La littérature saisie par l'histoire

Abstract

Literature in the grip of history The present article is not a study of the "Nouveau Roman", but rather a reflection on the conditions necessary for the break in French esthetics in the late 1950s. The new avenues opened up by the history of publishing and a sociological approach concerned with the production of symbolic goods authorize a rethinking of publishers' choices, which ensured the promotion of this literary movement. The Nouveau Roman has become inseparable from the Editions de Minuit. But this was not a forgone conclusion : the Editions du Seuil, who published Jean Cayrol, the first theoretician of the "Lazarist novel" (i.e. literature of redemption through suffering), should have been the logical ones to promote this avant-garde movement. Initially, unwilling to shoulder the costs of an avant-garde editorial strategy, Le Seuil, via Roland Barthes, helped the Editions de Minuit launch a new esthetic of the novel : Alain Robbe-Grillet became Jean Cayrol's natural successor. This aberrant succession - due to the recent past, the war (Cayrol had fought in the Resistance and been deported ; Robbe-Grillet, a follower of Marshal Petain, had done his stint at volunteer labor in Germany) -was made possible by the Editions de Minuit. How is it imaginable that one of the most public authors, the de facto if not official literary director of the publishing house born of the Resistance, could be "on the other side". From this standpoint it is not so much at the thematic level that one needs to think the all-important relationship between the Nouveau Roman and the War but at the level of its writing and its place of publication. The second crucial repercussion the Editions de Minuit had on the Nouveau Roman's accession to avant-garde status was their stand against the war in Algeria. For the break with current esthetics embodied by the Nouveau Roman to appear, Minuit had to come into conflict with the master of the hour, Jean-Paul Sartre and the dominant literary trend of the moment : "litterature engagée". By publishing subversive texts on the Algerian war at the same time as it was bringing out "pure literature", the Nouveau Roman, the Editions de Minuit managed to dissociate literature and politics. Their political commitment reminiscent of the "Dreyfus Affair" together with their disqualification of "engaged literature" helped bolster intellectuals' break with the Communist Party, but it also bore the seeds of another radical change : since Emile Zola, the intellectual had been inseparable from the man of letters ; with the writer dethroned, who was now going to embody the figure of the intellectual?