channel avant-garde literary activity towards a wider transformation of culture and society. They aimed to do this by unleashing desire and its forms of expression against the rationalist ideologies which in their view constrained or censured freedom. This would enable a new fusion of the real and the imaginary, a surreality, to be created to transcend the system of oppositions and hierarchies which this discredited Western ideology sustained. The Surrealist movement was the result of a series of connections: the meeting in 1917 of Aragon, Breton and Soupault, their shared discovery of Freud's work on the unconscious operations of the mind, their reading of nineteenth-century poets who had in their different ways practised forms of poetic language outside the didactic, Parnassian aesthetic (notably Baudelaire, Nerval, Lautréamont, Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Jarry), their contacts with avant-garde activity in Paris, and their meeting with Tzara, whose effect was to radicalise their opposition to the dominant culture. Thanks primarily to Breton, its chief theoretician and publicist, and despite (or because of) doctrinal disagreements and conflicts of personalities, Surrealism created a collective impetus which made it a major source of literary and cultural developments between the wars. From Paris, it spread quickly abroad, becoming the first truly international avant-garde movement.⁶⁸

Language and linguistic experimentation were a central focus of Surrealist activity. To the alternative nineteenth-century tradition of poetic language noted above, the Surrealists added Reverdy's description of the poetic image and their understanding of Freud's work on dreams. In 1918, in Nord-Sud, Reverdy had defined the image as a pure creation of the mind, the juxtaposition of two more or less distant realities. The more distant the relationship, the greater the image's power. This definition substantiated Lautréamont's description of the poetic beauty of the chance encounter, on a dissecting table, of a sewing machine and an umbrella.⁶⁹ Freud's work on word association and dreams had suggested that a huge, untapped source of pre-rational mental activity was readily available. In the écriture automatique [‘automatic writing’] of Les Champs magnétiques (1920), Breton and Soupault showed that when the rational mind's control over the instinctive urge to verbalise was removed, powerful repressed energies were released into language in the form of free verbal play. Such free association with the sounds and meanings of words would reveal the Surrealist dimension of the imaginary hidden within the real, the extraordinary hidden within the everyday of modern experience. As the Lautréamont example had shown, such verbalisation was intensely visual, hence Surrealism's impact on painting.

Not surprisingly, given the ambition, present in the Surrealist project from the outset, to extend this liberation into every aspect of cultural and social life, the Russian Revolution of 1917 became a crucial reference point for the revolution in literature. In 1927 the group's leading figures (notably Aragon, Breton, Éluard) joined the PCF (Parti Communiste Français), but the need to reconcile Marx and Freud—political transformation and the Surrealist commitment to liberation from intellectual and cultural constraints—remained a source of powerful tensions. The Marxist subordination of the latter to the former obliged Surrealists sooner or later to choose between the two. Breton's second manifesto (1929) showed the extent of dissensions within the group on this issue and though he re-stated his faith in the necessary relationship between Surrealism and revolution, relationships between him and the Communists were increasingly strained. In 1932 Aragon chose the Party, rather than the Surrealist, line; three years later Breton's Position politique du surréalisme consummated the divorce between the group and the Party. The emergence of the fascist threat in the 1930s nevertheless ensured that Communists and Surrealists remained allies in practice if not in theory.

Many of the major poets of the period were marked in one way or another by the Surrealist movement, usually adapting it to their own commitments and forms of expression. Paul Éluard (1895-1952), one of its founders, embraced wholeheartedly its liberation of the imagination but submitted its discoveries to the constraints of theme and the disciplines of rhythm.⁷⁰ His work contains some of Surrealism's most powerful images but their power derives less from their exploration of the unconscious per se than from the relationships they establish in the poem with other forms of human experience and the network of thematic and formal associations in which they participate. His poetic voice is a highly personal one but even in his free verse the familiar rhythms and patterns of the French poetic tradition can usually be discerned behind it. He brought to poetry his sense of the wonder of everyday experience and his conviction that the language of poetry could be liberated by and for everyone. The element common to these features of his work was his conviction that love was the source of the imagination's most creative, transformative energies and of the individual's most profound moral and political choices; love, for Éluard, was a truly revolutionary force. In Capitale de la douleur (1926) and L'Amour, la poésie (1929), love may bring the anguish of solitude and loss of self, but it is the ecstatic celebration of love shared which provides in both collections the most memorable verse. In ‘La Courbe de tes yeux fait le tour de mon cœur’, the sensations of light, water, wind and air generated by the eyes of the loved woman trigger in the poet both an intense erotic intimacy and an unlimited expanse of feeling.

Despite increasing internal dissensions within the Surrealist group, Éluard took part in collective efforts such as the poems of Ralentir travaux (1930), written with Breton and René Char (1907-88), and the automatic writing of L'Immaculée Conception (also 1930), on which he again collaborated with Breton. Like Breton, he was expelled from the Communist Party in 1933 but from 1936 the Spanish Civil War and his friendship with Picasso led him towards poetry of a collective humanism (Cours naturel, 1938; Donner à voir, 1939). This transition to a more explicitly political poetry led to Éluard's break with Breton in 1938 but would form the basis of his inspiring Second World War and Resistance poetry.

Among the earliest members of the group, Bejamin Péret (1899-1959) and Robert Desnos (1900-45) illustrate the diversity of poetic practices and intellectual commitments the Surrealist movement embraced during the inter-war years. Péret remained the most intransigent in terms of its original aesthetic and political ideals, and the most loyal to Breton's conduct of the movement. His unswerving contempt for all the forces which oppress, and a complete faith in the power of the imagination to liberate, fuelled the explosive mixture of vicious satire, burlesque verve and absurd linguistic and logical games which characterise his poetry (Je ne mange pas de ce pain-là, 1936). Like other Surrealists, Péret's anarchist faith led him to oppose Communist political orthodoxy, in his case by actively supporting Trotsky against Stalin, but his political commitment extended to fighting in Spain against Franco from 1936. Desnos, in Rrose Sélavy (1922-3), a collection of word-games which he claimed to have written in a transatlantic séance with the artist Marcel Duchamp, took Surrealist experimentation with hypnosis and automatic writing further than most, using with humorous, subversive and highly poetic results every manner of word- and sound-play to generate images and ideas outside the control of logic. In À la Mystérieuse (1926), he channelled this exceptional verbal virtuosity towards the poignant search for an inaccessible love. Surrealism's public commitment in 1927 to the PCF alienated Desnos, who was too much of an individualist to subscribe to any political programme, and his poems of Corps et biens (1930) represent his summary of his Surrealist years. Despite such divergent trajectories, both Péret and Desnos in their different ways later played significant roles in the French Resistance.

As important early members like Desnos and Queneau broke with the group in the late 1920s, there were new arrivals, notably René Char. He participated in the group's activities (working with Breton and Éluard on Ralentir travaux) and this participation, though brief, made a lasting impact on him. It was brief because he was soon uncomfortable with group formulae for poetry; it was lasting because Surrealism's central belief in the power of poetry to transform human existence was one he never abandoned. Though the poems of Le Marteau sans maître (1934) were written during this phase and appeared under the aegis of the Éditions surréalistes, they show that Char was already moving on. In Surrealist terms they present themes (such as poetry as mystery and spiritual combat) and forms (such as the prose poem) which were not inherently Surrealist and whose power would be reinforced by Char's experience of the Second World War.⁷¹

For poets indifferent to Surrealist performances of automatic writing or opposed to their assault on the fixed forms of the poetic tradition, poetry continued to represent an intellectual and spiritual journey, closer to Hugo than to Breton, in a language organised into recognised patterns of sound and image. Anabase (1924) by Saint-John Perse (pseudonym of Alexis Saint-Léger Léger, 1887-1975) is, in its author's words, an ‘expédition vers l'intérieur’, a journey into the interior through vast, undefined spaces of nature and memory. It is a rare example of a modern epic poem, weaving together the history of a people and of a poet, an Eastern and mental landscape.⁷²

Jules Supervielle (1884-1960) possessed a Surrealist sense of the imagination's magical transformation of the real, but in collections such as Gravitations (1925) and La Fable du monde (1938), the vastness of his exploration of time and space has greater affinity with Romantic poetry than with Surrealism. It differs from Hugo in the humour and lightness with which this exploration is recounted, even if certain poems do express the poet's alarm for a world which appears to have broken from its moorings.⁷³ More often, however, this cosmic vastness finds a human scale in the organic relationships between the animal, vegetable and mineral universe. Supervielle's imagination performs a vast humanist embrace of the world, taking in the most distant stars and the most familiar objects. Despite the intense desire for understanding, there is a deep innocence and gentleness in his work; despite the difficulties of understanding, there is no rage or despair. In formal terms, Supervielle appears to move effortlessly between regular or fixed forms, free verse and the verset (a short sequence subdivided like the Biblical text), in which the choice of form and patterning is determined by the nature of the poetic substance to be expressed. It is a very deliberate, crafted relationship between thought and rhythm quite opposed to Surrealist experimentation with automatic writing but which has won for Supervielle an audience which seems certain to grow.

Henri Michaux (1899-1984) began writing in the ambiance of Surrealism in the sense that it was his discovery of Lautréamont's work in 1922, followed by that three years later of contemporary painting (Klee, Ernst, Chirico), that precipitated his faith in the transformative energies of verbal and visual signs. Compulsive in his commitment to voyages of discovery within and outwith the self, to experimentation of all kinds (in the borders between prose and poetry, the narratives of European myths, the visual arts, linguistic research, drugs), he invented landscapes which were war-zones for the raging contradictions of his fragile, fragmented self. This experimentation seeks to liberate the unknown within the self and results in a poetry of relentless, turbulent, occasionally fluid rhythms. Michaux is in this respect a distant relation of the Rimbaud of the ‘Bateau ivre’ and the prose poetry. His utopian hallucinations are more private than those of Rimbaud, and they lack the latter's political project. But they have a lucidity in which humour plays an important part and whose effect is moving as well as alarming.⁷⁴

Like Michaux, Francis Ponge (1899-1988) was largely unclassifiable in terms of inter-war poetic practice, though for quite different reasons. He began writing, he tells us, as a result of the difficulties he encountered when, having tried and failed to express himself, he tried, and failed again, to describe objects. He decided to publish his accounts of these failures to describe. The result was Le Parti pris des choses (1942), in which Ponge confronts the difficulty of description and, in the process, transforms the reader's perceptions of the object described and of the nature of the language involved. The liberating potential of this repeated renewal of language and perception would echo down the twentieth century. Published in 1942, the collection was one example of the effort made by a Resistance poet to reclaim the language from the German occupier. In the post-war period, it (and subsequent Ponge texts) was identified in what became a trend of poetry devoted to the description of the visible world, in opposition to the Surrealist legacy of the imagination. Later still, it was adopted by the Tel quel group as a model of language's power to generate text.⁷⁵

THE SECOND WORLD WAR

The period of Occupation and Resistance witnessed a remarkable revival in the public fortunes of poetry in France. Hardly had the armistice been signed than poets hostile to it began to circulate poems clandestinely.⁷⁶ Given the circumstances, poetry had obvious advantages over other forms of literary production. It used less paper and print. It could be memorised and transmitted orally. Its concision, density of language and use of symbolism and allusion gave it more powerful forms of expression than prose and made life difficult for censors. Moreover, there is a sense in which poetry is by its very nature oppositional, that ‘good poetry is by definition protest and resistance, and cannot thrive on resignation or acceptance of the status quo’.⁷⁷ On the other hand, its effectiveness as an instrument of resistance depended on the reader recognising her or his place in a community of language and culture which the poetic tradition embodied. For this reason poets who were committed to the Resistance tended to abandon the introspective and esoteric forms of expression which since the late nineteenth century had distanced much contemporary poetry from its potential audience. Instead, they returned to more familiar rhythms, forms and language likely to prove more accessible to the wider public they now wished to reach. Some poets (Péret, for example) believed that political poetry was a contradiction in terms and refused to write during these years; others (Reverdy, Char) continued to write but refused to publish until after the war. But many poets wrote, circulated and published work which, taken together, redefined the relation between poetry and the circumstances in which it is written.⁷⁸

The extreme situation of 1940-4 provoked in many poets a deep sense of outrage and revolt, and the challenge to create forms of poetic language capable of communicating these feelings to others. The extent of their moral and political commitment and the engagement with language that resulted from them led in many cases to poetic creativity of exceptional range and quality. The outstanding example was Aragon, who, after a decade in which his greatest creative effort had been invested in the novel, launched with Le Crève-cœur (1941) a collection of volumes of poetry and critical writing on poetry which made him during this period an essential voice of Resistance poetry.⁷⁹ Other poets who, like Aragon, had been associated with the Surrealist movement from its beginnings, were also actively committed to the Resistance cause. In the case of Éluard, the experience of Occupation and Resistance strengthened the humanist themes present in his poetry of the 1930s (such as faith in a universal fraternity, or the power of the mediation of love), while in ‘Liberté’ he created the single most famous Resistance poem. Desnos's clandestine poetry celebrated liberty and castigated oppression in a poetic language which drew heavily on the rhythms and tones of popular speech and for which he ended up in a concentration camp, where he died.

As leader of the Basses-Alpes section of the Forces françaises combattantes, Char played a significant part in the Resistance effort and the work published in 1948 under the title Fureur et mystère tells of his fury at the obstacles which historical reality was placing against the poet's ambition to transform the real, and of the mystery which poetic language projects into the present. Prose poems, notes on clandestine activity, poems of Provence and Alsace landscapes are followed by what Char calls the ‘poème pulvérisé’ [‘pulverised poem’], fragments of emotion and sensation from which language seeks to establish a basis for a universal community of feeling. The distinct tensions Char's poetry creates made him one of the essential figures in post-war French poetry. From a non-Surrealist perspective, the Catholic poet Pierre Emmanuel (b. 1916-84) sought to establish the relationship between the historical reality of the war and human destiny in its ambition for the divine. In these and many other cases, the experience of Occupation and Resistance led poets to reformulate their understanding of the relationships between poetic, political and spiritual aspirations.⁸⁰

In 1941, Aragon's anger at the phoney war of the winter of 1939-40 and at the débâcle of June 1940 was expressed in the poems written in the twelve-month period from October 1939 and published in Le Crève-cœur. Their impact was enormous for they not only found words for the feeling of calamity which had engulfed the French in June 1940 but also demonstrated Aragon's conviction that poetry could help to regenerate the values of national unity and common culture necessary to overcome the sense of hopelessness and isolation which had resulted from the débâcle. In addition, this national poetry derived much of its emotional force from the poet's love for his wife, Elsa Triolet. Their enforced separation was a source of despair and anger, a form of death comparable to the collapse of unity in national life. So, in ‘Les Lilas et les roses’, their separation and the news that Paris has fallen to the Germans are ‘… les deux amours que nous avons perdus’ [‘… the two loves we have lost’]. But their love was also an affirmation of the solidarity at the heart of private and public life which fascism could not defeat. This reciprocal relationship between his love for Elsa and for his country remained a major theme in the two collections which followed, Les Yeux d'Elsa (1942) and La Diane française (1944).

One of the ways in which Aragon sought to represent love as a profoundly political response to fascism was to adopt the forms of medieval courtly love poetry. In this tradition of twelfth-century ‘amour courtois’, the knight placed his courage at the service of love and was loved in return, since his virtues were both a homage to his lady and a service to the Court community of which he was part. This 800-year-old poetic tradition seemed contemporary to Aragon in the early 1940s for it promoted the social values of the feminine over fascism's cult of masculine force. It was one example of the attempts made by poets to recreate the sense of national unity vital to the Resistance effort by drawing on France's geography, history and culture. In their poetry, French placenames appear repeatedly—Paris, inevitably, but also towns, villages, provinces and rivers. The most famous example is ‘Oradour’, by Jean Tardieu (b. 1903), written when news reached him in Paris of the atrocity perpetrated against the inhabitants of the village of Oradour-sur-Glane on 10 June 1944. Tardieu's poem made the name of the village synonymous with horror itself through the relentless rhythm of its repetition across the text.⁸¹ Similarly, historical reference and analogy was used to sustain the idea of the nation in the face of Nazi myths of superiority founded on race. Multiple references to the Middle Ages, whether historical or literary, remind the reader of the emergence at that time of a French national culture. Joan of Arc is invoked as an earlier representative of the struggle for sovereignty; the Revolution and its Marseillaise, the Paris Commune and its Internationale contribute their exploits, martyrs and anthems to the values of international brotherhood and resistance to oppression. A wide range of literary references drawn from high and popular forms underline this sense of a community of culture at a time when the culture appeared to have collapsed in the face of Nazi aggression.⁸²

For poets the most powerful instrument of resistance was, however, the language itself, and the most urgent need seemed to be to reclaim it from collaborators who were placing it at the service of an alien, destructive ideology. For many poets, this involved returning to the traditional rhythms of French poetry, to forms of versification anchored in the collective memory, in order to adapt them to the contemporary experience of defeat and resistance. This effort to create modern rhythmic patterns from within established ones took place at every level of the system of versification, from the use made of the most familiar fixed forms and line lengths to the organisation of stanzas and the creation of rhyme.

Once again, Aragon's poetry contains many examples. In Le Crève-cœur, for example, he uses a wide variety of stanza structures, ranging from the most familiar, the quatrain (‘Le Temps des mots croisés’ is made up of thirteen quatrains in cross rhyme, abab), to the less familiar, such as the stanza of six lines (sizain) in ‘Zone libre’, nine (neuvain) in ‘Pergame en France’, or ten (dizain) in ‘Le Poète international’. The same poem may combine several different stanza structures (cf. ‘Vingt ans après’, ‘Les Amants séparés’) to exploit the sharp changes of rhythm and tone which such combinations may reinforce. ‘Tapisserie de la grande peur’ is an unusual case of a single-stanza poem of 32 lines, in which three four-line sequences of embraced rhyme (abba) are interrupted by a sudden switch to four lines in cross rhyme (lines 13-16), followed by a return to the embraced rhyme pattern for the rest of the poem. The effect of the sudden switch is to give an exceptional emphasis to the word in the rhyme position of line 15, where the break from the embraced rhyme scheme adopted up to that point is recognised. This emphasis which the word (‘rapaces’) derives from the rhyme scheme is added to that from the phonetic patterning in which it is also involved (with ‘Espace’, ‘passe’ and the other elements in /a/ and /s/). This is only one small example among many in the same poem in which Aragon uses the different levels of the French verse system to evoke the sense of panic which accompanied the exode from Northern France in June 1940.

The two most common line lengths in the French system are the alexandrine and the octosyllable. In his essay ‘Crise de vers’, Mallarmé had called the alexandrine ‘la cadence nationale’ [‘the national cadence’], and the war poets used it for the history of shared feelings and rhythms it brought with it. Equally, the flexibilities which nineteenth-century poets from Hugo onwards had brought to its traditional 6/6 structure gave precedents for expressing profound feelings by showing a line's rhythm pushing against the alexandrine's well-established rhythmic constraints.⁸³ The octosyllable, on the other hand, had been a feature of more popular poetic forms and the war poets used it to connect their poetry to the familiar rhythms of folk song, with its emphasis on the spoken word, which lodged in the reader's memory. The vers impair, whose virtues Verlaine had extolled in his poem ‘Art poétique’, could be used in combination with the standard twelve- or eight-syllable line to create effects of emphasis or surprise through the switch between even and odd line lengths (as in Éluard's ‘Faire vivre’, in which the change to seven syllables in the final three lines of the poem underlines the sharp change of theme and tone on which the poem closes).

Fixed-form poems such as the sonnet, which had undergone a spectacular revival in the nineteenth century, also had deep roots in the collective memory. The dilemma facing Resistance poets in negotiating the relationship between expression and constraint was central to the ways in which the French sonnet worked, and its concision and familiar rhyme schemes made it easier to memorise. Jean Cassou (1897-1986) wrote his Trente-trois sonnets composés au secret (published in 1944) while in solitary confinement and their profound humanist values emerge more powerfully from the poet's respect for the constraints of the regular sonnet form. Desnos, on the other hand, in his sonnet ‘Le Legs’, which was published in the 1943 anthology L'Honneur des poètes, and opened with a reference to Victor Hugo, France's most famous nineteenth-century political exile, used an irregular rhyme scheme in the quatrains (abba in the first, changing to baab in the second) to reinforce his contempt for the Nazi leaders and French collaborators named there. Aragon adopted the earlier fixed forms of the complainte and romance for the same purpose of drawing upon familiar forms and reminding readers of the human and national values invested in these forms.

For Resistance poets, the problems of poetic language varied according to whether the poem was written as a private expression of feeling, without the intention to publish, or whether the aim was publication and, if so, whether this publication was intended to take legal or illegal form. Many poets wrote work of all three types but of the three, the attempt to publish a Resistance poem legally created particular problems, since the poet was obliged to choose themes and terms which censors would fail to recognise as an expression of resistance but which the poem's intended audience would identify as such. In this way, every contraband poem published represented a small victory over the forces of oppression. In this, as in many other aspects of Resistance poetry, Aragon played a major role, both by placing contraband verse in a French literary tradition (that of medieval troubadour poetry in which the lover declares his feelings to the lady under the nose of the husband, who fails to recognise the message), and by the examples he provided in his own poetry. To quote just one case in point, ‘Santa Espina’, in Le Crève-cœur, contains on one level a religious theme to which the authorities could hardly object and, on another, references to the Spanish Civil War and Catalonian anthems which would be unmistakable for those who had taken part in activities in support of Republican Spain's struggle against Franco.

SOME POST-WAR DIRECTIONS

The euphoria which greeted the liberation of France was of short duration. As was the case in the French novel, the ideals which had fuelled Resistance poetry were no match for the realities of the épuration, for the political expediencies surrounding the creation of the Fourth Republic, or for the ideological divisions which culminated in the Cold War. Symptomatic in this respect are the bitterness evident in Aragon's poems in his Nouveau Crève-cœur (1948) and the decline in his own position from the quasi-official status of poète national he had enjoyed at the Liberation. Though the publication of war poetry continued into the early post-war years, and though it was in some cases work of major significance (Char's Fureur et mystère, for example), it appeared at a time when the energies which the themes and forms of French war poetry had derived from the collective nature of resistance to oppression were receding. Poets withdrew once more into their more private spaces, where poetry could resume its broader historical development along the paths opened up in the latter part of the nineteenth century and which the events of 1939-45 had interrupted. In this respect, two collections of poetry published in the immediate post-war period signalled this renewed distance between the private and public spaces of poetry. The first, published in 1945, was the Pléiade edition of the complete works of Mallarmé, whose status in the post-war theory and practice of French poetry would not cease to grow. The second, the following year, was Paroles by Jacques Prévert (1900-77), whose poems of the everyday, liberating in their spontaneity, anarchic in their humour, full of the sights, sounds and rhythms of the street, have become classics of popular culture.

The major pre-war figures and the poets who had emerged during the war wrote on into the later stages of the century. Saint-John Perse, in Vents (1946) and Amers (1958), pursued his dialogue with the elements, and their relationship to human mortality and desire. In Épreuves, Exorcismes (1945), Michaux continued, as the title suggests, to develop his practice of poetry as exorcism of the obsessions and terrors of his private self; but from the post-war years, it is his interest and experimentation in different visual art forms which, more than his poetry, represent the new departures in his work. In Babel (1951), Pierre Emmanuel renewed his ambition to practise what he called the spiritual exercise of poetry, in this case a mystic contemplation of the rise and fall of humanity's Promethean ambitions.

Among the poets who began publishing in the post-war years, Yves Bonnefoy (b. 1923) has been the major revelation. In Du mouvement et de l'immobilité de Douve (1953) he explores the indispensable presence of death at all the transactions of experience. It is the common fate whose recognition is the essential prerequisite of knowledge. The poet's task is to find words with which to describe the presence of things permanently threatened by disappearance. In the poem, Douve is an enigmatic female figure who progresses through stages of death towards what the final section of the work calls the ‘true place’ of meaning in the material world, towards that sense of plenitude which the consciousness of mortality heightens. At certain moments experience of the natural world can be so intense as to fill the consciousness with an intimation of immortality, and poetry seeks to stabilise, however briefly, these hints of transcendence. This search for what Bonnefoy calls ‘presence’ and for the relationship between it and the language of poetry has been the focus of all his creative and critical writing.⁸⁴

Philippe Jaccottet (b. 1925) published in the 1950s two volumes of poetry (L'Effraie, 1953, and L'Ignorant, 1958) in which the world is perceived in the fragile beauty of its surfaces, elusive and enigmatic. His work shares with that of Bonnefoy this intense focus on the real, which aims to discipline the unfettered imagination of the Surrealist legacy and to oblige poetic language to respect the smallest elements of the real, which are poetry's subject. As in Bonnefoy, such attention to the here and now seems to invite the belief in some form of permanence, however far removed, however circumscribed by the interrogative forms his language takes. It appears as a pale shadow of the Romantic faith in the correspondences between the external world and the ideal. In the late twentieth century, Jaccottet seems to imply, such permanence could at best be provisional. Modern poets can no longer claim to reveal the meaning of the world as confidently as predecessors did but, despite the limitations of subjectivity, they can still manifest in language the means to involve others in human and social vision and ambition. Jaccottet took this further in Airs (1967), brief, limpid poems modelled on the Japanese haiku, in which fleeting sensations of nature open out onto the poet's interrogations of the meanings such beauty might contain.⁸⁵

The seriousness with which this search is conducted remains even when the means appear to be playful. The Oulipo experimentation practised in the novel (see above, pp. 229-31) took place in poetry too, notably in the work of Jacques Roubaud (b. 1932). His Trente et un au cube (1973) is, as its title suggests, a collection of 31 poems, each with 31 lines, each with 31 syllables, themselves distributed on the basis of a Japanese poetic form, the tanka (5 + 7 + 5 + 7 + 7). In addition, the poems openly recycle texts of different types, French and translations into French, in what amounts to an anthology of post-war experimental practices. But the seriousness of the game as a reflection of the power of language to rewrite itself, of the role of formal constraints in the process of writing, can be seen in the context of Roubaud's other efforts in the theory and practice of poetry, in particular his important study of French versification (La Viellesse d'Alexandre, 1978) and his contribution to the publications of the Change/atelier group, which included the definitive version, edited by Mitsou Ronat, of Mallarmé's Un coup de dés (1980).

It would not be difficult to find other examples of the faith which post-war poets continue to retain in poetry's power to trace a spiritual or philosophical journey from which to bring back alternative representations of being in the world. The work of Eugène Guillevic (b. 1907), Jacques Dupin (b. 1927), Michel Deguy (b. 1930) and Jean Daive (b. 1941), who, from different points on the generational and intellectual map, pursue the search for what Guillevic described (in Vivre en poésie, 1980) as the sacred in everyday life, provides further cases in point. This faith sustains the great vitality of contemporary French poetry. With hindsight, the intellectual upheavals which have taken place in the French cultural field since the late 1950s have tended to reinforce and generalise the terms of the discussion of the means and ends of poetry which Mallarmé formulated one hundred years ago. The ‘initiative’ which he ‘ceded to words’ has become the new orthodoxy. Yet this initiative has resulted not in a Surrealist vision of total freedom or automatic writing but in the continuing interrogation by poets of the relationship of modern experience to the language of poetry, of the nature of this language, and of its relationship to the French poetic tradition, its fixed forms, its systems and practices of versification. The one essential post-war cultural and political development which as yet lies outside these terms is that of women's writing (see below, pp. 276-93). As far as poetry is concerned, it is clear that a substantial number of French women are currently writing and publishing poetry and it may well be that the events of May 1968 were a defining moment in this development. Yet contemporary French poetry appears not yet to have engaged with the issues within feminist debate (for example, the distinction between ‘écriture féminine’ and ‘écriture féministe’).⁸⁶ Whether (and, if so, in which ways) this new voice of French poetry will enter and redirect the mainstream of French poetry is another question for the future.

III THEATRE: LANGUAGE IN PERFORMANCE

THE CURRENT OF CHANGE

Twentieth-century French theatre, said Jean-Louis Barrault (1910-94) in his Réflexions sur le théâtre (1949), is a protean form, reflecting a society that lives between two currents. One current pulls it to the past, described by Barrault as the great bourgeois epoch whose close we sometimes seem to be living, and is responsible for the prolonged life of conventional theatre and the ‘boulevard’ play. The other directed towards a still-underfined future, rushes forward to create channels of its own, towards dramatic forms still in the making.

This second current, starting up in the 1890s and given strength and direction in the early twentieth century by the attack on commercialism launched by the director Jacques Copeau (1879-1949), has transformed concepts of theatrical place and space, the roles of actor, director and playwright, acting styles and directing techniques, the relation between written text and performance and the relation between public and play. One of the few collective experiences still remaining to a fragmented society, theatre has become a rallying-place for avant-garde challenges to conventional ways of seeing. Increasingly materialist in its concept of itself—preoccupied with presenting the human body in its multiple and active relationships with the living world—seeking to liberate the imagination and the senses, theatre dispenses an excitement totally different from that of the cinema, whose challenge from the early years of the century forced it into radical self-examinations.

Antonin Artaud (1896-1948) argued the superiority of the theatrical over the cinematic image, which, he said, however poetic, is only film, and fixes imagination in a single visual form. Theatre allows imagination to pursue its own images and, most important, its medium is living matter, with all its challenges and resistances (Le Théâtre et son double, 1938). Paul Claudel, writing in 1929, had already seen further. Film for him was another creative resource, alongside music, poetry and action, to release the audience's imagination from the limits of the real. Film could open up the fixed décor of the stage to project the shifting variations and possibilities of dream (‘Note sur Christophe Colomb’, 30 December 1929).⁸⁷

From the start of the modern period, theatre was on the move.⁸⁸ Narrowly bounded from the mid-nineteenth century by boulevard theatre and the Comédie Française, its spaces expanded to include the privately run little theatres of the 1880s (which reappeared in the 1950s and 1960s), State-subsidised drama centres, the open-air festival venues pioneered by Jean Vilar (1912-71, founder in 1947 of the Festival d'Avignon), working factories, with their hastily improvised stages (again pioneered by Vilar, in the 1950s) and in 1968, the streets. From the 1910s, a steady process of decentralisation marked a search for wider audiences in the popular classes. Jacques Copeau (1879-1949) moved his Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier from the boulevards to the Latin Quarter in 1913. His book on Le Théâtre populaire (1941) argued for the need to break with Paris altogether. In 1945, Jeanne Laurent, in the socialist Ministère des Beaux-Arts, moved drama to the provinces by establishing the Centres Dramatiques Nationaux. In the 1960s, under de Gaulle, André Malraux followed with the Maisons de Culture. Pompidou swiftly turned off the tap after the events of May 1968. It was switched on again in the early 1980s with Mitterrand as President by Jack Lang, Arts Minister in a socialist government with a programme of political reform based on regionalisation.

Acting styles evolved to reflect the shift away from the notion of individual ‘star’ performance and towards ensemble production. The single-author script was no longer the sole mover of the drama. Body language, mime and mask, or the equally potent language of objects, were held to communicate more complex meanings, more effectively, than the word alone. Eastern theatrical traditions could offer whole languages of gesture and movement which attached different meanings to the different kinds of movement of different parts of the body, reaching the same complexity and subtlety as the West had brought to the elaboration of its verbal codes.⁸⁹ Performance became a collaboration between actors, playwright and director in which the latter increasingly took the major part, inventing and disseminating new acting techniques.

Jean-Louis Barrault's Réflexions sur le théâtre gives a glimpse of the networks of influence and mutual reinforcement which grew out of Jacques Copeau's school. Barrault studied with the actor-director Charles Dullin (1885-1949), whose teaching emphasised the body and its expressive powers and the importance of the mask. Dullin introduced him to the ideas of Copeau, the Russian director Constantin Stanislawski and the scenic designer Edward Gordon Craig. From Craig, he acquired the notion of theatre as a collective craft where the actor shares the work of carpenter and electrician, helps with costume design and learns how the music works. He learned about mime from the actor Étienne Decroux, formerly of Dullin's troupe, and developed his own techniques of breath-control and gesture. Barrault's first production, Autour d'une mère (1935), based on William Faulkner's modernist novel As I Lay Dying, was an exploration of the expressive powers of the body, which filled the stage with controlled movement, stylised gesture and non-verbal vocal sound.

The exceptional actor or actress continued to be a focal point in the production, with such stars as Louis Jouvet, Barrault himself, Madeleine Renaud, Gérard Philipe, Edwige Feuillère. But the later 1960s and early 1970s saw productions collectively devised by the acting group, whether working with a text or improvising their own themes. New relationships were established with the audience, or rather, the various audiences to which different productions were addressed.

Alongside these changes ran a continuing discussion of the relationship between the written playtext and performance. This has caught up many of the twentieth century's other debates on the origins of authority, the relations between writing and speech and between tradition and innovation, and (that false dichotomy inherited from the eighteenth century) whether understanding comes through reason or the senses.⁹⁰ More often than not, the best twentieth-century dramatic performances have been generated in negotiation with a script. A poet who can write for the page cannot necessarily transfer his talents to the stage, as Symbolist theatre discovered in the 1890s with plays by Verlaine, Mallarmé, Laforgue. But dramatic poetry, written for the human body to unleash the energies of language as part of a total discourse incorporating gesture and sound, breath-rhythms and body movements, and underlining the connections of speech and action, is quite another matter.

STEPPING STONES

In the period 1870-1920, the commercial theatre waxed fat on the continuing popularity on the boulevards of the farces of Georges Courteline (1858-1929) and Georges Feydeau (1862-1921), limiting its investment in new work to plays such as Edmond Rostand's tragi-comedy in verse, Cyrano de Bergerac (1897). Innovation came first from neighbour countries in Northern Europe through such diverse influences as Wagner, Ibsen, Strindberg and Maeterlinck, channelled through the little theatres of the Symbolist and Idealist movements. Home-grown Idealist drama consisted mostly of minor productions by minor playwrights, often with occultist sympathies (Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, Jules Bois, Joséphin Péladan), which foregrounded the text at the expense of performance.

Two dramatists from this period set the perspectives for twentieth-century theatre. In works such as Partage de midi (written 1905, staged 1948), L'Annonce faite à Marie (staged by Lugné-Poë, 1912), Le Soulier de satin (written 1919-24, published 1929, and staged 1943), the Symbolist Paul Claudel (1868-1955) dedicated his talents to the revival of the religious and political ideologies of the Right. For Claudel, spiritual and material worlds were joined in close communion, and his drama, built on Catholic doctrine and symbol (the Fall, the Cross, redemptive sacrifice, reparatory suffering, the Communion of Saints, the Providential direction of History), aimed to remake the connections between them in the contemporary imagination. The Wagnerian influence is strong in his work. In a programme note dated 30 December 1929, for the Berlin production of his play Le Livre de Christophe Colomb, he pointed to Wagner's interest in the subtle connections of rhythm and sonority that link the spoken word with music and enable the artist to transport his audience out of their present into a narcotic other-world of his own creation. In the 1930s, Claudel added to this discourse the techniques of the sacred lyrical drama of the Japanese Nô theatre, with its emphasis on ritual gesture, liturgical costume, and the use of the Chorus to provide a doubling commentary on the action (‘Le Festin de la Sagesse’, La Revue de Paris, 1 July 1938).

Claudel's theatre came into its own in the 1940s. Its search for a dramatic language which could make plain the tragic tensions between despair at a stifling present and longing for a liberating future is exactly that of the left-wing political drama of Sartre and Camus, who admired Claudel's work in this respect despite their antipathy to his religion and his politics. Jean-Louis Barrault, by then at the Comédie Française, was the first to realise the potential of his work and to stage Claudel's two evocations of star-crossed love, the epic and spectacular Le Soulier de satin (performed 1943) and the more intimate psychological drama, Partage de midi (performed 1948). Barrault's actors were excited by the technical challenges of a language which married mime and diction, the ‘breathed’ character of Claudel's prose-poetry, the loaded meanings to his words, and the drumming rhythms of his lines. The audience was, to Barrault's delight, overwhelmingly receptive to innovations which marked an energising reorientation of the theatrical enterprise.⁹¹

Equally influential, but set at the opposite political pole, was the work of Alfred Jarry (1873-1907), whose monstrous farce Ubu roi (1896), in a single two-night run, unleashed anarchy.⁹² This parody of Shakespeare's Macbeth, set in a parody of Poland, was a provocative onslaught on the Third Republic, indicted for its small-mindedness, obsession with money and power, blinkered positivism, worship of technology and disregard for humane values. Two years before the Dreyfus Affair, the play stirred the same mud and released the same poisons. In his theoretical statements on drama, written mostly in 1896-7 (‘De l'inutilité du théâtre au théâtre’, ‘Réponse à une questionnaire sur l'art dramatique’, ‘Questions de théâtre’), Jarry presented theatre as a visual, performative act, in which decor, mime and masks were as important as words. The puppets and robots who gesture and fawn mindlessly around the grotesque tyrant Ubu are the human wreckage on which the ballooning, predatory ego feeds. At the same time, for the fantastic horror of the play to achieve its full dimension, Jarry needed to depict the wreck of language, the gap between the words of modern culture and the meaning they create. Ubu's pompous rhetorics, parodies of medieval epic, Shakespeare, and Racinian tragedy, contrast sharply with his venal, cowardly and cruel acts. Jarry dramatised the processes by which culture is taken captive by an opportunistic bourgeoisie.

There are formal analogies between Jarry's work and that of his closest contemporary, Guillaume Apollinaire, whose verse play Les Mamelles de Tirésias, staged in 1917 under the tag ‘drame surréaliste’, bolstered its comedy with music, acrobatics and Chorus. But his direct heirs for both form and political intention were the Dadaists and Surrealists, who emerged in the 1920s and then again in the 1960s: Roger Vitrac, for example, whose Victor, ou les Enfants au pouvoir (1928) was revived in the 1962-3 season and who with Artaud was co-founder of the Théâtre Alfred Jarry in 1926.

In 1920-40, a stylish commercial theatre, fed by the prolific pens of Jean Cocteau (1889-1963), Jean Giraudoux (1882-1944) and Jean Anouilh (1910-87), produced much entertaining formal innovation but little substance. Isolated against this lightweight backdrop, Antonin Artaud identified a demand from the younger generation, against the establishment grain, for a culture which could reconnect human sensibility to historical event. Modern youth, he said, was opposed to bourgeois capitalism and like Karl Marx was sensitive to ‘le déséquilibre des temps où monte la personnalité monstrueuse des Pères basée sur la terre et sur l'argent’ [‘the unbalance in times when the monstrous personality of the Fathers, founded on money and land, is on the ascendant’].⁹³ In response to that demand, he proposed his own concept of a Theatre of Cruelty. This theatre was not necessarily cruel in the sense that it staged violence and crimes, though it often could. (Artaud's own play Les Cenci, 1935, rewrote the exploration by that other revolutionary, the English poet Shelley, of murder and incest within the patriarchal family.) Rather, its cruelty lay in tearing an audience away from the conventions that pad the edges of everyday existence and confronting it with the terrible thrill of being alive, part of the blind, zestful drive of creation (‘Lettres sur la cruauté’, 1932). Such a threatre required a new dramatic language, seen in action in the body-centred ritual forms of the Balinese Theatre in Paris in 1931. This became the basis of Artaud's radical rethinking of theatrical form and function in Le Théâtre et son double (1938), whose impact was only felt on its reissue in 1944 and which fed powerfully into the New Theatre of the late 1950s.

Theatre, Artaud argued, like plague, should shake its audiences with paroxysms of feeling, push them (in imagination) to extreme gestures and disclose repressed depths of eroticism, cruelty and violence. It was essentially a symbolic form, producing a double of reality, probing the myths and fables of the cultural inheritance to evoke their dark underside (‘Le Théâtre et la peste’). Words in such a theatre played a supporting role to the spectacular. The stage was a space to be filled with the concrete language of drama, which addresses itself to the unconscious, through the senses (‘La Mise-en-scène et la métaphysique’). Creating the ‘blaze’ of energies and images which constituted ideal drama required a synthesis of music, dance, mime, vocal intonation, architecture, lighting and decor.

In the 1940s and 1950s, the drama of Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus plunged theatre directly into history and politics.⁹⁴ Sartre's writing for the theatre doubles his political trajectory from optimistic faith in the revolutionary potential of France and Europe to deep disillusionment. Bariona (1940), written and staged in Sartre's prisoner-of-war camp, celebrated the collective rise of the local people to save the Holy Family from the Roman legions. Les Séquestrés d'Altona, produced in 1959 to indict French policy in Algeria, showed the impotence of individuals locked into family, nation, and a Europe bankrupted by past collusions with tyranny. All his plays deal with the problematic relation of character to historical situation, and with the individual subject's ability to turn intellectual desire for change into effective action. Their aims are theorised in Qu'est-ce que la littérature? (1947) and in the articles and interviews collected in Un théâtre de situations (1973). A Sartrean play is written to demystify conventional notions of human nature and motivation and to show how individuals are constructed by the situation—the complex of private, political, ideological and material relations—in which they are placed (‘Forger des mythes’, June 1946).

Serious bourgeois theatre continued to formulate its studies of contemporary issues as accounts of the psychological crises of the classically constituted hero (for example, the plays of Henry de Montherlant, La Reine morte, 1942; Le Maître de Santiago, staged 1948; Port-Royal, 1954). Sartre's analyses started from a situation in crisis, posing conflicts of moral and political values (‘Pour un théâtre de situations’, November 1947). Within that situation, individuals, caught in new lights and perspectives, confronted or dodged their contradictions and made or failed to make the choices that change worlds. Such a concept of character was meat and drink, as Barrault noted, to the modern director, concerned with the representation of the cross-currents of body language and speech. Sartre described the challenge of writing for popular theatre as one of re-establishing the connections between word and action (‘Théâtre populaire et théâtre bourgeois’, September-October 1955) and gave careful attention to the technical problems involved in giving contemporary colloquial dialogue a capacity for precise significance that could match the language of classical drama (‘Forger des mythes’). Every word uttered in the theatre should itself be an act: ‘une manière d'agir … serment ou engagement ou refus ou jugement moral ou défense des droits ou contestation des droits des autres’ [‘a mode of action … an oath, a commitment, a refusal, a moral judgement, a defense of rights or a challenge to the rights of others’] (‘Le Style dramatique’). Conversely, the written word needed the actor's gesture to complete its movement towards meaning.

In Qu'est-ce que la littérature?, Sartre argued that all writers must recognise the class standpoint from and to which they speak, and commit themselves to the cause of the oppressed. A play must find the appropriate myths to make visible the formative conflicts and preoccupations of its audience, generating an understanding that can be turned into political action. The myths could be, as in Les Mouches (staged 1943), a new version carved out within the shell of Ancient plots. More often, his plots were modern, encapsulating in vivid (melo-) drama those moments of confrontation and choice that were part of everyday life in post-war Europe. Huis clos (1944) brought together in a Hell of eternal futility three characters who limited their horizons to private life, and selfishly built their own happiness at the cost of the lives around them. Morts sans sépulture (1946) presented an arrested Resistance group, facing torture and death, struggling to fix their choices for the greater public good. La Putain respectueuse (1948) raised the issues of racist and sexist oppression. Les Mains sales (staged 1948) dramatised the failure of a young middle-class intellectual to break with his idealist conditioning and make choices which would further collective freedom.

Albert Camus's dramatic career began with the theatre collective he helped found in Algeria in 1937. For his models, he looked not to Brecht but to Shakespeare, the Spanish Golden Age and French Classicism and, among contemporaries, the novelist Faulkner, whose Requiem for a Nun he adapted for the stage. In all these periods, he saw a moment of major historical change, poised between present despair and future unknown and presenting a cluster of inevitably tragic choices. In their representative authors he prized the ability to represent those tragic tensions with heroic simplicity. His first text, written with the collective in 1936, Révolte dans les Asturies (published 1962), an account of the repression of the miners' rebellion in the Spanish Civil War, was banned from production. Its experimental features included a stage that surrounded the audience, locking them into the action, a stylised emphasis on the group (miners and ministers in opposition) rather than the individual actor, mimed battle scenes, and some skilful interplay of sound and presence. Radio news voice-overs, tracking the revolt and its defeat, indicated the dominance of distant Barcelona, and a closing scene of disembodied, imprisoned voices in the dark gave a powerfully lyrical presentation of crushed hope. Later work, more severe philosophical investigations of political problems, was less exciting dramatically. Caligula (written 1936-9, performed 1945) was an exploration of the meaning of freedom in an Absurd world, and of the tensions that exist between the individual's power to exercise his freedom and the freedom of others. Les Justes, which opened in 1949, explored the question of whether murder can be politically justified, comparing the different responses of a group of terrorists in 1905 in theory and in practice.

The 1950s and 1960s saw an acceleration in the dual emphasis on performance and politics, encouraged by a fresh wave of influences from abroad. The Piccolo Teatro de Milan, which in 1949 put down the first marker for a Marxist and materialist political theatre, returned regularly to Paris through to the 1960s. Brecht's Berliner Ensemble arrived in 1954, with its techniques for engaging the audience's enthusiasm while also positioning it to consider a case from a distanced, objective perspective (the ‘alienation effect’). The Théâtre des Nations welcomed performances by the Peking Opera in 1955 and by Japanese Nô companies in the 1950s and 1960s. In 1959, Joan Littlewood presented the work of Brendan Behan and her own Oh What a Lovely War. The 1960s saw translations from the English New Theatre of Harold Pinter, Edward Bond, John Osborne, Tom Stoppard and Arnold Wesker. Piscator was directing in Paris in the 1950s, and his Political Theatre appeared in French translation in 1962. The American Theatre anarchist collective, with Judith Malina and Julian Beck, touring Europe in 1964-8, appeared at the Théâtre des Nations. In 1966, Jerzy Grotowski of the Warsaw Theatre Laboratory came with his ‘poor theatre’, in which the sole means of representation was the actor's body.

In France, the first impulse was to seek to re-address tradition and turn it to serve the needs of the present. Jean Vilar, director of the Théâtre National Populaire (1951-63), and Roger Planchon, founder of the Théâtre de la Cité in Villeurbane, an industrial suburb of Lyons, offered productions of Racine, Molière and Shakespeare which reconstructed the original historical reality explored by these dramatists and added a second dimension that explored conflicts in contemporary France. But in France as in England, it was new plays that gave directors such as Vilar, Roger Blin, Barrault and Jean-Marie Serreau their greatest stimulus and made the mid-century French theatre a place where major critiques of power relations and practices were being undertaken at the level of structures and language. The great dramatists of the Absurd—Genet, Beckett, Ionesco—embraced the flow of that second, innovatory current of theatre identified by Barrault and declared its philosophical and political implications. In the theatre of performance, concepts of authority and meaning are completely transformed. ‘Meaning’ is not a noun, a message, a truth to be handed over on a plate. ‘Meaning’ in this theatre is a verb, a process of construction, an act of making made afresh from moment to moment. Meaning can be seen and understood on stage, modelled within given, pre-constructed forms, but not definitively lodged in any. It is a working congeries of many discourses, mutually transformative, and all showing their constructed nature, their status as human productions. To a culture still committed to rationalist and religious absolutes and to notions of essential structures and unchanging truths, Absurd drama presented the liberating alternative of an Absurd universe. In the beginning was not the Word; beginning is speaking and seeing.

The first signs of change appeared at the end of the 1940s in the first representations of the alternative world of Jean Genet (1910-86), Les Bonnes (staged 1947) and Haute Surveillance (1949). In his lyrical evocation of the murderous venom of the maidservant-sisters, and the snarling criminals in the death cell, Genet presented original and shockingly celebratory emblems of the eroticism and violence whose repression constitutes the limits of the bourgeois order. The Surrealist philosopher and prose-writer Georges Bataille, in a review of Haute Surveillance on its publication in 1949, wrote of the power of Genet's theatre to rediscover in the forbidden places of the modern world the sacred thrill and heroic grandeur of classical tragedy, which had slipped, he said, out of the reach of a mediocre bourgeoisie.⁹⁵

Genet's lyrical drama is a production of the lived relations of power between individuals and between individuals and society. These relations, political and economic in their origins, are seen, in the tradition of Artaud, as experienced most profoundly in the erotically-charged myths and symbols by which a culture lives. A culture focuses and displays or conceals its repressions, fears, desires and latent powers in certain images, which then become forms through which the culture can be manipulated. These forms, perceived as ‘natural’, are in fact constructions, ideological illusions which individuals live without questioning. All power, Genet told an interviewer, shelters behind some kind of theatricality, and only the theatre, the place of avowed illusion, has the means to lift the veils.⁹⁶ The erotic dressing-up games in the brothel (Le Balcon, published in 1956 and first produced in 1957), the play-rehearsals undertaken by blacks for the entertainment of whites (Les Nègres, first performed 1959), and the criss-crossing of screens over the stage of the Algerian War (Les Paravents, published 1961, first staged by Roger Blin in 1966) are so many emblems of the illusionary processes by which participants in a society collude to create the society's self-image.

‘Comment jouer “Les Bonnes”’, Genet's preface to the published text of Les Bonnes (1947), explained that the function of theatre was to externalise in scenic images and rhythms the buried processes of individual and social dream. To this purpose, scenic techniques and acting style must blend realism and artifice, introducing an edge of surrealism that frees convention-blunted perceptions for new kinds of understanding. Sartre spoke of the ‘whirligigs’ of a drama that disorientates spectators, tossing them to and fro from the true to the false and the false to the true (Saint-Genêt: comédien et martyr, 1952, Appendix 3). Genet had wanted the women in Les Bonnes to be played by adolescent boys, as part of a process of stylisation which could turn the women from individuals into symbols of femininity and so release the spectators from preconceptions and let them think creatively about the feminine function. The feminine is a central concept in Genet's work, representing that repressed, marginalised and dependent element in the psychological and social unit which colludes with and reproduces its own subjection but is also a potential source of hostile energies, permanently on the edge of revolt.

One of the great conjuring-tricks of ideology is its presentation of everyday life as a harmonious order. The jarring contrasts and discrepancies set up by Genet's drama scar and crack this smooth surface. In Les Nègres, the disruption comes in the foregrounding of the acting, the make-up, the masks, and also in the mixing of linguistic registers, juxtaposing the colloquial and the lyrical, in which the blacks make their challenge. Invisible gaps and divides in society are made visible. In Le Balcon, the brothel's clients and visitors (the Judge, the General, the Bishop) act out their fantasies in what look like discrete private rooms but are all essentially the same space. When the social battle-lines are drawn, the establishment figures line up together on the balcony and the real divide is disclosed, between those on high and the anonymous crowds struggling off-stage, out of the reckoning.

The collaboration between Samuel Beckett (1906-89) and Roger Blin on En attendant Godot (1953), staged at the Théâtre de Babylone, marked the opening of another potent investigation into the capacity of drama to reformulate the relationship of meaning and form, glossed by discreet reference to the deep structures of self-deception, exploitation, collusion and illusion which have shaped Western civilisation.⁹⁷ Like the full-length stage plays that followed, in French and English (Fin de partie, 1957; Krapp's Last Tape, 1958; Happy Days, 1961), and then the ever-shorter pieces written for stage, radio and television (Cascando, written 1962; Eh Joe, produced in 1966; Not I, premiered in 1972; and Catastrophe, in 1982), Godot was an experiment that put the spotlight on discourse. Or more accurately, it explored the relationship between discourse and the referent: that is, the universal silence which human perception, movement and speech punctuate into significance.

Beckett's genius was to marshal the left-over materials of the theatrical tradition—a minimum of décor, a diminishing number of characters, and a ragbag of rhetorics—into a set of relationships and exchanges which, realised in the rhythms of performance, model the absurd void of significance that constitutes the lived present of European culture. Habit, and the patterns of familiar routine, Beckett's dramas demonstrate, give the illusion of order, direction and sense to contemporary life. Speakers mouth rhetorics moulded around concepts—God, Reason, Nature—without substance. Life's lack of any absolute structure is modelled by the movement of the dramatic performance.

Beckett's plays play at stretching and shrinking time and space. Passing the time is the object of his characters, as it is the sole object of life demystified of religious absolutes and orientations. Time goes fast or slow depending how it is lived. The movement of the world is fixed by the situation of its speakers. Clov, the servant in Fin de partie (produced 1957), turns on Hamm, his master, refusing to differentiate ‘yesterday’ from any other day, when all days are equally grey and empty. In En attendant Godot, the destitute friends Vladimir and Estragon congratulate one another on a well-timed exchange of dialogue that has filled at least a minute with distraction. In the same play, Pozzo, the capitalist exploiter fallen on hard times, defines life as a fleeting awareness, empty of human feeling (a woman gives birth straddling the grave, light flickers, then darkness falls again). Objects, sparsely placed in this devastated world, are points in which meaning can be located. Radishes, turnips, boots keep people going in a literal sense (En attendant Godot), as well as in the sense of providing a subject to talk about. Winnie's handbag and toothbrush (Happy Days) perform the same function, as does, more ominously, her revolver. In the hands of the masters, both objects and language are politicised and turned into instruments of control. Pozzo rules through his whip, watch and food hamper; Hamm, with his whistle and his key to the food cupboard.

Beckett manages his world of frightening absurdity with black humour, humanly lurching between the grotesque and the sublime. Life, says Estragon, is a circus. As Beckett stages it, it is knock-about farce, shot through with cruelty, pain and terror. Terror comes with the realisation that being is self-authoring and self-perceiving (a recognition process brilliantly mimed in the silent comedy Film, 1963), and with the acknowledgement of the shortness of the time which the human voice has to find itself (Breath, 1969). At the end of the day, confronting the terror head-on is the heroism of the ordinary human. The light goes out on Krapp, playing over to himself the tapes of his past life, as he teeters on the brink of seeing what he is and has been, embracing it, and letting it go.

From a conservative and idealist position, Eugène Ionesco (1912-94), Romanian-born, settled in Paris from 1938, offered a critique of contemporary rhetoric superficially similar to Beckett's but different in its intentions and in the corrosive despair by which it is animated.⁹⁸ Ionesco denounced the stereotyped, robotic nature of modern society and its inhabitants, reduced to absurdity by their identification with their social functions, not human beings but effects of ideology (‘Le Rôle du dramaturge’, Notes et contre-notes, 1962). His black comedies, brilliantly visual, staged the monstrous absence of meaning from the forms that claim to communicate it. La Cantatrice chauve (first produced 1950) displayed the absurdity of language, the arbitrary nature of grammar and syntax, the lack of correlation between sound and sense, and the conventional nature of the narrative forms by which all these elements are constructed into a semblance of meaning. Ionesco emphasised the deceitfulness of the ‘story’, with its assumptions of a beginning, a middle and an end, which cocoons listeners in the prejudice that coherence and meaning exist. In his own plays, storyline was replaced by layered sequences of intensifying panic, where the real toppled over the edge into the disproportions and distortions of nightmare (‘Entretien avec Edith Mora’, Notes et contre-notes). The old couple in Les Chaises (1952) are gradually pushed off-stage by a proliferation of empty chairs. In Amédée ou comment s'en débarrasser (1954), a corpse swells to fill the stage. Panic breeds violence, not least in those who hold power. The teacher in La Leçon (1951), who kills his pupil with the language of authority, belongs to the same totalitarian impulse that in Rhinocéros (1960) takes over the whole world, leaving one solitary romantic standing symbolically in a crumbling house.

None of this ground-breaking new work was political in the simple, dogmatic sense. The work that declared itself political did not have the same intellectual and dramatic force: that of Arthur Adamov (1908-70), for example (Paolo Paoli, 1957), or the plays of Armand Gatti (b. 1924), which are interesting for their attempts to make the audience a working part of the production (Chant public devant deux chaises électriques, 1966, on the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti; V comme Vietnam, 1967; Les Treize Soleils de la rue Saint-Blaise, 1968, written in collaboration with the audience during the May events; and La Colonne Durruti, 1974). The ‘théâtre panique’ or ‘théâtre de cérémonie’ of Fernando Arrabal (b. 1932) is effective as spectacle but less so as political analysis, from Le Cimetière des voitures (1958) to the scatalogical black humour of L'Architecte et l'Empereur d'Assyrie ou Joseph K tenté par la mégalomanie (staged 1967).

AFTER THE EVENTS

May 1968 took theatre onto the streets.⁹⁹ A meeting organised by Roger Planchon in his Villeurbane theatre led to the ‘Declaration of Villeurbane’ that cultural action should be an exercise in politicisation and must invent ways to help a public accustomed to impotence to practise creativity and freedom of choice. Theatre unions took part in the general strike, demanding changes in theatre administration. The predictable government withdrawal of subsidies for popular and political theatre provoked further demonstrations.

The independent troupes who came to prominence from late 1969 in the regions and Paris made significant advances in improvisation, collective creation and audience participation. Jacques Kraemer's Théâtre Populaire de Lorraine, founded in 1963, dramatised the crises associated with the iron and steel industry (Splendeur et misère de Minette la bonne Lorraine, 1969; Les Immigrés, 1972). André Benedetto's Nouvelle Compagnie d'Avignon, founded in 1966, gave a dramatic voice to such issues as Occitanian independence, the Vietnam War, revolution and class struggle. In Paris, the Théâtre de l'Aquarium, a student company turned professional in May 1970, satirised urban exploitation and the abuses of the press. Jérôme Savary's troupe, Le Grand Magic Circus et ses animaux tristes, embarked on a series of riotous productions, subversive in their sheer exuberance.

Of all such companies, the most influential and successful was Ariane Mnouchkine's Théâtre du Soleil, founded in 1964, which first established its distinctive identity in Les Clowns (1969), a production built up through a process of individual and collective improvisation, with its thematic centre the relationship between actors and their society.¹⁰⁰ Mnouchkine's multi-stage spectacular presentations swept the audience into the actors' critique of the contemporary State. The latter was attacked at its Revolutionary foundations in 1789, La Révolution doit s'arrêter à la perfection du bonheur (1970), which offered from fairground trestle stages a panoramic, carnival analysis of the origins of the Revolution and its take-over by the bourgeoisie in 1791. 1793, La Cité révolutionnaire est de ce monde (1972) recreated the private lives of commoners in a revolutionary community and contrasted their disappointed aspirations with the triumphalist claims of bourgeois history. L'Âge d'or (1975), plotted on the struggles of an immigrant worker, satirised the materialism of modern France.

The emphasis on collective creation from the 1970s onwards resulted in the temporary marginalisation of the writer. At the beginning of the eighties, David Bradby has noted, the important names in French theatre were still those of directors: Barrault, Planchon, Mnouchkine, Chéreau, Vincent, Vitez.

Recently, women directors and writers have become more numerous.¹⁰¹ Their work is marked by a common motif of resistance to the confinement of meanings in rigid forms and categories and to the definition of an authoritative subject centre. Marguerite Duras's India Song (1972), which received its first performance in England in the summer of 1993, constructs a complex web of dialogues between voice-overs, voices off-stage, sound and music, combined with the spectacle of silent actors on-stage to model the slips and shifts of gendered desire (male and female, homosexual and heterosexual). Duras has also directed her own play, Savannah Bay (1983). Simone Benmussa, playwright, director and editor of the Cahiers Renaud-Barrault, is especially interested in turning non-theatrical texts into theatre. Her own La Vie singulière d'Albert Nobbs, adapted from George Moore's study of transvestism, appeared in 1977, and Enfance, adapted from Nathalie Sarraute's memoir-dialogue, in 1984. But Benmussa is best known for her adaptation and direction of Hélène Cixous's Portrait de Dora (1976), on which she comments in Benmussa Directs (1979). For this performance, different stage levels, voice-over, film projections and lighting effects were used to catch the swirl of significations around the split subject that is Dora: the shifting subject positions, complex interrelations of male and female desire, the overlapping time-planes of Dora's dream-recollections and Freud's crude interrogations. The movement of representation aims to displace Freud from the spotlight, prising away from him control of his case-study narrative and releasing Dora from the object-status in which it scientifically imprisoned her.

The most adventurous of the women directors remains Ariane Mnouchkine, though her adaptations of Shakespeare in the early 1980s and her attempts at contemporary epic have been criticised for allowing history to fall back into myth and for sacrificing analysis for an over-simplifying single vision. Her productions of Hélène Cixous's dramatisations of the Cambodian catastrophe (L'Histoire terrible mais inachevée de Norodom Sihanouk, roi du Cambodge, 1985) and the making of Gandhi's India (L'Indiade, 1987) were not helped by texts which themselves seem to have exchanged feminist ambition for myth-making and gesture.¹⁰²

Published plays were still few in the early eighties, but the situation was eased by subsidies from Jack Lang's Ministry, to help young writers. Two dramatists have dominated in recent years, both advocates of the written text. In his preface to the collection of dramatic commentaries developed in his seminars held in the 1980s at the universities of Paris III and Paris VIII (Écritures dramatiques: Essais d'analyse de textes de théâtre, 1993), Michel Vinaver emphasised the double nature of the dramatic text, which is produced both for representation and for private reading, and where spoken word and action are intimately connected. His closing pages, however, gave primacy to the text: ‘I'œuvre est tout entière dans son écriture même, et l'écriture n'est pas quelque chose qui change en cours de route’ [‘the work is entirely in the writing, and the writing is not something that changes as you go along’]. Bernard-Marie Koltès (1945-89) included in the Notes to the text of Roberto Zucco (1990) an impressioned plea for more new plays to be staged and fewer rewrites of the classical repertory, and a statement that the room for collaboration between writer and director (in his case, Chéreau) is limited to the narrow space between the points when the writing is finished and rehearsals begin.¹⁰³

From his first play, Aujourd'hui, ou les Coréens (staged 1956), to his most recent, L'Émission de télévision (1990), Michel Vinaver (b. 1927) has produced multi-layered political drama, which recognises the construction of so-called private experience by the webs of political and economic discourse. The marketing ethos and its transformations of the world of work and the individual subject inspired both the comic epic Par-dessus bord (1969) and the shorter Les Travaux et les jours (1980). The legal system is the focus of Portrait d'une femme (1988), where the heroine confronts judge, lawyers and witnesses in Court, object of an interrogation that emphasises the theatrical and constructed nature of her experience. Actors change costume and scenery in full view of the audience. Juxtaposed sets make it possible to offset against each other dialogues between different sets of characters and to use flashbacks to build up a picture of the complex machinery of the patriarchal State that has made of Sophie the prisoner in the dock. L'Émission de télévision (1990) evokes the anxieties generated around individuals who must redefine themselves as they cross the gulf between the world of work and the no man's land of unemployment, and who suddenly find themselves called to account not only by the stereotyping machinery of law but by the even more powerful machine of the media. No music, no scenery and a minimum of props leave language in full possession of the stage. Stage-directions specify the movement of lighting over different parts of the stage to indicate fragments of a reality made of various times and places: ‘Un peu comme si le spectateur, muni d'une télécommande, zappait face à l'espace du jeu’ [‘As though the spectator is zapping the playing space with a channel-changer’.]

Vinaver articulates and mobilises the anxieties of audiences caught in the sticky, quivering webs of contemporary life, which become substantial matter for analysis through the language of his drama. As the examining magistrate and would-be orchestrator of the action in L'Émission de télévision comments: ‘En cinq jours, j'ai vu des situations basculer / Je travaille une matière vive’ [‘I've seen situations turn upside down in five days; I work on living material’]. Koltès, in contrast, again in the Notes to Roberto Zucco, rejoices in the capacity of theatre to refuse the weight of the so-called real. For him, like Genet, theatre is the only place that does not claim to be real life. Rather, ‘C'est comme le lieu ou l'on se poserait le problème: ceci n'est pas la vraie vie, comment faire pour s'échapper d'ici?’ [‘It's the place where you can pose the problem: this isn't real life, how do we get out of here?’].

Koltès's plays give glimpses of the possibility of other realities, admittedly inaccessible, but whose evocation briefly lifts the darkness of the prisonhouse. Combat de nègre et de chiens (1983), set in colonised Africa, evokes the tantalising world of the enslaved black that itself defies definition but defines and denounces the limited horizons of its brutal and impotent white masters. (There is always, notes Koltés, a black lurking at the edge of his dramas—an intimation, we should understand, of an Otherness which is never the reassuring reflection that the gazer in the mirror thinks he can see.) In these and subsequent playful exercises in moral and political paradox (Quai ouest, 1986; Dans la solitude des champs de coton, 1987), Koltès's representative character is not the magistrate but the criminal, the mad murderer-hero Roberto Zucco, climbing onto the prison roof, slipping past the guards, demonstrating and creating a new logic of existence, seductive and liberating. Against playwrights who explore the ‘Why?’ of a narrative, its rationale, Koltès argues for the importance of simply showing the ‘How?’, taking an empty space, setting in it an unexpected collocation of characters, and seeing what develops.

The result is a concept of theatre which is in every sense play with the logic of language. The dialogue is a comic match for Molière's, simultaneously pastiche and parody, catching with a discreetly unifying hint of lyrical movement the precise inflections and distinctive styles of individuals who are chiefly performers of social functions (sons and mothers, big brothers and little sisters, prisoners and guards, slaves and masters). But alongside the fun is a distinct sense of awe at the ability of language to model the constraints of time and space, and this, increasingly, was what Koltès tried to stage. Out of his own dramatic experience he reinvented the classical theatre of speech and presence:

[J]'ai découvert la règle des trois unités, qui n'a rien d'arbitraire, même si on a le droit aujourd'hui de l'appliquer autrement. En tous les cas, c'est bien la prise en compte du temps et de l'espace qui est la grande qualité du théâtre. Le cinéma et le roman voyagent, le théâtre pèse de tout notre poids sur le sol.

[I have discovered the rule of the three unities, which is by no means arbitrary, though we are entitled nowadays to apply it in different ways. In any event, the distinctive feature of theatre is the account it takes of time and space. Cinema and novel can go travelling; theatre stands us full square on the ground.]

(Notes to Roberto Zucco)

Notes

1. This was only fully realised in the 1950s with the publication of his unfinished novel Jean Santeuil and his critical work Contre Sainte-Beuve. For full details see the 4-volume Pléiade edition of À la recherche du temps perdu, ed. Jean-Yves Tadié (Paris: Gallimard, 1987-9).

2. He translated The Bible of Amiens (1904) and Sesame and Lilies (1906). His collected Pastiches et mélanges were published in 1919.

3. See Jean-Yves Tadié, Proust et le roman (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1971); Jean-Pierre Richard, Proust et le monde sensible (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1974); Maya Slater, Humour in the Works of Proust (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979); J. M. Cocking, Proust (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982); Leighton Hodson (ed.), Marcel Proust. The Critical Heritage (London and New York: Routledge, 1989); Julia Kristeva, Le Temps sensible. Proust et l'expérience littéraire (Paris: Gallimard, 1994); Michael Sprinkler, History and Ideology in Proust: ‘A la recherche du temps perdu’ and the Third French Republic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).

4. See William W. Holdheim, Theory and Practice of the Novel. A Study on André Gide (Geneva: Droz, 1968); David H. Walker, André Gide (London: Macmillan, 1990).

5. See Paul Valéry, Œuvres, ed. Jean Hytier, 2 vols (Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1960), vol. I, pp. 988-1014.

6. See Maurice Rieuneau, Guerre et révolution dans le roman français 1919-1939 (Paris: Klincksieck, 1974); Frank Field, Three French Writers and the Great War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975); Holger Klein (ed.), The First World War in Fiction (London: Macmillan, 1976); John Cruickshank, Variations on Catastrophe: Some French Responses to the Great War (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982); Jean Relinger, Henri Barbusse: écrivain combattant (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1994).

7. See John Flower, Literature and the Left in France (London: Methuen, 1985).

8. See E. Tonnet-Lacroix, Après-guerre et sensibilités littéraires (1919-1924) (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1991).

9. On Giraudoux and the poetic novel see ‘L'Âge du roman poétique (1920-1930)’, in Michel Raimond, La Crise du roman (Paris: José Corti, 1967), pp. 224-43. On Ramuz see David G. Bevan, The Art and Poetry of Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz (New York: Oleander Press, 1977). On Giono see Pierre Citron, Giono, 1895-1970 (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1990).

10. See Calogero Giardina, L'Imaginaire dans les romans de Raymond Radiguet (Paris: Didier, 1991).

11. See Nicholas Hewitt, The Golden Age of Louis-Ferdinand Céline (Leamington Spa, Hamburg, New York: Berg, 1987); Ian Noble, Language and Narration in Céline's Writings (London: Macmillan, 1987).

12. See Robert Soucy, Fascist Intellectual: Drieu la Rochelle (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1979); Marie Balvet, Itinéraire d'un intellectual vers le fascisme: Drieu la Rochelle (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1984); Rima Drell Reck, Drieu la Rochelle and the Picture Gallery Novel: French Modernism in the Inter-War Years (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990).

13. See Camus's preface to the two-volume Pléiade edition of Martin du Gard's complete works (Paris: Gallimard, 1955), vol. I, pp. ix-xxxi.

14. See Olivier Rony, Jules Romains ou l'appel au monde (Paris: Laffont, 1992).

15. See Alan Rose, Surrealism and Communism. The Early Years (New York: Peter Lang, 1991).

16. See Roger Cardinal, Breton: ‘Nadja’ (London: Grant and Cutler, 1986).

17. See Jacqueline Lévi-Valensi, Aragon romancier (Paris: SEDES, 1989).

18. See W. D. Redfern, Paul Nizan: Committed Literature in a Conspiratorial World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972); Bernard Alluin and Jacques Deguy (eds), Paul Nizan écrivain (Lille: Presses Universitaires de Lille, 1988); Michael Scriven, Paul Nizan: Communist Novelist (London: Macmillan, 1988).

19. See P. M. Cryle, The Thematics of Commitment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), ch. VI, pp. 218-41.

20. See Susan R. Suleiman, Authoritarian Fictions. The Ideological Novel as a Literary Genre (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983).

21. See J. E. Flower, Writers and Politics in Modern France (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1977); Mary Jean Green, Fiction in the Historical Present: French Writers and the Thirties (Hanover and London: University Press of New England, 1986); Alice Yager Kaplan, Reproductions of Banality: Fascism, Literature and French Intellectual Life (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986); Geraldi Leroy and Anne Roche, Les Écrivains et le Front Populaire (Paris: Presses de la Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, 1986); Nicholas Hewitt, ‘Les Maladies du Siècle’: The Image of Malaise in French Fiction and Thought in the Inter-War Years (Hull: Hull University Press, 1988).

22. See Cecil Jenkins, André Malraux (Boston: Twayne, 1972); Thomas Jefferson Kline, André Malraux and the Metamorphosis of Death (New York and London: Columbia University Press, 1973); Robert S. Thornberry, André Malraux et l'Espagne (Geneva: Droz, 1977); Barrie Cadwallader, Crisis of the European Mind: A Study of André Malraux and Drieu la Rochelle (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1981); David G. Bevan (ed.), Via Malraux: Essays by Walter Langlois (Wolfville: The Malraux Society, 1986); Geoffrey T. Harris, André Malraux: A Re-evaluation (London: Macmillan, 1995).

23. See Malcolm Scott, Mauriac: The Politics of a Novelist (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1980) and The Struggle for the Soul of the French Novel: French Catholic and Realist Novelists 1850-1970 (London: Macmillan, 1989); John E. Flower and Bernard C. Swift (eds), François Mauriac: Visions and Reappraisals (Oxford, New York, Munich: Berg, 1989); François Mauriac et les romanciers de l'inquiétude de 1914 à 1945 (Paris: Grasset, 1991).

24. See Gerda Blumenthal, The Poetic Imagination of Georges Bernanos (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1965); J. E. Flower, Bernanos: ‘Journal d'un curé de campagne’ (London: Edward Arnold, 1970); Colin W. Nettlebeck, Les Personnages de Bernanos romancier (Paris: Minard, 1970).

25. See Paul Reed, Sartre: ‘La Nausée’ (London: Grant and Cutler, 1987); Jean Deguy, ‘La Nausée’ de Jean-Paul Sartre (Paris: Gallimard (Foliothèque 28), 1992).

26. See Anthony Cheal Pugh (ed.), France 1940: Literary and Historical Reaction to Defeat (Durham: University of Durham, 1991).

27. See Frederick J. Harris, Encounters with Darkness: French and German Writers on World War II (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983); Margaret Atack, Literature and the French Resistance: Cultural Politics and Narrative Forms, 1940-1950 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989). On the liberation see French Cultural Studies, V, 15 (October 1994), pp. 219-300 (special issue on ‘Culture and the Liberation’); H. R. Kedward and Nancy Wood (eds), The Liberation of France: Image and Event (New York and Oxford: Berg, 1995).

28. See Jacques Debû-Bridel, Les Éditions de Minuit. Historique et Bibliographie (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1954).

29. See William Kidd, Vercors: ‘Le Silence de la mer’ et autres récits (Glasgow: University of Glasgow, 1991); James W. Brown and Lawrence D. Stokes (eds), ‘The Silence of the Sea’/‘Le Silence de la mer’: A Novel of French Resistance during the Second World War by ‘Vercors’ (New York and Oxford: Berg, 1992).

30. See S. Beynon John, Saint-Exupéry: ‘Vol de nuit’ and ‘Terre des hommes’ (London: Grant and Cutler, 1990).

31. See J. E. Flower, Roger Vailland: The Man and His Masks (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1975).

32. See Christina Howells, Sartre's Theory of Literature (London: Modern Humanities Research Association, 1979); Mark Poster, Existential Marxism in Post-War France (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975); Rhiannon Goldthorpe, Sartre: Literature and Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984); Charles G. Hill, Jean-Paul Sartre: Freedom and Commitment (New York: Peter Lang, 1992); Christina Howells (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Sartre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Andrew Dobson, Jean-Paul Sartre and the Politics of Reason: A Theory of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).

33. See John Cruickshank, Albert Camus and the Literature of Revolt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959); Bruce Pratt, L'Évangile selon Albert Camus (Paris: José Corti, 1980); Susan Tarrow, Exile from the Kingdom: A Political Re-reading of Albert Camus (University of Alabama Press, 1985); Philip Thody, Albert Camus (London: Macmillan, 1989); J. C. Isaac, Arendt, Camus and Modern Rebellion (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1992); J. McBridge, Albert Camus: Philosopher and Littérateur (New York: St Martin's Press, 1992); Jean Guérin, Albert Camus: portrait de l'artiste en citoyen (Paris: F. Bourin, 1993); Ray Davison (ed.), L'Étranger (London: Methuen, 1988); Adèle King (ed.), Camus's ‘L'Étranger’: Fifty Years On (London: Macmillan, 1992); E. J. Hughes, Camus; ‘Le Premier homme’, ‘La Peste’ (Glasgow: University of Glasgow French and German Publications, 1995).

34. See J. E. Flower, Pierre Courtade: The Making of a Party Scribe (New York and Oxford: Berg, 1995).

35. See Nicholas Hewitt, Literature and the Right in Post-War France: The Story of the ‘Hussards’ (New York and Oxford: Berg, 1996); Christopher Lloyd, Aymé: ‘Uranus’/‘La Tête des autres’ (Glasgow: University of Glasgow French and German Publications, 1992).

36. See Deirdre Bair, Samuel Beckett: A Biography (London: Vintage, 1990); Leslie Hill, Beckett's Fiction: In Different Words (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); David Watson, Paradox and Desire in Samuel Beckett's Fiction (London: Macmillan, 1991).

37. On the nouveau roman, see the important collections of essays by Alain Robbe-Grillet, Pour un nouveau roman (Paris: Gallimard (Coll. Idées), 1963); Nathalie Sarraute, L'Ère du soupçon (Paris: Gallimard (Coll. Idées), 1964); Michel Butor, Répertoire, 5 vols (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1960-75). See also Jean Ricardou, Problèmes du nouveau roman (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1967) and Le Nouveau Roman (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1973); Nouveau Roman: hier, aujourd'hui, 2 vols (Paris: UGE (Colloque de Cérisy), 1972); Stephen Heath, The Nouveau Roman (London: Elek, 1972); Ann Jefferson, The Nouveau Roman and the Poetics of Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980); Celia Britton, The Nouveau Roman: Fiction, Theory, Politics (London: Macmillan, 1992).

38. See John Fletcher, Alain Robbe-Grillet (London: Methuen, 1983); Raylene L. Ramsay, Robbe-Grillet and Modernity: Science, Sexuality, and Subversion (Gainsville, Tallahassee, Tampa: University Press of Florida, 1992).

39. See Elf Jongeneel, Michel Butor et le pacte romanesque (Paris: José Corti, 1988); Jean Duffy, Butor: ‘La Modification’ (London: Grant and Cutler, 1990).

40. See Valerie Minogue, Nathalie Sarraute and the War of the Words (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1981); Sheila M. Bell, Nathalie Sarraute and the Feminist Reader (London and Toronto: Associated University Press, 1993).

41. See Marcelle Marini, Territoires du féminin: avec Marguerite Duras (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1977); Micheline Tison-Braun, Marguerite Duras (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1985); Sharon Willis, Marguerite Duras: Writing on the Body (Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 1987); Leslie Hill, Apocalyptic Desires (London: Routledge 1993); David Coward, ‘Marguerite Duras’, in Michael Tilby (ed.), Beyond the Nouveau Roman (London and New York: Berg, 1990), pp. 39-63. On Moderato cantabile see David Coward, Duras: ‘Moderato cantabile’ (London: Grant and Cutler, 1981).

42. See Renate Günther, Duras: ‘Le Ravissement de Lol V. Stein’ and ‘L'Amant’ (London: Grant and Cutler, 1993).

43. See Claude Simon: analyse, théorie (Paris: UGE (Colloque de Cérisy), 1975); Celia Britton (ed.), Claude Simon (London and New York: Longman, 1993); Mary Orr, Claude Simon: The Intertextual Dimension (Glasgow: University of Glasgow French and German Publications, 1993); Alastair Duncan, Claude Simon: Adventures in Words (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994).

44. See Anthony Cheal Pugh, Simon: ‘Histoire’ (London: Grant and Cutler, 1982).

45. See Robert M. Henkels, Robert Pinget: The Novel as Quest (Alabama: University of Alabama Press, 1979).

46. On Ollier see the Review of Contemporary Fiction, 8 (Summer 1988).

47. See Susan Hayward and Ginette Vincendeau (eds), French Film: Texts and Contexts (London: Routledge, 1990); Jill Forbes, The Cinema in France: After the New Wave (London: British Film Institute/Macmillan, 1992).

48. See Jacques Bens (ed.), Oulipo, 1960-1980 (Paris: Christian Bourgeois, 1981); Warren F. Motte (ed.), Oulipo: A Primer of Potential Literature (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986). See also Claude Simonnet, Queneau déchiffré (Paris: Julliard, 1962); C. Sanders, Raymond Queneau (Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 1994). On Zazie dans le métro see Walter Redfern, Queneau: ‘Zazie dans le métro’ (London: Grant and Cutler, 1980); Michel Bigot, ‘Zazie dans le métro’ de Raymond Queneau (Paris: Gallimard (Foliothèque, 34), 1994).

49. See D. Bellos, ‘Literary Quotations in Perec's La Vie mode d'emploi’, French Studies, LXI, 2 (April 1987), pp. 180-94 (p. 186). See also Warren F. Motte, The Poetics of Experiment: A Study of the Work of Georges Perec (Lexington, Kentucky: French Forum, 1984); Claude Burgelin, Georges Perec (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1988); David Bellos, Georges Perec: A Life in Words (London: Harvill Press, 1995).

50. See Serge Koster, Tournier (Paris: Veyrier, 1985); Arlette Bouloumié, Michel Tournier: le roman mythologique (Paris: José Corti, 1988); Colin Davis, Michel Tournier: Philosophy and Fiction (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988); David Gascoigne, Michel Tournier (New York and Oxford: Berg, 1996).

51. See Germaine Brée, Le Monde fabuleux de J. M. G. Le Clézio (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1990); Jean Ominus, Pour lire Le Clézio (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1994).

52. See David Gascoigne, ‘Patrick Grainville’, in Tilby (ed.), Beyond the Nouveau Roman, pp. 229-55.

53. See Roland Barthes, Sollers écrivain (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1979); Leslie Hill, ‘Philippe Sollers and Tel Quel’, in Tilby (ed.), Beyond the Nouveau Roman, pp. 100-22; Edmund J. Smyth (ed.), Postmodernism and Contemporary Fiction (London: Batsford, 1991); Malcolm Pollard, The Novels of Philippe Sollers: Narrative and the Visual (Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 1994).

54. See Colin W. Nettlebeck, ‘Getting the Story Right: Narratives of World War II in Post-1968 France’, Journal of European Studies 15 (1985), pp. 77-116; Alan Morris, Collaboration and Resistance Reviewed: Writers and the ‘Mode Rétro’ in Post-Gaullist France (New York and Oxford: Berg, 1992).

55. See Colin W. Nettlebeck and Penelope Ann Hueston, Patrick Modiano: pièce d'identité (Paris: Minard, 1986); Alan Morris, Patrick Modiano (New York and Oxford: Berg, 1996).

56. See Patrick Combes, La littérature et le mouvement de Mai (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1984); Keith Reader, The May 1968 Events in France: Reproductions and Interpretations (London: Macmillan, 1993).

57. See Jean-Claude Lebrun and Claude Prévost, Nouveaux Territoires romanesques (Paris: Messidor Éditions Sociales, 1990); Colin W. Nettlebeck, ‘The “Post-Literary” Novel: Echenoz, Pennac and Company’, French Cultural Studies, V, 14 (June 1994), pp. 113-38.

58. See Christopher Robinson, Scandal in the Ink: Male and Female Homosexuality in Twentieth-Century French Literature (London: Cassell, 1995).

59. See Stephen Health, ‘Night Books’, in David Hollier (ed.), A New History of French Literature (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 1989), pp. 1054-60; and Nettlebeck, ‘The “Post-Literary” Novel’, pp. 117-18.

60. See Peter Broome and Graham Chesters, An Anthology of Modern French Poetry, 1850-1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976) and The Appreciation of Modern French Poetry, 1850-1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976).

61. See Anne Hyde Greet, Apollinaire et le livre du peintre (Paris: Minard, 1977); Margareth Wijk, Guillaume Apollinaire et l'Esprit Nouveau (Lund: W.K. Geerup, 1982): Antoine Fongaro, Apollinaire poète: exégèses et discussions 1957-1987 (Toulouse: Presses Universitaires du Mirail-Toulouse, 1988).

62. See Claude Debon, Guillaume Apollinaire après ‘Alcools’. I: ‘Calligrammes’, le poète et la guerre (Paris: Minard, 1981); Willard Bohn, Apollinaire, Visual Poetry, and Art Criticism (Lewisberg: Bucknell University Press: London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1993).

63. See Monique Chefdor, Blaise Cendrars (Boston: Twayne, 1980).

64. Pierre Reverdy, En vrac (Monaco: Éditions du Rocher, 1956), p. 139. See Clive Scott, Reading the Rhythm: The Poetics of French Verse, 1910-1930 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993).

65. See René Plantier, L'Univers poétique de Max Jacob (Paris: Klincksieck 1963); Gerald Kamber, Max Jacob and the Poetics of Cubism (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1971).

66. See Mary Ann Caws, La Main de Pierre Reverdy (Geneva: Droz, 1979); Michel Collot, Horizon de Reverdy (Paris: Publications de l'École Normale Supérieure, 1981); Andrew Rothwell, Textual Spaces: The Poetry of Pierre Reverdy (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1989); ‘Pierre Reverdy 1889-1989’, Nottingham French Studies, 28, 2 (Autumn 1989).

67. See Christine M. Crow, Paul Valéry: Consciousness and Nature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), and Paul Valéry and the Poetry of Voice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982); Brian Stimpson, Paul Valéry and Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984).

68. See Sarane Alexandrian, Le Surréalisme et le rêve (Paris: Gallimard, 1974); J. H. Matthews, The Imagery of Surrealism (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1977); Marcel Jean, Autobiographie du surréalisme (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1978); Robert Stuart Short, Dada and Surrealism (London: Octopus Books, 1980); Keith Aspley, André Breton the Poet (Glasgow: University of Glasgow French and German Publications, 1989); Mark Polizotti, Revolution of the Mind: The Life of André Breton (London: Bloomsbury, 1995).

69. Lautréamont, Les Chants de Maldoror, in Lautréamont: Germain Nouveau, Œuvres complètes, ed. Pierre-Olivier Walzer (Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1970), p. 225.

70. See Jean Yves Debreuille, Éluard ou le pouvoir du mot (Paris: Nizet, 1977); Jean-Charles Gateau, Paul Éluard et la peinture surréaliste (Geneva: Droz, 1982); and Paul Éluard, le frère voyant (Paris: Laffont, 1988); Clive Scott (ed.), Anthologie Éluard (London: Methuen Educational, 1983).

71. On Péret, see Jean-Michel Goutier, Bejamin Péret (Paris: Veyrier, 1982). On Char, see Jean-Claude Mathieu, La Poésie de René Char, ou Le Sel de la Splendeur, vol. I: Traversée du surréalisme; vol. II: Poésie et résistance (Paris: José Corti, 1984-5); Michael Bishop, René Char, les dernières années (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1990); Eric Marty, René Char (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1990).

72. See Roger Little, Saint-John Perse (London: Athlone Press, 1973); Marie-Laure Ryan, Rituel et poésie: une lecture de Saint-John Perse (Berne: Peter Lang, 1977); Mireille Sacotte, Saint-John Perse (Paris: Pierre Belfond, 1991).

73. See J. A. Hiddleston, L'Univers de Jules Supervielle (Paris: José Corti, 1965); Robert Vivier, Lire Supervielle (Paris: José Corti, 1971); Paul Villaneix, Le Hors-venu, ou le personnage poétique de Supervielle (Paris: Klincksieck, 1972); Yves-Alain Favre, Supervielle: la Rêverie et le chant dans ‘Gravitations’ (Paris: Nizet, 1981).

74. See Malcolm Bowie, Henri Michaux: A Study of his Literary Works (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973); Jean-Pierre Martin, Henri Michaux: Écritures de soi. Expatriations (Paris: José Corti, 1994).

75. See Ian Higgins (ed.), Le Parti pris des choses (London: Athlone Press, 1979) and Francis Ponge (London: Athlone Press, 1979); Jean Pierrot, Francis Ponge (Paris: José Corti, 1993).

76. See Pierre Seghers (ed.), La Résistance et ses poètes, 2 vols (Paris: Marabout, 1978); Jean Gaucheron, La Poésie, la Résistance (Paris: Les Éditeurs français réunis, 1979); Ian Higgins (ed.), Anthology of Second World War French Poetry (London: Methuen, 1982).

77. Higgins, Anthology of Second World War French Poetry, p. 27.

78. Ibid., pp. 19-24.

79. See Maxwell Adereth, Aragon: The Resistance Poems (London: Grant and Cutler, 1985).

80. On Emmanuel, see Alain Bosquet, Pierre Emmanuel (Paris: Seghers, 1959). On the importance of Pierre Jean Jouve for Emmanuel, see Margaret M. Callander, The Poetry of Pierre Jean Jouve (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1965).

81. See Ian Higgins, ‘Jean Tardieu's Oradour’, French Studies, XLVIII, 4 (October 1994), pp. 425-38.

82. See the Higgins anthology of Second World War French poetry for examples of all of the types of reference discussed here.

83. See Claude Marie Beaujeu, L'Alexandrin dans le ‘Crève-cœur’ d'Aragon (Paris: Presses de l'Université de Paris-Sorbonne, 1993); Adareth, Aragon: The Resistance Poems, pp. 53-70; and Higgins, Anthology of Second World War French Poetry, pp. 31-44.

84. On post-war French poetry, see C. A. Hackett, New French Poetry. An Anthology (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1973); Michael Bishop, The Contemporary Poetry of France: Eight Studies (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1985); Michel Baude and Jeannine Baude (eds), Poésie et spiritualité en France depuis 1950 (Paris: Klincksieck, 1988); Marie-Claire Bancquart, Poésie 1945-1960, les mots, la voix (Paris: Presses de l'Université de Paris-Sorbonne, 1989); Richard Stamelman, Lost Beyond Telling: Representations of Death and Absence in Modern French Poetry (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1990); Martin Sorrell (ed. and trans.), Modern French Poetry: A Bilingual Anthology (London: Forest Books, 1992). On Bonnefoy, see John T. Naughton, The Poetics of Yves Bonnefoy (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1984); Daniel Leuwers, Yves Bonnefoy (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1988).

85. See Marie-Claire Dumas (ed.), La Poésie de Philippe Jaccottet (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1986).

86. On Deguy, see Michael Bishop, Michel Deguy (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1988); Jean Moussaron and Jacques Derrida, La Poésie comme avenir. Essai sur l'œuvre de M. Deguy (Grenoble: Syllabe, 1992). On Dupin, see Maryann De Julio, Rhetorical Landscapes: The Poetry and Art Criticism of Jacques Dupin (Lexington, Kentucky: French Forum, 1992); E. Loze, Approaches de Jacques Dupin (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1993). On Guillevic, see Gavin Bowd, Guillevic, sauvage de la modernité (Glasgow: Glasgow University French and German Publications, 1993); Michael Brophy, Eugène Guillevic (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1993). On recent women's poetry, see Martin Sorrell (ed. and trans.), Elles. A Bilingual Anthology of Modern French Poetry by Women (Exeter: Exeter University Press, 1995).

87. For a history of the development of film in France, see Susan Hayward, French National Cinema (London and New York: Routledge, 1993).

88. Two invaluable sources for this section have been David Bradby, Modern French Drama 1940-1990 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, rev. edn 1991), with its thorough accounts of the material practices of contemporary French theatre and the work of key directors and details of the staging of individual plays; and David Bradby and David Williams, Directors' Theatre (London: Macmillan, 1988). See also Geneviève Serreau, Histoire du ‘nouveau théâtre’ (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1966); John Fletcher (ed.), Forces in Modern French Drama (London: University of London Press, 1972); Bettina L. Knapp, French Theatre, 1918-39 (London: Macmillan, 1985); Jean Duvigneaud and Jean Lagoutte, Le Théâtre contemporain: culture et contre-culture (Paris: Librairie Larousse, 1974); Henri Béhar, Le Théâtre dada et surréaliste (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1979).

89. Keir Elam, The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama (London and New York: Methuen, 1980).

90. A difficult but rewarding consideration of issues appears in Jacques Derrida's essay on Antonin Artaud, ‘La Parole Soufflée’, Tel quel, no. 20 (Winter 1965), coll. in Jacques Derrida, Writing and Differance, trans. Alan Bass (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978).

91. See Jean-Louis Barrault, Réflexions sur le théâtre (Paris: Jacques Vautrain, 1949), passim, for Barrault's collaboration with Claudel. See, on Claudel, Jacques Madaule, Le Drame de Paul Claudel (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1947); Michel Lioure, L'Esthétique dramatique de Paul Claudel (Paris: Armand Colin, 1971). For background see Richard Griffiths, The Reactionary Revolution: The Catholic Revival in French Literature (London: Constable, 1966).

92. See Roger Shattuck, The Banquet Years: Origins of the Avant-Garde in France, 1985 to World War I (New York: Vintage Books, 1968); Michel Arrivé, Les Langages de Jarry (Paris: Klincksieck, 1972); Henri Béhar, Jarry dramaturge (Paris: Nizet, 1980).

93. ‘Trois conférences prononcées à l'université de Mexico. I: Surréalisme et révolution’ (26 February 1936), coll. in Antonin Artaud, Messages révolutionnaires (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1971). Other pieces by Artaud referred to are collected in Le Théâtre et son double (1938).

94. See Sartre's theoretical writings, coll. in Jean-Paul Sartre, Un théâtre de situations, ed. Michel Contat and Michel Rybalka (Paris: Gallimard, 1973); also Robert Lorris, Sartre dramaturge (Paris: Nizet, 1975). See Camus's theoretical writings, coll. in Albert Camus, Théâtre, récits, nouvelles, ed. Roger Quilliot (Paris: Gallimard, 1962); also Ilona Coombs, Camus, homme de théâtre (Paris: Nizet, 1968); Edward Freeman, The Theatre of Albert Camus: A Critical Study (London: Methuen, 1971).

95. Georges Bataille, ‘Notes: La question coloniale. D'un caractère sacré des criminels (Genet)’, Critique no. 35 (April 1949), pp. 365-71 and 371-3; rpt. in Œuvres complètes XI: Articles I (1944-49) (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1988), p. 469. See, on Genet, Richard N. Coe, The Vision of Jean Genet (London: Peter Owen, 1968); Richard C. Webb (ed.), File on Genet (London: Methuen Drama, 1992); Edmond White, Genet (London: Chatto and Windus, 1993).

96. ‘Jean Genet talks to Hubert Fichte’, tr. Patrick McCarthy, The New Review, IV, 37 (April 1977), pp. 9-21; first published in German, Die Zeit (20 February 1976), p. 17.

97. See Dominique Nores (ed.), Les Critiques de notre temps et Beckett (Paris: Garnier Frères, 1971); James Knowlson and John Pilling, Frescoes of the Skull, the Later Prose and Drama of Samuel Beckett (London: John Calder, 1979); Ruby Cohn, Just Play: Beckett's Theater (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980); James Acheson and Kateryna Arthur (eds), Beckett's Later Fiction and Drama (New York: St Martin's Press, 1987); Jonathan Kalb, Beckett in Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Christopher Ricks, Beckett's Dying Words (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993); James Knowlson, Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (London: Bloomsbury, and New York: Simon and Shuster, 1996).

98. See, on Ionesco, Richard N. Coe, Ionesco: a Study of his Plays (London: Methuen, rev. edn 1971); Emmanuel C. Jacquart, Le Théâtre de dérision: Beckett, Ionesco, Adamov (Paris: Gallimard, 1974).

99. See Philippe Madral, Le Théâtre hors les murs (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1969); Judith Graves Miller, Theater and Revolution in France since 1968 (Lexington: French Forum, 1977).

100. See Bradby and Williams, Directors' Theatre; and Ruby Cohn, ‘Ariane Mnouchkine: Playwright of a Collective’, in Enoch Brater (ed.), Feminine Focus: The New Women Playwrights (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 53-63.

101. See essays in Brater (ed.), Feminine Focus, especially Sue-Ellen Case, ‘From Split Subject to Split Britches’; Elin Diamond, ‘Benmussa's Adaptations: Unauthorized Texts from Elsewhere’; Jeannette Laillou Savona, ‘In Search of a Feminist Theater: Portrait of Dora’; and Sharon A. Willis, ‘Staging Sexual Difference: Reading, Recitation and Repetition in Duras's Malady of Death’. Also see Celita Lamar, Our Voices, Ourselves: Women Writing for the French Theatre (New York: Peter Lang, 1991).

102. On Cixous, see also Morag Schiach, ‘Staging History’, Chapter 4 in Hélène Cixous: A Politics of Writing (London and New York: Routledge, 1991); Jennifer Birkett, ‘The Limits of Language: The Theatre of Hélène Cixous’, in John Dunkley and Bill Kirton (eds), Voices in the Air: French Dramatists and the Resource of Language (Glasgow: University of Glasgow French and German Publications, 1992).

103. A good introduction to Vinaver and Koltès is the anthology in English, David Bradby and Claude Schumacher (eds), New French Plays (London: Methuen Drama, 1989). On Vinaver, see Anne Ubersfeld, Vinaver dramaturge (Paris: Librairie théâtrale, 1989).