David Bellos

How Many Identities Make One? The Curious Case of Romain Gary.

Romain Gary was born in Lithuania, moved to France at age 14, and spent much of his adult life in Britain and America. He represents an unusually extreme case of multiple identity in a transnational context. Despite this, Garys literary œuvre is not much concerned with the problem of identity. It exhibits instead a tension between protest at the inhumanity of men and the need to adapt to changing historical circumstances. The dialectic between opposition and adaptation is exemplified by the textual history of Éducation européenne. First published in wartime Britain, then amended for publication in Liberation France, then rewritten in cold war California, it was finally given a ‘definitive’ hybrid version in French. The same message is pursued in all versions but from different author-positions. It is argued that the revisions serve to dedramatise the psychological question of identity, and to redirect attention to the moral aims of writing fiction.

Sounding Out Les Misérables

Les Misérables is unusual for novels of its period in giving almost no indication of its characters’ pronunciation of French. The omission is striking in a work that highlights slang usage and includes fragments in many languages other than French. This essay argues that the ‘soundlessness’ of speech is camouflaged by heavy use of the word accent to draw attention to the affect of spoken utterances. The camouflage obscures the implausibility of Valjeans transformation from peasant and convict to entrepreneur, philanthropist and mayor of Montreuil-sur-Mer. Unimaginable in the English or German domain, where regional and social origins are indelibly marked in the enunciation of consonants and vowels, the accentless French of Les Misérables presupposes a concept of ‘standard diction’ at odds with linguistic reality. It foretells the state of affairs in contemporary France, where perception of the regional and social functions of variation in speech is very low. Les Misérables therefore appears less problematic now than at the time of its composition.

French as a Foreign Language: The Literary Enterprise of Antoine Volodine

Volodine’s fictions all resemble each other save for names and settings. They expose a world where the Revolution has failed and its protagonists are either dead, incarcerated, or holed up in the putrefying carcass of an abandoned building. Protagonists keep the memory of their political dreams alive by telling the stories of lost comrades, in works tapped out in code on the drainage pipes of a high-security prison or the asylum where they are held without charge, or else circulated, samizdat-style, among sympathizers. The authors of these narratives are themselves the subjects of others. So the characters created by Volodine become the authors of his work, such that Antoine Volodine is just one name among the many contributors to the literature of the post-exotic world. With formal roots in science fiction and thematic sources in Frances continuing nostalgia for the revolutionary road, Volodines dreamworld seems quite unrelated to the main trends of contemporary writing, yet it forms one of the most ambitious literary projects of our times. Couched in language of exquisite precision and grace, Volodines not entirely imaginary construction of a ruined world simultaneously denies individual authorship and reasserts human individuality through the memorializing function of storytelling. This article is available in Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature: http://newprairiepress.org/sttcl/vol36/iss1/8 French as a Foreign Language: The Literary Enterprise of Antoine Volodine David Bellos Princeton University The fifteen novels published under the name of Antoine Volodine since the 1980s together with a half dozen stories appearing under the names of Elli Kronauer and Manuela Draeger, probably one published as the work of Marina Soudaieva and perhaps other works purportedly translated from Russian make up one of the strangest and most compelling literary projects of modern times.1 All these prose works are of the same broad kind: narrative fragments of an imaginary universe that is at once a re-enactment and a complete reversal of the project first brought into fiction by Balzac when he said “la Societe francaise allait etre l’historien, je ne devais etre que le secretaire” (“Avant-propos” 11). ‘French society would be the historian, I would be only its secretary.’2 Like Balzac, Volodine purports to be the transcriber of a myriad stories about other people, but in his work the stories are actually told by others, and the transcriber called Volodine performs his secretarial role with utter self-abnegation. Each of his hundreds of named narrators are his friends and masters: “La premiere personne du singulier sert a accompagner la voix des autres, elle ne signifie rien de plus” (Le post-exotisme 19) ‘The first person singular serves to accompany the voices of others, it means nothing more than that.’ It is for them, on their behalf and in their service that he writes or speaks—the two words marking a distinction, not an equivalence. As in La Comedie humaine, several narrator-characters recur in different roles in various texts; similarly reminiscent of the Balzacian project is the consequent fact that it does not really matter whether you read Volodine in the order of publication of the separate titles, 1 Bellos: French as a Foreign Language: The Literary Enterprise of Antoine Published by New Prairie Press 102 STT as with Proust, you do not have to read everything to know what kind of a universe it is. But however much of Volodine’s work you do read, you still do not quite know what you have got into. Volodine is the pen-name of a French writer, a long-time resident of Orleans, who was for a time a teacher of Russian in the French secondary school system. (He is also a translator from Russian, and, under another pseudonym, the writer of adapted Russian folk tales or bylini for French children.) His knowledge of Soviet and contemporary Russian literature and history is substantial, but for many years he has been increasingly fascinated by the cultures and traditions of the Far East, notably Siberia, Tibet and southern China, where he has spent a good deal of his time. He does not belong to the literary milieu of contemporary Paris and he takes no account of it. “Cette masse romanesque a ete ecrite, a ete construite sans tenir compte des gouts, des tendances, des traditions du monde editorial dans lequel elle a pris place” (Volodine, “Ecrire en francais” 2) ‘This collection of fictions has been written and constructed without taking into account any of the tastes, tendencies and traditions of the editorial world in which it occurred.’ His published works have appeared, in sequence, with Denoel, Minuit, Gallimard and Seuil—an unusual trajectory that signals Volodine’s unclassifiable position in contemporary French literature. Like any radically new project, his work cannot usefully be situated in the cartography of the contemporary field, only—and very tentatively—on the much grander landscape of literature itself. Volodine has frequently formulated his writerly project as the composition of a foreign literature written in French, most notably in a self-presentation given to a round table of French and Chinese writers in 2001, when he said: “des l’origine mes romans ont ete etrangers a la realite litteraire francaise. Ils forment un objet litteraire publie en langue francaise, mais pense en une langue exterieure au francais...” (“Ecrire en francais” 3) ‘From the start my novels were foreign to the literary reality of France. They constitute a literary object published in the French language, but conceived in a language external to French.’ Remarkably, he would like his works to be thought of as translations, not originals. He is by no means the 2 Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature, Vol. 36, Iss. 1 [2012], Art. 8 http://newprairiepress.org/sttcl/vol36/iss1/8 DOI: 10.4148/2334-4415.1773

History in the Text: 'Quatrevingt-Treize' and the French Revolution

The title of this study “History in the text” is an oxymoronic phrase, and by this, the main focus of the book is clear immediately. On the other hand, there still remains the question to what extent text and history are comparable. The author of this volume tries to answer this by discussing the famous novel of Victor Hugo Quatrevingt-Treize against the background of the French Revolution.