Les Romanciers français: lecteurs et spectateurs de l'étranger (1920-1950)

In a country where, as Jacques Rivière proclaimed repeatedly in the pages of the NRF, classicism and clarity were treated as 'national characteristics' and the basis for France's self-proclaimed cultural mission, the reception of foreign authors was handled in a spirit of 'accueil et vigilance' (Auguste Anglès). This spirit dominated the NRF of 1919–20, as Anne-Rachel Hermetet shows in the opening paper, and while the overtly patriotic tone of 1919 was soon abandoned, its universalizing pretensions ensured that all foreign texts were assessed (and usually found wanting) by reference to the supposedly superior French model. A decade later, spurred on by Robert Brasillach in L'Action française, the recommended vigilance turned into open hostility, his alarmist diatribes warning that the nation's own literature was drowning beneath a wave of translations. As Paul Renard concludes in his analysis of the coverage of L'Action française, the violent rejection of foreign literature as 'contamination' was driven by chauvinism and nationalism, a position unfortunately 'en synchronie avec son époque qui se méfiait de la nouveauté culturelle, surtout quand elle venait d'ailleurs' (p. 33). This constitutes an inauspicious backdrop — both aesthetic and ideological — to what Hermetet and Monique Dubar call in their introduction a 'carte du goût littéraire en France'. A map of misreading might well be a better description of what these collected papers uncover, whether Valery Larbaud's Joyce as voice of a 'great European (Homeric) tradition' and practitioner of psychological analysis (in the face of the modernist Joyce promoted by Pound since 1914); Gide's Conrad as master of the adventure novel; or Colette's Shakespeare as verbose and indigestible. Productive misreading is revealed, too, on the part of critics such as the art historian Louis Gillet who, in the Revue des deux mondes, finds in the writer Arthur Schnitzler confirmation of ready-made ideas on Austria and Austrian culture; or the ethno-geographic constructs of a travel writer like André Bellesort, reading Hamlet through Kierkegaard as embodiment of 'l'âme scandinave'. Several papers show that the obsession with 'le terroir' as source of authenticity was likewise driven by provincialism (Mauriac and his prissy distaste for the 'ailleurs') or a 'chauvinisme sans vergogne' (Colette). And when the last four papers turn to the stage and music (the Cartel, Shakespeare, Giraudoux, R. Rolland on Strauss) only Gaston Baty, Georges Pitoëff and Charles Dullin can be shown to have gone beyond 'la réticence ancienne devant l'étranger' (p. 153). In short, despite the individual enthusiasm of established intermediaries such as Larbaud, Gide, Giraudoux or Camus who could overcome that resistance, all the evidence supports the reluctant conclusion of the editors that while 'ethnocentrisme réducteur' may sound harsh, 'la formule reflète assez précisément les positions d'une partie au moins des commentateurs qui, pour des raisons morales ou esthétiques, défend[aient] la primauté de la littérature et de la culture françaises' (p. 11). Progress on this front would have been more in evidence had the majority of the contributors to this conference shown themselves to be less reticent about referring to critical work originating outside France.