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Literature: Life, Death and Thought in Interwar and Occupation-Era France: René Char, Georges Bataille & Pierre Drieu La Rochelle

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Literature: Life, Death and Thought in Interwar and Occupation-Era France: René Char, Georges Bataille & Pierre Drieu La Rochelle Literature: Life, Death and Thought in Interwar and Occupation-Era France: René Char, Georges Bataille & Pierre Drieu la Rochelle Rowan G. Tepper December 2011 I. While the much celebrated debate concerning literature engagée came most prominently to the fore in the post-war period, following the (not unassisted) success of the résistance and the post-war épaurations, this debate has its roots principally in the tumultuous inter-war years of the Third French Republic, and even in times before. Indeed, Julien Benda, in his 1927 La Trahison des Clercs, decried the ever-increasing politicization of intellectual and literary activity. While the three principal figures and works under consideration in this essay, René Char, Georges Bataille and Pierre Drieu la Rochelle, were not without political engagement – the first in the résistance, the last as a collaborateur (subsequent to the events of February 1934), if unreliable and subversive in his actual activities, and with ends ostensibly purely literary and cultural, while Bataille's political commitments and activities are well-known, if poorly-understood; to cite one example, his activities in alliance with André Breton in Contre-Attaque were instrumental in supporting the electoral victory of the Front Populaire, led by Léon Blum (incidentally, the first Jewish prime minister of France), in 1936, an election in which Sartre had not even bothered to cast a vote1 – they were concerned principally with literary activity in a 1 Additionally, Bataille's literary patron, the pre- and post-war editor of La Nouvelle Revue Française, Jean Paulhan, won election to a mayorality, which he retained until the outbreak of the war and whose public works remain to this day. Furthermore, in 1996, Maurice Blanchot disclosed that he had felt it necessary to prevent Bataille from becoming a signatory to the “Declaration of the Right to Insubordination in the Algerian War,” “If Georges Bataille did not sign (against his will), it was at my request: he was already very sick then, and we knew that we were all heading for hard times... What would have made his 'case' particularly unfair is that his daughter Laurence was already in prison... her father, who was not in on the secret then, would have been mixed up with a dreadful intrigue, from which it was our 1 specific relationship to thought, as such, connected perhaps to culture, certainly to philosophy, but only indirectly with the political as such. Literature and thought, while necessarily political in some fashion, according to Bataille's 1950 letter to René Char, follows a “NON SERVIAM [which] is said to be the devil's motto [thus] then literature is diabolical... “To be a writer is nothing less than the possession of the inner ability to add another line to the drawing of that disconcerting vision which fills us with wonder while it terrifies,-it is man's incessant vision of himself.”2 You’re really late for life Unutterable life The only thing in the end you agree to join That’s denied you every day by beings and things From whom you wrest a few meager scraps here and there (René Char, “Common Presence”) II. ` In the preface to L'impossible (1962), the last of Bataille's writings to appear in print prior to his death a few months later – a re-introduction to a fictional/poetic triptych originally written during the occupation years of 1942-44 and published in 1945 and 1947 – of the relationship of literature to both thought and to life, as a mode of thought, a mode of relation to the real that evades “the impression of a mistake” to which literary realism, the realist novel, falls prey, that is the verbal reflection of the world of utility. Concluding this preface and extending the insights contained within the third panel of the triptych, L'Orestie (1945), he writes: Humanity is faced with a double perspective: in one direction, violent pleasure, horror, and duty to keep him at a distance.” (Maurice Blanchot, Political Writings, “For Friendship,” 138). 2 Georges Bataille, “Letter to René Char on the Incompatibilities of the Writer,” Trans. Christopher Carsten, Yale French Studies, No. 78, On Bataille (1990), 31-43. 34,37. 2 death – precisely the perspective of poetry3 – and in the opposite direction, that of science or the real world of utility. Only the useful, the real, have a serious character. We are never within our rights in preferring seduction: truth has rights over us. Indeed, it has every right. And yet we can, and indeed we must, respond to something which, not being God is stronger than every right, that impossible to which we accede only by forgetting the truth of all these rights, only by accepting disappearance. G.B.4 In short, it can be said that the proper role of literature, poetry and the literary use of language, is to give voice to the thought of “unutterable life [which is] the only thing in the end you agree to join / [All] that’s denied you every day by beings and things” (Char). That is to say, to all that which is declaimed as “useless,” “false,” “seductive,” “frivolous,” in life, which is, in fact, that part of life which makes life live and thought vital. “The modern writer can maintain a relation with productive society only by requiring from that society a protected reserve where, in place of the principle of utility, there reigns openly the denial of "signification," the non-meaning of what is first given to the mind as a finished coherence, an appeal to sensibility without discernible content, to emotion so vivid that it leaves to explication only a contemptible share...the non-meaning of modern literature is more profound than that of stones, for being non-meaning itself, it is the only conceivable meaning that man can still give to the imaginary object of his desire” (Bataille, Letter, 42-3). L'Orestie (1945, Éditions des Quatres Vents), later published as the first section of La Haine de la Poésie (1947, Éditions de Minuit) with Histoire de Rats and Dianus (written 1942-44)) and as the last of L'Impossible (1962, Éditions de Minuit), is principally a poetic work, interspersed with more prose-like passages and concluding with a theoretical meditation upon the problematic of the 3 Here, as where elsewhere concerned with Bataille's writings, the poetic will be construed as indistinguishable from the properly literary. 4 Georges Bataille, The Impossible, Trans. Robert Hurley (San Francisco: City Lights, 1991), 10. 3 literary/poetic use of language, vis-a-vis desire and truth – in opposition to the discursive-logical use of language as the origanon of 'thought,” for “logic on its death bed gave birth to mad riches. But the possible that's evoked is only unreal, the death of the logical world is unreal... Poetry reveals a power of the unknown. But the unknown is only an insignificant void if it is not the object of a desire. Poetry is a middle term, it conceals the known within the unknown” (163-4). Furthermore, this text represents the culmination of a series of texts on the margins of literature and philosophy; philosophy in a literary mode, as it were, written in the voice of a pseudonym – who is later a character in the narratives of L'impossible, the narrator of Histoire de Rats – Dianus, the first of which was published at the outbreak of war in 1940 and was later incorporated into the first part of Le Coupable (1944; also in the voice of Dianus, with Bataille contributing a brief 'editorial note' as a preface). The concluding fragment of L'Amitié (the title of the first publication and the first chapter of Le Coupable) Bataille writes of the relationship between writing, thought and reality. That is, literary writing presents that which cannot be grasped by discourse and propositional thought: Writing is never more than a game played with ungraspable reality. No one has ever been able to enclose the universe in satisfying propositions: I don' t even want to try. I wanted to make it accessible to the living – those pleased with the pleasures of this world and miscreants – the transports that seemed most distant from them... If no one sought pleasure (or joy); if only repose (satisfaction), equilibrium counted, the present that I bear would be vain. The present is ecstasy, the play of lightning...5 Moreover, friendship, immanence and the possibility of community, of genuine communication come to the fore. The writer, the poet, being one who supposes his role to show the way, to reveal the path: You were created for rare occasions Change disappear without regret 5 Georges Bataille, Guilty, Trans. Stuart Kendall (Albany: SUNY Press, 2011), 41. 4 At the will of the suave rigor District after district the liquidation of the world goes on Without interruption Without distraction Let the dust swarm None will reveal your union. (René Char, “Common Presence”) None but the poet. none but the writer. III. Pierre Drieu la Rochelle's 1931 novel Le Feu Follet is not even a roman à clef: with La valise vide (published in 1923 in the Nouvelle Revue Française) and the posthumously published Adieu à Gonzague (included as a postscript to the 1963 re-edition of Le Feu Follet, published on the occasion of the production of a film adaptation by Louis Malle). The tragic anti-hero of Le Feu Follet, Alain, is, like Gonzague in the other two pieces, explicitly a depiction of Drieu's friend Jacques Rigault, a member of the early Dadaist circles in which Drieu participated, who became addicted to heroin and committed suicide in 1929.6 While written prior to Drieu's decision to throw his political lot in with quasi-fascist elements (it must be noted that his collaboration and efforts at alliance/piece were motivated by a desire to preserve the privileged political and cultural position of France in the dramatically changed geopolitical régime that emerged following the first World War, with the rise of the US and the Soviet Union as major powers hemming in Europe), there is nevertheless a preoccupation with decadence, with the liquidation of the world, and with the addict as the figure of 6 Rigault published little, frequently ruminating upon suicide in a comical voice.
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