Egalitarian Strangeness: On Class Disturbance and Levelling in Modern and Contemporary French Narrative

Abstract

The adjective egalitarian evokes movements and institutions that are governed by a principle of virtuous uniformity. Egalitarianism is typically grounded in the belief that all individuals should have access to the same rights, opportunities, and resources.In his new study of class disturbance and leveling in modern and contemporary French narrative, Edward J. Hughes draws on the philosophy of Jacques Rancière to problematize that conceptual framework and develop a variegated account of how a commitment to equality can function in a world defined by inequality. The titular motif of “egalitarian strangeness” (13)—a direct borrowing from Rancière—refers to an ethical and aesthetic outlook that has the potential to disturb and level entrenched systems of inegalitarian socioeconomic organization. Central to that vision is an emphasis on the emancipatory power of spontaneity and improvisation. For Rancière, autonomous individual struggles to break free of social determination represent a vital means of resisting regimes of inequality that can seem impervious to broader social contestation; and the essence of equality resides in difference and singularity, or what he calls “non-aggregation,” rather than class-based homogeneity.Building on Rancière’s analyses of art and culture as potential sources of liberation, Hughes applies that theoretical model to a wide range of narrative works spanning the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries. His book’s ten chronologically varied chapters include discussions of canonical authors such as Charles Péguy, Simone Weil, and Marcel Proust, of recent works of politically charged fiction by Thierry Beinstingel, Marie NDiaye, and François Bon, and of the nineteenth-century “worker-philosopher” (91) Louis Gabriel Gauny, whose writings were rediscovered by Rancière. Even Philip Roth makes an appearance as Hughes draws an illuminating parallel between his depictions of glove production in postwar Newark in American Pastoral (1997) and the dexterity with which Françoise, the hero’s housekeeper in Proust’s Recherche (1913–27), expresses herself through material objects.Such eclecticism resembles Rancière’s account of his own method of working during the 1970s by, in Hughes’s paraphrase, “throwing together . . . seemingly contrasting contexts” (211). Like Rancière’s work, the resulting argumentation is sinuous and does not readily lend itself to tidy summarization.Two crisscrossing guiding threads nonetheless stand out in Hughes’s book. The first, drawn from Le Maître ignorant (1987), Rancière’s study of Joseph Jacotot’s experimental pedagogy, involves eliding the opposition between manual labor and the work of language. That perspective informs Hughes’s astute comparative reading of Péguy, Beinstingel, and NDiaye, who are drawn together here by their shared investment in physical and verbal toil as sites of resistance to capitalist modernity. The second consists of examining how narrative portrayals of seemingly impregnable hierarchies may disrupt those divisions. For example, Hughes offers a nimble analysis of leveling in Proust’s Recherche, where both linguistic ability and addiction to cliché are traits that reoccur across all social classes.Looming over Egalitarian Strangeness is Rancière’s quarrel with the highly deterministic account of inequality propounded by Pierre Bourdieu, whose acolyte Didier Eribon is central to the final chapter. Hughes provides a stimulating overview of that at-times vituperative antagonism. He might, however, have made more of the way Eribon’s trajectory from poverty to academic and literary distinction seems to belie his own arguments about the iron grip of social determination.The book’s vision of disruption and improvisation as sources of egalitarian energy invites parallels with current political developments. Loosely organized, nonhierarchical, and spontaneous movements such as Black Lives Matter, Extinction Rebellion, and the gilets jaunes exhibit many of the features of organic political activism championed by Rancière. Their intermittent ability to dominate media coverage attests to their disruptive power. And yet their distance from actual political power justifies Hughes’s theoretical caution in emphasizing the mitigating rather than transformative impact of an approach to inequality grounded in “egalitarian strangeness.” For, like the artistic interventions analyzed in his book, such outbursts of revolt make occasional dents in the structures of inequality without truly leveling them.