French Literature: A Very Short Introduction (2 page)

List of illustrations
xi

Introduction: meeting French literature
1

Saints, werewolves, knights, and a poete maudit: allegiance and character in the Middle Ages
5

The last Roman, `cannibals', giants, and heroines of modern life: antiquity and renewal
18

3 Society and its demands
32

4 Nature and its possibilities
46

r_ Around the Revolution
58

6 The hunchback, the housewife, and the flaneur
72

From Marcel to Rrose Selavy
88

The self-centred consciousness
104

French-speaking heroes without borders?
117

Further reading
129

Index
133

1 Charlemagne finds Roland's
corpse after the battle of
Roncevaux, from Les Grandes
Chroniques de France,
c.1460 10

© Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris/
Giraudon/The Bridgeman Art Library

2 Illustration by Gustave
Dore (1854) for Rabelais's
Gargantua (1534) 25

© akg-images

3 Chateau of Vaux-le-Vicomte,
designed by Louis Le Van, in an
engraving by Perelle (1660) 34

© akg-images

4 Engraving by Francois
Chauveau (1668) for La
Fontaine's fable Le Loup et le
chien 36

5 Scene from Bernardin de SaintPierre's novel Paul et Virginie
(1787), in a 1805 engraving
after Francois Gerard 55

© Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris/
Archives Charmet/The Bridgeman
Art Library

6 Napoleon Bonaparte
throwing a Marquis de Sade
book into the fire, drawing
attributed to P. Cousturier
(1885) 62

© Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris

7 Voltaire's remains are
transferred to the Pantheon,
1791, engraving after
Lagrenee 65

© Roger-Viollet/TopFoto

8 Bust by Jean-Baptiste
Carpeaux, entitled `Why be
born a slave?' (1868) 68

Courtesy of the Image of the Black
in Western Art Project and Photo
Archive, W. E. B. Du Bois Institute

9 Engraving by Luc-Olivier
Merson (1881) inspired by
Victor Hugo's novel Notre
Dame de Paris (1831) 74

Cc) Roger-Viollet/TopFoto

10 Maxime Lalanne (1827-86),
`Demolition work for the
construction of the Boulevard
Saint-Germain', scene from Haussmann's renovations of
Paris 84

© MusEe Carnavalet/Roger-Viollet/
TopFoto

11 Claude Monet, La Gare
Saint-Lazare (1877) 85

© The Granger Collection/TopFoto

12 Page of Stephane Mallarme's
poem, Un coup de des jamais
n'abolira le hasard
(1897) 87

© Roger-Viollet/TopFoto

13 `Les yeux de fougere,
photographic montage
illustration for Andre Breton's
Nadja (1928) 96

(c© ADAGP, Paris, and DACS, London,
2009

14 Marcel Duchamp as Rrose
Selavy, c. 1920-1, in a
photograph by Man Ray 101

n Man Ray Trust/ADAGP,
Paris, and DACS, London, 2009.
Photo n The Philadelphia
Museum of Art/Art Resource/Scala,
Florence

15 Lucien Raimbourg and Pierre
Latour in Samuel Beckett's En
attendant Godot, photograph
from the 1956 Paris
production by Roger Blin 107

© Roger-Viollet/TopFoto

16 Scene from Alain Resnais's
film Hiroshima mon amour
(1959) 115

n Argos/Como/Pathe Overseas/
DAIEI Motion Pictures/Album/
akg-images

The heritage of literature in the French language is rich, varied,
extensive in time and space, and appealing both to its immediate
public, readers of French, and also to a global audience reached
through translations and film adaptations. The first great works
of this repertory were written in the 11th century in northern
France, and now, at the beginning of the 21st century, French
literatures include authors writing in many parts of the world,
ranging from the Caribbean to Western Africa, whose works
are available in bookshops and libraries in France and in other
French-speaking countries. For many centuries, French was
also a language of aristocratic and intellectual elites throughout
Europe.

What is `French literature'?

Both `French' and `literature' are problematic terms. What are
the boundaries of `French'? Historically, the effective domination
of the `French' language among the population living within
the boundaries of today's `France' was realized only at the end
of the 19th century, when universal schooling brought the
language of Paris and the elites to the speakers of such tongues
as Breton (Brezhoneg) spoken on the Brittany peninsula, Basque
(Euskara) on the southwest coast, varieties of Occitanian (Lenga
d'oc) such as Gascon and Provencal in the south, and Alsatian (Elsasserditsch) in the northeast. Moreover, there are many
important authors who have written and now write in French who
do not live within the borders of the European territory known
as `France', though in many cases they are citizens of France (the
residents of Martinique, Guadeloupe, New Caledonia, and so
forth) or of former colonies of France such as Quebec and Senegal.
Some authors whose first language is not French have chosen to
write a significant portion of their work in French, for instance
Samuel Beckett. Other authors, born in France and French
citizens, have chosen not to write in `French': Frederic Mistral,
like Beckett a winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, wrote in
Provencal. As for `literature', the current use of the term dates
from the 19th century, when what had long been called `poetry'
or belles lettres was amalgamated with other writings such as
memoirs and essays as the basis for literary studies in universities.
It is a bit flippant, but useful, to think of literature as what we
read when we do not have to - what we read without immediate,
circumstantial purpose.

The protagonist as starting point

To get one's bearings in French literature means, in part, to have
some idea of the major texts of the evolving tradition and a sense
of how they relate and respond to one another. Coming into that
tradition can be, at first, disorienting. Fortunately, perhaps, the
situation of having to relate to an unfamiliar society and of having
to determine one's own place while observing other people is a
central topic of some of the principal texts of the French tradition.
Whether by their choice or by circumstance, the protagonists of
many French texts find themselves in situations of opposition
to, or isolation from, most other members of their society. This
is often a literary device for authors to make critical, polemical,
or didactic points (and French literature can be called justly
a literature of ideas), but it may also be a source of emotional
turmoil that offers the reader an experience of empathy, rather
than a purely intellectual insight.