MARC FUMAROLI
AND
PHILIPPE SOLLERS
67
The notion of a stake in power, much loved by an entire school of sociol–
ogy, dissolves the boundary between
Ii
terature (the daughter of rhetoric)
and ideology.
In
my view, ideology arises from an abusive credibility that
invokes scientific rationality and applies it where it doesn't belong.
In
this
scenario, reason may be the worst enemy of Pascal's "intuitive mind."
In
Les Provinciales,
he does not join the categorical theologians. He is elegant
enough to discuss theological questions in the order and according to the
shades of the credible. He takes as arbiter the common sense of "honest
folk." This is the source of his triumph which today still illuminates Port
Royal.
In
politics and history - areas that depend entirely on credibility–
Lenin and his kind cut themselves off entirely from the scientists and set
loose a reign of terror.
PS:
What you're defining is the modern form of ideology, which I feel
should be seen as much more comprehensive.
But let me get back to Mallarme and his Tuesday audiences. They
were all deeply influenced by what they perceived as essential in the new
property of condensation which Mallarme applies to language. But it
would be quite a while before this sense of rupture brought about some–
thing resembling a new classicism - which is exactly what
La
Nouvelle
Revue Franraise
was. There we are then, at the end of
th.!'
nineteenth cen–
tury, in a kind of parenthetical state of expectation. French literature will
enjoy a reflowering twenty, thirty, forty years later thanks to several wide–
ly unknown seeds: along with Rimbaud and Mallarme, consider Lautreamont
and the rhetorical force of the
Chants de Maldoror
and his
Poesies,
which
becomes apparent only with the Surrealists and, even then, is usually mis–
understood . I find this rupture more striking than the idealized continuity
which you believe you see there.
In
the late 1800s, society was in a state of
complete exhaustion and literary decadence much like the one you diag–
nose today. History has known such uneventful periods.
Like you, I believe that the period leading up to World War II, on the
other hand, is marked by a forceful literary presence in all areas. You men–
tioned Celine. Look at what is taking place now. What CeJine wrote after
World War II isjust barely reaching us today. Like it or not, everyone real–
izes that his work constitutes a major monument for the French language,
its resources and dimensions.
In
his work one finds, highly refined, Villon
as well as Saint-Simon. Celine is considered an exploder oflanguage, writ–
ing in a constant scream. Open the magnificent edition of the fourth
Pleiade
volume edited by Henri Godard, and you will be struck by the
number of references to rhetoric and the classics. For example, in the mid–
dle of a long digression on the fact that nature is shi t, that our organs
devour our lives, that we permanently suffer from cancer, amidst this long
