Belgian Literature in French: Information from Answers.com Mobile

Belgian Literature in French

Aside from a tiny German-speaking area in the east, Belgium is essentially a bilingual country made up of Flemish-speaking Flanders in the north and French-speaking Wallonia (la Wallonie) in the south. The northern provinces were the home of four Flemish dialects, now close to standardization as modern Dutch, while the southern ones spoke the Walloon dialect, which has merged into modern French. Originally, in 1830, the Flemings and the Walloons joined forces to throw off Dutch rule and establish the modern Belgian state; yet intermittent separatist upsurges on either side have threatened national stability ever since, whether sparked off by quarrels over education, government power, and an uneven economy, or by the instinct of local patriotism. Any qualities deemed specific to Belgian francophone literature need to be mapped in relation to two opposed claims which challenge that specificity: on the one hand there is the position (defended in 1937 in a famous manifesto signed by prominent Belgian writers like Charles Plisnier, Marie Gevers, and Franz Hellens) that Belgian literature forms an integral part of French literature at large; while on the other there is the view that it is the expression of an uncertain enclave whose suspect identity can only be maintained by artificially warding off the cultural impact both of France and the Netherlands.

Within Belgium at large, French has traditionally been the tongue of the educated and the politically powerful, as witness the dominance of French use among the cultured bourgeoisie in Flemish cities like Ghent and the fact that, though situated within Flemish Brabant, the country's capital, Brussels, is largely francophone. This has meant that the prestige of French as a medium of modern culture is interestingly tinged with self-conciousness and even an anxiety concerning the social and political dimensions of its use. Ought a francophone Belgian to opt for a modest horizon and address a provincial audience? Or ought that writer to set his or her sights on Paris, settling for a local reputation only by default? It is true that Parisian literary models are as readily available as any others: but is the writer inside Belgium in a position blithely to ignore his or her cultural inheritance, with its unmistakable strain of ‘Flemishness’? The paradox is that the majority of Belgium's best francophone writers come from the northern provinces rather than from Wallonia itself.

A rigid definition of what is typically ‘Belgian’ about Belgian literature in French would be merely caricatural, though as little is to be gained by stirring it indistinguishably into the French mainstream as by reducing it to a sluggish backwater of Dutch culture, marked by Flemish stolidity and an archaic ruralism. What can be isolated are some obvious references to geography and local custom; a less obvious cast of thought and temperament, where pragmatism coincides strangely with a certain mysticism; and an implicit awareness of linguistic difference and the cross-play of cultural codes even in daily life. To speak of cultural dualism may sound too pat: perhaps it is more a question of a sense of contrary options suspended in fertile tension—the cosmopolitan and the regional, the urban and the rural, the sophisticated and the popular, the visionary and the earthbound. Inadequate to the subtler task of characterizing individuals, such general notions at least offer points of orientation in the present overview, which will attempt simply to scan the considerable variety of Belgian francophone writing, naming prominent individuals while sketching general trends within the genres of poetry, fiction, and drama.

The first true wave of Belgian writing in French occurred in the 1880s, at a time of great social unrest. Writers largely belonged to the bourgeois class, yet were sympathetic to left-wing aspirations and often half-consciously associated their own antiphilistinism with contemporary anarchist ideals. The literary struggle was waged through a series of journals promoting neglected Belgian writers like Charles De Coster (1827-79), author of the overtly patriotic Thyl Ulenspiegel (1867), and emerging ones like Camille Lemonnier or Émile Verhaeren. In 1882 the young Max Waller (1860-89) took over the review La Jeune Belgique (1881-97) and made of it the lively, even noisy, forum of a Belgian literary renaissance whose first works, it is true, benefited from the Parisian styles of Naturalism and Parnassianism. Soon came a review called La Wallonie (1886-92), an epoch-making formulation which crystallized the very concept of a francophone homeland. Its editor, the Liège-based poet Albert Mockel, at first advocated regionalism. Later, though, he turned the magazine into one of the foremost international platforms of Symbolism, publishing work by Parisian ‘stars’ like Ghil, de Régnier, and Mallarmé (who made a celebrated lecture tour through Belgium in 1890); the American Symbolist Stuart Merrill; and a team of Belgian poets of the highest calibre— Maeterlinck, Verhaeren, Rodenbach, Van Lerberghe, and Elskamp. The remarkable fact is that each of these last was brought up in Flemish-speaking Ghent; so that this first generation of major francophone writers strike a distinctively ‘Belgian’ note—with Verhaeren's muscular turbulence complemented by Maeterlinck's metaphysical quietism—while also holding their own alongside their foreign counterparts.

Much the same strategy of sustaining fruitful contact with Paris while nurturing local identity was pursued by Belgian Surrealism during the inter-war years. The activities of Clément Pansaers (1885-1922), editor of the Dada magazine Résurrection (1918), prefigured those of Paul Nougé, Marcel Lecomte, Camille Goëmans (1900-60), and Louis Scutenaire (1905-87), who, along with the painter Magritte and the musician André Souris, worked out a Brussels version of Surrealism which diverged from Breton's Parisian blueprint in cultivating irony and enigma, as well as an occasional acerbic aggressiveness. A more idiosyncratic Surrealism was exemplified by the poet Achille Chavée, a left-wing activist who fought in the Spanish Civil War; while a further nonaligned Surrealist was the poet Robert Guiette (1895-1976).

Among the poets of Brussels belonging to no particular group may be cited the varied examples of Jean de Boschère, visionary mystic and friend of James Joyce; the short-lived Odilon-Jean Périer (1901-28), a graceful neoclassicist; and Géo Norge, whose overtly regional, even earthy, themes place his work firmly at one extreme of Flemish francophone typology. The compulsive experimentalism of the painter-poet Henri Michaux may be ascribed in part to his medical background, in part to his Surrealist affinities and his interest in exotic cultures. Michaux left his native Namur as a young man to travel in South America and Asia, and settled in Paris in 1937; even so, an argument might be made for seeing his anxious metaphysics as a throw-back to Belgian Symbolism, while his tireless grapplings with collapsing verbal forms could be linked with the linguistic tensions mentioned earlier.

The poetry of Marcel Thiry reflects a kinship with French post-Symbolist writers, and his colourful travels in Asia and America make of him in many ways another cosmopolitan. Despite this, Thiry does sound an appreciably Belgian note in his fantastic fiction. A capacity to tie the impossible and the outrageous to ordinary experience is indeed one of the distinguishing traits of Belgian writing of the Fantastic, and may be found in varying measure in the work of Franz Hellens, Jean Ray, and Jacques Sternberg (b. 1923). Their taste for things spectral or magical may be seen as a function of Belgian popular tradition, though there are equally plausible antecedents in Belgian Symbolism, with such protofantastic works as Rodenbach's novel Bruges-la-morte (1892), an uncanny suffusion of the macabre within a named locale. Certainly it can be said that a pragmatic grip on real places is often a characteristic way for the Belgian literary imagination to launch its flights of fancy (though admittedly this general remark might prove to be applicable to Flanders and beyond, as well as to Wallonia).

The notion of a mingling of the poetic with the down-to-earth may also be traced back to certain writers of the 1880s who were not Symbolists. A certain lyrical realism informed the work of the popular novelist Camille Lemonnier, author of Unmâle (1881) and exponent of a Naturalism somewhat cautiously responsive to Zola's example, as well as that of the francophone Fleming Georges Eekhoud (1854-1927), who specialized in studies of provincial life in the Antwerp lowlands, as in Kermesses (1884). Some commentators have pointed out the tradition of earthy, folkloric regionalism in the work of Dutch-language novelists such as Félix Timmermans (1886-1947) and Ernest Claes (1885-1968); and, developing an enticing analogy with the peasant-life scenes of Pieter Bruegel, identify the Belgian francophone sensibility with the rural-archaic model. Certainly, an unrestrained devotion to the genius loci of her native Campine district by the River Scheldt is typical of the ruralist novelist Marie Gevers (1884-1975). More sophisticated shades of realism characterize Constant Burniaux (1892-1975), whose novels reflect his experiences as a schoolteacher; or Charles Plisnier (1896-1952), a one-time Communist whose chronicles of family life in provincial Belgium earned him, in 1937, the distinction of being the first foreigner to win the Prix Goncourt. An eye for telling detail informs the fiction of Georges Simenon, whose notoriety as an expatriate crime-writer should not distract attention from his abilities as a serious novelist and what might be seen as his ‘Belgian’ concern with the atmospherics of concrete situations. Again, it is harder to find signs of national temperament in expatriates such as the Paris-based novelist Félicien Marceau, author of the metropolitan extravaganza Creezy (1969), though Françoise Mallet-Joris, daughter of the francophone Flemish author Suzanne Lilar but now a French citizen, has written novels explicitly based on her Flanders upbringing.

In the domain of the theatre, Belgian writers seem always to have chosen to look to Paris, yet, apart from Maeterlinck, not to have become expatriates. Staged at the Théâtre de l'Œuvre by Lugné-Poë, Maeterlinck's early Symbolist dramas were mystifying and exotic imports for Paris audiences accustomed to a French Realist diet. Lugné-Poë went on to stage the highly successful Le Cocu magnifique (1920) by Fernand Crommelynck, the equal of Giraudoux in the interwar Golden Age of Paris theatre, yet very much the Fleming in his Bruegel-like ebullience. Yet another Flemish francophone, Michel de Ghelderode, conquered that same stage in 1947 with his Hop signor!. This happened, however, only after a long apprenticeship with the Vlaamse Volkstoneel, the Flemish People's Theatre, and Ghelderode remained loyal to Flemish popular culture throughout his prolific career, exploiting a vein of demonic and hallucinatory spectacle harking back not so much to Bruegel as to the weird fantasmagorias of Hieronymus Bosch. The religious drama Barabbas (1928) was seen in Paris and Brussels, but has become a regional classic by virtue of the Flemish version in which it has been performed each Easter since 1928. Indeed, the irreducibility of Ghelderode's regional attachment typecasts him as the paradigmatic Belgian franco-phone, always tempted by Paris yet never neglectful of his homeland, its folklore, its uneven cultural and linguistic fabric.

[Roger Cardinal]

Bibliography

A. J. Mathews, La Wallonie 1886-1892: The Symbolist Movement in Belgium (1947)
V. Mallinson, Modern Belgian Literature 1830-1960 (1966)
R. Burniaux and R. Frickx, La Littérature belge d'expression française (1973)