Dissolving narrative

Andrew Robert Hodgson on Marcel Béalu for 3:AM Magazine.

Marcel Béalu is a figure, at a glance, singular in 20th century French literature. A marginal figure god parent to no school, writer of no manifesto who, unlike many of his contemporaries, as Henri Peyre writes, “being French … had to formulate, hence to invent, a body of doctrinal views to clarify their own aims and to impress the philosophical reviewers”. Béalu is bizarre; he had no favourite café from which to declaim at his ease to his Sorbonne students; he, in fact, didn’t have any Sorbonne students to declaim to. Though very (very) loosely linked he at no point found himself in the position of championing or slapping down André Breton, or committing to both stances in repeated and rapid succession. From our mid-Atlantic footing looking East to Paris, to glimpse such a writer feels rare; singular. Yet Béalu is one amongst many, not only individuals but groups and post-Breton movements eclipsed by their OuLiPo, SI and NR contemporaries. That garret lurking writer vivid in the anglo encyclopaedia of cliché is an anomaly in the French literary landscape; or at least that which reaches our bookshelves. Publication in France, it seems, relies on radio, TV chat show and Le Monde like a presidential campaign trail much more so than that in our ken. The received image of French literature appears as a competition of whose ego bleats the loudest, and any who feel uneasy with self-promotion, group marketing, or out and out rejected it like Béalu are time and time again shuffled deep down in the deck, a deck here confusingly labelled “Kafkaesque”. An adjective applied at the flick of the tongue to many of the writers I have recently approached, Roland Topor, Béalu, Pierre Bettencourt, Fernando Arrabal, its application is something I find uncomfortable, whether it is intended to describe their outsider status or outsider approach or something else altogether. The adjective wielded seems afforded the power to level all time and space to reduce Kafka to an ambiguous genre and the subject to which it is applied the status of an –esque; a vague –ish; an ambiguous referential referencing the ambiguous.