De l’écrivain qui s’engage à l’écrivain qui se souvient. Ou la littérature française face à l’Histoire au tournant des années 1960

Abstract

This paper describes the transformations which, in the course of the 1960s, affect the relationships between French literature and History. It first analyzes the main types of commitment caused by the historic crises of the Algerian War and May 68, as well as the weakening of the prestige of the « man of letters » and of the powers of the fiction they reveal. The author distinguishes four main literary possibles that are then available to the writer for recording in writing his relationship to the world: the committed literature of Sartre, the aesthetic purism of the Nouveau Roman, the avant-gardism of Tel Quel and, finally, the « romanesque lazaréen », theorized by Jean Cayrol and embodied by Robert Antelme’s exemplary work. This last literary possible, although discreet, would have a major influence on the new literature that emerged in the 1960s and in particular that of Georges Perec: trying to get rid of the models of the committed literature as well as of the avant-garde, without returning to the aesthetic purism, the novel of Perec builds its relationship to reality on the work of memory and so defines for the writer a new form of implication in the world and of responsibility before History.