3 - Universalisms and Francophonies

Summary

La fiction narrative de la mondialisation est produite par le peuple en marche, par le peuple déraciné, par le peuple dépaysé.

Joël des Rosiers, ‘Entretiens’

French literature is no longer ‘French,’ nor is it yet ‘global.’ The manifesto ‘Pour une “littérature-monde” en français’ published in Le Monde des livres on March 16, 2007 is but a belated recognition of the creative decentering of the French literary world, and a flawed if confident diagnosis of its currently ‘depressed’ state. If French literature is in a searching mood, and seems at pains to define itself, the French language, by contrast, with its many regional and global inflections, remains a capacious and fertile terrain irrigated by many local idioms and the lively vernacular cultures they translate. French is present on all continents, practiced by 200 million speakers, only a fraction of whom (primarily those living in France) are monolingual. A palimpsest under the pen of the bilingual Francophone writers who wrestle with it, transform it, and keep it polyphonically alive, French bears the traces of its innumerable encounters with other oral and written traditions. When produced by writers whose everyday lives are awash in multilingual environments, Francophone literature is a vehicle that raises to a new level its readers’ awareness of a long-standing philological feature of literary language, namely, its polysemy, and the distinct subjective dynamics of such textured palimpsestic creativity in a ‘minor’ mode.

The manifesto acknowledges, and aims to promote, the ‘returned’ presence of the ‘world’ on the literary scene (‘le monde revient’), but oddly enough, it fails to address the nature of language as the hybrid medium that brings this world into being. It focuses on thematic, generic, and categorical issues, but is silent on the quality of the linguistic innovations that have served to anchor literature in specific landscapes and transnational critical geographies. It raises timely cultural issues. But more than half a century after Erich Auerbach first proclaimed that ‘our philological home is the earth: it can no longer be the nation,’ a statement variously echoed in the works of Edward Said and Edouard Glissant, the manifesto seems surprisingly indifferent to the intricate layering of linguistic codes and rhetorical practices that are the philological hallmark of many Francophone texts.

Or rather, the manifesto ironically evokes the burden of Francophone literature's exotic appeal: ‘quelques piments nouveaux, mots anciens ou créoles, si pittoresques, n’est-ce pas.’