Intellectual Retreat
By DANIEL OSTER
rr HE end of the Algerian war and the vote of 1 confidence in the technocrats together put an end to the immediate participation of French intellectuals in the course of history. They have forced them back upon themselves, and at the same time into a less conspicuous position. Constantly torn between thought and action, the French intellectual is now clearly inclining towards thought, and his position in de Gaulle's France is not so very different from what it was at the end of the reign of Napoleon HI and under the Moral Order of the Third Republic.
Is this a good thing, or not? Well, the future will see how many Rimbauds, Flauberts and Mallarmes it produces. Meanwhile, the Prime Minister may persist in dining 'en famine at Lipp's, but the intellectuals seem to have gone back, with no regrets, to the outer arrondissements and to the suburbs. They go to work (the well- known 'bread-and-butter job') like everyone else —that is, grumbling and on the metro. The time for manifestoes is past and nowadays if the Salle de la Mutuality is packed out, it is for a debate on the novel, with—in person, or represented— Sartre, Aragon and Robbe-Grillet.
The Novel—the mirror held up to society— has become in fact the focus for every kind of passion and inquiry, and the outlet for every frustrated revolution. For some, Robbe-Grillet has become a kind of high priest (one wouldn't dream of being on bad terms with him): for others, he is a grave-digger or an abominable decadent. One thing at least is certain : he exists; and, however they try, the supporters of the so- called traditional or bourgeois novel succeed only in blunting their weapons on this rock. More than a high priest, Robbe-Grillet is a martyr who takes all the knocks while others (not necessarily his disciples) get ahead : Sarraute, Simon, Cayrol, Butor, Pinget come out in paperbacks, Faye gets one of the big literary prizes, and one has to admit that the young contributors to reviews like Tel Quel, le Mercure de France or L'Herne (Philippe Sollers, Edern-Hallier) are the only writers who recognise the need for a vision and language in tune with the present.
No doubt they have never been so exacting in their requirements or so determined in their intentions, and yet rarely has literature been less `committed.' But it is committed in another sense. Mayakovsky said, 'there can be no revolution in art without a revolution in form.' And it looks as if the French intellectuals, with the experience.of over one hundred years of thwarted revolution- ary hopes behind them, have tired of fighting a perpetually losing battle and have preferred to introduce subversion through the less obvious channel of form and to keep alive the revolution- ary spirit in artistic structure alone. It is as if literature deliberately let politics take the lead in order to make a more effective comeback.
Clearly in these circumstances the words 'right- wing' and 'left-wing' no longer apply as they used to twenty years ago. The Paris intellectuals who flock to lectures by the sociologist Roland Barthes, or the psychoanalyst Lacan, know very well that they are 'left-wing' and likely to remain so until philosophers are kings, which is for ever. The fact that,an intellectual (in the guise of Andre Malraux) is in office is no guarantee that intellec- tuals in general have any power. In fact, they seem to have less and less.
The french intellectual is as serious as a
prospector for gold. He knows his duties, and the word that comes most often from his pen is `inquiry.' The thirst for novelty is as apparent in the world of the intellect as it is in the Galeries Lafayette. There is a demand for foreign plays and novels even before they have come out in translation. Gombrowicz, Pound, Carpentier, Pavese, Henry Green and above all Borges, have taken over from Kafka, Joyce and Faulkner. At the same time the influence of the United States declines. After all, what possible influence could Salinger, Kerouac and pop art have on readers who were brought up on Henri Michaux, Alfred Jarry and Surrealism?
Coined during the Dreyfus affair as a name for the university teachers and writers on Dreyfus's side, in France the word 'intellectual' remains an insult, good for discrediting any pro- ject which aims to disturb rather than to please. So it was, and still is to some extent, with the films of Resnais, Rouch, Godard or Robbe- Grillet; with the plays of Ionesco, Beckett and Gatti; the productions of Planchon, Blin and Peter Brook. It may be that the general medio- crity of the boulevard theatre and popular cinema has led the partisans of the avant-garde to over- estimate its achievements. In spite of everything the average Frenchman is more conservative than he would admit. He is easily shocked and irri- tated, but is just as easily reconciled and pacified. A year ago fifteen million French television viewers would not stand for the babies put through a mincer by the 'intellectual' producer
J. C. Averty. Today they flock to see him in a music hall. Ionesco and Beckett have been established in the repertoires of the official theatres for some time now, and Brecht is within reach of all the suburbs. It makes one wonder whether they are still dangerous.
There is no fear of television becoming dangerous. For every Mitrani, Lorrenzi or Max- Pol Fouchet who can lead the most insensitive viewer towards literature, there are any number of demagogues and phonies. Yet it is worth noting the upheaval into which the intellectuals' conscience has been thrown by the invasion of the field of culture by sight and sound. Some optimistic sociologists like Edgar Morin, pre- occupied with 'mass culture,' are in favour of absolute liberalism here. But most intellectuals, although they dare not own it for fear of being thought 'reactionary,' still cannot bring them- selves to desert their colours.
In the end one wonders whether there aren't really only two parties in France—the intellectuals on the one hand and the Gaullists on the other; and whether their basic disagreement does not stem from their respective attitudes towards language. The 300,000 intellectuals in France have recently re-discrArered humility towards words, which they obstinately refuse to use as tools or to string together in cliches. The Gaullists have sound political reasons for continuing to .speak the language of classical rhetoric. As in the classical world, criticism and the study of language have assumed public importance. The 'risk of the word,' to borrow the expression of the poet Pierre Emmanuel, has become for the French intellectual the only risk worth taking— while he waits for something better.
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