The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Absent Without Leave: French Literature under the Threat of War by Denis Hollier
Leon S. Roudiez

Denis Hollier. Absent without Leave: French Literature under the Threat of War. Trans. Catherine Porter. Harvard Univ. Press, 1997. 239 pp. $27.95.

I found Hollier’s title surprising at first, with its military connotation, especially when set against the original French, Les Dépossédés, and its ironic reference to Dostoevsky’s novel. It might then be viewed as a counterpart to Julien Benda’s The Treason of the Intellectuals (1927; Benda is mentioned several times but never in connection with the book). While Benda reproached intellectuals with forsaking permanent values such as rationality and justice in favor of transitory passions, thus getting their hands soiled in petty political squabbles, Hollier seems to find them remiss in their duty to fight totalitarian ideologies and practices. Writers under scrutiny are Georges Bataille, Michel Leiris, Roger Caillois, André Malraux, and the early Jean-Paul Sartre. Actually, the essays are not as rigorously focused as my reading of the title might suggest, and I consider the fourth one, “Bataille’s Tomb,” the most rewarding in the series—perhaps in part because of its emphasis on death in both an individual and social context: written about 1982, it evokes the ambience that prevailed half a century earlier when Western civilization was indeed under the threat of extermination. Ambiguity (a key word in these essays) is not expected in Bataille (or in Leiris and Caillois for that matter), and it enables Hollier to develop intellectual pyrotechnics that one need not agree with—what matters is that they are challenging. The reader of Absent without Leave is led to reassess his or her own position, changing it or strengthening it. Reading is thus an active process, as it should be, and that could constitute Hollier’s most praiseworthy contribution here. [Leon S. Roudiez]