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Things in Recent French Literature
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Extract
Since the second world war, journalistic critics and generalizing cultural pundits have been pointing out to us that serious French literature is headed, on the one hand, toward an eventually sterile period of realistic despair, and, on the other, toward an intensification of difficult writing characterized by a kind of supreme indifference to audience on the part of the creator. Examples to prove their point are not lacking. There would seem to be, however, at least one other trend in recent French writing which, although owing something, perhaps, in the way of formation or occasion for reaction to the two types mentioned, falls not at all into such categories. For lack of a better name, and in order to avoid painful jargon, this literature might best be called a literature of Things.
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- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1956
References
1 Thus, the realm of animal literature (Colette, medieval fabliaux, etc.) does not properly fall under object-literature, for the motivation of such writing, its charm and attraction, lie in the fantasy of animals playing men.
2 “La Pensée circulaire de Flaubert” in NNRF, xxxi (1955), 30–52, as well as Poulet's point of departure in Erich Auerbach, Mimesis (Princeton, 1953), pp. 482–491.
3 René Crevel, however, comes many times very close to object-writing in his general and repeated plea for a return to the world as it is. See particularly the conclusions of Le Clavecin de Diderot (Paris: Editions Surréalistes, 1932), pp. 62–63, 128–129.
4 La Nausée (Paris: Gallimard, 1938), pp. 161–163.
5 Cf. Ernst Cassirer, An Essay on Man (New York: Doubleday), p. 103, for the mythic or what he calls the physiognomic character of things. They have lost their “objective or cosmological” value but not their “anthropological value.”
6 Passages (Paris: Gallimard, 1950), p. 30.
7 “Raymond Queneau et la Cosmogonie,” Critique, xlix (1951), 489.
8 Despite the reservations of Georges Bataille, “De l' âge de pierre à Jacques Prévert,” Critique, iii-iv (1946), 195–214. There are clearly many texts of these poets which do not lend themselves to our analysis; that is why I speak of tendency. I am convinced, however, that the poets are basically intent upon communicating and that they trust language as a medium.
9 Proémes (Paris: Gallimard, 1948), pp. 208, 130.
10 It was Ponge who wrote the introduction for a folio of Braque reproductions (Paris: A. Skira, 1947) which he calls “Braque, le réconciliateur.” The introductory essay gives a clear indication of the sympathy of Ponge, writer of things, for Braque, the painter of them. “J'ai dit que la seule raison et justification de l'art était une impérieuse nécessité d'expression. Non pour troubler, mais pour rassurer. J'ai dit que la seule fafon de nous exprimer authentiquement était de nous enfoncer dans notre différence,—de l'exprimer à travers une matiére traitée sans vergogne, non à partir de nous-mémes mais à partir du monde–et done des objets les plus familiers. …”
11 “J'en sais,” says Beckett in Molloy, “ce que savent les mots et les choses mortes, et ĉa fait une jolie petite somme, avec un commencement, un milieu et une fin, comme dans les phrases bien bâties et dans la longue sonate des cadavres.” For different explanations of the phenomenon, Beckett, see Georges Bataille, “Le Silence de Molloy,” Critique, xlviii (1951), 387–396; and Edith Kem, “Drama Stripped for Inaction,” YFS, xiv (1955), 41: “It is not man's relationship to the world of things that counts for Beckett.”
12 Les Gommes (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1953); “Trois Visions réfléchies,” NNRF, xvi (1954), 614–623. Robbe-Grillet's latest work, reviewed in NNRF, xxxi (1955), 105–112, by Maurice Blanchot, is Le Voyeur (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1955).
13 In Critique, lxxxvi–lxxxvii (1954), 581–591.
14 See the perceptive article of René Micha, “Une nouvelle Littérature allégorique,” NNRF, xvi (1954), 696–706, where he groups René Daumal, Julien Gracq, Noël Devaulx, and others (e.g., Beckett—and wrongly so, I think) as writers influenced by the “open universe” of Kafka and absurdity (therefore somewhat like the writers discussed here) who identify themselves with the objects of their novels by way of allegory. What Micha is discussing is not object-literature.
15 Cited in article by Barthes, Critique, lxxxvi–ixxxvii (1954).
16 Cf. Ponge at the conclusion of his short pamphlet Note hâtive à la gloire de Groethuysen (Lyon: Les Ecrivains réunis, 1951): “Mais c'est bien à partir d'ici, mon Gr?th, si comme je le pense, la Matiére est l'unique providence de l'esprit. …”
17 Cf. Ponge, “Texte sur l'é1ectricité” in NNRF, xxxi (1955), 14; “Et puis je relis Lucréce et je me dis qu'on n'a jamais rien écrit de plus beau, que rien de ce qu'il a avancé, dans aucun ordre, ne me paralt avoir été séirieusement démenti, mais au contraire plutôt confirmé.”
18 Profanes, p. 180.
19 Sartre, despite his study of Ponge (L'Homme et les Choses, Paris: Seghers, 1947), would find fault with the use of the word as well as with the subsequent discussion of passing from denomination of things to comprehension of man, as he makes clear in an attack on materialist method. “Mais une fois qu'il a supprimé la subjectivité au profit de l'objet, au lieu de se voir chose parmi les choses, ballotté par les ressacs de l'univers physique, il se fait regard objectif et pretend contempler la nature telle qu'elle est absolument. Il y a un jeu de mot sur l'objectivité, qui tantôt signifie la qualité passive de l'objet regardé et tantôt la valeur absolue d'un regard dé-pouillé des faiblesses subjectives. Ainsi le matéialiste, ayant dépassé toute subjectivité et s'étant assimilé it la pure vérité objective, se proméne dans un monde d'objets habité par des hommes-objets” (Situations iii, Paris: Gallimard, 1949, p. 141). For an excellent presentation of Ponge as seen by Sartre, see Robert Champigny, FR, xxv (1952), 254–261.
20 Proêanes, p. 162.
21 Gaston Bachelard, La Terre et les rêaieries du repos (Paris: Corti, 1948), p. 11. The valuable and unique studies of Bachelard include L'Air et les songes, L'Eau el les rêaies, La Terre et les rêaieries de la volontê, and La Psychanalyse du feu. Although written from a special point of view, Bachelard's studies are extremely illuminating on the whole problem of object-literature. In the text quoted, depending upon the meaning given to “connaissance,” Bachelard suggests equally egocentric poetry and object-poetry.
22 Cahiers du Sud, ccvc (1949), 481.
23 Ponge, “Texte sur l'électricité,” p. 9.
24 Cf. Proêanes, p. 161: “J'ai choisi alors le parti pris des choses. … Mais je ne vais pas en rester là … c'est l'Homme qui est le but (Homme enfin devenu centaure, à force de se chevaucher lui-même).”
26 Ponge, “Texte sur l'électricité,” p. 15.
28 That the term begs many a question and is capable of arousing much disagreement, I am quite aware. By classic, it seems to me, one must necessarily suggest “more tendencies in one direction than in another,” just as by “romantic” one does not nicely delimit a metaphysic, a theme, and a style. Thus, my usage here approximates the scientific manner of delineating acidity-alkalinity on a sliding scale. G. E. Clancier, Panorama critique de Rimbaud au surréalisme (Paris: Seghers, 1953) would disagree because “on ne peut pourtant pas parler de classicisme à propos d'une poésie qui s'éléve en un temps tragique, au milieu d'un monde en mines … et qui doit user d'un langage qui ne peut plus, depuis longtemps, étre le lieu commun des pensées ou des sentiments d'une société cohérente.” Thus Clancier, too intent on a purely sociological interpretation of classic tendencies, misses the whole novelty and interest of Ponge's experiment.
27 My Creative Method, (a work of Ponge I have not seen), cited in Ponge's L'Araignizée (Paris: Aubier, 1952) in the introduction to the poem written by Georges Garampon, “F.P. ou la résolution humaine.” Garampon is himself close to Ponge, e.g., “Poémes en langue morte” in Esprit, x (1951), 498–500.
28 Cahiers du Sud, ccvc.
29 Proêanes, p. 205.
30 For Ponge on Mallarmé, see Proêanes, pp. 63–56: on Valéry, p. 163. Rimbaud is mentioned frequently in Ponge's works, e.g., “Il faut travailler à partir de la découverte faite par Rimbaud et Lautréamont (de la nécessité d'une nouvelle rhétorique).” My Creative Method, vide supra.
31 There is no suggestion here, however, that the Pascalian situation of the human being has influenced these writers. On the contrary, most of them, like Ponge, are anti-Pascal. Cf. Proêanes, p. 208. See also the article of Georges Mounin, “L'Anti-Pascal, ou la poésie et les vacances—Francis Ponge,” Critique, xxxvii (1949), 493–500, despite its overworked political conclusion.
32 In this poem, Ponge is at once the spider and the poet describing the spider. In the introductory essay by Georges Garampon, Garampon's final word for the attempt Ponge makes to synthesize the object and the poet is “sympathy.” “L'?uvre de Francis Ponge procéde d'un principe de sympathie.”
33 Cf. Ponge, La Rage de I'expression (Lausanne: Mermod, 1952), p. 12.
34 What Roland Barthes says (Critique, lxxxvi–lxxxvii, 587) of Robbe-Grillet applies to this whole discussion: “En somme, les opérations descriptives de Robbe-Grillet peuvent sésumer ainsi: déruire Baudelaire sous un recours dérisoire à Lamartine, et du même coup, cela va sans dire, détruire Lamartine.”
35 As Monnerot, La Poêsie moderne et le sacré (Paris: Gallimard, 1945), p. 145, puts it: “Ils [the surrealists] ont accepté que 1'inconscient fût quelque chose d'homogéne, alors qu'une propriété toute négative le définit.”
36 Cf. in Ponge, “Texte sur l'électricité,” the recurring and perhaps overdone phrase “Est-ce clair? Je crois que c'est clair.”
37 La Terre et les réveries du repos, p. 169.
38 Panorama de la nouvelle litteruture franqaise (Paris: Le Point du jour, 1951), p. 151.
39 Reism is the term chosen by Yvan Goll for a manifesto on poetry. First in his Masque de cendre (1945) and later in the Manifesto of Reism, he seems very close to the kind of direction towards Things under discussion. “Surgie du Verbe seul, la poésie reste dans le domaine de la rhétorique, de la grammaire, de 1'artifice crée par l'homme lui-méme. ‘Au commencement dtait le Verbe?’ Le reiste dira plutot: ‘A la fin 6tait le Verbe,’ apres unelongue et patiente métamorphose qui dans le poéte ou l'artiste, transforme l'objet en Verbe, en ceuvre d'art.” The term as used here, and as I understand it, must not be confused with the much-discussed réification, which, although sharing perhaps some common points of insistence on materialism with our discussion of Things, is a much stronger and broader concept with psychological and political overtones, and lacks the humanism we have attempted to read into a literature like Ponge's. Cf. the article by Joseph Gabel, “La Réification,” Esprit, x (1951), 459–482.
40 Proêanes, pp. 105–107.
41 It would be equally a mistake to equate the movement with political sentiment. Ponge, in his most recent “Texte sur l'electricite,” p. 17, where more than a little preciosity begins to show through, says: “Les architectes, comme les poetes, sont des artistes. En tant que tels, ils voient les choses dans I'eterniti: plus que dans le tempore!. Pratiquement, ils se défient de la mode. Je parle des meilleurs d'entre eux.”
42 Proêanes, p. 117.