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European Francophonie: The Social, Political and Cultural History of an International Prestige Language ed. by Vladislav Rjéoutski, Gesine Argent, and Derek Offord (review)

By any standards, Bernard Pingaud qualifies as both a witness to and participant in the literary and intellectual history of France since the 1940s. This volume, which presents selected critical texts and reviews from a forty-year period up to the mid-1990s, along with an entirely new Précis, testifies to a sustained appetite for theoretically informed reflection on the question of literature, one exceptionally grounded in a creative literary practice. The author’s position is a productively complex one — as the dual recurrent references of Sartre and Robbe-Grillet suggest. Politically and ethically informed by his proximity to Sartre, the aesthetic challenge of the nouveau roman (personified to a lesser extent here by Butor and Sarraute) is also clearly significant for the framing of Pingaud’s critical interests as they unfold through the 1950s and 1960s. His perceptive readings of an early Sollers novel, Le Parc (Paris: Seuil, 1961), or of Perec’s Un homme qui dort (Paris: Denoel, 1967), among many other possible examples, illustrate a critical sureness of hand and a resistance to modish language that justifies their republication five decades on. Cumulatively, the critical journalism of the ‘honnête courtier’ (a self-description Pingaud takes from Blanchot, another abiding reference here) points to a reader acutely attentive to the links between the lived experience of text-making and the political and social condition of the contemporary thinking subject. It is this inclusive breadth of focus that informs the opening Précis also, a text Pingaud presents as the belated engagement of a semi-outsider with a field of reflection that has, in his view, ceased to interest literary authors directly: ‘Aujourd’hui, du côté des auteurs, il semble que la littérature ait cessé de poser un problème ou, si elle en pose un, qu’il ne soit pas nécessaire de s’attarder sur lui, on le résoudra en écrivant’ (p. 12). In some pragmatic sympathy with this perspective, Pingaud’s own analyses are particularly attentive to the complexities of the writing process — literature (above all, but not exclusively, the novel) becomes a theoretical object as the result of a set of practical problems faced by the writer. Pingaud’s terminological distinction between the ‘écriveur’ and the ‘écrivain’ — the latter that element of the practitioner who executes the ‘coup de force’ of finishing the literary work, the publishable texte that will later support the final avatar in his trinity (the ‘auteur’) — provides a very helpful way of framing the stages of literary practice, but also of thinking the complexity of modern literary individuation. His deceptively modest dissenting engagements with figures and œuvres as prominent as Barthes and Bourdieu — all the more powerful for their quality of experienced understatement — reaffirm both a practicality of theoretical reflection and a deep sense of literature’s specific importance as signifying practice. The Précis ends with an unsentimental assessment of the future of the book and of reading, which Pingaud uses to extend the pertinence of categories developed in respect of a pre-digital literature. Elegantly and accessibly written, intellectually robust and without dogmatism, this opening section of the volume would happily justify its own poche edition.