Negotiating the middlebrow: women writers and literary stardom in contemporary France

ABSTRACT

This article examines the construction and functions of literary celebrity through the lens of a specific context, which may be termed ‘middlebrow’ women authors in contemporary France. Taking the two very different cases of bestselling novelists Anna Gavalda and Amélie Nothomb, the article examines the relationship between the textual qualities of each author’s work – the sine qua non of reader appeal and hence of celebrity itself – and the way that each performs the role of author in the face of French culture’s persistent belief that mass popular appeal is incompatible with authentic literary quality.

KEYWORDS:

• middlebrow
• women writers
• bestsellers
• readership
• narrative performance
• French culture

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. France has been a Republic since the end of the Second Empire in 1870, apart from during the years 1940–1944.

2. France accords high honour to its writers, appointing those judged the greatest to the Académie française, whose mission is to defend and promote French culture and language, and burying them with full pomp in the Pantheon. As one contemporary Academician put it: ‘One might even say that France itself is a literary creation’ (Rouart 2014).

3. Since 1981 France has implemented a fixed-price policy on books that limits the right to discount sales and thus protects independent booksellers from the giants such as Amazon. This policy, largely supported by both Left and Right, means that independents still have around 23% of the market share in France.

4. Pour Noël, lisez français, 2011. The total erasure of women on this occasion did lead to a flood of complaint, and an apology appeared in a later issue (4 January 2012).

5. If these names are little known in the UK, this is not unconnected with the deplorably low level of translated fiction available, usually calculated at around 3%.

6. The expression is used by the eminent literary theorist Tzvetan Todorov who, in a passionate essay, castigated France’s literary and educational establishment for their formalism and failure to respect the life-enhancing pleasure of fiction for ‘ordinary’ readers (2007, p. 72).

7. Translations are my own unless otherwise stated.

8. These are representative comments taken from Le Figaro’s well-used pages for readers’ comments and the readers’ blog ‘dérangée de livres’. See Websites and readers’ blogs on Anna Gavalda.

9. Barthes’ opposes the ‘readerly’ (lisible) text to the ‘writerly’ (scriptible). Although this distinction is interesting and complex enough to have provoked endless debate and commentary, its major legacy is a powerful formulation of the modernist credo that accessible, mimetic, broadly realist literature is intrinsically inferior to texts that are more opaque, formally experimental and self-reflexive.

10. Critical studies of Nothomb abound in English and in English-language journals from around 2003, and several books have been dedicated to her work. She is the object of far fewer academic studies in French and is often the object of negative criticism in the serious press. See http://modernlanguages.sas.ac.uk/centre-study-contemporary-womens-writing/languages/french/am%C3%A9lie-nothomb. [Accessed 25 July 2016].

11. Anne Fulda in Le Figaro describes the crowd who wait for Nothomb to arrive at her guest appearances as ‘monomaniacs, nothombophiles’ and as, in the majority, young and female (2006 cited Lee 2010, p. 66). Her popularity with teenagers is often remarked on – for example, in the dossier that the magazine Lire devoted to her in September 2006: ‘what is most striking is the youth of her audience: mainly between 15 and 30, a lot of girls, though some boys too’ (Garcia 2006, p. 38 cited Lee 2010, p. 67).

12. In France, Colette (1873–1954) and Annie Ernaux (born 1940 and one of the most prominent and widely read of contemporary French women writers) are good examples of sustained, close relationships with a large female public. Nothomb forms a sharp contrast with, for example, her contemporary Michel Houellebecq, who fosters a public image of the reclusive artist indifferent to readerly or critical reception.

13. Angela Carter (The Bloody Chamber 1979, The Virago Book of Fairy Tales 1992), Marina Warner (From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers 1996, Once Upon a Time: A Short History of Fairy Tale 2014) and even Disney’s film Frozen (2013) have all demonstrated the powerful and continuing place of fairy stories in the representation of female identities, desires and relationships.

14. Simone de Beauvoir (2011) in The Second Sex provides a brilliant analysis of what in existentialist terms is the pubescent girl’s discovery of her body’s ‘en-soi’ ‘(in-itself’) status as object of desire, whereas as a child she has experienced herself as pure consciousness, ‘pour-soi’ (‘for-oneself’).

15. The literature on the extreme visibility and eroticisation of women’s bodies is too extensive to reference in detail. See, for example, Zoonen (2006) and Holmes and Negra (2011).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Diana Holmes

Diana Holmes is Professor of French at the University of Leeds, UK. Her work on French women’s writing from the late nineteenth century to the present ranges across the hierarchy of culture from ‘high’ to ‘low’ brow, with a particular interest in what women choose to read, including romance. Her recent work has focused particularly on popular fictions. She is one of the editors of the international online journal of popular cultures Belphégor, and is writing a book on the French middlebrow to be published by Liverpool University Press. She also works on film and co-edits the Manchester University Press series French Film Directors, which has just published its 40th volume.