The 19th century French classicists

[Kafka's Crow]

Ducasse (Comte de Lautréamont), Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, Leconte de Lisle, Vigny, Musset, Dumas, Stendhal, Lamartine, Rostand, Huysman, Mérimée, Barbey d'Aurevilly (among those who haven't been named yet) and many more could be looked into. As you are looking to consider France artists of that time as a group, I would assume that the bigger sample you have, the better.

Oh yes, the list goes on and on. The 19th century is totally dominated by French and Russian literature, so much so that I can't bring myself to read anything of sustained length written in England at that time. Rimbaud, Ducasse, and Baudelaire are the spiteful, evil, beautiful, fearsome and dark gods of my idolatry. How could a whole generation write so beautifully about so much spleen, boredom, self-laceration and self-loathing. Here is Arthur Rimbaud:

Mauvais Sang
J'ai de mes ancestres gaulois l'oeil bleu blanc, le cervelle 'etroite, at la maladresse dans la lutte. Je trouve mon habillement aussi barbare que leur. Mais je ne beurre pas ma chavelure,
Le Gaulois etaient les ecorcheurs de betes, les bruleurs d'herbes les plus ineptes de leur temps.
D'eux, j'ai: l'idolatrie et l'amour du sacrilege;- oh! tous les vices, colere, luxure, - magnifique, la luxure; surtout mensonge et paresse.
J'ai horreur de tous les metiers. Maitres et ouvriers, tout paysans, ignobles. La main a plume vaut la main a charrue.- Quel siecle a mains! Je n'aurai jamais ma main. Apres, la domesticite' mene trop loin. L'honnetete' de la mendicite' me navre. Les criminels degoutente' comme de chatres: mo, je suis intact, et ca m'est egal.
Mais! qui a fait ma langue perfide tellement, qu' elle ait guide' et sauvegarde jusqu'ici paresse? Sans me servr pour vivre meme de mon corps, et plus oisif que le crapaud, j'ai vecu partout. Pas une famille d'Europe que je ne connaise.- J'entends de failles comme la mienne, qui tiennent tout de la declaration des Droits de l'Homme.- J'ai connu chaque fils de famille!

Mark Treharne's translation:

Bad Blood
From my ancestors the Gauls I inherit pale blue eyes, a narrow skull and a lack of skill in fighting. My clothes seem to me to be as barbaric as theirs were. But I don't use butter on my hair.
The Gauls were the clumsiest flayers of beasts and burners of grass of their time.
From them I inherit: idolatry and love of sacrilege;- oh! all the vices, anger lechery, - wonderful thing, lechery;- annd above all lying and laziness.
I loathe all trades. Foremen and workmen, peasants the lot of them, debased. The hand that wields the pen is as good as the hand steering the plough.- What a century of hands! - I shall never get my hand in. And then, the servitude goes too far. The decency of begging distresses me. Criminals are as disgusting as men without balls: I've got mine and it's all the same to me.
But! who has given me such a treacherous tongue that, up to now, it has guided and protected my idleness? Without using even my body to make a living, lazier than a toad, I have lived everywhere. There's not a family in Europe I don't know.- I mean families like mine who owe everything to the Declaration of the Rights of Man. - I've known every young man of good family there is to know!

I could spend whole night sitting here quoting from Lautreamont. I once wrote a term paper on Maldaror incorporating paintings from Goya and the Surrealist school, must be the most enjoyable task I ever undertook during my academic years.

[Kafka's Crow]

double posting.

[wessexgirl]

We have met already on the LNF but whilst browsing former threads I came across your comments on Maupassant's possible humanity and compassion. I'm afraid you won't find much in this writer's output, because he was an unabashed hedonist; thanks to the fabulous wealth he made from his writing.
He is not sympathetic to his characters as Hugo and Zola are. They are merely the means by which he creates great stories - and two of his novels are great i.e Bel Ami and Une Vie (translated in English as A Woman's Life.)
There has always been a sniffy attitude by the French literati towards Maupassant, but just as I have made a point in visiting the tombs of Zola and Hugo (they are buried next to each other in the Pantheon) so I have been to visit Maupassant's in the Cimetiere Montparnasse; he could tell great story with the best of them despite the Academie Francaise.

I'm afraid that de Maupassant is another author on my long list of those I want to read. I made the assumption that as an associate and friend of the French literatti, particularly Zola and Flaubert, and an advocate of the realist/naturalist school, that he would show some humanity in his writing, (working on the premise of like attacting like). The fact that he was an unashamed hedonist doesn't necessarily preclude him from having compassion. In fact, it may be an advantage towards it, as he would presumably be of a non-judgemental character towards the vagaries of human nature. But as I haven't yet read him, I will withdraw him from my comments, and try to read him soon.

[Jozanny]

Maupassant even prefigures, weakly, granted, but still there, the society of victimization that America and a little of Europe, perhaps, has become.

This is what I actually wrote, and said nothing about Maupassant in terms of humanity and compassion. I discussed his story about a blind man abused by his family, and his story about a rape victim, on my disability in fine arts group

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/DisabilityinArts/

and by today's standards, these are horrible stories, terribly inhumane, but in them, one finds the glimmer of the victimization mentality which becomes so prevalent in the late 20th century, and on into the 21st, so I believe Brian is misconstruing my intent.

[Bitterfly]

I'm not sure "humanity and compassion" are the most relevant things one could say about Maupassant either - perhaps in Une Vie, yes (even then, I felt disgust for the poor woman rather than empathy, but then I didn't like that story much). But he's generally rather cruel, even sadistic, with his characters (memories of Contes de la Bécasse) and the narratorial tone can be pretty ironical. I found Balzac very cruel as well (Father Goriot!!).

I'm trying to find points shared by the authors you mentioned in your first post, but it's actually quite hard: a social conscience maybe, or rather a desire to show the (somewhat corrupted) workings of society? They were all denouncers of something in their own way (maybe Maupassant less than the others - and I'm not sure Flaubert had much of a social conscience, compared to someone like Zola).

[Jozanny]

I'm trying to find points shared by the authors you mentioned in your first post, but it's actually quite hard: a social conscience maybe, or rather a desire to show the (somewhat corrupted) workings of society? They were all denouncers of something in their own way (maybe Maupassant less than the others - and I'm not sure Flaubert had much of a social conscience, compared to someone like Zola).

Welcome to the forums Bitter! I am enjoying your posts!

I am a very slow writer, and at 45 this is beginning to panic me , but I've wanted to do something with 19th century French realism for maybe the last four years or so--not as a sale piece, really, just to do some litcrit I care about--and though I agree with you that *universality threads* aren't easy to articulate, something tells me that they are there. Whether you take disability (they all treat the issue, even Flaubert), or city themes, as wessex mentioned close to the start of the discussion--there is just something which comes through, even in translation, as annoyingly French! Hopefully I will catch it in a nice effort. I am into the first paragraph, and will no doubt discover the idiocy of my ignorance along the way. That can be a good thing.

[Inderjit Sanghe]

Oh yes, the list goes on and on. The 19th century is totally dominated by French and Russian literature, so much so that I can't bring myself to read anything of sustained length written in England at that time. Rimbaud, Ducasse, and Baudelaire are the spiteful, evil, beautiful, fearsome and dark gods of my idolatry. How could a whole generation write so beautifully about so much spleen, boredom, self-laceration and self-loathing. Here is Arthur Rimbaud:

Hear, hear! Agree with your completely-France and Russia produced a host of groundbreaking novelists-way more than English lit. which seems to have been in terminal decline since the romantcists. I mean Flaubert, Chauteubriand, Ducasse, Verlaine, Mallarme, Rimbaud, Victor Hugo, Stendhal, Baudelaire, Huysmans and de Nerval for France, and Gogol, Tolstoi, Chekov, Pushkin, Lermentov, Turgenev for Russia-apart from Keats and Dickens, I can't think of any 19th century English writers of poets who match up with the best of Russia and France-Flaubert, Tolstoi, Gogol, Bauedlaire, Rimbaud, Pushkin and Chekov. I like Jane Austen and 'Wuthering Heights', but it is a right royal pain churning through masses of prim, mediocre victoriana.

I made the assumption that as an associate and friend of the French literatti, particularly Zola and Flaubert, and an advocate of the realist/naturalist school, that he would show some humanity in his writing

Flaubert had no interest in 'humanity'. (in the positive sense of the word)

[Jozanny]

I could spend whole night sitting here quoting from Lautreamont. I once wrote a term paper on Maldaror incorporating paintings from Goya and the Surrealist school, must be the most enjoyable task I ever undertook during my academic years.

Can someone tell me more about Ducasse's impact once he was rescued from obscurity? I am a tad nervous about buying more books in the current fiscal crisis, but I lost much of my limited fluency in French years ago, so downloading Gutenberg's Maldaror would be a lot of blood sweat and tears for me.

I have to say, although I know Sade will always be a cult figure, no doubt, that his work leaves me uninspired. To me it is just a gratuitous indulgence which the modern porn industry has made rather completely pedestrian--to take a word out of curly's playbook.

I write about sex, but to me I want it to have significance. I fail to see that in Sade whatsoever--how does Ducasse offer me more? Or compliment and contrast the realists I'd like to focus on?

[Etienne]

Ducasse does not talk much about sex, I'd link it more to Rimbaud than to Sade, but where Rimbaud's misanthropy is more of a spleen, Maldoror assume his hate and evilness. There is sadisme in Maldoror, but it is not sadism à la Sade, there is significance. It is also a kind of unclassifiable work, which while acknowledge by the surrealists cannot be said to have belonged to that school... my suggestion is that you read it. The book is divided in cantos so you might very well get a taste from the first Canto and see afterward whether to continue or not. It all depends too what direction you want to make your paper take. If you want to concentrate on Balzac, Flaubert, Maupassant, Zola, etc. then perhaps Ducasse is not the most pertinent addition. But if you want to talk about Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Breton et al. then Ducasse would without a doubt be a vital figure.

[Jozanny]

Ducasse does not talk much about sex, I'd link it more to Rimbaud than to Sade, but where Rimbaud's misanthropy is more of a spleen, Maldoror assume his hate and evilness. There is sadisme in Maldoror, but it is not sadism à la Sade, there is significance. It is also a kind of unclassifiable work, which while acknowledge by the surrealists cannot be said to have belonged to that school... my suggestion is that you read it. The book is divided in cantos so you might very well get a taste from the first Canto and see afterward whether to continue or not. It all depends too what direction you want to make your paper take. If you want to concentrate on Balzac, Flaubert, Maupassant, Zola, etc. then perhaps Ducasse is not the most pertinent addition. But if you want to talk about Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Breton et al. then Ducasse would without a doubt be a vital figure.

Okay, thanks. I have found some free, if limited English excerpts. You LitNetter's may really make me sing for my supper!

[stlukesguild]

While I would not underestimate the merits of Dickens, Browning, Tennyson, Hardy, Stevenson, Wilde, Pater, Rossetti, or even Lewis Carroll... nor would I forget the contributions of such Americans as Dickinson, Melville, Whitman, James, and even Poe... I would have to agree that as much as the Renaissance owes to the Italians (and certainly the Flemish, Germans, and even the English... when counting 15th and 16th century literature... played a role), Modernism is a product of the French. For all the strength of the Russian novelists they are but "also-rans" in comparison. From the mid-1800s until WWI France... Paris absolutely dominates all of the arts... with the possible exception of music. Considering Wagner, Brahms, Schumann, Mahler, Bruckner, Wolf, Johann Strauss, Richard Strauss, etc... it is clear that the German dominance of music was not easily surrendered. Ravel, Debussy, Faure, Berlioz, Bizet, Saint-Saëns, and Durufle are not quite up to taking that title.

By the early 20th century, however, the situation begins to change greatly. As poets, Apollinaire, Breton, Eluard, Claudel, Reverdy, etc... cannot match the Spanish-and Latin American poets: Garcia-Lorca, Rafael Alberti, Miguel Hernandez, Jorge Guillen, Antonio Machado, Pablo Neruda, Vinciente Aleixandre, and Cesar Vallejo, the Portuguese Pessoa, the British Yeats, the Italian Montale, to say nothing of the Americans: Crane, Stevens, Frost, Pound, and Eliot foremost. The Spaniard, Picasso steals the limelight as the greatest painter... and the Germans... the Expressionists, the Bauhaus, Max Beckmann, and Paul Klee have clearly made a far deeper mark on subsequent art than any 20th century French painter except Matisse (unless we consider the Impressionists who lived into the early 20th century). And the novel seems up for grabs. The British claimants include Joyce, Beckett, and Woolf... the Americans have Faulkner, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Thomas Wolfe... the Germans Kafka, Hesse and Mann... the Russians Bely and Bulgakov... but the French have Proust.

Of course as an art/book/music lover I have little invested in making any decision as to which culture/country was the leader in this or that art form in the Modern era. I may pick the best from what every culture has to offer. Looking at the dazzling array of what arose during the heady days of high Modernism (shall we say roughly 1870-WWII) I am certain that Modernism was the greatest period in the history of Western art bar only the Renaissance... in spite of all those who continue to imagine that the whole of Modernism was some vast conspiracy or at the very least... an aberration or anomaly. On the other hand... as much as I admire certain artists/writers/composers of today, I have more than a sneaking suspicion that we are not living in an era to match that which preceded us.

[Bitterfly]

Welcome to the forums Bitter! I am enjoying your posts!

Thank you very much for your welcome.

Can someone tell me more about Ducasse's impact once he was rescued from obscurity? I am a tad nervous about buying more books in the current fiscal crisis, but I lost much of my limited fluency in French years ago, so downloading Gutenberg's Maldaror would be a lot of blood sweat and tears for me.

Lauréamont was a cult figure of mine when I was much younger! I think he had a lot of impact on the surrealists (this very famous sentence keeps popping up in my mind-

"Il est beau comme la rétractilité des serres des oiseaux rapaces; ou encore, comme l'incertitude des mouvements musculaires dans les plaies des parties molles de la région cervicale postérieure; ou plutôt, comme ce piége à rats perpétuel, toujours retendu par l'animal pris, qui peut prendre seul des rongeurs indéfiniment, et fonctionner même caché sous la paille; et surtout, comme la rencontre fortuite sur une table de dissection d'une machine à coudre et d'un parapluie !"
(translation mine) He is as beautiful as the retractility of the talons of birds of prey; or as the hesitancy of the muscle movements in the wounds of the soft parts of the posterior cervical region; or rather, as the rat-trap, which is taughtened over and over again by the captured animal, that can catch rodents by itself indefinitely, and even work when it's hidden under straw; and especially, as the fortuitous meeting, on a dissection table, between a sewing-machine and an umbrella.)

I write about sex, but to me I want it to have significance. I fail to see that in Sade whatsoever--how does Ducasse offer me more? Or compliment and contrast the realists I'd like to focus on?

I advise you the chapter about Sade in Fourier, Sade, Loyola (Barthes). Lautréamont doesn't have much to do with him (I do remember, though, a love/sex scene between a female shark and the poet ).

[Inderjit Sanghe]

The British claimants include Joyce, Beckett, and Woolf... the Americans have Faulkner, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Thomas Wolfe... the Germans Kafka, Hesse and Mann... the Russians Bely and Bulgakov... but the French have Proust

You forget Nabokov for Russia, James Baldwin for America, and Queneau, Perec, Gide and Robbe-Grillet fof France. British lit. can prob. claim Burgess and Graham Greene too.

[Etienne]

StLukes I think you are underestimating 20th century French literature. While I would agree that it might not have been the "powerhouse" it was in the 19th century. If you think that French contributions to literature stop to Proust during that period, then you are highly mistaken.

Mauriac, Sarraute, Robbe-Grillet, Perec, Gide, Queneau, Bataille, Vian, Pinget, Simon, France, Céline, Camus, Sartre, Genet, Colette, Yourcenar, Butor, Alain-Fournier, Valéry, Loti, Larbaud, Leroux, Cocteau, Aragon, Prévert, Artaud, Char, Saint-John Perse, Anouilh, Malraux, Ionesco, Adamov, Celan, etc. etc. etc. Also don't forget the Oulipo, which your idol Calvino was part of.

If you want to talk only in terms of really major, if not fundamental figures, there is plenty to chose from, from Gide to Ionesco, from Céline to Camus and from Valéry to Sartre.

As poets, Apollinaire, Breton, Eluard, Claudel, Reverdy, etc...

Well Apollinaire is among my favorite poets, his "Alcools" is marvellous, although I would have to agree that "Golden ages" had shifted to the New World.

So, if you want to compare France to, say, America or Latin-America, I'd say it was the New World's century, but saying that 20th century England or Russia had a greater or better input than France, I wouldn't be so sure about it. In the end I think a lot of those discussion has a lot to do with how much a certain culture is "marketed" at a certain point.

[stlukesguild]

So, if you want to compare France to, say, America or Latin-America, I'd say it was the New World's century, but saying that 20th century England or Russia had a greater or better input than France, I wouldn't be so sure about it. In the end I think a lot of those discussion has a lot to do with how much a certain culture is "marketed" at a certain point.

No... I'm not suggesting that Britain, Russia, America, or anyone else took the title from the French. Rather no one held hegemony the way that France did for a period in the 19th century... and Italy did for a longer period during the Renaissance. A list of the 10 or 20 greatest novels of the 20th century would find contributions from all over. Personally... as much as I like Apollinaire, Eluard, Valery... and more recently Yves Bonnefoy... I have yet to have read any French 20th century poet whom I feel can match or surpass Montale, Rilke, Pessoa, Yeats, Eliot, Stevens, Garcia-Lorca, Pessoa, or Vallejo... but neither would I suggest that France no longer continued to produce top-notch poetry... and undoubtedly the innovations of Surrealism may have had far greater impact than might be suggested when simply considering the quality of Breton and the other Surrealist poets.

From my experiences in art school I repeatedly found French who refused to admit that the French hegemony in the arts was no longer a reality... and many Americans who far over-stated the supposed American usurping of that crown. If I were to make a list of the 20 greatest working artists in 1890, at least 10 would be French. If I were to do the same in 1920... perhaps 4 or 5 would be French... but another 4 or 5 would be living and working in France. If I were to ask about today... I would be hard-pressed to come up with a single important French artist... perhaps Christian Boltanski. Of course... in spite of the image of America dominating the 1950s with the great Abstract Expressionists, Francis Bacon, Giacometti, Dubuffet, Tapies, Giorgio Morandi, and others are equal to any of the AbEx giants. America... or rather New York may dominate the art market... and London especially now offers a serious challenge with all the money coming in from Russian and Middle-Eastern and Chinese billionaires... but no one seriously dominates the actual production of art... the center does not hold... there is no center.