We are entering the commemoration of the First World War, which affects us all in one way or another. This lecture, entitled "The Literary War", will oscillate between two related but often overlapping topics.
The first is literature or literary life as battle, the inseparability of literature and war, from theIliad at least, to War and Peace and beyond. Like many human activities, literature is by nature a combat sport. Literary life is competitive and agonistic, even if it can sometimes be cooperative and supportive, in schools and movements, among groups or generations. Literature has always had something to do with games, song contests, the quest for laurels and prizes. There's something universal about the connection between poetry and struggle or war. Furor poeticus was exalted by rivalry and the prospect of ranking. The modern, paradoxical claim to neutrality confirms the fundamentally bellicose nature of literary life. The idea of a canon was an integral part of poetic activity, long before the best-seller lists in the weeklies. The war libido seized even the most skeptical, peaceful or marginal of writers, such as Baudelaire and Proust, who, to invent his novel, rose up against the obscurity of Symbolist poetry, against Sainte-Beuve, and then against popular and patriotic literature during the Great War. Originality asserts itself against the other, and literary communism is rare.
Should we evoke the age-old rivalry of words and weapons, The pen is mightier than the sword, an adage coined by Edward Bulwer-Lytton ? This thought, as old as writing itself, is to be found everywhere, in Euripides, the Jewish Bible and the New Testament, the Koran and Napoleon in 1804. The first part of Lost Illusions deals with what Balzac calls "literary warfare" (hence the title of this lecture), i.e. "horrible struggles, from work to work, from man to man, from party to party, where one must fight systematically not to be abandoned by one's own". Baudelaire, too, was deeply influenced by a conception of literature as war by other means. His Conseils aux jeunes littérateurs (1846) makes force the only literary value, and contrasts sympathy, the result of esprit de corps, with hatred, which must be concentrated and poured out wisely, implying "éreintage", the poet's neologism for destructive, malicious criticism. Philosopher Ernest Bersot compares "erintement" to "literary boxing". Since the mid-19thcentury , this has been the modern variant of "literary fencing", a topos since the classical age. It is present in muchtwentieth-century literature, particularly American. All writers are boxers.
The second, more topical theme of the lecture is the 1914-1918 war. In Le Temps retrouvé, among other strategic considerations on war, Proust, through Saint-Loup and the narrator, compares the literary art to the military art ("A general is like a writer who wants to make a certain play, a certain book") and argues that both have in common that they are not sciences, but arts of improvisation, of the occasion, of kairos. So it was war - with its generals' improvisation, sense of occasion and adaptation to the adversary - that enabled Proust to formulate his poetic art and the crucial law ofÀ la recherche du temps perdu after the fact.
