Genre, style and culture in the translation into French of popular fiction

This paper considers two authors, Ian Fleming and Dashiell Hammett, who contributed to the popular genres respectively of spy fiction and crime fiction. We examine the changing reception in France of the authors by analysing some examples of how their books were translated when they were published and at the present time. The discussion centres on a consideration, on the one hand of the books’ literary qualities, given that they are what George Orwell called ‘good-bad’ books, and on the other of the wider socio-cultural context that seems to determine the reception of literature of this kind. To highlight the French situation we consider in tandem the sharply contrasting UK socio-cultural context. Introduction The category of ‘good bad books’ was defined by Orwell (1968: 19), in an entertaining essay on the subject, as ‘the kind of book that has no literary pretensions but which remains readable when more serious productions have perished’. Genre fiction seems to be in the majority in this category. Orwell (ibid.) mentions as an outstanding example the Sherlock Holmes stories, ‘which have kept their place when innumerable “problem novels”, “human documents” and “terrible indictments” of this or that have fallen into deserved oblivion’. Orwell also cites Uncle Tom’s Cabin as a book that is hard to take seriously by strictly literary criteria. We might therefore add to the list didactic fiction, and risk the generalisation that the category excludes modern mainstream novels, the principal subject of which can be perhaps be defined as the complexity of human relationships, dramatised in settings that are not too far removed from the experience of most readers. This category has emerged fairly recently; since about 1800 in English literature, in contrast to the picaresque that was largely prevalent before then. We consider here Ian Fleming and Dashiell Hammett, who made notable contributions to the good-bad genre known respectively as ‘spy fiction’ and what is variously labelled crime, detective, noir, policier, etc. Ian Fleming For the sympathetic reader, Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels and stories are situated towards the ‘good’ end of the good-bad category. Fleming’s brother Peter, himself an accomplished travel writer and journalist, said much the same thing when he described the Bond books as ‘‘tosh’ – but tosh of the highest order, fashioned with great professional skill’ (Hart-Davis 1974: 355). The books can be placed more or less squarely in the spy story sub-genre of crime fiction (although Bond, strictly, is a secret agent). The spy story, as Symons remarks in his comprehensive survey of the crime genre (1985: 214), ‘owed its existence to awareness of the threat to national security implied in professionally organised spying’, which is no doubt true so far as the social impulse is concerned. Symons’s approach is fairly relentlessly sociological, a position we shall have occasion to nuance in what follows. Fleming (1908–1964), owing to his dates, his implacably anti-Soviet stance and his war-time experience in British Naval Intelligence, was well placed to sketch in six of his twelve James Bond novels an at least superficially plausible cold-war setting, presented from a pro-Western viewpoint. Equally, Fleming’s privileged background enabled him to take the spy story in a new direction by setting it in a glamorous international context, replete with luxury brand-names and (for the 1950s and 1960s) exotic locations, most notably Jamaica where Fleming owned a house. This glamour (and his ‘sadism’), while providing excitement for many if not most ordinary readers, brought out the puritan in many critics and condemned him at the time to good-bad status at very best. Amis published in 1965 a diverting and at the same time critically well-informed study of the Bond novels. The study is significant in being one of the first, if not the first, to bring to bear the critical apparatus of the time on a body of popular fiction. Amis deplored the rigid distinction between serious and genre literature, and himself wrote several genre works, including the first post-Fleming Bond novel (Colonel Sun, 1968). He was mostly concerned in his 1965 study to rebut the charges of sadism, misogyny and snobbery commonly levelled against Fleming, and to explore what he called the ‘Fleming effect’, what Larkin (1983: 266) described as: