France and the modernist privilege

In March 2007, the manifesto ‘Pour une “littérature-monde” en français’, signed by 44 French-language novelists, appeared in Le Monde.Though its primary aim was to argue for a polycentric and ‘world’ vision of literature in French, rather than one that made ‘francophone’ writing subsidiary to that produced in metropolitan France, the manifesto also attacked what it claimed was the formalist creed that governed contemporary French literature: ‘Le monde, le sujet, le sens, l’histoire, le “référent”: pendant des décennies, ils auront été mis “entre parenthèses” par les maîtres-penseurs, inventeurs d’une littérature sans autre objet qu’elle-même’ (Barbery et al., 2007; ‘The world, the subject, meaning, history, the ‘referent’: for decades, these have been set aside by the most influential thinkers, who have invented a literature concerned only with itself’).

In the same year Tzvetan Todorov, a prominent French intellectual who in the 1960s had played an important part in the introduction of formalist criticism to France, surprised the French literary world with a passionate essay, La Littérature en péril, in which he condemned the ‘formalism, solipsism and nihilism’ of not just much contemporary French writing, but also of the educational and critical discourse that shaped its reception and promoted a view of the authentic literary work as solely ‘un objet langagier clos, autosuffisant, absolu’ (Todorov, 2007, 31; ‘a linguistic object closed in on itself, self-sufficient and absolute’). Todorov defended the right of the ‘lecteur non professionnel’ (‘non-professional reader’) to find in the reading of stories a direct relationship with his or her own life, to believe that literature can ‘nous faire mieux comprendre le monde et nous aider à vivre’ (72; ‘make us understand the world better and help us to live’), endorsing this belief unreservedly and applying it across the spectrum of fiction from the classics to Harry Potter.Those who dominate the cultural scene in France, he argued, have diverged so far from such a view that they can only interpret such readerly enthusiasm as ‘intolérablement niaise’ (68; ‘intolerably naïve’).

Manifestoes, and indeed deliberately provocative essays such as Todorov's – La Littérature en périlcame out in Flammarion's Café Voltaire collection, designed, as the cover announces, to be ‘un lieu où les humeurs s’affichent, où les idées s’entrechoquent’ (‘a place where moods can be expressed and ideas can collide’) – are by nature polemical and given to demonising the opposition.