Maitresse

May 6 1968

The great photographer of May 1968, Goksin Sipahioglu, has died. Here, one of his most memorable shots, from May 6th 1968. A policeman throws a pavé at a storm of students surging over the Boulevard St Germain on the first big day of fighting. More at Lettre de la Photographie.

Don't call me Mademoiselle

French feminists are calling for the salutation "Mademoiselle" to be done away with, and frankly I couldn't agree more.

The term itself is lovely. "Mademoiselle." Makes me think of young girls in full skirts and ballerina slippers. Something about the turn of the moi and the resolution of the selle. Like a girl twirling in a skirt, and then smoothing it down.

But as a practical term, it's endlessly irritating. When you occupy that shadow space between obvious girlhood and clear Madame-hood, every day is a long parade of people scrutinizing you to figure out what to call you. Are you married? How old, exactly, are you? Mademoiselle? ou Madame? they'll ask. (Docteur, I answered once.) Or they'll start with one-- Madame?-- and then change their minds-- Ou plutôt Mademoiselle.  Or the reverse.

There may be more important things to think about other than what 51% of the population are called in the street. So then let's not think about this any longer: let's get rid of Mademoiselle. It's intrusive at best and condescending at worst. Or, let's bring back damoiseau.

 

L'Education mise à nu

    

There's a mini polemic on in France right now about a series of photographs depicting professors (apparently real professors-- call me, Monsieur X--) in their birthday suits to protest the "dépouillement" (or dispossession-- literally: plucking) of the education system in France. These photographs are part of a calendar which you can see in its entirety here. On the news the other day, some conservative bureaucrat was complaining that these photographs "dévalorisaient la profession [d'enseignant]" [devalued the teaching profession]. What do you think?

Goncourt longlist announced

Shortlist and even shorter list to come on October 4th and then 25th, with the winner announced on November 2.

- Stéphane Audeguy Rom@ (Gallimard)

- Emmanuel Carrère Limonov (P.O.L)

- Sorj Chalandon Retour à Killybegs (Grasset)

- Charles Dantzig Dans un avion pour Caracas (Grasset)

- David Foenkinos Les souvenirs (Gallimard)

- Alexis Jenni L’Art français de la guerre (Gallimard)

- Simon Libérati Jayne Mansfield 1967 (Grasset)

- Ali Magoudi Un sujet français (Albin Michel)

- Carole Martinez Du Domaine des Murmures (Gallimard)

- Véronique Ovaldé Des vies d’oiseaux (L’Olivier)

- Eric Reinhardt Le Système Victoria (Stock)

- Romain Slocombe Monsieur le Commandant (Nil)

- Morgan Sportès Tout, tout de suite (Fayard)

Full listing of prize longlists here.

- Lyonel Trouillot La belle amour humaine (Actes Sud)

- Delphine de Vigan Rien ne s’oppose à la nuit (JC Lattès)

Le blurb

France is getting blurbs! Lire Magazine reports. Never before has such a sneaky marketing concept sullied the covers of French books. And the blurbs still won't be on the cover, but restricted to the red bandeaux (like a skinnier version of a dust jacket) that are wrapped around new publications, sometimes to announce prizes the author has won, or that the book has been nominated for, but sometimes to reproduce the name of the author in larger letters. 

Did you know that the blurb was invented in 1907, and was named after the heroine (Miss Belinda Blurb) of Gelett Burgess's novel Are You A Bromide? (Subtitle: The Sulphitic Theory Expounded And Exemplified According To The Most Recent Researches Into The Psychology Of Boredom Including Many Well-Known Bromidioms Now In Use.) 

The "act of blurbing" is an unattractive woman vulgarly cupping her hand around her mouth to call something out to the reader!

Lire Magazine looks into the "you scratch my back I'll scratch yours" aspect of blurbing (Hmm, Jonathan Coe will blurb any book whose author shares his agent!) and is astonished at the number of Anglo-American writers who do it regularly. "Even Thomas Pynchon, the great recluse of American lettres-- the most recent photo we have of him dates from 1960!-- is an inveterate 'blurber'!"

Francis Geffard, editor of American literature at Albin Michel, points out why the "blurb" system hadn't taken on in the past (and why he's wary about it going forward): in France, authors are identified as belonging to a particular publishing house, and for a Gallimard author to blurb an Albin Michel author would be unthinkable. "Whereas on the other hand," he said, "in the US the blurb is a tradition which comes out of a mentoring relationship, or from the collegiality of the university system [NDLR: in the US many writers teach in MFA programs, whereas France doesn't offer a degree for creative writing, at least not as far as I know] (....) For some writers, it's like accompanying a young writer who they believe in to the baptismal font."

The incessant Catholic metaphors are part of the charm of living in France. And now, so is le blurbing!

The End of Francophonie?

I've recently published an article on the littérature-monde manifesto and the Etonnants-Voyageurs festival in issue 2 of The White Review:

My friend Elisabeth and I had travelled from Paris to Brittany to check out the Etonnants Voyageurs (Astonishing Travellers) literary festival in Saint Malo, created by Michel Le Bris in 1990. Every year, around sixty writers converge there to celebrate... well, what exactly we’re not sure, but it’s got something to do with travel literature, francophone literature, and Russians. In 2009, when I was researching a piece on the French literary milieu, all anyone could talk about was this festival and the movement associated with it: littérature-monde.

‘French literature is opening outward,’ I was told. ‘Just look at the success of the Etonnants Voyageurs festival.’ This was all the encouragement I needed to book a spot on the TGV to the 2010 edition, which was dedicated to Russian literature, Haitian literature, and the theme of the organisers’ new book, Je est un autre – I is Other. Of all the literary festivals in France – and there are hundreds – this one is the most political, and the most controversial. This is in part because Le Bris and Jean Rouaud were the major voices behind a 2007 manifesto, ‘Pour une littérature-monde en français’ (Towards a World Literature in French), which ran in Le Monde and was followed by an anthology of the same title.

Signed by forty-four writers including JMG Le Clézio, Tahar Ben Jelloun, Maryse Condé, Nancy Huston, and Edouard Glissant, the manifesto’s argument was twofold: first, that French literature ought not to be divided into ‘French’ (for work produced by writers born in France) and ‘francophone’ (read: those writers with origins in France’s former colonies) but rather should be considered as one continuous world literature in French. We are witnessing the ‘end of francophonie,’ they wrote, ‘and the birth of a world literature in French’. Second, they argued that French writers who since the rise of the nouveau roman and post-structuralist theory have been engaged in a ‘literature with no other object than itself’ should stop navel-gazing and put the world back in the text. Le Bris and Rouaud called for literature ‘to rub up against the world to capture its essence, its vital energies’, making the littérature-monde movement a sort of randy grandchild of Sartre’s littérature engagée.

 

Read more here. Full article available in the print journal-- which you can order here.

Charlotte Mandell on translating Zone

 If you haven't already heard about Mathias Enard's Zone, you should be hearing a lot more about it in the months to come, on the road to its English publication in December.  (I've lost track of how many times I've mentioned it on this blog.) It was THE book of the rentrée in 2008; it won the Prix du Livre Inter; Claro called it "the book of the decade, if not of the century" (ok he and Enard are tight, but that doesn't mean he's wrong); François Monti called it "a novel for the ages"; and I'm here to tell you: it's really good.

But the reason I'm telling you about Zone yet again is because the English translator is Charlotte Mandell (who I also mention here more times than I can count, because she is a top-notch translator and friend), and Charlotte just did a great interview with the NEA's Art Works blog (Charlotte won an NEA grant to fund her translation of Zone).  Here's an excerpt:

NEA: Zone offers a unique challenge with its one-sentence format. Why did you decide to take on this translation?

MANDELL: There’s nothing else like it out there! Especially not in French. One of my favorite novels is Joyce’s Ulysses, and Zone reminds me a little of that, and a little of another of my favorites, Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds, with some Apollinaire and Burroughs and Pound thrown in for good measure. Translating a 500-page sentence combines the creativity of translating poetry with the challenge of translating difficult prose. Zone is narrated on a train, and it has the rhythmic, slightly lulling feeling of being on a train, but it also has a sense of urgency and inevitability in French that I wanted to recreate in English. I loved the continuity and flow of the text, and I really loved the experience of translating it—I was always mid-sentence, no matter where I stopped for the day! I never read ahead when I translate, so I was always wondering what was going to happen next in the story. Translating Zone was one of the most enjoyable translation experiences I’ve ever had.

You can read the rest here. And plan on blocking out some reading time over Christmas break-- the book will be out in the US December 14th from Open Letter. (The same lovely people who bring you the blog Three Percent.)

(And in case you missed it, you can read my interview with Charlotte here.)

(And now I'll stop with the parentheses.)

On the World Cup final

"pas ça Zinedine, pas ça Zinedine, pas ça Zinedine!... oh, c'est à pleurer. On était dans un conte de fées jusque-là."

Well-- nothing nearly as dramatic in the World Cup final the other night. We were rooting for Spain, more out of anti-colonial sentiment than real affinity for Spain. But the game was a bit of a snooze-- I was taking a little nap when the one goal was scored (they woke me up for the replay). But it made me nostalgic for 2006, when I was so into the World Cup I was moved to Shakespearean levels of parody...

And I was not the only writer inspired by Zidane that night! Jean-Pierre Toussaint published La Mélancolie de Zidane, a translated excerpt of which you can find in Dalkey Archive's Best European Fiction 2010 (which I reviewed here). Toussaint imagines the agony and the ecstasy of being Zinédine Zidane in the last game of your career:

He no longer has the means, or the strength, the energy, the will, to pull off a last stunt, a final act of pure form; the header deflected by Buffon a few moments earlier, for all its beauty, will definitively open Zidane’s eyes to his irreparable impotence. Form, at present, resists him – and this is unacceptable for an artist.

In other news, Best European Fiction 2011 will be published in November! Hemon is still editing, this time with a preface by Colum McCann. (Let's hope McCann has a better handle on the topic than Zadie Smith did in the first volume.)

**A Twitter friend writes to tell me that back in 2006 there were two considerations of Zidane, Camus, and narrative in The New York Times and in Trebuchet.

French literatures

 Have been home sick with some kind of sinus thing, missing the Salon du Livre this weekend-- so instead of giving you the kind of hardheadedhard-nosed reporting you've come to expect from us here at Maîtresse, I've translated an interesting piece that ran in Le Monde this week in connection with the book fair: "Pour une littérature en langues françaises."

This is a subject I find myself thinking about more and more, and clearly the problem is more than just semantic. It has to do, I think, with a basic human need to classify, which seems to have become a prerequisite for understanding-- as if we can't understand a writer's work until we have contextualized him somehow.  But in the (dare I say post-) post-colonial context the literary and political milieu of French and Francophone literature has become more complicated. We need a new way of classifying writers who weren't born and raised in the Hexagone but who persist in writing in French anyway-- and the best way to reclassify them may be to declassify them, as Christine Rousseau argues here.

"Pour une littérature en langues françaises" [For French literatures*], by Christine Rousseau (Le Monde, March 25 2010)

Hardly had the ripples caused by the Salon du livre francophone begun to still, in March 2007, when a brick was hurled into the pond, in the form of a manifesto entitled Pour une littérature-monde en français ("For a world literature in French"), written by Jean Rouaud and Michel Le Bris, the founders of the Etonnants voyageurs festival [which takes place in St-Malo every day].  Signed by 44 writers, including JMG Le Clézio, Tahar Ben Jelloun, Edouard Glissant, Amin Maalouf, Maryse Condé, Lyonel Trouillot and Nimrod, the manifesto announced the birth of a world literature in the French language, and, consequently, the death of francophonie [Francophone literature].

At first glance, the change of moniker was laudatory, as the term "francophone literature" was a bit dubious. As Alain Rey revealed in 2006, in the book section of Le Monde, on the occasion of the Salon du livre consecrated specifically to Francophone literature, the term "Francophonie" "is a sort of hot potato that countries, powers, and artists pass around with conflicting intentions."

It is true that it covers over greatly differing realities.  Initially a geolinguistic distinction-- the term was created in 1880 by the geographer Onésime Reclus, in a specifically colonial context-- the term was politicized after the independences of 1965, and then of course [became] literary and artistic. But now it must be said that the word, with all its connotations, seems too narrow when faced with a sphere [of influence] that extends beyond the auspices of the Organisation international de la francophonie (OIF) [International Francophone Organization].  For we find writers outside the habitual francophone zones (African, Caribbean, North American, Middle Eastern, and Asian), such as Boualem Sansal, Gary Victor, Nelly Arcan, Charif Majdalani or François Cheng, others like Milan Kundera, Hector Biancotti, Anne Weber or Jonathan Littell, who have each chosen French as their language of expression.  Their French is a language that they have often forged whilst very much in contact with another language, in very different historical, political, social and economic contexts.

The literature we call francophone isn't singular but plural.  Playing with its boundaries-- where else to classify Dany Laferrière, a Canadian originally from Haiti, or Yasmina Traboulsi, who is a Brazilian-Lebanese?-- it brings us another vision of the world often obscured if not totally negated by French literature. But it also undoes the ancient organizations of genre. It's enough to make booksellers-- and indirectly, readers-- dizzy, so much are they used to classifying authors by their geographic origins, in the Francophone aisle as in that of French literature. Their Anglo-Saxon counterparts, on the other hand, classify all works written in the English language by alphabetical order.

One foot in, one foot out. Such would seem to be the fate of francophone writers.  Despite the efforts of Abbé Grégoire, who in De la littérature des negres (1808), composed a lively plea to recognize a foreign literature in the French language.  Two hundred years have passed and the problem has remained more or less the same.

Of course, the most optimistic would argue that many editorial efforts have been made to made this literature better known, by publishing them, n the best cases, in the general collections, and in the worse, in reductive (even ghettoizing) collections like "Continents noirs" at Gallimard. At the same time, we've noticed a significant rise, over the last few years, in francophone authors being awarded the major national prizes-- especially in 2006, which saw Jonathan Littell receive the Goncourt and the Grand Prix du roman de l'Académie française, Alain Mabanckou won the Renaudot, Nancy Huston the Femina and Léonora Miano the Goncourt des lycéens.

Was it the direct effect of the celebration of francophone culture that made its mark on 2006? It is true that, encouraged by this crop of winners, Jean Rouaud and Michel Le Bris, a year later, wrote Pour une littérature-monde.** Somewhat over the top, slightly naive and certainly partisan in its vision of literary history (amongst those attacked indirectly are Claude Simon and Georges Perec, "inventor of a literature without an object"), this combative text took as its aim the "Center," that is Paris, its consecrating authority, its hardened literary milieu and its narcissistic writers, in order to better exalt the victorious return (after decades of "gulag poetics") of writers from the periphery. Unfortunately, as Camille de Toledo remarked with regret in his pertinent essay "Visiter le Flurkistan" (PUF, 2008) as seductive as this manifesto may be politically, its effects are limited because of its war-like posturing, opposing two literatures and aesthetics which have only ever nourished each other in dialogue. An opportunity has been wasted to think about these literatures together. We ought not to pit them against each other, especially not when the only valid label we can use for either of them is doubtless that of Literatures in French.

*My translation hasn't retained the structure of the original French, which refers to the structure of Le Bris and Rouaud's essay. Other translation suggestions welcome.

**The original manifesto appeared in Le Monde on March 15, 2007. It was later expanded into a book-length essay and published by Gallimard that same year. To read an excerpt (in English) by the acclaimed Francophone writer Alain Mabanckou, click here (PDF).

Initials S.G.

 

I can't wait to see the new Gainsbourg biopic, which opened in France yesterday-- watch the trailer here. 

Obviously I love Gainsbourg (who doesn't?), but I'm also a big fan of the director, Joann Sfar, who is primarily known as a graphic novelist with a penchant for rabbi's cats. I did an interview with him a few years ago-- he was the nicest guy, and very patient with my nervous bumbling phone-French.  The piece is still up, caught in the folds of the internet, although something strange has happened to the line breaks.  Anyway, you can read it here.

Women and the Occupation of Paris

You might remember that last year I mentioned there was a controversy here in Paris over an exhibit at the Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris showing a number of photographs by André Zucca of a very normal-looking Paris under the Nazi Occupation.

That controversy lives again in a very fine essay by Ian Buruma in this week's New York Review of Books:

When a cache of these pictures was exhibited at the Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris last year, the press reacted with dismay. How could this "celebration of the victor," "underlining the sweetness of life in an occupied country," take place "without any explanation"?

Buruma has an interesting take. "Perhaps there should have been more explanation," he writes,

but the pictures are only tendentious in what they do not show. You don't see people being rounded up. There is only one blurred image of an old woman walking along the rue de Rivoli wearing a yellow star. There are no photographs of endless queues in front of half-empty food stores. There are no pictures of Drancy, where Jews were held in appalling conditions before being transported east in cattle trains. But what Zucca's pictures do show, always in fine Agfacolor weather, is still revealing. They are disturbing to the modern viewer precisely because of their peculiar air of normality, the sense of life going on while atrocities were happening, as it were, around the corner.

Buruma effectively illustrates that there were at least two Parises under the Occupation, one normal one, for non-Jews, and one of "barbarity and evil, represented by this yellow star," as Hélène Berr wrote in her journal.  Apart from those suffering deportation and death, the vast majority of Parisians under the Occupation were "just trying to get by." 

What is interesting in Buruma's piece is his discussion of French journalist Patrick Buisson's 1940–1945 Années érotiques, which examines the way the body of the "Boche's girl," the French women accused of horizontal collaboration, became a site of conflict, occupation, and collaboration as much as Paris itself. Buisson "shows

that the presence of large numbers of German soldiers meant liberation of a kind for large numbers of French women: young women rebelling against the authoritarian strictures of bourgeois life, middle-aged spinsters yearning for romance, widows, women alone, women in bad marriages, and so on. Buisson does not ask us to admire these tens of thousands of women engaging in "horizontal collaboration," but to comprehend the complexity of their motives.

He is scornful of the movie stars, fashion folks, and social climbers who did better than most, thanks to their German contacts or lovers: Arletty, Coco Chanel, Suzy Solidor, et al. But he is just as hard on the men who took their revenge after the war on the army of unknown women who had strayed into German arms. Such women were stripped naked and paraded through the streets, shorn of their hair, their bodies daubed with swastikas, jeered at by the mob. Buisson writes:

When the Germans were defeated, or about to be defeated, the "Boche's girl" served as a substitute to prolong a battle that no longer held any dangers and affirmed a manliness that had not always been employed in other circumstances....

At last year's MLA in San Francisco, I gave a talk about Claude Cahun's wartime resistance activities on the Channel island of Jersey on a panel entitled "French Women Write the Résistance." We had a serious turnout given that the panel was at 8:30 in the morning, and during the discussion section a rigorous debate took place, which indicated to us (confirmed by this article) that this is very much a discussion people want to be thinking about right now, and thinking about in new ways. Couching the discussion of French resistance and collaboration in gendered terms seems to be one of these productive ways of re-thinking this historical moment. My co-panelists and I have put together a book proposal on the topic, which I believe is on submission at UPenn UP, so we'll see how that goes.

Meanwhile, do read Buruma's essay.

The eBook and the French reader

I know. You don't have to say it. I'm sorry. But I'm here now, aren't I? 

So I've been teaching. And working on my dissertation. And trying to keep myself sane in an apartment gone haywire. And last week I flew to Montreal to participate in a panel on Thirties Modernism and a seminar on Woolf and modernism. (I write to you now from my parents' kitchen on Long Island; back to Paris on Saturday.) So things have been busy. But I know, it's no excuse. 

One thing I did do a couple of weeks ago was attend a panel at the Centre national du Livre on digitalization. I was there because the panel was part of the study trip a couple of friends had made to Paris to learn about the way French publishing works. Here's how it works, for those of you who were not on the trip: protect, protect, query nervously, protect. 

That policy of protectionism is mostly a good thing. (For more on that, see my article in issue 8 of Five Dials magazine, downloadable here). It's occasionally seen as a bad thing (cf Donald Morrison and Antoine Compagnon's Que reste-t-il de la culture française) because it encourages a kind of stasis in French letters; it could be said to perpetuate a dominant tone of mediocrity amongst the writers, publishers, and readers' expectations. But hey, it's better than the dominant tone of trash you find in the US and UK. 

For years now, the French have been  talking about the digitalization of the book, and what that might look like. No one could have imagined at the beginning of the '00s that people would actually want to read a book on a screen, much less on a cellphone; and so for years now, the conversation has remained hypothetical. But with the success of the Kindle and other e-readers in the US, the French are starting to get a little nervous, and a little excited, like a seven year-old standing at the edge of the high diving board, about to jump for the first time, but terrified of how very far down there is to fall.  

French readers, however, are no more ready than the publishers are to take the plunge.  A poll currently being conducted by Le Figaro asks "Are you ready to read a novel on a screen?" A resounding 75% percent is saying Non! "[An e-book is] not a book!" declares one commenter, who compares the e-book to margarine and decaf coffee (with whom I happen to agree). "Right or wrong, I want my books on paper," says another. Only a very few readers are able to identify this as a false dichotomy, pointing out that the advent of one does not necessarily imply the decline of the other. 

But I'm only scratching the surface of what was discussed at that panel. For a more in-depth view of the Great Franco-American Publishing Exchange, do read Chad Post's write-up of what the American editors learned on their trip.  And to be continued, when the French come to New York early next year...

unfinished

Since I've been back in Paris I've all of a sudden become a shockingly lazy reader. I've spent more time planning my lessons and watching "Big Love" than doing anything else.  So Wolf Hall sits, halfway finished, next to my bed, joined by Sigrid Nunez's The Last of Her Kind (which I'm reading for a Thursday evening Barnard Alumnae book group), David Foenkinos's La Délicatesse, and Steve Toltz's A Fraction of the Whole.

The only book I did manage to finish was Beigbeder's Un roman français, and the only reason I blew through that is because it was mediocre enough that it didn't take much concentration. I didn't hate it, but I didn't feel like it was worth the time it took to read it.  Here's a summary: Beigbeder gets caught sniffing cocaine with a friend outside some nightclub from off the roof of a car.  They are too messed up to notice they're getting high right in front of a police car.  They're arrested and hauled into jail.  Being in jail is a terrible experience, Beigbeder finds, and, much like that other writer-guy dipping a madeleine into some tea, or whatever, Beigbeder finds the fact of imprisonment summons up his entire childhood. Being locked up--oh so paradoxically!--gives him access to all these memories he thought were locked away inside himself.

Although it has real moments of tenderness (when he thinks about his daughter, or his relationship with his brother, verging into full-blown, large-scale sentimentality, weeping about his mother while sitting in prison, his tears dripping into his beard), the rest of the guy's strut and performance seriously undercuts any lasting affect the book might have had. He tells us over and over that he's such a loser-- but it just feels like part of the act. We never for a moment believe that Beigbeder really believes he's a loser.

Occasionally funny, but often not, the novel's worst offense is its complete unwillingness to trust the reader.  Beigbeder can't just tell a joke without immediately telling you why it's funny; he can't build on a theme without pointing it out to you-- how do you like my theme?-- which is just insulting. Even the dimmest Beigbeder fan is capable of noticing different passages and ideas seem to circulate around the idea of imprisonment.

Other ideas that he tries to bring in-- such as his childhood summers spent in the southwest, or his family history-- don't really work. As he said the other night at Literary Death Match, lamenting the fact that the only thing that interests people in his book is the coke-sniffing scene: "No one seems to care about my great-grandfather." Maybe it's because Beigbeder doesn't seem to care that much about his grandfather. The man is there, one suspects, just as an opportunity to share details about his aristocratic lineage. The grandfather in question died on the field of battle in the First World War, "like a Japanese kamikaze or a Palestinian terrorist, this father of four children sacrificed himself knowing full well what he was about. This descendant of Crusaders [oh yes, apparently he is descended from Crusaders] was condemned to imitate Jesus Christ: to give his life for others. I am descended from a valiant knight who was crucified on the barbed wire of Champagne." With all due respect to the soldiers of World War I and their families: Oh, lord. Eye-roll.

What does work nicely are the descriptions of the various houses and apartments in which he grew up; Beigbeder evokes quite nicely the different spaces, how it felt to be in them, and how they determined who he would become. (There are some scenes with his father and his friends that could have been taken from the adult Beigbeder's life-- we certainly understand why he became such a fétard.) But Beigbeder doesn't seem interested in asking hard questions of himself, and hard questions are the only ones that really matter in a memoir. Otherwise it's just a show, just a shallow depiction of what it's like to be Beigbeder, without yanking the reader into that hulking physique. 

More on Foenkinos, Toltz, et al, when I finally finish reading them.

For more on Beigbeder at Literary Death Match, see here.

hong kong you're nice but paris je t'aime

Toy Soldiers from Alta Media Productions on Vimeo.

I'm going home in less than a week and I can't wait.

Behind the scenes at the Prix du Livre Inter

The Prix du Livre Inter was bestowed earlier this week on Mathias Enard for his novel Zone (to be published by Open Letter in May 2010). Via Three Percent, I came across this video, which takes us behind the scenes at the final meeting and voting of the jury.  It's really interesting to get a look behind the process of choosing a winner, although I would have like to have heard a little of what went on during the 4 hour long final debate:

Prix du Livre Inter 2009
envoyé par franceinter. - Regardez les dernières vidéos d'actu.

The jury, we learn, was divided between Stephane Audeguy (for Nous Autres), Emmanuel Carrère (for D'autres vies que la mienne)  and Enard. But Zone carries the day!

And then through the miracle of cell phone and public transportation, Enard shows up, all bearish and happily surprised. He thanks everyone, and explains that he, Emmanuel Carrère, and a couple of the other nominees had been planning a "dîner des déçus" [dinner of the disappointed]. But he is the winner! I wonder if he paid for dinner.

The cool thing about this prize, as EJ points out, is that it's composed of France Inter listeners, not book professionals, and not thousands of anonymous voters.

For more on Zone, check out François Monti's review in The Quarterly Conversation, and my interview with Charlotte Mandell, who is presently translating the novel into English.

around the internet on a tuesday

Well, I'm back in Paris after a prolonged stay in Tokyo, and my, oh my, am I glad to be back.  There are all kinds of people in the world, my friends, and there are people who love Tokyo, and there are people who love Paris, and I belong to the second camp.

Also, I missed my dog.

And the internet has been busy while I was gone! Lots to report.  First of all, Wyatt Mason is no longer going to be blogging at Sentences.  Wyatt: we hardly knew ye. A year may seem like a decade in the blogosphere, but it's not really that long, and your dispatches will be missed.  Luckily I subscribe to Harper's, but there's something about a blog post that print book reviews and essays can't touch.  The sketch-like quality, the half-formed thought, the gesture toward one's interlocutor to further the idea... it's valuable not only for the blogger but for the reader.  This post, for example, in which Mason throws out some ideas on Beckett and translation, got me thinking, and may turn into a longer project.  So, thanks.

*

Last month the Oulipians gathered in New York. Artforum gives us the play by play.  Stephen Mitchelmore has an excerpt from Jacques Roubaud's The Loop, published in English last month by Dalkey Archive Press. And for those of you in Paris wanting a little action from the OUvroir de la LIttérature POtentielle, they'll be doing their thing Thursday May 14th at 7 pm at the BNF.  The theme of the evening will be "Proses liquides."

*

If you liked Félix Fénéon's Novels in Three Lines, which came out last year from NYRB, you will love Joanna Neborsky's illustrated version of Fénéon's texts.

*

I was thrilled to find, via The Valve, that this intrepid soul is (re)reading Zola's Rougon-Macquart cycle backwards. Oh! how I long for the time to do the same. There is nothing better than curling up with a chunky Folio paperback and losing yourself in the minutiae of Second Empire France.  Sigh. 

(Did I just out myself as the biggest dork in the land?)

On a related note, Scott Esposito asks, and I echo: what's your favorite Zola novel?

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ReadySteadyBook has a review of J-M.G. Le Clézio's Wandering Star.

It feels like now, in the aftermath of Israel/Hamas war, might be the saddest of times to be reading J.M.G. Le Clézio's Wandering Star. Yet I couldn’t help feeling, too, that this novel was confirming, affirming. The simple fable-like quality of the prose offered up a place where I found shelter from all the shouts -- the noisy rhetoric and rigid absolutes which seem to be filling up the media pages about Israel and the Arab World. Le Clézio has achieved a revisiting of modernist sensibilities which serve to place the subjective "I" into the center of our reader’s mind. This voice is a singular, isolated voice who is more witness than victim, and more reliable as the teller of historical truths than all the objective reportage we have come to rely on and believe in. Paradoxically, then, a literature based on subjective sensibilities serves to become one of our most objective looks into the Israel/Palestine conflict. Unlike the many "embedded journalists" (a term I always found sort of funny, imagining these Western newspaper guys stuck in sand dunes or ensconced inside rocky limestone caverns) this fiction reaffirms and redefines the possibility of the novel. Again, the novel can exist as a history-bearing fruit, immerse us inside a forgotten and buried world history. When the very writing of a novel asks the question: "can a novel be useful?" then, for me, the novel is once again operating at the top of one of its most exciting peaks.

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And if you're still on a Japanese kick, Marie Mockett has a piece up at Maud Newton's blog. 

Thanks to a resourceful reader named Joe (Thanks again, Joe!), I am happy to provide you with the text of the recent London Review of Books article dealing with the French university strikes, by Mat Pires, a fellow angliciste who teaches in Besançon. Download it in pdf format here.

Christophe Claro on "French literature"

Meandering around the internet last week, I came across the blog of Christophe Claro, who is one of the more unique voices writing the French language, as well as the French voice of Pynchon, Rushdie, and Vollman, whose works he has translated.  Claro's blog, called Le Clavier Cannibale [the Cannibal Keyboard] after his latest novel (Editions Inculte), is a collection of odds and ends and occasionally the site of compelling discursions on matters literary and non-. One in particular, "Aux écrivains la patrie méconnaissante," caught my eye, since I'm interested in the problematic concept of national literatures, and, thinking it might be interesting for an English-speaking audience as well, I took it upon myself to translate it, with Claro's permission. For more on Claro, see François Monti's interview in The Quarterly Conversation.

Writers Without Country*

A cultural magazine (doesn't matter which, alas) has devoted a recent cover article to the following question: "Is French literature dead?" Of course, we have no doubt that the ten writers asked to "respond" are going to nuance, or even contradict this staggering possibility.

We also vaguely imagined that the article would serve as a kind of response to the incredibly dull polemic which grew up around Donald Morrison's article for Time magazine not long ago [Ed: The Death of French Culture].  Nevertheless, the very fact of using this kind of question to hook the reader speaks volumes. The question is provocative, though in a way I can't quite put my finger on.  What bothers me is not that it is provocative (and, to say the least, absurd); no, what bothers me (not that I'm losing sleep over it) is that it contributes tot he reification of this disastrous notion of "French literature" as a defined body of work, a paper entity, go figure-- and the question of the morality of this corpus, whether or not this is in question, conspires to personify an object of study which is all the same difficult to define. 

Because really, what is "French literature"? Books written by French authors? French-speaking authors? French-speaking French authors? A translation doesn't count? Although? If it's written in French? By a French person? What are the necessary conditions to be considered an author of French literature? How many months a year do you have to live in Paris or in Laval? Does French have to be your mother tongue? Does your subject have to wear a beret? When Raymond Federman writes in French, is that French literature? If Jim Harrison were naturalized tomorrow, would he count retroactively?

In short, it's all very complicated. And if "French literature" is a less precise idea than it would seem to be, how can we imagine that this imprecise idea could, like a body, be subject to an organic phenomenon like death? How can a literature die? Did it have to be born first? Is it possible for it to get sick? Does it grow up, or get old? These kinds of questions only reinforce the rancid notion of "generational literature" [a kind of literature that is associated, for better or for worse, with a group of writers of about the same age, and treating the problems of their generation] -- we had more fun, even, with the invigorating notion of the "death of the author."

So contested is the idea of French literature in the writers' responses in said article, that the mere fact that [the editors] thought it might produce something useful says more about literary criticism than it does about literature.  The scare quotes, I hate to say, don't change much.  The word "French" is pretty and all that, but as soon as we apply it to literature, that great destroyer of borders, or, for that matter, with the idea of death, well, we become aware of a a certain anxiety that-- how to put it? Perhaps we ought to reserve this kind of questioning for the obituary section (i.e. "It is with regret that we announce the death of French literature," and a memorial service would be held upstairs at the Café du Flore) or for the medical journals ("Researchers in Marne-la-Vallée have perhaps found the miracle drug to counteract the degeneration of French literature.  Preliminary testing has been carried out on the afflicted inhabitants of St Germain-des-Prés").  However, we look forward to reading the responses generated by this cultural magazine, which we hope is safe from nasty existential headcolds.

*I'm not entirely happy with this title.  Anyone want to suggest something better?

around the internet on a tuesday

I have been completely laid out by one of those strange French strains of a cold they call a rhinopharyngite.  But today I feel a bit more lucid than I have, just in time to take a look around and see what's been going on.

Here in France, the teachers' strike continues, and the manifestations are getting more and more original. On Friday, in honor of Valentine's Day, a group of people stood outside Valérie Pécresse's office holding red and white balloons, which they then released.  Yesterday a group of people read La Princesse de Clèves out loud (see here for video, starts around 43 seconds in) in front of the Pantheon.  (They did this because Sarkozy has a weird little fixation with this book that I don't entirely understand.) And tomorrow there will be a "flashmob" at 12 noon exactly at Place St Michel.  Here's what to do:

"1. Bring your favorite book (or any book)
2. Show up at Place St Michel at noon on the dot, Wednesday February 18th
3. When the whistle blows, begin reading aloud from your book as loud as you can
4. When the second whistle blows, scatter!"

The whole thing will last precisely 5 minutes.

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I was very shocked to learn via Caroline Weber that it was apparently Grégoire Bouillier who sent Sophie Calle the infamous "Prenez soin de vous" [Take Care of yourself] text message, the one that inspired a hundred creative interpretations, a Biennale exhibit, and many deconstructions of whether or not it is still appropriate to vousvoyer someone you're sleeping with. What's even more shocking is the cavalier way Weber tosses off this information-- as if everyone knew about it.  Did everyone know about it? I knew she was a central figure in his memoir L'invité mystère [The Mystery Guest], but didn't know they were ever involved. It makes me think he did that just so she would turn it into one of her projects.  Does that make him more or less of a cad? I can't decide.

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Earlier this month was the 100th anniversary of the Nouvelle Revue Française. For the anniversary issue, Jonathan Littell provided an appreciation of Maurice Blanchot, which This Space is currently featuring, in a translation by Charlotte Mandell. An excerpt:

Writing does not describe, does not relate, does not signify, it does not represent a thing, existing in the world of men or even only in the world of the imagination; it is neither more nor less than "the test of its own experience" (Blanchot again, I forget where, unless it's Bataille – so indistinguishable is their thinking on this point), the faithful account of what happened at that moment, the moment when the one who, seized by the desire to write, sat down in front of a blank piece of paper and began putting language onto it. It's not that the text that results from this experience – poem, story, novel – is deprived of meaning, is not shot through with elements referring to the reality of life; rather it's that these elements function (to use a comparison that Blanchot would no doubt have discreetly avoided) like what Freud called the manifest content of dreams: the rags of reality they cloak themselves with so as both to manifest and veil their truth, their very reality. Thus, if writing is related to truth – and it certainly is, it has to be, or else not be at all, or in any case fall outside of the realm we designate by that mysterious word, literature – it is not by way of knowledge. Literary writing does not explain, does not teach: it simply offers the presence of its own mystery, its own experience, in its absence of explanation, thus inviting not some illusory "understanding" ("Reading either falls short of understanding or overshoots it," writes Blanchot), but precisely a reading.

[UPDATE: Charlotte writes in to let us know the original French is here, and there's lots more on Blanchot at Pierre Joris's blog. Thanks!]

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Finally, Wyatt Mason gives a very patient explanation of the differences between reading as a reader and as a writer, and what this means for ltierary criticism.

Academics take to the streets

Last Thursday we were out in the streets protesting again; this one was even better than the last! This time there was chanting, singing, and even a little dancing. The energy was high, the press was everywhere, and everyone seemed to be having a grand old time-- all the while completely serious about our cause, but happy to be out marching on such a beautiful day.

We began the march at Jussieu, walked past the Jardin des Plantes, down to Censier, up rue Claude Bernard, hung a right on rue d'Ulm, continued past ENS, up to the Pantheon, where the march came to a halt.  We were supposed to finish in front of the Education Minister's compound, but since the protests had turned ugly that morning in Strasbourg (where the Minister, Valérie Pécresse, had inaugurated a new university), the police had blocked off all the streets leading to the ministry.  So the cortège continued up rue Victor Cousin ("A la Sorbooooooooonne!" cried the leaders), left on the rue des Ecoles, right on Boulevard St Michel-- and here things got out of hand.  Half of the marchers took off leftward on the Blvd St Germain, walking right into traffic, between the cars, who stopped in their tracks and began honking to show their support for the demonstrators.  The other half stayed on Blvd St Michel, where the demonstration ended about a half hour later. 

For a summary of the issues in English, see The Guardian.