The ULg’s publishing house has just brought forth a work signed by Jean-Marie Klinkenberg, called Périphériques Nord. It is a collection of the most significant essays and articles written by the ULg’s Professor of Rhetoric and Semiotics, today named a Professor Emeritus, and the work is devoted to Belgian literature expressed in the French language, which explains its subtitle: Fragments of a Social History of Belgian Francophone Literature.

For a long time the histories of literature were no more than an accumulation of the names of authors and the titles of works, vaguely brought together under the label of some school or another and following an implacable historical line.    They were full of holes and excesses, including unanimous celebrations but also deafening silences. Such and such a writer were given all the honours, whilst others were haughtily ignored. And more seriously than that, within these histories literary works were presented as completely disembodied, clean of any social marking or ideological stamp. In short, a pure aesthetic product, born ex nihilo from the singular genius of the writers and their quills. And the literary critical books? So many summarising works with a pedagogical aim, to be repeated (or even copied?) one after the other.

All of the articles brought together within Périphériques Nord (1) more than show that Jean-Marie Klinkenberg broke with this fossilising practice, widely attributed to the French critic, Gustave Lanson. Nourished by the pioneering works of Jacques Dubois – including that of L'institution de la littérature (Nathan/Labor, 1986) – and those by the very prolific Pierre Bourdieu, he places his analyses within a resolutely sociological perspective, thus making us aware that literature is the site of the manoeuvres of powers struggles. It is at the same time an economic commodity and a symbolic commodity: economic, as the book, having a market value, does not escape the infamous rules of market forces, even if writers grumble about considering this dimension of their solitary creative activity; symbolic because their literary value is established along the criteria specific to a field of production dominated by Paris, a city where the authorities of legitimation formulate their rules.

This state of affairs does not lack significant consequences for peripheral Francophone literatures, and those of Belgium in particular, and as much for the publishers as for the writers themselves. The former, whether they are from Brussels or Wallonia, are forced to abandon to the Parisian stage the monopoly of what is in literary terms considered of ‘high value’; it is left to them to fall back on the crumbs of a literature which is considered less culturally endowed, comic strips for example, even if it means abandoning leadership when this so typically Belgian genre acquires prestige. The latter, whose works nourish the publishing world, are faced with a dilemma which can be summarised in two words; assimilation or differentiation. To put it another way, for francophone writers from the margins (Belgian, French speaking Swiss or Quebecois), is it better to become assimilated with the French circle or to cultivate their difference at any cost?

(1) Périphériques Nord, Fragments d'une histoire sociale de la littérature francophone en Belgique, Jean-Marie Klinkenberg, Editions de l'Université de Liège, 2010.