1913: The year of French modernism

Efthymia Rentzou, André Benhaïm

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781526145048
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: French Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

1913: The year of French modernism is the first book to respond to two deceptively simple questions: "What constituted modernism in France?" and "What is the place of France on the map of global modernism?" Taking its cue from the seminal year 1913, an annus mirabilis for literature and art, the book captures a snapshot of vibrant creativity in France and a crucial moment for the quickly emerging modernism throughout the world. Essays from specialists on works of literature, art, photography and cinema which were created or made public in and around 1913, outline in a dazzling fresco the protagonists, strategies and genres, the dynamics, themes, and legacies of what was French modernism.

Part I

1913, French modernism and historical time

Introduction

Part I explores notions, perceptions and representations of time, timeliness and historicity in literature, criticism, photography and cinema. Assumptions that modernism was all about the ‘new’ as well as a radical and unrecoverable break with tradition and the past have long ceded to considerations of modernist works’ complex relation with history and historicity, time and timeliness. Modernism’s obsession with time and history is symptomatic of modernity’s acceleration and compression of time, the feeling of an ever-growing global synchronization, but also a sense of an irreparable loss of the past – a loss that Charles Baudelaire saw already in the nineteenth century and projected on the new urban bourgeois uniform, the black frock, which he interpreted as as a sign of mourning. The five chapters in this part flesh out prismatically different treatments of time and history around 1913 and question, explicitly or not, concepts that have been central to theoretical discussions of modernism: origin (Benhaïm), originality and repetition (Eburne), self-historization (Le Gall), centre/periphery and synchronicity (Rentzou), modernism and the avant-garde (Marx).

André Benhaïm in ‘Prehistoric Proust’ discusses modernity’s fascination with prehistory as a cognitive and imaginary object, spurred by a series of palaeontological discoveries from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, as a way to cope with modernization by seeking an elusive point of ‘origin’. Benhaïm draws a parallel between this cultural reality circa 1913 and the ‘prehistory’ of Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu – that is, the book’s ‘false starts’ with various other works and drafts before 1913 – but also similar creative processes of ‘false starts’ from other modernist writers and artists, like Valery Larbaud. Ultimately, the structure of the monumental Recherche, which was already put into place in 1913 with the composition of the first and the last volume completed, is seen as dominated by the new concept of ‘prehistory’, understood as a new relationship with time that escapes linear historicity and permits the coexistence of different temporalities.

Similarly, Jonathan P. Eburne reflects on the modernist grappling with the linearity of historical experience in his consideration of seriality. Eburne, in his chapter ‘Fantômas and the shudder of history’, approaches the Fantômas book and film series as examples of modernism’s thinking through the problem of recording and assessing historical experience – a process parallel to Proust’s grand oeuvre also marked by a certain seriality. Pulp Fantômas is thereby put in dialogue with the work of Nietzsche, Freud and Bergson, all different modernist attempts to comprehend the special resonance of history, historical truth and time. Eburne ultimately argues that the seriality of the Fantômas novels and films strives to capture the radical otherness of historical experience in modernity, and they thus exemplify ‘the shudder of history’, that is, history and time in modernity as fundamentally unknowable in their vanishing effervescence.

From the seriality of cinema to that of photographic albums, Guillaume Le Gall, in his chapter ‘Inventing, collecting and classifying in the margins: The work of Eugène Atget, a shift in photographic representation’, proposes Atget’s work as a visual representation not just of Paris but also of its historicity. Le Gall discusses two of Atget’s photographic albums in tandem, Les Fortifications de Paris and Zoniers, seeing them not only as part of Atget’s modernist photographic project, which aimed at exploring the medium’s documentary potential, but also as a project aiming at shaping history. The creation of a serial archive of a soon-to-disappear urban past, falling victim to the pressures of a rapidly changing modernity, also harbours a political dimension, as it documents the discontinuum between human life and urban environment, especially in the impoverished no-man-land’s exurban sites.

Anxiety over time and history turns from a consideration of the rapidly disappearing historical experience in the previous two chapters to a consideration of synchronicity and timeliness in an ever-expanding modern world. Effie Rentzou, in ‘The anxious centre’, outlines perceptions of Paris, the cultural ‘centre’, in its own modernity and timeliness. The antagonism between British, Italian and French avant-gardes, often encoded in clear nationalist terms, culminated in a discussion of the 1913 debate around the term ‘simultaneity’, a term that became hotly contested, with bitter attacks over who invented it first. Denoting a specifically modern perception of time and synchronicity, simultaneity seems to transcode ideological, political and economic issues on the representational and conceptual level, that of a perceived belatedness, and of a generalized sense of time’s unevenness. Rentzou shows that Paris, the alleged ‘centre’ of modernism, acts as anxiously as the ‘peripheries’ in measuring its own modernity, and thereby argues that a weak and uneven ‘centre’ discredits the logic of ‘centre/periphery’.

This part ends with William Marx’s provocatively titled chapter ‘1913, year of the arrière-garde?’. Marx delineates cultural life in 1913 as a triangle with modernism, the avant-garde and the rear-guard as its apexes. Enclosed in this triangulation, different positions vis-à-vis literary history and tradition are at play. Marx argues that the crisis in literature and literary history brought about by symbolism, which led to a full-circle literary autonomy, allowed thereafter only two possible positions: either going backwards, to a literary moment before symbolism and romanticism, which in this case meant neoclassicism – this was the choice made by the rear-guard – or leap forward and consider literature in a radically new configuration with social praxis – which is what the avant-garde did. Marx shows that the dividing line between avant-garde and rear-guard was porous, while the modernist landscape of 1913 was remarkably heterogeneous, with the newly founded La Nouvelle Revue Française an arbiter of this tug of war. This closing chapter raises issues of modernism’s place within literary history, but also interrogates modernism’s self-historization, as its protagonists and agents deliberately positioned themselves in relation to the past, the present and the future.

1

Prehistoric Proust

André Benhaïm

In 1900, Paris is hosting the new World’s Fair, ‘L’Expo du Siècle’ (The Exhibition of the Century).¹ The main access gate, in the shape of a monumental forty-metre-high arch designed by René Binet, towers over the Place de la Concorde with fifty-six counters letting in more than a thousand visitors per minute. With its huge cupola whose central dome rests on three arches, this enormous structure looks more like a temple than an entryway. Flanked by two minarets, it is decorated with ornate byzantine motifs and Persian ceramics. However, this exotic, multicultural dimension is far from the oddest part of the monument on top of which stands the huge female allegory of the ‘Parisian Woman’. The gate is in fact an immense cave of sorts, an open rock shelter. Binet, inspired by Jean Gaudry’s 1896 Essai de paléontologie philosophique, wanted his work to appear natural, even ancient. To be sure, each side of the central arch makes Binet’s intentions evident, albeit discretely, as they replicate dinosaur spines. In order to enter the 1900 World’s Fair and walk into the twentieth century, one must go through prehistory.

But the twentieth century does not really start in 1900. It begins just before the Great War. In 1913, the century still awaits its dreadful birth. In fact, it is also a time when one looks back at the past with a new-found confidence; now, even cavemen looked modern. Be it by train or on aeroplanes, everyone rushes towards the dawn of humanity. This is how we meet the Man of Cro-Magnon: his bones are found on the construction site of the train tracks between Pau and Agen, in the south-west of France. Prehistory cannot escape the motions of the century. The poets of 1913 know it: Apollinaire imagines Christ and his predecessors as aviators in ‘Zone’ while Blaise Cendrars goes even further in his Prose du Transsibérien et de la petite Jehanne de France, where the poet offers his travelling companion another kind of trip:

If you want we’ll take a plane and fly over the land of the thousand lakes
The nights there are outrageously long
The sound of the engine will scare our prehistoric ancestors
I’ll land
And build a hangar out of mammoth fossils²

One (almost) does not believe any longer that the Flood divides human time into a before and an after. One does not believe any longer in the calculations of Renaissance scientists, like the archbishop James Ussher who, inspired by biblical chronology, had concluded that the World had been created in 4004 BC. This temporality as revealed by the Book did not convince everyone, and from Leonardo da Vinci to Buffon, the origins of humanity were pushed further and further, albeit with enduring uncertainty.

A hundred years before the 1900 Fair, crowds gathered in the Jardin des Plantes in Paris to listen to Cuvier’s lessons on animal fossils. Thanks to the principles of comparative anatomy, Cuvier was able to reconstitute them so masterfully that he became a demiurge of sorts, and even, according to Balzac, the greatest poet of his time. A generation later, after spending years unearthing hundreds of fossils and working flints, Jacques de Crèvecœur de Boucher de Perthes became the proponent of ‘man’s antiquity’, claiming in his notorious 1860 discourse, De l’Homme antédiluvien et de ses œuvres (Of Antediluvian Man and his Work), that we once walked alongside great beasts who lived long before the Flood, but were now extinct. Despite the incredulity of many, prehistory as a concept and object of study came to be.

The term préhistoire itself appeared in French in the 1870s, at a moment when archaeological sites are discovered in great numbers, like the site of Cro-Magnon where five sepultures were found in 1868, among which that of the emblematic ‘Old Man’. At the end of the nineteenth century, Man gets older and older, faster and faster – but also remains the same. At least, Cro-Magnon does, being depicted as wise and human, while poor Neanderthal, discovered ten years earlier, continues to be seen as Homo stupidus, and this will be true for a long time. In the twentieth century, while time flies and knowledge blossoms, humans keep crawling closer to animals. As Darwin’s ideas progress in leaps and bounds, the human family circle grows ever larger with monkeys and apes creeping in. Proof that they deserve this privilege comes from the island of Java where Anthropopithecus erectus was discovered in 1891 as the missing link. In 1900, visitors at the Paris World’s Fair, the exhibition of the century that celebrated the most ancient of times, gasped at the sight of Pithecanthropus erectu...