SOURCE: Schwartz, Leonard. “The Forgotten as Contemporary: Benjamin Fondane and Roger Gilbert-Lecomte.” Literary Review 30, no. 3 (spring 1987): 465-67.

In the essay below, Schwartz discusses how the relatively obscure surrealist works of Fondane and Roger Gilbert-Lecomte are newly relevant to contemporary French writing.

Literary activity and literary history need not be divorced from one another. Why include two writers from an earlier epoch in an issue devoted to contemporary French writing, if the relationship between the contemporary and the historical were not significant? Indeed, one of the most striking aspects of writing in France is the way older texts are suddenly revived, taken seriously, and assigned fresh critical significance in the presence of a particular contemporary interest or mood. This sense of an active fertile past that informs the language of the present can be traced back to both an acute self-consciousness in France about predecessors, and to the fact...