Claire White

Introduction: Literature and Labour

The Introduction describes the conceptual and historical issues that frame the book’s investigation into the relationship between labour and literature in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain and France. It considers what might be gained from this specifically cross-cultural approach, as well as how the respective contexts of British and French politics, culture, and industry inflect the book’s central questions. This wide-ranging discussion takes in key theoretical and critical reference points, as it explores the economic, political, ethical, and personal ambitions and anxieties that underpinned the association of literature and labour in this period.

Epilogue: Work Ethics, Past and Present

Since the near collapse of the Western financial system in 2008, and the subsequent nationalization of failed banks, an awareness has grown that the speculative activities of the City of London and Wall Street are not ‘private’ at all, but effectively underwritten by the state. This, in turn, has fostered new interest in the relationship between private goods and public benefits, and in the nature of transactions—or forms of work—previously supposed invisible. The ‘credit crunch’ that precipitated Britain’s ‘lost decade’ had causes distinct from those that led to recession in France and the much of the Eurozone. But the ‘austerity’ policies enacted to contain these different crises have involved a similar calculus, one that pits supposedly productive activities against social and cultural programmes deemed expendable. Difficult decisions, in both cases, have re-opened questions of definition and value.

George Sand, Digging

In the final part of her autobiography Histoire de ma vie [Story of my Life] (1854–55), George Sand provided a surprising take on her own career trajectory: she would, she claimed, rather have been a digger than a writer. This chapter takes as its point of departure Sand’s fleeting fantasy of a life of hard labour with a view to re-examining her reflections on the legitimacy and ethics of the writer’s vocation. Sand’s dream of class solidarity, achieved through shared physical work, is read alongside her defence of the worker-poet. The latter’s radical refusal of a prevailing social division of manual and intellectual labour provides, it is argued, a model of transgression that informs Sand’s own account of her work as writer.

Work Avoidance: Idleness and Ideology in Turn-of-the-Century Utopian Fiction

This article explores the political stakes of idleness in a range of turn-of-the-century utopian novels, all of which engage explicitly with socialist and anarchist discourses: Paul Adams Les Cœurs nouveaux (1896), Emile Zolas Travail (1901), and Jean Graves Terre libre (1908). These works attend, it is argued, to the fate of idleness, and of the idler, in ways which not only bear out very different ideological agendas, but also provide a reflection on the limits of utopian idealism. By the turn of the century, an increase in leisure time had become critical to almost every effort to imagine the future trajectory of working-class emancipation. But the question of just how this abundant free time was to be employed gave rise to much anxious speculation. If calls for the individuals right to leisure were clearly bound up with ideals of edification and aesthetic and moral cultivation, which were both sanitary and salutary, these depended on the worker choosing to spend his or her time ‘well’. Whether at ...

Introduction: Jules Laforgue, ‘un carrefour d’échos’

In a letter to his sister Marie of May 1886, Jules Laforgue wrote that he had a bright future as a writer, partly to reassure her that he would, eventually, have the means to repay money she had loaned him, but also no doubt because he believed in the plaudits of his contemporaries: ‘il n’y a pas un littérateur de ma génération à qui on promette un pareil avenir’ (Laforgue, 1986–2000, II [1995]: 925; hereafter OC). The dramatic irony of this statement is twofold: firstly (and more obviously), he died three months later from tuberculosis having added nothing of note to his corpus due to the debilitating effects of the disease; secondly, his future – taken in the broader sense of the afterlife of his works – was indeed unparalleled, only not in the way that he imagined. For Laforgue was, for much of the twentieth century, the half-forgotten man of French poetry; never quite consigned to total neglect, but never quite emerging to the prominence of his illustrious contemporaries Rimbaud, Verlaine, andMallarmé. Indeed, his death at the age of 27 often seemed to define his reputation as a tragic but minor figure, a writer who was gifted but whose potential was unfulfilled and whose melancholic verse seemed to foretell his early demise. Like Lautréamont and Tristan Corbière, who similarly died young, Laforgue’s works can, as Malcolm Bowie puts it, ‘easily be seen as singularities or erratic blocks stranded on the very edge of the French literary tradition’ (2003: 236). Laforgue’s reputation abroad, however, tells a different story; and his place in international literary history has been far more significant due to his influence on T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. Eliot, who came to Laforgue via Arthur Symons’s The Symbolist Movement in Literature (1899; revised in 1908), famously declared Laforgue to be ‘the first to teach me how to speak, to teach me the poetic possibilities of my own idiom of speech’ (1965: 126). But a focus on this harnessing of Laforgue’s writing to the ends of the Modernist movement in English has tended to obscure an appreciation of the former’s work on its own terms. The French poet has too often come to be known, Laforgue’s English translator laments, ‘as influence first and as poet second’ (Peter Dale, 2001: 9). Put differently, Laforgue’s prominence in our critical narratives of aesthetic modernity has paradoxically tended to reduce the importance of his work to that of a stepping stone from French poetry to English, from Decadence to Modernism, from the nineteenth century to the twentieth. In both this critical picture, and in the biographically-focused one, there is a teleological impulse at work: the former sees the innovative promise of his writing – his dix-neuf, Vol. 20 No. 1, February 2016, 1–8

Laforgue, Beauvoir, and the Second Sex

Simone de Beauvoirs allusions to Jules Laforgue in her founding text of post-war French feminism, Le Deuxième Sexe (1949), are the starting point in this article for reexamining the poets writing on women and relations between the sexes. Laforgues diagnosis of the female condition is coloured by the misogyny at work in Schopenhauer and Hartmanns visions of sexual relations. But he is also at pains to explain how womens circumscribed fate, as lovers and mothers, has been sealed. This article demonstrates the ways in which — across his notes, poetic verse, and prose — Laforgues attention to womans condition is already rooted in many of the concerns, and terms, central to Beauvoirs existentialist account. It suggests that Laforgues reflections on sexual politics are underwritten by more radical ideals than it might appear, not least his call for fraternal relations between the sexes — symbolised by a handshake — which was to capture Beauvoirs imagination.

Naturalism in extremis

In planning his 1888 Le Reve, Zola envisaged a novel that would be distinctly out of character: ‘je voudrais faire un livre qu’on n’attende pas de moi’. The present article explores what is at stake in Zola’s desire to break with his own image at this juncture in the history of naturalism’s reception. While Le Reve can be understood as a demonstration of the author’s aesthetic versatility and experimentation in the aftermath of the ‘Manifeste des Cinq’, it also responds to a more longstanding engagement with the language of idealism. The article focuses on Zola’s harnessing, and critique, of the idealist imagination in Le Reve. It first proposes a psychoanalytical reading of the Zolian heroine’s fantasy life through the lens of Freud’s 1908 ‘Family Romances’. The child’s power to redraw reality through daydream — to enact what Freud terms ‘a correction of actual life’ — is connected, in turn, to the wager that frames Zola’s narrative: that of rendering ‘la vie telle qu’elle n’est pas’. Zola’s experiment with idealism thus involves rehearsing the terms and suspicions at work in his earlier biographical writing on George Sand — the idealist writer Zola had assimilated to the ‘dream’ of the novel’s title.

Naturalism in extremis: Zola’s Le Rêve

In planning his 1888 Le Reve, Zola envisaged a novel that would be distinctly out of character: ‘je voudrais faire un livre qu’on n’attende pas de moi’. The present article explores what is at stake in Zola’s desire to break with his own image at this juncture in the history of naturalism’s reception. While Le Reve can be understood as a demonstration of the author’s aesthetic versatility and experimentation in the aftermath of the ‘Manifeste des Cinq’, it also responds to a more longstanding engagement with the language of idealism. The article focuses on Zola’s harnessing, and critique, of the idealist imagination in Le Reve. It first proposes a psychoanalytical reading of the Zolian heroine’s fantasy life through the lens of Freud’s 1908 ‘Family Romances’. The child’s power to redraw reality through daydream — to enact what Freud terms ‘a correction of actual life’ — is connected, in turn, to the wager that frames Zola’s narrative: that of rendering ‘la vie telle qu’elle n’est pas’. Zola’s experiment with idealism thus involves rehearsing the terms and suspicions at work in his earlier biographical writing on George Sand — the idealist writer Zola had assimilated to the ‘dream’ of the novel’s title.

Dominical Diversions: Laforgue on Sundays

The weekly rhythm of work and leisure in late nineteenth-century France turned around the Sabbath. Invested with moral, religious and familial ideals, Sundays were alternately prized and abhorred in the social and cultural imagination of the fin de siecle, whilst in legal and medical debates they proved divisive in bringing into focus the question of the proper organisation of work, rest and play. What Zola describes in those urban and suburban leisure episodes of Les Rougon-Macquart, discussed in the previous chapter, is more often than not the changing dominical landscape of the Second Empire. For the gradual secularisation of the Sabbath participated in the development of a burgeoning leisure industry, offering the urban bourgeoisie, and increasingly the working classes, ever more entertaining and imaginative ways in which to occupy their weekly day off. Suburban escapades, promenades, cabaret and theatre were the distinctly modern forms of dominical sociability. This chapter begins by tracing various political, cultural and countercultural attitudes to the Sabbath in the nineteenth century, before bringing into focus the philosophical and literary significance of Sundays for the poet Jules Laforgue. With a remarkable 18 poems bearing the word ‘dimanche’ in their title, and many more clearly set on this day, Sundays are indisputably Laforgue’s bete noire.1

Beyond the Leisure Principle: Luce and Neo-Impressionism

Our brief juxtaposition of Laforgue and Seurat’s visions of dominical leisure in the previous chapter afforded an illustration of the discursive meeting points between contemporary poetry and painting that is all the more compelling in light of Laforgue’s ongoing interest in contemporary avant-garde art.1 In the early stages of the Neo-Impressionist movement, bourgeois leisure was a primary object of satire; and the early work of Seurat’s follower Paul Signac, Le Dimanche parisien (1889–90), lampooned the alienating domesticity of the middle-class Sunday in a way that could not but recall Laforgue’s caricature of dominical recreation. We have seen how the poet’s attention to the Sabbath extended beyond class critique to questions of poetic style and self-reflexivity; and in not altogether dissimilar ways, this chapter demonstrates that such connections between leisure and aesthetics were integral to the public agendas and self-understanding of Neo-Impressionism, from Seurat onwards. This chapter takes as its starting point a passage from T. J. Clark’s The Painting of Modern Life. In it, Clark brings together questions of modernity and modernism, material history and aesthetic shifts, by relating the broad outlines of painting’s trajectory in France through and beyond the late nineteenth century to a transformed — and transformative — view of leisure: I think this implication of leisure in class struggle goes some way to explain the series of transformations undergone by the subject in painting from 1860 to 1914. In particular it seems to me to shed light on the painters’ changes of mind about how leisure should be depicted: the way, for example, styles of spontaneity are repeatedly displaced by styles of analysis — grandly individualistic modes of handling, that is, abandoned in favour of ones claiming to be anonymous, scientific and even collective. The classic instance is Neo-Impressionism: I do not believe that its vehemence (or its appeal to Pissarro) can be understood unless it is seen as deriving from an altered view of leisure, and of art as part of that leisure — which in turn derived from a new set of class allegiances.2