Doomsayers and boomsayers: the critical context

Over the last thirty years or so, critics and cultural commentators in France and elsewhere have regularly – often with irritation, sometimes with gloomy defeatism and occasionally with a touch of Schadenfreude – drawn attention to what they believe to be the current ‘crisis’ or even decline of the French novel. These comments are, of course, part of a much more general context in which France has seen its cultural influence in the world undermined by among other factors: competition from the New York and London art markets, the impact of American cinema on French box-office receipts, the popularity of translations of English-language novels in France, the reduction in the number of translations of French texts published each year, and the fluctuating fortunes of Modern Languages in the secondary and university sector in the US and Europe. As France's authority and influence have apparently receded, the arts pages of newspapers and magazines have offered their readers frequent reminders of its supposedly ailing culture.

The stridency and repetitiveness of the décliniste alarms sounded over the last three decades are explained partly by the stress placed by French cultural history on linearity and its conception of literature and art in terms of a succession of movements (Taylor, 1996, 143). Perhaps more than its counterparts elsewhere in Western Europe and in North America, French cultural discourse has traditionally been characterised by a fondness for periodisation that has manifested itself, in particular, in what would seem to be a tenacious aspiration to carve its artistic patrimoine into manageable epochs, generations, movements, schools, and styles and in the perennial popularity of the textbook histories of French literature that continue to be published by the major educational publishing houses and that, since Lanson's Histoire de la littérature française (1895) and through the Lagarde and Michard, Castex and Surer, Chassang and Senninger anthologies, have contributed so significantly to the establishment of the ‘canon’. From the late nineteenth century until the 1980s, this aspiration was duly satisfied.