Can we ever separate the artist from the art?

A portrait of controversial author, Louis-Ferdinand Céline. (Image credit: Wikimedia Commons)

The ‘death of the author’ debate is one that has been fought for decades, but that has become particularly virulent in recent years following the rise of #MeToo. One discovery I made during the first half of my year abroad is that this debate has not eluded France. When I returned to my student flat one day and told my Parisian flatmate that I had to deliver a presentation on a ‘controversial figure’ in French culture, she wasted no time in suggesting Louis-Ferdinand Céline. Although considered one of the greatest innovators in 20th-century French literature, Céline is just as well-known for his vehemently antisemitic pamphlets and collaboration with the Nazis. Shocked that such a figure could still be published, studied and admired today, I decided to delve deeper into the question ‘peut-on séparer l’homme de l’artiste ?’. What my preparation for this exposé revealed is that while French society lacks a consensus on the matter, its dividing lines cut right through fundamental questions about literature and its purpose.

Céline was initially known not as a writer but as a war hero, receiving the Croix de Guerre in 1914 for his exploits, only a couple of years after enlisting at the age of 18. Forced by injury to retrain as a doctor, Céline published his most famous work, Voyage au bout de la nuit, in 1932. This pessimistic and semi-autobiographical novel - which drew on Céline’s experiences of the First World War to condemn militarism, capitalism and colonialism – still receives praise from critics, notably Henri Godard, for the musical qualities of Céline’s prose, said to approach spoken language as it oscillates between humour and despair. However, Céline followed this work, which is still widely studied in French schools, with two viciously antisemitic polemics. These texts have not only been condemned as racist for their depiction of Jewish people as ‘monsters’, but also contributed to criticisms of Céline as being a collaborator with Nazi Germany. In the 1938 work L’école des cadavres, for example, Céline boasts of his desire to see a Franco-German alliance, describing Hitler as a ‘friend’ and himself as the ‘number one enemy’ of Jewish people. France’s 1939 law for the protection of racial minorities put a stop to the publication of both L’école des cadavres and Bagatelle pour un massacre, but Céline’s other works remain widely available.

Indeed, debates have recently re-emerged over this controversial author and his place in the French literary canon. While historians such as Annick Duraffour and Pierre-André Taguieff have been keen to emphasise Céline’s criminal activity, including in the 2017 work fittingly subtitled Literary Legend and Historical Reality, in 2011 Céline was included in the French Ministry of Culture’s list of 500 personalities to which it would dedicate national celebrations. In 2017, the French publishing house Gallimard even announced that it would republish the antisemitic polemics with a preface situating them in their historical context. Céline remains, therefore, a polarising figure in French literary circles, renowned as a literary genius while also being condemned for his unapologetic racism and antisemitism.

When the debate around separating art from artist is viewed more broadly , the long-accepted position in France has been to emphasise art’s autonomy. This stance was exemplified by the 19th-century literary critic Théophile Gautier, who argued that aesthetic and moral judgements of works of art should be kept separate. At the same time Gautier was writing, however, the figure of the ‘écrivain engagé’ was beginning to emerge, culminating with Jean-Paul Sartre’s theory of ‘engagement’ and defence of socially responsible writing. According to Sartre, writers are obliged to take a stand on the major political conflicts of their era. Although evidently not all writing is political, the proliferation of ‘autofiction’ in French literature has arguably blurred the lines between author, narrator and character, making it harder to separate an author’s personal views and deeds from the content of their works. Today, therefore, many important French cultural figures are being called into question, just as they are in the Anglophone sphere. Roman Polanski, for example, has won five Best Director awards at the Césars, the latest of which was in 2020 – yet none of the cast and crew of An Officer and a Spy attended the ceremony, as it was overshadowed by accusations of statutory rape levelled against Polanski. The author Gabriel Matzneff is similarly notorious, having published books that describe his own acts of paedophilia and sexual tourism. Yet Matzneff has faced no criminal prosecution throughout his literary career, and has benefited from the wide and enthusiastic support of French literary circles.

Today, arguments that these figures must be situated in their historical context, and that their contributions to the field should not be erased, are commonplace. However, feminist scholars argue that women authors for centuries have not had the choice of being ‘separated from their art’. Publishing houses were hesitant to accept their work, and when it was accepted, it was read as explicitly ‘feminine’, neglected by literary critics and the historians who followed. To draw an example from the art world, Camille Claudel and her husband Auguste Rodin were both immensely talented sculptors – yet while Rodin’s name has resounded in history, Claudel is remembered only for stories of her mental health issues and relationship with Rodin. Art and literature are ultimately an industry and a market, a fact not to be forgotten during debates over whether a particular figure should be ‘cancelled’. Who deserves to profit from the publicising of their work, and who deserves to be forgotten, or indeed ‘silenced’?

This conversation is complicated and layered: every case is different, not least due to the need to rephrase they- surely, as men accused of sexual crimes, the context is the same inhabited by Polanski and Matzneff, still at large today, and Céline, whose fame peaked in the 1930s. Many would argue that artists who acknowledge their own misdeeds should be forgiven, and judged for their works rather than their past. Ultimately, however, the ‘tortured artist’ is not simply a trope, but a source of profit for authors and filmmakers accused of crimes. What I learnt from preparing this exposé, therefore, is that ‘cancelling’ a figure like Polanski has material implications beyond the Twittersphere: it requires difficult, consequential decisions about what our society values.