B.FONDANE AND L.JANOVER, SAME COMBAT

par Michel Carassou

November 21, 2021

In 1988, I published in Mélusine a short article entitled "On the side of utopia with Fondane and Janover" (n° 10, p. 267-270). I highlighted a number of convergences between the two authors in their critique of the surrealist movement or in their conception of the relations between poetry and ethics. I also showed, regarding the judgment on reason, that Janover's analysis was not far from Fondane's. However, at that date, Louis Janover had not yet read Benjamin Fondane.

Thirty years later, it's done and Fondane occupies a place of choice in Louis Janover's poetic pantheon, alongside Antonin Artaud and Roger Gilbert-Lecomte. This is evident both in the preface written for the work Front Noir and in his new introduction to The Writer Before the Revolution.

I will focus here on the circumstances of this discovery of Fondane's thought by Louis Janover, a discovery of which I was both the actor and the witness. Let us go back to the late 1990s: at Paris-Méditerranée editions, which I ran with Anne Soprani, our discussions with Louis (our friendship ties were already old) led us to conceive a collection of polemical texts that he would direct. From the outset, the collection was placed under the sign of René Crevel by taking as its title that of one of his books: Les Pieds dans le plat (Putting Your Foot in It). Crevel liked to quote Tzara's saying: "there are only two genres, poetry and the pamphlet." He himself knew how to dip his pen in vitriol to denounce all obscurantisms. For example in Le Clavecin de Diderot, this book without which, Breton would write, surrealism would have lacked "one of its most beautiful volutes." Louis Janover had already been interested in Crevel; he had been able to read other polemical texts by him in Le Roman cassé, the collection of his last writings that he had prefaced a few years earlier. All the volumes of the "Les Pieds dans le plat" collection would bear on the back cover this presentation of its objectives:

"To put ideas back in place, or in their place, and follow them step by step in current events, a collection that puts — and this is where Crevel comes in — 'the feet in the dish of contemporary opportunism, which dish is, as everyone knows, only a vulgar butter plate.'"

In this collection which includes about a dozen titles, Louis Janover published several works, several pamphlets, first Nuit et Brouillard du révisionnisme which was the opening volume, then Voyage en feinte dissidence, Thermidor mon amour and Le Surréalisme de jadis à naguère. Titles that suffice to evoke some of the themes that are dear to him. Among the other published authors, one will not be surprised to find Maximilien Rubel with Guerre et Paix nucléaires; one will also find Jean-Pierre Garnier (the accomplice of La Deuxième Droite, a co-written book), with a pamphlet on contemporary urbanism, La Bourse ou la Ville; then Jean-Marie Brohm and his Shootés du stade (sport, drugs and money), Charles Reeve and his Portuguese chronicles entitled Les Œillets sont coupés, also the Tuareg poet Hawad with Le Coude grinçant de l'anarchie. And finally Fondane. Finally does not mean that Fondane's text was the last published, it was a question of giving here an idea of the environment where it was going to appear.

When, at the bottom of a suitcase of Fondane's manuscripts, I found this unpublished text "L'Écrivain devant la révolution," still convinced of a Fondane-Janover convergence, I immediately thought that Louis was the ad hoc person to present it — and the book naturally found its place in the "Les Pieds dans le plat" collection.

Subtitled "Unpronounced speech at the Congress of Writers of Paris (1935)," this text was written on the margins of this congress initiated by the communists to constitute an anti-fascist intellectual front. A major event in the cultural history of the 20th century that had sealed the grip of communist (actually Stalinist) ideology on a large part of the intellectual class...

Extremely critical of the viewpoints then expressed, Fondane's speech could not fail to challenge Louis Janover who had already had the opportunity to reflect on the scope of this Congress. The first time was with André Breton. He reports that the first text he read by him, and which influenced him durably, was Position politique du surréalisme, a collection that contained the speech of the surrealist leader for the 1935 Congress and which marked the definitive rupture of their movement with the Third International, led by Stalin. The second time, with René Crevel, the latter's speech being in the volume of last writings that Janover had prefaced, particularly sensitive to his last words: "to the revenant opposes the becoming." And now with Fondane and his unpronounced speech.

These three texts, of different tones but which all express divergent positions in relation to the majority line at the Congress, advocating the acceptance of a Soviet tutelage over culture to effectively resist the rise of Nazism, these three texts have known thwarted destinies. Having slapped Ilya Ehrenbourg in the street, a Soviet delegate who had qualified surrealist activity as pederastic, Breton was banned from the congress; his friends only obtained that his speech be read by Éluard, but in the hubbub of an end of session, when the public was leaving the room and the lights were being turned off. Crevel did not read his text because he had committed suicide the day before the Congress and, as he was not found in time, another declaration of his was given to be heard.

As for Fondane, he had not been invited to speak. He wrote his text after the fact. Les Cahiers du Sud did not publish it at the time, for lack of space, and Fondane forgot it at the bottom of a drawer.

Let us specify that during the Congress, only one dissenting voice managed to make itself heard, and thanks to André Gide's support, that of one of the rare women invited to the podium, Magdeleine Paz, who demanded the liberation of Victor Serge who was rotting in a gulag in Siberia. (And that's why we put her photo on the cover of the new edition that we have just produced.)

Comparing the three speeches, in fact all "unpronounced," and emphasizing the qualities of each of them, Louis Janover considers that by far the most relevant is that of Fondane, due to his better understanding of the totalitarian system (of its mode of functioning) to which the three authors clash and of his positions on the freedom of the spirit which remain topical even today.

"Benjamin Fondane's writing occupies a very special place. He is then one of the rare ones to pose the problems on art, politics and avant-gardes in terms that today resonate with our reflections. And in a certain way, the position of withdrawal, which left him foreign to certain quarrels and concerns, allowed him to keep the precious distance, necessary to go beyond his time. Benjamin Fondane, as he does not have to respond to the PC's intellectual diktats, and defends the principle of this freedom, goes directly to the root of this cultural hegemony of Marxism."

Fondane's radical ideas in "The Writer Before the Revolution," his will to preserve the freedom to think and write, were already essentially present in older writings, like his 1927 article: "The Revolution and the Intellectuals" or his texts on cinema. How could he have understood, before others, better than others, what was the nature of this power that claimed to be communist and had usurped even the language of the revolution? How could he, the Romanian exile, contrary to many others better integrated into cultural and social life, keep his distances vis-à-vis a Leninist Marxist conception that placed the writer's freedom under the dependence of a dictatorship? One would be right to answer by putting forward his independence of mind and his perspicacity, but one must not forget the influence of Léon Chestov, the existential thinker whom he had met as soon as he arrived in Paris, in 1924, and of whom he would become the disciple. In Russia, one does not always know it because his political writings are rare and little disseminated, Chestov had been revolutionary and anarchist, often close to Prince Kropotkin's positions. Forced to exile, as soon as he arrived in France, in 1920, he had published in the Mercure de France a long article, "What is Bolshevism?" where he presents his testimony and his analysis of the October events. I extract these few lines from it:

"For anyone who was at all clear-sighted, the very essence of Bolshevism and its future appeared at once. It was clear that the revolution was crushed and that Bolshevism was, essentially, a profoundly reactionary movement, that it even constituted a step backward from Nicholas II."

Further on:

"Bolshevism began with destruction and is incapable of anything other than destruction. [...] Lenin and those of his comrades whose conscience and disinterestedness are beyond all suspicion have become a toy in the hands of history which realizes with their own arms plans directly contrary not only to socialism and communism, but to any possibility of improving in any way the situation of the oppressed classes."

Chestov was one of the first on a list of authors, from Boris Souvarine to Maximilien Rubel — dear to Louis Janover — who would denounce the imposture of a pseudo revolution. If the Mercure de France was then an important review, rather libertarian in orientation, Chestov's article aroused little comment at the time, but it had at least one attentive reader: Fondane. This article and the almost daily frequentation of the philosopher were to protect him against the sirens of this so-called Soviet revolution that endangered the freedom of the spirit.

However, it was not especially for his political conceptions that he had approached Chestov. In his eyes, the latter was above all the existential thinker engaged in a merciless struggle against the diktats of reason. He himself, in his experience as a poet, had perceived what danger reason could represent for artistic creation and he had found himself on the same line as Dada in his critique of speculative thought. When he met Chestov, he saw him in some way as a continuator of Dada. I quote his first article devoted to Chestov, in 1928 in the review Europe: "Although an art movement, which was only art, could not have attracted from him anything but reservations, he would certainly have applauded the worst manifestations of Mr. AA. the Antiphilosopher (that is to say Tristan Tzara). But where others stopped, with their souls worn out, he incessantly discovers the necessity of going further." As it is especially after this date that he writes on Dada, one can wonder if, in fact, it is not Chestov's thought that made him measure the importance of Dada. Irrationalism and, even more, antirationalism represent, for him, what makes Dada's specificity and, after Dada, what must be safeguarded. And first of all in surrealism. A priori, Fondane admits the raison d'être of surrealism: "It was necessary to create a category that permitted the existence of a nebula, a star that justified the telescope. This sought continent was the dream." But, very quickly, he perceives deviations from the initial utopia: by conceiving poetry as a mental document, as a means of knowledge, — reason that decides on the "mobilization of unreason," the occult "clear and distinct" — the surrealists make it again tributary to speculative thought; by claiming historical materialism, they sacrifice the marvelous, poetry in freedom to the categorical imperative, to moral precepts, to the dictatorship of the proletariat by reason. In all cases, it is reason that prevails and the drama of surrealism, according to Fondane, is to experiment "at its own expense the impossibility of an agreement between the poetic exigency and the ethical exigency."

At forty or fifty years' distance, Louis Janover, who was a member of the surrealist group at another moment of its history, questions the duality of the movement which presents "an ethical criterion in incessant struggle against the artistic criterion." He takes sides for what remains alive in surrealism beyond the renunciations, for what he perceives as its utopia: "poetry made by all, the space of poetic creation extended to daily life." A utopia inseparable from a revolutionary behavior supposing the refusal of any integration into a society characterized by inequalities between men. According to Janover, surrealism began to deviate from its utopia when it dissociated art from ethics, and this dissociation operated in the very poetic practice, when it was a question of capturing the forces of the unconscious to submit them to the control of reason.

Janover's analysis, one observes, joins that of Fondane: it is when reason interferes in the poetic act that surrealism turns away from its initial intention. However Fondane conceived this control of reason as a tribute paid to ethics while, for Janover, it is accompanied by a renunciation of the ethical exigency. Are the two viewpoints irreconcilable? No because the notion of ethics does not have the same meaning in the two perspectives: for Janover ethics commands the refusal of any compromise on the level of social integration; with Fondane, it is a question of a normative morality, imposed by adherence to an ideology that consecrates the individual's dependence before necessity. In renouncing the first attitude, had not the surrealists found themselves prisoners of the second?

Fondane had evoked, as the raison d'être of nascent surrealism, a star that justified the telescope. Janover seems to answer him when he observes, in Le Rêve et le Plomb, that the surrealists forget "the light of their star to preserve their finite." This finite, what he also names "egoistic and finite satisfaction," is it not what Fondane had designated before that as "enjoyment of sensibility." This finite is indeed, for one as for the other, the product of reason that incites to judge that it is wise to accept the laws of necessity, the petty reasons that ensure our peace of mind and our comfort in this world. Whether one sees in it, with Fondane, the effect of a submission to ethics, or with Janover its rejection, according to the meaning they confer on the word, it is indeed always the utopia that is forgotten and poetry diverted.

What would therefore be a non-diverted poetry? "Poetry is not a social function, but an obscure force that precedes man and follows him." To this affirmation of Fondane, Janover would certainly have subscribed and, without being in disagreement with his elder, he would also have recognized in the poetic act the Great Dream formulated by Antonin Artaud: "no longer being riveted to the earth."

With the surrealists, against the surrealists, because they had faith in poetry and not in the prerogatives of reason, Fondane and Janover have always waged a combat so that man would no longer be riveted to the earth.