MARC FUMAROLI
AND
PHILIPPE SOLLERS
71
increasingly dominated this country? It had a prestigious name, a real
adversary in the most noble sense of the word, a philosopher who knew
that
Ii
terature could be played for high stakes: Sartre. Sartre was involved
in all areas, including the literary. From a certain perspective he was a
Flaubert, from another a Mallarme or a Baudelaire. It's not by chance that
Sartre intervened at these precise points, with these authors who had been
so important at the end of the nineteenth century. On the other hand there
was a f100d of realisms - socialist or not - that is, a f100d of amorphous
literature meant to "ref1ect." It was, remember, an argument of the time.
It was almost scandalous to point out that literature was made from lan–
guage - it won't be long before we have to start that again. At the moment
we are surrounded by ideology. The term "ideology" should not be
reserved for the supposedly triumphant structuralism. Literature was
already mid-crisis before those criminals named Barthes, Foucault, Lacan,
Derrida, and so on appeared. This destruction is related to the compro–
mising, in the drama of World War
II,
of literary elite with this or that
totalitarian capital - whether Berlin or Moscow.
So there was this movement in which I fully participated and do not
now renounce. We did oppose this powerful dominant ideology rather
severely, if not as terrorists, and recalled some elementary things, to wit
that literature is not made primarily of ideas or descriptions, but, first and
foremost, of words.
LE DEBAT: You cannot deny that these assertions were themselves directly
connected with the dominant Marxism.
ps:
It later became an ideology that invaded the university.
LE
DEBAT: A poli tical ideology. Mao Tse Tung does not lend himself well
as Mallarme's natural counterpart.
MF:
And the Cultural Revolution? There has rarely been anything as
horrible in man's history.
PS:
Precisely because the linking of Mallarme and Mao was so little evi–
dent, we are still talking about it.
MF:
Speaking of Mallarme, since he has been mentioned a second time, let
me point out something that is not without relevance to these disasters.
The "Renaissance" of 1910-1912 which gave French letters such momen–
tum until 1940 came about against, rather than with, Mallarme. Fortunately
Mallarme was a challenge, not a program. In Claudel, in Valery, in the first
issue of the
Nouvelle Revue Franraise,
there is a richness, a reappropriation of
tradition that Mallarme's gnosticism would not allow. French literature
knew how to be modern without being modernist. The same goes for
