A Time of Transition in the French Novel: 'Les Années tournantes' 1928-1934 (review)

Christopher Shorley annexes from that excellent critic Claude-Edmonde Magny the recurrent metaphor of the Maginot Line. It is, as he concedes, a swing-wing tool, and, like the historical defence, it is more valuable symbolically than practically. Shorley starts with an excessively reverential account of littéraires, historians and sociologists on the question of cultural change and the advisability or not of compartmentalization in the 'années tournantes' or hinge-years of his title. His concern for individual works and writers ensures that the reader never forgets the idiosyncratic literature without which no panoptic stance could sustain itself. For instance, he analyses acutely the ubiquitous but variegated fear that propels all of the characters of Queneau's Le Chiendent, while relating it to the more dispersed dreads current in Western capitalist society in the selected years. He writes persuasively of the role of money in Gide, Céline, Queneau and Malraux (the 'fatalités économiques' which cripple both the idealist Communist Kyo and the piratical venture-capitalist Ferral in La Condition humaine). He concludes: 'Money is a metaphor in Voyage au bout de la nuit, a model in Le Chiendent, and a motor in La Condition humaine'. On anti-colonialism, a growing phenomenon of that watershed period, he usefully compares and contrasts Georges Simenon's lucid critique of colonialism (in Le Coup de lune) with Céline's more fantastic one in Voyage au bout de la nuit. On the riots of 6 February 1934, he studies Nizan's Le Cheval de Troie and Drieu la Rochelle's Gilles. He is too kind to the second, stupid text. Shorley is generally rather reluctant to pass value-judgments. Hence, although his analyses of the fustian-riddled Gilles and the more thoughtful La Galère of André Chamson implicitly place a higher literary value on the latter, he does not spell this out. Malraux best typifies Shorley's overarching concept of transition, by his responsiveness to world-historical shifts in power, as well as his readiness to put his money (his life) where his mouth or writing-finger was. In his quest for immediacy, for in-your-face prose, Malraux readily appropriated the virtues of painting, photography, cinema and theatre: a true culture-vulture. Queneau, on whom Shorley earlier published an excellent study, is revisited by an expert unearthing of the constant allusions and motifs of Le Chiendent. Queneau was happy to be a sponge of pre-existent culture as well as an innovator. This least snobbish of writers unclichéically celebrates the banality of everyday life, and Shorley is ever alert to this quintessential Quenaquatique mood. His last area of transition embraces popular literature (especially Simenon's detective-fiction), film, jazz and the city as protagonist: a rich haul. Shorley's overall achievement in this book is to place, or re-place, several leading literary figures in the determining environment of cultural and political change without thereby practising reductionism on them. His book is truly informative, coherently structured, and written with real verve.