Engagement in 21st Century French and Francophone Culture

Countering Crises

Helena Chadderton, Angela Kimyongür

• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781786831200
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: French Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

In the face of the contested legacy of engagement in the Francophone context, this interdisciplinary collection demonstrates that French and Francophone writers, artists, intellectuals and film-makers are using their work to confront unforeseen and unprecedented challenges, campaigns and causes in a politically uncertain post-9/11 world. Composed of eleven essays and a contextualising introduction, this volume is interdisciplinary in its treatment of engagement in a variety of forms, as it reassesses the relationship between different types of cultural production and society as it is played out in the twenty-first century. With a focus on both the development of different cultural forms (Part 1) and on the particular crises that have attracted the attention of cultural practitioners (Part 2), this volume maps and analyses some of the ways in which cultural texts of all kinds are being used to respond to, engage with and challenge crises in the contemporary Francophone world.

Part 1

Culture in Crisis? Evolving Cultural Forms in the Twenty-first Century

1

Engagement in la fiction d’affaires: François Bon and Thierry Beinstingel

HELENA CHADDERTON

The treatment of social and political issues and formal experimentation have been traditionally polarised in the development of the French novel. Reflecting this polarisation, from the end of the 1980s, there has been a backlash against what is perceived to be the hegemony of formalism: against self-reflexivity and metatextual questioning, which arguably came to dominate the offerings of the French novel from the nouveau roman onwards. Indeed, there has been a revival of narrative which is socially and historically anchored to reality. This has involved a ‘retour au récit’, or return to the story, as summarised by Simon Kemp in French Fiction into the Twenty-first Century: The Return to the Story, as well as a renewed interest in history, and a preoccupation with contemporary social and political issues.¹ It is this final aspect of this revival which will interest us here. In March 2007, a campaign entitled ‘Pour une littérature-monde en français’ was launched in Le Monde to reinstate ‘le monde, le sujet, le sens, l’histoire, le “référent”’ in French literature.² In the same way, Tzvetan Todorov, in his 2007 critique, La littérature en péril, laments what he perceives to be the metafictional posturing of French literature and calls for a return to the study of texts in terms of what they bring to ‘la connaissance de l’humain’.³ The quandary which contemporary writers now face is how to present the social and political world while nonetheless acknowledging the loss of innocence, the expected questioning of the relationship between language and the world, that has been brought about by literary theory and recent literary movements, from Barthes’s ‘death of the author’ to the nouveau roman’s rejection of realism on the grounds that it is the creation of an illusion. Indeed, shortly after the peak of publications associated with the nouveau roman, Barthes asked: ‘Notre littérature serait-elle toujours condamnée à ce va-et-vient entre le réalisme politique et l’art-pour-l’art, entre une morale de l’engagement et un purisme esthétique, entre la compromission et l’asepsie?’⁴

Despite a long and problematic history in the French context,⁵ contemporary understanding of literary engagement is now largely constituted by a similar binary opposition. This opposition is represented on the one hand by the Sartrean understanding of the term, that a literary text functions as a call to action and that language functions instrumentally to contain a particular message,⁶ and on the other, by Barthes’s understanding of engagement of form and the poetic of language.⁷ La fiction d’affaires,⁸ or business fiction, is particularly interesting as a genre that aims to overcome this restrictive literary perception as it is very much ‘of the world’, rooted in social reality, and yet at the same time is a genre within which use of language is of the utmost importance. The blurb of Dire le travail: fiction et témoignage depuis 1980, a collected volume of writing on work, attempts to explain why:

Le monde des ouvriers, des employés et des cadres, observé, décrit, raconté ou fictionné pour lui-même, n’est pas un objet comme un autre, mais un de ceux qui ont le plus contribué à renouveler les formes narratives depuis trente ans en France et ailleurs dans le monde. Entre autres raisons parce que c’est un objet de langage: dans un monde où «l’entreprise» a imposé ses normes à la langue, le roman, comme la poésie, doit inventer les formes qui rendent toute sa puissance critique à la pensée.⁹

The manipulation of language has been one of the major ways of instigating often unwanted change in the workplace. Examples include the eradication of certain roles through changes in job title or the requirement not to deviate from prescribed scripts in communication with customers. Consequently, the relationship between language and the workplace is particularly productive in inspiring literary activity, as Bruno Blanckeman has shown:

La culture de la communication, dans le monde de l’entreprise et sur la scène publique, valorise la performance fonctionnelle de la langue au détriment de sa puissance significatrice. Dans ces circonstances, la pratique du roman fait sens: ni conservatoire comme jadis, ni laboratoire comme naguère, elle réanime la langue.¹⁰

The language of neo-liberalism has been accused of impoverishing and limiting language, rendering it impersonal and emptied of meaning and value. Through examples from the work of contemporary authors François Bon and Thierry Beinstingel, this chapter will tease out the nature of the réanimation Blanckeman describes. Beinstingel makes the point that since ‘la culture d’entreprise’ has used language so aggressively to manipulate perceptions, we must respond using the same tools: ‘Dans cette perspective où l’entreprise tente une mainmise sur le langage, le roman et la fiction représentent peut-être la seule issue possible. En effet, comment dénoncer sinon en utilisant les mêmes armes?’¹¹

The use of language as a tool, a medium and a means with which to capture, represent or reflect the social world is, however, challenged by François Bon. For this reason, he refuses the concept of littérature engagée, arguing that ‘La question de l’engagement part toujours d’un malentendu […] parce qu’elle constitue le monde social et son actualité comme cible et but de l’activité d’écriture.’¹² Accordingly, this chapter will show how Bon’s refusal of this division is apparent both in his work and also in that of Thierry Beinstingel. Through examples from selected texts, which fit into the developing genre of fiction d’affaires, I will suggest that their work foregrounds the role of language and links it to situations of alienation and insecurity surrounding work. In this way, I will show how Bon and Beinstingel overcome the simplistic division between engagement of content and engagement of form in order to condemn the neo-liberal workplace, and in so doing, contribute to what can be seen as a new form of engagement for the twenty-first century. Alongside la fiction d’affaires, France has also seen a trend for témoignages, factual accounts that record the experiences of often difficult working conditions, set both in the present, such as Florence Aubenas’s Le quai d’Ouistreham¹³, in which the journalist went undercover as a contract cleaner, and in the past, such as Frank Magloire’s Ouvrière¹⁴ and Aurélie Filipetti’s Les derniers jours de la classe ouvrière,¹⁵ which both recall the authors’ parents’ experiences as factory workers. In Ouvrière, Magloire’s mother argues that the pages of the book are nothing more than ‘des copies de la vie’.¹⁶ In focusing on fiction rather than such individual testimonies, an additional aim of this chapter will be to establish the contribution of fiction to an understanding of the contemporary workplace.

François Bon has been writing since the early 1980s and is the author of over thirty full-length texts dealing largely with the working-class industrial and post-industrial experience. He has written several works which can be classified as fiction d’affaires: Sortie d’usine (1982), Temps Machine (1993) and Daewoo (2004). Bon himself worked in a factory and is clearly politically engaged; alongside his individual acts of writing, since 1992 he has held creative writing workshops in schools, prisons and community centres, and three of his books actually emerged from these classes. He talks about his reasons for publishing the novels in Tous les mots sont adultes: ‘la voix des humbles, la voix des anonymes, ne résonne encore que bien trop faiblement dans la littérature.’¹⁷ Yet Michel Ragon, in Histoire de la littérature prolétarienne de langue française, describes Bon’s style as: ‘plus proche de Claude Simon que d’Emile Zola’,¹⁸ suggesting that Bon’s commitment is to form rather than the highlighting of social ills. Indeed Bon is far more than a witness of social deprivation, rejecting the description of his work as ‘l’ecriture sur [quelque chose]’.¹⁹ His objection to the preposition ‘sur’ as a divider between writing and subject of writing suggests that he does not consider the two to be connected by a simple relationship of means and message, or that he sees writing as a tool with which to capture an object external to itself. Indeed, what I will go on to show is that while Bon’s work indisputably focuses on the social world, in so doing it nonetheless questions the representative relationship between language and the world. In Sortie d’usine, Bon evokes strike, hierarchy, accidents at work and the mind-numbing monotony and danger of factory work. Tellingly in Daewoo, published twenty-two years later, Bon deals this time with twenty-first-century crisis: the neo-liberal economic imperative forcing the closure of an otherwise profitable electronics factory.

Daewoo, named for the Korean electronics manufacturer, takes as its subject the closures of the Daewoo factories in Lorraine in 2003–4, amid circumstances mired in political and financial scandal.²⁰ Yet direct comments on social injustice or exploitation, such as this example at the opening of Daewoo in which the narrator explains his desire to undertake the project, are rare: ‘parce que ce qui transperce l’actualité, séparant ou brisant ce qui était établi de façon stable entre les hommes et les choses, a disparu sans suffisant examen préalable des conséquences’ (p. 13).²¹ Rather, in focusing on the materiality of language through his visceral and innovative style, Bon’s work ineluctably links his content to representation and use of language, thereby encouraging new understandings of the situations he presents. In Bon’s work we come across fragments, limited accounts, multiple voices, ellipses, repetition, delay and the switching of genres, all of which highlight, as the following examples from Daewoo show, the productive power of language to comment on its own usage.

Bon emphasises throughout Daewoo how his subjects express themselves: ‘sa façon de dire les mots’ (p. 103),²² the rhythm and cadence of their voices, the kind of words they employ: ‘Je notais à mesure, sur mon carnet, les phrases précises qui fixent une cadence, un vocabulaire’ (p. 48).²³ Stories are told several times in different ways by different people, highlighting, as Korthals Altes has shown, the importance of ‘des manières de dire et de voir’.²⁴ This interest in how is echoed on a structural level in that Daewoo is generically unstable. Indeed Bon’s texts are infamously hybrid, allowing him to highlight different representative modes, something which has led him to publish with Minuit, Fayard and Verdier; all his works which appear with Verdier are classed as récits. In 2007, Bon set up the collection ‘Déplacements’ with Seuil, which aimed to encourage the publication of unknown first-time authors and to break down generic norms. Bon, a leading light in the digital revolution, now self-publishes via his website le tiers livre. Daewoo, arguably the most generically unstable of Bon’s texts, is made up of a mixture of interviews, narrative and what Bon calls ‘theatre’, in which his protagonists take it in turn to speak, although on the title page it claims to be a novel. In this way, the reader’s attention is constantly drawn to the movement bet...