Ganadería y medio ambiente Plan de Biodigestión de Purines

The nouveau roman and Tel Quel were a literary response to the Manichaean opposi-tions of the post- and Cold-War years, in which philosophy and literature were sub-ject to a political stranglehold. In the 1960 preface to Signs, Maurice Merleau-Ponty argued that there had been a political mania among philosophers, which had produced neither effective politics nor good philosophy (Merleau-Ponty 1964 [1960]: 6). The same holds true for literature: if it was not politically engaged, it was immediately viewed as reactionary by French existentialists and Marxists. For Jean-Paul Sartre,

“pure” literature – or what we commonly refer to as “art for art’s sake” – was a delusion that reinforced the most conservative social forces. “If literature is not everything, it is worth nothing. This is what I mean by ‘commitment’”: in stating this, Sartre was prac-tically suggesting that literature had to be everything but itself (Sartre 1974: 13–14).

The alternative was to be either “revolutionary” without “literature,” or – since “lit-erature” is “bourgeois” – conservative (Sollers 1968: 398). It was as though literature were, in and of itself, reactionary.

In an interview granted to Tel Quel in 1963, the new novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet maintained that Sartrean engagement and Aragonian socialist realism were contrary to the practice of literature (Robbe-Grillet 1963: 39–40). Socialist realism, synony-mous with Zhdanovism, presupposed the absolute subordination of art and literature to political ends. Since content necessarily preceded form, for Stalin, formal innovation was considered suspect. Robbe-Grillet’s conception of literature was shared not only by apolitical aesthetes such as the founding members of Tel Quel, but also by a new generation of Communist militants who felt that it was impossible to be “modern” in literature and “militant” in politics. In 1986, the former Communist militant, Jacques Henric, who joined Tel Quel in 1971, argued that, unlike the avant-garde writers who had preceded them, the Telquelians never sacrificed their literary and artistic convic-tions to the political slaughterhouse in the name of false gods like Stalin and Zhdanov (Henric 1986). Like Louis Aragon, who had abandoned the surrealists for the Com-munist party and Stalinism, Sartre too, in the postwar years, sacrificed literature in the name of politics. Instead of elaborating the doubt regarding the redemptive role he had accorded to the writer, Sartre merely shifted it to the terrain of the intellectual (Lyotard 1986: xi). This type of intellectual, whom Roland Barthes preferred to call an écrivant (writer), was a direct descendant of the eighteenth-century revolutionary

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figure who appropriated language for political means. Such a writer “posits a goal (to give evidence, to explain, to instruct), of which language is merely a means; for him language supports a praxis, it does not constitute one” (Barthes 1972: 144, 147). Bar-thes opposes this type of writer to the écrivain (author), for whom writing is an intran-sitive activity, fusing the creative and critical functions of language.

Barthes maintains that Sartre answered the question “What is literature?” “from the outside, which gives him an ambiguous literary position” (Barthes 1972: 98).

Although Sartrean engagement accounted for the social context of literature, it nev-ertheless failed to free language from an idealist framework where it is considered a mere instrument or ornament. For the engaged writer, language is essentially instru-mental: words are “useful conventions, tools which gradually wear out and which one throws away when they are no longer serviceable” (Sartre 1949: 13). Style must pass unnoticed: “Since words are transparent and since the gaze looks through them, it would be absurd to slip in among them some panes of rough glass” (Sartre 1949: 25).

In reducing language to an instrument and discarding style as excess, the committed writer fails to take language seriously. Unlike Sartre, the new novelists and Telqueli-ans would remain as close as possible to the literary object by raising “the fundamental problems of language, without which [literature] would not exist” (Barthes 1986: 21).

Literature would continue to have a secondary status so long as it remained subordi-nate to politics or aesthetics – that is, insofar as language was reduced to being “the con-venient instrument or sumptuous décor of a social, emotional or poetic ‘reality’ which pre-exists it and which it is responsible, in a subsidiary way, for expressing, provided it abides by a few rules of style” (Barthes 1986: 4). If, for Sartrean engagement, man is Homo significans, “it is not because he speaks, but because he exists. Meaning is the char-acteristic medium of his life, not the effect of his speech” (Hollier 1986: 59). Contrasting postwar literary concerns with those of the early 1960s, Foucault contended that the

“humanist” literature of the 1940s and 1950s was essentially a literature of signification (What is the meaning of man? of the world?). Then came “something very different, almost resistant to meaning, which is the sign, or language itself” (Tel Quel 1964: 38).

The preoccupation with language during the late 1950s and early 1960s was not necessarily an act of political disengagement. According to Barthes, “The origin of semiology was political for me. Weary of the immobile, oratorical character of ideo-logical denunciations, I glimpsed with bedazzlement, in reading Saussure (it was in 1956), that there could be an elegant method (as one says of a solution to a math-ematical problem) for analyzing social symbols, class distinctions, and ideological cun-ning” (Barthes 1974: 28). For Kristeva, the formalist reaction of the late 1950s and early 1960s, exemplified both by structuralist theory and the practice of the nouveau roman, served to purge “that subjective or rhetorical edema that our parents had set up to protect themselves against the devastating suffering of wars, or that they had used to construct their martyrdom.” It was, she argues, a reaction against the romantic, grandiloquent, and pathetic rhetoric of the postwar years (Kristeva 1984: 263).

Language had supplanted History, which had been a revolutionary concept in the nineteenth century and a watchword for an entire generation of writers and

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intellectuals who came of age in the 1930s and into prominence in the postwar years (Foucault cited in Tel Quel 1964: 77). The disciplines of semiotics, psychoanalysis, and ethnology were repeatedly accused of undermining philosophical and historical thought – the hegemonic disciplines of the postwar years. Highly critical of Foucault’s The Order of Things (1966/1973), Sartre proclaimed that

Foucault gives the people what they needed: an eclectic synthesis in which Robbe-Grillet, structuralist linguistics, Lacan and Tel Quel are systematically utilized to demonstrate the impossibility of historical reflection. Behind his-tory, of course, it is Marxism which is attacked. The task is to come up with a new ideology: the latest barrier that the bourgeoisie once again can erect against Marx.

(Sartre 1971: 110) The theoretical advances in the various intellectual disciplines were actually facili-tated by a concrete, historical reality – the “Stalinist truth” – which could no longer be ignored after the events of 1956. After Khrushchev’s indictment of Stalin at the Twentieth Soviet Party Congress, the invasion of Hungary by Soviet troops, and the Polish October, French intellectuals could no longer contain the doubts that had plagued them since the early 1950s. Although Sartre proclaimed, in 1960, that Marxism remained “the unsurpassable horizon of our time,” he was forced to concede that as an official state doctrine, “Marxism was at a standstill” (Sartre 1960: 29, 25, respectively). Many French left-wing intellectuals turned to the Algerian revolution (1954–1962) and to Third Worldism (tiersmondisme) as a means of salvaging Marxist thought through praxis. Others used the paradigm shift of this period to cast new light on Marxist thought, by deconstructing it from within.

For example, Edgar Morin’s journal Arguments (1956–1962), which was housed at the Editions de Minuit publishing house in Paris, deconstructed the monolithic dog-matism of Stalinism that had clouded French intellectual thought in the early 1950s (and would continue to do so until the mid-1970s when Soviet dissidence was finally taken seriously in France), undertaking a pluri-dimensional revision of all aspects of political and cultural life in France. The Editions de Minuit itself, which began as a clandestine venture in 1941, during the German Occupation of France, managed to house two key journals, not only Arguments but also Critique (and theirrespective book series), as well as the apolitical nouveau roman, while publishing a number of the most controversial texts pertaining to the Algerian war, most of which were censored by the French government. In fact, Marguerite Duras’s new novel Moderato Cantabile was published at the same time as Henri Alleg’s celebrated denunciation of French torture in Algeria, The Question (1958). According to Anne Simonin, Minuit had “a subver-sive publishing strategy: one in the literary domain, the other in the political sphere, thus assuring the temporal coincidence of an aesthetic and political avant-gardism within the same publishing house. The genres co-exist but do not mix” (Simonin 1991: 236).

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Minuit could never be accused of being a right-wing publisher. Beginning with Jean Bruller’s The Silence of the Sea, published under the pseudonym of Vercors, which circu-lated in a clandestine manner in October 1942, Minuit subsequently published twenty works, under pseudonyms, by established authors such as Paul Eluard, André Gide, Jacques Maritain, Jean Paulhan, François Mauriac, and Aragon. They also published a translation of John Steinbeck’s The Moon Is Down [Nuits noires]. In the wake of this initial Resistance sprit, they went on to publish Premier combat (1947) by the noted Resistance fighter Jean Moulin (1947); La Rose blanche (1955), by Inge Scholl, the sister of Sophie and Hans Scholl, who were executed in 1943 Nazi Germany for their participation in the non-violent resistance group, the White Rose (this publication would not appear in English until 1970); Un camp très ordinaire (1957), by Resistance fighter Micheline Maurel, who spent almost two years at Ravensbrück concentration camp; Night by Elie Wiesel (1958); the re-edition of L’Univers concentrationnaire by David Rousset (1965); and the series Auschwitz et après, by Charlotte Delbo (1970).

During the Algerian war (1954–1962), Minuit once again assumed the subversive role they had played during the Occupation. They published a number of key texts in opposition to the war, in addition to Alleg’s The Question. These include: Jacques Vergès and Georges Arnaud’s Pour Djamila Bouhired, prefaced by Simone de Beauvoir (1957), the testimony of an Algerian bomb carrier, raped and tortured by the French, and L’Affaire Audin (1958), the story of a French mathematician tortured to death in Algeria. These works clearly demonstrate the complicity of French political forces with respect to military actions in Algeria. In 1972, Pierre Vidal-Naquet’s La Tor-ture dans la République appeared. The publishing houses of Minuit, Maspero and Seuil (which housed Tel Quel) became synonymous with intellectual resistance during the Algerian war.

With the Sartrean notion of engaged writing under suspicion in the mid- and late 1950s, a new form of writing that might have been viewed as right-wing during the Occupation or in the immediate postwar years was legitimated as experimental under the Minuit seal. Jerôme Lindon (who took over Minuit’s direction in 1948) was very committed to literature per se; he would repeatedly state that without Samuel Beckett (whose works, previously rejected by numerous publishers, began appearing at Minuit in 1950), Minuit would never have existed. Lindon believed that style translated a moral position and that form could not be disassociated from ethics. Political direc-tions never dictated literary, philosophical, or social science direcdirec-tions at Minuit (Le Monde 2001). Robbe-Grillet could thus state in 1957 that commitment for the new novelist now implied “full awareness of the present problems of his own language, the conviction of their extreme importance, the desire to solve them from within”

(Robbe-Grillet 1965: 41).

Robbe-Grillet’s early novels and screenplays were deliberately devoid of any politi-cal content. He did not allude to the Algerian war in his screenplay, L’année dernière à Marienbad [Last Year in Marienbad] (1961). This was not necessarily an apolitical stance on his part. His association with the politicized Alain Resnais and with Minuit was already indicative of liberal political leanings. Furthermore, in September 1960, he

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signed, along with other intellectuals such as Simone de Beauvoir, Francois Châtelet, Henri Lefebvre, Sartre, and Duras, the “Manifesto of the 121,” a manifesto in opposi-tion to the Algerian war, which was a declaraopposi-tion of the right of insubordinaopposi-tion and an act of civil disobedience. Although endorsed by Sartre’s journal Les Temps Modernes, the manifesto was condemned by the Communist and Socialist parties.

By refusing to refer to the Algerian war in Marienbad, Robbe-Grillet was not simply being apolitical; he was defending the responsibility of forms that would become the leitmotiv of writers and theoreticians during the 1960s. Had he alluded to Algeria in his screenplay, he would have conceded that the only way to be revolutionary in literature was to write about class struggle or anti-colonialist war. Unwilling to accept the engaged notion that literature had to focus on a certain content, Robbe-Grillet repeatedly subverted this content with a narrative technique that prevented a story from being told and that attempted to suspend meaning: a technique characterized by endless repetitions, lacunae, and interior duplications (mises en abyme; see McHale, this volume). He contended that the subordination of form to content led to a social-ist realism that was merely a revolutionary parody of nineteenth-century (Balzacian) bourgeois realism.