What does "Belgian literature" really refer to?

Transcription

1 What does "Belgian literature" really refer to? 6/2/14 The historiography of Belgian literature, the part written in French, reflects the period of time during which it is written. From a unitary Belgium, soaked in the ambiance of the "Nordic myth", we pass to the period of France as a standard point of cultural reference and to the emergence of francophone "literatures", subsequently exploring the sociology of "Belgitude" and "literatures of the periphery". "History is always the daughter of the present," wrote the historian Fernand Braudel. One might certainly say as much of the historiography of any literary grouping, that is, any discourse that intends to construct historical knowledge about creatively written texts. This is particularly true as concerns Belgian literature written in French

2 Or at least, this is the impression one gets from reading the imposing collection (1) gathered together by Björn- Olav Dozo (research fellow of the FNRS - Centre for the study of the francophone literature of Belgium at the University of Liège) and François Provenzano (instructor in the sciences of language and rhetoric unit in the department of Romance languages and literature at the ULg). This compilation of 12 metadiscourses on the productions of writers who express themselves in the language of Molière follows an order that is both diachronic and synchronic. The first deals with a period during which Belgium was at all times a single entity, up to the point where it becomes - after many vicissitudes - Federal, a state of affairs that extends from the second half of the 19 th century to the early years of the 21 st. The second order is constructed around four angles of attack that are called "constructing history", "writing the language", "living the society" and "thinking the concepts". This arrangement allows us to get an approximate idea about various theoretical experiments that have differentiated periods of discourse on Belgian literary production over the long run. Elements of a theoretical laboratory The historical approach comes to grips with Charles Potvin who in 1870 saw the nation, which he considered as having existed for a very long time, as the secular ferment of the march of progress, something to which writers had made a decisive contribution. "Yes, our writers have always stood as beacons of progress," Potvin gushed. Francis Nautet, discerned in the "Belgian soul" which was so highly prized by Edmond Picard a profound justification of the original literary expression of Belgian authors. The birth was a slow one, he admitted, but thanks to the Romanticism that brought about "the fusion of a Latin thought and a Germanic one, we were at length affected. Because of an ethnographic duality, we find ourselves at the confluence of two intellectual currents; from this point on, we have a literary raison d'être." Finally in 1921, breaking away from this idealized conception at a moment when Flemish linguistic claims were becoming ever more insistent, Paul Hamelius discovered in the territory, the land of the nation and its history a source of inspiration that would give priority "to accidents instead of trying to raise itself to the level of a pure idea." To his mind, Belgian authors "make themselves the voice of the people [...] and are not well understood, except through a study of their milieu." On another hand, for Gustave Charlier, who was first to enunciate the theoretical paradigm based on language, there was no unitary Belgian literature whose French and Flemish expressions could be considered panels of a diptych. In 1938, he took note of the existence of a "literature that is developing in a language it shares with another country" - namely France. Regarding this "second literature" (the concept is not derogatory), he thought that it carried "the weight of the literary tradition belonging to the language it employs." Standing opposed to this somewhat restrictive concept, Joseph Hanse took a larger view in 1964: "The linguistic community [...] creates a unity that is more real than belonging to the nation." According to him, it was appropriate to "speak of French literature, and of the French literature of Belgium". This acceptance of a single cultural space or civilization appears again in 1968 with Maurice Piron and "literary francophony," a notion that had only emerged, but to which he gave real theoretical consistency - as he did to the notion of "marginal literatures" (of Belgium, Romandy (the part of Switzerland also known as "Suisse Romande") and French Canada). Speaking of these, he said, "the hour has finally arrived [...] to affirm their vocation." In 1980 Marc Quaghebeur announced a resolutely ideological turn. In Belgium there was an enormous complex of societal predispositions that distorted the relationship between literature and the context of its production, to the point where Quaghebeur remarked that "the absence of rigor unfortunately affects our literary - 2 -

3 manuals, and ideology seems quite definitely to be considered more important than cognitive quality." This state of affairs gave rise to equally unfortunate cases of manipulation in which regional interests, especially those that favoured Walloon literature of the literature of the Brussels region, were obviously at work. Despite this he was able to hope that "Belgian letters in the French language constitute [...] an exceptional field of investigation for anyone who can accept, without blinkers or clichés, the task of rethinking the status of writing as influenced by language, history and culture." This challenge was accepted by Jean-Marie Klinkenberg, who made use of historical sociology. In 1981, well aware that literature was more the result of opposing forces than a disembodied process of creation, he introduced a "gravitational model" intended to clarify the strategies of literatures at the periphery: the centrifugal phase ( ) of independence from Paris; the centripetal phase ( ) of rapprochement with Paris; the dialectical phase (beginning in 1960), a synthesis of nationalist leanings and their "nationless" antithesis. (2). The ultimate goal of the Belgian writer, and the test of a writer's quest for legitimacy, was still considered to be "getting published and recognized in Paris." Finally, José Lambert said in 1983 that the notion of "national literatures" needed to be re-examined, and he questioned whether there really were boundaries between literatures of a political or even a linguistic nature. Thus he held it to be necessary to establish a really effective system of explanation that would be able to furnish us with "a key that will allow us to characterize the so-called national literatures as well as the vicissitudes to which they appear to be subject." - 3 -

4 Michel Bironcarried out such an attempt in a manner of his choosing in 1994, by selecting a concept that was capable of including all the examples of Belgian literature since the 1870s. Basing himself on a proper socio-critical methodology, it is the concept of modernity that he emphasizes and interprets, remaining "sensitive to the many senses that are given to (modernity)" and showing that "the diffuse and polymorphic circulation of such an aesthetic emblem often is a response to strategic imperatives existing within the literary hierarchy in Belgium." In 2004, in works by Dirk De Geest and Reine Meylaerts, the question concerns "Belgique" and "België". What heuristic value is to be given to these two proper names, each designating a country that is notable for its bilingualism - not taking the German-speaking community into account - or to the adjectives that are related to them in their respective languages (French and Dutch)? One takes one's best shot, as it were, for nothing other than "the concept "Belgian" stirs up such a range of acceptations, some opposed to others, some complementary, never obvious or univocal, and it runs like a golden thread through Belgian literary practices. This contest over identity, not always fought fairly, might be moderated thanks to the contribution of a comparativist approach in the matter of culture, accompanied by consciousness of the "lack of evidence attached to even the idea of a national literature." With Paul Aron and Benoît Denis, the concept of a "literary network" assumes importance, not in order to be substituted for Pierre Bourdieu's theory of fields, but in order to make possible a "more precise description of certain processes at work in a sub-field that is under some sort of domination, or else only weakly autonomous." Such is the case of the field of "Belgian letters" - the reference is only to literary production in French - in which the relational capital of a given agent may compensate in a non-negligible way for the weakness of the symbolic capital that only Paris can really provide. A polymorphous rhetoric Three texts of a certain length illustrate each of the four phases mentioned above, and the transitions also offer some insight. We pass from a single Belgium (Potvin, Nautet, Hamelius) that is steeped in a "Nordic myth" to the standard-setting status of France and the emergence of "francophone literatures" (Charlier, Hanse, Piron), - 4 -

5 and thence to a sociological exploration of "belgitude" and the "literatures of the periphery" (Quaghebeur, Klinkenberg, Lambert), before winding things up with other university specialists who focus on new concepts and new explicative possibilities (Biron, De Geest and Meylaerts, Aron and Denis). It may be assumed that these historiographical protocols have each their own rhetoric. In this respect, in the very dense introduction to their anthology, Björn-Olav Dozo and François Provenzano offer a table that displays the development of various strands of argument followed by several selected texts. They reckon that "the discourse on literary history in Belgium [...] often articulates a proposition about the intrinsic identity of that history in terms of a proposition about the relationship between that history and the literary history of neighbouring countries." For example, the "bastardy" of the Belgian writer (this is considered something positive) forces him or her into "exile", considered a negative value; the negative "institutional misery" of the same may turn into a positive "intersection of influences"; finally, an "absence" of legitimacy, translating the lack, opens up upon a promising "space of possibilities". In other words, today as yesterday, speaking about literary practice in Belgium is never done univocally. Perhaps it is just the way things are in a country of meeting places like ours, which bounces back and forth between unity and multiculturalism, affected more often than many believe by ideological developments. No, truly, no more than literature, this historiography cannot claim to be the bearer of an essentialism... (1) Björn-Olav Dozo et François Provenzano, Historiographie de la littérature belge. Une anthologie. ENS éditions, (2) Here we present the revised names for these phases that are used in our text generally, and not those from the original 1981 text that is in fact included in the anthology