Is literature a political affair? Do you like it engaged or loose? Is writing an aristocratic or democratic act?
This is what Alexandre Gefen, specialist in contemporary French literature at the CNRS and founder of the site, tried to find out. fabula.orgby surveying 26 French writers, from Annie Ernaux to Nicolas Mathieu, including Marie Darrieussecq, Mathias Énard, Nathalie Quintane and Leïla Slimani.
If the title of this collection of unpublished interviews, conducted between summer 2020 and summer 2021, seems to be an affirmation, it is because it reflects the opinion of the writers who were surveyed: Literature is a political affair. So we can’t get out of it.
For many of them, the image of a Sartre who connects plays and “thesis novels” or who harangues the crowds on his barrel at the exit of the factories is distant, outdated, almost ridiculous. If literature is indeed a political affair, the time seems to be for more subtlety. Rather than wielding the fire of discourse, contemporary writers have chosen narration: they seek to act, underlines Alexandre Gefen, by showing reality rather than by prescribing to their readers what they should think.
Everyone was therefore asked the same questions, including: do you have a nostalgia for committed literature? Can literature be beneficial for democratic life? Do you think there is a left language and a right language?
For Annie Ernaux, whose texts carry a vision and a contestation of the social order, as well as a committed look at the condition of women, since it is a question of giving an image of the world and of individuals, writing is of course “a political act in the broad sense”.
Recalling that a writer is in the service of nothing, Yannick Haenel (Circle, The pale foxes) believes that the “freedom of one is always beneficial to all of the others.” Literature at the service of democracy is not beneficial for democratic life, because it is no longer literature”.
“All great literary works have a political significance,” says Camille de Toledo, for whom Moby-Dick is “an immense fresco of the Anthropocene”, a meditation, before its time, on the ruins of capitalism. This is somewhat what Patrick Chamoiseau thinks, for whom a great literary text “is in itself a refusal, a denunciation”, while above all being an openness and “a determining gap vis-à-vis the dominant forces”.
Marie Darrieussecq, who thinks that the novel is the “place of ambivalence”, believes that Sartre and Camus “impoverished when they explained too much to us what to think”.
Whereas for Éric Reinhardt, it is clear that literature is opposed to political discourse. According to him, “the novel allows us to think about the world in all its complexity, by developing forms that are not points of view but awarenesses”, through characters, situations, emotions and sensations.
Pages of stimulating reflections – and easily exportable – on a question that remains topical.