Egalitarian Strangeness

InPart Two, Hughes analyses forms of domination and dressage withreference to Simone Weil’s mid-1930s factory journal, Paul Nizan’s novel ofclass alienation Antoine Bloyé from the same decade, and Pierre Michon’sVies minuscules [Small Lives] (1984) with its focus on obscure rurallives.

---

The formulation ‘egalitarian strangeness’ is a direct
borrowing from Courts voyages au pays du peuple [Short Voyages to the
Land of the People] (1990), a collection of essays by the contemporary French
thinker Jacques Rancière. Perhaps best known for his theory of radical equality
as set out in Le Maître ignorant [The Ignorant Schoolmaster] (1987),
Rancière reflects on ways in which a hierarchical social order based on
inequality can come to be unsettled. In the democracy of literature, for
example, he argues that words and sentences serve to capture any life and to
make it available to any reader. The present book explores embedded forms of
social and cultural ‘apportionment’ in a range of modern and contemporary
French texts (including prose fiction, socially engaged commentary, and
autobiography), while also identifying scenes of class disturbance and
egalitarian encounter. Part One considers the ‘refrain of class’ audible in
works by Claude Simon, Charles Péguy, Marie Ndiaye, Thierry Beinstingel, and Gabriel Gauny and
examines how these authors’ practices of language connect with that refrain. In
Part Two, Hughes analyses forms of domination and dressage with
reference to Simone Weil’s mid-1930s factory journal, Paul Nizan’s novel of
class alienation Antoine Bloyé from the same decade, and Pierre Michon’s
Vies minuscules [Small Lives] (1984) with its focus on obscure rural
lives. The reflection on how these narratives draw into contiguity antagonistic
identities is extended in Part Three, where individual chapters on Proust and
the contemporary authors François Bon and Didier Eribon demonstrate ways in
which enduring forms of cultural distribution are both consolidated and
contested.