Death and French Writers - A Non-Comprehensive Chronological Survey

As preparation for the comprehensive exams I have gone through my notes, tried to rework my understanding of a few key texts that I will use to support my arguments during the exams, and have attempted to trace a secret line that will bind my story, after all as we are all well aware, we all need narratives to make sense.  I have purposefully looked at how authors have represented death, reacted to their own fears and constructed a way to confront the problems of being alive.

So at the risk of boring you a bit I will try to summarize in what will amount to an oversimplified version of how some texts, eclectically selected, treat and deal with the question of death across time in the French language.

During the middle ages I consider the Song of Roland, an anonymous epic poem that was conveniently used by the Capetian Kings to justify the unification of the kingdom under Charlemagne and was “re-discovered” in the 19^th century to ground a nationally-based literature looking for a precise point in time, an origin, a birth.  In fact this text was originally in Anglo Norman, but popular among Christian troops (many versions circulated in different dialects) as a rallying song for those heading into battle during the crusades.  Here death –the death of Roland- serves as a justification and rationalization for Charlemagne’s rule and the violence against the Muslims.  The gory details of his last battle and death serve as propaganda to advance religious and political needs. 

Then I look at a few Saints Lives, for instance at The Sequence of Saint Eulalie, a canticle (short rhythmic poem song during mass) that happens to be the oldest surviving text in Old French, where we are met with the life of a martyr who enacts Christian ideals of good vs. evil, withdrawal from earthly life in exchange for eternal life.  Her death is described as a victory over temptation.

Finally towards the end of the Middle Ages I look at Francois Villon and his testament (Ballade des Pendus) where death takes on a grotesque face and we are met with macabre humour.  In his poetry we find an ironic tone towards death that seeks to give shape to the tragic reality of men:  we all live with the spectre of our end.  Rabelais, Baudelaire and all the poète maudits will find in his work sources of inspiration.

Rabelais:  Death is intrinsically linked to laughter – both are creative engines – they liberate truth and incarnate a world upside down, in constant re-creation

De la Boétie: On Involuntary Servitude:  Why if man is born naturally free he chooses to serve others?  Vice? Cowardice? To be free all one has to do is to desire it so.  We serve because of habit although all men can imagine liberty thus they can be free at any moment.  Yet the institution of tyrants  (who have arrived at the top by election, or by force, or by succession) seeks to pacify men by making them stupid (via religion, entertainment or the stupidity of nationalisms).  Those who surround the tyrant are the farthest from their liberty.  The court is nothing but a crowd of fools; the tyrant is incapable of love, love is sacred and true friendship requires total equality.

Montaigne: Death is what drives man to confront himself. We have in this Renaissance man psychoanalysis before such concepts are even possible.  Birth of a genre (essay), birth of the concept of subjectivity in the world of French letters (all writers interested in these questions will go back to him) Ambivalence and undoes the myth of unity of self (“A chaque minute, il me semble que je m’echappe” – “Je suis autre moi-même”). Every act of reading is an act of translation (“car je ne vois le tout de rien”)

Du Bellay: Deffence and Illustration of the French Language (1549).  During King Francois I institution of French as official language of the court and legal matters. Birth of the city of French letters- invitation to stop translating from Greek and Latin:  create in the new language of the nation. Refusal of medieval values – recreation of the French identity based on classical archetypes.  Poems will become the monuments to the nation.

Descartes: We can prove the existence of God; in fact he will ground Truth. One point of view, one man (himself) will build a philosophical edifice.  Method of doubt.

Cyrano de Bergerac: Plurality of text: many genres, many voices: advocates incredulity and doubt in a century of Cartesian method.  Inversion of sexuality: world of dreams and ambiguity.  Liberty will be the recurrent theme in the world of the sun and the moon.  Place of irony as political, religious and social critique.  Once we die, we have a transformation of matter:  death does not exist: there is only transmutation.

Bossuet:  A direct look at death, in the direction of the limits of man is necessary to know the immortality of the soul and find the path to eternal life.  Faith can be grounded on fear.  Rhetorical strategies : the corpse and the grave serve as springboards to knowing God. 

Pascal:  “Les Hommes n’ayant pu guérir la mort, la misère, l’ignorance, ils se sont avisés pour se rendre heureux de n’y point penser” Man finds “divertissements” do distract from his angst face to death. 

Racine: Classical tragedy form in France (5 acts, alexandrine form) Man cannot escape his fate- he is driven by passions (deathly illness) sent from the gods.  There is no way out, the fall is inescapable and grace is uncertain (Jansenism)

Corneille:  Tragedy in the service of the king.  Under Carndinal Richelieu, Intervention of the King to resolve the intrigue (Le Cid, Horace). In the case of the cid, we have the first time the French Academy has to decide on aesthetic questions.  Institution of national codes for art – to sustain the regime.  Man is great and his passions ought to guide his moral.  It is through the choice of his heroes that Corneille lauds man.  Man possesses self-control and his moral dilemmas are a way to know himself better.

Molière: elevate comedy to the heights of tragedy to decry hypocrisy and falsity.  Theatre is a public mirror (psychological analysis of typologies).  Ridicule is the best tool for moralists.  Stupidity of science and doctors (they are only driven by greed and true knowing only resides in common sense)

Voltaire: Man is morally superior to the gods, Victory of Humanism of the enlightment. In his early tragedies (like Oedipus) we have an accusation of divine order that traps men into impossible situations.  Denunciation of religious order (metaphysical and concrete) Refusal of philosophical systems, only man alone (Candide in his garden) can create his own way of life.  Neither an Utopian world (Panglos/Leibnitz) nor pessimistic (Martin/Pierre Bayle)

Marquis de Sade: Philosophy in the Boudoir  7 dialogues, no narrator ( theatrical nature of the work, almost stage directions) Sexually explicit text is weaved with political discourse.  Death is again like with Cyrano the transmutation of matter.  Deeply anti-religious: Republic form of government and Religion do not coexist.  The fervour once directed towards god and the church will we channelled to the nation-state.  Man (who he views negatively: continuously seeking slavery) needs to believe in something greater than him.  Men are led by their desires and even behind noble endeavours hides less honourable drives.  If La Boétie shows us the voluntary servitude, Sade shows us voluntary illusions (we desire because we imagine). 

Diderot: Natural religion:  pleasure of doing the good and the horror of evil – Intelligence vs. Instinct is the conflict that would remain irresolute.  In Jacques le fataliste the master is free and believes in freedom yet remains fearful and inert while Jacques does not believe in freedom (everything is written in a long roll in the sky) yet exercises his power. Trip to nowhere, constantly interrupted narratives of Jacques love awakening to exasperate the reader.  8 days where very little happens, there is no philosophical system: the only constant is the ambiguity

Rousseau: Discourse on Science and Letters (1750) surprising claim for a philosopher in the 18^th century; progress in science and the arts is the source of unhappiness.  Man is good and happy in nature (natural religion) it is civilisation that renders him unhappy (Pre-Romantic).  Virtue depends on man’s conscience not on science (he does not believe in material progress). Progress is born out of vice (pride), art is nothing but desire for luxury. The more man separates himself from nature, the clearer the picture of his own death will become thus the more unhappy he becomes

 Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (1755) man is born free, yet submits to laws created man who concieved the idea of property.  Those who sought to possess conceived the most well thought out pan to subject others to their will.  Law of property is against the natural law.  Against Hobbes since passions are not found in nature, but in society. 

Laclos:  Dangerous Liaisons denunciation of a society where women cannot possibly be the equals of men due to structural factors.  He is a feminist in the 18^th century.  Women who are educated are trapped in a world that forces them to hide their intellect and to have recourse to vile strategies to disguise who they truly are (Merteuil); piety is decried as well as it keeps women powerless and perfect victims to men (like Valmont) who understand their fragile psychology (Tourvel).  He is not a moralist in the usual sense; he is extremely progressive in the sense that women are labelled as slaves that need a revolution to claim their equal stake in society.  Without equality of the sexes, society will be perverse. 

Simone de Beauvoir: All her works are situated in relation to what I would call an intellectual autobiography.  She seeks to reveal her coming into consciousness that uncovers myths that hide a social reality - a social reality driven by bourgeois ideals.  “Auto criticism” is her intellectual journey.  The experience of nothingness (néant) among human action is never overcome despite the will to deny it. 

Albert Camus:  Absurdity of man’s condition was to be worked out in four creative stages:  Cycle of the absurd (The Stranger, The Myth of Sisyphus), the cycle of revolt (The Rebel), the cycle of measure (The First Man), the cycle of love: never accomplished – died too young.  In the modern world, l’absurde is the impasse that man’s thinking meets when he is faced with his  desire for the eternal, in a mortal form.  Conscious of his own death, man must accept joyously this condition, as this is his only route to liberty and happiness.  Joy resides in the acceptance of the present, a life built on the belief that all is absurd, yet worth living.  “Je me revolte, donc nous sommes”  

Nathalie Sarraute: the total collapse of the old conceptions of the novel; Le Nouveau Roman:  we are immersed in the world of sensation; the construction of characters in the old sense does not make any sense for the writer- a self-conscious act of creation.  “Sous-Conversations” (under-conversations) what she terms the

André Malraux: The Human Condition. Meditation in the form of tragic historical novel to show that man is in prison (pascalian line), he is not the key to the cosmos.  Set in 1927 at the turn of the Chinese communist revolt, it is a feverish inquiry where exceptional circumstances (China) of exemplary human beings seek to find the meaning of their existence to break (undo) their feeling of loneliness.  The human condition is one where we seek to escape reality (gambling, sex, power, drugs, ideologies) The desire to escape a tragic condition is closely tied to fear of death.  Malraux’s solution is found in Art, a contemplative form of art inspired by his encounters with the Orient (Tentation de l’Occident). “L’art c’est le chant de la metamorphose- les esthétiques, les rêves et même les religions ne sont plus que les livrets d’une inépuisable musique” (Imaginary Museum).  A work of art is a voice, a presence that survives life.