Louis Guilloux
Encyclopedia
Louis Guilloux was a French writer born in Saint-Brieuc
, Brittany
, where he lived throughout his life. He is known for his Social Realist novels describing working class life and political struggles in the mid-twentieth century. His best-known book is Le Sang noir
(Black Blood), which has been described as a "prefiguration of Sartre's La Nausée."
In high school, Guilloux befriended the philosophy tutor Georges Palante
, an anarchist thinker who later killed himself. Palante's despair inspired him to create the character of Cripure, the anguished anti-hero of Le Sang Noir (1935), which is considered his masterpiece. The name Cripure is a contraction of "Critique de la raison pure" (Critique of Pure Reason
). He also commemorated his old tutor in a memoir.
Before becoming a professional writer, literary translator and interpreter, Guilloux worked in various trades, including journalism. He was well known for his fluency in the English language.
He married in 1924, and published La Maison du Peuple in 1927.
The success of the book led to a long series of novels on socially committed themes, usually based in his native Brittany. His masterpiece Le Sang Noir was notable for its departure from his earlier, more staightforwardly socialist literature, since it contains elements of what was later associated with an existentialist or absurdist
vision. It centres on the suicidal thoughts of the anti-hero, Cripure, who feels overwhelming disgust at humanity in the destructive circumstances of militarism during World War I
. Contrasted with the figure of Cripure is the nominal hero, Lucien, who aspires to work for a better future. But the grotesque and self-excoriating visions of Cripure are repeatedly portrayed as more powerful and compelling than Lucien's idealism. The book was translated into English under the title Bitter Victory.
Le Pain des Rêves (Bread of Dreams), which he wrote during the Occupation, won the Prix du roman populiste in 1942. After the liberation of France, Guilloux worked as an interpreter for the American army of occupation. In OK Joe! he explored racial inequalities and injustice in the segregated American army of the time. Guilloux's experiences at this time are described by Alice Kaplan
in her 2006 book The Interpreter.
His 1949 novel Le Jeu de Patience (Game of Patience) won the Prix Renaudot
. It has been described as his most experimental work, "an intricate text demanding patient reconstitution by the reader. Micro- and macro-history collide: the horrors of war, and anarchist and Popular Front politics or right-wing coups, impinge violently on private dramas. It is a haunted kaleidoscope, often hallucinatory."
Guilloux was also a translator of a number of books, including the novel Home to Harlem written by black American author Claude McKay
, published in 1932 under the title Ghetto Noir. He also translated John Steinbeck
, Margaret Kennedy
, and Robert Didier, and some of the Hornblower series of novels by C.S. Forester. Towards the end of his life he created scripts for television adaptations of literary classics.
Louis Guilloux was friendly with many notable writers. He knew the philosopher Jean Grenier
from his teenage years, and was close to Albert Camus
. He was also friends with André Malraux
and Jean Guéhenno
. Camus praised his work highly, and compared his story Compagnons (Companions) to Leo Tolstoy
's The Death of Ivan Ilyich
.
He was Secretary of the first World Congress of Anti-fascist Writers in 1935, then became head of Red Aid International (later known as Secours Populaire - The People's Aid), which helped refugees from Nazi Germany and later assisted the Spanish Republicans.
Following a discussion with Ilya Ehrenbourg, André Gide
invited him to accompany him on his famous trip to the USSR in 1936, in which Eugène Dabit also travelled. However he refused to endorse the Soviet system.
After World War II he helped to establish several provincial Maisons de la Culture.
He died in Saint-Brieuc in 1980 and was buried in the Cimetière Saint-Michel.
Saint-Brieuc
Saint-Brieuc is a commune in the Côtes-d'Armor department in Brittany in northwestern France.-History:Saint-Brieuc is named after a Welsh monk Brioc, who evangelized the region in the 6th century and established an oratory there...
, Brittany
Brittany
Brittany is a cultural and administrative region in the north-west of France. Previously a kingdom and then a duchy, Brittany was united to the Kingdom of France in 1532 as a province. Brittany has also been referred to as Less, Lesser or Little Britain...
, where he lived throughout his life. He is known for his Social Realist novels describing working class life and political struggles in the mid-twentieth century. His best-known book is Le Sang noir
Le Sang noir
Le Sang noir is a 1935 novel by Louis Guilloux that has been described as a "prefiguration of Sartre's La Nausée", because of its concentration on the psychological alienation of an individual.-Origins:...
(Black Blood), which has been described as a "prefiguration of Sartre's La Nausée."
Life and work
Guilloux's father was a shoemaker and socialist activist, a background that Guilloux describes in his first book La Maison du Peuple (The House of the People), which centres on the struggles of a shoemaker called Quéré as seen through the eyes of his young son. The story describes how Quéré's idealistic political activism threatens his small business as he loses custom by pushing against ingrained conservatism. Nevertheless he manages to build self-help cooperatives on the model of Proudhonism.In high school, Guilloux befriended the philosophy tutor Georges Palante
Georges Palante
Georges Toussaint Léon Palante was a French philosopher and sociologist.He advocated aristocratic individualist ideas similar to Nietzsche and Schopenhauer. He was opposed to Émile Durkheim's holism, promoting methodological individualism instead.-Life:Palante was born in Blangy-les-Arras in the...
, an anarchist thinker who later killed himself. Palante's despair inspired him to create the character of Cripure, the anguished anti-hero of Le Sang Noir (1935), which is considered his masterpiece. The name Cripure is a contraction of "Critique de la raison pure" (Critique of Pure Reason
Critique of Pure Reason
The Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant, first published in 1781, second edition 1787, is considered one of the most influential works in the history of philosophy. Also referred to as Kant's "first critique," it was followed by the Critique of Practical Reason and the Critique of Judgement...
). He also commemorated his old tutor in a memoir.
Before becoming a professional writer, literary translator and interpreter, Guilloux worked in various trades, including journalism. He was well known for his fluency in the English language.
He married in 1924, and published La Maison du Peuple in 1927.
The success of the book led to a long series of novels on socially committed themes, usually based in his native Brittany. His masterpiece Le Sang Noir was notable for its departure from his earlier, more staightforwardly socialist literature, since it contains elements of what was later associated with an existentialist or absurdist
Absurdism
In philosophy, "The Absurd" refers to the conflict between the human tendency to seek value and meaning in life and the human inability to find any...
vision. It centres on the suicidal thoughts of the anti-hero, Cripure, who feels overwhelming disgust at humanity in the destructive circumstances of militarism during World War I
World War I
World War I , which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939, and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918...
. Contrasted with the figure of Cripure is the nominal hero, Lucien, who aspires to work for a better future. But the grotesque and self-excoriating visions of Cripure are repeatedly portrayed as more powerful and compelling than Lucien's idealism. The book was translated into English under the title Bitter Victory.
Le Pain des Rêves (Bread of Dreams), which he wrote during the Occupation, won the Prix du roman populiste in 1942. After the liberation of France, Guilloux worked as an interpreter for the American army of occupation. In OK Joe! he explored racial inequalities and injustice in the segregated American army of the time. Guilloux's experiences at this time are described by Alice Kaplan
Alice Kaplan
Alice Kaplan is the John M. Musser Professor of French at Yale University. Before her arrival at Yale, she was the Gilbert, Louis and Edward Lehrman Professor of Romance Studies and Professor of Literature and History at Duke University and founding director of the Center for French and Francophone...
in her 2006 book The Interpreter.
His 1949 novel Le Jeu de Patience (Game of Patience) won the Prix Renaudot
Prix Renaudot
The Prix Théophraste-Renaudot or Prix Renaudot is a French literary award which was created in 1926 by ten art critics awaiting the results of the deliberation of the jury of the Prix Goncourt....
. It has been described as his most experimental work, "an intricate text demanding patient reconstitution by the reader. Micro- and macro-history collide: the horrors of war, and anarchist and Popular Front politics or right-wing coups, impinge violently on private dramas. It is a haunted kaleidoscope, often hallucinatory."
Guilloux was also a translator of a number of books, including the novel Home to Harlem written by black American author Claude McKay
Claude McKay
Claude McKay was a Jamaican-American writer and poet. He was a seminal figure in the Harlem Renaissance and wrote three novels: Home to Harlem , a best-seller which won the Harmon Gold Award for Literature, Banjo , and Banana Bottom...
, published in 1932 under the title Ghetto Noir. He also translated John Steinbeck
John Steinbeck
John Ernst Steinbeck, Jr. was an American writer. He is widely known for the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Grapes of Wrath and East of Eden and the novella Of Mice and Men...
, Margaret Kennedy
Margaret Kennedy
Margaret Kennedy was an English novelist and playwright.-Family and education:Margaret Kennedy was born in Hyde Park Gate, London, the eldest of the four children of Charles Moore Kennedy , a barrister, and his wife Ellinor Edith Marwood...
, and Robert Didier, and some of the Hornblower series of novels by C.S. Forester. Towards the end of his life he created scripts for television adaptations of literary classics.
Louis Guilloux was friendly with many notable writers. He knew the philosopher Jean Grenier
Jean Grenier
Jean Grenier was a French philosopher and writer. He taught for a time in Algiers, where he became a significant influence on the young Albert Camus.-Biography:...
from his teenage years, and was close to Albert Camus
Albert Camus
Albert Camus was a French author, journalist, and key philosopher of the 20th century. In 1949, Camus founded the Group for International Liaisons within the Revolutionary Union Movement, which was opposed to some tendencies of the Surrealist movement of André Breton.Camus was awarded the 1957...
. He was also friends with André Malraux
André Malraux
André Malraux DSO was a French adventurer, award-winning author, and statesman. Having traveled extensively in Indochina and China, Malraux was noted especially for his novel entitled La Condition Humaine , which won the Prix Goncourt...
and Jean Guéhenno
Jean Guéhenno
Marcel-Jules-Marie Guéhenno, known as Jean Guéhenno was a French essayist, writer and literary critic....
. Camus praised his work highly, and compared his story Compagnons (Companions) to Leo Tolstoy
Leo Tolstoy
Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy was a Russian writer who primarily wrote novels and short stories. Later in life, he also wrote plays and essays. His two most famous works, the novels War and Peace and Anna Karenina, are acknowledged as two of the greatest novels of all time and a pinnacle of realist...
's The Death of Ivan Ilyich
The Death of Ivan Ilyich
The Death of Ivan Ilyich , first published in 1886, is a novella by Leo Tolstoy, and is considered to be one of the masterpieces of his late fiction, written shortly after his religious conversion of the late 1870s.-Characters:...
.
Political activities
Guilloux was active in left wing causes. In 1927, he signed the petition, published April 15 in the magazine Europe, against the law on the general organization of the nation for war, objecting to the restrictions on intellectual independence and freedom of opinion.He was Secretary of the first World Congress of Anti-fascist Writers in 1935, then became head of Red Aid International (later known as Secours Populaire - The People's Aid), which helped refugees from Nazi Germany and later assisted the Spanish Republicans.
Following a discussion with Ilya Ehrenbourg, André Gide
André Gide
André Paul Guillaume Gide was a French author and winner of the Nobel Prize in literature in 1947. Gide's career ranged from its beginnings in the symbolist movement, to the advent of anticolonialism between the two World Wars.Known for his fiction as well as his autobiographical works, Gide...
invited him to accompany him on his famous trip to the USSR in 1936, in which Eugène Dabit also travelled. However he refused to endorse the Soviet system.
After World War II he helped to establish several provincial Maisons de la Culture.
He died in Saint-Brieuc in 1980 and was buried in the Cimetière Saint-Michel.
Prix Louis Guilloux
In 1983 the Conseil général des Côtes-d'Armor created the Louis Guilloux Prize "to perpetuate the literary ideals and values of the Breton writer". The prize is granted each year to a work in the French language which is characterised by "the humane qualities of generous thought, refusing all dualism and all sacrifice of individuality in favour of ideological abstractions".Published books
- La Maison du Peuple (1927)
- Lettres de Proudhon, choisies et annotées par L. Guilloux en collaboration avec Daniel Halévy (1929)
- Dossier confidentiel (1930)
- Compagnons (1931)
- Souvenirs sur Georges PalanteGeorges PalanteGeorges Toussaint Léon Palante was a French philosopher and sociologist.He advocated aristocratic individualist ideas similar to Nietzsche and Schopenhauer. He was opposed to Émile Durkheim's holism, promoting methodological individualism instead.-Life:Palante was born in Blangy-les-Arras in the...
(1931) - Hyménée (1932)
- Le Lecteur écrit, compilation de courriers de lecteurs du journal « L'intransigeant » (1933)
- Angélina (1934)
- Le Sang Noir (1935)
- Histoire de brigands, récits (1936)
- Le Pain des Rêves (1942)
- Le Jeu de Patience (1949)
- Absent de Paris (1952)
- Parpagnacco ou la Conjuration (1954)
- Les Batailles Perdues (1960)
- Cripure, pièce tirée du Sang Noir (1961)
- La Confrontation (1968)
- La Bretagne que j'aime (Ma Bretagne) (1973)
- Salido, suivi de OK Joe ! (1976)
- Coco Perdu (1978)
- Carnets 1921-1944 (1978)
Posthumous
- Grand Bêta, conte (1981)
- Carnets 1944-1974 (1982)
- L'Herbe d'oubli, mémoires (1984)
- Labyrinthe (1999)
- Vingt ans ma belle âge (1999)