Absent without Leave

French Literature under Threat of War

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by Denis Hollier,

Translated by Catherine Porter

Harvard University Press

Due/Published November 1997, 256 pages, paper

ISBN 0674212711

Hollier recovers the literary prehistory of postmodernism in these interlocking studies of the main figures of French literary life in the 1930s and early 1940s. Georges Bataille, Michel Leiris, Roger Cailois, AndrŽ Malraux, and the early Jean-Paul Sartre, writers torn between politics and the pleasures of the text, writers whose influence on Derrida, Foucault, deMan, Deleuze, and Ricoeur is clear, are the figures Hollier considers as uneasily balancing the influences of the philosopher and the man of action. As Harvard says, "Hollier coptures the comical pathos of these writers prusuing the ideal of 'engagement' through an exercise in dispossession. His work indentifies, as none has before, the master plot for literature that was crafted in the 1940s, a plot in which we are still very much entangled.

Review

French writers and novelists of the 30's and 40's including, Georges Bataille, Michel Leiris, Roger Caillois, André Malraux, and the early Jean-Paul Sartre influence had tremendous influence on a later group of theorists Derrida, Foucault, de Man, Deleuze and Ricoeur. Faced with the memories of World War I and then later World War II and the Holocaust, the writers of this generation wrestled with the question of the place of literature in a world where its relevancy was threatened by the terrors of the modern world. In these perceptive essays, Hollier examines the different roles these writers sought for the novel and the conditions in which literature could exist. Thus, on one side there is Sartre and his work What is Literature, which argued that literature needed to work towards a world where literature could exist (for him a form of democratic socialism). The ideas of other writers such as Bataille and Blanchot rejected the commitment Sartre asked of writers. Hollier writes, “[it was not] a question of protecting art against the world. Quite the contrary: it was a question of exposing art to a world in which it would no longer have any protectors....Literature does not expect to be made possible by a transformation of the world; rather in a transformed world literature will be able to realize its own essence by ceasing to be possible.” The debates within these discussions and the novels themselves are intelligently critiqued by Hollier as he captures the rather comical pathos of these writers pursuing the ideal of “engagement” through an exercise in dispossession.