French Literature: A Very Short Introduction (17 page)

Given Breton's preference for writing that eschewed any form
of premeditation, moral censorship, and respect of traditional
genres, it is not surprising that he assigned great weight to the
creative role of chance in life. This is illustrated in his text Nadja, which is sometimes called a'novel', though Breton fulminated
against the tradition of the novel and stated that it was simply
the record of real events, centred on his chance encounter with
a young woman who called herself Nadja (though she made it
clear that this was not her real name). He perceived in Nadja
various parapsychological powers, and in answer to his question
`Who are you?', she answers, `I am the wandering soul' (Je suis
l'&me errante). He meets her several times, often by chance, and
as they wander through Paris, each place becomes heavy with
half-explained significance, suggesting that Nadja, at least, has
had a previous existence in some of these locations. They dine
in the Place Dauphine and later find themselves, by chance, in a
cafe named'Le Dauphin'; Breton explains that he had often been
identified with the sea-mammal of the same name, the dolphin.
Breton's respect for the reality of these Parisian places can be
seen in the 48 photographs that are integrated into the text,
some of them reproducing drawings made by Nadja, but most
representing locations such as the Hotel des Grands Hommes in
the Place du Pantheon, Place Dauphine, the Humanite bookstore,
the Saint-Ouen flea market, and so forth. These photographs
ostensibly serve to avoid the lengthy descriptions that are so
much a part of 19th-century realist and naturalist novels, but,
since Breton does also describe things and people in words, they
seem to have another purpose, or at least the effect, of preserving
objects that have an almost talismanic importance for the author.

Breton's slim volume - Nadja is closer in size to a pamphlet than
to most novels - does have at least one thing in common with
Proust's sprawling work. Both authors consider the everyday
world to be a source of great fascination and continue the progress
of an ever greater inclusiveness in what can be deemed worthy of
description and narration. For Proust, asparagus, diesel exhaust,
and homosexual brothels figure alongside gothic churches and
chamber music, while Breton found flea markets, film serials,
and advertisements important to include in his text. Even more
important is the role these authors give to involuntary mental processes in aesthetic creation. In a celebrated passage ofA la
recherche du temps perdu, Proust's narrator Marcel attributes
the rediscovery of the events of childhood to the unpremeditated
flash of memory that occurs upon tasting a madeleine dipped
in a cup of linden tea. This aesthetic of memoire involontaire is
comparable to Breton's intention, as he stated it in Nadja, to tell
of his life:

to the extent that it is subject to chance events, from the smallest to
the greatest, where reacting against my ordinary idea of existence,
life leads me into an almost-forbidden world, the world of sudden
connections, petrifying coincidences, reflexes heading off any other
mental activity...

An innovative novel from the right

Not all great shifts in writing come out of manifestos and selfproclaimed movements. In terms of prose style, Journey to the End
of Night (Voyage an bout de la nuit) by Louis-Ferdinand Celine
(1894-1961, born Louis-Ferdinand Destouches) had great impact
on the diction of novels in the decades following its publication
in 1932. And in addition to its influence on style, it contributed
to the deflation of the protagonist's claim to the status of `hero' in
the noble sense. In this first-person novel, which begins with the
First World War, the tough-talking, acerbic, working-class young
narrator, Ferdinand Bardamu (the surname matches the author's
and will be the name of the protagonist in Celine's subsequent
novel, Death on the Installment Plan (La mort a credit, 1936) ),
quickly decides that the war is a pointless butchery and gets
himself hospitalized for mental illness, essentially for fear. He is,
in short, anything but heroic, since the examples of heroism he
sees around him seem to spring from lack of imagination or simple
stupidity. Finding himself in a military hospital where the director's
therapeutic idea is to infuse his patients with patriotic sentiments,
Bardamu adapts by feigning compliance and even tells stories that
become the basis for the recital of his `heroic' adventures at the Comedie Francaise. Wandering from Flanders to Paris, and then to
West Africa, and from there to the United States, and finally back
to Paris, where he becomes a medical doctor, Bardamu is a kind
of Candide without the burden of an imposed philosophy. In fact,
he is immune to almost every grand scheme of values, a precursor
to the literature of the `absurd' that became a recognized trend
twenty years later. He serves, like Voltaire's character, as a critical
lens through which to denounce American capitalism and the
French military and colonial classes, and literature itself as vehicle
of heroism. There is something Pangloss-like about the psychiatrist
crowing about the recognition his method has received -'I say that
it is admirable that in this hospital that I direct has been formed
under our very eyes, unforgettably, one of these sublime creative
collaborations between the Poet and one of our heroes' (Je declare
admirable que dans cet hopital queje dirige, it vienne se former
sous nos yeux, inoubliablement, une de ces sublimes collaborations
creatrices entre le Poete et l'un de nos heros!) - but Bardamu, who,
after all, is narrator of this story, is the very first to see through
all this hokum. Celine's narrator's corrosive, wordplay-filled
descriptions achieve their goal of demystification by drowning the
grandiose in the trivial or gross. Manhattan banks appear to him as
hushed churches in which the tellers' windows are like the grills of
confessionals, and only a few paragraphs later Bardamu describes
the efforts of `rectal workers' (travailleurs rectaux) in a public
toilet.

Celine's use of slang and of the rhythms of popular, workingclass speech are matched with a kind of narrow-focus narrative
sequencing that keeps Bardamu's attention fixed on small
details, while provoking the reader to extract from all of this the
ideological significance of this additive critique. In various ways,
Celine's innovations had a strong impact both on his younger
contemporaries, like Albert Camus (in LEtranger), and on much
later writers such as Marie Darrieussecq (in Truismes). The huge
and lasting fame of Journey to the End ofNight has not been
diminished by Celine's anti-Semitism and subsequent ties to the pro-Nazi Vichy regime (he was, after the war, declared a'national
disgrace'). However, the populist hero Bardamu, who had declared
that `the war was everything we didn't understand' (la guerre en
somme c'etait tout ce qu'on ne comprenaitpas), has remained
much more alive for the reading public than the contemporary
anti-war heroes of another First World War novel, Roger Martin
du Gard's LEte 1914 (1936, part of the longer work Les Thibault,
1922-40), for which Martin du Gard won the Nobel Prize for
Literature in 1937. Perhaps, besides the inventiveness and the
biting dark humour of Celine's work, this enduring success among
anti-war novels is due to Bardamu's dead-pan cynicism, which
seems closer to common perceptions of reality than the idealism
of Martin du Gard's idealistic pacifist Jacques Thibault.

The Second World War and the camps

Although Celine continued to write after the Second World
War, his fame depends essentially on Voyage an bout de la nuit
and La mort a credit, because during and after the war, Albert
Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre began to occupy some of the same
terrain of populist critique and to provide coherent philosophical
contextualization for the scepticism and anger that rolled so
unpredictably through Celine's work. The war itself, and the
German camps, ended the lives of many authors and changed
the lives of others. It helped to form lasting institutions like the
publishing house Minuit ('Midnight'), which had published works
clandestinely during the war before becoming a major post-war
press. The war ended much that was playful and experimental in
the entre-deux-guerres period, and Robert Desnos (1900-45, died
of typhus in Theresienstadt) is probably the best example. Editor
of the review La Revolution Surrealiste from 1924 to 1929, Desnos
published abundantly, drawing on the popular culture of Paris and
on pulp crime serials such as FantBmas.

An illustration of the way ideas circulated as jokes within
Surrealist circles is the character Rrose Selavy, who appears, among other places, in Desnos's 1939 book Rrose Se'lavy:
oculisme de precision, poils et coups de pieds en toes genres
(Precision Oculism, Complete Line of Whiskers and Kicks). It
was the multimedia artist Marcel Duchamp who created `Rrose
Selavy' in 1920 as an alter-ego. Duchamp was photographed
in drag as `Rrose' by Man Ray, and then Desnos made `her' a character threaded through some of his poems, even as late
as June 1944, just a year before his death. In `Springtime'
(Printemps, June 1944), we see the formerly playful figure now
remembered as belonging to the imagination of a former time, or
of a time that may come again later, after the poet's death in the
theatre of war.

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

Printemps