The French Exception

On Laurent Binet and French Literature

Pablo Picasso, Cat Eating a Bird, 1939, Oil on canvas

If you are a diligent reader of the novels flowing out of the Anglosphere for the last five or ten years, there are a number of reasons why French literary culture might strike you as rather strange. First, French writers seem to be unusually responsive to current events: while we were all writing our neat little autofictions about that time someone was mean to us in our MFA program, Michel Houellebecq was concocting terrorist attacks and farmers’ rebellions with such sociological acuity that one or two of them actually came true. Second, French writers seem to revel in nastiness in a way that few international contemporaries can: while we were all looking deep within ourselves and trying to work out whether we were good, or authentic, or racist, Emmanuel Carrère was charting the developments of his latest herpes outbreak and Annie Ernaux remembering her abortions in excruciating detail. Third, French writers have remained unapologetically erudite: while the rest of us were channeling the crisp, boring cadences of Strunk and White, Mathias Énard was writing page-long sentences likening the metaphysics of existence to “the ostinato of the zarb.”

Most of all, though, French literary culture seems capable of producing works of high literary merit which manage to be fun. There is an expansiveness to a lot of French writing these days — a hearty appetite for other places, other epochs, other people, and a willingness to enjoy the world’s variegations in a way that is untroubled by “stay-in-your-lane” conservatism. Perhaps the best exemplar of this most overlooked of literary virtues is Laurent Binet.

Binet’s back catalogue is full of the kind of wacky, high-concept efforts that end up languishing in other writers’ sock drawers. His last novel, 2019’s Civilizations, rendered, via a stream of made-up letters and other pseudepigrapha, an alternate history where the Americas were never conquered, ending with Montaigne and Cervantes stepping off the boat on the shores of the Inca Empire. The novel before that, The Seventh Function of Language, spun the death of the French semiotician Roland Barthes into a murder mystery, its more memorable moments including a threesome involving Julia Kristeva, Hélène Cixous, and the detective tasked with solving the case. The Binet recipe, in other words, seems to be combining some plank of École Normale Supérieure’s humanist curriculum with enough ludic raciness that the reader forgets they are receiving what is, in essence, a history lesson. It is a dangerous strategy. It hasn’t failed him yet.

Binet’s new novel, Perspectives, takes as its setting the Florence of the late renaissance. It is New Year’s Day, 1557, and the Mannerist painter Jacopo da Pontormo has been found dead amid his own half-complete frescoes in the church of San Lorenzo, stabbed through the heart with his own chisel. The authorities suspect murder. But by whom? A robber? A disgruntled member of his workshop? A rival artist? To make matters all the stranger, a part of the frescoes seems to have been hastily repainted by a different hand, and upon searching Pontormo’s residence, the authorities find an obscene version of the famous nude Venus and Cupid, in which Venus’ face has been replaced by that of seventeen-year-old Maria de’ Medici, daughter of the Duke of Florence.

Fittingly for a novel about renaissance culture on the brink of sliding into Mannerism, this story wears its formal conceits and conventions proudly. Binet begins with a winkingly postmodern account of finding a cache of yellowed old letters in a Tuscan bookshop, already arranged to reveal the shocking murder and its aftermath. There follows a tight epistolary narrative, as half of Florence contrives, variously, either to uncover or conceal what has happened to Pontormo. Subplots bloom with improbable frequency, as the eleventh Italian war rumbles towards its conclusion and Maria de’ Medici elopes to France with a courtier. In other words, though the subject matter is Italian, the real urtexts seem to be French: first the theories of Binet’s beloved Barthes, then Les Liaisons Dangereuses.

The cacophony of different voices, and the brisk, gossipy tones Binet has his Florentine luminaries adopt, have led a number of critics to conclude that France’s great literary entertainer has given up on intellectual seriousness. One French reviewer, counting a total of twenty correspondents in Binet’s convenient list of characters, grumbled that “this is no longer an epistolary novel, it’s a WhatsApp group.” And there is, admittedly, a certain staginess that must be exorcised before the narrative can get underway: Maria’s first letter to Catherine de’ Medici, for instance, cannot resist the clunky expository observation that “you are my aunt,” and a later letter from Vincenzo Borghini to Giorgio Vasari apprises him of what has happened with the one line that all decent dramaturges are taught to avoid: “As you know . . . .”

But these slips are brief, and forgivable. This is the sixteenth century: self-dramatization, high camp, and great tempests of gossip are entirely to be expected. And often, when characters’ prose seems most overwrought in Perspectives, what is actually being carried out is a very careful, competent pastiche. The great art historian Giorgio Vasari, whom the Duke of Florence appoints detective of choice, fawns upon both his patron and the artists whom he interviews to a degree that can seem ridiculous:

One sees celestial influence raining the most precious gifts upon certain men such as you, oh my divine Master, genius of a kind that occurs only twice a century. (And even the magnificent Leonardo is your inferior, because he lacks your tremendous piety and because he is no sculptor).

Except, of course, if you read the real Vasari, in The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, you will find all the same tics: the invocation of the heavens, the hyperbolic praise, the compulsive ranking of grades of genius like some kind of sixteenth-century Harold Bloom.

Similarly, the occasional absurdities of Benvenuto Cellini, who is tasked by the Duke’s French enemies of stealing the offending nude and likes to describe himself as things like “too quick for the human eye,” are if anything muted when compared to Cellini’s own famous Autobiography — in which, lest we forget, he actually claims to have summoned legion of devils in the pit of the Colosseum while lamenting the departure of one of his many mistresses. Overall, Perspectives’ fidelity to the spirit, if not the letter, of its source material is an immense achievement on Binet’s part. At a time when a lot of historical novels seem content to import contemporary issues into exotic settings — imagine what it was like to be a marginalized person in medieval times, with no HR department to protect you, etc. — the author has, at the very least, done his research.

It is thus even more of a shame that in its English editions the book seems to be marketed and reviewed more as a “romp” (The Guardian’s word), than a literary novel with something to say about art and its place in history (tellingly, both the US and UK have expunged the brackets in the French title, Perspective(s), with its off-putting echo of the graduate critical theory seminar). But this strategy is, I believe, a mistake. Lurking beneath the murders and mischief, there is not just a serviceable collection of pastiches and imitations, but a thoughtful, timely book about the tussle between aesthetics and society trying to get out.

Perhaps the most important thing to bear in mind when trying to understand the art-historical significance of Perspectives is that it is not really about the renaissance — at least not the renaissance we think we know. We have arrived at the party late. Leonardo and Raphael are dead, Michelangelo is living out his last days in exile in Rome, and Florence is overrun by philistines, from the counter-reformatory puritans, to pyromaniac followers of Savonarola. The duke who appoints Vasari to solve the murder is not the famously munificent, dynasty-founding Cosimo de’ Medici, but his sixteenth-century namesake — a thoroughly worldly character who seems to care about very little besides getting himself crowned king. The renaissance, in other words, is sputtering; the golden age is lapsing into the silver; painting, meanwhile, is on the cusp of curdling into Mannerism, as the laws of perspective handed down by the great Brunelleschi are left behind. That Binet wants us to make some connection between this age and ours is suggested by his inclusion of little anachronisms — the troupe of proto-Marxist color-grinders who want to reduce the renaissance to an accretion of their labor, and, most memorably of all, a brace of appalling proto-woke nuns desperate to kindle their very own bonfire of the vanities. Binet’s epigraph, plucked from one of Michelangelo’s letters to his father, is quite clearly meant to resonate today: “These are hard times for art.”

The strangeness of the epoch puts its great artists in a difficult position. On the one hand, they want to stick up for their illustrious forebears against the tide of philistinism. On the other hand, as artists, they also have a duty to modify, overturn, push beyond; excessive reverence of the past will strike their art dead. They are caught in the old paradox articulated by Eliot in “Tradition and the Individual Talent”: how to honor and preserve tradition while remaining original? And how to walk the tightrope between deference and iconoclasm?

Some of Perspectives’ most beautiful passages are to be found as Florence’s luminaries grapple with these questions. Michelangelo, in a letter to Vasari that proves decisive in solving the murder, writes that:

Brunelleschi’s discovery of the laws of perspective, was like Prometheus stealing fire and giving it to mankind. [ . . . ] Depth opened the gates of infinity to us. [ . . . ] Perspective is infinity brought within reach of all those who have eyes to see. Our mortal perception did not and could not grasp the notion of infinity, so we thought. But, by grace of the painters who mastered optical effects, the miracle was made possible: we can see beyond.

Over Perspectives’ 250 pages, such musings build to a remarkably cogent defense of Mannerism — an often-derided school of painting — as the crowning glory of the golden age that preceded it. In an age of puritanism, Binet shows, the importance of developing a self-conscious style — informed by erudition, but not bound by it. In the novel’s preface, Binet channels his former self, full of mistrust for the Mannerist period:

Florence produced geniuses, then chased them away or at least failed to keep them; that was why the city’s glory years ended with the Middle Ages. [ . . . ] When Savonarola ordered Botticelli to burn his paintings, it was not only beauty that he killed. By reducing idealism to his own blinkered fanaticism, he destroyed the very desire for the ideal.

But reading through the cache of letters that comprises the novel prompts him to change his mind. “I was wrong, I confess,” he writes. “And it took the events I am about to recount to you to save me from my blindness. Because to see is to think. The viewer must deserve his painting.” Even in the most puritanical of times, great art can be found, if only you know how to look for it. Sometimes the perceived sterility of an age is the fault not of its artists, but of their public.

What causes bursts of local genius like the Florentine renaissance? This is the other great question posed by Perspectives, and is never satisfactorily answered. The narrator’s own contention in the preface — that Florence’s “breeding ground for genius” is explained by it also being “a crucible of boiling passions” — hardly convinces. Perhaps the point is not so much to find an answer to the question as to discover, through asking it, the myriad ways in which different historical societies have managed to produce the sense that their art deserved to last. In any case, it is certainly a question I returned to again and again while reading Perspectives. Except the society I had in mind wasn’t Florence at all: it was France.

Thomas Peermohamed Lambert is a writer and academic from London. He writes for a number of publications, including The Times, The New Statesman, and Unherd, and his first novel, Shibboleth, was released in May. He is also a doctoral student in Modern Languages at the University of Oxford, researching Jorge Luis Borges.