FRENCH LITERATURE: BEGINNING THE 20TH CENTURY

Beginning the 20th century: from 1900 to 1940 The legacy of the 19th century French writing of the first quarter of the 20th century reveals a dissatisfaction with the pessimism, skepticism, and narrow rationalism of the preceding age and displays a new confidence in man's possibilities, although this is undercut by World War I. There is a continuity with the poetry of the late 19th century but a rejection of the prose. Mallarm and Rimbaud were models for Paul Valry and Paul Claudel, but the Naturalist novel was considered by the new generation to be unduly deterministic and falsely objective. Charles-Louis Philippe, in Bubu de Montparnasse (1901; Eng. trans., Bubu de Montparnasse), used the material of Zola, namely the Paris slums, but depicted it through a narrator who could identify with the working-class protagonists. In philosophy the rationalism of Taine and Renan exerted less influence than Henri Bergson's belief in man's creative ability and in intuition as an instrument to understand the universe. Among foreign thinkers Arthur Schopenhauer, so important to the preceding generation, gave way to Friedrich Nietzsche, whose books were read not for the superman theme but as a protest against the limitations of the mechanistic world. Literature continued to follow the political and social struggles of the Third Republic. The Dreyfus Affair unleashed a wave of commitment, with Maurice Barrs and Charles Maurras on the anti-Dreyfus side (those opposed to a retrial for Dreyfus) and Charles Pguy on the other. The debate about the education system and about the separation of church and state form the backdrop to a Roman Catholic renaissance that begins with Claudel and Pguy and later finds expression in Franois Mauriac and Georges Bernanos. Although often politically conservative and theologically orthodox, this writing is audacious in depicting the individual's need for God and his personal quest for salvation. Meanwhile the anti-German sentiment, which stemmed from the 1870 defeat and was revived in the years immediately preceding World War I, helped create the Action Franaise, led by Maurras. The group sought to steer French culture toward integral nationalism, a policy that sought to restore the monarchy, even as the burgeoning Socialist movement also won adherents. The Nouvelle Revue Franaise and its writers Although the Third Republic governments were weak, centrist coalitions that writers found difficult to admire, the hidden stability of French society made possible a literature that exalted individual experience. Some of the leading writers of the years before 1914 gathered around the Nouvelle Revue Franaise, which was founded by Andr Gide in 1908. The review, which became France's leading literary magazine while also spawning the Gallimard publishing house, shunned extremes, was distrustful of commitment, and sought a balance between modernity and tradition. Although its articles represented a network of dialogues rather than one fixed position, it nonetheless emphasized the authenticity of inner life. Valery Larbaud's A.O. Barnabooth: son journal intime (1913; A.O. Barnabooth: His Diary) depicts the slow discovery of the self after an initial liberation. The enormously successful Le Grand Meaulnes (1913; The Wanderer) by Alain-Fournier (pseudonym of Henri-Alban Fournier) explored the new theme of adolescence; in poetry, Saint-John Perse (pseudonym of Alexis Lger) depicts the triumphant recovery of childhood in loges (1911; loges, and Other Poems); and Jacques Rivire's essays on painting, the Russian ballet, and contemporary writers show an excellent critical mind piecing together its age. The house of Gallimard published the four greatest writers of this period: Gide, Marcel Proust, Claudel, and Valry. Gide's Les Nourritures terrestres (1897; Fruits of the Earth) and L'Immoraliste (1902; The Immoralist) encouraged a generation of French youth to question the values of family and tradition and to be guided by that part of themselves that typically was ignored or repressed by society. Les Caves du Vatican (1914; The Vatican Swindle) depicted the acte gratuit, which is undertaken not for gain or self-interest but because it expresses the deepest strain in one's character. Less influential was La Porte troite (1909; Strait Is the Gate), which explains the concomitant themes of asceticism and sacrifice. Pursuit of freedom also guided Gide's technical experiments from Paludes (1895; Marshlands), considered to be one of his most important books, to Les Faux-Monnayeurs (1926; The Counterfeiters). He rejected the closed world of the 19th-century novel and instead sought forms of narration that were both internal and multiple and that allowed the reader a greater range of interpretation. Although some authors continued to produce traditional novels and multivolume works (such as Romain Rolland's Jean Christophe, 190412) using a conventional plot and time sequence, the best writing of the period is consciously avant-garde. Marcel Proust's la recherche du temps perdu (191327; Remembrance of Things Past) subjects existence to a remorseless analysis that seems to be in the best tradition of the French psychological novel. In the best known episode, that of Swann's love affair with Odette, Proust shows how the object of love is an illusion created and defined by the lover. But if reason dissects, unconscious memory may create the totality of experience. In the last volumes of this work its structure, which is based on recurring motifs perceived by intuition, is laid bare. Unlike his great rival Gide, Paul Claudel believed that man's deepest self emerged in the dialogue with a God who is jealous and remote but never absent. Less pious and less of a preacher than he is sometimes considered to be, Claudel depicts in L'Annonce faite Marie (1912; Tidings Brought to Mary) a heroine who restores the divine order by her suffering and isolation. Yet in Partage de Midi (1906; Break of Noon) sexual love, albeit purified and punished, is the image of God's love for man. Claudel's masterpiece is Le Soulier de satin (1930; The Satin Slipper), in which divine grace haunts the characters who try in vain to escape it. This view of human character was well suited to the theatre, and Claudel's plays are full of buffoonery, ritual, and movement. They break with the realistic theatre of the 19th century, and they have also lasted better than the vaguely Symbolist plays of Maurice Maeterlinck, whose Oiseau bleu (1908; The Blue Bird) was more popular at the time. Although he was also a great poet, Claudel may be less important than Paul Valry, who inherited Mallarm's sense that the language of poetry was separate from ordinary discourse. Valry, however, pursued poetry not as an end in itself but as a form of self-knowledge. The act of writing and of reading poetry reveals various states of consciousness, and the process makes possible glimpses of totality. In his greatest poem, Le Cimetire Marin (1920; The Graveyard by the Sea), Valry combines extraordinary self-awareness with sensuous enjoyment of the outside world. Earlier, in a prose work called La Soire avec Monsieur Teste (1896; An Evening with Monsieur Teste), which offers parallels with Paludes, Valry had parodied the ideal of complete self-awareness.