Reading Order
La Femme assise (Apollinaire)La Femme assise Reading Order
La Femme assise (The Seated Woman, 1920) by Guillaume Apollinaire is his only full-length novel — published posthumously, having been composed from 1914 to 1918 during the same period as Calligrammes and his service at the front. It is a picaresque novel about a Bohemian adventuress named Elvire, born in Spain, who drifts through the Americas, France, and Switzerland, encountering Mormons, American adventurers, anarchists, and artists, before ending in Paris. The novel is unusual in Apollinaire's work for its sustained prose narrative, its comic realism, and its portrait of modern female independence in ways that anticipate the novel of female liberation later in the century. Like all of Apollinaire's prose, it blends fantasy and realism, the folkloric and the contemporary, the erotic and the satirical. La Femme assise is not widely read but is essential for understanding the full range of Apollinaire's ambition and the way his imagination worked in extended prose narrative rather than in the concentrated lyric forms of the poetry.
Where to start
Read the novel straight through — it has a more conventional narrative structure than the prose poems and fantasy stories, and the picaresque plot (Elvire's adventures) gives it a forward momentum that the earlier prose works lack. The Mormon and American episodes are the most unusual (Apollinaire invented his American geography freely) and the most characteristic of his fantastic-realist mode.
Complete La Femme assise (Apollinaire) Book List
- 1Buy
La Femme assise (1920)
Guillaume Apollinaire·1920·In the Gallimard/Folio edition or the Pléiade Œuvres en prose complètes. No complete English translation is currently in print. - 2Buy
Alcools (1913)
Guillaume Apollinaire·1913·The poetry that the novel complements — reading both shows the full range of Apollinaire's imagination, from concentrated lyric to extended picaresque narrative. - 3Buy
Le Poète assassiné (1916)
Guillaume Apollinaire·1916·The semi-autobiographical prose fiction — the natural companion to La Femme assise, as the two major prose works bracket the period of Apollinaire's creative maturity. - 4Buy
Candide
Voltaire·1759·The great French picaresque philosophical tale — Voltaire's Candide is the most obvious formal model for La Femme assise's picaresque structure and satirical mode, and reading them together shows what Apollinaire absorbed from the tradition. - 5Buy
L'Hérésiarque et Cie (1910)
Guillaume Apollinaire·1910·The earlier short stories — the natural predecessor to La Femme assise in Apollinaire's prose fiction, showing the range of his fantastic-realist prose before he attempted the full novel form.
La Femme assise (Apollinaire) — Frequently Asked Questions
What is the plot of La Femme assise?
The novel follows Elvire, a Bohemian Spanish woman of no fixed identity, through a series of adventures in the United States (particularly among Mormon communities in Utah, which Apollinaire imagined freely), in Switzerland, and in Paris. The 'seated woman' of the title is partly Elvire (who is often described sitting, waiting, observing) and partly a reference to the famous seated female figures in Cubist painting (Apollinaire knew the Cubists well). The novel is episodic rather than tightly plotted, with the picaresque structure — a series of encounters with eccentric characters — providing the main momentum.
Did Apollinaire know Utah or the American West?
No — Apollinaire never visited the United States. His American geography in La Femme assise is entirely invented, assembled from reading (particularly popular literature about the Wild West and American sensationalism) and from his capacious imagination. The Mormon communities he describes bear no particular relation to actual Mormon life in Utah; they are a projection of his fantasies about American religious extravagance. This freedom from factual accuracy is characteristic of Apollinaire — he preferred the mythological and fantastic to the documentary.
Why is the novel rarely read compared to the poetry?
La Femme assise suffers from the posthumous circumstances of its publication (it was assembled and published in 1920, two years after Apollinaire's death, from a manuscript he had not finished revising) and from its genre — novel-reading in early twentieth-century France expected something different from what Apollinaire delivers. The novel doesn't have the concentrated lyric intensity of the poetry, nor does it have the formal experimentation of the calligrams; it is a relatively straightforward picaresque narrative that reads as somewhat diluted by comparison with the major work. It is best understood as a side-current of Apollinaire's creativity rather than as a central achievement.
What does the title 'La Femme assise' mean?
The title means simply 'The Seated Woman' — a phrase that evokes both the central female character (Elvire, who is often described in the posture of waiting, seated) and the tradition of the seated female figure in Cubist painting and sculpture. Apollinaire was deeply embedded in the Cubist world (he was the movement's most important critic) and the title consciously evokes paintings like Picasso's various seated women. The 'seated woman' is also a figure of self-sufficient interiority — the woman who sits rather than acts, observes rather than participates, which makes her an interesting figure for Apollinaire to center a picaresque adventure novel on.
What other late works did Apollinaire complete before his death?
In the final two years of his life (1916-1918), after his head wound, Apollinaire was extraordinarily productive: Calligrammes (published April 1918); the play Les Mamelles de Tirésias (performed 1917 — where he coined 'Surrealism'); the novel La Femme assise (not published until 1920); and an enormous volume of journalism and criticism. He also worked on a collection of erotic tales and continued writing the love poems for Jacqueline Kolb ('Lou' replaced by the woman he married in 1918). His death at thirty-eight cut short a creative period of renewed energy and ambition.
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