VII.

The 20th century

Twentieth-century French literature was characterized by the sheer volume of published material, its diversity, and its often revolutionary and influential nature. Scientific advances, psychoanalytic theory, and the spread of Marxism all contributed to the destruction of old certainties. The critical theories of Jacques Derrida and Jacques Lacan challenged the idea of literary authority: while their influence on the total creative output was small, they encouraged new attitudes to reading. Most influential, perhaps, was the work of the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss in formulating new theories of communication and thus encouraging change in the nature of narrative.

A.

Poetry

Symbolist theory liberated poets from the constraints of traditional verse forms and privileged the subjective vision of the poet. Early 20th-century poets, like Emile Verhaeren, Jean Moréas, and Henri de Régnier, all initially embraced Symbolism, then abandoned it, Verhaeren for a violent lyricism that was almost Romantic, Moréas and Régnier for Classical forms and themes. Even Paul Valéry, although profoundly influenced by Mallarmé’s assertion that poetry should have the direct impact of music, preferred to cast his allusive images within the rigid framework of Classical versification. Only Guillaume Apollinaire built significantly on the Symbolist legacy, experimenting with poetry for the eye, in which he attempted some of the effects of the Cubist painters he championed, delighting in unusual verbal associations and dispensing with punctuation and often rhyme. Many of these techniques were further developed by later poets. In his use of unconscious association, Apollinaire’s work anticipated Surrealism, a movement that arose in the early 1920s, partly from the ashes of Dadaism (which briefly celebrated the disordered unconscious and proclaimed its hostility to art) and partly from the influence of psychoanalytic theories of the subconscious. The Surrealists tried to suppress, in the creative process, the operation of reason, with its contingent moral and aesthetic concerns, in favour of the unregulated images of the unconscious mind. André Breton was the autocratic leader of a group that included Paul Éluard and Louis Aragon, both of whom were far from disordered in their careful craftsmanship and mastery of metrical form. Both poets eventually abandoned the movement for the poetry of political commitment, joining poets like Robert Desnos, Pierre-Jean Jouve, and others as part of the intellectual resistance to the German Occupation in 1940-1944. Outside these movements, French poetry showed a great diversity of style and subject matter. For example, a mystical tradition may be observed, which linked poets like the Catholics Paul Claudel and Charles Péguy and the humanist Saint-John Perse: on all three, biblical and liturgical rhythms had a marked influence.

During World War II, the Resistance poets abandoned poetic theory and experimentation in their need to speak directly to the public. After the war, although some poets continued to use traditional themes and verse forms—René Char, Jules Supervielle, and Yves Bonnefoy, for example—others increasingly experimented with new verse forms, like the haiku-inspired poems of Philippe Jaccottet, the strangely spaced verse of Jean Daive, and the free-flowing word games of Marcelin Pleynet, all writing in the 1950s and 1960s. Pleynet, assistant managing editor of the avant-garde review Tel Quel (As Is), was part of a movement that sought to de-poeticize poetry and was more concerned with language as a system of signs, than as a conveyor of meaning. The poet and the poet’s emotions were effectively effaced by a lack of syntax, punctuation, and other guides to sense. The words on the page were the poem. Such poetry tended to be the preserve of a small group of intellectuals: it was not a popular genre. Among the poets of the 1970s and 1980s, there were examples of more reader-friendly poetry, although there was no great renaissance of traditional lyricism, except among poets like Jacques Prévert and the poet-musicians of the popular song, like Charles Trenet, Serge Gainsbourg, Jacques Brel, and others.

In the final decades of the 20th century, poets questioned the purpose and nature of poetry. A great deal of poetry was written, although the critic and novelist Julien Gracq (1910-2007) claimed cynically that there were not many poets to be found. Attitudes varied, however. Denis Roche, of the Tel Quel group, maintained that poetry was inadmissible, while Yves Bonnefoy advanced the view that poetry should be committed to genuine communication and to love for the world, to “that which is”. This was the theme of his later collections, like Ce qui fut sans lumière (What was in darkness, 1987) and Début et fin de la neige (Beginning and End of the Snow, 1991). Philippe Jaccottet, while accepting that “nobody today, for fear of being ridiculed, dares talk of inspiration or of the muse”, nevertheless sought constantly those moments of illumination that transfigure the natural world and put us in touch with something beyond. This was evident both in early collections, like L’Effraie (The Barn Owl, 1953), and in later works, like Pensées sous les nuages (Thoughts Below the Clouds, 1983). All the poets of the late 20th century shared an acute sense of the discipline of poetic endeavour, of the precision of the phrase, and, even at their most demanding of the reader, strove for what Bonnefoy called “a vague glimpse of that shimmering which is the essence of simple things”.

B.

Theatre

Early 20th-century theatre was as much the creation of actor-directors as of dramatists. The Théâtre Libre of actor-director André Antoine had, until 1896, promoted Naturalist drama. Antoine went on to encourage Realist playwrights like Georges de Porto-Riche, Henri Bataille, and Henry Bernstein, who all wrote dramas of great psychological intensity, dealing with difficult personal relationships. At the Théâtre de l’Oeuvre, another actor-director, Aurélien Lugné-Poë, kept the Symbolist flame alive with plays by Maurice Maeterlinck and Paul Claudel, whose L’Annonce Faite à Marie (The Annunciation) appeared in 1912 and L’Otage (The Hostage) in 1914. Lugné-Poë’s innovations in staging, scenic design, and acting style were widely influential. Even more so was the work of Jacques Copeau at the Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier in Paris, who promoted good acting, innovative production, and most of the technical tricks that make for exciting theatre. From this theatrical nursery emerged playwrights like Jean Anouilh, a versatile and hugely successful author of both light and serious plays, often concerned with the loss of innocence in a corrupt world; Jean Cocteau, whose plays ranged from the tragic (La Machine Infernale/The Time Bomb, 1934) to the frivolously surreal (Les Mariés de la Tour Eiffel, 1921; The Eiffel Tower Wedding Party, 1924); and Jean Giraudoux, whose wit, imagination, poetic expression, and love of paradox often concealed deeply held views, as in his anti-war play, La Guerre de Troie n’Aura pas Lieu (1935; Tiger at the Gates, 1955). For all the modernity of their technique, these playwrights were strangely drawn to the Classical world, often reworking the old myths in a modern form.

Other serious playwrights, like Paul Raynal, tackled contemporary problems in a straightforward realistic way, while Henry de Montherlant, besides writing powerful historical dramas, explored the tensions created by religion. The commercial theatre’s great successes in the first half of the 20th century were undoubtedly in the genres of farce and light comedy, in which Georges Courteline, Georges Feydeau, Marcel Pagnol, and André Roussin all excelled.

In the 1940s, philosophy itself took to the stage, with the plays of the moralist-philosopher Albert Camus and the existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre. In Caligula (1945) and L’Etat de Siège (State of Siege, 1948), Camus explored the absurdity of the human predicament. A great admirer of the theatrical teaching of Jacques Copeau, he hoped to be able to harness modern dramatic techniques to the cause of ideas. In the event, Sartre was the more successful dramatist. In Les Mouches (1943; The Flies, 1947), Huis Clos (1944; No Exit, 1946), and Les Mains Sales (Dirty Hands, 1948) he variously tackled the problems of identity, freedom, responsibility, and political commitment, without losing sight of the drama.

Theatrical innovation did not end with Copeau. Antonin Artaud, influenced by what he saw as the dramatic power of Oriental theatre, conceived the Theatre of Cruelty, designed to shock the spectator into a recognition of humankind’s primitive ferocity. His own output was very small, but his influence was seen in dramatists like Jean Genet: in Les Bonnes (1947; The Maids, 1954) and Le Balcon (1960; The Balcony, produced earlier than the French version, in 1957), cruelty enshrined in ritual and masquerade, as advocated by Artaud, evoked a visceral response in the spectator. Genet’s plays also exhibited features of the Theatre of the Absurd, the generic term for drama that conveys the absurdity of the human condition in a correspondingly illogical—sometimes surreal—way. The masters of this genre were Eugène Ionesco, whose first play, La Cantatrice Chauve (1950; The Bald Prima Donna, 1956) defied all the conventions of realism in dialogue and characterization, and the francophone Irish writer, Samuel Beckett, who managed, in plays like En Attendant Godot (1953; Waiting for Godot, 1955), to pare down to its essence the pointlessness of existence, while making dramatic capital out of his characters’ pathetic efforts to invest life with some kind of meaning.

In the 1970s and 1980s, dramatists like Robert Pinget took up the Beckett legacy with successful plays for stage and radio. Novelists like Marguerite Duras and Nathalie Sarraute found success in the theatre, but the scene was dominated by directors, rather than writers. Ariane Mnouchkine, Robert Hossein, Patrice Chéreau, and Roger Planchon, among many stars in this constellation, blended political commitment with richly theatrical and innovative production techniques. A striking example was Mnouchkine’s epic production of Hélène Cixous’s L’Histoire Terrible mais Inachevée de Norodom Sihanouk, Roi de Cambodge (The Terrible but Unfinished Story of Norodom Sihanouk, King of Cambodia, 1985). Good, new dramatists started to emerge, some treating contemporary social issues like race, poverty, and exploitation (Bernard-Marie Koltès, for example, in Dans la Solitude des Champs de Coton/In the Solitude of the Cotton Fields, 1986), others exploring character and relationships, like the internationally successful Yasmina Reza (Art, 1994). There was no observable “school” in late 20th-century theatre—dramatists like Jean-Claude Grumberg (L’Atelier/The Workshop, 1979), Michel Vinaver (A la Renverse/Backwards, 1980), and Jean-Claude Brisville (Le Souper/The Supper, 1989) all worked differently, but there was a general return to the pleasures of dialogue and to a sense of theatre.

C.

The Novel

At the beginning of the 20th century most people thought they knew what a novel was: until 1950, the traditional format, in which the reader is invited to share the lives and adventures of recognizable and realistic characters, operating in chronological time, was the preferred vehicle of most French novelists. The popularity of the genre was evident in the large number of romans-cycles (series of novels, tracing a character, family, or society through a particular period) published during this time. Georges Duhamel, Roger Martin du Gard, Romain Rolland, Jules Romains, and Henri Troyat all wrote successful cycles, chronicles of their times.

An exceptional example of the genre was Proust’s À la Recherche du Temps Perdu (1913-1927; Remembrance of Things Past, 1922-1931), which was infinitely more than a portrayal of the life of a man moving in a narrow society. The novels constituted a brilliant exploration of the nature of time, memory, reality, and the creative process. Marcel Proust started no movement, but his influence could be seen in works like Les Faux-Monnayeurs (1926; The Counterfeiters, 1955) by André Gide, in which a novel-within-a-novel told the very story that was yet to be written, and Sartre’s La Nausée (1938; Nausea, 1949), which tackled, on a more philosophical plane, the problem of truth and existence, reaching a Proustian conclusion about the ultimate reality being the work of art.

Even within the traditional framework of the novel, there was considerable diversity. Colette, in Chéri (1920) and Gigi (1945), painted the human heart realistically but with lyricism. Some writers escaped the realist formula: Le Grand Meaulnes by Alain-Fournier (1913) was a dream-like, poetic adventure; Gide’s Les Caves du Vatican (The Vatican Cellars, 1914), a Surrealistic romp; Cocteau, Giraudoux, Julien Gracq, Raymond Queneau, and others escaped into fantasy and poetry. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, in Vol de Nuit (1931; Night Flight, 1932), achieved a remarkable fusion of poetry, philosophy, and narrative excitement.

Narrative was, in many novels of the first half of the 20th century, a vehicle for other concerns: psychological analysis or spiritual conflict in the Georges Bernanos novel Journal d’un Curé de Campagne (1936; Diary of a Country Priest, 1937), Gide’s La Porte Étroite (1909; Strait is the Gate, 1924), and Thérèse Desqueyroux (1926) by François Mauriac; political or ethical problems in Les Beaux Quartiers (1936; Residential Quarter, 1938) by Louis Aragon and La Condition Humaine (1933; Man’s Fate, 1934) by André Malraux; the existential predicament in Camus’s L’Etranger (1942; The Outsider, 1946) and Sartre’s trilogy Les Chemins de la Liberté (The Paths of Freedom, 1945-1949); and feminist concerns in Les Belles Images (Pretty Pictures, 1966) and La Femme Rompue (1967; The Woman Destroyed, 1969) by Simone de Beauvoir. Whereas novelists like Montherlant found something to admire in humankind, when it was bold, brave, and very manly, as in Les Olympiques (1924), Louis Céline poured out his disgust with human nature in violent, colloquial lyricism in Voyage au Bout de la Nuit (1932; Journey to the End of Night, 1934). Henri Bosco, Jean Giono, and Henri Queffélec used the novel to celebrate the beauties of provincial France. Both World Wars I and II had their novelists, not only among those writers already cited, but also including Henri Barbusse, Roland Dorgelès, and Vercors (pseudonym of Jean Bruller), whose Le Silence de la Mer (The Silence of the Sea, 1942) was a Resistance classic. These are but examples of a rich and varied genre, to which should be added the name of Georges Simenon, who was a master of the psychological detective novel, and a writer of straight fiction with an acute perception of human nature.

The nouveau roman (new novel) of the 1950s and 1960s, exemplified by Michel Butor, Marguerite Duras, Alain Robbe-Grillet, and Nathalie Sarraute, did not mark the death of the traditional novel—subsequent successful French novelists, like Michel Tournier, remained within the tradition—but it did show the limits to which the genre might be pushed. The authoritarian author who named and described characters, ordered chronology, and demarcated the real and the imaginary was effaced. The passive reader had to wake up and work things out for himself or herself. Ambiguity, unease, and lack of resolution were the defining features of the nouveau roman. Philippe Sollers, co-founder of the critical review Tel Quel, went further: the text was not an expression of the author, but an independent linguistic adventure, to be experienced by the reader. His Drame (1965) was a text rather than a novel, and it is significant that Sollers’s later fiction became more traditional in format, suggesting that the theory was not very satisfying in practice. More amusing, perhaps, were the linguistic gymnastics of Georges Perec: in La Disparition (1969; A Void, 1994) the letter e was not used once.

From the 1950s, there was a marked increase in the number of successful women novelists, among whom Marguerite Yourcenar, author of the historical novel Mémoires d’Hadrien (1951; Memoirs of Hadrian, 1954), was the first woman to be elected to the Académie Française. Bonjour Tristesse (Good Morning Sadness, 1954) by Françoise Sagan won the Prix des Critiques, and Christiane Rochefort, Françoise Mallet-Joris, and Christine de Rivoire all enjoyed considerable public acclaim. Marguerite Duras and Nathalie Sarraute owed their reputations to more than the novelty of the nouveau roman: Duras’s work was filmed and Sarraute went on to write engaging satires of the novelist’s trade. In the more consciously feminist canon, Hélène Cixous, Monique Wittig, and Benoîte Groult all made noteworthy contributions.

By the late 20th century, there were recurring themes in the novel: life was arbitrary and incoherent, memory unreliable, experience fragmented. Claude Simon, winner of the 1985 Nobel Prize for Literature, reflected this in disrupted chronology and complex, multi-layered narrative, as in Les Géorgiques (The Georgics, 1981), in which he also used intertextuality (the use, rewriting, or subversion of existing texts), a popular modern technique. Georges Perec, in La Vie Mode d’Emploi (Life a User’s Manual, 1978), dealt with life’s incoherence by imposing an arbitrary, artificial order on his narrative, where numerical formulae dictated the book’s structure and constituted its only certainties. For Jean-Marie Le Clézio, language was humankind’s means of engaging with a mechanistic urban society: we rebel by dislocating it. This was admirably illustrated by typographical and narrative experiments in early works such as Le Procès-Verbal (The Statement, 1963). (In later works, celebrating simpler, more spiritual, primitive worlds, his tone became more lyrical.) Michel Tournier’s short stories, more ambiguous than his novels, demonstrated the multiplicity of interpretations open to a diversity of readers; the function of the author being to “present figures the reader cannot quite grasp”. Similarly, Robert Pinget teased the reader with ambiguities that were never resolved. There were plenty of novelists dealing more conventionally with contemporary social concerns—Hervé Guibert with AIDS, Annie Ernaux with the problems of gender, for example— but this ludic quality in language and narrative, even extending to hitherto traditional genres, such as the espionage, detective, and space adventure stories of writers like Jean Echenoz, particularly seemed to mark the late 20th century.