VARIETY
THE AVANT-GARDE IN
FRENCH FICTION
The need for an avant-garde
has always been felt in France.
For the past fifty years, however,
there have been singular changes
in its character. Before 1914 the
avant-garde led a hard life. By its
very nature it was unrecognized
by the public.
It
could be com–
posed of rich men or poor, ad–
venturers like Rimbaud, bourgeois
like Gide or important govern–
ment officials like Claudel-but
the fact remained that these
people, in the field of their ar–
tistic activities, did indeed form
a vanguard neglected or despised
by a public which in those days
was faithfully wedded to academic
values.
Immediately after the First
World War, everything changed.
Since most Frenchmen, at bottom,
were no longer entirely in agree–
ment with the social framework
in which they lived-even if they
profited from it-they acquired a
taste for revolt without danger.
And this revolt they found in the
arts. Those were the days when
the Cubists made their fortune,
Picasso became the most fashion–
able of painters and the Surreal–
ists themselves saw their methods
and principles vulgarized, so to
speak, by the profiteers of rebel-
467
lion. Jean Cocteau was the most
famous of these intermediaries. In
1920, the vanguard was at the
Boeuf sur Ie Toit, when it was
not in the salons. The result has
been that, ever since, there has
been a certain amount of hurrying
and pushing to belong to the
avant-garde, and everyone ends by
having his own. Certain of these
groups mark the convergence of
different, even opposed, milieux.
For one kind of public, the
avant-garde is made up essentially
of young people. And it ends by
assuming that every young artist
is necessarily part of the move–
ment. The Minou Drouet affair
having misfired, we are left with
Franc;oise Sagan and Roger Va–
dim.
If
one is to believe weeklies
such as
Arts
(rightwing) and
L'Express
(leftwing), Franc;oise
Sagan and Roger Vadim,-as wit–
ness their collaboration in creating
the ballet
R en,dez-lv'ouS manque–
now constitute the liveliest core of
the 1958 avant-garde. This, on re–
flection, is rather surprising, since
each of these young people in his
own field-literature and cinema
-seems to have been content to
follow an extremely well-travelled
road.
It
is hard to see what dis–
coveries or revolutions they bring
us. 'On the other hand, if
Arts
and
L'Express
are right-and they
were joined by the Communist
weekly
L es Lettres Franfaises,
when Sagan and Vadim explained
in its columns that their ballet had
failed because it constituted an at-
