belles lettres

Among the English-speaking peoples, at least, it would seem that the French novel ranks a distant fifth beneath the Russian, English, American and German novel, in importance if not in reach and scope. While I disagree wholeheartedly with such an assumption, I do understand why some may claim this to be the case. The French novel is often less showy, more economical, more inclined to calm understatement, than the above traditions. While Russian novels strain under the weight of their national soul and multi-layered characters; the English novel peppers itself with verisimilitude and broad sweeps of language; the American novel bursts off the page with barely-controlled enthusiasm at the prospect of tackling the psyche of an entire nation within its pages; and the German novel ponderously delivers nothing more nor less than inquiries into the ideas and passions of world thought (these are all gross oversimplifications, of course), the French novel tends to examine, with great delicacy and thought, the inner workings and personality shifts of the individual human being, in all our contradictions and imperfections. It would be sloppy to characterise these works as novels of "ideas", but there is a grain of truth to that - if by "ideas" we mean the building blocks of the human condition.

I was reminded of this tendency in French literature after quickly plowing through Benjamin Constant's 1816 novel Adolphe yesterday (well, and a little this morning - last night's call for lights out came a few chapters before book's end). At 125 pages, 34 of which are taken up with introductions and prefaces, reading Adolphe in one sitting is hardly a feat of endurance - Thomas Mann's Josef and his Brothers has longer digressions than the whole of this book. And yet this "miniature masterpiece," as translator Leonard Tancock describes it, is as devoted to detail and explication as any number of larger volumes. Adolphe is the story of a spoiled and moody young man who sets about conquering a beautiful, intelligent and older woman, only to find himself dissatisfied when she returns his love. What sounds in synopsis to be mere soap opera melodrama is transformed into a stunning investigation into Adolphe's mind as he teeters back and forth between raging passion and callous indifference. For 1816, it's far ahead of its time, and may be viewed as a distant yet nearly fully-formed predecessor of the psychological novel. Comparing Adolphe to other works of literature released at or about the same time - the Romantic poetry of Wordsworth and Shelley, Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther, the adventurism of Sir Walter Scott, or the novels of Jane Austin - showcase the work's individuality. The close biographical similarities between the novel and the life of Benjamin Constant himself (including, most obviously, his tumultuous love affair with the older Madame de Stael) do nothing to damage the artistic qualities of the novel, and indeed only heighten the work's effectiveness.

After reading Adolphe, I'm reminded of the fact that many of my favorite novels are French in origin. Leaving aside the matter of Proust (recent subject of a blog post of mine), I'm thinking specifically of Alain-Fournier's Le Grand Meaulnes (1912) and J.-K. Huysmans' A Rebours (1884). Both are barely 200 pages in length, and both deal primarily with the inner workings of two specific individuals. After that, the similarities end. Le Grand Meaulnes, the only novel by Alain-Fournier, who was killed in action at the age of 27 on the Meuse in 1914, is a mysterious and deeply moving account of a lost love during youth, but the novel is really more of an appreciation of the mental states of childhood, of how memories shift over time, and of the hauntingly magical state of youthful exploration. The novel shimmers like a mirage, and ends with as deeply moving a succession of events (or non-events) as I've found in all of world literature. The fact that it's known by so few is tragic (it's been variously translated into English as The Wanderer, The Lost Domain or The Lost Estate; "Good Old Meaulnes," especially given the Meaulnes - Moan unintentional rhyme, has been deemed unacceptable).

Huysmans' A Rebours (Against Nature or Against the Grain) is an amusing and at times disturbing chronicle of the decadent Jean des Esseintes, who walls himself off from society to create an artificial world of pure aestheticism. A defiant move away from the dominant school of Naturalism towards an as-yet undefined sensibility that vacillated between Decadence and Symbolism, nearly nothing happens inside the pages of A Rebours. Des Esseintes decides to take a trip to London, but after overhearing two Englishmen in conversation decides he's plumbed the depths of English culture and turns around. He sets gemstones into the shell of a pet tortoise. He tries to invent his own line of perfume. He works at creating real flowers that look fake. There's much more.

So, in just over 500 pages, three French authors from a 100-year-span offer as sturdy a defense of the supremacy of French literature as any other. It's foolish to compare world literary traditions, but that's what we do. It's hard to dispute the mastery of George Elliot or Ivan Turgenev, but when it comes to psychological explorations....Vive la France!