French Literature: A Very Short Introduction (3 page)

It makes sense to look at literary works in terms of their central
characters, or protagonists, since throughout history, epics,
tragedies, short stories, and poems have very often taken the name
of the protagonist as their title, whether it be Beowulf or Hamlet
in English, or, in French, Lancelot, Gargantua, The Misanthrope,
Chatterton, Consuelo, Madame Bovary, `Le Mauvais vitrier' (The
Bad Glazier), Cyrano de Bergerac, Nadja, The Story of O. But even
in works that do not feature the central character's name in the
title, the focus on his or her characteristics, thoughts, and actions
makes the protagonist an obvious place to start an exploration of
the literature. And it should be noted that the term `protagonist'
also applies to works, like many poems and autobiographical texts,
in which the main figure is some version of the author ('some
version' in the sense that we often assume a creative reworking
of the first-person speaker, as when Ronsard embellishes or
mythifies `Ronsard' in his love poetry, or when Rousseau writes of
himself in his Confessions). And since most works that make up
the literary tradition have central characters, their study offers a
convenient way to compare works to one another, within a single
period or from one epoch to another.

Protagonists necessarily have problems. If they did not, there
would be no story, no quest, no obstacle to overcome, no
mysteries to solve, no desire to satisfy, no enemy to defeat. In
the French literary tradition, moreover, the central figures often
have problems of such a unique type as to warrant being called
`problematic heroes' - heroes and heroines whose very status and
place in society is at stake - or even `anti-heroes' (defined by the
OED as chief characters who are `totally unlike a conventional
hero'). What kind of person is chosen as focal point of the plot
and that person's relation to her or his society can tell us a good
deal about a literary text and its time, whether that character
is portrayed as very good within prevailing social norms or
very unusual in an undesirable way. For instance, Rousseau's
character `Emile' in Emile, or, On Education (1762) is neither
the most complex nor most believable character of the time, but he presented a revolutionary model of human nature and of the
consequences for childrearing.

In the pages that follow, we will meet a number of protagonists
who were often controversial at the time when their stories were
first told or published, but who now are central to the French
literary tradition and to our vision of the epochs from which
they come. We will also see, for the sake of comparison, some of
the other figures against whom they define themselves by their
difference. In each of the chapters described below, which largely
correspond to conventional historical periods of French literature,
three or four representative texts will be taken up in some
detail, while others will be mentioned for brief comparison and
suggested for future reading.

The protagonists of medieval texts tell us about the worldview
of the period that chose to focus on them. When a literature
arose in the vernacular, Old French, as distinct from Latin,
in the 11th century, the territory we call France had different
boundaries and nothing like the national identity or organization
we know today. We would describe it as highly decentralized
geographically and politically (the concept of `de-centralization'
is itself our way of projecting backwards the presumption
that France should have a `centre') and personalized in its
social organization. In the feudal system, power, identity, land
ownership or use, and even the sense of the passage of time
from one epoch to another, depended on the person in power
in a given place at a given time. Allegiances shifted, power
and wealth within the leading families varied from generation
to generation depending on the skill and luck of individuals.
Threaded throughout this society was an international
institutional framework, the Church, that provided a kind of
meta-identity delineating the southern and eastern boundaries
of Europe. In this context, it is not surprising that the
protagonists of literary works, almost invariably in verse form, should be represented primarily in terms of their loyalty, the
principal value of a feudal society.

Lives of saints

The text that is usually identified as the very first substantial
work of French literature concerns its hero's decision about the
lord to whom he will be loyal. The Life ofSaintAlexis (c. 1050)
is the story of the only son of a wealthy nobleman in 5th-century
Rome, who was married in his adolescence and fled on the night
of his marriage, telling his bride that `In this life there is no perfect
love' (En icest siecle nen at partite amour). He travelled across the
sea to Syria, where he lived for seventeen years in anonymous,
ascetic spirituality. But because he began to be honoured, he fled
from where he was living, and setting sail, he was involuntarily
carried back to Rome. He returned, unrecognizable, to live for
seventeen more years as a holy beggar under the staircase in
his father's house. His identity was discovered only at his death,
from an account of his life that he wrote on his deathbed, but The
Life ofSaintAlexis that we read must be significantly different
from Alexis's own account, which was written from his point
of view. The narrative Life continues after this death to include
the lamentations of his mother, father, and virgin widow and
points towards the complexity of the project of holy heroism,
saintliness, itself. His mother cries out, speaking to her dead son,
`Oh son, how you hated me!' (Efilz... cum m'ous enhadithe !).
There remains an ambiguity about whether she supposes that
Alexis resented her for not recognizing him upon his return from
abroad - he did not: the narrative of the Life makes it clear to the
reader, but not to the family, that Alexis was determined not to
be recognized during his life - or whether she supposes that this
hatred drove him to his initial departure and animated his whole
withdrawal from his family.

The poem makes it clear, in any event, that this type of heroism
exacts a cost. The emotional cost is greater for those who love the saint than for the saint himself, since he, after all, has chosen his
priorities. Yet while the family suffers, the community as a whole
is shown to benefit from the presence of a saint, whose soul has
gone directly to live with God in heaven: `The soul separated
from the body of Saint Alexis; / it went straight to paradise'
(Deseivret l'aneme del cors sainzAlexis; / Tut dreitement en
vait en paradis). The people of Rome, the Emperor, and the
Pope all celebrate that they have the body of a saint, who will
henceforth serve as their advocate with God. The Life of Saint
Alexis, like many texts from other periods, is open to varying
interpretations, to varying arguments for and against the values
represented by the hero. Yet this does not imply that the writer
of the Life was himself ambivalent. It appears clear that for the
writer, and for most 11th-century readers, Alexis represented
a triumph of Christian, transcendent values. Family ambition
and sexual love are less important than large social units, such
as the Church, the city, and the empire. On the other hand,
this edifying reading does not prevent us from seeing similar
conflicts of values in later works in which protagonists sacrifice
their families, like the hero of Corneille's Horace (1640) or the
heroine of Flaubert's Madame Bovary (1856), for what appears
to them a higher calling.

Werewolf - a nameless hero from Celtic sources

Werewolves, like saints, make difficult bedfellows, and yet loyalty
to a werewolf is the crux of a story (perhaps meant to be sung)
that appeared in a collection of verse narratives a little over a
century after the Life ofSaintAlexis. The Lais of Marie de France
(c. 1160-80) draw on two literary traditions from within what is
today France: the troubadour poetry of Provence and the Celtic
oral narratives of Brittany. They were probably composed at the
English royal court for a French-speaking Norman audience.
Many of the Lais concern unhappily married women (discussions
about love were pursued with great sophistication in the milieu
of Eleanor of Aquitaine, who had been successively Queen of France and of England), but one of them stands out both for
the peculiarity of its title character, Bisclavret, and for showing
sympathy to a husband married to a disloyal wife.

Marie points specifically to the Celtic origin of the story of
Bisclavret while recognizing that her audience is French: `I do
not want to forget Bisclavret: / Bisclavret is his name in Breton /
But the Normans call him Werewolf' (Ne voil ublier Bisclavret /
Bisclavret ad nun en bretan, / Garwafl'apelent Ii Norman).
The hero - simply known as `a lord' (un ber), he is thus really
nameless - is just like other people except for a need to shed his
human identity several days each week. This metamorphosis
no doubt represents the fondness of Celtic literature for magic
and for permeable boundaries between humans and other
living or imagined creatures. But it has often been noted that
Marie minimized the supernatural elements in traditional
stories that she retold, and in the case of Bisclavret, the hero's
transformation into non-human form may simply be a way of
representing ordinary outbursts of violence or times when one
is not `oneself'. Simply put, the husband's eccentricity consists of
taking off his clothes and running around naked in the woods.
The narrator tells us at the outset that `in the old days, many
men used to become werewolves', so that this characteristic is
not in itself presented as being evil or necessarily alarming. The
real problem, one that appears as a theme in texts of many other
periods (such as Jean de La Fontaine's `The Loves of Psyche
and Cupid', LesAmours de Psyche et de Cupidon, 1669) is the
absence of trust in the person one loves. He never showed her
anything but gentleness, and he trusted her enough to reveal
the deep secret that he is a werewolf. Yet the husband gets in
return only fear and disgust. His wife steals the clothes that he
needs to return to his human form, so that he is trapped in that
of the animal, until the happy ending of the lai when justice is
done. Tellingly, the husband's behaviour while in canine form,
exhibiting great loyalty to the prince, is the value that assures his
triumph and return to human identity.

Langue d'OII and Langue d'Oc

The Old French language appeared in writing in 842 in the
`Strasbourg Oaths'. What we call Old French was the language
of the north of what is now France and is sometimes called
the Longue d'Oil - that is, the `language of oui', after the
word for `yes' - to distinguish it from the language spoken
and written in the south (Langue d'Oc, or Occitanian, of
which Provencal is the best-known dialect), where `yes' was
said as oc. Provencal was the language of the troubadours
(trobador in Provencal: poets who recited or sang their own
compositions) and of the trobairitz (women troubadours).
Old French differs much from Modern French, which has
remained largely consistent in written form since the 17th
century. Today many French readers rely on the increasing
numbers of bilingual editions of medieval poetry which
present the Old French original and a Modern French
translation side by side.

Epic: the chanson degeste

Although the gentleman wolf of Bisclavret was a knight, the lai does
not concentrate on what he did while in human form. Yet the conduct
of the knight is the core of the characterization of protagonists in
two other major genres of the period, the chanson degeste and
the roman. In a highly personalized system such as feudalism, the
protagonist's usefulness as well as loyalty was repeatedly scrutinized.
Heroes sought occasions to demonstrate their cleverness and valour.
In the chanson de geste, of which the earliest and greatest is the
anonymous 12th-century Song ofRoland (La chanson de Roland),
military prowess and loyalty to the sovereign come to the fore. In
the contemporaneous roman (or romance), the knight is challenged
to find an equilibrium between military glory and success in a relationship with a beloved woman, as we see in Chretien de Troyes's
Erec and Enide (Erec et Enide, about 1170).