La Chronique littéraire: 1920–1970 (review)

In this survey of literary chroniques, the editors distinguish between literary critics and literary chroniqueurs. The latter are demonstrably subject to the vagaries of social mores, political movements and events, as well as to their own 'humeurs' and passions: the former, described as 'la critique littéraire classique, de type universitaire [. . .]', are characterized by a greater 'neutralité'. Yet this book demonstrates that the plethora of literary reviews ('cette écriture de second rang') that regularly produced columns in the press of the interwar era and beyond displayed a wide range of reactions to the books of the day, from ideologically motivated appreciations (Surrealist reviews, L'Action française) to more considered, objective accounts (Marcel Arland in La Nouvelle Revue Française — René Godenne). In the first contribution, it is contended that the Golden Age of reviews was the era of the avant-gardes. According to Patrice Allain and Gabriel Parnet, the 'Bretonian Surrealists' emerged from this period of short-lived (and some longer-lived) revues as the dominant force. Aragon's ideologically biassed chronique, 'Livres choisis' in Littérature, launched a generation of Surrealist poets (Yves Thomas). In the area of French and German literature, Alexandre Vialatte's work has been unjustly forgotten (Alain Schaffner). Henri Béhar provides an overview of the approach, methods, and ideological motivations of Surrealist literary criticism in the 1920s. Moving into the 1930s, Paul Renard examines literary criticism in L'Action française in the light of its somewhat ambivalent, but consistent ideological opposition to Rousseau as 'l'ennemi public nº 1'. In competition with L'Action française, La Bête noire (Nicolas Surlapierre) and Nouvelle journée (Jean Leclercq) are presented as antifascist reviews, and Martyn Cornick reveals the extent to which the NRF became an ideological battleground, hovering occasionally between 'le juste milieu' and 'l'extrême milieu'. Catherine Helbert analyses the authors, reviewers and critics of Marianne. Nicolas Monseu expounds lucidly on the complex relationship between the Husserlian philosophy of alterity and literary criticism in a brief examination of Maxime Chastaing's column in Esprit. There follows the uneasy alliance between Emmanuel Berl and Pierre Drieu la Rochelle in Les Derniers Jours (Stéphane Chaudier), four journals of the Occupation (Bruno Curatolo), a general analysis of the literary press of 1944-1954 (Paul Dirkx), and Blaise Cendrars as a writer of the older generation who emerges at the Liberation at odds with the current of littérature engagée (Laurence Guyon). Grégory Singal and Michèle Touret deal respectively with Claude Roy's chroniques and Les Vivants, a review founded at the Liberation. Hervé Bismuth investigates the reception in French reviews of Solzhenitsyn's Une journée d'Ivan Denissovitch. There follow Robert Morel (Jean-François Seron), the work of poet-reviewers Philippe Jaccottet and Michel Deguy (Alain Paire and Stéphane Baquey), and André Pieyre de Mandiargues's criticism in the NRF (Ivona Tokarska). Jacques Poirier concludes the collection with a portrait of Pascal Pia. This book makes a singular contribution to the study of literary chroniques. One of its strengths is that it makes an implicit comparison between the 'consensual' objectivity of today's literary columns with those examined here, which exhibit a greater partisanship and susceptibility to the external forces of history and of the 'moment', and aroused a livelier, if unstable and transient, reaction in readers. It is simply a pity that the typos are numerous and that there is no index.