Nizan, Drieu, and the Question of Death

Abstract

IT I S P E R H A P S A M I S TA K E, when considering French literary practice of the 1930s and 1940s, simply to separate politically committed romans a these from seemingly apolitical or antipolitical avant-garde experimentation. Traditionally, of course, such a neat distinction is usually made; the rise of socialist realism in Communist literature-a kind of ossified nineteenth-century naturalism in the service of Stalinist dogma-has often been seen as a terrible betrayal of the invigorating formal adventure that dated back at least to Baudelaire. And it goes without saying that right-wing romans a these can be seen as equally reactionary in their form, and at the same time politically reactionary in their content. But when we look closer at some of the romans d these of this period we are a bit surprised to find their authors grappling with many of the same problems that avant-garde writing in general (and prose in particular) was coming to face. After the euphoria of the late teens and early twenties, writers within, and at the edges of, the surrealist camp were questioning the role of collective exaltation, sacrificial violence, and madness in society and politics. It was not enough to glorify Sade or the Papin sisters and posit a purely fantasmatic gratuitous act; the order of the day was now to consider violence and ecstasy in society and in political formations. Perhaps Andre Breton's Nadja posed this problem already in the twenties, but it was in the thirties that it really came to the fore: one thinks of works like Antonin Artaud's He'liogabale, Louis-Ferdinand Celine's Voyage au bout de la nuit (Journey to the End of the Night), Michel Leiris's L'Age d'homme (Manhood), Georges Bataille's Le Bleu du ciel (Blue of Noon), the investigations of the College de sociologie, as well as the strange mixture of naturalism and late surrealism in jean-Paul Sartre's La Nausee. The interest in Freudian psychoanalysis and the exploration of the unconscious gave way, in part, to an interest in French anthropology and sociology: what role does madness or ecstasy play in society; how can ritualized murder (sacrifice) be seen as liberating; how can the collective frenzy of crowdsseen first at fascist rallies-reinvigorate a society that offers nothing but alienation