MARC FUMAROLI
AND
PHILIPPE SOLLERS
75
ancient solidarity of genres and disciplines within one literature in France.
In order for this solidarity to arise again, as it perhaps is doing now, we
should rather turn our backs on that element of the sixties that so fasci–
nated American "French departments." The guerilla alliance you find
regrettable played French literature's academic audience off against its tra–
ditional audience. It did not reunite but rather divided around a jargon
that had its success and its innocent converts, but it is now on the way out.
We see it today. "Interdisciplinarity" or "multidisciplinarity" (horrible,
Attila-the-Hun type terms) are all that remains when everything possible
has been done to forget and make others forget general culture - which
can only be a literary culture. Bergson can enter into a dialogue with
Peguy or Proust, within the framework of literature in the widest sense of
itself. What we need now in this country, rather than nostalgia for the rul–
ing interdisciplinarity of the 1960s, is a return of literature to its own
means and its natural role, which is to offer to all kinds of talents and dis–
ciplines, in its love of language, a common ground and a common public.
Translated from the French
by
Tess Lewis
New from
Guy
Davenport
An
extraordinary collage of
ideas, conrrnrrentary,
and criticism
"Davenport is among the very few truly
original, truly autonomous voices now
audible in American letters."
George Steiner,
The New Yorker
"\\Those work will still be read in the next
hundred years? Guy Davenport, for one."
John Gardner
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