In a recent interview for a French journal Julian Barnes was asked what he thought of the love-hate between France and Great Britain. The author of Flaubert's Parrot replied that there have always been great Francophiles and great Francophobes in his country, but that "it is simply easier to accentuate the latter in the media".
In fact love seems always to win. Far from being inhibitive, the temperamental tension between the French and the British has long been a highly fertile ground for intellectual discourse. From the influence of the English empiricists such as Hume on the philosophes of the Enlightenment to that of Proust on the modern English novel, the cross-fertilisation has produced remarkable results. This is largely thanks to Francophile intellectuals of every generation who bring "the word from France" to these shores by their passionate advocacy.
For the past 30 years John Sturrock has occupied a special place in Anglo-French literary relations. In a series of long essays he has presented the intellectual and literary developments taking place in Paris to the English-speaking world. In doing so he has adopted a mid-Channel position, tempering enthusiasm with critical detachment, sympathy with nuance, caveats with charm. He counters the ludic state of writers like Raymond Queneau and Georges Perec with his own brand of English humour. Above all he writes with disarming modesty and decorum, rare qualities in the age of deconstructionism.
Each essay was originally written as the review of a specific book or a writer's entire oeuvre for the London Review of Books and the Times Literary Supplement , the two publications with which Sturrock has been associated as an editor. They have all been rewritten and expanded for this book, resulting in an elegant guide through the intellectual landscape of French culture for the past 50 years.
The first essay is a tour d'horizon of French intellectual life since the war. The intellectuals first emerged as a force during the Dreyfus affair. Zola's J'Accuse in defence of Dreyfus was the first example of engagement (commitment), later advocated by Sartre. ("The intellectual is someone who brings the competence-cum-notoriety earned in a specific context to bear on a wider public issue.") From then on famous 尘补?迟谤别蝉&补尘辫;苍产蝉辫;à&补尘辫;苍产蝉辫;辫别苍蝉别谤 on the left and the right played an important part in France's history by "directing the thoughts of their fellow citizens".
The great era of "intellocrats" came to an end after the é惫é苍别尘别苍迟蝉 of 1968. Today there are no towering figures like Malraux, Sartre, Camus, "generalists" who occupied the moral high ground and told their countrymen "what best to think". Perhaps inevitably the "intellocrats" have become "mediacrats", giving up "priesthood for the hit-parade", exchanging the high regard in which they were held in the past for the ephemeral fame and material gain the media bring. Yet media exposure can be used in the cause of justice and human rights: Pierre-Henri Levi and Alain Finkielkraut, two of the nouveaux philosophes who emerged from the é惫é苍别尘别苍迟蝉 , crucially influenced France's policy in the Yugoslav conflict.
The rest of the book is divided into two sections - the Thinkers and the Writers, whose impact and interaction created the intellectual climate of France after the war. There are illuminating essays on Barbusse, Proust, C é line and Roussel, precursors who belong to the first half of the century but whose legacy was decisive in postwar developments.
After the war France made up for what she had lost on the battlefield with an upsurge of creative energy that made Paris the artistic and intellectual capital of the western world. With giants like Picasso and Braque, Sartre, Camus and Lévi-Strauss, the city became a magnet for artists and writers from all over the world.
Appropriately Sturrock's first two essays are on Sartre and Camus, the most influential writers after the liberation, and their brand of existentialism. With its emphasis on personal freedom and "authenticity" as a supreme value, it fitted the mood of a population traumatised by the occupation. Later the two friends separated in a famous row: while Sartre veered towards Marxism and tied himself to the French Communist Party - the most Stalinist in Europe - Camus remained true to his own humanistic, anti-totalitarian values. Sturrock finds Camus's growing worldwide popularity "excessive" in relation to the "the sanctimonious humanism of a novel like La Peste ". But Camus is rightly admired as an exemplar, more for his courage and integrity than for his books: he stood alone at a time when the pro-Communist left so dominated the intellectual life of France that dissident voices could not be heard.
Important political thinkers such as Raymond Aron (the author of The Opium of the Intellectuals ) lived in a kind of exile, while the philosopher and mystic Simone Weil was virtually unknown. Nor do they appear in the pages of this book. Yet today they have a far larger following worldwide and greater enduring power than many of the 迟补辫别-à-濒'辞别颈濒 "new theorists" who dazzle the author.
Sturrock entered the scene when the "first rustlings of literary theory were to be heard", and he came across the early books of Roland Barthes. It was a coup de foudre , and he decided to "try and give a wider exposure to the acceptable face of Parisian theory". Later the new theories, structuralism followed by deconstructionism, would conquer the English departments of American universities. Their various exponents - Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser, the Freudian psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, philosophers Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, and the prophet of deconstructionism, Paul De Man - are the beneficiaries of Sturrock's vigorous championship.
With the new theory came a new vocabulary - it is all about this "signifier" and that "signified" and the other "textuality" and so on. Sturrock does his best to explain and elucidate what in the original is convoluted and opaque. Simone de Beauvoir once said that she had never met anyone, not even the most ardent Lacanian, who could tell her what on earth Lacan was about. Despite Sturrock's gallant effort, Lacan remains hermetic. One wonders whether le ma?tre 's "self-contained" system was not just mystification. The same goes for Derrida - even his generous exegetist here concedes that the post-1960s works are written in a prose "so alembicated" and "self-indulgent" that it has become easy to write them off as "the vapourings of a philosophical mystagogue". Or as we say politely, a load of old toffee.
It is with great relief that one arrives at the second half of the book, devoted to writers. It starts with a wonderful essay on Proust, not only as the author of ? la Recherche but as letter writer and critic. Though he died in 1922, Proust determined everything that has happened in fiction subsequently. "After Proust it was impossible to write Balzacian novels", wrote Nathalie Sarraute, whose first book, Tropismes , first published in 1939, marked the beginning of the nouveau roman . Nothing really "happens" in Sarraute's novels: her concern is "the troubling things that are felt but do not get spoken whenever intimates, acquaintances or even strangers meet". It is in her half-a-dozen plays that Sarraute's formidable intelligence best illuminates the subtle power-play that underlies human relationships.
Alain Robbe-Grillet, the high priest of the nouveau roman , is the subject of another exegesis. The trouble is that like Sturrock's "theoricrats" the "new" novelists are opaque and frightfully boring, with no plot, characters, or other building blocks of the traditional narrative - le texte est tout , whatever that means. Even the Nobel prize did not bring Claude Simon a wider readership, while Sarraute's and Robbe-Grillet's only accessible books have been their autobiographies, respectively Enfance and Le Miroir Qui Revient .
By contrast Sturrock's last two subjects, Queneau and Perec, have been among the most popular French authors. They are also the most appealing of the bunch, representing the ludic, anarchic seam that goes back to the surrealists and beyond to Rabelais. Lightness and zany humour conceal a tragic sense of life.
This is a rich, rewarding book, which will delight the Francophiles and students of French culture, while providing plenty of ammunition for those who find the games intellectuals play across the Channel quite maddening.
Shusha Guppy is London editor, The Paris Review .
The Word from Paris: Essays on Modern French Thinkers and Writers
Author - John Sturrock
ISBN - 1 85984 832 X
Publisher - Verso
Price - ?18.00
Pages - 206
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