SOURCE: Anderson, Kirsteen H. R. “Imagination and Ideology: Ethical Tensions in Twentieth-Century French Writing.” Modern Language Review 96 (January 2001): 47-60.

[In the following essay, Anderson traces the development of the French ethical imagination in the twentieth century, noting that as the century progressed, French intellectuals moved away from forms of thought that were morally accountable to their historical and cultural context.]

Four prophetic presences could be taken to represent stages in the development of the French ethical imagination in the course of the twentieth century. Valéry's Hamlet, questioning the very ground on which European intellectual identity stands and the precariousness of its continuing existence (La Crise de l'Esprit, 1919); Camus's Clamence, denouncing yet simultaneously affirming the guilt-ridden hypocrisy of European bourgeois consciousness (La Chute, 1956); Tournier's Ogre, poised on the Franco-German frontier as he sifts the debris of Nazi totalitarianism for any redeeming shards of meaning (Le Roi des Aulnes, 1970); and Irigaray's Antigone, appealing ironically for rebirth from beneath centuries of phallogocentric rubble (Ce Sexe qui n'en est pas un, 1977).

Under their aegis I shall examine the tendency for imagination, as a concept implying subjective agency and accountability, to lose ground, as the century advances, to forms of thought that are no longer morally accountable to their cultural and historical context. This shift can be linked with a transition that occurs between two main senses of the term ‘ideology’. Early- to mid-century readings interpret ideology mainly in its neutral sense, as systems of thought or belief, or symbolic systems, relating to social action or political practice. Mid- to late-century readings tend to understand ideology critically, as a state of false consciousness, as meaning in the service of power and as misrepresentation of reality.¹ The best French fictional writing exploits the tension between these two senses, refusing to relinquish a concern with consciousness as necessarily implicated in and responsible for its environment. Much theoretical discourse, in contrast, prefers to interpret ideology in its distorting sense, thus surrendering very willingly to a view of human consciousness and agency as impaired or impotent. These opposing attitudes to the subject's ethical and historical responsibility may be referred to, in shorthand, as imagination and ideology.

I focus on those authors whom I judge among the most influential in the period under discussion, and on the texts which will, in my view, stand the test of time: André Gide's L'Immoraliste (1902), Albert Camus's L'Étranger (1942), Marguerite Yourcenar's Mémoires d'Hadrien (1951), Jean-Paul Sartre's Les Mots (1963) and Michel Tournier's Le Roi des Aulnes (1970).² I read these authors as memorialists of twentieth-century creative subjectivity or historians of the vicissitudes of the imagination responding to its cultural environment. Their texts chart the progress of a conscience malheureuse in crisis. As modernism and postmodernism fulfil themselves, through technological advance, the rationalization of economy and aesthetics and the methodological dehumanization of war and production line, consciousness is seduced into escaping into the false security of its own alienation. The failure of myth as culturally meaningful gives rise to myth as duplicity. Theoretical works also have their part to play here: Roland Barthes's Mythologies (Paris: Seuil, 1957), Alain Robbe-Grillet's Pour un nouveau roman (Paris: Minuit, 1963) and Michel Foucault's various writings on power (in the 1970s and 1980s) are relevant.

In attempting a genealogy of the creative consciousness in its relation to power and knowledge I retain the term ‘imagination’ deliberately, despite its long and problematic history, for the value that it attributes to human consciousness.³ Broadly speaking, it has been defined in terms of two main functions: as reproductive, it is capable of imitating and representing reality, as creative, it is able to interpret and transform experience. Imagination emerges from nineteenth-century practice and debate as a definable if embattled phenomenon, potentially empowering and still largely attributable to human agency. It slips from critical sight in the course of the twentieth century, increasingly obscured in the French tradition behind interpretations of consciousness as unconsciously or collectively determined.⁴ The postmodern undermining of the humanist imagination, perhaps an inevitable consequence of the ‘death of God’, denies its Promethean value as affirmative of the creative power of individual subjectivity. Many of the functions once attributed to the imagination are usurped by ideology.

Paradoxically, Nietzsche's effect, at least on his French devotees, has not led to an extension of human imaginative potential once freed from the shackles of Christian mythology and ethics. Instead, and his role here is paramount, it has encouraged a surrender of moral agency to a series of ambiguous fetishes.⁵ To be clear, I am not claiming, with due respect to Sartre, that all writers should be ethically or historically responsible. Yet, surveying the extent to which much recent French theorizing is obsessed with fantasies implying power and control, while simultaneously arguing a position of powerlessness or paralysis for human consciousness, a question remains unanswered: why attribute so much authority and value to language (Barthes), form (Robbe-Grillet), ideology (Althusser), écriture (Tel Quel), the Symbolic Order (Lacan), or power (Foucault), but deny them to the critical consciousness of individual human subjects who remain, in my view, agents of their experience, to some extent at least?⁶

The power associated with these pseudo-deities, or developed as thematic in the work of, say, Jean Baudrillard, Foucault or Paul Virilio, does not imply empowerment, responsibility or resistance on the part of the creative imagination: subjectivity features as either outmoded, as the pawn of forces which transcend it, or as a ‘possessed’ entity riddled with the energies of a virtual reality.⁷ Are we, as readers in retrospect of the twentieth-century French tradition, to conclude that its theoreticians have served it well through texts which, respectful of the mimetic paradigm, replicate the progressive paralysis of the moral will and faculty for interpretative response, and an ethically derelict reality?⁸ Alternatively, should we conclude that they have betrayed the potential of human agency's imaginative responsibility in succumbing so readily (in a Vichy of the mind this time) to the persuasions of the negative that recent and contemporary experience are all too willing to offer?

A connected question, in this context of responsibility and empowerment, is why a number of influential French intellectuals should have allowed themselves, since the mid-century, an interlude from ethical involvement. Their retreat into theoretical impunity comes at a critical moment for European consciousness and identity, whose very survival depend on clarification, insight and understanding.⁹ Reviewing the theoretical stance of some of the leading critical minds from the 1950s to the 1980s, one is struck by their withdrawal into a solitary, even solipsistic, attitude of distance from the community or of condemnation of the human.¹⁰ Barthes depicts himself as outside the polis, relegated to the loneliness of a self-imposed exile deriving from his excessive lucidity. Sarcasm is his only mode of relation with his fellow man (Mythologies, p. 245). Robbe-Grillet's final solution fantasizes the purification of the landscape, moral, psychological and aesthetic, of all contaminating human meaning (‘Nature, Humanisme, Tragédie’ (1958) in Pour un nouveau roman.) Foucault, more brazenly, proclaims the ‘death of man’ (what place post-Holocaust fantasies here?) whose only access to subject status is through subjectification by power/knowledge strategies whose ultimate victory is incontestable.

Surely the principal lesson of the defeat of the Nazis in 1945 was precisely that resistance to the misuse of power is worthwhile and can be effective. Germany could easily have slipped back into an attitude of politico-cultural resentment in the immediate post-war period. Yet it is Habermas and the Frankfurt School who offer a critique of Foucaldian theories of power and the concomitant disempowerment of human agency; and an appeal for a more responsible subjectivity grounded in a renewed understanding of post-Enlightenment reason in history.¹¹ The perverse rejection of Enlightenment values, characteristic of certain contemporary French thinkers, has rightly been questioned.¹² An attempted explanation of the periodic retreat of the French critical mind into self-subjugation to the irrational in its most totalitarian forms points to the demoralizing ethical legacy of the Third Republic (Judt, Past Imperfect, pp. 15-25). To plead that we are all victims of the postmodern predicament is not convincing. Denying the efficacy of any human action on, or engagement with, a recalcitrant environment seems unduly negative. An alternative response would be to arouse the imagination to its maximum potential in demanding of it some contribution to the challenges of the present. Fictional writing does this better, I suggest, by persisting in exploiting the tension between humanist and postmodernist value systems whereas much theoretical discourse ‘sells out’ too fast to the ‘death of man’ scenario.

The key distinction here is between a form of thought that values symbolic richness (imaginative writing) and one that approximates to the clarity of scientific logic and abstraction (theory). The opposition of the mythical and the historical consciousness provides a supporting paradigm. Both myth and history may be read as narratives and thus, also, though in differing degrees, as symbolic modes of expression. Yet modern Western consciousness prefers to define itself as historical only, and uniquely in the sense of being differentiated, by scientific knowledge and analytical thinking, from mythical or symbolic thought, which is capable of synthesis and relates to archetypal configurations.¹³ If imagination is taken as a metaphor for the condition of creativity then its relative eclipse in contemporary culture and philosophy is not surprising (Robinson and Rundell, Rethinking Imagination, p. 11). The predominance of structures of abstract thought which lack any connection to the lived reality of human experience is increasingly recognized as one of the regrettable by-products of a technology-driven culture of commodified consciousness. Similarly, so much of postmodern theory restricts itself uncourageously to the surface as though afraid to look deeper where meaning may also be found.¹⁴ Parody and pastiche allow us to mark time but it is becoming urgent to move forward in cultural awareness rather than simply to repeat.¹⁵

Each of the fictional texts selected implies a burial or repression whether literal or metaphorical: of the old Adam (L'Immoraliste), of the mother (L'Étranger), of the child Poulou (Les Mots), of Antinoüs (Mémoires d'Hadrien), of Tiffauges alongside the Erl King (Le Roi des Aulnes). Each intuits that the depths contain value, should Western culture possess the means to decipher and recover it as meaning-bearing and not simply unconscious fantasy. Perhaps the step beyond our present postmodern predicament requires the resurrection of that buried other which contemporary thought thematizes variously as the expression of the body alienated in scientific discourse; as the image driven into disrepute by its misinterpretation in empiricist theories of knowledge; as creativity marginalized by predominantly rationalist, ‘masculine’ modes of consciousness, or as the murdered mother on whom patriarchal imperialism stands.¹⁶ Evoking the same problem in different terms, perhaps Western culture must learn to see ‘myth’ and ‘history’ as complementary, not exclusive, ways of thinking; as, equally, narratives expressing the psychological or fantasy dimension of a culture. To restore cultural fertility demands a work of reintegration. We have to conceive of truth as embracing more than the strictly rational, and of power as empowerment rather than violence.

A partial gauge of the balance between imaginative empowerment and ideological impairment is the diminishing significance of guilt as a theme. The transition from imagination to ideology is accompanied, and perhaps in part accounted for, by the shift from a guilty (because responsible) consciousness, to a passive (because ethically drained) one. Such an emancipation of ‘la conscience malheureuse’ may be cause for rejoicing but is also a matter for concern: guilt at least indicates awareness of the other. Its disappearance from narrative and theoretical discourse is suggestive.¹⁷ The loss of this significant other may have revealing gender implications. Imagination, unlike ideology, implies participant subjectivities: the subject defines itself in relation to an/the other. Perhaps the withdrawal of much masculine creative and theoretical vision into an attitude of megalomaniac power or abstraction is a response to an acute sense of infantile fear and rage at its vulnerability to its environment. Unable effectively to negotiate with the other, whether as human subjectivity, natural world or death, it tries to assert its control, over a context that it can neither understand nor master, by means of power envisaged as violence. When this strategy fails, it surrenders all responsibility for its context.¹⁸

Existentialism has no part in my discussion although it can be read as one of the last attempts at a secular ethics that the French tradition has offered. As generated in the 1930s and 1940s by De Beauvoir and Sartre, it was indeed an imaginative response to the demands of the other in a precise and extreme historical situation. It proffered a valid if arduous ideal in its vision of an individualized ethics. Its driving force was undoubtedly guilt as the obverse of responsibility. Yet I discount it for two reasons. Firstly, the fiction that it produced belongs too obviously to the roman à thèse category.¹⁹ Secondly, it seems to me that Sartre abandoned the demands of his ideal (as too utopian or too demanding?) preferring the illusory promise of control over reality that reason, as encountered in Marxist theory, seemed to offer. He rejected negotiation with his context in favour of fantasies of power. He never completed his project for an ethics: much of the rest of his productive career was spent wrestling with the abstractions of the dialectic.²⁰ From an early and valid perception of the need for a consciousness rooted in ethics and of the potential of myth as having positive connotations, he moves to a reductive view of myth as history-induced alienation.

L'Immoraliste depicts an individual crisis, symptomatic of the crisis of European identity and of the ethical imagination assumed to be part of it. Nourished by humanist culture, alive to the resonances and implications of its history and myths, Michel fantasizes liberation from the burden of conscience and consciousness that this entails. The force of the text derives from the modernist dichotomy that inhabits it. It attempts, on the one hand, to restrain the protagonist within the stability of control—of his appetites, his intellectual allegiances, his physical and psychological potential, his narrative stance. Yet it reveals, on the other hand, the overwhelming attraction of the thrust to destroy all that structures his life—past, memory, culture. Power as authority rests exclusively with the male narrator: economically, intellectually and sexually, Michel dictates the course of events. This power is manifested principally as violence: in the wilful destruction of his earlier cultured self, of his material possessions, of his wife's health and life, and of his moral and spiritual integrity.

Yet, although it anticipates the bleak horizon of postmodernism's insights, the depiction of imaginative consciousness in L'Immoraliste, still infused with the memory if not the plenitude of myth, remains suspended between an attraction to ethical norms and surrender to nihilism. Its anchoring within an explicitly ethical problem provides the counterpoise to the lure of ideology: Michel voices the seductive influence of Nietzsche, Ménalque proposes a proto-existentialist ethic, Marceline pleads the cause of an averagely enfeebled human being. However ironically disguised, the text's lesson is clear. Michel's confession of masculine power's systematic destruction of the feminine other and of its own worth, although implicitly punctuated by the disingenuous querying of his own responsibility, calls unambiguously, by its very tone and structure, for moral judgment.

A number of fleeting and ambiguous images encapsulate the tension between plenitude and dereliction: the self as palimpsest, bearer of undeciphered potential; the attempted glory of baptism in the living water which somehow fails to purify; the desert as site of reduction and annihilation or purification and rebirth. Michel as moral agent may already have ‘passed out of the major order and symmetries of Western civilisation’ at the close of the narrative,²¹ yet, and Steiner on the sinews of language as binding European culture into a recognizable continuity is valid here (pp. 87-88), the grip of his linguistic imagination has not faltered. (Contrast the bereftness and deficiency of Camus's renégat some fifty years later).

Forty years after L'Immoraliste, with the transition to Meursault's ‘ce n'est pas de ma faute’, the balance between individual agency and powerlessness is significantly altered. Meursault, already conveniently stripped of a European consciousness or humanist inheritance, pursuing Nietzschean logic through to its post-Gidean conclusion, succeeds Michel in the sands of North Africa. Like the latter, he wields the power of life and death. Comprehending his homelessness, for the condition of the absurd mind is to be deprived of the solace of contact with meaning, memory, others, continuity, he turns to violence. Perhaps the imagination has endured too much under the onslaught of its relegation to the present, of the inevitability of death and of the withdrawal of God. The pain of this mutilated consciousness rebuts comforting promises of lucidity, empowerment and creative transformation. Camus's own plea for the humanist imagination, ‘il faut imaginer Sisyphe heureux’, and his conviction of the urgent need for a myth appropriate to the contemporary moment are both admirable and implausible.²² Yet L'Étranger as moral fable warns of the void deriving from existence unsupported by myth.

As Meursault loses control of any shape and purpose which his life might once have had while his mother was alive, he resorts to the only power he retains in an effort to overcome the fearful sense of vulnerability which abandonment to independent and unprotected existence induces. Masculine consciousness, simultaneously deprived of and rejecting its feminine other, reacts with violence: a violence of the sensibility which prevents him imagining Marie fully as empathetic other, perceiving her only as a means of punctual sexual satisfaction; violation of his own ethical being in his adoption of indifference, and violence at its most brutal in the climactic destruction of the Arab other which leads to his own execution and so to the abolition of the very possibility of imaginative or ethical agency. Meursault is as spiritually dead as Michel: there is no creative revolt in him. Yet Camus does not present him as entirely the pawn of linguistic terror (in contrast to Barthes's depiction of Dominici and Dupriez in Mythologies). Meursault constructs his narrative with a minimal but highly effective rhetoric. Linguistic cohesion, if not conventional meaning, still matters. Perhaps his imprisonment, a nourishing return to a foetal state of private and protected existence, has enabled him to resurrect, however briefly, the vestiges, if not the humanist core, of self. Thus L'Étranger, though to a lesser degree than L'Immoraliste, evokes a lingering remnant of linguistic if not moral empowerment.

Language and the linguistic imagination are important in the genealogy of the ideologized consciousness. In the 1930s and 1940s Camus and Sartre, amongst others, searching for a creative idiom that would be culturally and ethically empowering to contemporary society, focused on the possibility of reinventing myth, although their attempt was abandoned.²³ The evacuation of subjective responsibility for moral and historical involvement, discernible in some theoretical writing from the 1950s onwards, can be traced to the deification of language as successor to this dead myth: Barthes's vision of salvation through structure, which increasingly diverts him from the ethical difficulties encountered in relation to the linguistic sign; Robbe-Grillet's conception of a uniquely self-referential literary text functioning autonomously once unharnessed from the awkward complexities of authorial subjectivity; Tel Quel's proposal of a supposedly neutral ‘textual production’ to replace an inevitably ideological ‘representation’; all these approaches operate by simultaneously advocating the power of creativity (as, for example, écriture, forme, langage) yet refusing to accept responsibility for it, to attribute it to an originating consciousness.

This ambiguous stance is questionable, possibly dangerous. It can be partially explained, if not justified, by the historical context: the fear of taking responsibility for conveying meaning in case it is the ‘wrong’ one may stem from the difficulties of making the ‘right’ choices during the war period, when only hindsight would reveal the ‘truth’ of right or wrong. Interpreting their stance more benignly, the fetishization of language may express an unconscious desire to retain the notion of value by attributing it to some force or presence in culture, while rescuing it from the ambiguities which arise if it is associated with human subjectivity.²⁴

The question of value leads to two fictional texts exploiting the cultural problem of this same immediately post-war period: Mémoires d'Hadrien and Les Mots can be read as alternative models of imaginative response to the ethical and historical challenges facing the mid-century European consciousness. Yourcenar's text, so far removed in its classical serenity from contemporary taste, is often excluded from critical discussion on the grounds of its alleged post-colonial nostalgia for Empire, its vanished ideal of humanist self-confidence and its overtones of moral rearmament. It can be superficially sidelined as a utopian response to the urgency of postwar reconstruction of Europe (‘Avoir vécu dans un monde qui se défait m'enseignait l'importance du Prince’, Carnet de notes in Mémoires d'Hadrien, p. 329). Sartre's text, in contrast, chimes more satisfyingly with current critical canons in its narrative disruption, irony and overriding relativism. However, in any attempt to reinvigorate the imagination as an ethically empowering force, the real challenge and harder option may require a reassessment of the potential of the values to be found in Europe's past. It is perhaps precisely Hadrian's pre-Nietzschean secular morality, which, in providing an alternative to twentieth century atheisms, can offer the West a ressourcement drawing on, though not identical to, the Classical vision.²⁵

To use the past in this way is not necessarily proof of the closure of the historical mind.²⁶ Such a judgment sees myth and history as oppositional. Yourcenar's interpretation of Hadrian, as an embodiment of power relevant to contemporary needs, can serve as a positive paradigm to twentieth-century historical consciousness, which stands in sharp contrast to the retreat into irony of Sartre's essentially nineteenth-century depiction.²⁷ So much unites yet separates these virtually contemporaneous fantasies of the subject in history. Two male narrators take stock of their lives in fictional memoirs (Hadrian) and fictionalized autobiography (Sartre). Yet the respective titles are already indicative of the contrasts I shall explore: memory, and the continuity of subjectivity and narrative, are paramount for Hadrian; language, as our defining though deceptive reality, for Sartre. Both are exemplars of a European identity, humanist versus postmodernist, yet are distinctively divided by their purpose and tone. Both meditate on power, the one within an expansionist reach towards the world of action, the other retreating into the apparent safety, yet ultimate suffocation, of self-condemning, word-based solipsism. Both are concerned with the possibility and meaning of freedom, one integrated realistically in the historical fabric of his era, the other at an uncomfortable remove from his contemporary moment.

What distinguishes them most profoundly is the fundamental difference in attitude of Yourcenar and Sartre towards the role of the creative imagination, in its relation to its context and to myth. The former conceives the value of imaginative empathy as enabling the subject in time to extend her understanding beyond the limitations of the now, towards the vitally enriching perspective of a past that inevitably informs the present. The latter, distrustful of imagination's powers, rationalizes it to the point of annihilation, criticising it both as a source of literature's enchantment and as an origin of ideology's nefarious influence. Hadrian, classically engendered, harmoniously structured as narrator, recalls his life-journey in the frame of the overarching metaphor of construction. Belief in the metanarrative still holds: the governing sense of his account is of a steady ‘réalisation de soi’, viewed spiritually as well as intellectually and psychologically, within the framework of the significance and expansion of the Roman Empire. Stability, strength, order, and endurance are qualities shared by man and Imperial domain. Hadrian's vision of existence, as worth deriving purpose from and endowing with meaning, is offered, by implication, as exemplary. He is not naive about the internal divisions and external disasters that mar the self's progress, but the mode of consciousness animating his beliefs, action and speech retains a basis in myth as valid.²⁸ His relation to both experience and language is one of fiducia. Power in its various manifestations, physical, cultural, spiritual, is shown as a balancing between success and failure. As an ideal of perfectibility and individual responsibility for self-creation, nothing could be further removed from Hadrian's self-portrait than the Sartrean formulation of subjectivity.

Poulou/Sartre, ironically self-defensive, flees reader and self in a prolonged game of stylistic sophistication and ontological sleight of hand. Progressively demolishing any ground on which his subjectivity might once have tried to stand, he refuses all myths of stability, certainty, security (family, childhood, reading, religion), and lies stranded at the close of his story in that uncertain no-man's land between past and present, success and failure, life and death. There is little to suggest any harnessing of ethical or spiritual potential in the uncreative environment depicted in Les Mots. Power in a variety of forms has shaped and produced the protagonist as a subject in the manner of Foucault: familial tradition, language, history as bourgeois ideology in nineteenth-century mould, are presented as delusory influences alienating the self from an implied ‘truer’ way of being. The Marxist metaphor of ideological inversion so fatally informs the narrative that even the potentially joyful energy of the linguistic imagination is transformed, in Sartre's masochistic fantasy, into a contaminating influence from which he can never free himself. Behind its ironic deflections Les Mots, with its revelation that neither imagination dethroned, nor ideology as mythe laid bare, can offer plenitude or solace, portrays a subjectivity filled with pain and deprived of forgiveness. Yet this is its strength: it emphasises the spiritual vacuum attendant on the destruction of the idols. Behind its postmodern wrappings Les Mots recounts the fall from an imaginative paradise into the disillusions of reality as myth, ‘une énorme puissance collective’ (p. 208).

One proposal to emerge from current efforts to generate a new role for the imagination suggests rethinking the relation between utopia and ideology. Instead of viewing them as oppositional imaginative practices, as in Sartre's text, Paul Ricœur argues that they could be thought of together, in their constructive, healthy aspect, as related figures of false consciousness.²⁹ These two poles are illustrated in the dramatic transition from the existentialist outlook of the 1940s and early 1950s, with its humanistic concept of self and of responsibility for experience, to Barthes's Mythologies, where a cynical analyst of mythical lies abandons his contemporary cultural wasteland as beyond redemption. For a new understanding of imagination to emerge, what belongs to myth, in its validating sense, may have to be brought back within the cognitive tradition of French thought which, thus far, has defined culturally valid knowledge almost exclusively in terms of a particular form of rationality.³⁰ Myth, in its most recent French forms, is almost exclusively negative in connotation.³¹ A significant inflexion of its meaning, bending it towards the untrustworthy sense of political myth that Barthes will give it, comes in De Beauvoir's Le Deuxième sexe (2 vols Paris: Gallimard, 1949 and 1976). Starting from a neutral definition, ‘Tout mythe implique un Sujet qui projette ses espoirs et ses craintes vers un ciel transcendant’ (i, 235), she then develops a more political interpretation of myth as serving the interests of a specific social group (‘le mythe s'explique en grande partie par l'usage que l'homme en fait’ (i, 391) and ‘les femmes ne se posant pas comme sujet […] c'est encore à travers les rêves des hommes qu'elles rêvent’ (i, 235). Women's alienation is demonstrated by the way in which they live out the projections which culture/men require of them. Myth has shifted closer to ideology as misrepresentation here, insofar as it is no longer the locus of values, serving an exemplary function for culture as a whole, but has instead become the expression of vested power interests.

Barthes's subsequent theory of myth develops further its ideological status as distortion of reality. In contrast to the purpose of De Beauvoir's critique of masculine myth, to stimulate women's critical reaction, on the assumption that they are capable of refusing collusion with patriarchal oppression by determining their own subjective agency, consciousness in consumer society according to Barthes is already ideologized beyond recall. Mythologies depicts its commodification as symptomatic of the postmodern condition. Imagination is never mentioned as such, though myth is defined, in implicit acknowledgement of Sartrean existentialism, as ‘l'imaginaire de la mauvaise foi’. This can be nothing but a nostalgically decorative nod in the direction of ethical awareness since the individual consciousness, swamped by collective delusion, is stripped of all access to its constituent function as imagination. In Barthes's conception of culture as a mass of deluded consumers deprived of the capacity for self-analysis or ethical insight, there is no explicit acknowledgement of this crucial shift from an ethically empowered critical imagination to the collective anaesthetization of the fascinated consciousness.³² Some critics interpret Barthes's myth-reading methodology as proof that his concern is with resistance to the paralysing effect of ideology.³³ Yet his depiction of the universalizing tendency of mystification, and his later admission that semioclasm is the only way to break its hold, permit the reader to doubt.³⁴

Barthes's debased, or reductively political, variety of myth may be all that contemporary society is able to produce.³⁵ Assessing the multiple exclusions which afflict the mythologist (from politics, culture, history, the real), he faces an ethical impasse: ‘ou bien, poser un réel entièrement perméable à l'histoire, et idéologiser; ou bien, à l'inverse, poser un réel finalement impénétrable, irréductible, et, dans ce cas, poétiser’ (Mythologies, p. 247). It is perhaps impossible and undesirable to resurrect myth as culturally viable particularly in the light of the dubious applications of mythical thought in recent times. It may be that imaginative replenishment must come about in other ways. In the concluding section I shall argue that recent theories of metaphor, on the one hand, and new interpretations of rationality on the other, can perhaps point in the direction of an ethically and historically responsible consciousness to replace Western culture's problematic mythical inheritance. Tournier's fiction and Foucault's discourse on power provide a fertile context for assessing the risks and challenges of such a project.

Foucault's explicitly Nietzschean genealogies date from the 1970s; Le Roi des Aulnes, the most Germanocentric and Nietzschean in tonality of Tournier's texts, was published in 1970. Both writers lived in Germany, absorbed its cultural atmosphere and brought its intellectual influence to bear through their writings. As theorist and as novelist of postmodern subjectivity, each abstains from offering ethical guidance. Yet Tournier's dependence on the multivalency of literary symbolism inevitably engages the reader critically in contrast to the diminished role of individual subjectivity implied by Foucault's political and cultural pessimism. The undisputed impact of Tournier's writing derives largely from the resonance of his imagery and the cogency of his imaginative structures; his fictions are splendid proof of the semantic and iconic enhancement advocated by Ricœur as a means of extending imagination's reach into uncharted territory. The imaginative and historical consciousnesses are not, in the latter's view, separate but interdependent. The semantic innovation characteristic of metaphorical uses of language not only enhances our perception of experience by rendering it more vivid, it also opens up subjectivity to its context, whether as relatedness to the other or as interaction with history: ‘The possibility of an historical experience in general lies in our ability to remain open to the effects of history […]. We are affected by the effects of history, however, only to the extent that we are able to increase our capacity to be affected in this way. The imagination is the secret of this competence’ (Robinson and Rundell, Rethinking Imagination, p. 129).

Tournier's texts hover between a postmodernist tendency to generate autonomously self-referential systems which, though symbolically rich, lack any consistent and convincing correspondence with reality, and an attitude of critique of just such an evacuated symbolism. This ambivalence can be read as a reminder of the responsibility which inventing new meaning for culture entails. His treatment of myth, power and history in Le Roi des Aulnes suggests that he is critical of their potential for misinterpretation; the text's openness to interpretation leaves scope for the reader's critical imagination. Le Roi des Aulnes, like Mythologies, can be read as a contemporary fable warning, by negative example, of the vital importance of interpreting accurately the signs of our culture, of selecting the ‘right’ myths by which to lead our lives, on pain of death. Tournier, like Yourcenar, selects a significant moment from Europe's past (the German Reich replaces the Roman Empire) to reveal, in striking counterpoint to Hadrian's validation of myth-empowered subjectivity, the disastrous effects of misunderstanding and abusing myth and symbolism. Blindness, not insight, characterize Tiffauges in his clumsy postmodern deciphering of his historical moment. Lacking the suppleness of the ‘savage’ or truly mythic mind, he is incapable of creative bricolage. His symptomatic borrowing of bits and pieces of inherited myth reveals the disempowered state of the contemporary consciousness, unable to synthesize the fragments of its experience.³⁶ Personal delusion and cultural catastrophe are the inevitable outcome of this untutored and undigested manipulation of structures of meaning whose subtlety and relevance elude him. Tournier experiments here with the possibility of myth providing nourishment, insight and value, yet, ultimately, seems to offer a powerful denunciation of the uselessness, and the danger to our contemporary predicament, of turning to ‘broken’ or unintegrated myth.

Tiffauges's fascinated consciousness, disempowered by the ‘logic’ of systems of meaning that transcend his grasp, cannot achieve a critical distance from experience. The unanchored symbolism of the Reich which, in a crucial passage in the text (pp. 320-24) is revealed as highly dangerous, can be interpreted on at least two levels: as the danger which follows when any sign is fetishized for its own internal logic; or as the risks incurred by any ideology, unharnessed from experience and released into abstraction. Both point to the cultural catastrophe which is inevitable when power, cut loose from responsible human agency, degenerates into terror. Though Tournier's retreat from history has been questioned, I would argue that, at least in this text, it serves a valuable purpose in universalizing the symbolic implications of his critique (similar to Camus's technique in La Peste).³⁷ Though the focus here is on ideology in one of its crudest forms as fascist or Nazi, the text is targeting by extension all such abuses of intelligence. Tournier may plead the aesthetic logic of the narrative to account for the impalement of the three boys, but the text does at least show how that logic leads to apocalypse as the outcome of irresponsible systematizing.³⁸

The contrast with Foucault is revealing. His genealogies offer a critique of power in contemporary society. This is valid but problematic. Criticism implies truth-value, an issue that Foucault refuses to confront squarely. His writing thus embodies a fundamental contradiction: his depiction of power, though valuable in many respects, presents subjectivity as the product of power/knowledge strategies, yet argues for his own discourse some redemptive authority deriving from its freedom from such strategies.³⁹ Most major criticisms of his stance indicate how his sceptical freedom, detached irony and refusal to provide a positive characterization of the ethico-political position informing his critique lay it open to the ‘danger of becoming empty—or, even worse, of withholding judgment from those catastrophic possibilities which have erupted or can erupt’ (Bernstein, New Constellation, pp. 62-63). His vision of all-pervasive power resembles its representation in Le Roi des Aulnes as free-floating, dangerously detached from individual agency.

As a specific intellectual with some cultural authority, as he recognizes, his evasive stance is hard to justify. It is of a piece that his only contribution to ethics constitutes a retreat into aesthetics: his late interest in the self is essentially a rewriting of the Baudelairean dandy.⁴⁰ His ethics show no concern for the other as engaging responsibility. Tiffauges's obsessive concern with constructing a ‘meaningful’ self may be interpreted as a similar aestheticization of existence, yet Tournier's fictions at least offer the expression of a range of viewpoints. Foucault's discourse provides little potential for dialogue or diversity of interpretation: the reader is trapped within the monotone of an unchallenged ‘reasoning’ reminiscent of Camus's penitent judge or renegade priest.

Both these ‘narratives’ of postmodern subjectivity highlight Habermas's contention concerning the pathologies of modernity. If we are to move beyond a conception of reason as narrowly instrumental, a view which he criticizes as leading to the dehumanizing excesses of contemporary technocratic culture, then we must rethink the problem of rationality (Bernstein, New Constellation, p. 204). This, arguably, is what Foucault fails to do: though virulent in undermining Enlightenment reason, his conception of essentially victimized subjectivity (resistance occupies a limited place in his vision) provides no convincing alternative. Habermas's suspicion of some of the major trends in recent French intellectual life is understandable. Yet where theory speaks of closure, imaginative writing promises openness. Tournier's fictions suggest that the project of searching for better alternatives is worthwhile, just as Habermas emphasises that modernity is still an unfinished project. Tiffauges dies yet the child he fathers hints at a future that has yet to be imagined.

A new conception and practice of reason, integrated with rather than opposed to, imagination (and ironically it was Foucault who unearthed the damaging exclusions of this sort which undermine Western thought) could try to remain open to the other, to its own otherness. Both the French and the German traditions point in this direction. Ricœur's substantive reason giving way to procedural reason, or Habermas's instrumental rationality surrendering to dialogical rationality, both emphasize the cultural benefits of leaving behind an idea of reason as embodied in a world order, preferring a project of reason accomplished in intersubjective performance. Perhaps it was important that imagination should be dethroned, dusted and reflected upon. It may now be time to reinstate, if not imagination as it was once known, then at least a contemporary equivalent. Rather than juxtaposing fiction and theory, myth and history, unreason and reason in hostile tension, it could bring them into some kind of more fertile alignment. It is perhaps only in this way that an effective ethical consciousness, for which there can be no power without responsibility, can come into being.⁴¹

Notes

1. For definitions see Terry Eagleton, Ideology: an introduction (London: Verso, 1991) and John B. Thompson, Ideology and Modern Culture: Critical Social Theory in the Era of Mass Communication (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990).

2. For the purposes of this article the editions referred to are: L'Immoraliste (Paris: Gallimard Folio, 1972); L'Étranger (Paris: Gallimard Folio, undated); Mémoires d'Hadrien (Paris: Gallimard Folio, 1974); Les Mots, ed by David Nott (London: Methuen, 1981); Le Roi des Aulnes (Paris: Gallimard Folio, 1976).

3. Key studies of the imagination include: Denis Donoghue, The Sovereign Ghost: Studies in Imagination (London: Faber & Faber, 1976); Richard Kearney, The Wake of Imagination. Ideas of Creativity in Western Culture (London: Hutchinson, 1988); Mary Warnock, Imagination (London: Faber & Faber, 1976).

4. The concept of the imaginary, with the increasing significance which it accords to the unconscious, occupies an ever more important position here. Developing out of the work of Gaston Bachelard and Sartre, it is central to Lacan and receives perhaps its most extensive recent theorization in the writings of Cornelius Castoriadis. For a range of perspectives on the future of the imagination, particularly concerning contemporary transformations of the concept of reason, see Rethinking Imagination: Culture and Creativity, ed. by Gillian Robinson and John Rundell (London: Routledge, 1994).

5. J. M. Cocking in Imagination. A Study in the History of Ideas (London: Routledge, 1991) identifies Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy as the greatest seminal influence on French theories of the imagination with his distinguishing of the conceptual language of knowledge from the imaginative language of fantasy (p. 76). Cocking argues, however, for imagination not separated from the logical and empirical.

6. Frank Füredi situates this passivity in the context of the current Western ethical and political crisis: anxiety about the future; nostalgic idealization of the past; the lack of any plausible vision of the common good as basis for a new consensus, and positive identification with society; the denigration of reason: all lead to a devaluation of consciousness as in charge of its destiny (Mythical Past, Elusive Future. History and Society in an Anxious Age, London: Pluto Press, 1992)

7. Arthur Kroker, The Possessed Individual: Technology and Postmodernity (London: Macmillan, 1992).

8. See Kearney's three paradigms in The Wake of Imagination: the Classical productive imagination, the Romantic mimetic imagination and the postmodern parodic imagination.

9. Julien Benda at least had the merit of identifying the importance of intellectual responsibility (La Trahison des clercs, 1927). More recently, the accountability to culture of the intellectual community in general has been a topic of concern: The Political Responsibility of Intellectuals, ed. by Ian Maclean and Alan Montefiori (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). More specifically, reputable scholarship has revealed the recurrent attraction to the French mind of terroristic thought or totalitarian systematising which divorces reason and intellect from responsibly critical views of reality and moral answerability: Tony Judt, Past Imperfect: French Intellectuals, 1944-1956 (Berkeley and Oxford: University of California Press, 1992); Christopher Norris, Uncritical Theory. Postmodernism, Intellectuals and the Gulf War (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1992).

10. Nietzsche's exaltation of the exceptional individual is difficult to fit into any humanist ethical system: ‘The Birth of Tragedy lays down the pattern of intellectual exploration by which the lone figure, removed from the human community and its ethical rules, is the privileged example of the philosopher’ (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) p. 68.

11. Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, trans. by Frederick Lawrence, Lectures 10 and 11, pp. 266-93 and 294-326 (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987).

12. Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), p. 396.

13. Myth and the Crisis of Historical Consciousness, ed. by Lee W. Gibbs and W. Taylor Stevenson (Scholars' Press, American Academy of Religion, 1975).

14. I discount the unconscious here on the grounds that, ‘scientifically’ legitimized by Freud, it has become a convenient but not always enlightening ‘catch-all’ term enabling us to avoid the necessity and difficulty of creating meaning.

15. A number of critics point in this direction: Zygmunt Bauman, Postmodern Ethics (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993); Richard Bernstein, New Constellation: the ethical-political horizons of modernity/postmodernity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991); Christopher Norris, Reclaiming Truth: contribution to a critique of cultural relativism (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1996).

16. It is worth noting that in Destutt de Tracy's coining of the term ‘ideology’ as, literally, the ‘science of ideas’, sensations, in other words the body, were a significant part of the equation (Thompson, Ideology and the Modern Culture, p. 30). See Eagleton's review of Western rationality as requiring reconnection with its somatic aspect through the aesthetic (The Ideology of the Aesthetic). Matricide is important in the ethics of Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva.

17. Judt notes that French thought, in following the worst of the Nietzschean heritage and opting for reason in its more totalitarian forms, lost a more moderate ethical vision to the States: ‘Much central European (and Jewish) social and ethical theory went to the USA in exile—leaving France with Hegel, Nietzsche and Heidegger’ (Past Imperfect, p. 77). Noteworthy here as a lost influence is Emmanuel Levinas whose concern for the other as the only valid basis for ethics is now being recovered.

18. The feminine vision, in contrast, apparently more attentive to otherness as inevitably part of human experience, maintains a negotiatory dialogue with the world. Irigaray attributes this sensitivity to the metaphorical as well as literal implications of the female organism's capacity to tolerate the other within itself during intercourse and pregnancy.

19. Susan Suleiman's Authoritarian Fictions: the Ideological Novel as a Literary Genre (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983) is valuable here. Alex Hughes provides a balanced assessment of Le Sang des Autres in this context in Simone de Beauvoir: Le Sang des Autres, Introductory Guides to French Literature, 28, (Glasgow: University of Glasgow French and German Publications, 1995).

20. See ‘Notes for an Ethics’ in Christina Howells, Sartre: The Necessity of Freedom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).

21. George Steiner, In Bluebeard's Castle (London: Faber & Faber, 1971), p. 48.

22. Camus, though condemned as naive, non-Parisian and not much of a systematic philosopher, nonetheless allowed his imagination to assess the rights and wrongs of Vichy, Resistance France and Cold War issues. Reason, in all its tortuous meanderings, never enabled Sartre to trust his imagination or to complete his lifelong project for an ethics. There is more than one reason for regarding Les Mots as the most honest because, ironically, it is the most imaginative work that he wrote.

23. Camus: Le Mythe de Sisyphe (Paris: Gallimard, 1942), Mediterranean thought and creative revolt in L'Homme révolté (Paris: Gallimard, 1951); Sartre: ‘Forger des mythes’ (1946) in Un théâtre de situations, ed. by Michel Contat and Michel Rybalka (Paris: Gallimard, 1973); and the entire existentialist project.

24. See Foucault's power as a ‘deus absconditus or religious creator’ in David Hawkes, Ideology (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 166-67.

25. Yourcenar cites Flaubert as detecting the potential of Hadrian's historical moment: ‘Les dieux n'étant plus, et le Christ n'étant pas encore, il y a eu, de Cicéron à Marc Aurèle, un moment unique où l'homme seul a été’ (Carnet de notes, p. 321).

26. Füredi's analysis contrasts historical thinking, critical and open to the future, with historical thought as idealizing the past, closed to any possibility of renewal, incapable of taking responsibility for creating the future.

27. Hayden White's Metahistory: the Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973) surveys different forms of historical imagination acknowledging the fictive character of all historical reconstructions and analysing these in terms of narrative discourse. Sartre's fictionalized history of his emergent subjectivity lends itself well to this typology. White notes that ‘much of the best historical reflection of the twentieth century has been concerned […] to overcome the condition of irony into which the historical consciousness plunged in the late nineteenth century’ (p. 433). Where Yourcenar's style of historical reflection belongs clearly to the twentieth century, Sartre's in Les Mots seems to echo the previous one.

28. ‘Les réalités, non pas religeuses peut-être, mais mystiques me sont toujours apparues comme le seul axe de notre vie’: Yourcenar in a letter to Charles Du Bos, quoted in Le Sacré dans l'œuvre de Marguerite Yourcenar: Actes du colloque international de Bruxelles (26-28 mars 1992), (Tours: Société Internationale d'Études Yourcenariennes, 1993), p. 99.

29. Paul Ricœur, ‘Imagination in Discourse and Action’ in Robinson and Rundell, Rethinking Imagination, Ch. 6, pp. 118-35. Ideology serves the function of social integration, utopia that of social subversion.

30. Johann Arnason, pointing to imagination's marginalization by reason in modern thought, calls for the hermeneutic transformation of both concepts insofar as both are crucial to the continuing self-interpretation of modernity (Robinson and Rundell, Rethinking Imagination, Ch. 8, pp. 155-70).

31. An exception here is the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss who arguably did most to return the concept of myth to centre-stage in France from the 1950s onwards. He interprets it in a way that makes it acceptable to the rationalist tradition. Developing his views mainly in opposition to Durkheimian thinking on myth, Lévi-Strauss perceives the ‘untamed’ or ‘multiconscious’ mind of so-called ‘primitive’ man as better equipped to respond to his environment on many levels simultaneously (Terence Hawkes, Structuralism and Semiotics, New Idiom Series (London: Methuen, 1971), p. 52.) He defends it as being ‘as rigorous as modern science’ (p. 49); and identifies mythical thinking as formal and logical, quite distinct from the mystical and the sacred (Ivan Strenski, Four Theories of Myth in Twentieth-Century History (London: Macmillan, 1987), pp. 156-57).

32. It is acknowledged, by implication, when Barthes identifies his outsider status as mythologist as a moral position (Mythologies, p. 245). Thompson, in contrast, offers a positive reading of ideology in culture, contesting the myth of the passive recipient and arguing that the individual has a critical, appropriative role to play in the ‘interpretative transformation of doxa’ (pp. 25-26). It is nonetheless noteworthy that the term ‘imagination’ does not feature in his, admittedly, sociological and not literary study.

33. John Sturrock, ‘Roland Barthes’ in Structuralism and Since, ed. by John Sturrock (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), p. 64.

34. ‘Semioclasm’ is the term used by Barthes in ‘Change the Object Itself’ to describe the destruction of the linguistic sign. (Roland Barthes, Image-Music-Text, ed. and trans. by Stephen Heath (London: Fontana, 1982), p. 167).

35. Christopher Flood, citing Ernst Cassirer in The Myth of the State (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1946) points to the tendency for this sort of myth, characterized as ‘political’, to emerge in times of cultural crisis (Political Myth. A Theoretical Introduction, New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1996, p. 74). Although he disqualifies Barthes's conception from his own schema, Mythologies may be read as an expression of the crisis in cultural values of the period.

36. Michael Worton examines the extent of his mythic borrowings in ‘Myth-Reference in Le Roi des Aulnes’, Stanford French Review, 36 (1981), 299-310. See also Tournier's comments on ‘le mythe mort’ in Le Vent paraclet (Paris: Gallimard, 1977), p. 188.

37. David Gascoigne provides a detailed discussion of the tension between history and archetypal symbolism in Le Roi des Aulnes in Michel Tournier (Oxford: Berg, 1996), pp. 183-206.

38. In Le Vent paraclet Tournier's own condemnation of the implosion of reason into unreason, ‘la folie raisonneuse et systématique’, is explicit (p. 113).

39. There is a good discussion of this point in the chapters on Foucault in Peter Dews, Logics of Disintegration. Post-Structuralist Thought and the Claims of Critical Theory (London: Verso, 1987).

40. Madan Sarup, Identity, Culture and the Postmodern World (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1996), pp. 87-90.

41. Hans Jonas, The Imperative of Responsibility. In Search of an Ethics for a Technological Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984).