SubStance

Once again, literary and cultural studies are focusing on the encounter between modernity and democracy. With increasing urgency, literary theorists, film scholars and cultural historians are looking at relations between forms of art and the ideals of equality and liberty that began to appear in Europe after 1789. To this field, Dudley Andrew and Steven Ungar have added an immensely important volume. Their study Popular Front Paris and the Poetics of Culture focuses on the popular entertainment, the mass media, the novels and films, in a word, the art forms of the multitudes that led up to the election of the Popular Front in June 1936. By revivifying the critical practice dubbed "poetics of culture" by Stephen Greenblatt, Andrew and Ungar seek to understand and describe the relation between the "indefinite text" (8) of culture and the social and political relations that constituted 1930s Paris.

The authors compare their approach to the multiple columns of a newspaper, to the collage technique of the Surrealists, and, most emphatically, to the fragmentary, unstable and heterogeneous construction of Alain Resnais's 1974 film Stavisky… , a biopic of the famous financier whose crooked deals with French politicians led to right wing street riots around February 6, 1934 and, eventually, to the creation of the Popular Front and the election of Léon Blum. Andrew and Ungar insist, however, that the truth of Stavisky… can be found not in any kind of synoptic vision of the financier's life or of the 1930s, but in its conscious desire to stage the multiple "fronts" and "flows" (13) of culture. Stavisky… is the perfect interpretative model for the authors in part because Sacha Stavisky (a.k.a. Serge Alexandre) was himself many men in one: a Ukranian Jewish immigrant, a financier to Third Republic politicians, a newspaper magnate, and the owner of the Empire Theatre, which produced operettas that seemed to echo Stavisky's own melodramatic career. To what they call the "gilded mirror of intelligibility" (31) often proposed by narrative histories, the authors prefer the ellipses and narrative folds of Resnais's landmark film.

To better illustrate the complexity of this circulation between the politics and aesthetics of Popular Front Paris, the authors turn to a series of paired readings. Early on in the book there is a chapter on two writers, André Malraux and Louis-Ferdinand Céline, both of whom wrote wildly [End Page 164] popular, revolutionary novels in the early 1930s, and both of whom turned to political engagement. But this paired reading shows precisely the difficulty of charting equivalences between art and politics. Céline's Journey to the End of the Night (1932) may have enthused leftist writers, including Henri Barbusse, Claude Lévi-Strauss, who reviewed it in L'Etudiant socialiste, and the Populist novelist Eugène Dabit, but, as Andrew and Ungar point out, this enthusiastic reception is also a cautionary tale about too quickly associating a working class novel with any kind of movement for workers' rights. By 1936, Céline was writing his wretched pamphlets and had exchanged social critique for anti-Semitism. As for Malraux's The Human Condition (1933), Andrew and Ungar point to the novel's destabilizing technique of "scattered vignettes" (98), and "multiple centers of attraction," (99). In this convincing reading, the authors argue that the narrative techniques of The Human Condition can best be understood in relation to the montage of attractions put into practice by Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein, whom Malraux met in Moscow "to dream of an adaptation of La Condition humaine" (99). More pressing for Andrew and Ungar, however, is to tease out the complexity of the relation between art and politics. As divergent as their politics had become by 1936, both Céline and Malraux had turned their novels into sites of "deep cultural investment and critique"(106), both had made their literature "an anteroom to politics" (108), and both had borrowed forms of popular culture in order to propose new ways of seeing and being in...