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BASIL HATIMthe reasons for the state of neglect suffered by the French writer Jules Vallès’strilogy L’Enfant, Le Bachelier and L’Insurgé, and shows that the reasons areessentially discoursal. Central to the trilogy on all levels (thematic, formal andfunctional) is an intense rejection of the oppressive ideological apparatus ofthe state’s educational system. To achieve these discourse aims, Vallès putsthe entire gamut of linguistic and textual form to work, from neologisms tojuxtaposition and irony, from syntax to discourse. As Bruce points out, thismust have constituted sufficient grounds for excluding Vallès from the Frenchcanon ‘in part for revenge, in part lest the virus spread’ (1994: 51). It isinteresting to note that this intentional exclusion was not restricted to France,as the strategic neglect was almost immediately echoed in French literaturecurricula around the globe, particularly in non-francophone countries wherethe Lycée model had been adopted.The primary reason for neglecting Vallès’s works is certainly ideological:the writer’s anarchist links with the commune, his less than favourable attitudetowards the educational establishment and the critical stance he adoptedtowards the oppressive humanist culture were probably enough to qualify himas a subversive element that must be suppressed. Part of the ideological reasonis also the way the French critical establishment signalled its displeasure,banishing Vallès from anthologies and literary histories, a move that was notlost on non-French users of French literature.But there are other possible reasons for the ‘ghettoization’ of Vallès’swritings:• in terms of style, the rather heavy use made of journalistic devices was seenby Vallès’s critics as ‘inferior’ and not ‘belletristic’;• rhetorically, the texts were strongly ‘referential’ (inaccessible when portrayingthe explosion of the Commune, for example);• politically, the texts were morbid, problematizing social conflict instead ofproviding an escape from it;• in the intellectual climate of the times, Vallès’s exclusion from the canonmeant that the taste for his writing was not generally cultivated, anotherpernicious aspect of the delegitimization process.3.8 CONCLUSION AND IMPLICATIONS FOR THE TRANSLATIONANALYSTIn this chapter, we have examined the complexity surrounding four basicsuprasentential entities with which writers and readers of English and translatorsinto and from English constantly engage: register, text, genre anddiscourse. It might be helpful now to see this process of interaction schematicallyrepresented (see Figure 3.2). It is discourse that is shown to enjoy aprivileged status: it subsumes (and is expressed through) genre, which in turnsubsumes texts and is thereby enabled to exist. Texts revolve round the idea52