La Vie derrière soi: fins de la littérature by Antoine Compagnon

Abstract

Reviewed by: La Vie derrière soi: fins de la littérature by Antoine Compagnon Ian Ellison La Vie derrière soi: fins de la littérature. By Antoine Compagnon. Paris: Éditions des Équateurs. 2021. 384 pp. €23. ISBN 978–2–382–84184–6. In Proust's La Prisonnière, as the narrator's favourite author Bergotte approaches the end of his life, he is perturbed to have no recollection of a brilliantly painted yellow wall in Vermeer's View of Delft that has been highly praised by an art critic. Spurning his doctors' advice to remain in bed, Bergotte insists upon seeing the painting once more and, as he gazes at the canvas, he remarks, 'c'est ainsi que j'aurais dû écrire' before collapsing. How does a writing life come to a close? With his retirement in sight and still deeply affected by the recent death of a close friend, this question plagued Antoine Compagnon in his final year of teaching at the Collège de France, in 2020. It subsequently provides the impetus for his final series of lectures, handsomely published a year later as a beautifully illustrated collection of thirteen essays under the title La Vie derrière soi: fins de la littérature. Literature, Compagnon declares, has an essential link with melancholy, mourning, and death. Indeed, paraphrasing and inverting Montaigne, Compagnon remarks towards the beginning of this collection that in what follows it is less the case that 'la mort n'est pas le but mais le bout de la vie', but rather that 'la fin n'est pas le bout mais le but de la littérature' (p. 7). This is not new territory for Compagnon (moreover, his essais could be conceived of as an hommage to Roland Barthes's provocation in his own final lecture series at the Collège de France that 'je pourrais décider de ne plus écrire', p. 19). Nor is it particularly ground-breaking as a point of departure. Yet these lectures do shed new light on the well-tilled fields of lateness and late style. Across the vastness of European culture it is not necessarily the case that, as Compagnon claims, the late works of writers have aroused less curiosity than the old-age style of painters and musicians, who may be more clearly afflicted by the failures of their body, hand, eye, or ear (in his second essay Compagnon recalls Gian Lorenzo Bernini's waspish pronouncement upon observing Nicolas Poussin's last paintings in Paris in 1665 that 'People should stop working at a certain age; for [End Page 238] all men end up declining', p. 50). Nevertheless, it is true that the notions of Spätstil and Altersstil are typically exemplified and theorized with far greater frequency in the Germanic—and, latterly, Anglophone—sphere than in the field of French letters: Shakespeare, Goethe, Beethoven, and Rembrandt are notably invoked, for example, by Adorno, Benn, Broch, and Neumann. It is also, overwhelmingly, a man's game. While Compagnon's essays still focus predominantly on male canonical writers and the theoretical scaffolding of the book is notably Anglo-German, his application of the discourse of late style to French writers is illuminating. In his fifth essay, for instance, Compagnon draws on the work of Georg Simmel to clarify 'pourquoi il n'y a pas ou peu d'artistes français dans le canon habituel des stylistes tardives' (p. 110). Pointing to Victor Hugo in the 1830s and Rimbaud in the 1870s, he observes how many French writers remain youthful in cultural memory: 'Conformément au mythe de la revolution politique et esthétique, ce sont en France des jeunes rebelles qui font l'art en mettant à bas les idoles' (p. 110). Perhaps unsurprisingly, the French Revolution is the elephant in the room that does not forget: if ageing and late style connote a certain bourgeois conservatism, it is worth remembering that 'En France, depuis le romantisme, le bourgeois est un salaud; en Allemagne, il est un héros' (p. 110). La Vie derrière soi runs the gamut of canonical Western European literature, is pithily and personably written, and is a pleasure to read. It...