Tragedy and Celebration: The Novel in 2015

Abstract

THE FRENCH REVIEW, Vol. 90, No. 1, October 2016 Printed in U.S.A. Tragedy and Celebration: the Novel in 2015 by William Cloonan 2015 was an awful year for France. It began with the terrorist killings at Charlie Hebdo and l’Hyper Cacher (7–9 January) and ended with the mass murders of 13 November. In the middle and at the end the Extrême droite progressed in polls and elections, the level of chômage just barely declined, and more than the usual amount of malaise seemed to infiltrate French life. It was a time which made Yeats’s lines in“The Second Coming”—“The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity”—seem like a simple truth statement. While it would have been a gross exaggeration to describe the French as living in fear, one could certainly say that the country was in shock, numb. The literature of 2016 will certainly begin the process of digesting and reflecting the events of this annus horribilis, but the novel in 2015 appears largely untouched by the wanton brutality and political stalemate which characterized the year. What stands out in the fiction of 2015 is a more celebratory element, specifically the celebration of the centenary of the birth of Roland Barthes. As Tiphaine Samoyault’s Roland Barthes chronicles in vivid detail, Barthes is something of an anomaly in the history of French letters. Born in 1915, he was a gifted, albeit sickly student whose recurring bouts with tuberculosis prevented his taking the examination for l’École normale supérieure, one of the major pathways to academic success. His illness also handicapped his efforts to pursue a doctorate. Nevertheless, this man sorely lacking in the educational baggage considered essential in the profession, managed to advance in the academic hierarchy, avoid the many potential pitfalls, and eventually achieve the ultimate recognition, a professorship at the Collège de France. Barthes was a talented essayist who aspired to be a novelist,a gay man at once discrete and overt,a Marxist who largely shunned political activism, an inspired teacher who did not enjoy reading his students’ papers, and a friend and colleague to the leading intellectuals of his era. By all accounts he was a kind and gentle man who managed to hold his own in intellectual discussions and amid the academic infighting surrounding him. Two accounts of Barthes, written by former students and published this year, clearly stand out. Chantal Thomas’s Pour Roland Barthes is the less personal of the two. It deals with Barthes’s lifelong love affair, often tempestuous, with language. 43 For Thomas language was certainly his primary tool, but it is also an important, if implicit theme in all his writings. Antoine Compagnon’s L’âge des lettres is more personal since in addition to being Barthes’s student, he collaborated with him on several projects. While Compagnon’s affection for his friend is deep, it does not cause him to lose his critical perspective. In a narrative Compagnon qualifies as“plus ou moins sincère” (129), he expresses his displeasure with Sur Racine (1963), and is hardly unqualified in his praise of other works by his former teacher. His respect for Barthes is such that it is in no way diminished by an occasional difference of opinion. Sur Racine has had a curious afterlife in 2015. In this controversial work, Barthes proposed that in Bérénice Titus never really loved Bérénice, or at least not as much as he loved gloire. Nathalie Azoulai’s novel, Titus n’aimait pas Bérénice provides belated support to Barthes’s contention. It is the story of a woman jilted by a man for allegedly exalted reasons that she does not accept. She finds echoes and consolation in the seventeenth-century dramatist’s work, and eventually solace in speculating how a writer from so long ago with such different values, could nonetheless express so forcefully her feelings of loss and betrayal. After being shortlisted for the Prix Goncourt, Titus n’aimait pas Bérénice was awarded the Médicis. The Goncourt went to Mathias Énard’s Boussole. At the center of...