Donald Morrison made quite a splash last year when he published an article entitled "The Death of French Culture" in Time Magazine. "[N]obody takes culture more seriously than the French," he wrote.
They subsidize it
generously; they cosset it with quotas and tax breaks. French media
give it vast amounts of airtime and column inches. Even fashion
magazines carry serious book reviews, and the Nov. 5 announcement of
the Prix Goncourt — one of more than 900 French literary prizes — was
front-page news across the country. (It went to Gilles Leroy's novel Alabama Song.)
Every French town of any size has its annual opera or theater festival,
nearly every church its weekend organ or chamber-music recital.
So what's the problem?
There is one problem. All of these mighty oaks being felled in France's
cultural forest make barely a sound in the wider world. Once admired
for the dominating excellence of its writers, artists and musicians,
France today is a wilting power in the global cultural marketplace.
Oh. So French culture is actually alive and well and living in France. It's just that the rest of the world has stopped taking notice. Isn't that more their problem than, speaking for the French, ours?
Only a handful of the season's new novels will find a publisher outside
France. Fewer than a dozen make it to the U.S. in a typical year, while
about 30% of all fiction sold in France is translated from English.
That's about the same percentage as in Germany, but there the total
number of English translations has nearly halved in the past decade,
while it's still growing in France. Earlier generations of French
writers — from Molière, Hugo, Balzac and Flaubert to Proust, Sartre,
Camus and Malraux — did not lack for an audience abroad.
Oh again. Leaving aside the speciousness of arguing a point against a romanticized vision of the past (I'm guessing Molière and Balzac didn't bring much revenue into France considering the idea of copyright, much less foreign rights, didn't exist until the late 19th century), this again seems more a symptom of the US market– as well as a reflection of some changes in the international literary scene, namely that our post-colonial epoch has become more and more interested in voices from beyond Western Europe.
Clearly I don't much care for this article. But Morrison is publishing a book in France tomorrow on this very topic with Antoine Compagnon, who I do take seriously, most, if not all, of the time, so I'm paying attention to this debate to see if Compagnon has anything interesting to add to it. His point seems to be that France is suffering under the weight of her own grandeur. But having just spent nearly 4 months in Japan, let me say– it was a massive relief to get back to France's grandeur.
Morrison will be putting in an appearance tonight at the American Library. 7 pm, 10 rue du Général Camou, 75007. See you there?
