Editors' Introduction

scan.dal

Middle English: in the sense ‘discredit to religion (by the reprehensible behavior of a religious person)’

Old French: scandale

Ecclesiastical Latin: scandalum ‘cause offense’

Greek: skandalon ‘snare, stumbling block.’

‘Scandale’ was the theme of a series of 2017 plays staged by the “Paris des Femmes” troupe. Anne Rotenborg, the troupe's director, invited nine female playwrights to compose short pieces with a limited number of actors based upon this theme. Playwrights included Leïla Slimani, Marie Nimier, Christine Angot, Sylvie Germain, and Nancy Huston. As Carole Fréchette notes in her introduction to the published volume of the plays, the playwrights were initially confused over the meaning and parameters of the word ‘scandale.’ Some looked for a dictionary definition of “scandale,” she writes, and found “grave affaire malhonnête, honteuse, qui a un grand retentissement dans le public… querelle bruyante… fait qui heurte la conscience, le bon sens, la morale, suscite l’émotion, la révolte” (9–10). The playwrights slowly began to appropriate this slippery concept, “à le retourner dans tous les sens.” The plays that resulted from this experimentation took different approaches to the notion of scandal, ranging from intimate affairs, to relationships undergoing dishonesty or betrayal, to representations of public shame and personal offence.

Fréchette claims that scandal constitutes “l'appétit de notre monde” (11) and perceives a thirst for scandal in contemporary public and private life. She argues that scandals can range from “grandes affaires d’État” to “affaires intimes.” Indeed, at the same time as the plays were being performed, presidential favorite François Fillon saw his campaign irreparably damaged by a scandal involving misuse of public funds regarding payments to his wife and children for allegedly fake jobs as his political assistants. “Penelopegate,” a perfect example of Fréchette's scandalous “grande affaire d’État” recalls the financial scandal that derailed Nicolas Sarkozy's political campaign one year before. Fréchette writes that a Google search for “scandale” will generate around 20,200,000 results that range from private to public scandals and contain, beyond references to Donald Trump's latest comments, references to controversial bra collections, athletes’ artificially inflated muscles, technical glitches in Volkswagen car emissions systems, and the contents of popular soap operas.

The aim of this volume is to interrogate scandals that result from literary works in contemporary France. It is inspired by the unprecedented number of high-profile scandals involving literary texts in the twenty-first century. Indeed, it appears that the “appetite” for scandal in contemporary society discerned by Fréchette has now spread to literature. While isolated works and notorious authors in the history of French literature have provoked scandals, never before have so many occurred simultaneously. Scandals involving plagiarism, literary hoaxes, and atteinte à la vie privée in particular have made headlines in France since 2000. This phenomenon led us to develop two international conference panels on the topic: one at the Modern Languages Association convention and a second in the Australian Society for French Studies, both in 2015. We asked participants to reflect upon the nature of this phenomenon, noting who is targeted, by whom, and how. We were particularly interested in how literary scandals straddle the public and private realms and how they play out in a nation in which the freedom of expression and creativity is inscribed in the Constitution.

The volume opens with a discussion of the atteinte à la vie privée law that has brought several literary writers to trial. Natalie Edwards compares two cases in which writers of autofiction have been accused of atteinte à la vie privée. Examining Camille Laurens' and Christine Angot's cases, Edwards analyzes the reasons why the former was judged to be innocent while the other was found guilty. Continuing an investigation of autofiction as a genre closely linked to scandal and French public life, Dawn Cornelio examines a single work in the corpus of Chloé Delaume. Cornelio's analysis concedes that Delaume's work is open to the charges of attention-seeking navel gazing often leveled at autofiction. However, she argues that this author's targeting of major media figures in her work forms part of a wider writerly project that is distinctly activist, a responsive gesture she compares to that of a famous American activist film.

The role of the media in propagating scandal surrounding authors forms a major thrust of this collection. Eftihia Mihelakis and Ania Wroblewski examine the scandal surrounding Marcela Iacub's Belle et bête. They examine the debate between philosopher-journalist-author Iacub and Angot and link this to a broader discussion of the representation of women's writing and credibility in the French media. The mediatization of scandalized reader responses to a provocative literary work is also the subject of Katia Gottin's article. Gottin examines the creation of Catherine Millet's La Vie Sexuelle de Catherine M. as an unexpected “événement littéraire sensationnel.” Gottin explores the peritext of this work and also points to an important paratext of written, audiovisual, and radio-based media by several prominent critics and scholars.

Scandals provoked by first-person narrative are also examined by Leslie Barnes, who turns to the sub-genre of testimony. Barnes studies the manipulation of readers within what she terms the “global rescue industry,” investigating the relationship between literary testimony, mediatization, and human rights campaigns in the scandals surrounding the controversial “memoir” of Cambodian migrant and self-proclaimed former sex worker Somaly Mam. Amy Hubbell continues to probe sub-genres of life writing by reflecting on memoir. She examines the mediation of and relationship between memoir and national mémoires in the wider realm of international relations in her essay on terrorism testimonials from the Algerian War. Her examination of the debates between victims of the Milk Bar bombing in Algiers in 1956 and the debates that have ensued between Nicole Guiraud, Danielle Michel-Chich, and Zohra Drif show how individual authors’ quarrels over the right to represent specific traumatic moments in Franco-Algerian history continue to create scandal in France today.

Éloïse Brezault explores the role of Francophone postcolonial writers in exploiting mediatized Western responses to their work. Brezault analyzes scandals involving Calixthe Beyala and Léonora Miano, arguing that these writers have developed a “stratégie d'exotisme” that enables them to increase their notoriety within the literary establishment. The use of media by contemporary Francophone authors to exploit notoriety is also the topic of Christopher Hogarth's article. After providing an overview of scandals involving Francophone African literary authors, Hogarth focuses on the nature of scandal in the work by Alain Mabanckou, the best-selling Francophone author today and perhaps the most media-savvy.

If Mabanckou is arguably the most prominent controversial Francophone writer of the moment, Michel Houellebecq has been the most consistently controversial from France. Françoise Grauby's article goes beyond a reading of the mediatization of the figure of Houellebecq hors-texte to explore how this author creates himself by means of mise-en-scène within his novel, La Carte et le territoire.

Beginning with a reference to Claude Autant-Lara's La Traversée de Paris, to get to Valery Larbaud's Poèmes par un riche amateur and Le Livre de M. Barnabooth. Prose et Vers, précédé de Vie de M. Barnabooth, de X.-M. Tournier de Zamble, by way of references to Baudelaire, Céline, Nietzsche, and others, André Benhaïm's is both a mischievous critico-theoretical potpourri and an (incisive and “serious”) examination of the “scandal” involved in publishing works under a pseudonym, Larbaud's “Barnabooth series”; in the process Benhaïm proceeds with a (mostly) playful indictment of the often murky divide between rich and poor, les “salauds de pauvres” an expression that, in itself, leads us back to the idea of scandal.

Karine Schwerdtner reflects upon scandalous mothers in her comparison of works by Chantal Chawaf and Camille Laurens. Schwerdtner analyzes these authors' literary responses to childbirth and connects their representation of the creation of life with their creation of literature.

Jean Anderson's article continues the discussion of scandalous women. Anderson studies the socio-cultural attitudes demonstrated by responses to the depiction of “submissive” female characterizations in the infamous Histoire d'O by “Pauline Réage.” Through an analysis of its 1966 translation into English and reception in the U.S.A., Anderson focuses on the overlap between politics and aesthetics in response to a scandalous work of literature.

Translating scandalous material between cultures and between languages is the subject of the final article in the volume. Alistair Rolls, Clara Sitbon, and Marie-Laure Vuaille-Barcan investigate the trajectory of Jim Thompson's Pop 1280 in its several French-language renditions. They situate the text within a history of the translation practices of Jean Duhamel's team at Gallimard's Série Noire from the 1940s onwards. While assessing the degree to which critiques of Duhamel et al.'s infidelities towards the original English in American “thrillers” are warranted, the authors investigate the textual machinations of a team that promised a scandalous brand including violence and depravity. Thus the collection ends with a reminder that scandal in French literature is nothing new but that it is constantly being reinvented in an ever-changing cultural context.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Natalie Edwards

Natalie Edwards is Associate Professor/Reader in French at the University of Adelaide, Australia. She holds a Ph.D. from Northwestern University and specializes in life writing, women's writing, and feminist theory in French. She is the author of Plural Subjectivity in Contemporary Women's Autobiography (U of Delaware P, 2011) and Voicing Voluntary Childlessness: Narratives of Non-Mothering in French (Peter Lang, 2016), and the co-editor of Textual and Visual Selves (U of Nebraska P, 2011) and Framing French Culture (U of Adelaide P, 2015). She has published numerous articles that have appeared in journals such as The French Review, French Cultural Studies, The Australian Journal of French Studies, Life Writing, Women in French Studies, and A/b: Autobiography Studies.

Christopher Hogarth

Christopher Hogarth is Lecturer of Comparative Literature and French at the University of South Australia, Adelaide. He teaches courses in both languages and literature. He holds a Ph.D. from Northwestern University and his research focuses on Francophone African intellectuals, the literature of African migrants and its reception in France and Italy, and the depiction of migration in Sub-Saharan Francophone literature. He has published 7 volumes on this area. He has published numerous articles that have appeared in journals such as French Cultural Studies, The Australian Journal of French Studies, Women in French Studies, and A/b: Autobiography Studies.

Roger Célestin

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).

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).