Reflections on Literature in Contemporary France

A FEW WORDS, at the outset, to clarify my topic. Reflections on literature rather than or criticism: for I would like to limit myself to the conception of literature, its implications and consequences, as they emerge from the writings of a few authors. In so doing, I leave aside two other types of discourse equally related to literature. On the one hand, that of the critic, for I do not intend to present a survey of the critical studies published in the last thirty years and bearing upon specific texts. Neither, on the other hand, am I concerned with methodological discourse, however important the latter may become at certain moments in history-with the type of discourse, in other words, which bears upon literary studies rather than literature. If the word France in my title requires no comment, such is not the case with its determinant, contemporary. It is not enough to say that I will deal only with those authors who began writing after 1945. For the authors whom I have chosen to discuss are contemporary in two distinct senses of that word: chronologically, to be sure, but ideologically as well. Chronological objectivity is misleading, for at any given point in time, fragments of the past and future can be seen to coexist with the present. In order to clarify this more difficult meaning of the word contemporary, I am forced to review briefly the ideological context of the postwar years, so that I may then show how the various individual positions which seem to me to characterize most clearly our own present thinking are related to this ideological context. The latter can be identified on two superimposed levels, one global and general, the other immediate. The global context of the postwar years, in the area of aesthetics and literature, is that of Romanticism. Based on the ideas of equality and individual freedom, Romantic ideology is indirectly related to the advent of the bourgeoisie. Romantic aesthetics can be summarized in the following five points: (1) preference is given to the process of creation at the expense of the final product; (2) utilitarian and external functions are rejected, and art becomes defined in terms of the intransitivity of its material (poetry, for instance, is language valued for its own sake); (3) the

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