Qu’est-il arrivé aux écrivains français? d’Alain Robbe-Grillet à Jonathan Littell (review)

In a concise discussion of contemporary French literature, its authors, critics, and very existence, Jean Bessière asks, “What has become of French writers?” in his 2006 publication, Qu’est-il arrivé aux écrivains français? d’Alain Robbe-Grillet à Jonathan Littell. He proposes that contemporary French literature is in a constant state of contradiction and paradox involving blindness, addiction, and an obsessive affirmation of the present. In an effort to resolve these issues he searches for a foundational literature that can be liberated from the past and can become a valid part of the current approach to French literature.

The rich past of French literature is a force to be reckoned with for authors and critics alike who find themselves in competition with a canon that one dares not match and includes such extraordinary writers as Hugo, Proust, Saint-Beuve, and Sartre. Bessière explores the difficulty in defining oneself as an author, and further, in defining literature itself. He suggests that literature becomes all-powerful, and manifests in the contemporary context itself with difficulty. As such, literature becomes “everything” that occurs, and contemporary literature waits its turn to be identified by authors and critics alike. Ultimately these endless discussions of what may or may not be literary enough demonstrate a theatrical quality in literature reflective of the paradoxical quality of the domain.

Bessière further complicates the state of French literature in an examination of the tendency toward an obsession with modernity and refusal of the present. He suggests that modernity is not conceived of as it should be, as a human project and social infinity based on historical conditions. Rather, the obsessive see it as that which permits the allegory of the writer, of literature. Further, the question of the constancy of literature and its ability, as a constant presence, to complicate the relationship between the past and present is central to Bessière’s presentation of modernity’s continued influence on the state of literature.

Bessière does see a move away from the distractions of the canonical past and the all-powerful literature that remain contradictory and paradoxical. In the concluding sections of his work, Bessière narrows his definition of contemporary literature and provides examples of his vision in the work of Michel Houellebecq and Jonathan Littell. Unlike the canonical literature of the past, contemporary literature includes works of detective and science fiction as well as Holocaust and postcolonial writing. These works, for Bessière, play with the traditional notions of reality, time, and the subject and address the realm of the possible. Science fiction, for example, exists outside of the time and the society that we as readers consider to be “real”; however, those fantastic visions are created by a member of that “real” society, thus complicating the concept of reality as such. Holocaust writing also operates similarly for Bessière in that it offers a view to the past with modern eyes: readers are given a look at what could have been, but was not.

In his conclusion, Bessière discusses what he has called “the new literature” as autopoiesis. His goal of finding a new foundation for literature is achieved in Jonathan Littell and his work Les Bienveillantes (2006). Littell’s creation of a homosexual Nazi officer does not seek to reveal unknown details about the Holocaust, rather, as Bessière suggests, he repeats the historical context and connects it to contemporary society. This new approach to creating and defining literature frees us from the blindness and the obsession with the past that Bessière thought provokingly examines. Bessière contributes to the ongoing discussion of literature that continuously evolves in demonstrating that literature itself becomes a part of its own creation.