MARC FUMAROLI
ANI)
PHILIPPE SOLLEI"tS
65
ature and those who taught it. The two breviaries, Sartre's
Qu'est-ce que fa
fitterature?
and Barthes's
Le
De,Rre zero de f'ecriture,
take a very superior view
of earlier literature, seeing it as an accomplice of alienation, as bourgeois.
But what remains of literature once it has been deprived of its role as
"humanity's jurisprudence," cut off from its past with even the continuity
of its language disrupted? I will leave it to Philippe Sollers to bear wit–
ness to this period which he knew from the inside, while I looked on from
a distance wi th a sense of loss.
Now the ideologies have lost ground. The humanities have lost much
of their vanity, and I've been pleased to see an author of Philippe Sollers's
stature become a wri ter once again, reclaiming the classics rather than in–
voking Chomsky. And yet, astonishingly, far from regaining its central and
vital role, literature finds itself defenseless before what others call "the age
of emptiness": the utter victory of consumer society, its vast surfaces and
high-tech spectacles.
In truth, what I call the ideological period of our postwar literature
cruelly weakened its immune system against dangers that were already
evident. Literature let itself be devoured by film and advertisement. It lost
entire aspects that were once part of its living and eloquent being: the joy
of expression, the art of persuading both the spirit and the heart, the art of
narrative, descri ption, characters - everything, in short, that made it an
ancient yet perennially youthful, multifaceted, magical mirror reflecting
the human world. Our postwar literature even let itself be robbed of the
common imaginative fund that writers of all genres could happily share
with ordinary readers: the myths, the dreams, the universals of the imagi–
nary which Vico discusses.
Must we invoke the second law of thermodynamics and apply it to
literary language in France? The energy has dissipated in heat; extension (the
number of books published) has conquered comprehension. But this would
be giving in to fatalism or searching for an alibi. Unfortunate circumstances
sometimes hide opportunities. It seems to me that literature has suffered as
much from internal blows as from the external threats of scale and the mass
market. Literature has suffered from its belief that by outrageously modern–
izing its own techniques, it would fare better amidst the decor of technical
modernity. And heavy traces from the ideological period remain in the
teaching of
Ii
terature, wi th its jargon and presumption of being scientific.
The fundamental recovery of literature must begin in the schools.
PHILIPPE
SOLLERS:
Let's return to the end of the nineteenth century.
Wasn't there a similar sense of emptiness, of exhaustion? When we realize
that it was not until 1912 that Claudel wrote about Rimbaud, whose
Illuminations
had created a stir in 1886 and converted Claudel, and that
