As several contributors to this volume have indicated, the modern French novel has shown a particularly strong capacity for questioning and redefining itself. This dynamic of constant self-renewal expresses the broader vitality of modernism at large, understood as a general ethos informing a variety of artistic movements since the 1880s, all bent on expanding, and in some cases exploding, a space of representation deemed to be unduly monopolised by codes inherited from the past. In the modern novel, as in the visual arts, the main codes under attack are those sustained by the orthodoxy of classical nineteenth-century realism, with the attack itself often being justified in the name of a 'higher' form of the same basic mimetic urge, such as 'psychological' realism, which prioritises the inner world of human subjectivity, or 'phenomenological' realism, which tracks the outer world as physically experienced by a human subject. Modernism, then, is characterised by a strongly felt need to effect a break with the past, which in turn generates a search, often conducted in an experimental spirit, for new forms and modes of artistic expression. In the twentieth century, this modernist logic of rupture and renewal, central to the very concept of an 'avant-garde', provides the framework within which most theorising about the novel has taken place.

In 1801, in the preface to Atala, the first runaway bestseller of the new century, Francois-Rene de Chateaubriand offered an account of his text's evolution in the traumatic decade of the French Revolution. Atala was not a novel at all, he claimed, but a segment of an epic on Native Americans planned before the Revolution. He called this fragment of his writings from a trip to the United States in 1791 a 'sort of poem' (Œuvres romanesques et voyages, ed. Maurice Regard (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), vol. 1, p. 17) modelled on works of classical antiquity. Transformed in form and purpose by the events of the Revolution and Terror, this little book no longer figured as part of an epic, but was now offered up as a pre-publication teaser for its author's monumental historical and philosophical treatise, Le Génie du christianisme (1802) to which he claimed it now belonged.

For more than a century, Atala and its pair, René (1802), have served as the inaugural texts in a critical history of the modern French novel. By means of these fictions, and especially of Rene, Chateaubriand has been credited with inventing the 'Romantic novel', the 'autobiographical novel', even Romanticism itself. Immensely popular and critically appreciated for decades, these two works did indeed sound a clarion call at the dawn of the new century. They were marked by an indelible sense that the overturned 'natural order' could not be reinstated (see Œuvres romanesques, vol. 1, p. 17). For a young aristocrat like Chateaubriand, aged 31 in 1789, the Revolution had changed not just his financial or social expectations, but the entire vista of the future.

From a historical standpoint, the metaphor of 'decadence' implies that art and society must age, decline, and die like a human body. Prestigious dramatisations by Baudelaire (for example in 'La Géante' of Les Fleurs du mal, 1857) and Laforgue, as later by Eliot, Toynbee and Spengler, perpetuated this notion. One cannot limit considerations of decadence to the novel or to France: decadence was an international intellectual current that left its mark on historiography, philosophy, poetry, drama, prose fiction and the visual arts throughout Western Europe and England.

In history, the degeneracy of French society seemed to have been foreshadowed by the decline and fall of the ancient Roman and Byzantine Empires. In these empires, moral decay had led to military defeats that recalled the humiliating rout of the French armies in the recent Franco- Prussian War (1870), and the three-month takeover of Paris by the revolutionary Commune in 1871. The self-selected title of 'Second Empire' (1851-70) for the government of Louis Napoléon, himself a pale reflection of Napoleon I, invited comparisons with Imperial Rome. Afterwards, France tried to live down its shame. The spectacular Basilica of the Sacré-Coeur (constructed between 1875 and 1914) stands today on Montmartre as a monument of national expiation and as an expression of the will to moral renewal after 1870.

PRELIMINARIES

The Concept of Anxiety is a maddeningly difficult book. In one of the most lucid commentaries on this short tract, Arne Gron has suggested that the book is too difficult; in other words, it could have profited from another rewrite. In one of the central images of The Concept of Anxiety, anxiety is likened to dizziness. One reader of Kierkegaard has commented that the book attempts to evoke the very dizziness that it describes. Another prominent Kierkegaard scholar insists that the book is simply a spoof, devoid of any serious psychological insight. While I disagree with this scholar's assessment, I sympathize with his judgment that The Concept of Anxiety has elements of farce.

If someone were to articulate a Kierkegaardian ethic, one of the dictums would certainly be -be honest about what you know and do not know. In all honesty, I must confess that there are many passages in The Concept of Anxiety the meaning of which completely escapes me. Worse yet, Kierkegaard scholars are silent on most of these passages. Nevertheless, exasperating as it is, The Concept of Anxiety is a wise book. It is also a book that has exercised an enormous influence on philosophers such as Heidegger and Sartre and theologians such as Tillich, Barth, and Niebuhr. Moreover, if a single text needed to be chosen as the source book of existential psychology and psychoanalysis, it would most certainly be The Concept of Anxiety.

INTRODUCTION

In The Point of View for My Work as an Author Kierkegaard uses the concept of “the aesthetic” to establish one of the fundamental divisions of his authorship. Even more significantly, he seems to give to the question of whether the authorship is “aesthetic” or “religious” a pivotal place in defining the correct “point of view” from which to understand that authorship as a whole. We might therefore conclude that a concern with “the aesthetic” lies at the very heart of Kierkegaard's intellectual project.

But what is meant by “the aesthetic” here? When the aesthetic is defined as an “existence-sphere” in opposition to the religious, are we to assume that Kierkegaard has a particular grudge against the life-styles of artists and art lovers? Does writing a novel or going to the theatre exclude those who do such things from living ethically or religiously? Kierkegaard himself seems to have denied this quite conclusively in references to the feuilleton article The Crisis [and a Crisis] in the Life of an Actress he wrote in 1847, which paid tribute to Madame Heiberg's triumphant performance as Juliet, nineteen years after she had established her reputation as one of the stars of the Danish stage in that very role. The significance of this article, he claims, is that it refutes the view that “religion and Christianity are something one first has recourse to when one grows older” (PV 31). It showed that the religious aspect of his authorship did not simply replace the aesthetic. “That little article” (as he referred to it on several occasions) showed that an appropriate engagement with art could coexist alongside the religious.

It is almost trivially easy to distinguish between serious and popular fiction. We can do it on external criteria and rest safe in the assumption that anything published under, say, the Harlequin imprint, is unlikely to bring us new insights into the human condition. Previous generations have similarly turned to recognisable brand names. Around the time of the First World War, the titles in the 'Bibliotheque de ma Fille' announced themselves on the inside front cover as novels for young ladies. 'Les Romans Bleus' a generation later made the same claim more explicitly, asserting that they were for the (chastely) passionate young Frenchwoman of the day, modern, moral and respectable. Nor should it be assumed from the avowedly moralising character of these novels - irreproachable, upright and salutary as they proclaim themselves - that they are necessarily dull. Those who read (and still do read) them, read them avidly for enjoyment.

The ethics whose teleological suspension is at issue in Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling is the secular ethics of his own time. This secular ethics is the ethical that is contrasted with the aesthetic in his Either/Or. Scholars disagree about the relative importance of the Kantian and Hegelian strands in ethics thus conceived.I This is also the first ethics spoken of in the introduction to The Concept of Anxiety. Vigilius Haufniensis, the pseudonymous author of that work, tells us that “the first ethics was shipwrecked on the sinfulness of the single individual” (CA 20). It is only the second ethics, he goes on to say, that can deal with the manifestation of sin (CA 21). For Kierkegaard, the second ethics is a distinctively Christian ethics. His most thorough treatment of this ethics occurs in Works of Love. According to Bruce Kirmmse, this book is Kierkegaard's “major ethical work and one of the most important works in his entire authorship,” and it contains “his clearest and starkest formulation of a Christian ethics.” Hence most of this essay will be devoted to a discussion of Works of Love. Kierkegaard, however, writing under the pseudonym of Anti-Climacus, also treats Christian ethics from a somewhat different perspective in Practice in Christianity, and this essay will have something to say about that book as well.

'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.