L’Histoire littéraire des écrivains ed. by Jean-Louis Jeannelle et al. (review)

Literary history no longer needs defending the way it did in the days of theory. But as with so many other ‘returns’ that have marked the past three decades, literary histories are not what they once were: they have adopted new forms to include new canons, new concepts, and new practices. This collection of essays is devoted to literary history from the point of view of writers themselves; it marks the culmination of a project based at Paris–Sorbonne and carried out through a series of conferences and collective publications, of which this is the last and the most comprehensive. By focusing on the histories that writers themselves construct, the volume serves to pluralize further the notion of literary history itself. The emphasis, however, is principally on the modern period, when, as William Marx says, ‘[a]vec la création de l’idée moderne de littérature, c’est l’histoire de la littérature qui devient enfin possible’ (p. 125), and literary traditions become the product of a repeated need to ‘recréer ou refonder la littérature elle-même’ (p. 137). The volume is unified by several recurrent points of reference, most notably Albert Thibaudet’s distinction between three kinds of criticism—academic, journalistic, and literary — applied here to literary history; and Julien Gracq’s 1960 essay ‘Pourquoi la littérature respire mal?’, where Gracq detects the end of a shared literary culture rooted in three thousand years of history. Marielle Macé opens with an excellent analysis of what she calls ‘une façon de s’interpréter devant le temps’ (p. 28), and she charts the emergence of two contrasting ways of inhabiting history conceived alternately as ‘une littérature d’avancée’ and ‘une littérature de maintien’ (p. 65), exemplified by a range of writers from Jacques Rivière to Maurice Blanchot. The other essays highlight the variety of means whereby literature’s own version of its history takes form. Jean-Louis Jeannelle discusses the role of the chroniclers and memorialists of ‘la vie littéraire’ in stabilizing and ensuring literary reputations. Bruno Curatalo makes a similar point with reference to literary revues, many of which were at the heart of twentieth-century literary history. Christophe Pradeau tracks the shift of gravity towards the novel in literature’s sense of itself, and Michel Murat argues that the ‘histoire des écrivains’ depicted in fiction is itself a form of literary history and to be taken seriously as such. Didier Alexandre contends that the very status of writer entails being ‘pensé et produit par le collectif ’ (p. 238) and that ‘[o]n ne devient écrivain qu’en se donnant une histoire’ (p. 276). Vincent Debaene examines how this is played out in the way francophone writers position themselves in the French literary tradition, and, in contrast to the national basis of academic practice, Michel Espagne discusses the tendency of personal literary histories of individual writers to cross national frontiers. The volume has a useful Introduction, contains a comprehensive bibliography, and makes an excellent case both for the unavoidability of reading historically and for the variety of forms and contexts in which this reading might be pursued.