Greetings readers! In this week’s post, I will be looking at the fall 1977 edition of the French literary journal Tel Quel, a special double issue on “The United States.” This issue features interviews with North American artists and writers, articles about American visual art and literature, and several American poems in translation. The publication of this issue in 1977 is a testament to the direct cultural exchange between France and the United States and, more specifically, to the impact of American art on French postmodern thought.
Tel Quel (translated into English as “as is”) was a French avant-garde literary review published by Éditions du Seuil between 1960 and 1982. Founded by writers Philippe Sollers and Jean-Edern Hallier, it had an enormous impact on the formation of literary and cultural debates of the 60s and 70s. The journal published some of the earliest work of French structuralist (and later poststructuralist) philosophers Jacques Derrida, Julia Kristeva, Michel Foucault, and Roland Barthes. It was also associated with key thinkers in the French avant-garde and published work by Antonin Artaud and Georges Bataille.[1]
In the fall of 1977, Tel Quel put out a special double issue titled “États-Unis” which included French translations of texts by John Ashbury and Philip Roth, and interviews with Merce Cunningham, Viola Farber, Robert Wilson, and Michael Snow (a Canadian). There are also essays on American culture, including “Women’s Studies” by Domna C. Stanton, “Theater in the United States” by Tom Bishop, “Robert Motherwell” by Marcelin Pleynet, “The American Body” by Guy Scarpetta, and “Foreign politics and social struggle” (“Politique étrangère et la lutte sociale”) by Norman Birnbaum.
The cover deviated from other editions of the review. Rather than featuring its usual listing of article titles or a portrait of a writer, a photograph by François Thiolat of Lower Manhattan appears. New York’s skyline is viewed through the steel cables of (presumably) the Brooklyn Bridge. The image of skyscrapers is overlaid by the grid pattern composed by the bridge cables, slightly askew. The effect of the full-bleed cover image is totalizing: the viewer is confronted with an image that collapses foreground and background. We are implicated in a language of forms. The word “États-Unis” appears in all caps, slightly off center. Words are subjected to the striking geometrical composition of the image.
In the issue’s introduction, titled “Pourquoi les États-Unis?” (or, “Why the United States?”), editors Julia Kristeva, Marcelin Pleynet, and Philippe Sollers reflect upon their experiences visiting the United States in the 60s and 70s and discuss what they find interesting about its culture and politics. They remark upon differences between France and the U.S., including the role of intellectuals in politics, the role of history in cultural production, the relationship to each culture vis à vis socialism, China, and the Soviet Union, and the state of literature and art. Building upon a somewhat obvious and clichéd articulation of the major differences between the cultures–America being a “new” country full of “diverse” citizenship with a heterogeneous cultural history as compared to the patrimonial stature of a centralized, coherent yet war-weary French culture–they draw conclusions worth re-examining.
Kristeva notes that underground, oppositional culture in the United States is more diffuse and multifaceted–more polyvalente, she writes, than in Europe.[2] This sense of heterogeneity gives way to a “divided history” (“histoire dédoublée”) in which the opposition of two strands of time–one related to capitalist production, the other a diverse mix of the lived cultural histories of the many immigrant communities that make up labor–holds revolutionary potential: “On a l’impression que la linéarité dictée par le développement économique jamais tout à fait à ce fond culturel et religieux et c’est dans cette non-correspondance que des éclats se produisent, des éclats qui remettent en cause l’évolutionnisme et la foi dans un progrès qui existe néanmoins.”[3]
The marginalization of cultural production in American life gives rise to a similar “polyvalence” when it comes to arts practices. Kristeva notes that there is more volume and diversity of aesthetic experience in the U.S. than in Europe. But what the editors find the most interesting about contemporary American art is its ability to work with “non-verbal” practices–that is, the exploration of the disjuncture between what is expressed through language onstage or in print and the use of non-verbal elements such as gesture, color, and sound: “Les Américains me semblent exceller, aujourd’hui, et pousser très à fond et très loin et beaucoup plus radicalement que cela ne se fait en Europe, tout ce qui relève du geste, de la couleur et du son…ils n’adhèrent pas verbalement c’est-à-dire consciemment et analytiquement, au sens naïf du terme d’analyser, ce qu’ils effectuent. Quand ça se parle, ça ne correspond pas à ce qui se fait en geste, couleur et son.”[4]
Philippe Sollers traces the history of the “transplanting” of the avant-garde, after surrealism, from Europe during the Second World War into the United States.[5] Again, this was already a well-worn narrative in the late 1970s, but Sollers’ choice of words reveals the stakes of this French-American exchange. The French word Sollers uses, la greffe, or “transplant”, is taken up by Kristeva to further articulate the goal of Tel Quel’s special issue–it is “to see the joy in the exchange of the round trip…to mark how these transplants can be nourished by different soils” (“de voir quel est le bienfait, je dirai le bonheur de l’échange de l’aller-retour…de marquer comment les greffes peuvent fertiliser les sols différents”).[6]
[Members of the Tel Quel editorial team in 1971. From left: Denis Roche, Jean Ricardou, Pierre Rotenberg, Marceline Pleynet, Julia Kristeva, Jean-Louis Baudry, Philippe Sollers. Photo by Jean-Pierre Couderc for L’Express.]
What does the image of a “transplant” do for our understanding of the complex exchange between French and American culture? To “transplant” means to move an object from its original place and introduce it elsewhere. It requires a two-fold action, a lifting or removal and a resetting or reintroduction into another context. The object of a transplant is often a living being, or part of one–a plant, organ, or tissue. When the French editors of Tel Quel use the word greffe to speak about the context of exchange between the two cultures, they imply that part of the cultural life of France has been lifted and is now growing as a separate entity in the United States. Their interest in exploring this connection speaks to the ongoing interdependence of the two cultures–an aller-retour that describes the continuous migration of artistic and political influence.
As a literary object, this issue of Tel Quel attests to the dialogue between dance and poetry, American and French art, and literary theory and artistic practice that continued throughout postwar culture. It further demonstrates the deep influence that American postmodern dance had on French thought.
[1] For a comprehensive history of the journal, see Patrick ffrench, The Time of Theory: A History of Tel Quel (1960-1983) Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995.
[2] Julia Kristeva, “Pourquoi les Etats-Unis?” in Tel Quel (Fall 1977, issue 71/73): 4.
[3] Kristeva, 6.
[4] Kristeva, 4-5.
[5] Philippe Sollers, “Pourquoi les Etats-Unis?” in Tel Quel (Fall 1977, issue 71/73): 8-9.
[6] Kristeva, 10.