Fins de la littérature: esthétique et discours de la fin. Tome I by Dominique Viart et Laurent Demanze (review)

The title of this collection of essays by some twenty writers, academics, and journalists plays on the double meaning of the word ‘fins’ — ending and purpose — and the book also concludes with a contribution exploring a homophonic ‘faim de la littérature’. Most French Studies readers will be familiar with the sense of an ending that seems to hover over literature in general, French literary culture in particular, the humanities, the book, etc., and which in the gloomier moments of the ‘déclinologue’ (p. 172) can be sweepingly subsumed in the catastrophizing notion of an end of ‘Western civilization’. But, as this rich and intelligent volume suggests, things are not that simple. Ends deserve closer scrutiny. There are, of course, many ends to be distinguished as they appear to threaten the end of history, of experience (Walter Benjamin), of man, ecological disaster, as well as the end of literature, which, as Alexandre Gefen shows, has a long and venerable history as succeeding generations have lamented the death of a previous version of literature. The anachronism or un-timeliness of literary language may even, as Laurent Demanze argues, be one of its virtues, and for Marielle Macé literature offers an antidote to the erosion of experience through the way in which it requires readers to attend to ‘les formes de la vie’ (p. 150) and invites them to differentiate and discriminate. This is also the theme of Michel Deguy’s powerful intervention on the topic of ‘Écologie et poésie’, which, among other things, discerns the risks of the ‘culturalization’ of culture, against which poetry has a key role to play: ‘Penser, c’est juger. Juger, c’est comparer. La poésie pense, elle exerce la clairvoyance du jugement’ (p. 117). The judgement of poetry compares and distinguishes in ways on which human life may now depend. We have in any case, as René Ouellet points out, been immersed in an extensive discourse of finality ever since Beckett announced ‘Fini, c’est fini, ça va finir, ca va peut-être finir’ (p. 119). We live in an ending that never quite happens, and much of modern writing has explored this condition (Nietszche, Ernst Bloch, and, more recently, Antoine Volodine and Valère Novarina). Ending has become part of literature’s condition, whose fragility is a paradoxical source of strength — or, more precisely, of dynamism, as Martine Boyer-Weinmann suggests. The statistics about the decline of reading in the context of an exponential growth of ‘la zizouille vendue dans les hypers’ and ‘la bestsellersisation normative’, in the words of François Bon (quoted on p. 187), are certainly depressing, but Bon’s own website (www.tierslivre.net) exemplifies the possibilities that digital alternatives offer to the serious author no longer exclusively associated with books. Contemporary French literature as seen by John Taylor or Claude Burgelin is far from moribund, and the three writers interviewed in the last contribution hold their own against any pronouncement of the demise of literature. This is not just a question of looking on the bright side of life but, as the collective impact of the volume itself demonstrates, of the value of intelligent analysis and reflection. A final thought: I suspect it takes French literary culture to carry this off without sounding either desperate or defensive.