Once upon a time, in the late 1970s of the past century, Parisian students flocked to listen to Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze and so many thinkers whose names made French university departments in America drool with envy—stunned by the fact those were civil servants on fixed wages and not academic carpetbaggers on inflated six figure salaries. Some among that youth began also to navigate with changing bearings the truly astonishing embarrassment of riches that was France’s intellectual life then. They looked for new beacons and new directions. Change was in the offing.
So, unlike Hercules at the Crossroads made to stand, like a soccer player ready to shoot a penalty, at the forked paths of virtue or vice, studious life or “divertissement” as Pascal put it, some young intellectuals in the making played on both teams, the (post) Moderns and the (new) Ancients. They came to age in a period, the late 1970s, that was less Manichean than today some commentators (especially Anglo-Saxon) believe, for they have not known it or, if they have, they were not insiders. You had to belong. I speak here of students from the right schools; with the right sort of professors; with the right sense of rebellion and the right, polymorphous libido sciendi. A historiography of that generation on the cusp of change remains to be written. By an insider, preferably.
Cusp of change? Indeed Barthes’ and Foucault’s untimely deaths, in the prime of their lives and oeuvres, in 1980 and 1984, marked the incipient end of their masterly rule. Masters they had been, undeniably. But new intellectual lights slowly shone. To wit, in September 1982 liberal weekly of record L’Express noted a change. It credited four academics for heralding “the death of regnant Marxism.” One (pace the three others, they have vanished into thin air) was Marc Fumaroli whom daily Libération never short of a delicacy would later call “the youngest of the old farts.” A new Ancient. That spiteful spit was not fortuitous. A new era had begun. I rather think, however, that L’Express had become aware of the “young Sorbonne professor” as they called Fumaroli, by reading a Time magazine of June 1982. Penned by no less than Robert Hughes, Time had carried an enthusiastic review of Fumaroli’s essay for the New York Metropolitan’s exhibition on “France in the Golden Age.” So the youth I referred to, while getting still terribly excited over psychoanalysis and semiotics, and even the lost dreams of revolutionary Mao-spontex (which included … neo-royalists), also began to seek out different leaders, and among them was Marc Fumaroli.
It is in that turbulent intellectual ambiance that a particular group was born. Some of its members were Fumaroli’s students, and others admired him. Not that he made any effort to play direct intercessor. Not his style.
A Young Parnassus of Last Europeans
It so happened that a few young writers, poets, philosophy students found themselves involved in an academia of sorts, a modest Parnassus of literary enthusiasm. They had a tutelar totem: god Alpheus—a mythological figure who in pursuit of his love became a river and plunged under the Peloponnese, to re-emerge on the island of Ortygia, to be united with his object of desire. Hercules, him again, diverted Alpheus’ waters to clean the Augean Stables.
So, they gathered, or were gathered around a plain-looking review (printing was expensive, then) called Avalanche. A fit title for their first “alphean” move: let’s “descend” (meaning of “avalanche”) and let’s go underground, and let’s re-emerge as new Alpheus! That is how L’Alphée, a quarterly, soon succeeded Avalanche. Its pale, watery shade of blue bore a Renaissance emblem of Alpheus. In its last avatar L’Alphée got printed luxuriously in folio format, an unusual 22.5 cm x 33.5cm, on high grammage ivory vellum—in homage to the great printers of the Renaissance as well as to the precious parchment of pre-Gutenberg era, august receptacles of the transmission of poetry and the arts. The “maître d’oeuvre” was Michel Orcel, a student then of Italian literature. Destined to be crowned, as a poet, by the Académie française, he was to become a prominent translator and exponent of Tasso, Foscolo, Leopardi. It was he who had traced, within those two journals, the limits of a pomerium, of an imagined Parnassus.
Adhering to the Alphean allegory, those young intellectuals dedicated themselves to pursue their love for literature and the arts, by digging deep below a world that was, socially and politically, far from enchanting at the dawn of the 1980s, searching for light; and perhaps they wanted to help clean up the detritus of a “culture” that had not Alpheus as a symbol but ABBA’s Dancing Queen. They cast themselves as exemplars of the Unzeitgemäss, the Nietzschean unactual, and perhaps as the Last Europeans.
The members of this circle hardly ever met in the flesh, as a group: they formed a spiritual academy. Remember that, in those days, the web did not exist: we could not search and find. We had to wait to discover, in person, who was who. Reading a poem we imagined the poet. I recall nonetheless a party in a Parisian “entresol.” We drank champagne moderately, we smoked (no pot) a lot, but above all we were amazed to get to know each other, to put a face on a verse, a posture on a poem, a smile on a turn of phrase. It took me fifty years to meet some of them again. They all fulfilled their promise. They were, as the Scriptures put it, trees growing near a river.
All for Mousike
Who were they? Just a few names: poet Christian Gabriel(le) Guez-Ricord (1948-1988) whose meteoric and tragic destiny raised him, for some, to the rank of a Rimbaud. Scottish poet Andrew Greig (b. 1951) published a long letter in and to Avalanche asking, rhetorically: “Do you have in France “lost” poets? Are you a “lost” review?”—he extolled the value of dialectal poetry, “lost,” and regained. Poet François Boddaert (b. 1951) would soon launch his own journal and publishing concern, Obsidiane, before becoming the soul of another school of poets. French Grand Prix de Poésie de l’Académie française, and photographer, Gérard Macé (b. 1946), published in L’Alphée. Avalanche and L’Alphée made room for music, opera, the arts, from Italy, France, Lebanon, Portugal, Poland, and further afield, in the wide circling dance of the Muses: it embodied mousike.
That group intersected also with the rarefied circle of literary cognoscenti of previous generations, whose names meant little to the media then and today nothing: discrete poet and mentor Pierre Oster Soussouev (1933-2020), editing scene éminence grise Henri Thomas (1912-1993). Transmission mattered for them and their younger interlocutors. Speaking of Thomas, he gave L’Alphée (vol 2, 1980) mordant pages from his unpublished travel diary in America: “De Profundis America.” His witty (and cruel) contribution was followed in the same issue by Orcel’s translation of Leopardi’s Coro di Morti and a short story by that very same new scholar who stood at the fringes of the group, Marc Fumaroli. Under a nom de plume, Claude Delidel, Fumaroli offered a fiction: Mémoires. That same year (1980) he published his epoch-making Age de l’éloquence. Few of us were in the confidence. To this day Fumaroli-Delidel remained “un secret bien gardé.” The Postil reveals it forty-four years later (and in English).
Now, as so often with Fumaroli, little was left to improvisation. I found the clippings of L’Express and Time articles in a signed copy of his edition of the Goncourt brothers’ naturalist novel Madame Gervaisais (1982). He wrote that he had been working on it since the publication of Age de l’Eloquence. He credited even “the Muse” for letting him return to 19th century literature (cast aside since his 1977 edition of Huysmans’ A Rebours), choosing again an unusual text (as with, later on, Maurice de Guérin’s Poésie, 1984). Not fitting in niches, “créneaux” as the French put it, was one of his ways of catching his colleagues on the back foot. His aim was to remain atypical, to be unclassifiable, and occasionally to lead astray, I suspect, those who disliked him.
A Short Story about the Dark Side
However what is the link between his secret short story and Madame Gervaisais?
The title of his nom de plume fiction is Mémoires. Ambiguous: is it memoirs? Or memories? Or even memento? The French is as polysemic as the English, if not more. What does it tell? The story of a dream or trance. What sort of dream? A dream about a peregrination. As in the Alpheus myth, the hero enters a concealed place, and re-emerges at the end. And what of Madame Gervaisais, the character? Well, like the one of Mémoires she “discovers” a place (her new Roman dwelling) within an even stranger locale, Rome, in a journey of sorts from where she hopes to emerge and meet the Supreme Pontiff.
Compare these two sequences. The Goncourt’s devout “grande bourgeoise,” mad with God, dies when the Vicar of Christ materializes before her eyes, in a stunning scene worth of Fellini: she collapses, spews blood and life “like a gurgling bottle,” and her child, a little boy, has to carry her—a Pietà in reverse. Delidel-Fumaroli’s narrator recounts a strange scene of purification and rebirth of a Christ-like feminine figure, that could be, this time, filmed by Bergman. These scenes of Madame Gervaisais and Mémoires are of course not identical, but they are rhetorically analogous: they draw on the overwrought imaginary of late Romanticism and esoteric Symbolism.
So, thinking back to the mentioned dedication of Madame Gervaisais, one wonders: wasn’t Fumaroli’s surprising choice to edit Madame Gervaisais guided, upstream, by the esoteric fiction he dared not sign with his own name? In other words, isn’t in fact Mémoires what the French call an “aide-mémoire,” a memory-aid by which Claude Delidel reminded Marc Fumaroli to guard himself against his persistent inclination toward dark Romanticism, he who was becoming the cool master analyst of French clarity? He, the new torch-bearer of “la clarté française” à la Poussin or La Fontaine, or of luminous levity à la Watteau, he, the last of the Sun King’s courtiers was indeed forcefully attracted by Nervalian “soleil noir de la mélancolie” and the dark side of Romanticism.
To sum, Mémoires was a secret exorcism of those fantasies, just as the Goncourt wanted to write a novel to exorcise religious neurosis. The link between these various elements, that are the other side of Fumaroli’s legacy, was made clear to me when he confided his fascination with J. M. Coetzee’s “noirceur protestante.” As if the Nobel writer’s novels were an exorcism of South African Calvinism. Was, then, Mémoires written by Fumaroli to exorcize his Romantic inclination, so that he could safely emerge, like Alpheus, into the blazing light of Classicism?
Featured: Lyre players, vase, Eturia, ca. 560-550 BC.
