Earlier this year, Jean-Christophe Bailly published Un arbre en mai, a brief narrative of his own — more often than not marginal — involvement in May ‘68 and the political episodes that followed it.
Cette fièvre de retours, sans doute ne puis-je ici que la précéder, mais en ayant tenté, et ce sera ma présomption — ou mon excuse — de l’avoir quand même esquivée.
Jean-Christophe Bailly, Un arbre en mai
The text was, however, largely written nearly fifteen years ago — meaning that in anticipating the fiftieth anniversary that was to motivate its eventual appearance it pre-empts the ‘fièvre de retours’ with which Bailly identifies May.
The long march of the past
Post-war France had its own several projections of the the society that it was on the point of bringing into being — those of the Trente glorieuses, the Fifth Republic, May ‘68 and the subsequent project of the left to ‘Changer la vie’ with the espousal of non-revolutionary socialism (Kedward 451), and the ‘gauche plurielle’ at the turn of the millennium. The anniversary of several of these milestones falls also this year. Bailly prompts us to as how we can look back at this past, while somehow evading the pull of the visions of a future of which they were the purported bearers.
May ‘68 is one of the most vibrant of these, though the return to power of the government of the right in the summer of the same year meant that the intimations of the événements for the future were soon to become equivocal.
Yes, May was also the ultimate expression of the resurgence of ‘political vitality’ (Kedward 398–99) that characterized the 1960s. And yes, its delayed influence was to be decisive in one way at least — think of ‘the return of politics’ in the 1970s (Kedward 477) and the election of Mitterrand in 1981.
But now, these are all versions of the future that have one foot at least in the past. Already, 1998 marked the fortieth anniversary of the establishment of the Fifth Republic and the thirtieth anniversary of May. At least as significant was the quarter of a century that had elapsed since the first oil crisis of 1973 — a moment that foreshadowed the future in which the grand narratives notably associated with the Trente glorieuses began to lose whatever claim to credibility they might once have had.
A writer whose concerns centred precisely on credibility was to testify to the gap that resulted. Writing in the mid-1970s, Michel de Certeau drew the conclusion that the moment had come to recognize and indeed to embrace existential risk as the expression of a future orientation.
Seule une action fait connaitre ce qui se cachait dans l’opacité de la vie sociale. Une intervention est déjà ‘culturelle’ par ce qu’elle fait sortir ainsi de l’ombre: elle produit des effets de représentation et de transformation sociales. […] une tactique culturelle devient possible. Elle proportionne à des données mesurables un risque non mesurable — celui d’exister, qu’aucune idéologie des ‘valeurs’ ou de ‘l’Homme’ ne saurait couvrir. L’analyse et la pratique de l’innovation dans nos espaces construits ne touchent pas à l’essentiel, qui est aussi le plus fragile: un désir de vivre en perdant les assurances que multiplie chaque société — une folie d’être.
Michel de Certeau, La Culture au pluriel
The turn to this ‘folie d’être’ represented also the abandonment of the kinds of reassurance that received versions of the future purport to give us.
Who speaks for the future?
The future was also the much more uncertain space that shaped the emergence of a new generation of writers in the 1960s and early 1970s. The past on which Annie Ernaux looked back ten years ago from today, in Les Années, is one that burdened her with expectations that were the expression of a future for which those of her generation were somehow to assume responsibility.
Cependant on grandissait tranquillement […] Bientôt on défilerait tout en blanc dans les rues sous les acclamations lors de la première fête de la Jeunesse, jusqu’au champ de courses où, entre le ciel et l’herbe mouillée, on exécuterait sur la musique hurlante des haut-parleurs le « mouvement d’ensemble » dans une impression de grandeur et de solitude.
Les discours disaient qu’on représentait l’avenir.
Annie Ernaux, Les Années
Both Ernaux and Patrick Modiano emerged early among writers born in the 1940s for whom a sense of the future implied a rupture, voluntary or not, with the outlooks of their parents — and in turn with of a value system whose roots lay in the tainted period in which they were born or in which they grew up.
Modiano, who was still too young in 1967 to be able to sign a contract for the publication of his first book, would lightly step into a future in which he would never see his father again — anticipating the rejection in the following May of the paternalism that was the pervasive rationale of the Fifth Republic (Kedward 391).
Le printemps de 1967. Les pelouses de la Cité universitaire. Le parc Montsouris. À midi, les ouvriers de la Snecma fréquentaient le café, au bas de l’immeuble. La place des Peupliers, l’après-midi de juin où j’ai appris qu’ils acceptaient mon premier livre. […]
Ce soir-là, je m’étais senti léger pour la première fois de ma vie. La menace qui pesait sur moi pendant toutes ces années, me contraignant à être sans cesse sur le qui-vive, s’était dissipée dans l’air de Paris. J’avais pris le large avant que le ponton vermoulu ne s’écroule. Il était temps.
Patrick Modiano, Un pedigree
Yet he had pre-empted this account of the writing and publication of La Place de l’étoile some years before, when he was to realize that what was indeed to be an unbroken and continuing future in writing was nonetheless shaped at the outset by the irreparable belatedness of the imperative from which it sprang.
Et cela me semblait d’autant plus injuste que j’avais commencé un livre — mon premier livre — où je prenais à mon compte le malaise qu’il avait éprouvé pendant l’Occupation. J’avais découvert dans sa bibliothèque, quelques années auparavant, certains ouvrages d’auteurs antisémites parus dans les années quarante qu’il avait achetés à l’époque, sans doute pour essayer de comprendre ce que ces gens-là lui reprochaient. […] Moi, je voulais dans mon premier livre répondre à tous ces gens dont les insultes m’avaient blessé à cause de mon père. Et, sur le terrain de la prose française, leur river une fois pour toutes leur clou. Je sens bien aujourd’hui la naïveté enfantine de mon projet: la plupart de ces auteurs avaient disparu, fusillés, exilés, gâteux ou morts de vieillesse. Oui, malheureusement, je venais trop tard.
Patrick Modiano, Dora Bruder
Back to the future: the call of 1998
Thus Modiano in 1997, recalling a moment in which the disclosure of a baleful past did generate a feverish sense of urgency.
His practice of writing, as he expounds it at a more recent point, consists in advancing ‘à l’aveuglette’, following the unknown course of an initial scene.
For Ernaux too, it would emerge that to write is indeed to bear witness to a turn to the future that implies an absolute loss.
C’est donc aujourd’hui. […] quelque chose glisse là, maintenant, d’insaisissable, et qui me fait passer de la présence possible d’hier à l’absence définitive de demain. Ce jour est la charnière du passé et de l’avenir. C’est comme la mort. (Même sentiment à la mort de mon père et de ma mère, plus tard: écrire pour joindre le jour où je l’avais vue vivante à celui où elle était morte.)
Annie Ernaux, Se perdre
This future is a void. It is different, yes, but only because it diverges from a state of things whose pastness is now definitive.
French and francophone studies of the past twenty years — the ADEFFI years — have been drawn along the path of their own future by the example of Ernaux and Modiano, to mention only these two writers.
L’avenir est trop immense pour qu’elle l’imagine, il arrivera, c’est tout.
Annie Ernaux, Les Années
It was to be a future in which the past would be newly — and decisively — interrogated. And it was to be a future in which writing in French was newly identifed with intellectual risk, precisely because this was the context in which the real imponderability of a time to come that was to be so marked by past rupture and change would at least be acknowledged.
Eternal spring?
Where now? This year, Pierre Bergounioux and Jean-Paul Michel published the shared correspondence since 1981. Bergounioux (born too in the 1940s) recalls how a hopeful spring gave way to the prolonged and problematic autumn of this long exchange.
Un grave penseur a suggéré que l’âge adulte ne sert à rien qu’à exaucer les désirs irréalisés de l’enfance. La nôtre a coïncidé avec le grand aggiornamento du début de la deuxième moitié du siècle dernier, le printemps du monde auquel a succédé, très vite, l’automne qui pèse toujours sur la terre. Nous semblions voués, comme nos devanciers, à ne rien entendre à ce qui se passait et nous concernait. Que nous ayons été les contemporains d’une conjoncture d’exception, c’est, rétrospectivement, l’évidence. Encore fallait-il un détonateur pour libérer les énergies soudain assemblées, fendre la muraille, briser les barreaux de l’isolement, de l’ignorance, du silence.
What emerges from this spring is indeed a chemin on which one can only embark, come what may.
Le sort, les puissances occultes ont désigné Jean-Paul, qui s’est mis aussitôt en chemin. Il n’était plus que de le suivre. Mais l’aventure était à ce point déconcertante et neuve que ses échos roulent toujours plus d’un demi-siècle plus tard, ce qui explique ce besoin d’y revenir, cette correspondance.
Pierre Bergounioux and Jean-Paul Michel, Correspondance: 1981–2017
It is a path whose course one can only discern by going back over it — by seeing where it merges with, where it diverges from, the longer past in which it is now immersed.
Trop tard?
And yet the final project of Roland Barthes — a writer who at the time of formulating it was beginning to feel his age — is salutary, in that it implies that it is never too late to look to the future. In his inaugural lecture in the Collège de France, Barthes anticipates embarking on a kind of rebirth in the midst of the younger individuals who now surrounded him, wilfully forgetting a past of which he is acutely aware and unlearning an intellectual project more d’avenir than most and which had brought him to this illustrious point in his career.
Are we, then, too late, or not? Well, today that is indeed the question, when intellectual adventure has come to be overshadowed by the possibility of environmental annihilation. Philippe Descola writes from a sense of the ecological urgency that results from a commitment to what he terms ‘le grand murmure’ — or the immense foisonnement of social and cultural practices.
C’est à chacun d’entre nous […] d’inventer et de faire prospérer les modes de conciliation et les types de pression capables de conduire à une universalité nouvelle, à la fois ouverte à toutes les composantes du monde et respectueuse de certains de leurs particularismes, dans l’espoir de conjurer l’échéance lointaine à laquelle, avec l’extinction de notre espèce, le prix de la passivité serait payé d’une autre manière: en abandonnant au cosmos une nature devenue orpheline de ses rapporteurs parce qu’ils n’avaient pas su lui concéder de véritables moyens d’expression.
Philippe Descola, Par-delà nature et culture
He advocates an approach to practice in which our engagement with an endangered world demands that we find ways to transmit our understanding of it to a future from which we may be excluded. Descola’s concern is with the risk of environmental or human annihilation, or both, and in turn the heightened ephemerality of the usages that are the characteristic object of anthropology. Its task and its lesson are reinvented in the light of this sense of threat — so Descola repeatedly insists. Thus his call to expand its scope to encompass humans and non-humans alike.
Is this the longue marche on which we should now embark? In the direction of a future in which we may have no future? Even if we do so in the knowledge of the risk that it may indeed be too late?
Descola’s response to questions like these sees him draw on categories which are those of our discipline — that of our ‘moyens d’expression’, for instance. But, as for Barthes, this is a project that implies an unlearning too. The threats that the world faces in the Anthropocene are not least those that an anthropology like Descola’s, with its stress on the ephemerality of cultural systems, might allow us to anticipate and — above all — to respond to. ‘Le grand murmure’ is, for Descola, the insistent if remote clamour of a vulnerability that we characteristically fail to acknowledge.
He is not alone in seeking to reorient anthropology in the light of this concern. Like Descola, Eduardo Kohn aims to expand the range of conceptual tools on which we can draw in understanding environments encompassing humans and non-humans.
Kohn’s account of how forests can be said to think is comparable to Descola’s approach in its insistence on the urgency of an anthropology that, in working to embrace all existants, takes us beyond an exclusive conception of thought as distinctively human — and beyond the sense of time that this implies too.
This, then, will perhaps be a future in which our own fortunes will increasingly be caught up with those of other disciplines — in the humanities and beyond — for which this is now the most urgent question too. Some of the attitudes and gestures that we have witnessed will equip us to adjust to it. They provide us with resources not so much for a journey of hope, to recall Raymond Williams’s formulation, as for a disabused engagement with the degraded environment to which the long march of the human past now exposes us: the assumption of the reality of a ‘risque non mesurable’, to quote Certeau’s phrase once more; the sense of being called upon to speak for a future whose emergence may be irretrievably connected to loss; the intimation that our belatedness can be our most pressing motivation to act.
