New History of French Literature

[George McClintock III]

***** Empire Building *****

By George McClintock

A New History of French Literature

Denis Hollier, editor, with R. Howard Bloch, Peter Brooks, Joan Dejean,
Barbara Johnson, Philip E. Lewis, Nancy K. Miller, Francois Rigolot and
Nancy J. Vickers
Harvard University Press, 1150 pages, $49.95

There's never a Commando for Epistemological Intervention
around when you need one. A New History of French Literature, a
magisterial volume published last year by Harvard University Press,
pretends to represent the state of the art in American French literary
history and criticism. Seeking to construct a "panorama of French
literature in its cultural context--music, painting, politics, and
monuments public and private," the editors negotiated an overwhelming
debt with a bank of methodologies once developed by anthropologists,
historians, philosophers, political scientists, psychoanalysts and
sociologists, then synthesized and marketed by post-1968 critics,
linguists and philosophers of language. The editors' negotiations,
unfortunately, resulted in ideological bankruptcy; the New History is
more a semi-private monument to institutional hegemony and hubris than
it is a source for whatever knowledge of French literature or culture
one may hope to acquire from the volume.

"Conceived for the general reader," the editors tell us
straightaway, the New History is a collection of 200 short essays
written by 164 professors of French literature teaching primarily at
American universities. Literary history should be written, the
editors declare in their introduction, "not as a simple inventory of
authors or titles, but rather as a historical and cultural field
viewed from a wide array of critical perspectives." History and
culture are framed at the beginning of each essay with a date and a
headline, followed by a title: "1799, 10 October/On 18 Brumaire,
Bonaparte Seizes Power/The Ideologists" or "1968, May/Ten Million
Workers Strike in France; Students Demonstrate Worldwide/Actions, No!
Words, Yes!" Although the editors would have us "question our
conventional perception of the historical continuum," the
juxtaposition of historical events serves to establish an infinite
cultural context that homogenizes their project, otherwise "designed
to produce an effect of heterogeneity and to disrupt the traditional
orderliness of most histories of literature." Did the editors
conceive of a neutered "general reader" only to send it to an
intellectual disorderly house?

From the first to the last page of the New History, dates,
headlines and essays follow one another, but the chronological event
may not figure in the context of the essay it introduces. The first
essay by John Benton, "778/Roland Dies at Roncevaux/Entering the
Date," is not a study of the Song of Roland but a discussion of the
difficulties medieval scholars have dating their manuscripts. In the
last essay, "1985, 27 September/The 500th Program of 'Apostrophes' is
Broadcast on Antenne 2/Friday Night Books," Stephen Heath complains
about the commercial sterilization of "an idea of writing, of
literature, before or beyond" the French television talk show devoted
to promoting the French publishing industry. Money talks, nobody
walks, even hermits make the scene. "Thus [Claude] Simon, like all
the others, had been persuaded, even before [winning] the Nobel [Prize
for literature], to forgo his seclusion and appear on the show."
It is not easy to escape from the confines of traditional
literary history, defined by the editors as a "continuous historical
narrative or alphabetical dictionary," despite the constant collision
of anecdotal, biographico- thematic, deconstructionist, Freudian,
Lacanian, Marxist, structuralist, post- structuralist--the list is
endless--analytical methods chosen by the individual contributors, of
whom many offer fine readings of French texts. In contrast, the
editors justify their pedagogy of discontinuity by reducing the
literary encyclopaedia--both a pedagogical tool and a significant
cultural artefact, still required reading for doctoral
examinations--to "masses of often irrelevant information,"
while the literary dictionary "artificially homogenizes literature
into linear genealogies."

If the editors' anti-encyclopaedic conception of literary
history is betrayed by these arbitrary and futile definitions, a
number of contributors either support or reject between the lines of
their essays the editorial ideology of discontinuity. "In other
words, knowledge is not worthless because it is uncertain," Lionel
Grossman remarks in his coherent study of Pierre Bayle's Dictionnaire
historique et critique of 1697, otherwise a classic defense
deconstructionists employ whenever their literary theory is accused of
obstructing the quest for knowledge with obscure discourses broadcast
by metaphysical prophets to a crowd of yawning disciples. The
definition of the dictionary that Alain Rey proposes concisely
describes the pedagogical tool that the editors of the New History
reject out of hand, even though the success of the volume relies on
its use as a tool: "A dictionary can have two goals: to unveil the
social truth of language (that is, the norm); and, through an
appropriate use of words and terms, to reveal the scientific,
philosophical and cultural achievements of society at large." Even if
discontinuity is the antithetical "norm" assumed by the editors, the
New History also reconstitutes for the "general reader" the
17th-century "worldly criticism" popular among aristocrats, a critical
mode that, according to Joan DeJean, "kept the educated public
informed about the literary scene by taking over where childhood
education had left off. It can thus be seen as a program for
continuing education...."

Although there is no hard evidence that the so-called
"historical continuum" is constituted by institutional canons,
literary or otherwise, the editors declare that the New History
"presents the classical [sic] canon next to both its rivals and its
opponents." The "rivals" of the canon are presumably those writers
excluded from traditional French literary history for reasons of
gender or ethnicity--an illogical identification, because the
establishment of the literary canon reflects the changing ideology of
scholarship, not the historical significance of dissected or ignored
writers. The "opponents" are presumably those scholars who, blindly
opposing the inevitable social evolution of an international literary
canon, cannot tolerate the presence of gender or ethnic "otherness" in
their sacred book of writers. Is the New History merely a pedagogical
battlefield? For the editors, democracy transcends the canonical
controversy: "In setting forth not only their knowledge but also their
points of view and their choices, the contributors offer encounters
with the major methodological and ideological positions in today's
literary studies."

Paternalism

The first essay resumes the ideological parti pris of the New
History ; while the author identifies the canonical segregation of
orality and literacy, he does not seem to understand the paternalism
of such arbitrary and useless distinctions: "Copies of such texts made
at different dates are like the sketches of a growing child, each an
authentic representation of a given stage, no one more authoritative
than another." Apparently the medieval scribes should have been able
to respond to the needs of 20th-century scholars: "Some scribes were
careless; some ignorantly misunderstood their exemplars; others, too
bright for their readers' good, introduced 'corrections' where none
were needed."

Although the intellectual, according to general editor Denis
Hollier, has ceased "to be the omniscient giver, the paternalistic
advocate of others who used to place his university at the service of
those suffering," scholarly paternalism is expressed between the lines
of several essays, especially when distinctions are made between the
bourgeoisie and the working classes. Regarding the 19th-century
popular melodramas, Peter Brooks hands down a judgement typical of
traditional academic critics: "Crude as they often were, [these
melodramas] corresponded to the needs of the times and expressed a
prevailing imaginative mode." Brooks also affirms, this time about
Stendhal's The Red and the Black, that literary paternity is "itself
inextricably bound up with the political problem of legitimacy and
authority. The entire plot and structure of the novel turn on the key
political questions, to whom does France belong, and who shall inherit
it?"

Nationalist Propaganda

Who were the Franks of France? R. Howard Bloch offers a
fascinating study of late nineteenth century medieval scholarship.
Because the Song of Roland was first sung in a political no man's land
between France and Germany, French literary historians "from the
beginning used what they could not know with certainty about such
early texts for their own nationalistic purposes," in order to justify
the Franco-German wars for control of the Alsacian region. "At the
center of medieval studies from the beginning lay the troubling
suspicion that French literature may in fact be German. ... Thus the
application to Roland of Romantic notions of the epic could only
excite the worst fears of the French that France was really Germany in
disguise." Joseph S. Duggan suggests that the Song of Roland, as a
"foundation myth" of French nationality, "exemplifies the mutually
beneficial relationship between the jongleurs and history: the poets
preserved in their songs fragmentary memories of historical events,
which they embellished for artistic purposes, while historical figures
such as Urban II appropriated and exploited the epic legends to
further their political and social agendas." According to David F.
Hult, given that "vernacular literature could also be used as a
propagandistic tool," the Roman de la Rose constitutes "the most
elaborate expression in medieval French literature of the power of the
written word and the dangerous privilege constituted by the act of
interpretation." Donald R. Kelly reports that the study of history
during the Renaissance was "deeply involved, too, in 16th-century
partisan controversy, both political and religious, and indeed was a
major form of propaganda." If 19th-century medievalists deployed
theories of the Song of Roland in order to support nationalist
politics, they were following in the footsteps of their founding
fathers. Never innocent art and scholarship, forever and always
propaganda's foie gras.

Feminist Nationalism

This confusion between French and German identities also appears
much later, in an essay by Naomi Schor on Flaubert and George Sand.
Schor advises the reader to avoid confusing Sand's feminine idealism
with "the more traditional Germanic and misogynistic strain of
idealism" linked by Kantian aesthetics to the male discourses of
French realism. Distinguishing between virtuous feminine and degraded
male realisms, Schor combats in theoretical terms the sexist
tendencies of French realist literature. Sand's altruism leads Schor
to think of Felicity, Flaubert's character, whose melodramatic virtue,
when confronted by the death of her parrot, "testifies to her unique
capacity to love the Other." Other? Or theoretical howler? Schor
continues, "After all, what is the parrot if not the absolute Other,
first as an animal, then as inert matter, and finally as
transcendental signifier?" Schor even insists, like a
deconstructionist in name only, that "despite its tendency to
collapse, as all oppositions do, the opposition between idealism and
realism must be revived and revised if the hegemony of patriarchal
realism is to be challenged and Sand recanonized," without examining
the premises of canonical conceptualization. Barbara Johnson
chastises misogynist Romantic poets, for whom dead women "seem
repeatedly to be inseparable from moments of poetic renewal." Victor
Hugo's dear departed are "Better dead and idealized than real and
pregnant"--a phrase that would sound profound and witty at an academic
cocktail party or during a group therapy session, but smacks of
reactionary propaganda in a volume devoted to literary history,
traditional or otherwise. This is not to say that feminist arguments
are not cogently presented in the New History; Madelyn Gutwirth's
study, "Civil Rights and Wrongs of Women" offers readers both a
stimulating analysis of the social and political status of women
during the 18th century, and of the contradictions evident in the
enlightened discourses of the male philosophes.

Colony of "Others"

Because "difference and otherness always the province of the
poet" [Nathaniel Wing] is the theoretical commonplace dominating the
New History, the rhetorical figure of the Other--alterity--reappears
again and again in a variety of contexts throughout the volume. In an
essay on Montesquieu by James Creech, the Other, as it is revealed in
the Persian Letters, represents a Freudian return of the repressed in
order to naturalize a social practice with some ancient castration
complex: "Although we have no categories for understanding the
eunuches' otherness, their pleasure can still be affirmed as natural.
In this way Montesquieu handles otherness, not only as a site of our
temporary ignorance on its way to be colonized, but also as something
that has a place within 'the way things are' even though it remains
unknown."

The rhetoric of "Otherness," linked to the colonization of
knowledge, thus to the imperialist assimilation of colonized peoples
into a mono-cultural or nationalistic ideology, reveals the business
as usual of bourgeois narcissism. Such rhetoric is not inexpensive,
according to Creech: "No culture can absorb [women, "Orientals,"
"Indians," eunuches, and all others] and what they represent without
at the same time revealing something about the mystification behind
its most fervent attitudes and values." The problematic of
decolonization versus cultural assimilation reflects the implicit
narcissism of post-colonial ethnography. In his essay, "Negrophilia,"
James Clifford explains that Michel Leiris "sees not entropy but
colonialism, struggles for power, and the reinvention of identities.
Western literary and social-scientific writers still hesitate between
these post-colonial visions, the one global, elegiac, and
anthropological, the other local, emergent, and ethnographic," in
other words, between Eurocentric mythology and hypothesis.

To Forgive Is Divine

For Richard Terdiman, "'otherness' defines our vision of 1848,
"when the February Revolution of the working class was brutally
repressed by the bourgeoisie. Years later, the bourgeois survivors
questioned their role in history: "Was it real--or simply a play of
images?" Uncertain as to the "authenticity" of the 1848 insurrection,
the bourgeoisie assimilated itself to the "otherness" of the working
class: "History and feeling seem to have become as disjunct as the
classes whose initial alliance and later conflict determined the
physiognomy of 1848." Terdiman apparently seeks pardon for crimes
committed by the bourgeoisie against the Enlightenment. Or the
bourgeois warriors misunderstood the significance of the violence they
inflicted on the working class: "But now the universalizing ideals
that up to 1848 had undergirded all the French revolutions seemed to
have been liquidated along with the working class protesters. The
revolution of 1848 revealed that these values were themselves
representations--subject to manipulation, to slippage, to all the
effects of power directly or indirectly stated." In other words, the
bourgeoisie became the victim of its own propaganda. Is propaganda
thus a function of individual or collective subjectivity? During the
Enlightenment, explains Patrick Coleman, "political understanding
could not be divorced from the critical exploration and exercise of
subjectivity."

Alice Yaeger Kaplan hopes to pardon Brasillach, the notorious
editor of the infamous fascist weekly, Je suis partout [I Am
Everywhere], who was executed by firing squad after the Liberation in
1945. Kaplan paints Brasillach in the tragic colors of a Corneillian
hero who knows how to die with style. It is Brasillach, by his stoic
behavior in military court, who "allowed us to understand that justice
is not relative, that we can indeed distinguish good from evil in the
use that human beings make of their liberty, and that therefore we can
will the good." Kaplan's praise of Brasillach literally reeks of
structuralist propaganda: "Structuralist poetics, with its formal
analyses of texts, provided a new freedom from the ambiguities of
accusation, from the righteous triumphs and mistakes of the postwar
intellectual purge." Although the accusation against Brasillach and
his subsequent execution were in no way ambiguous judicial acts,
Kaplan feels obliged to justify her reading of a fascist, as if she
didn't know that the freedom of speech comprehends the freedom to read
as well.

Academic Democracy

A New History of French Literature presents a theoretical
ensemble, whose subjective variations undermine the editors' attempt
to transcend the canonical controversies that for years have been
raging quietly in literature departments all over the nation. These
controversies are the direct result of a dissipation of historical
curricula in favor of hit-or-miss textual analyses performed during
the graduate seminar or at the conference table. Nevertheless, a
plethora of literary theories does not necessarily serve to expand the
literary canon. The New History does not present a cultural panorama;
the editors reserved too little space for art, music and francophone
literature to merit this attribution. (Indeed, virtually no primary
source is cited in the original French; all quotations are
translations.) What is worse, the editors deliberately ignored the
dissident voices of new French critics and philosophers, who have been
debating since 1983 the merits of post- 1968 methodologies, upon
which the vast majority of the contributors to the volume have based
their scholarship and built their academic careers. The work of these
apparently extra-canonical scholars, general editor Hollier told me,
is "not very important."

The New History also lacks an aesthetic je ne sais quoi. Instead of
164 different scholarly voices, the "general reader" hears only one;
each essay was rigorously edited for clarity as defined evidently not
by the editors of the volume, but by a copy editor at the Harvard UP.
(Given the prestige of the Harvard UP, it is not surprising that the
name of the late Paul de Man, the most important postwar literary
critic in the United States, whose pristine reputation has been
forever soiled by the revelation of his past as a propaganda writer
for the Nazis, is rarely cited and cannot be found in the index of the
New History.) Is it surprising that the New History received in the
United States, according to le Monde, the Parisian daily, "the most
astonishing reception and admiration that a scholarly work has
inspired for a long time" [1/19/90]? In fact, the New History has
provoked few enthusiastic critiques; reviewers have tended to dismiss
the book's debatable contribution to literary history. Inasmuch as
the New History reflects the status of French studies in the United
States, its problematic reception may be seen as a reaction to the
theoretical paradoxes and to the ideological prejudices the editors
either refused to consider, or conveniently ignored. This is why the
New History is the Cadillac of academic journals devoted to French
literature--still deluxe, somewhat defective, and there's plenty of
room if you can make the payments.

This review, written in French for Lendemains, Technische Universitat
Berlin, was translated and revised by the author. Printed with
permission.

>> The opinions expressed are those of the author and in no way reflect the
>> opinions or policies of the City University Graduate School, its agencies,
>> or its personnel. {:-(

>> George McClintock III
>> Ph.D. Program in French
>> Computer Center

--

>> The opinions expressed are those of the author and in no way reflect the
>> opinions or policies of the City University Graduate School, its agencies,
>> or its personnel. {:-(