Why France? Why literature?

With the recent addition of Mario Vargas Llosa to the French Academy, the disposition of France towards letters is revived, with the specific surprise that it is an author who does not write in the language of the academy, but in Spanish, who integrates it. Obviously, the Peruvian writer has a Nobel behind him and world prestige for his talent that shakes the dust off an institution as old as it is prestigious, created in the 17th century, and whose founding mission of its statutes is to give certain rules to the French language and “make it pure, eloquent and capable of dealing with the arts and sciences”. There is little pure in awarding the prize to a novelist of another language. But it is here where it is convenient to consider, in a broader context, this anti-academic audacity.

letters to an old novelist

It was probably the 19th century, with the realistic novel, that gave the greatest possible diffusion to the French language. Although it is unavoidable to keep in mind novelists like Cervantes or Samuel Richardson, the plethora of French novelists of that century mark the consecration of the genre: Victor Hugo, Balzac, Stendhal, Flaubert, Dumas, Madame de Stäel, Jules Verne, Maupaussant, Zola. Obviously the list can be extended to the 20th century with Malraux, Camus, Proust, Gide, Céline, Yourcenar, Duras, Colette. And although its imprint may have declined, it was French literary criticism and philosophy that compensated for its prestige in the last third of the 20th century, with authors who continue to be a reference such as Deleuze, Blanchot, Barthes, Certeau, Ricoeur, Kristeva, Foucault. Although less well known, I have a particular fondness for two great essayists who have written suggestively about the novel: Marthe Roberte and Claude-Edmonde Magny.

This does not mean that there are no novelists currently claiming world attention with every right: in addition to three Nobel laureates who are still active (Le Clézio, Modiano and the recent Annie Ernaux) authors who have imposed themselves without Nobel, from the controversial Houellebecq to the prolific Amélie Nothomb or the exquisite Pierre Michon, Pascal Quignard or Richard Millet. Although there are authors to spend a lifetime reading exclusively, it has always been argued that there was no canonical French book, the way there is in Italy (Dante), Germany (Goethe) or England (Shakespeare). Those who propose Balzac complain that this puts aside the tradition of poets, where Baudelaire, Verlaine or Rimbaud appear.

I suspect that the key is leaving the century of novelists. Go back. The French 17th and 16th centuries opened with figures of strength such as Diderot, Voltaire and above all Rousseau, who, although he was Swiss, wrote in that language. For reasons of space, you have to stick to the best-known authors, but the health of the French tradition are those authors who hang around the margins and who continue to be just as dazzling and speak to our time. Two titans are inescapable: Montaigne and Rabelais. I believe that it is in them that the basis that sustains the specific weight of French culture is found, even more than the hypothesis of the nineteenth-century novel. Rabelais wrote a kind of protonovela, composed of five books that make up his great work Gargantua and Pantagruel. Simple editions only include two of the five books. It is a work of great humor, mythical fables about overflowing, fantastic, laughing, drunken, provocative, disrespectful characters. When Notre Dame burned down in 2019, I couldn’t help but remember episode 17, when the gigantic Gargantua climbed to the top of the cathedral and, fed up with the Parisians who seemed stupid and foolish to him, urinated on the city, which would have put out the fire, although Rabelais says in his novel that the result was that 260,418 Parisians drowned, not counting women and children.

Five curious facts about Mario Vargas Llosa’s admission to the French Academy (and why it makes him an “immortal”)

Rabelais is laughter. Montaigne is humour. A fine, melancholic humor, as befits the finest humors. Also author of another monumental work, the essays. Published in 1580, a few decades after Gargantua and Pantagruel, is a foundational work for an elusive genre, the essay, which is precisely characterized by its impurity. It is not a treatise, it does not pretend to establish any dogma, it improvises, sometimes it even contradicts itself, it tries, tries, tests and makes mistakes, but it is, above all, a way of prose that wants to understand from individuality human nature of the author who perceives the world and tries to share it without any will to convince or impose.

The French Academy is an example of formality. But behind the right comme il faut (as it should be)Behind a language that has all the conventions and rigors that allow even its least talented writers to shine, an intelligent humor and laughter beats underneath that does not leave her. I will not forget an occasion, in 2015, when I had to give a lecture during a writer’s residency that I had been granted in the French port of Saint-Nazaire. It would be held in the city’s Media Library. They had adapted a space with several tables on which were placed dozens of works by Latin American authors, from different eras, all translated into French. I was surprised to see so many authors together, how they had welcomed the creations of Latin America. Two years later they would also translate one of my novels. That is the part of the great courtesy of your culture: welcoming that of other countries. When one wants to find authors who have not been translated into Spanish, be sure that France has done it. That two-way dialogue, that passion centered on literature, which they consider one of their highest values, is the reason for their greatness as a country in a world that seems less and less interested in precise words, intelligence, sensitivity and humor as means of coexistence. (EITHER)