'What should I do?' 'What can I do?' 'What will it mean for me?' Personal and urgent, these questions are at the core of story-telling and fictional narration cast in terms of plot and action as a thematics of difficult ('hard') choices. Scenes of men and women faced with such choices recur throughout the history of the novel in France, from Madame de La Fayette's La Princesse de Clèves (1678) and Balzac's Le Père Goriot (1835) to André Malraux's La Condition humaine (1933) and Annie Ernaux's Une Femme (1988). As a set, these scenes provide literary expressions to concerns with personal identity that vary over time more in detail and circumstance than in essence. For the novels mentioned, the decisions range from remaining in or retreating from courtly society (La Fayette) to moving with a spouse to another part of France or staying instead in one's native region (Ernaux). Both cases provide dramatic content for metaphysical concerns with existence set forth as a problematics of the individual in his or her world.

Søren Kierkegaard wrote his books for “that individual, whom with joy and gratitude, I call my reader.” He opposed the ruling philosophical system of his day, despised lecturers and professors almost as much as paid churchmen, entered into dispute with his entire home town, and regarded having a disciple as the worst fate that could ever befall him. His books were written in an ironic, sophisticated, parodic style that allowed of no clear position for the reader and allowed of no definite result either.

It cannot be a matter of surprise, then, that the history of the reception of his work must be an account of the ways that individuals have reacted to his work. Time and time again, it is noticeable that, at a key point of their own thinking, philosophers, theologians, and writers have been influenced by the almost “random” encounter with Kierkegaard, both by his passionate and ambiguous private journal, which he kept throughout his lifetime, and the rich and ambivalent work he published between 1843 and 1855.

When Marcel Proust cites Racine or Saint Simon, Flaubert and Baudelaire in A la recherche du temps perdu, he embeds the literature and language of the past into the present of a narrative laced with criticism. Creating a new context from which to speak of literature and reading, he rejected the notion of a canon as that which imposes a universalising style on heterogeneous thought. Yet the search for what is most unique for the writer produced a work considered now to be one of the most canonical.

As the narrator of A la recherche du temps perdu looks back on the great works of the nineteenth century, he notes incompletion: Balzac's Comédie humaine, Hugo's La Légende des siècles, Michelet's La Bible de I'humanité, all were completed through prefaces serendipitously written after the fact. Like Wagner and Ruskin, these authors discovered unity in retrospect, creation occurring in discrete fragments whose relation remained unsuspected, unbound by any thesis until a 'retrospective illumination' swept them into a whole. Proust sets a different course for his work, mapping out the project of a book unified from its very inception, although it would be exceeded endlessly by the process of writing. Searching the Judeo-Christian tradition for the secret of creation, he looked to philosophy, music and painting to help transform the reading of literature into writing.

In a journal entry from 1842-3 Kierkegaard asks rhetorically, “Can there be a transition from quantitative qualification to a qualitative one without a leap? And does not the whole of life rest in that” (JP I 110)? He thus strikingly and unambiguously sets the leap in perspective - the leap, the form of qualitative transformation, lies at the heart of all life. Later in his journals this master of polemic against the theoretical makes two intriguing references to what he calls “my theory of the leap” (JP III 20). Whether or not he has a theory as such, the concept of a leap is appropriately associated with the name of Kierkegaard, since the leap is a structural element that winds its way throughout his whole authorship: it informs his various accounts of the peculiar character of transitions between radically different ways of life as well as his challenge to the philosophical and romantic accounts of such transitions that were influential in his day.

The popular association of the leap with Kierkegaard is often couched in terms of the leap of faith. It is worthwhile to be reminded, however, and interesting to note, that Kierkegaard never uses any Danish equivalent of the English phrase “leap of faith,” a phrase that involves a circularity insofar as it seems to imply that the leap is made by faith. He does, however, clearly and often refer to the concept of a leap (Spring) and to the concept of a transition (Overgang) that is qualitative (qvalitativ) or, alternatively, a meta-basis eis all0 genos (transition from one genus to another); moreover, he clearly and often refers to such a qualitative transition to religiousness and to faith in an eminent sense, namely, Christian religiousness.

Simone de Beauvoir's Le Deuxieème Sexe (1949) soundly refuted the patriarchal myth of an eternal feminine nature which, until then, had provided poets and novelists with their most cherished topoi. The famous opening line of Beauvoir's second volume is considered the origin of gender construction theory: 'On ne nait pas femme; on le devient' (Beauvoir, Le Deuxième Sexe (Paris: Gallimard, 1949), vol. ii, p. 2) ['One is not born, but becomes, woman']. Writing after the Holocaust, in the early days of France's colonial wars, at a time when Afro-American writer Richard Wright was in Paris publishing articles and excerpts from his novel Black Boy in Les Temps modernes, Beauvoir showed that patriarchy uses the eternal feminine to oppress women, precisely as antisemitic and racist systems of oppression deploy ideologies of the Black soul or Jewish character. Le Deuxième Sexe outraged French literary and critical establishments. Hostile articles and hate mail poured in. Even Beauvoir's friend Albert Camus castigated her for making French men appear foolish. But Le Deuxième Sexe also elicited letters of gratitude from female readers and stimulated a wealth of women's fiction in the following decade. It remains the intellectual cornerstone of twentieth-century Western feminism, the text with or against which feminist theorists and novelists have been writing for nearly fifty years.

KIERKEGAARD AS CLASSICAL MORAL PSYCHOLOGIST

In an explanatory note appended to the last book in his pseudonymous authorship, Kierkegaard declared that the importance of his pseudonymous authors “unconditionally does not consist in making any new proposal.” In his intentionally provocative readings of the human existence-relationships, Kierkegaard stamps such words as “subjectivity” and “existence” with his distinctive mark (this is especially true of “existence”).These words have fostered his reputation as one who holds that, in matters of ethics and religion anyway, “truth” is created by human decisions rather than discovered or known; the words have encouraged a conventionality associating Kierkegaard with the epistemological claims and departures of existentialists and their postmodernist successors.” Other items in his vocabulary of human existence, such as “character,” “pathos,” “passion” and “inwardness” suggest other historical associations and a more classical orientation. Still others, such as “personality” and “self,”have a modern rather than postmodern ring.

In this essay I want to take seriously Kierkegaard's disclaimer to be making any radically new proposal. I shall read Kierkegaard more as a successor of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas than as a predecessor of Sartre and Foucault. On this reading, “subjectivity” and “existence” will evoke the thought of character rather than subjectivism and radical choice.

What is the 'Francophone novel' in relation to the 'French novel' and how do these two traditions form a continuum? This chapter will give an overview of French-speaking areas of the globe beyond Europe (excluding Canada which will be dealt with separately in the next chapter). It concentrates on those areas of francophonie that share a history of colonial domination: sub-Saharan Africa, the Maghreb, the Caribbean and the Indian Ocean, with brief mention of the Mashreq.

These locations have played a crucial role in the development of a specifically French imaginaire since the Renaissance. From Montaigne's cannibals to Montesquieu's Persians, from Baudelaire's exotic tropical islands to Flaubert's Egypt and Nerval's Orient, from André Gide's Voyage au Congo to Hergé's Tintin au Congo, the colonial encounter has marked the imagination of European readers, allowing them to project onto foreign lands and cultures an imaginary reality largely constructed through discourse. Written into Western narratives, the real human subjects of the French empire who were educated in the language and culture of the colonisers have been forced to negotiate with these representations of their identity. Their self-knowledge continues to be mediated by these discursive and literary examples, and many have reacted in strong opposition to these Afriques imaginaires

Although in recent years French-Canadian writers, like their counterparts in other Francophone communities, have been energised by nationalism, the literary development of French-speaking Canada bears only a superficial resemblance to that elsewhere. Its conquest, by the British, goes back well over two centuries, but Canada has been politically independent from Britain since 1867, with Quebec as one of its founding provinces. What has happened there since has been the responsibility of its own citizens; and the fifty thousand French of the mid-eighteenth century, far from being swamped in a flood of English-speaking immigrants, have grown to seven millions. Montreal, a small, largely English-speaking town in the early nineteenth century, is now a vast metropolis, by far the biggest Francophone city outside Paris.

Formerly the term 'French-Canadian' was used to cover all Francophone Canadian literature; since the 1960s, it has been superseded by 'Quebec', 'québécois'. In some ways this term is less clear, even tendentious, since it sidelines writers from outside Quebec, such as Gabrielle Roy, from Manitoba, often considered Canada's greatest Francophone novelist, or Antonine Maillet, born in New Brunswick, the only Canadian Goncourt prizewinner. 'Québécois' also excludes Anglophone writers who draw their inspiration from the 'belle province', of whom the best-known is Mordecai Richler. Be this as it may, in French Canada we find the most vigorous of all non-French Francophone literary cultures, and from its rich stock of novels only a few salient titles can be cited. The present essay is of course written from the viewpoint of an interested Anglophone observer.

Myths attach rather easily to some thinkers, especially to those who like Hegel are hard to read or like Kierkegaard hard to place. Such myths are often based on hearsay or a superficial reading of the texts. One lingering myth about Kierkegaard is that he is an irrationalist in some sense that denies the value of clear and honest thinking. Kierkegaard did deny the ability of reasoned thought to arrive at universal and objective truth on matters of value, but today that is considered quite rational. This collection of previously unpublished essays is offered as proof of how wrong it is to suppose that if Kierkegaard's philosophical star is in the ascendant, as it now is, things must be going badly with philosophy.

Besides this general myth, though owing as much to them as they to it, are the particular myths - of Kierkegaard's uncontrolled predilection for paradox, a delight in exaggeration, and his writer's weakness for rhetoric over perspicuity - myths that have led in their turn to superficial renditions of the ideas and to failures to detect consistency or development in his multiauthored production. More than with any other recent thinker, and for good or ill, the reception of Kierkegaard's work has carried the subjective stamp of the receiver's own preferences. So much so that one might well ask if Kierkegaard has not so much enjoyed as “suffered“ his several renaissances.

Staël, Sand, Rachilde: we now remember women's contribution to the nineteenth-century French novel as a few exceptional figures leaving their mark on a genre dominated by men. But women were in fact the most acclaimed practitioners of the novel when the century opened and integral to the novel's development during what critics have long considered its 'golden age'. If their importance has subsequently been forgotten, it is the result of literary battles which this chapter describes. The nineteenthcentury novel takes shape in struggles between the sentimental form which reigns at the beginning of the century and newly-emerging realism which will come to supplant it. Throughout these struggles, female novelists overwhelmingly prefer sentimental codes.

The history of the nineteenth-century novel has long been written from the standpoint of the victorious realist aesthetic. This chapter brushes such literary history against the grain. It isolates four phases in women's contribution to the nineteenth-century novel that are inseparable from the prestige and decline of the sentimental form. From the Revolution to 1830, the most important novels are sentimental novels written by women. During the years 1830-1850, realism takes shape in a struggle to displace the sentimental novel, but the contest has no clear winner. The years 1850-80 correspond to the triumph of the realist aesthetic and women writers' disappearance from the vanguard of the novel. At the century's end, women writers once more emerge as important presences in the novel, and their contributions now cover the spectrum of possible novelistic forms (sentimental, realist, decadent).

The two decades spanning the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries were a period of intense crisis for the novel. On the one hand, it was not clear what more could be done with the form after the achievements of Balzac, Stendhal, Flaubert and Zola. Balzac had created a world rivalling 'l'état civil' for his era, and Zola's project for systematic, scientifically documented studies of all sectors of society, had been all but consummated by its principal begetter. The realistic portrayal of everyday life could be extended into ever more marginal or sensational sectors such as those explored by the Goncourt brothers (Germinie Lacerteux, 1864) and less memorable exponents; but this was merely following in Zola's footsteps, without the creative conviction or epic gifts that, until the anticlimax of Les Quatre Evangiles, compelled the assent of his readers. In Pierre et ]ean (1888) and its prefatory essay, 'Le Roman', Maupassant sought to revitalise realism by drawing attention to the illusions of the mind that influence the formation of stories, but the picture conveyed by the naturalist novel was beginning to be perceived as the least significant feature of reality.

HISTORICAL SITUATION

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, lived religiousness and piety were no longer a matter of course in the intellectual circles of Europe. Schleiermacher's early work, On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers, signals this shift, as does the religion that is at once criticized and philosophically defended in Hegel's concept of Absolute Spirit. The opposition of rational enlightenment to nonconceptual (religious) revelation such as Kant and Lessing had carried out with exemplary success at the end of the eighteenth century lay like a long shadow over every effort of the subsequent period to present faith in God and religion - or even the core of Christianity, reconciliation - at all argumentatively.

If a reader should go into a good library and browse through the books about Kierkegaard, she would, I think, be struck immediately by a significant difference between most of the older books and quite a few, though certainly not all, of the more recent volumes. Older books, such as James Collins's The Mind of Kierkegaard, tended to see Kierkegaard primarily as a philosopher, albeit an unusual one with poetic gifts and religious interests. By and large, they approached Kierkegaard as one would approach other philosophers, inquiring as to his views on ethics, epistemology, and other standard philosophical issues. The underlying assumption is that Kierkegaard had convictions about such issues, and that those convictions might be, in part or as a whole, true or false, correct or incorrect.

Roger Poole's Kierkegaard: The Indirect Communication may serve as a good example of the type of later book I have in mind, though works by such authors as Louis Mackey, Sylviane Agacinski, John Vignaux Smythe, and John D. Caputo would serve equally well. Poole explicitly distances himself from the tradition, one that he stigmatizes as “theological,” that understands Kierkegaard's pseudonymous works as containing philosophical doctrines. On his view, “Kierkegaard writes text after text whose aim is not to state a truth, not to clarify an issue, not to propose a definite doctrine, not to offer some meaning that could be directly appropriated.” Kierkegaard cannot offer us objective truth because he is seen as committed to a view of language and meaning similar to that of Derrida and Lacan. In order for propositions to have fixed truth values, they must be about something, and Kierkegaard's texts do not refer in this way.

Kierkegaard was prophetic in his estimate of the place Fear and Trembling was to have in his authorship. Although several of his pseudonymous works have also become philosophical classics, Fear and Trembling continues to haunt us like no other of his writings. Its defense of individual existence still resonates at the end of a century marked by horrifying mass movements, while its depiction of radical religious obedience stirs new fears as we enter a period when older political ideologies are being replaced by renewed expressions of religious absolutism.

Fear and Trembling remains so evocative partly because of its enigmatic nature. From the outset, by means of the famous epigraph drawn from Hamann, Kierkegaard signals that not everything that follows is as it seems. Beyond this, there is evidence that Kierkegaard designed Fear and Trembling as a text with hidden layers of meaning. In The Point of View for My Work as an Author, Kierkegaard tells us that the most important ethical and religious truths cannot be communicated directly, as though one were writing on a blank sheet of paper. They demand instead creative endeavor by the author and a corresponding effort by the reader that involves “bringing to light by the application of a caustic fluid a text which is hidden under another text” (PV 40).

The literary history of France and the Francophone world has, it has been said, a long tradition of censorship. Emphasis on individual genius has not only produced an exaggerated belief in the French cultural heritage, it has fostered an attitude of submissiveness on the part of the student of literature. Literary history has its covert political agenda, and what gets taught in the classroom and in literary manuals tells us much about the authoritarian tradition in which the discipline has evolved.

These were remarks made by Roland Barthes in a 1969 essay entitled 'Reflexions sur un manuel' ['Réflections on a Manual']. The definition of literature itself, he suggested, might in the end be nothing other than 'ce qui s'enseigne' ['what gets taught'], so that the great canonical figures are inevitably invested with all the authority of the state educational apparatus. And Barthes adds: 'II y a . . . toute une autre histoire de notre litterature a ecrire, une contre-histoire, un envers de cette histoire, qui serait l'histoire de ces censures précisément' ['A quite different history of our literature remains to be written: a counter-history, the other side of that history, and that would be, precisely, the history of what has been censored']. He suggests that, in telling the hitherto untold, any literary history worthy of the name must also be a history of the idea of literature, of the way literature has been interpreted, received, distorted or used as a form of political control. It must ask the hard questions, not only of other histories of literature, but also of itself. What is being occluded or foregrounded, and why?

A constant theme in Kierkegaard is what might be called the presence of the Absolute, though Kierkegaard does not often use this Hegelian term. He talks instead of God's unchangeableness, of the infinite, the unconditioned, or the absolute good. What can unchangeableness in the presence of change mean to us today? More than a limited scientific rationality would allow, no doubt. But within the so-called postmodern context, indifference and skepticism to such an idea have as their counterpart nothing but an escalation of irrational religious needs.

The dizzying speed of change in highly industrialized societies has given wide currency to talk of “crises of meaning” and with that ample scope for the expression of religious needs. But we should prevent such talk or needs from entering into theoretical discourse as a way of bolstering argument; pressure emanating from a need can substantially distort discussion in matters of truth. Today, it is only by skeptically insisting on even greater caution, and minimizing as best we may (for we can never altogether eliminate) the powerful dynamic of wishful thinking that we can keep the ideological function of religion separate from its absolute truth claim. The functions of religion can of course be analyzed from sociological and psychological points of view, but it is impossible in principle to reduce the meaning of absolute spiritual presence to these functions and they themselves contain hints of something more.

As Timothy Unwin points out in the opening chapter, one of the aims of this volume is to discuss not only 'great' French novels, but also fiction which has been marginalised by the literary-critical establishment - women's novels, thrillers, novels written in former French colonies. It is clear what kinds of prejudice may have operated in this marginalisation: sexism, snobbery, racism. But in the process of highlighting these prejudices, and reassessing the marginalised works, we need to remember that it may not be solely bias that has promoted some novels and allowed others to sink into the background. Is it purely misogyny that makes most readers prefer Stendhal's Le Rouge et le noir (1830) to the novel which in part inspired it, Edouard (1825) by the talented Mme de Duras? Is it purely middle-class ideology that makes them prefer Zola's L'Assommoir (1877) to Sue's shocking novels about the Paris working class (1842-57)?

Kierkegaard's slim book Repetition was published in 1843 on the same day as Fear and Trembling. Six weeks later he published a discourse on The Book of Job.The theme of sudden loss and wondrous restoration recurs: Abraham must release Isaac and then he gets him back; Job is stripped of his world and then he gets it back. The book Repetition alludes to Job's yearning for his world's return and also depicts the suffering of a young man who has lost his love and yearns for her return. These motifs provide a clue to the concept of repetition. The question posed by Repetition is whether repetition is possible, whether a world or loved one, now lost, can be restored. But unraveling either the text or the concept is not a straightforward task.

PRELIMINARIES

Repetition is written under the pseudonym Constantin Constantius. It gives ample grist for dialectical mills: repetition is paired with kinesis, the Aristotelian “motion” of becoming, and it is marked as “the task of freedom.” We learn that repetition is (paradoxically) both “the interest of metaphysics and the interest on which all metaphysics comes to grief” (R 149). But these remarks are largely undeveloped, and to complicate matters, they are inserted casually, perhaps even ironically, within a book that reads as a puzzling romantic roman à cléef or novella. Theoretical insights float precariously on a complex literary surface. However serious the idea of repetition is for Kierkegaard, in this book it often seems to flicker merely as an artifice or entertainment.

So little is known about Johnson's activities and whereabouts in the year 1745 that enthusiasts have imagined him in Scotland serving Bonnie Prince Charlie until the Jacobite cause met its final end at the battle of Culloden. The truth about his activities in 1745 is probably much more mundane. In 1745 Johnson published his Miscellaneous Observations on the Tragedy of Macbeth, a sixty-four page specimen of what would eventually become his edition of Shakespeare's plays (1765). It has been suggested that Johnson was responsible for a bare-bones edition of Shakespeare, hastily assembled in 1745 under the auspices of London publishers eager to reclaim the copyright over his works seized by Oxford University Press with the edition of Thomas Hanmer in 1744. This hack work would not be inconsistent with much that Johnson had done before for the London publishers. Moreover, it fits roughly into the particular kind of work Johnson was doing in the early 1740s and suggests a professional transition of the kind he made in the second half of the decade as part of the ongoing compromise in his life between the “dreams of a poet” and the fiscal realities of writing for a living in the eighteenth century.