FRENCH LITERATURE: CONTINUING THE 20TH CENTURY

Continuing the 20th century: from 1940 Writers continued to enjoy a leading place in cultural life, but the outstanding names were not mainly connected with imaginative literature. Their work was philosophical and critical and the movements with which they were associated extended beyond the field of literature as narrowly defined. Even within this field the nouveau roman (New Novel) was to challenge established conventions, and fiction no longer appeared to have a privileged place in literary culture. But, paradoxically, by asserting the primacy of the text as an object in itself, critics severed the last remaining links between its reality and the one it purported to describe, to conclude that all writing was essentially an exercise in the creation of a fictional textual world. The German occupation and postwar France France's defeat by German troops in 1940, and the resultant division of the country, was experienced as a national humiliation, and all Frenchmen and Frenchwomen were confronted with an unavoidable choice. Some writers escaped the country to spend the remaining years of the war in exile or with the Free French Forces. Others, because of political options made during the previous decade, moved directly into collaboration. And still others, because of pacifism or a belief that art could remain aloof from politics, tried to carry on as individuals and as writers, ignoring the taint of passive collaboration with the occupying forces or the Vichy government. Jean Cocteau and Jean Giono were among those and later were criticized for their conduct. Giono in fact was briefly imprisoned, as was Louis-Ferdinand Cline, whose reputation was seriously damaged by his anti-Semitism. Several writers joined the military, as well as the intellectual, resistance. Andr Malraux served on many fronts and commanded a group of underground resistance fighters in World War II in France, confirming the image of the writer as a man of action; he was to serve as a minister under Charles de Gaulle in the postwar government and the Fifth Republic. The German attack on the Soviet Union in 1941 was decisive for the French Communist Party, which was to gain considerably through its organized opposition to Fascism. The events of the 1930s and '40s strengthened the conviction that intellectuals could not remain politically uncommitted; the war clarified choices and made them seem crucial for the individual. After 1945, Existentialism, depicting mankind alone in a godless universe, rationalized this view of individuals as free to determine themselves through such choices. Meanwhile, the occupation brought prestige and an attentive audience to writers who upheld the honour of their defeated country. The poetry of resistance reached a wide public, notably in the works of Paul luard and Louis Aragon. Both were Communists (Aragon was to become the country's cultural commissar after 1945) and had been associated with the Surrealist movement from the 1920s. They turned in the war years to writing poems in direct language, and their poems were often transmitted orally through the occupied zone. A flourishing clandestine press was able to issue some publications, including the newspaper Combat and the Editions de Minuit, which brought out as its first book the story Le Silence de la mer (1942) by Vercors (Jean-Marcel Bruller). With the additional stories later added to a collection under the same title, this is probably the literary work that most accurately evokes the atmosphere and the dilemmas of the time. Camus's fable La Peste (1947; The Plague), an allegory set in a city visited by the plague, gave a universal dimension to the treatment of these dilemmas. The war transformed the literary scene, eclipsing some writers and lending prestige to those who had made the fortunate political choices. During the occupation Sartre further elaborated his Existentialist philosophy in plays, such as Les Mouches (1943; The Flies) and Huis-Clos (1944; No Exit, or In Camera) and expounded it in the treatise L'tre et le nant (1943; Being and Nothingness). After the liberation, the writer and his ideas set the tone for a postwar generation that congregated in the cafs and cellar clubs of Saint-Germain-des-Prs. The myth of this disillusioned youth, its district of Paris, its innocence, its jazz clubs, and its worship of Sartre were captured in Boris Vian's L'cume des jours (1947). Sartre's reputation fluctuated widely during the 30 years from 1950 until his death: at times he was compared to Voltaire, and at other times he was dismissed as a senile fellow traveller. Until 1952 his name was linked with that of Camus, whose novel L'tranger (1945; The Stranger, or The Outsider) expressed a vision similar to that of the early Sartre. But after their highly publicized break, Sartre moved toward the Existentialist Marxism of his Critique de la raison dialectique (1960; Search for a Method), and Camus toward a stoical humanism, his later fiction (La Chute, 1956; The Fall) showing evidence of his isolation, his creative unease, and his distress over France's war with Algeria. The conflicts submerged in the euphoria of liberation surfaced during the Cold War period and were intensified by the colonial wars of the 1950s. Sartre's lifelong companion, Simone de Beauvoir, vividly depicted the contrary attractions of Communism and the United States for French intellectuals in her novel Les Mandarins (1954; The Mandarins). However, her analysis of the feminine condition, Le Deuxime Sexe (1949; The Second Sex), although reviled on its first appearance, was to be a more influential achievement, its themes being substantiated by her later autobiographical works. After Sartre's death she gave a moving account of his later years in La Crmonie des adieux (1981; Adieux, A Farewell to Sartre), which was acknowledged as confirmation of their crucial role in intellectual life.