1When asking what “French” fiction is or might be in the 21st century, what it means for literature to be profoundly French, we might ask what a literature of “la France profonde” looks like in the 21st century. This is not only a question of what contemporary novels portraying rural France tell us, but of how we can frame rural literature overall from a contemporary globalist perspective. What can we learn about both the “Frenchness” and the “literariness” of rural literature when we consider this category as a whole ? This means works set outside of Paris or other major metropolitan centers in which the rural location plays a fundamental role in the narrative. Can these works be said to be representative of a specifically French identity, and what does that mean in the contemporary world ? It is worth asking whether there is any ethical way to talk about a national identity or consciousness, even a literary one, and this is especially true regarding so-called regional literature. This category has a historically problematic relationship to nationalism and conservative politics and aesthetics, particularly in Western Europe. This relationship has created both a very real basis for caution when addressing the topic, as well as a stigma that has for this reason attached itself to the genre. For this reason, the category of “regional” literature after World War II has largely been restricted to those who voluntarily associate themselves with what is considered to be genre literature and published almost exclusively now in collections devoted to that genre (Éditions Baudelaire, Trois Colonnes, Calmann-Lévy, etc.). While there are other writers who recount experiences (their own or others) outside of the city, they would resist that qualification of “regional”, as would many of their readers and critics, should they wish to valorize such literary productions, either ideologically or in terms of literary quality.

Why Regional Literature has Problematic “Roots”

• 4 Ibid., p. 73.

Reprenant le discours sur le déterminisme par la terre, Barrès donne valeur sociale à ce sol qui est source de toute énergie. La terre où l’individu s’enracine, la race qui lui donne sa force […]. Son sens présent est donné par sa tradition. La transmission, à travers les âges des principes et de la volonté agissante est source d’énergie pour la jeunesse. Au sol géologique des théoriciens précédents, Barrès substitue le terreau familial. La sédimentation des roches est remplacée par la succession cumulative des générations, laquelle définit progressivement ce qu’est l’individu, ce qu’il peut vouloir et espérer.4

4The title indicates that these young men, in leaving their home and becoming involved with national and European politics are separated not only from their roots but from their race, in contrast with the stereotypically “oriental” or Jewish cosmopolites. The teacher who originally enticed the boys to the capital is, notably, an orphan, with no roots or race. The regions or the provinces are where Barrès’s racialized idea of Frenchness existed, for him, in its most uncontaminated form.

5Environmental theorist Ursula K. Heise has been a vocal critic of regionalism for these associations and additionally insists that :

• 5 Ursula K. Heise, “Ecocriticism and the Transnational Turn in American Studies”, American Literary (...)

[M]any of the specifics of [regionalism] draw their strength from cultural and rhetorical traditions particular to the United States, where rootedness in place has long been valued as an ideal counterweight to the mobility, restlessness, rootlessness, and nomadism that Americans themselves as well as observers from outside have often construed as paradigmatic of American national character.5

6She suggests that regional literature is inappropriate to the European context, and with this idea of rootedness comes a more general critique of the idea of regionalism, beyond its European instantiation — that focus on the local is at the expense of an understanding of interconnection of all ecological phenomena, the global nature of risk, and the necessary global nature of response. Heise’s point about a correlation between ‘Americans’ and regionalism is borne out by the history of the body of critical work. In a North American context, works set in a rural context could uncontroversially be called “regionalist”, in that they speak from a peripheral geographic location and portray the specificity of life in that location. Unquestionably regional authors such as Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings and Sherwood Anderson are accepted as part of the American literary canon, and writers such as Flannery O’Connor, William Faulkner, John Steinbeck, or Zora Neale Hurston can be called regionalist without raising objections. It is unclear, however, why literature that carries this label would necessarily be opposed to rootlessness and nomadism, or why someone like Steinbeck, whose work took into account specific regional features and cultures, could be seen as ignoring the larger global context in which his narratives are embedded, as his most well-known works address the drive for westward expansion and the ways in which this enterprise failed the most vulnerable populations within the global financial collapse of the 1930s.

7A literature that takes place into account need not be one of rootedness, where the land is seen as belonging to the inhabitants or the inhabitants to the land. In fact, this idea of belonging is one that is exclusive to a variety of regional literature popular at the turn of the twentieth century, and the one that has colored the perception of the entire genre :

• 6 Christian Gras, “Le mouvement régionaliste français et l’histoire sociale : éléments de problémat (...)

Le mouvement régionaliste est donc l’affaire de la classe moyenne rurale (Mistral) et d’une noblesse terrienne (Folco de Baroncelli-Javon) qui refusent et la centralisation politique parce qu’elle les prive de leur puissance politique et l’industrialisation qui les prive de leur pouvoir économique.6

9In addition to the reasons given above, writing about rurality may have received less attention from the literary establishment after World War II due to who was writing some of it. To cite Anne-Marie Thiesse again :

• 9 Christian Gras, op. cit., p. 110.

Les notations de type ethnographique sont nombreuses et la prose régionaliste fournit un riche florilège des grands moments de la vie rurale : mise à mort du cochon, battages, moissons, charivaris, etc. Les auteurs sont en général proches des ethnographes proprement dit. Beaucoup même publient des travaux folkloristes en sus de leur œuvre littéraire.9

Rootless Inhabitation

• 16 Bart Welling, “This is What Matters : Reinhabitory Discourse and the ‘Poetics of Responsibility’ (...)

The study of poetics has taught us about the deep interrelatedness of structure and meaning in literature [...]. And as a growing body of work on environmental poetics attests, this vision can have a bearing on ecological matters as well as literary questions. A bioregional poetics would not just involve writing about a place but would be concerned from the start with questions relating to what we might think of as the coimbrication of literature and bioregion. [...] a bioregional poetics would define the text as a thoroughly emplaced phenomenon. Such a theory would help us see more clearly how all texts are embedded in various physical, economic and intellectual networks of production, distribution, and readerly consumption.16

13As already mentioned, there exists a widespread aversion to anything that smells uncomfortably of the retour à la terre of the Vichy régime, an association that does not obtain in the same way in the Western hemisphere, and this aversion extends beyond the rural culture to the natural environment surrounding it. This aversion was articulated by, among others, Luc Ferry, in his liberal democratic criticism of ecology and environmentalism. Andermatt Conley objects that ecologists’ :

• 18 Verena Andermatt Conley, Ecopolitics : The Environment Poststructuralist Thought, London, Routled (...)

attempts to think relationally are complemented by spiritual components [...]. They aim at undoing dualisms [...]. The opposition is drawn between materiality and spirituality and less, as Ferry sees it, between a republican universalism à la française and nationalism with its conservative and fascistic resonances privileging the local and the ethnic.18

15So how can we resolve these accumulated criticisms of the rural and regional, bio or otherwise, to show that they go beyond the provincial both in recognition of the importance of the global and in avoidance of the ethnocentrism associated with these terms in the early 20th century (i.e. 3rd republic and Vichy, for the most part) ? A focus on the rural, on the local, does not exclude contact with global influences and globally recognized concerns. The rural is not closed within the boundaries of its region, but connected to communities with a similar set of experiences around the globe. The double tension between the inhabitants of the region and the environment from which they try to extract their livelihood and the center to which they remain peripheral if not invisible is not unique to France even as its instantiation is shaped by history and geography. Jean Rouaud recognized this in his 2007 collection Pour une littérature-monde :

• 21 Jean Rouaud, « Mort d’une certaine idée », in Michel Le Bris, Jean Rouaud (dirs), Pour une littérat (...)

Cette découverte était d’abord, à travers le temps, l’espace et le passage d’une langue à une autre, une rencontre. Dans L’enfant élu, qui raconte l’histoire d’un enfant sans père prénommé Jean, vivant dans cette partie de la Prusse-Orientale, marécageuse et boisé, où la religion envahissante pèse de tout le poids du Ciel sur la conscience et le comportement de ses habitants, quelqu’un pour la première fois me parlait à l’oreille d’un presque moi. Mais de ce qui me crève les yeux aujourd’hui, ces similitudes, je n’étais pas conscient alors. Simplement, cet univers m’était familier, pour lequel je n’avais pas besoin de faire un grand effort d’imagination. Un pays humide, une société rurale qui ne peut plus faire semblant de vivre en autarcie, d’ignorer les lumières de la ville et de rester sourd aux rumeurs du monde.21

16There is a global resonance to the themes and settings of this literature. In the same volume, Alain Mabanckou recognizes a political valence of this kinship from the opposite direction, affecting not just the content of these works, but their reception :

• 22 Alain Mabanckou, “Le chant de l’oiseau migrateur”, in Michel Le Bris et Jean Rouaud (eds), Pour u (...)

On le constate aussi à l’intérieur même de la France. En effet l’écrivain ‘provincial’ français n’est pas mieux loti que le ‘francophone’ : il est aussi vu par la place parisienne comme un ‘local’, comme un auteur du ‘terroir’, avec ce que cela comporte de ricanements sous cape.22

17Mabanckou expresses his frustration with the assumption that anything that only the “center” of the French-speaking establishment is considered to be of universal appeal and application, while one peripheral location is not seen as being relevant either to the center or to other parts of the periphery, or that something that resonates from periphery to periphery is not of interest to the center.

18The themes of this regional literature reflect the ethnographic and sociological observations of rural France summed up by Roger Bétaille in La crise rurale, and all show how the rural can no longer be isolated. In addition to an aging and feminizing population, Bétaille identifies five disrupting factors in rural society :

• 23 Roger Bétaille, La crise rurale, Paris, PUF, 1994, p. 24-25.

- Fractures de la famille rurale et alignement sur certains comportements urbains, malthusiens par exemples.
- Atteintes à la sociabilité villageoise ancienne.
- Dépassement de plus en plus fréquent de l’espace local pour le travail, les achats, les loisirs et adoption des valeurs de la grande consommation.
- Altération ou disparition de la particularité Culturelle rurale.
- Impacte des contacts de plus en plus nombreux et habituels avec les citadins.23

19All of these factors find their place in the literature of these regions. While not pretending to universality, these themes have a planetary scope and are driven by the forces of global social, economic, and technological change. Witnessing the changes in or disappearance of the “sociabilité villageoise” or the “particularité Culturelle rurale” need not be seen as nostalgic in whole or even in part for the world in which these throve. We can see the confluence of a number of these factors in Maryline Desbiolles’s Anchise, which was awarded the Prix Fémina in 1999, but which has received little attention from the scholarly community. This is not a universal story of an aging man reaching the end of his life, but of a man aging in a particular context. The title character’s experience has been shaped by the history and the physical environment of the place in which he lived, with the transformation of what was once purely rural space into the périurbain, occupied primarily by elderly people, squatters, and seasonal campers. Anchise’s nostalgia, in that it can be considered such, is not for the old way of life, but for his long-dead wife, and for their relationship which was triangulated through her relationship to nature but violently circumscribed by the rules of the family and social group in which they lived. His inner experience, his ability to process these emotions, are strictly defined as well by the limited education and socialization he received. The whole book is bathed in the harsh sun of the midi summer, in a vegetal abundance that is no longer useful to its inhabitants. This story is not isolated within its province but plays out in the long aftermath of World War II and in the recent spread of global capitalism that has transformed Anchise’s village into the outer circle of urban sprawl.

20There is a precedent for the notion that attention to emplacement is compatible with globalism. As a political ideology or practice, there is a movement that has, in fact, a long and diverse history in France. Altermondialism promotes a more sustainable and locally-based way of life with connections around the world. This ideology and lifestyle enjoy an indulgence from progressive politics not extended to the literary portrayal of the rural. Is it possible to consider rural literary production in the same way that one considers other rural productions — as creating a different kind of global community through its attention to the local ?

“Relation” and déracinement

21A new consideration of rural or regional literature as both French and Literature worthy of that designation is : emplaced but not rooted, globally embedded but not universal. I return to where Verena Andermatt Conley argued for the relational nature of ecological thought. It is necessary to think of the rural and regional as a literature of relation and relationality, and, more precisely, of Relation with a capital R as it was theorized by Édouard Glissant. In his Poétique de la Relation, Glissant distinguishes between what he calls terre and territoire :

• 24 Édouard Glissant, Poétique de la Relation : Poétique III, Paris, Gallimard, 1990, p. 158-159.

L’identité-relation
- est liée, non pas à une création du monde, mais au vécu conscient et contradictoire des contacts de cultures ;
- est donnée dans la trame chaotique de la Relation et non pas dans la violence cachée de la filiation ;
- ne conçoit aucune légitimité́comme garante de son droit, mais circule dans une étendue nouvelle ;
- ne se représente pas une terre comme un territoire, d’où on projette vers d’autres territoires.24

22What I propose in this article is a vision of literature of emplacement in a terre and not “enracinement” in a territoire. But for Glissant, the Americas, the Antilles and more particularly the plantation are the crucible of this deterritorialized and, as he puts it, rhizomatic Relation, having severed the previous enracinement of their inhabitants. Is it anathema then to promote a Relational reading of metropolitan French writing ? This is not to suggest that all French rural literature is a perfect expression of Relational thought — a concept developed from the Caribbean context—but rather that the poetics of Relation allow us a new lens with which to read this body of literature, and also to consider even how some of the more reactionary tendencies that have associated themselves with rural literature trace the movement of the trauma of déracinement and the shock of being put in Relation that were experienced long ago by other cultures who were much more violently uprooted. Millet’s protagonists, for example, express not blind nostalgia for the regional (as shown earlier with his ambivalent-to-disdainful attitudes towards provincial society) but reactionary tendencies in response to the situation of rural life within a network of global change, suspicious of the changing demographics of his province and resentful of the ways women take up space. While it may be helpful to hold such positions at arm’s length, it is worthwhile to ask how representative they are of more widely-held opinions, as well as how such points of view are influenced by or influence the experience of the physical environment : the physical and social stratification of the small town, the difficulty of access on public transit, the dilapidation of the paternal home, and the ways in which one’s social circle becomes defined by the lack of mobility, particularly amongst an aging population.

23Glissant also worries that an attention to place “ecology” might tip into the antihumanism predicted by Ferry and Heise, or worse :

• 25 Ibid., p. 160-161.

L’écologie nous apparaît comme la pulsion par laquelle les hommes étendent à la planète Terre l’ancienne pensée sacrée du territoire. Elle est ainsi à double orientation : ou bien on la concevra comme une dérivée de ce sacré, auquel cas on la vivra comme une mystique ; ou bien cette extension portera en germe la critique de cette pensée du territoire (de son sacré, de son exclusive) et l’écologie alors s’agira en politique.25

• 27 Ibid., p. 215.

Ne nous arrêtons pas à ce lieu commun, qu’une poétique ne nous garantit aucun moyen concret d’agir. Elle nous permet peut-être de mieux comprendre notre action dans le monde. Nous considérons par exemple comment notre exigence de la responsabilité culturelle, inséparable de l’indépendance politique, est à mettre en rapport avec cette violence prophylactique des déculturations. Mettre en Relation, c’est ce qui s’appelle défolkloriser. La réduction folklorique (la croyance que les seules vivacités ataviques sont porteuse d’existence) guette toutes les cultures, technologiques ou non. Le sentiment de la modernité nous en écarte, en nous présentant l’image des relations, des similitudes de situations ou des divergences d’orientation, du nous à l’autre.27

25We separate the rural or regional from the folklore, acknowledging that difference and seeing beyond the images of folklore and “local color” to what is behind it. The mise en Relation is not always smooth, and one of the consequences of this can be anger and resentment that express something less than a harmonious existence in the global community, both literary and social. Rather than reject such literature as closed and provincial, it is valuable to read it as part of this process of mise en Relation that respects the distinctiveness of local culture but places it within the global network or, as Glissant might envision it, a node in the global rhizome.