Introduction Excerpt for New York Nouveau

Introduction

Projects for a Revolution in New York

A New Literary History

WHEN MARGUERITE DURAS published her novel Le Ravissement de Lol V. Stein (The Ravishing of Lol Stein) in 1964, Jacques Lacan famously hailed it as a work of extraordinary psychoanalytic acumen.¹ In the decades that followed, the novel became one of the “classics” of twentieth-century French literature. After selling over 9,000 copies in its first year in France, The Ravishing of Lol Stein went on to be translated into twenty languages and was taught in classrooms around the globe.² It has since inspired an extensive body of international scholarship that, following Lacan, emphasizes Duras’s brilliant demonstration of the mechanisms of psychoanalysis, as well as her pressing interrogation of female subjectivity, trauma, and desire.³ As Duras poignantly put it in an interview late in life, her Lol novel was poised to outlive its author by a hundred years.⁴

This is the narrative about Duras and The Ravishing that almost any scholar of twentieth-century French literature will know. Yet there is another side of The Ravishing that became apparent to me only when I happened upon some of its archival traces. In 2014, I was conducting research in the Grove Press special collections at Syracuse University for a very different project (one in which I was looking at books that had been recommended for the international literary Formentor Prize), when I came across some of Duras’s personal papers that caught my attention. A letter from her American literary agent, Georges Borchardt, suggested that Duras had shown drafts of The Ravishing to Grove editors Barney Rosset and Richard Seaver well before the release of the French publication.⁵

In an effort to learn more about this pre-history of the novel, I visited the Institut de Mémoires d’édition contemporaine (IMEC) in France, a historic, renovated abbey in Normandy where most of Duras’s papers are housed, alongside an extensive collection of publishing archives and manuscripts by other influential writers and artists of the twentieth century. Scattered within Duras’s massive folders of drafts and papers, we can see the cardstock paper on which she composed the French version of The Ravishing by hand. The pages are thick and heavy—almost like manila folders—and each one of them is stamped with the name of a different American publisher: Macmillan, Random House, Appleton-Century-Crofts, Scribner, Rinehart & Co., Putnam, and so on. Most of the stamps reference big American trade publishers such as these, though some include more vague titles like “university presses miscellaneous,” as if someone were compiling a list of possible venues for publication. When Duras was drafting the novel in 1962 and 1963, she had yet to set foot in the United States, nor had she been published in translation by any of the presses listed. A handful of her books had been translated into English and published by Grove—The Square (1959), Moderato Cantabile (1960), Hiroshima mon amour (1961), Ten-Thirty on a Summer Night (1962)—but Grove’s name did not figure among the stamped markings. How and why did Duras come to write on these particular pages? What could it mean that a mid-century novelist firmly rooted in the world of French letters—a person who had just won the inaugural Prix de Mai literary prize in France and was referred to in the 1960s as “the leading woman novelist of France today, with Simone de Beauvoir”—drafted an entire French novel on manuscript pages that all invoke the American publishing industry?⁶

This book makes the broader case that material details such as these are not just incidental. Duras’s manuscript indexes synecdochically a more capacious literary history about the role of American publishing in French literature of the postwar period. As this book will contend, some of the major literary movements that we associate with postwar French literature intersected in meaningful and transformative ways with the American publishing world. French writers were at the vanguard of postwar literary innovation, from the experimental minimalism of the New Novel, to the literary games of the Oulipo, to the existential angst in theater of the absurd. While many of the writers associated with these literary endeavors may have written primarily (though not exclusively) in French, they worked closely with American editors and translators, published actively with American presses, and often theorized transatlantic connections within the body of literary works themselves. Like the incongruous, fascinating manuscript pages that have been ignored in Duras scholarship (a subject that will be treated in more detail in Chapter 2), the prevailing critical tendency has been to overlook just how dramatically the New York publishing scene has shaped twentieth-and twenty-first-century French letters.

New York Nouveau aims to acknowledge, challenge, and rethink the relationship between French literary experimentalism and New York publishing in the postwar decades. My starting point, as the title of this Introduction makes plain, is Alain Robbe-Grillet’s 1970 novel Projet pour une révolution à New York, a book that critics in France bemoaned as having very little to do either with revolutions or with New York. Where, they asked, was the spirit of social, cultural, and political revolt so present in the global imaginary since 1968? And what exactly was Robbe-Grillet’s version of New York, where most of the action took place in apartments that could be anywhere, and with so few reference points that actually anchored the plot in the streets or neighborhoods of New York? In a full-page spread that Le Monde devoted to the novel in October 1970, reviews were decidedly mixed, but all critics agreed that Robbe-Grillet’s New York bore little resemblance to the actual city. Its lack of local color gave it, for Jacqueline Piatier, the “seedy look of an imaginary or even symbolic city.”⁷ For the writer Pierre Bourgeade, this was an unforgivable version of New York, which “looked like New York as much as a building resembles a bowl of corn flakes.”⁸

New York was indeed still a myth for Robbe-Grillet. When he started drafting Projet pour une révolution à New York in 1969, he had not yet started a teaching gig at NYU that would bring him to live in Manhattan every other year from 1972 to 1991. Given his relative unfamiliarity with New York, it is easy to forgive some of the casual mistakes he makes that any New Yorker would recognize, as in a reference to a subway at the “Madison Avenue station.”⁹ (There were not then, and are not now, any subways on Madison Avenue in New York.) The novel takes us on subways and down alleyways and into apartment buildings, where, as readers are accustomed to doing in most Robbe-Grillet novels, we shift between different narrative perspectives, much of which centers in this book around abandoned girls, lascivious men, and acts of violence. With its nonchalant depictions of sexual assault, where women are bound and trapped in a world of male fantasies, the book feels fairly unreadable—and certainly unteachable—today. In the years after it was published, though, the novel was widely read and reviewed, and feminist critics did important work to unpack its sado-erotic violence as deeply tied to masculine ideas of authorship.¹⁰ Robbe-Grillet’s novel still, however, begs an unanswered question: what exactly did New York mean to the French literary avant-garde in the 1960s and 1970s?

This book reclaims both the revolutionary spirit and the situatedness of New York as meaningful and relevant for postwar French literary history. Just as New York remains elusive in Robbe-Grillet’s novel, literary criticism has not sufficiently accounted for the fact that the city presented new and unusual opportunities for twentieth-century French fiction beginning during World War II. I take Robbe-Grillet’s title as a challenge to discover alternative histories of French literary and cultural productions that come into view when we attend to New York as a real and tangible site of inquiry. By this I’m referring less to New York as fictional setting—although that can matter—than to the city as a cultural locus for writers, editors, translators, and teachers of the postwar period to articulate edgy and experimental literary ideas through new publishing initiatives in French. Shifting the center of gravity from Paris to New York does not just suggest a re-historicization of Pascale Casanova’s tentative observation that Paris was losing its literary dominance to anglophone city centers only at the end of the twentieth century.¹¹ It also brings into view unknown voices and literary figures, many of them women, whose contributions have not received proper credit, but who helped to foster a sense of new possibilities for twentieth-century writing in French. These untold histories, stitched together here through research in special collections and personal archives on both sides of the Atlantic, in Syracuse and Caen and Los Angeles and Philadelphia, as well as more obvious publishing centers like New York and Paris, served as the primary motivations for writing this book.

While New York Nouveau attends closely to writers who belong to what remains for many readers the canon of twentieth-century experimental French fiction—in addition to Marguerite Duras and Alain Robbe-Grillet, writers like Samuel Beckett, Eugène Ionesco, and Georges Perec—its critical methodology works to amplify the voices and labor of those who have been less visible, though no less relevant. One of the primary interventions of this book is to show how collaborations between French writers and American cultural agents with close ties to the publishing industry shaped works and literary movements that we have come to see as foundational in a French literary canon. By tracing the origin stories of a selection of projects, and by seeing how they were generated through collaboration and exchange—even in cases when only one person’s name earns recognition on the cover page—this book contributes to the dismantling of rigid notions of canonicity, authorship, and national literature.

In what follows, I unpack the theoretical frameworks signaled in both the book and the Introduction’s titles, from the idea of French literature’s Americanness, to notions of literary revolution and experimentation, to the centrality of New York as a publishing center. These sections show how New York Nouveau intervenes methodologically to place scholarship on Franco-American cultural exchange into critical dialogue with important recent work in the fields of translation, book history, and cultural studies that, through attention to manuscripts and publishing realia, recover the impactful role of less studied figures. The experimental French literature of the mid-twentieth century that still inspires artists all over the world is no less French for being ineluctably connected to New York. In recognizing this, we gain a more nuanced sense of the global dynamics that undergirded French literature of the last century.

In the salon culture of eighteenth-century Paris, the French-born American immigrant J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur became a celebrity figure when he published Letters from an American Farmer (1782), a volume of fictional correspondence about American society after the Revolution. French readers without a strong working knowledge of English were keen to hear a Frenchman’s firsthand account of American cultural life, however fictional it was, and with the help of the salonnière Madame d’Houdetot and her literary circle, Crèvecoeur published a French translation of his Letters to much acclaim.¹³ The early nineteenth century would see other such cultural ambassadors who traveled to the United States and reported back to French readers about their impressions of American culture and politics, from François-René de Chateaubriand’s Voyage en Amérique (1826) to Alexis de Tocqueville’s Démocratie en Amérique (1835). The formation in the mid-nineteenth century of an international book market for translation facilitated literary and cultural exchange across languages, especially in the wake of the 1885 Berne Convention that established regulations around copyright and authorized translations. By the end of World War I, “exporting French books abroad became one of the missions of French foreign policy,” as Gisèle Sapiro has shown.¹⁴ As American readers gravitated towards French writers like Alexandre Dumas, Honoré de Balzac, and Jules Verne, who were among the most widely translated and popular novelists worldwide in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, readers in France witnessed an astounding rise in translations in the interwar period, particularly of American novelists like Dos Passos and Faulkner.¹⁵ In the expansion of the publishing market after World War II, and in our current era of globalization, the number of translations between French and English has soared astronomically.

As this very brief and schematic sketch affirms, there are plenty of compelling reasons why scholars have attended to the history of Franco-American literary and cultural exchange. The extensive bibliography among intellectual historians and political theorists about shifting transatlantic sentiments and popular perceptions, particularly in the wake of Vichy and Cold War–era Americanization, is too vast to cite exhaustively.¹⁶ Meanwhile, the old and enduring trope of “Americans in Paris” across cultural media—from Gershwin’s 1928 eponymous musical rhapsody to Ta-Nehisi Coates’s piercing essay on race and fear in Between the World and Me (2015), with hundreds of other examples in-between—continues to resonate, testifying to the historical reality and sustained idea that Paris offered a mecca for Americans seeking artistic, cultural, and personal freedom. The sheer number of recent books with “Americans in Paris” in the title speaks volumes to its staying power as a cultural symbol.¹⁷ Literary scholars, journalists, and cultural historians have explored in great detail both the creative possibilities that Paris afforded American writers and intellectuals across the twentieth century, as well as, from a reverse angle, how the U.S. has figured in the French literary and cultural imaginary.¹⁸ This line of thinking has led to a wealth of scholarship centered closely on questions of representation, intertextuality, and aesthetic influence between France and the United States. From Claude-Edmonde Magny’s foundational L’Âge du roman américain (1948) through William Cloonan’s more recent Frères ennemis (2018), scholars have attended to the ways that French writers have borrowed and adapted literary techniques from their American counterparts, and vice versa.¹⁹

This book harnesses this critical energy for Franco-American literary exchange and channels it through a close attention to publishing histories. Through a carefully curated set of examples, I show how literary texts written in French in the second half of the twentieth century were conceived and created with a keen eye to American publication. In some cases, this meant a rare opportunity for new francophone writers to encounter editors in New York willing to take a chance on them by publishing their first novels with American presses—in French no less. In other cases, this involved commissioned, collaborative projects that persuaded well-established French writers to try out new media forms expressly for American audiences. In still other cases French writers adopted formal and conceptual techniques that made their works seem strategically suitable for a U.S. translation market, in what Rebecca Walkowitz has called a kind of “born translated” novel characteristic of twenty-first-century global literature.²⁰ In all cases, we see how French literary production and experimentation were deeply imbricated in, and shaped by, U.S. cultural networks.

This overarching phenomenon that I am proposing, by which French literature “became” American, does not signal a definitive or categorical switch from one cultural positioning to another. It indicates rather the various processes and mechanisms through which postwar French literature emerged and shifted as a result of American cultural figures and contacts. These shifts began in the 1940s and accelerated in the wake of the Second World War, when massive changes in the American university and publishing industries gave French writers new opportunities to participate in literary and cultural projects in the United States. Transatlantic collaborations between writers and other cultural figures energized new avenues for French literature by expressly targeting a U.S.-based audience, and the projects that emerged from these encounters challenged the boundaries and assumptions about French cultural productions of those periods. A behind-the-scenes look at the conversations, ideas, and collaborative drafts that fueled such works offers a new way of understanding these transformative transatlantic exchanges. Tracing a cross-cultural narrative of these literary projects—one that programmatically attends to their material and genetic histories—shows us that even those works that seem most avant-garde, most unconcerned with commercial viability, were anchored in American publishing and university networks that aimed to attract large audiences. In other words, the centrifugal force of the American literary field had a lot to say about what French works were created, and even which ones became commercial successes back in France.

Throughout this book, I insist on the multidirectional nature of these networks, tracing narratives from France to the United States and back again. While most of the French-language projects that I discuss were published, aired, or distributed in the U.S., their creation had reverberations back in France too—whether that was through their eventual adaptation for a French readership, in their reception histories, or in the ways that they shifted the direction and nature of French writers’ subsequent works. This critical perspective adopts a “French global” disciplinary approach, as articulated by Christie McDonald and Susan Suleiman, and builds on recent scholarship attentive specifically to the ways that American institutions have interacted with and promoted French culture.²¹ François Cusset’s French Theory has been especially important in this regard, showing how the category of “French theory” was born on American university campuses in the 1960s and 1970s, a product of “creative misunderstandings” that took place when French philosophical thought was translated—both literally and culturally—into an American context.²² Cusset dates the precise “birth” of French theory to a 1966 Johns Hopkins conference that gathered together some of France’s most prominent thinkers—Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, and Jacques Lacan among them—who began to develop what would later be known as poststructuralism. The invention of French theory as a unified construct involved a process of “uprooting and reassembling,” whereby ideas and texts by Derrida, Michel Foucault, Jean-François Lyotard, and other French philosophers came into contact with editorial, linguistic, and pedagogical norms in the U.S. that pushed towards legibility, quotability, and comprehensive paratexts aiming to clarify material.²³ A rigorous philosophical discipline in France became a far more amorphous (and less sophisticated) category called “theory” in America, a cultural mistranslation and rebranding that not only decontextualized and distorted the meaning of highly complicated texts, but was mobilized in the American academy, as Cusset details, for various ideological and political ends that further disconnected the source material from its application in a U.S. context.²⁴

We should understand the rise of French theory as one prong in a larger operation through which American cultural institutions reshaped French literary and cultural productions. New York Nouveau in that respect develops Cusset’s work in two important ways: first, through a comparative literary practice that, echoing David Damrosch’s “mode of reading” world literature across cultures, attends both to the circulation of texts in a U.S. context and to its cross-cultural aftereffects in France; and second, by establishing a literary pre-history that contextualizes the conditions in which French theory emerged.²⁵ Literary texts largely fall outside the scope of French Theory—with the exception of moments when Cusset suggests that some French writers are read in the U.S. as illustrations of French theory—but they reveal important parallels with and precursors to the rise of French theory in the United States. As we’ll see, American publishing houses and universities during World War II and in the postwar period initiated opportunities, well before the Johns Hopkins conference, that were essential for opening up a space for French theorists and writers alike. A publishing landscape in which French literature held particular cultural capital, and in which American editors and professors cultivated a curious readership, allowed for the invention not just of “theory” as a category but of innovative literary endeavors.

In this focus on literary collaboration, New York Nouveau participates in a growing body of scholarship attentive to the instrumental role of editors, publishers, and other cultural agents—“committed mediators,” as Gisèle Sapiro calls them—in the literary marketplace.^>26 Book historians and sociologists have long reminded us of the institutional conditions that enable and foster literary production, while literary scholars have increasingly attended to the ways that editors and agents shape reading practices.²⁷ Jordan S. Carroll credits editors at City Lights Books, Grove Press, Playboy, and elsewhere with sparking America’s sexual revolution, and Loren Glass dials in on Barney Rosset and Richard Seaver at Grove as “siphon[ing]” European cultural capital to New York and, through cheap paperback editions, inspiring university students and mainstream readers to read avant-garde writers and playwrights in translation.²⁸ Meanwhile, Mark McGurl’s groundbreaking work The Program Era does not just show how creative writing programs “transformed the conditions under which American literature is produced”; it also offers compelling case studies of celebrated editors whose developmental edits and attentiveness to market demands transformed the literary legacy of American writers.²⁹ The recent scholarship of Dan Sinykin, Laura McGrath, Kinohi Nishikawa, and other literary scholars continues to demonstrate the critical relevance and instrumental role of editors, literary agencies, and publishing houses in shaping literary taste in the U.S., particularly in the postwar period.³⁰

This book widens the lens to show how editors and other cultural agents in the U.S. played pivotal roles in reshaping French literature, too. Alice Kaplan credits the publisher Blanche Knopf’s strategic marketing strategy of Albert Camus’s The Stranger in 1946 as the reason why existentialist thought became wildly popular, particularly among American students.³¹ The idea that committed mediators—in the form of literary agencies, rights agents, scouts, and translators—could function as taste-shapers informs many recent works about Franco-American cultural exchange, from Cécile Cottenet’s Literary Agents in the Transatlantic Book Trade: American Fiction, French Rights, and the Hoffman Agency (2017), to Laurence Cossu-Beaumont’s Deux agents littéraires dans le siècle américain: William et Jenny Bradley, passeurs culturels transatlantiques (2023), to Laura Claridge’s The Lady with the Borzoi: Blanche Knopf, Literary Tastemaker Extraordinaire (2016).³²

New York Nouveau follows in this scholarly lineage, but as a cultural history firmly grounded in literary studies, it situates close textual readings alongside archival documents to show how the conditions of production informed writing practices themselves. This book looks particularly at projects that originated in a U.S. context by virtue of cultural contacts. By considering a writer’s manuscripts, editorial notes, and correspondence, we can see just how much the “work of revision,” to borrow Hannah Sullivan’s phrase about modernist anglophone writers, was a collective enterprise that informed publishing practices in the second half of the twentieth century.³³ Through collaborations with U.S.-based partners, French-speaking writers devised innovative projects, often in ways that transformed their subsequent literary practices. The sheer volume, financial power, and cultural capital of the U.S. publishing industry were enormous draws for writers abroad, and this laid the groundwork for greater aesthetic experimentation. American publishing opportunities led many francophone writers to pursue new and unprecedented projects that could not have existed otherwise, or in any other cultural context. The work of this book is to illuminate how these projects came to exist, from the germ of an idea, across unpublished and translated drafts, through to a finished project that circulated across languages and cultures.

Many of the literary figures discussed in this book self-identified as experimental writers and translators who adhered to avant-garde literary movements with distinct principles for breaking with conventions. Georges Perec was one of the earliest members of the Oulipo group, an interdisciplinary mix of writers, mathematicians, and pataphysicians, who sought to liberate language through imposed formal constraints. The “great mission” of the Oulipo, as François Le Lionnais articulated it when co-founding the group in 1960, was “to open new possibilities unknown to older writers.”³⁴ The Oulipo members followed through on that aim with seemingly impossible literary challenges, yielding such formally inventive books in French as Perec’s La disparition (A Void), a 300-page novel written as a lipogrammatic experiment without the letter “e”—a book that nonetheless manages to remain entirely coherent while brilliantly complex.

Alain Robbe-Grillet, another example, professed himself the leader of the “Nouveau Roman” or “New Novel,” a literary movement that began in the 1950s and that captured the literary energies of dozens of other novelists. In his foundational manifesto, Robbe-Grillet took aim at literary critics and writers who instrumentalized literature as political action and privileged realist modes or conventionalized storytelling; his vision for a renewed “art for art’s sake” model involved a radical destruction of characters, narrative, and temporality that one finds across New Novelists’ works.³⁵ Meanwhile, as innovators of what became known as the “theater of the absurd,” Eugène Ionesco and Samuel Beckett revolutionized mid-century drama in plays that subverted theatrical conventions around language and communication and exposed the incomprehensibility of human behavior.³⁶ All of these movements sprouted up in France in the second half of the twentieth century, and despite important aesthetic differences, overlapped in their self-conscious attempt to radically destabilize the boundaries of form and the limits of meaning.

One of the main dynamics that I explore is how this experimental drive, with its emphasis on aesthetic innovation, intersected with commercial pressures to produce works that might appeal directly to American audiences—a dynamic that recalls Pierre Bourdieu’s discussion of the literary field as a perpetual source of tension between “art-as-commodity” and “art-as-pure-signification.”³⁷ In taking on commissions from U.S. publishers and academics, French writers walked a tightrope between maintaining rigid aesthetic principles and acceding to market demands. By exploring this tricky balance for postwar French writers, New York Nouveau contributes to contemporary debates, particularly in Anglo-American scholarship, about the interconnections between commercialism and literariness. Merve Emre’s Paraliterary suggests that postwar American institutions—government bodies, universities, publishers, and so on—were all in some ways responsible for producing reading practices organized around ideals of public communication, cultural diplomacy, and international relations.³⁸ The risk of literature, as Emre shows throughout, is its inability to remain independent from market forces and escape the push to commercialize it as a product.³⁹

Lawrence Rainey dated this dynamic even earlier, as intrinsic to the modernist literary project. Countering a prevalent critical tendency to see modernism as contemptuous of mass culture, Rainey posits that “modernism, among other things, is a strategy whereby the work of art invites and solicits its commodification.”⁴⁰ Rainey sees Anglo-American modernism and commodity culture as “fraternal rivals,” whereby publishing institutions and literary patronage—think of Sylvia Beach and Adrienne Monnier’s Shakespeare & Co., as one example—serve as reminders that works by James Joyce, Ezra Pound, and others were deeply embedded in capitalist practices.⁴¹ The creation of limited editions, the practice of collecting, and the commitment to investing publishing resources in avant-garde writers prove, for Rainey, just how much modernism was imbricated with commercialism right from the start.

This argument aligns quite closely with Andreas Huyssen’s general point that both modernism and postmodernism operate dynamically and dialectically with mass culture, both in the United States and Europe. His assessment of Theodor Adorno’s engagement with U.S. culture offers an instructive parallel: where Adorno’s experiences in the U.S. convinced him that American cultural institutions, and their prioritization of the profit motive, were ultimately antithetical to the production of real art, Huyssen recognized a more synergistic interplay between cultural forces. As he put it, “The possibilities for experimental meshing and mixing of mass culture and modernism seemed promising and produced some of the most successful and ambitious art and literature of the 1970s.”⁴² Huyssen saw American culture as a laboratory for exploring the ways that commercial pressures and high art necessarily came into contact—not inevitably as oppositional forces, but as dynamic and fluid. His case studies draw largely from German film, television, and the theater, but offer productive comparisons for postwar French cultural works in the United States. As many of the chapters in this book contend through different lenses, it is precisely by addressing head-on the tension between commercialism and experimentalism that French writers uncovered new literary forms and methods.

This perspective offers a counterpoint to Kristin Ross’s Fast Cars, Clean Bodies, which takes as its object of inquiry the cultural landscape of France and the U.S. in the 1950s and early 1960s and examines the ways that French writers grappled with the threat of rapid Americanization in the postwar era. Ross demonstrates how the parallel historical realities of American cultural hegemony and decolonization worked in tandem to produce and enforce racial exclusions and capitalist modernization, and she takes to task those writers and intellectuals whose works seemed to deny historical contingencies, and who prized evenness, timelessness, hygiene, smoothness, and related tropes at the expense of all that might have been uncomfortable or “other.” This is why Ross so vehemently critiqued the projects of the New Novel, the Annales school, and structuralism as hiding “under the auspices of scientific rigor rather than those of history” and as “complicitous with the workings of capitalist modernization, in part because of its avant-gardist refusal or dismantling of historical narrative.”⁴³

Ross makes a case for turning to artists and writers that embrace historicity and realist modes—people like Georges Perec (his earlier texts, at least), Simone de Beauvoir, or Jacques Tati—as a way of learning about the lived experiences of people at a critical moment when American culture loomed so large in the French imaginary and made direct and tangible changes in everyday life in France. Ross reads through objects themselves—refrigerators, cars, televisions—whose textual and cinematic presence testify to the reality of Americanization in France. Objects signal the values that accompanied the U.S. push towards capitalist modernization: a tendency to efface messiness and prize hygiene, a willingness to gloss over ambiguity, a steadfast denial of historical and structural inequities. Ross reads the New Novel, in that context, as derivative of both decolonization and the postwar American mindset: Robbe-Grillet’s focus on surface over metaphor—what Ross calls his “cleansing of literary language”—aligns with the cultural prizing of hygiene and cleanliness (think of American kitchens and advertisements for cleaning products) over the “dirtiness” of a rising immigrant population.⁴⁴

In this forceful and sharp condemnation of mid-century novelists, Ross nonetheless misses an opportunity to see behind the surface of things: that is, experimental literary movements like the New Novel, with their resistance to realist modes, nonetheless reveal, both textually and paratextually, anxieties about commercial culture and modernization that complicate how we read and integrate those texts. Ross is absolutely right to point out the connection between novels in the 1950s and 1960s and their alignment with capitalist forces, without fully reconciling how realism as a genre is perhaps maximally capturable by commercial interests. The publishing and genetic histories of many texts by Robbe-Grillet, Beckett, Duras, Ionesco, and others demonstrate, in fascinating ways, how experimental writing negotiated underlying ambivalences about the conditions of their production, and in so doing offered responses of their own to the challenges for avant-garde writers of working within and against market dictates. New York Nouveau brings to light these stories and shows how the fact of writing for a U.S. reading public enabled French writers to reaffirm the value of experimental, non-realist literary works.

In one of the only references to “revolution” in Robbe-Grillet’s Projet, one of the characters makes this casual response in defense of a text he had written to report a crime:

“This time I must say you’re the one who’s exaggerating! Especially since no one has ever claimed that the narrative was being made by an American. Don’t forget that it is always foreigners who prepare the revolution. Now where was I?”

“Cette fois-là, je trouve que c’est vous qui exagérez! D’autant plus que personne n’a jamais prétendu que le récit était fait par un Américain. N’oubliez pas que ce sont toujours les étrangers qui préparent la révolution. Où en étais-je?”⁴⁵

Robbe-Grillet was notorious for moments like this of metanarrative reflection, and though a crime report is not the same thing as a novel—except, perhaps, in Robbe-Grillet’s unconventional literary universe—the character almost winks knowingly at this dynamic of literary revolution and foreign publication that I have been outlining. The revolutionary nature of the literary projects in this book takes various forms, but, as we will see, all speak to the ways that a “foreigner” might be particularly well-positioned to spark innovation and meet commercial demands.

Notes

1. Jacques Lacan, “Hommage fait à Marguerite Duras du Ravissement de Lol V. Stein,” Cahiers Renaud-Barrault, no. 52 (December 1965): 7–15.

2. These statistics on sales come from Laure Adler, Marguerite Duras: A Life, trans. Anne-Marie Glasheen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 253.

3. While far from an exhaustive list, some of the excellent scholarship on the novel can be found in Julia Kristeva, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989); Elisabeth Lyon, “The Cinema of Lol V. Stein,” in Feminism and Film Theory, ed. Constance Penley (New York: Routledge, 1988), 244–273; Pierre St. Amand, “The Sorrow of Lol V. Stein,” trans. Jennifer Curtiss Gage, Paragraph 19, no. 1 (March 1996): 21–35; Susan Rubin Suleiman, Subversive Intent: Gender, Politics, and the Avant-Garde (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990); and Sharon Willis, Marguerite Duras: Writing on the Body (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987).

4. Marguerite Duras, Le Livre dit: Entretiens de “Duras filme,” ed. Joëlle Pagès-Pindon (Paris: Gallimard, 2014), 114.

5. Borchardt’s letter, addressed to Grove’s administrative assistant, reads as follows: “Under separate cover, a copy of Gallimard’s edition of the new novel by Marguerite Duras, Le Ravissement de Lol V. Stein. I believe Barney and Dick already read this in manuscript form. I look forward to your offer.” Letter from Georges Borchardt to Judith Schmidt, 23 April 1964 (Grove Press Records, Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Libraries, Box 237).

6. Duras won the Prix de Mai for her novel Moderato Cantabile (Paris: Gallimard, 1958). The comparison between Duras and Beauvoir comes from a sales pitch when Grove Press decided to buy the translation rights for Le Ravissement (Undated Notecard in Grove Press Records, Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Libraries, Box 237).

7. In French, Jacqueline Piatier calls this “l’allure louche d’une ville imaginaire, voire symbolique”; see her article, “Projet pour une révolution à New York,” Le Monde (30 October 1970): 18.

8. “. . . à quoi New-York ressemble comme un building ressemble à une assiette de corn-flakes,” in Pierre Bourgeade, “Un projet douteux,” Le Monde (30 October 1970): 18. Interestingly, Bourgeade had himself just published a fairly dubious novel about New York, in which a young French woman encounters a host of perverse characters; see Pierre Bourgeade, New York Party (Paris: Gallimard, 1969).

9. Alain Robbe-Grillet, Projet pour une révolution à New York (Paris: Minuit, 1970), 77; Projects for a Revolution in New York, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Grove Press, 1972), 61. In a strange twist, a character in the novel admits later on to making a mistake about the name of the subway—as if a proofreader had pointed this out to Robbe-Grillet: “One other thing: you mention West Greenwich or the Madison subway station—any American would say ‘the West Village’ or ‘Madison Avenue’” (160). The funny correction nonetheless does not fix the mistake about subways on Madison.

10. The most compelling reading of the novel remains a chapter in Susan Suleiman’s Subversive Intent, in which she argues that “Projet’s ‘murderous mythology,’ consisting in the repeated violation of the maternal organs, can indeed be seen as a metaphor of the modern writer’s activity”; see Susan Rubin Suleiman, “Reading Robbe-Grillet: Sadism and Text in Projet pour une révolution à New York,” in Subversive Intent: Gender, Politics, and the Avant-Garde (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), 51–71, esp. 70.

11. As Casanova puts it in 1999, “It may be that we find ourselves today in a transitional phase, passing from a world dominated by Paris to a polycentric and plural world in which London and New York, chiefly, but also to a lesser degree Rome, Barcelona, and Frankfurt, among other centers, contend with Paris for hegemony.” Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, trans. M. B. DeBevoise (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004 [1999]), 164.

12. Lafayette’s quote comes from a private letter in 1777 to his wife Adrienne, while the origin of Jefferson’s quote is unknown. For more on the early political intersection between France and the United States, see James W. Ceaser, Reconstructing America: The Symbol of America in Modern Thought (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), particularly ch. 3.

13. Andrew Moore, “The American Farmer as French Diplomat: J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur in New York After 1783,” Journal of the Western Society for French History 39 (2011): 133–143.

14. Gisèle Sapiro, “French Literature in the World System of Translation,” in French Global: A New Approach to Literary History, eds. Christie McDonald and Susan Rubin Suleiman (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 301.

15. For an in-depth analysis of the international translation market between 1932 and 1977, see Daniel Milo, “La bourse mondiale de la traduction: un baromètre culturel?,” Annales: Histoires, Sciences Sociales 39e année, no. 1 (February 1984): 92–115.

16. For a select sampling, see, in addition to Ceaser’s Reconstructing America, Frank Costigliola, France and the United States: The Cold Alliance Since World War II (New York: Twayne, 1992); Julian G. Hurstfield, America and the French Nation, 1935–1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012 [1986]); Richard F. Kuisel, Seducing the French: The Dilemma of Americanization: A Century of French Perceptions, trans. Gerry Turner (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); Denis Lacorne, Jacques Rupnik, and Marie-France Toi, eds., The Rise and Fall of Anti-Americanism (New York: St. Martin’s, 1990); Jean-Philippe Mathy, French Resistance: The French-American Culture Wars (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000); Michel Winock, “‘US Go Home’: l’antiaméricanisme français,” L’Histoire 50 (November 1982): 7–20.

17. See Brooke L. Blower, Becoming Americans in Paris: Transatlantic Politics and Culture Between the World Wars (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); Charles Glass, Americans in Paris: Life and Death Under Nazi Occupation (New York: Penguin, 2009); Adam Gopnik, ed., Americans in Paris: A Literary Anthology (New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 2004); Lynn Gumpert and Debra Bricker Balken, eds., Americans in Paris: Artists Working in Postwar France, 1946–1952 (Munich: Hirmer Publishers, 2022); and David McCullough, The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2012).

18. Some notable examples include Jean-Philippe Mathy, Extrême-Occident: French Intellectuals and America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), Brent Hayes Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013); Louis Menand, “The Promise of Freedom, the Friend of Authority: American Culture in Postwar France,” in Americanism: New Perspectives on the History of an Ideal, eds. Michael Kazin and Joseph A. McCartin (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 205–220; and Yan Hamel, L’Amérique selon Sartre: littérature, philosophie, politique (Montreal: Presses universitaires de Montréal, 2013).

19. Claude-Edmonde Magny, L’âge du roman américain (Paris: Seuil, 1948); William Cloonan, The French in American Literature, Americans in French Literature (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2018). See also Mathy, Extrême-Occident and the podcast L’Amérique des écrivains français, especially episodes 1 (“Amérique, je t’aime, je te hais”), 2 (“Après la guerre la modernité”), and 3 (“Écrire à l’américaine”), which trace the literary origin of the French verb “américaniser” to Baudelaire’s writings on Poe and discuss literary influences in poetry, dime novels, and crime fiction (France Culture, 2–4 November 2020).

20. Rebecca Walkowitz, Born Translated: The Contemporary Novel in an Age of World Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015).

21. Christie McDonald and Susan Rubin Suleiman, eds., French Global: A New Approach to Literary History (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010).

22. François Cusset, French Theory: How Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida, & Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States, trans. Jeff Fort (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 5.

23. Cusset, French Theory, 87. One could see this, for example, in Foucault’s choice of register when his translator Mark Seem asked him to write the introduction to the English version of Anti-Oedipus: “Foucault, with great awareness of the displacements involved, chose a programmatic tone and the imperative mood in order to invite the Americans to use this ‘great book’ as a ‘guide to everyday life’” (89).

24. A critique of the misguided application of French philosophy-as-theory is a throughline across Cusset’s book but is especially trenchant in chapters 4, 6, 7, and 9. As Cusset phrases the critique rhetorically, in reference to Derrida’s rise as a cultural phenomenon in the U.S., “How is it that this thought was able to become the most bankable product ever to emerge on the market of academic discourses? How did this obscure trajectory find itself taken hold of, domesticated, digested, and served in individual doses in an American literary field . . . ? How is [it] that for every French reader of a book by Derrida in the land of obligatory high school philosophy courses, ten Americans have already looked it over, despite their meager philosophical formation?” (107).

25. David Damrosch, What Is World Literature? (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003); see 281 and 297, as well as 5, where Damrosch first articulates “a mode of circulation and of reading.” As a work anchored more in intellectual history than literary studies, Cusset’s book attends specifically to a U.S. context and is less interested in exploring how the emergence of theory in the U.S. returns to France and transforms discourses and disciplines there.

26. Sapiro, “French Literature in the World System of Translation,” 304.

27. In a French context, I am thinking especially of works like Bernard Lahire’s La condition littéraire: la double vie des écrivains (Paris: Éditions la Découverte, 2006) and Gisèle Sapiro’s La sociologie de la littérature (2014), recently translated into English as The Sociology of Literature, trans. Madeline Bedecarré and Ben Libman (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2023).

28. Jordan S. Carroll, Reading the Obscene: Transgressive Editors and the Class Politics of US Literature (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2021) and Loren Glass, Counter-Culture Colophon: Grove Press, “the Evergreen Review,” and the Incorporation of the Avant-Garde (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013), 10.

29. Mark McGurl, The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011), 281. Such was the case, for instance, with Gordon Lish’s heavy hand in editing Raymond Carver’s short stories, which McGurl credits as instrumental in creating “literary minimalism” as a “singular aesthetic triumph” in American letters in the 1960s and 1970s (293).

30. See Dan Sinykin, Big Fiction: How Conglomeration Changed the Publishing Industry and American Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 2023); Laura McGrath, “Literary Agency,” American Literary History 33, no. 2 (Summer 2021): 350–370; and Kinohi Nishikawa, Street Players: Black Pulp Fiction and the Making of a Literary Underground (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018), as well as Josh Lambert’s The Literary Mafia: Jews, Publishing, and American Literature (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2022).

31. Alice Kaplan, Looking for “The Stranger”: Albert Camus and the Life of a Literary Classic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 176, 179–181, and 191–198. Sarah Bakewell adds that, alongside Knopf, periodicals like the New Yorker, Time, and the New York Post worked hard to advertise French existentialism as intellectually sophisticated and cutting-edge; see At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails (New York: Other Press, 2016), 172–173. For more on the intellectual links between French existentialism and U.S. culture, of which there has been a considerable amount of scholarship, see Cusset, French Theory (24–25) and Louis Menand, “The Promise of Freedom, the Friend of Authority: American Culture in Postwar France,” in Americanism: New Perspectives on the History of an Ideal, eds. Michael Kazin and Joseph A. McCartin (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 205–220.

32. Cécile Cottenet, Literary Agents in the Transatlantic Book Trade: American Fiction, French Rights, and the Hoffman Agency (New York: Routledge, 2017); Laurence Cossu-Beaumont, Deux agents littéraires dans le siècle américain: William et Jenny Bradley, passeurs culturels transatlantiques (Lyon: ENS Éditions, 2023); and Laura Claridge, The Lady with the Borzoi: Blanche Knopf, Literary Tastemaker Extraordinaire (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016).

33. Hannah Sullivan, The Work of Revision (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013).

34. “Il s’agit d’ouvrir de nouvelles possibilités inconnues des anciens auteurs,” writes Le Lionnais in this foundational definition of “la grande mission de l’Oulipo.” See Jacques Bens, “Queneau oulipien,” in the Oulipo’s Atlas de littérature potentielle (Paris: Gallimard, 1981), 22.

35. See Alain Robbe-Grillet’s collection of essays in Pour un nouveau roman (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1963), esp. “Sur quelques notions périmées” (1957), 25–44.

36. For more on the playwrights that fell under the umbrella term of “theater of the absurd,” see Martin Esslin, The Theatre of the Absurd (New York: Anchor Doubleday, 1961).

37. Pierre Bourdieu, “The Market of Symbolic Goods,” in The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, ed. Randal Johnson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), ch. 3.

38. Merve Emre, Paraliterary: The Making of Bad Readers in Postwar America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017).

39. Emre’s reading of the American Express brand is particularly sharp on this point, showing how it functioned as an institution that aided tourism and international travel, but also as one whose registered literary presence (in works such as James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room or Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying) could challenge heteronormative ideas of family and travel (Paraliterary, 103). By internally reconciling with such brands, literature could, on the one hand, call attention to commercial forces and serve as a site of resistance. Yet the power of branding could paradoxically also subvert attempts at literary resistance, as evidenced, Emre suggests, when a work like Fear of Flying becomes itself “read too widely across the dominant sphere . . . branded as ‘mainstream,’ ‘popular,’ or ‘too familiar’ to encode a culturally subversive mode of discourse” (Paraliterary, 122).

40. Lawrence Rainey, Institutions of Modernism: Literary Elites & Public Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 3.

41. Rainey, Institutions of Modernism, 73.

42. Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 198; also see 144 for the point about Adorno in the United States.

43. Kristin Ross, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996), 183 and 13.

44. Ross, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies, 75–77.

45. Robbe-Grillet, Project, 160 (English) and Projet, 189 (French).