There once was a time when, partly through cultural laziness (French still the most taught language in the British Isles, though to a more proportional extent) and partly through international recognition, the works of French authors were published throughout the English-speaking world to the same extent as their native contemporaries, dominating the sphere of translated works. One grew up with Verne and Dumas in childhood, before progressing to Hugo, Zola, Balzac and Flaubert. Of course, prior to this, Voltaire and Moliere were the big beasts of the literary field, one potentially pointing to Rabelais as the progenitor. Moving into the 20th century, Proust and France were the notable pre-war scribes, before a more modern generation of Camus, Sartre and de Beauvoir proved more accessible to changing tastes. Strangely, the final flowering came from foreign authors, with Beckett and Ionesco both writing masterpieces in their second tongue. But who carries the 21st century torch? Only Houllebecq is widely-read or recognised, and Atomised proved more a succes du scandal than anything else. On the one hand, English has become the universal language of the digital age, but on the other, there have never been more works in translation, so like the Irish soccer team, has the well of top-quality French authors finally run dry?
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The strange death of French literature
Christ, hardly. I'm discovering new old ones all the time, thanks to the new availability of information and cheap copies of everything ever published around the world.
There was always a time lag and a lot of great writing languishing untranslated. You can follow threads now to check out the books that made it: Calder and Boyars spent the money they made off the back of Beckett's success on translating a lot of French lit; Barbara Wright was probably the UK's leading translator in this area. Spend an hour following those up on Amazon and you can pick up tonnes of great stuff from Robert Pinget, Pierre Albert Birot, Nathalie Sarraute, Claude Simon, Marguerite Duras, Maurice Blanchot and plenty more.
I'm not sure anyone who's picked up Being and Nothingness would describe Sartre as "accessible" but he does seem to have been pretty famous.
Partly thanks to French theory crawling across the arts like ivy since the eighties, experimental French authors like Perec and his gamesy Oulipo gang, like the theorists themselves, have a lot of reach with your post-McSweeney's lot and across the visual art world. I don't much rate those authors or theorists myself, but they they are.
I'm not too well up on current and recent French authors, but the same probably applies to most foreign countries. How France compares with other countries for producing "quality" literature seems pretty moot - have the US or UK been turning out equivalents of Houllebecq by the bucketload? Has Spain, Mexico? -
The strange death of French literature
This is a subject that regularly pops up in the Culture pages of the French press — a particularly hysterical example here (in French) suggesting, not for the first time, that the novel is dead. The same accusation is also levelled at French visual arts, cinema, and beyond. There is a longstanding tradition in France of déclinologues making grand statements about the barbarism or meek conformism of present-day cultural production.
That said, it's true that contemporary 'literary' French writers have not exported themselves well, except for Houellebecq and, perhaps, Le Clézio, both of whom live and work abroad. I have my own pet explanations for this. One of them is that, on an intellectual level, France has just barely begun to embrace identity politics, particularly postcolonialism and multiculturalism. A lot of French culture is steeped in traditions that have become unfashionable elsewhere: materialist (Ken Loach's films are really popular here) and psychoanalytic. Writers like François Cheng and Marie Darrieussecq, who have been heavily promoted by French publishers, produce work that is strange, visual and emotive, but enormously introspective. They are difficult to read and hard to care about.
What's missing is a way of storifying the give-and-take between 'I' and 'the outside world'. Another of my pet theories is that France has not yet embraced the creative writing workshop. Where such workshops do exist in France, they tend to be about language and composition: a voyage of discovery for the writer. There's little of the "anglo-saxon" focus on structure, tightening, grabbing the reader.
There's also the problem of young readers. Few of the French classics are as accessible to bibliophile teenagers as Dickens, Austen, Conan Doyle, or the anglophone WW1 poets. Young French boys are into comic books, graphic novels, manga, and genre fiction to a much greater extent than in the UK. I think they find the language, rhythm and tone are closer to the (American) tv series they were brought up on. And there's no passé simple.Comment
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The strange death of French literature
From what I know of post-war French novels, that point about introspection does seem right. The nouveau roman approach does not throw its readers a bone, and the effect can be amazing or dire. It was never going to a make a big splash internationally, but that's true for a lot of great art - it can still have a place, even it's not the bestseller list. I guess that was a stark indication of which way the writerly winds were blowing in France.
I'd be wary of overestimating the effects of creative writing workshops though. The US-UK publishing market itself certainly demands punchy storytelling and 'accessibility', and I think that's the real motor. I don't think many big-name writers did creative writing courses (although most end up teaching on them). Those workshops seem as likely to turn out introspective Bookerish novels, the kind of stream-of-consciousness lite that's usually available for £0.01 on Amazon six months after publication.Comment
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