Guy Dammann makes the following thought provoking point about the late Robbe-Grillet, l’Académie Française, and the effects of gatekeepers on French culture:
The Académie has a venerable tradition of excluding controversial authors. Tireless scourge of the French establishment Émile Zola stood for election 13 times, eventually giving up after the J'accuse affair forced him into exile in England. Balzac, before him, was passed over for Victor Hugo on the grounds that the genre in which he worked was too lowly, and later because he was too poor. Denis Diderot, polymathic figurehead of the French Enlightenment's racier side and editor of the Encyclopédie, was barely even considered for election while Jean d'Alembert, his co-editor until the censors turned up the heat in 1759, became one of the institution's leading lights.
Robbe-Grillet, on the other hand, stirred up trouble with vigour and relish from the moment his literary career got under way. Arguably, he courted controversy for its own sake as an integral part of the anti-literary aesthetic of the nouveau roman movement whose undisputed founding father - or "pope", as he preferred it - he was.
[…]Aside from the distribution of some 70 literary awards, none of which have the prestige of the Prix Goncourt (administered by another "Académie" set up as a progressive thorn in the establishment's side), the primary function of the immortels is to "safeguard the purity of the French language". This duty they discharge through their own dictionary, the last edition of which was published in 1935 with a total of 35,000 definitions.
[…] the wonderful thing about French culture has always been the dichotomy between haughty officialdom and rampant liberté. For while the academicians police the official language, doing their best to ward off the invading franglais hordes, the less exalted regions of French society have never lost any time in inventing their own argots.
A good parallel here is with the French education system, which, though based on a rigorously old-fashioned "learning-by-rote" model designed to stamp out original thought and its causes, has nonetheless consistently turned out an exceptionally high proportion of the intellectual and artistic world's mavericks, revolutionaries and left-field geniuses. Perhaps, in much the same way, the staid and fusty Académie, in maintaining standards that few find themselves able to live up to, is all the while silently fuelling the rude health of France's unofficial linguistic life.
Dammann is wrong to see in Robbe-Grillet somebody who tried to shake things up because he was so conventional that all of his attempts to be different, to write differently, and to shake things up were fluffy. They were, unfortunately, not well-thought and poorly executed stratagems to remain relevant, which are already forgotten because they weren’t intended to survive their author.
The big question of whether French culture is being “damaged” by its gatekeepers is bigger than Robbe-Grillet and very much relevant because it is impossible not to answer positively that interrogation precisely when considering the case of Robbe-Grillet and of the infamous Académie. The existence and the importance of the Académie Française is the proof that it is possible to have too much of a good thing and that attempts of preserving a culture from commercialization and devaluation can make it elitist and inaccessible. I love the fact that French culture is rich, stylish, difficult, and complicated but I stop loving those qualities when it becomes clear that they have nothing to do with substance or meaning, but everything to do with conservatism and the erroneous desire to resist modernity and simplicity because they are viewed as ways of dumbing down French culture and “unfrenching” it. My point is that I love French culture so much that I don’t want it to be clustered in a museum like the Mona Lisa of Da Vinci under the pretext that it is a masterpiece that ought to be protected from the common folk. My worst nightmare is that I will have to grow old in a world where French becomes a dead language as Latin and where French culture becomes something that only a few members of a shrinking, disappearing and educated elite treasure.
