French Literature Reviews - 2026
Bertrand Leclair, The Powers of Art, or The Spear of Telephus
Literary Theory, Linguistics and Stylistics
Far from being an end in itself or a refined form of entertainment, artistic practice (writing as much as reading) is first and foremost an experience—that is, a gateway to a form of knowledge. This knowledge forms the bedrock of art. It resists intellectual discourse, yet it remains incomparable and undoubtedly unique, worlds away from the self-help manuals that sprout like cacti across our spiritual wasteland.
It is this stubborn conviction that The Powers of Art, or The Spear of Telephus seeks to unfold. Crafted in the mode of an essay in the truest, most literary sense of the word, it owes its subtitle to one of the opening lines of Samuel Beckett's luminous Proust, published back in 1930: “Each of Proust's spears could be a spear of Telephus,” asserts Beckett right at the outset, omitting to mention that Telephus—accidentally wounded during the siege of Troy by Achilles' spear—was healed, as the oracle had predicted, by a scraping of rust from the iron of that very same spear. In short, the poison is the remedy, and there is no other. Indeed, In Search of Lost Time hammers this point home: we are unfailingly wounded by truth, to the point of seeking shelter from it behind reason and “anaesthetizing habit,” yet only a surplus of truth can heal us of this wound and restore us to joy.
Tracing its path of errors and therefore of wisdom while holding philosophy at arm's length, the Search thus stands as a vital demonstration of the powers of art, which might be summarized as follows: whereas in the West revealed truth has shaped our ways of living and thinking in the name of otherworldly bliss, being rid of this imposed truth in no way means—quite the contrary—renouncing the pursuit of the gates of joy here and now, in the strongest sense of the term: “A joy akin to a certainty and sufficient without other proof to make me indifferent to death,” the Search asserts on several occasions—no small claim if one is willing to entertain it.
While The Powers of Art could just as easily have been entitled “Concerning the Spiritual in Art, and More Particularly in Literature,” in reference to Wassily Kandinsky's famous essay, the spiritual invoked here makes no appeal to heavenly or religious representations. On the contrary, it is anchored in the “earth-sense” (Nietzsche), rejecting all ordinary forms of sacralization of art, where to sacralize is always to set apart, to divide: literature here only has meaning insofar as it signifies living life, experienced life, quite by contrast.
Wandering from text to text through the foundational notions of order and disorder, knowledge and erudition, capacity and power, and ultimately, the real and reality, The Powers of Art achieves a form of elucidation by liberating the “id” of the sacred: for in the end, that “it creates” (*ça crée*) had to be heard, carving out spiritual escapes in a world that, on certain days, seems on the verge of losing consciousness.
Read an excerpt from the work on Fabula…
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A novelist, essayist, and playwright, Bertrand Leclair was born in Lille in December 1961. He has published some twenty books since L'industrie de la consolation, released by Verticales in 1998, including L'invraisemblable histoire de Georges Pessant (Flammarion, 2010), Malentendus (Actes Sud, 2013), and Perdre la tête (Mercure de France, 2017). He was awarded the CNL Cioran Grant in 2009 for his essay Dans les rouleaux du temps (Flammarion). Also the author of around thirty radio dramas (for France Culture and France Inter), he has worked as a literary critic for numerous periodicals (La Quinzaine littéraire, Les Inrockuptibles, Le Monde des livres...), and regularly contributes to the digital daily AOC. His most recent title is Le Train de Proust (Fayard, 2022).
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P. Senges dedicated a review to this book on en-attendant-nadeau.fr:
"In 2001, in Théorie de la déroute, Bertrand Leclair described literature as ‘the very site of the most concrete resistance to dominant ideologies.’ Twenty-three years later, literature, ideologies, and artistic forms of resistance remain for him a subject of concern and study—proof of a constancy happily combined with maturation (otherwise, what is the point of growing older and reading books?). In The Powers of Art, placed under the aegis of In Search of Lost Time (as well as Beckett, that reader of Proust from whom is borrowed the image of the spear of Telephus, capable of both wounding and healing), the author invites us to distinguish erudition (fixed, hoarded, assertoric, associated with power) from knowledge (shifting, unquantifiable, tied to desires and the life drive, associated with capacity) and to see in art (literary art, in particular) the finest vehicle for this knowledge.
According to him, at a time when spirituality is no longer the prerogative of religions, the artist and the art lover must concern themselves with the sacred: with the origins and ends of a work, not merely its craftsmanship. A Freudian-Lacanian wordplay, ça crée (it creates), illustrates or justifies bringing together spirituality and an art anchored in the drives and the body (elsewhere, etymology coaxes words out of their slumber). Certain claims may leave one perplexed (a ‘rational obscurantism’ inherited from the Enlightenment correlated with ‘the destruction of European Jews’; the body designated as ‘the sole authority,’ and capable of ‘testifying to a sense of truth’). By offering us an essay driven by an appetite for knowledge, never boxed in by scholarly authority, Bertrand Leclair was well aware that he was also exposing it to dispute, or even refutation—the very guarantees of its vitality." — Pierre Senges
Crafted in the tradition of the literary essay, the volume engages with foundational questions regarding the nature of artistic creation, distinguishing between rigid erudition and a dynamic pursuit of knowledge. By examining how literature operates outside conventional religious frameworks, the text situates its reflections within broader discussions on the spiritual dimensions of art and the ways in which aesthetic experience engages with reality. Readers interested in contemporary French essays and the intersection of literature, philosophy, and modern cultural thought may find the volume relevant to their inquiries.
Drawing inspiration from diverse intellectual traditions and figures such as Marcel Proust and Samuel Beckett, the work considers how creative expression confronts dominant ideologies and responds to the spiritual conditions of the contemporary world. The author navigates complex notions concerning order, desire, and the sacred, presenting artistic practice as an enduring form of inquiry. Through close attention to texts and cultural forms, the publication contributes to ongoing debates surrounding the role of art in shaping human understanding and experience.