Original title Combats littéraires Language French Genre essays | Country France Subject literature Originally published 2006 | |
Publisher L'Age d’Homme, Lausanne Octave Mirbeau books Sébastien Roch, Le Calvaire, Abbé Jules | ||
Combats littéraires is the title of a 2006 collection of 187 articles and prefaces written by the French writer Octave Mirbeau, between 1876 and 1916, on literature, journalism, and publishing over the course of his long career as an influential journalist. Although Mirbeau collaborated with numerous daily newspapers, he was never officially assigned the work of literary reviewer. Of these articles, some 60 were published between 1925 and 1926 under the title Les Écrivains, and these are available on Wikisource.
Contents
Eclectic Criticism
Even if certain articles by the author of Les affaires sont les affaires (Business is business) bestow praise on Émile Zola, toward whom Mirbeau was not otherwise so kindly disposed, and on Edmond de Goncourt, they evidence an esthetic that is overtly hostile to naturalism, considered by Mirbeau to be one of the century’s gravest errors in matters of art.
Even more than in his Combats esthétiques, Mirbeau demonstrates eclectic taste, expressing appreciation for such diverse authors as Léon Bloy and Maurice Maeterlinck, Leo Tolstoy and Oscar Wilde, Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly and Anna de Noailles, Léon Daudet and Charles-Louis Philippe, Jules Laforgue, and Léon Werth or Marguerite Audoux. In Mirbeau's eyes, they all had the merit of showing people and things in a new light and of having a style that was uniquely personal.
However, Mirbeau was well aware that, in a conformist bourgeois society, and under a capitalist economy whose sole object was profit, journalism and publishing were becoming increasingly contaminated, serving only as an instrument for besotting the masses. Good literature, Mirbeau believed, was incompatible with the prevailing trend toward mercantilism and publicity, and so its impact could only be limited. Mirbeau harbored no illusion about writers’ ability to change the world.
However, Mirbeau was well aware that, in a conformist bourgeois society, and under a capitalist economy whose sole object was profit, journalism and publishing were becoming increasingly contaminated, serving only as an instrument for besotting the masses. Good literature, Mirbeau believed, was incompatible with the prevailing trend toward mercantilism and publicity, and so its impact could only be limited. Mirbeau harbored no illusion about writers’ ability to change the world.
A Realm of struggle
Literature, for Mirbeau, was contested terrain, as were the social issues for which he campaigned, and while he rejected the discredited function of literary critic, he played in the realm of literature, as he did in the domain of the fine arts, the role of intercessor, promoter, and discoverer.