FRENCH CRIME FICTION: FROM GENRE MINEUR TO PATRIMOINE CULTUREL
Cardiff University
One book in five sold in France today is a polar. In the face of repeated diagnoses of a crisis in French literature, sales of crime fiction of all varieties have remained buoyant and testify to a clear demand for new crime fiction, both home grown and from abroad.1 The vitality of this market is also evident in the explosion of specialist crime fiction collections in recent years. Most major publishers in France now edit a crime fiction series, whilst a number of small- to medium-sized publishing ventures have emerged in the last decade to contest the dominance of established imprints such as the Série noire and Le Masque. Amongst these are presses created precisely to cater for a crime fiction readership, such as La Baleine (now subsumed into Éditions du Seuil) and L'Écailler du Sud, or publishers with more general listings, such as Éditions Viviane Hamy, who have made their reputations through discovering talented new crime writers.2 Indeed, a number of these new voices in French crime fiction have become publishing sensations with translation rights and film and television adaptations of their novels making their work known to a global audience.3
The visibility in the media of such writers underscores a second important feature of the current state of crime fiction in France: its progressive infiltration of French cultural life. The changing status of French crime fiction can be attributed to both developments within the body of crime writing itself, for example, the rise of a younger generation of crime novelists formed by the debates surrounding the events of May 1968, as well as to broader trends within contemporary French fiction, such as the ‘retour au récit’ since the 1980s and the championing of more populist notions of the literary.4 In terms of institutional recognition, French crime fiction has also benefitted from the academy's increasing receptiveness to forms of popular cultures: from the inclusion of French crime fiction on collège programmes to the creation of a specialist copyright library in Paris supporting an evolving publicly funded research culture.5 Such shifts have been complemented, at grass roots level, by the multiplication of spaces, places and locations where crime fiction is debated in France, such as specialist reviews, websites,6 literary salons and festivals. This participatory culture, where ordinary readers are encouraged to interact with authors and their novels, is neither specific to crime fiction nor to France itself. However, the number and ambition of such events pay tribute to the appeal of crime fiction and to the passionate conviction of some in the educational establishment that it represents a privileged means of reaching sectors of the community not traditionally associated with a literary culture.7
These two features — market share and cultural activity — are evidence of a process of transformation affecting the profile of crime fiction in France. From being classified as a genre mineur, crime fiction has come to be recognized as an important part of France's patrimoine culturel. Or, as Annie Collovold and Erik Neveu have claimed, crime fiction has taken ‘l'ascenseur vers la légitimité culturelle’.8 This review article will evaluate the extent to which this process of cultural legitimization has been tracked, over the past fifteen to twenty years, in the critical sphere. It will assess past and present trends in criticism of French crime fiction and discuss the emergence of new work that integrates crime fiction into wider cultural histories of France. Lastly, it will consider what a reinvigorated French crime fiction tradition might have to offer the disciplinary fields associated with French studies.
Critical studies of French crime fiction have evolved considerably in recent decades but can be grouped into three distinct if overlapping phases. Firstly, during the 1970s and early 1980s, criticism tended to be dominated by authors or critics whose main aim was to give readers an overview of a vast range of writings. Such studies were targetted at the general reader and focused on the history and evolution of various sub-genres of crime fiction. They mapped out the key stages and developments in French and Anglo-American crime fiction, mainly from the nineteenth century onwards, and created a canon of French crime novels judged to represent what was best in fiction past and present. The titles of these studies give some indication of the ‘survey and select’ approach taken: Panorama du polar français contemporain, Le Guide du polar and Le Roman criminel: histoires, auteurs, personnages.9 With the emphasis on categorizing, classifying and defining the parameters for the study of crime fiction, these texts exhibit a profound anxiety about the status of crime fiction, an anxiety that often takes the form of a defensive stance vis-à-vis the literary establishment. Revelling in its marginalized status, the authors of such works rarely make connections that challenge a highly polarized high/low cultural divide. Indeed, by creating an alternative literary genealogy for crime fiction, these studies served to maintain and reinforce a sharp distinction between littérature blanche and littérature noire.
By the mid to late 1980s, crime fiction was making its ways into the academy, albeit in incremental steps. Early work took the form of special issues of prestigious literary and cultural reviews, such as Europe, Littérature and Roman.10 These were soon followed by studies written by literary and cultural historians who were able to apply a range of critical methodologies to the study of crime fiction, from structuralist and narratological readings of form to more socio-cultural and historically located analyses.11 It was also in the mid 1990s that a number of introductory guides to crime fiction were produced, targetted mainly at university students, such as those by Franck Evrard and Yves Reuter.12 These give a good indication of the changing attitudes to crime fiction, for whilst they are still organized around a series of perennial questions relating to the form and status of crime fiction (the first section of Evrard's study is entitled ‘Qu'est-ce qu'un roman policier?’), they also focus on the vacillating borders between high and low literary cultures. Evrard, for example, explores crime fiction's ability to sustain ‘une grande diversité de lectures possibles’13 and creates networks of exchange between crime fiction writers and ground-breaking novelists, such as Alain Robbe-Grillet and Patrick Modiano. However, both studies are still wedded to the notion of a binary divide in literary production — crime fiction vs literary mainstream — even if they admit to the possibility of interchange and the models crime fiction has offered writers in terms of themes, aesthetics and ideologies.
By the late 1990s, the repeated return to a high/low cultural divide was breaking down in discussions of French crime fiction. A study such as Pierre Verdaguer's La Séduction policière: signes de croissance d'un genre réputé mineur signals, in its title alone, the changing fortunes of crime fiction, now a supposedly minor genre entering a period of expansion.14 For over the past five to ten years, criticism of French crime fiction has evolved to take account of its increasing importance in contemporary French culture. Gone is the obsessive need to redefine the object of study, its history and generic conventions and, in its place, there is a greater recognition of the diversity and plurality of crime writing.15 This has been a liberating act for many critics who have accentuated the porosity of the boundaries marking out crime fiction and the literary mainstream. Exploring the various sub-groupings within the current crime fiction market, such as the polar historique, Collovold and Neveu have noted the high degree of hybridization that characterizes French crime fiction into the twenty-first century, a ‘hybridisation comme circulation à deux sens’ as it operates to the advantage of other literary genres caught up in the fervour for crime fiction.16 Indeed, for others, such as Colin Nettelbeck, the literary mainstream's receptiveness to popular cultural forms, such as crime fiction, is indicative of a more general reconfiguration of the French cultural landscape and one which has resulted not in ‘the demise of the literary but the displacement of a cultural dominant’. Analysing novels by Jean Echenoz and Daniel Pennac, Nettelbeck comes to the conclusion that we have entered a ‘post-literary phase’ in which traditional notions of the literary now operate at the periphery of the ‘turbulent non-literary core of contemporary French culture’.17
The impact of this dual process of cultural legitimization of the polar, on one side, and the remapping of French cultural activity, on the other, has been significant in at least two major respects for those working on French crime fiction. Firstly, it has generated a movement to integrate crime fiction into wider cultural histories of France, particularly those centred on narratives of crime and transgression. Three of the seven essays in a special issue of French Cultural Studies devoted to crime and punishment published in 2001 approach the subject through the lens of crime fiction. As Margaret Atack outlines in her introduction to the issue, to explore the ‘thematics of crime’ is to recognize the productive exchange at work between different narratives of disorder and to accept that ‘boundaries between discourses become in many respects non-pertinent, for the imaginative, the socio-political and the journalistic, all play necessary roles’.18 Viewed from this perspective, crime fiction assumes its place within a broad spectrum of literary and cultural material capable of giving the reader a crucial insight into the complex and evolving self-representations of French society. From being considered a minor genre concerned above all with policing the social order, here crime fiction, particularly the roman noir, is credited with a subversive potential, an ability to confront and challenge the status quo. With a number of contributors examining texts relating to traumatic periods in French history, such as the Occupation and the Algerian war,19 this issue of French Cultural Studies emphasizes French crime fiction's engagement with centrifugal forces at work within French society, those that fragment and divide rather than those that bind and unite.
These counter-cultural readings of French crime fiction, especially in its noir incarnations, are not new.20 However, a second feature of recent work on French crime fiction is the location of such readings within a broader time frame and in relation to complex transnational networks. This expansive new stage for the inscription of French crime fiction and its effects is well illustrated by the 2005 special issue of Yale French Studies. The editors of the journal pay homage to France's centrality in literary histories of crime fiction, noting that ‘it is the country's robust trade in tropes, plots, figures, and devices across national boundaries that has allowed France to attain its pivotal status in the realm of crime fiction’.21 Focusing on French crime fiction's credentials as political fiction, Goulet and Lee put forward a persuasive argument for understanding French crime fiction as a trenchant form of social commentary that has traversed centuries and cultures. To this end, seven of the thirteen contributions investigate texts from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, challenging the often implicit assumption of a teleological progress in crime fiction from social conservatism to radical critique. Other contributions highlight the sophisticated intertextual and intercultural affiliations that link metropolitan French crime fiction to America and Europe, as well as to Africa, where, as Pim Higginson asserts, it has offered francophone African writers ‘a new way of instantiating a particularly pointed critique of modern Africa and its relation to France’.22 As the editors acknowledge in their Introduction, yet more research remains to be undertaken into relatively neglected areas, such as the contribution of French women writers or the crime fiction traditions of other francophone regions.23
The 2005 edition of Yale French Studies demonstrates the wealth of interdisciplinary work being undertaken into French crime fiction and the influence of such writings on wider cultural histories of France. The volume gestures at the repositioning of the polar within contemporary French culture and explores some of the novel and startling ways in which crime fiction has reinvigorated the literary sphere in France and elsewhere. Yet what of crime fiction's place in the field of French studies? To what extent would a greater openness to crime fiction signal a loss of cultural points de repères, a dumbing down of the subject? Or, conversely, could it offer the possibility of new literary affiliations and an enrichment of the field of inquiry? In his recent wide-ranging discussion of French studies and the ‘post-colonial turn’ in this journal, Charles Forsdick makes a compelling case for ‘canon enlargement’, one that, from the perspective of francophone postcoloniality, would open up the discipline area of French studies ‘to recognize the emergence of a globalized, transnational object of inquiry’.24 In many senses, crime fiction is always already caught up in these processes, a literary form that was conceived at the intersection of three national cultures, France, Great Britain and America, and that continues to circulate globally through and across a range of cultural media, from the graphic novel to film and the internet. As French studies faces new challenges into the twenty-first century, not least in terms of undergraduate recruitment, crime fiction continues to offer one means of promoting a vibrant and genuinely intercultural understanding of what it means to study and research within a French context.
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Footnotes |
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1 According to statistics compiled by Livres Hebdo, 471 new crime fiction titles were published in France in 1994. This figure had risen to 1228 by 2004. In terms of quantity, 18 million crime novels were sold in 2001; cited in Annie Collovold and Erik Neveu, Lire le noir: enquête sur les lecteurs de récits policiers (Paris, Bibliothèque Publique d'Information/Centre Pompidou, 2004), pp. 62–63.
2 Éditions Viviane Hamy's Chemins nocturnes series has been influential as the first publishing outlet for a number of mainly French women crime writers who have gone on to attain best-seller status, for example, Maud Tabachnik and Fred Vargas.
3 Perhaps the most notable examples here are Daniel Pennac and his Malaussène series of novels, published in the UK by Harvill Press/Vintage, and Jean-Christophe Grangé, whose second book, Les Rivières pourpres (1998), was filmed in 2000 by Matthieu Kassovitz. Another French crime fiction writer on the verge of international fame is Thierry Jonquet. In 2004, film rights to his novel Mygale of 1984 were acquired by Pedro Almodovar with a view to filming the novel with Antonio Banderas in the lead role.
4 See Colin Davis and Elizabeth Fallaize, French Fiction in the Mitterrand Years: Memory, Narrative and Desire (Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 1–17, for an overview of the literary context in France during the 1980s and 1990s.
5 BILIPO, the Bibliothèque des littératures policières, was created in 1984 as a resource centre and archive for crime fiction. It has evolved into an important institution for supporting cultural activities around crime fiction, from school projects to international conferences, festivals and exhibitions.
6 The often ephemeral nature of these sites has led to the loss of valuable material for both the informed reader of crime fiction and the academic researcher. The demise after six years of mauvaisgenres.com in June 2005, a site devoted to both crime fiction and science fiction, was widely lamented as an extensive back catalogue of interviews and articles was taken offline.
7 See, for example, the annual Festival du polar dans la ville hosted by the town of Saint Quentin-en-Yvelines on the outskirts of Paris. Created in 1994, by 2006 the festival hosted over 120 events in eighty different locations, from cafés, schools and restaurants to retirement homes and even private homes. See the festival's website at www.polar.agglo-sqy.fr.
9 Stefano Benvenuti, Gianni Rizzoni and Michel Lebrun, Le Roman criminel: histoires, auteurs, personnages (Nantes, l'Atalante, 1979); Maurice Périsset, Panorama du polar français contemporain (Paris, Éditions de l'Instant, 1986); Michel Lebrun and Jean-Pierre Schweighaeuser, Le Guide du polar (Paris, Syros, 1987).
10 See Europe, nos 571–72, ‘La fiction policière’ (1976) and nos 664–65, ‘Le roman noir américain’ (1984); Littérature, 49, ‘Le roman policier’ (1983); Roman, 24, ‘Poétique du polar’ (1988). More recently, the literary credentials of the roman noir were strengthened by a special issue of Les Temps modernes, ‘Pas d'orchidées pour les temps modernes’, no. 595 (août–octobre 1997).
11 See Marc Lits, Le Roman policier: introduction à la théorie et à l'histoire d'un genre littéraire (Liège, Éditions CEFAL, 1993), and Jacques Dubois, Le Roman policier ou la modernité (Paris, Nathan, 1992).
12 Franck Evrard, Lire le roman policier (Paris, Dunod, 1996), and Yves Reuter, Le Roman policier (Paris, Nathan Université, 1997).
13 Lire le roman policier, p. 2.
14 La Séduction policière: signes de croissance d'un genre réputé mineur (Birmingham, AL, Summa, 1999). Verdaguer's text is interesting for the choices he makes about the form and focus of his study. It is not based on establishing a canon of French crime writing but, instead, analyses a selection of novels by contemporary authors whom Verdaguer views as ‘révélateurs de l'état d'esprit de notre fin de siècle’ (p. 4).
15 Collovold and Neveu dismiss decades of debate in their study Lire le noir to state baldly that ‘un roman policier est ce qu'on trouve au rayon policier de la librairie’ (p. 21).
17 ‘The Post-Literary Novel: Echenoz, Pennac and Company’, French Cultural Studies, 5 (1994), 113–38 (pp. 115, 137).
18 ‘Introduction’, Crime and Punishment: Narratives of Order and Disorder, French Cultural Studies, special issue, 12 (2001), 233–36 (p. 234).
19 See, in particular, Charles Forsdick, ‘"Direction les oubliettes de l'histoire": Witnessing the Past in the Contemporary French polar’, French Cultural Studies, 12 (2001), 333–50.
20 See the sizeable scholarship on the néo-polar of the 1970s and 1980s which takes just such a reading as given, in, for example, the special issue of Mouvements, 15–16 (mai–août 2001), entitled Le Polar: entre critique sociale et désenchantement.
21 Andrea Goulet and Susanna Lee, ‘Editors’ Preface: Crime Fictions’, Yale French Studies, Crime Fictions, no. 108 (2005), 1–7 (p. 5).
22 ‘Mayhem at the Crossroads: Francophone African Fiction and the Rise of the Crime Novel’, Yale French Studies, no. 108 (2005), 160–76 (p. 160).
23 An evolving body of research is available on French women's crime fiction; see, in particular, the work of Véronique Desnain, for example ‘"La Femelle de l'espèce": Women in Contemporary French Crime Fiction’, French Cultural Studies, 12 (2001), 175–92.
24 ‘Between "French" and "Francophone": French Studies and the Postcolonial Turn’, FS, LIX (2005), 523–30 (p. 529).
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