French Literature Since 1940
CLAUDE-EDMONDE MAGNY
I
T IS
now some ten years that French literature has been suffering from
a guilty conscience. But the state of "distraction" in which we had been
living until the outbreak of the war spared us too harsh a realization
of
this fact. Political copcerns had usurped every moment of our attention
and the unceasing importation of foreign literature prevented us from
seeing ourselves in our own light. But for the past four years France has
had to live on itself and the tendencies toward militarism and despair
which had hitherto been latent have obsessed its writers. In the same
way that an epidemic, developing in a stable environment such as an
island, declines and dies out completely once the germs have multiplied
to their maximum, so the sickness we suffered from, no longer sustained
by infusions of fresh blood from abroad, seems on the way to being
cured after having passed through a crisis marked by the appearance of
several works concerned with nothingness and despair. One sign of this
is Jean-Paul Sartre's
L'Etre et le Neant-perhaps
the only book that
does not lead its author down a blind alley and condemn him to silence,
and the only one, in addition, that opens up new roads to thought and
literature.
It is immediately obvious that all the important works that have
come out in these last four years-aside from poetry, which would need
a separate study to be dealt with in its entirety-can
be
easily reduced
to
a certain unity. This unity has so little of the arbitrary about it that
works of literature containing nothing explicitly philosophic-the novel–
istic efforts of Raymond Queneau and Elsa Triolet, for example, or the
poetry of Francis Ponge-can be best understood when related to the
common tendency of the literature of this period-a tendency that is
more directly expressed by certain half-intellectual and half-emotional
essays.
It is significant that the most representative works published since
the
armistice are not so much novels as books in a rather new genre,
half-way between abstract thought and literature. These books sometimes
belong to literary criticism, as in the case of
Les Fleurs de Tarbes
by
Jean Paulhan and
Faux Pas
by Maurice Blanchot, sometimes to political
philosophy-but most often they are what Pascal called "impassioned
