San-Antonio et la culture française: actes du colloque international des 18, 19 et 20 mars 2010 en Sorbonne (review)

Frédéric Dard was famously delighted by the accolade of being the subject of an academic conference in Bordeaux in 1965, organized by the sociologist of literature Robert Escarpit. It has taken forty-five years for another such event to be held, although the number of scholarly articles and books devoted to his writings is now very significant indeed. The twenty-four papers gathered here focus on the 184 San-Antonio novels (written over fifty years and constituting just over half of Dard's total production for the period), covering a wide range of approaches and topics, including biographical, literary historical, cultural, and narratological readings. Quantitative studies of the frequency or value of a particular feature across the corpus sit alongside a variety of sociological analyses such as the reception in the press, or the cultural and social lessons to be learned from the frequent if discreet rewritings to update references, or political and sexual vocabularies. The complexity of the extraordinary fictional machine of San-Antonio, 'flic-écrivain' commenting on the process of writing, and the reception and value of his novels, is a central concern. There is some inevitable repetition, in the discussions of his literary heroes, his linguistic and stylistic virtuosity, the dazzling shuffling of the metafictional pack of cards, and the tension between his aspiration for literary recognition and the devalued popular form he made his own, a tension constantly thematized within the novels themselves; but collectively the analyses offer persuasive support to the argument set out in the introduction, that these novels can be productively read in the context of French cultural politics and national identity. Their massive popularity — to set alongside the great comic post-war films — resulted from the qualities of the writing as production and product, spectacle and commentary, generated by Dard's inimitable combination of mastery of narrative form, parody, and pastiche of French literature and culture, and from the mobilization of the stock characters of a very rich and ancient comic tradition, together with an equally traditional deployment of puns, word games, neologisms, and slang. Read by millions, addressing both a popular audience and an intellectual one, they are shown to have been in their heyday one of the building blocks of the imagined community of Frenchness, translatable only with difficulty, and not at all into the Anglo-Saxon world (which took the framework of the spy thriller and very little else). The readership is now both ageing and waning, with print runs of between ten and fifteen thousand, but the establishment of a fonds documentaire in Dard's home village, with various promotional concours and prizes, accompanies the increasing scholarly interest. Driven by his contractual obligations, melancholy about the value of his work, the figure of the popular and populist writer emerges as strongly here as the extraordinarily acute analyst of representation and discourse. The volume concludes with a comprehensive list of the novels, an extensive critical bibliography, a bibliographical index of the contents of the first fifty-two issues of Le Monde de San-Antonio, and an author index of its correspondents.