“A view from the terrace,” Alyson Waters.
The adjustment of reality to the masses and the masses to reality is aprocess of unlimited scope, as much for thinking as for perception.
—Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
On a recent spring evening, one of us was walking back from a literary award ceremony that began in the late afternoon in midtown Manhattan. The ceremony took place in one of those “clubs” located in that “prime real estate” area of the city (it seems the entire city has become “prime real estate”). Both before and after the actual awards were given, in one of the main rooms, guests could gather on the extensive terrace, surrounded by lofty office buildings and skyscrapers, among them the famous Chrysler building, its art deco steeple glistening in the late afternoon light. After the ceremony, walking through the now brightly lit city, that particular editor passed a church and, his/her thoughts, perhaps helped along by the wine that had been so freely dispensed at the event, mused about the difference between the responses of the medieval population to Gothic cathedrals and how we, the contemporary masses, viewed these modern cathedrals of capitalism, the Chrysler building among them. Awe before the magnificence of religion, it seemed to the contemporary flâneur/flâneuse, was, unfortunately, not very different from the admiration of that view from the club's terrace by a number of the gathered translators, academics, novelists and graduate students who made up the bulk of the assembly. Still, what more theoretically minded thinkers might call a “paradigm shift,” what we might call a sea change in perception has occurred; this shift is to be found, precisely, in the particular contemporary flâneur/flâneuse's ability, an ability shared by many others who were present at the award ceremony, to see the money and the power inherent in the architectural backdrop. We will not engage in a recapitulation of the history of consciousness or the history of capital—here called more mundanely “money”—and of its ruptures from the Middle Ages to the present. The objective of this issue is simultaneously more modest and more pointed and might be succinctly summarized as follows: to focus on money as concept, context, and content in twentieth century and contemporary literature and the arts in the French-speaking world.
We begin in Manhattan yet again, this time with the Occupy Wall Street movement, a protest and societal “cri de cœur,” and a reply to economic frustration and injustice, as is, in its own way, this volume's focus on the theme of money. The financial crisis of 2008 demonstrated, once again, that the dominant economic system in which we live and work consistently undermines any serious attempt to build socially equitable and financially stable societies that prioritize basic human rights. In this “globalized economy” large banks, corporations and stock markets ultimately rule, and their ethos, if it can be called that, is their bottom line, not an equitable distribution of wealth. What we propose in this issue of Contemporary French & Francophone Studies: SITES is to examine this state of affairs and its impact on artists, writers, and thinkers.
Considering literature and the arts through the lens of money and capital is obviously neither new nor original. Among many others, we need only to think of Karl Marx and his avatars or, contemporary to him, the great novels of the nineteenth century that unveiled the human toll of the “industrial era.” Closer to our own time, we can think of Roland Barthes's lucid “reading” of consumer society in his Mythologies and elsewhere, Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle and Raoul Vaneigem's Treatise on Living for the Younger Generations (aka: The Revolution of Everyday Life), or a great deal of post-colonial theory. Those who camped out in Zucotti Park in Lower Manhattan in that early fall of 2011 and brought to the forefront of contemporary consciousness the economic and social injustices of their time belong to this particular tradition of questioning and even resisting the supposedly fatal or “natural” propensity of the market economy.
The aim of this volume is to contribute to the general debate on the place occupied, as it were, by money in twentieth century and contemporary society by focusing more particularly on the relationships between money and literary, artistic, and theoretical production. The issues addressed by the essays gathered here range from mechanisms of control and censorship, to the proposition of creative methodologies and vocabularies for dismantling constructs that impede change.
The articles follow a chronological order that covers an extensive historical swath of the twentieth and twenty-first century French and Francophone culture as it relates to money writ large. Eugène Nicole examines how, in the early twentieth century, Charles Péguy, founder of the review Cahiers de la Quinzaine, contends with his own personal finances and the diminishing role of bookstores. Péguy faced a fundamental problem, not uncommon for writers today: the high quality of content means fewer readers. Financially, this equation forced the price per copy to rise and Péguy to confront the economic law of diminishing returns. Nicole displays the depths of Péguy's struggle, as he must either find money or die of exhaustion. Péguy's existential struggle exemplifies the personal and cultural risks wrought by early twentieth century capitalism where the building of capital for its own sake conflicts with the critique of value itself.
In her essay on Georges Bataille, Yue Zhuo helps us understand the relationship between economic structure and destruction (dépense), as she discusses Bataille's economic theory, in which destruction ushers forth a theory of negation. Zhuo proposes that Bataille's focus on human sexuality and religion leads to an economic theory in which spiritual force and physical energy are constantly negotiated. A fully developed or adult state of sexuality demands that essential stages of child sexuality be lost or destroyed. Gain and loss, best represented by the tradition of potlatch, with its spiritual overtones, are inherent to human psychology and are in play in the search for balanced negotiation.
Necessary risks are inherent to practical economics and their stakes become abundantly clear in some of the situations described in the following essays. In what might be considered one possible way out of the dilemma faced by Péguy described above, Marcel Proust stretched his economic potential by buying time. Nicholas L'Hermitte, this year's recipient of the “Recherche au present” prize, explains that by subsidizing the publication of Du côté de chez Swann, Proust avoided making concessions in his narration, all the while hoping that his financial support would not have an impact on the literariness of his novel. Proust was concerned with the cost of production brought on by the corrections of his first draft, and so offered to increase his subsidies. L'Hermitte contends that the extent of Proust's “corrections” were so radical that they make Proust Proust, since the financial input of the author of A la Recherche enables him to prioritize the process and development of his writing, indeed of his conception of literature over the economic imperatives of publication. Fittingly, in the case of Proust, time enables the quality of writing and L'Hermitte argues that through his financial involvement, Proust “gained lost time”—even if the date of publication was delayed by Proust's very will to write as he wanted to.
Proust, his work, and the vicissitudes of money are also the topic of Brigitte Mahuzier's essay in which she examines the role played by economics in the creation of Proust's narrative style as wartime strategies and vocabulary enter the vernacular of early twentieth century discourse. Playing on the double meaning of the word “temps” (“time” or “weather”) in the title of Proust's masterwork and on the unpredictability of the sciences, often viewed as exemplifying predictability, Mahuzier explains how Proust takes advantage of the unknown—what time or weather may bring—to create different avenues of narration. The changes in the genesis of Proust's narration, moved by forces like the weather and directed with the precision of military strategy, reflect modernity in its evolution from the nineteenth to the twentieth century. Here the over-arching economy of war, according to Mahuzier, winds its way into narrative strategy.
Given the fact that the term “mission civilisatrice” was often a (money) veil over economic imperatives, it is no accident that the experience of French imperialism and colonialism also find their way into literature. In his essay, Yves Clavaron demonstrates how European capitalism and modernity exported to Viet Nam through colonialism are central to Marguerite Duras's novels. Duras's finely tuned sensitivity to the economic, social and political impact of colonization, also found in the fiction of Henry Daguerches and Roland Dorgelès, lays bare the inherent brutality of colonialism and its “characters,” ranging from European financiers and businessmen to rich Chinese and Indian bankers, all seeking their fortune under the flag of France's “civilizing mission.” Clavaron demonstrates how the violent history of imperialism and the power of “overseas money” engage the imagination of mid-century French authors who, in turn, influence readership in France and beyond.
Dealing with the fall-out from France's colonialist history, Charles Forsdick analyzes the mechanisms and rituals of the Republic's official recognition of its role in the slave trade, and examines its response to claims of compensation. Forsdick calls such efforts symbolic in nature because they fail “to address the entangled relationship of Revolution, republicanism, slavery and its contemporary afterlives.” Ultimately, Forsdick contends, the official discourse responding to requests for reparations allows those guilty of crimes against humanity to avoid addressing injuries to human dignity; colonization continues to inhibit social and international relations today. Forsdick's essay reminds us of a chapter of history where greed extracted a terrible human toll that remains vivid and so deeply rooted in our economic histories as to seem impervious to resolution.
Continuing our emphasis on French colonialism, Justin Izzo focuses on Africa, through the world of Franco-Cameroonian writer Gaston-Paul Effa's novel, Voici le dernier jour du monde. Izzo describes what he terms a “global palimpsest” in Effa's narration of a global economy that counterintuitively excludes more citizens than it had hoped to include. Effa portrays sex, disease, and contagion, in a self-destructive cycle, as attracting global attention and investment, leading to certain devastation. Ironically, Africa, the cradle of humanity, is mined of its natural and human resources, as multinationals pinpoint their extraction of wealth, forcing masses to emigrate and risk their lives for a European form of stability. Izzo suggests that global economic forces are a contentious form of contemporary humanism in that they force Africans to make rational choices when facing both “exclusion and integration.” In his novel, Izzo contends, Effa configures a palimpsest of these multi-layered economics wherein surface events only cover up hidden ones.
Taking us back to the Hexagon in the second half of the twentieth century, Cecile Mahiou contributes an essay on the career of Robert Filliou, an experimental poet of the 1960s and 1970s, who, affiliated with the American pop art movement and the group Fluxus in France, created texts engineered to break the economic binds of the marketplace and its impediments to creativity. Filliou proposes forms of creativity that include collaboration, multimedia and, more to the point for this issue, engagement with the relationship between art and money, the very means of distribution. Elaborating on the “dispositif,” he and his collaborators piece together art projects that contain elements of an innovative system of creation that builds new economic institutions and rewrites historical discourse. Reacting to money's control on creativity, Filliou and company rebuild a functional, although utopic, economy of artistic expression whose goal is the autonomy and emancipation of both the artist and the worker, breaking down what Mahiou terms the “work versus leisure” binary.
In her contribution, Jiewon Baek proposes that François Bon, an author often classified as belonging to the “extrême contemporain,” sees his narrative skills transformed by the blurring speed of technological and industrial change, the distance between the actual means of production and the goods produced, and by “digital technologies and the immaterial economy.” Baek underscores Bon's awareness of threats to the material book, now digitized and subsumed by the powerful “cognitive economy” stemming from economic practices that turn fiction into a speedy download and diminish its ability to communicate a sense of the eternal; the material book becomes itself a fiction and now, in its digital form, capitalizes the intellect. Baek's reading of Bon intimates that literature is at risk of domination by capitalistic economies in which subjectivity is increasingly and rapidly monetized. However, on what can be considered a note of optimism, Bon concludes that even such economies depend on sentient beings in need of kinship.
Marx is back in the fold in Elizabeth Cardonne-Arlyck's study of Jean-Philippe Toussaint in which she extrapolates on Marx's contention that the bourgeoisie moves from solid, practical demands on and of production to desires that melt and fade in a constancy that, for better or for worse, energizes capitalist economies. Toussaint reproduces the melting and fading of demand and production by writing about the world of fashion (haute couture), where clothing modeled on the runway looks like what can be worn, is not often worn, and will surely fade because of fashion's need to be in a constant state of renewal. Toussaint's protagonist is a seamstress-artiste who creates a dress made of honey that melts away as the runway model is corporeally transformed into fashion itself, embodying what Cardonne-Arlyck calls “l'obsolescence capitaliste.” However, arguing that Toussaint is not a strict minimalist novelist, as purported by most critics, Cardonne-Arlyck intimates that the economy Toussaint configures is unable to melt because its essential value is the body “capitalizing” on the Earth's bounty. By placing economic situations and outcomes at the heart of their concerns and contentions Filliou, Bon and Toussaint, paint a picture of late twentieth culture that cannot escape confrontation with the powerful forces of money and its multiple, invasive tendrils.
The marketplace of relationships, ideas, correspondence and reciprocity are at the heart of Agnès Disson essay on the work of Ryoko Sekiguchi, a Japanese poet who writes in French. Disson focuses on Sekiguchi's book of poetry Deux marchés, de nouveau in which, she explains, she writes about exchange through, of and by words. The poet, Disson suggests, understands that money eases exchange between those who may never have met and will never meet again. Confidence is integral to an exchange and Sekiguchi exploits the elements upon which such confidence is built, whether that be the fruits, the lurking threats, or the furtive glances at a green market. At the same time, Sekiguchi senses the fragility and the fleeting quality of exchange and, correspondingly, money's power to corrupt, as the tidal wave of March 11, 2011 and the ensuing destruction of the Fukushima nuclear power plant make abundantly clear. In the aftermath, Sekiguchi recognizes death residing in the comestibles, now lethal when digested, and sees money, greed and misplaced national pride corrupting the cleanup of nuclear waste.
Karin Schwerdtner reports that in Chantal Chawaf's latest novel, Délivrance brisée, the author continues her direct critique of power, money and the “pensée molle” of disengaged writers. In fact, a certain billionaire sued Chawaf and her publishing house for over-exposing her social life. Thanks to the lawsuit, and to the publicity it provoked, Chawaf, the publishing house and her latest novel gained further visibility and notoriety. The billionaire lost her case, and raised the exposure and distribution, and thus the value of the novel, highlighting the fact that proximity to power has collateral value, even as it entails risks.
In the volume's final essay, ethical and ecological issues are raised in a study that falls into the category of Animal Studies, extending the range of this issue to include what has become a cutting edge area of research. Alain Romestaing analyzes the treatment of animals in literature and society by looking directly at the moment when animals are slaughtered, a moment regulated by what he terms the “logic of money.” Romestaing considers authors such as Pierre Gascar, Jean Giono, Joël Egloff, Joy Sorman, Isabelle Sorente and Olivia Rosenthal. Romestaing depicts the butcher as an intermediary between slaughter and preparation, between life and death (exchanging the death of the beast for the life of the customer) and between large-scale industry and small town shopkeepers. The butchers portrayed by these novelists consider slaughtering the beasts themselves in order to return the profession to its roots and upset the falsifying mythology that sanitizes slaughter and distances meat eaters from the killing of beasts, a distance created by industrialized, and therefore more profitable, slaughter houses. Romestaing reveals, at the conclusion of his essay, how the butcher-protagonists confront the very language of industrialized slaughter, thus weakening its power and impact.
From the early twentieth century to the beginning of the Third Millennium, it seems that the power and impact of money in its various incarnations—“the profit motive,” “the bottom line” or, as one fictional financier put it (in a film from the late 1980's that now appears quaint) “greed is good”—have increased exponentially and proliferated to the point of threatening the living and health conditions of the planet's population as never before. It would be unfair to say that current economic structures have only produced negative and debilitating outcomes. However, the paradox that money is once again a dominant theme of cultural studies and artistic representation provides us with evidence of the prevalence of disturbing economic imbalances. It is our hope that this volume responds with equally powerful critical analysis.
Dedicated to the memory of Philip Coulter Watts.
Roger Célestin, Peter Consenstein, and Eliane DalMolin
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Roger Celestin
Roger Célestin is a Professor of French and Comparative Literature and co-chair of French and Francophone Studies at the University of Connecticut. He has written on travel literature, detective fiction, film, and translation, among other topics. He is the author of From Cannibals to Radicals. Figures and Limits of Exoticism (U of Minnesota P, 1996), co-editor (with Isabelle de Courtivron and Eliane Dalmolin) of Beyond French Feminisms: Debates on Women, Politics, and Culture in France, 1980–2001 (Palgrave/St. Martin's, 2002), and co-author (with Eliane Dalmolin) of France From 1851 to the Present: Universalism in Crisis (Palgrave, 2007).
Peter Consenstein
Peter Consenstein is a Professor of French at Borough of Manhattan Community College and a member of the faculty of the Ph.D. Program in French at the CUNY Graduate Center, specializing in twentieth-century French literature with a focus on contemporary French poetry. Targeting the group Oulipo, his latest articles critique the works of Jacques Roubaud and Raymond Queneau. Currently, he is working on the manner in which Georges Perec expresses his Jewish identity and is completing a translation of Dominique Fourcade's Son blanc du un.
Eliane DalMolin
Eliane DalMolin is a Professor of French and co-chair of French and Francophone Studies at the University of Connecticut. She has published numerous articles on modern and contemporary poetry and on cinema and is the author of Cutting the Body: Representing Women in Baudelaire's Poetry, Truffaut's Cinema, and Freud's Psychoanalysis (U of Michigan P, 2000), co-editor (with Roger Célestin and Isabelle de Courtivron) of Beyond French Feminisms: Debates on Women, Politics, and Culture in France, 1980–2001 (Palgrave/St. Martin's, 2002), and co-author (with Roger Célestin) of France From 1851 to the Present: Universalism in Crisis (Palgrave, 2007).