French Literature: A Very Short Introduction (review)

Brevity is not what it was. Once the soul of wit and held to be prevented by an insufficiency of time, shortness has been brought low by sound bite and tweet. Oxford’s best-selling VSIs are on the cusp: sometimes nugget, sometimes supermarket sweep. Doubtless the format concentrates a writer’s mind and feeds a reader’s busy one, but how can — why should — anyone address a millennium’s worth of complex French imaginings in less than forty thousand words? Enter Hercules or Quixote? Here a distinguished early modernist makes a valiant job of the chronological approach: balanced coverage, imaginative variations of pace and focus, judicious comment, and sixteen cleverly chosen (sometimes hilarious) illustrations. Rather than cut the Gordian knot by presenting an overarching thesis and then illustrating it (cf. Nicholas Boyle on German literature), John Lyons chooses a guiding strand through the tangles: the protagonist. For ‘what kind of person is chosen as focal point of the plot and that person’s relation to her or his society can tell us a good deal about a literary text and its time’ (p. 3). The ensuing journey proceeds from the Vie de saint Alexis to Le Clézio, punctuated by compulsory site visits — La Chanson de Roland, La Princesse de Clèves, En attendant Godot, for instance — as well as such off-piste sorties as Ourika, Voyage au bout de la nuit (allegedly of ‘huge and lasting fame’, p. 99), and ‘Les Pas’. The itinerary ends with a comparison between literary texts and Monet’s water lilies, which ‘are rooted separately in the soil at the bottom of the pond but drift on their stems so that the leaves and flowers shift and touch on the water surface’; so ‘[j]ust as Le Clézio’s work encounters Bernardin [de Saint-Pierre]’s and Montaigne across the space of hundreds of years, so also Darrieussecq’s depiction of the shifting boundary between animality and humanity intersects with the Lais of Marie de France’ (p. 127). Having forgone a thematic, sociopolitical, generic, formalist, or linguistic approach, Lyons seeks thus to redeem his atomism with a ‘shifting’ and ‘touching’ that can be witty (‘Werewolves, like saints, make difficult bedfellows’, p. 7) and adventurous (‘lyric poetry [. . .] has often been in the forefront of attempts to expand the concepts of character and voice’, p. 113). But the impression that perforce remains is of water surface rather than rootedness. Lyons advocates the value of French literary culture as ‘the single most significant alternative, at least among Western nations, to the English-speaking world’, concluding that ‘in a world threatened by sameness, we have never had a greater need for the French différence’ (p. 128). But wherein lies that difference? Derrida himself is not mentioned, nor any facet of French thinking about ‘literariness’. French literary technique is rarely foregrounded. And some treasured shape-shifting lilies have sunk from sight: Artaud, Éluard, Rimbaud, À rebours, Flaubert’s narrative innovations, Hugo’s poetry, Lamartine’s Méditations, Le Neveu de Rameau, Jacques le fataliste, Montesquieu, Racine’s verse, Béroul. Balzac gets six lines, Zola eight, Sartre about ten . . . Such is brevity’s price.