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Them’s big terms, I know. They were the ones pinging around in my brain when I left the Musée de Cluny on Saturday. It was my first visit, shamefully enough. I went with my Victorianist and the Reluctant Anthropologist, an American friend I made during our mutually frustrating time in Toulouse. We were all thrilled with the place, for different reasons — I because I harbor secret medievalist ambitions, the Victorianist because, in addition to the cultural-historical curiosity we share, she’s a bit of a Marianist idolator, and the R. A. because she is passionate about art history, and interested in the Cluny’s array of objects primarily for their aesthetic values.
As we made our way through rooms full of wooden and marble altarpieces, saints’ images, chapel windows, the R.A.’s constant refrain was, ‘I cannot believe — I just cannot believe that France was once a Catholic country.’
It’s an odd statement. Even given the rigor with which la laïcité has been enforced as a national way of being by the Cinquième République, France — at least to a WASP from the American Northeast — still feels Catholic. It feels especially so to a WASP from the Northeast who spends much of her time in a period when the whole point about France was that it was a Catholic country. And not just any Catholic country, but — as even the most stringent modern laïcarde will note with bizarre grudging pride — la fille aînée de l’Eglise.
And yet, amid all this palpable Ecclesiastica, one can’t help but think about laws regarding public exhibition of signes ostensibles de la religion, about the unspoken prohibition against discussing divinity or religion in polite, casual company, about how weirded out the French are that the English maintain a state Church, or that the American President is sworn in on a Bible. One must confront the fact that la laïcité has been a defining feature of French républicanisme since the 1790’s.
The Cluny is, nevertheless, a national museum. With the exception of a few tapestries and the odd bit of garment and such, virtually every object it contains was once a prop of the Catholic Church. Exquisitely looked-after, well-curated, these ecclesiastical belong to a state that professes to want nothing to do with religion.
The museum is currently experimenting with free admission. It is not only a national space, then, but a truly public one. Anyone may enter, at no charge, to view this array of objects that form part of the patrimoine national closely guarded and deeply valued by the French nation-state.
How is this possible? These objects have, it would seem, become public, historical art-objects, memorials to a history that is now sufficiently other to be showcased as an object to be visually consumed. The very fact that the laïc state subsidizes this showcasing seems to indicate that these objects have been irreversibly transformed. This is a place for history, not for devotion. These are not devotional objects, claims the Musée National du Moyen Age.
That line — between art/history and devotion — is, I think, one that only a modern nation-state could make. The distinction is one that this wee mouse, apostate though she is, simply cannot force herself to maintain when faced with these objects. It seems somehow sad, somehow degenerative. What happens to religion, to devotion, to the spirit (or Spirit) when once it has been constituted as an artifact?
La douce France has outdone herself yet again.
A basic post-colonial inventory, to situate us:
Item: One (1) human head. Mummified. Provenance: New Zealand.
Item: One (1) patrimoine national français. Gloriously preserved. Exquisitely curated. Contents: châteaux, medieval armaments, lighthouses, churches, monasteries, stolen Maori human remains, etc. Provenance: ci et là, eh beh je sais plus mais c’est beau, hein?
Item: One (1) insane, self-righteous, paranoid-nationalist ministre de la culture. Provenance: Toulouse / one of François Fillon’s many deep, dark closets.
French Debate: Is Maori Head Body Part or Art? [NYT]
Rouen n’en fait qu’à sa tête [Libération]
Thing is, one of the many insidious things about colonialism is that it causes people to traffic in human remains. And then to put stolen remains, like this mummified Maori head, on display in museums. And to call those stolen remains part of one’s own “patrimoine national.”
One of the many insidious things about European metropoles’ tendency toward post-colonial oblivion is that those practices don’t get revised once the whole colonial project has been soundly denounced by basically everyone.
Now, it’s true that there are bits and pieces of Barbaric Peoples all over the damned place in museums in the west. (Interestingly, though the NYT claims there are 30 Maori heads in the Museum of Natural History, it’s not possible to find them through the museum’s website. “No, no, no heads here!” Says the site. “Pretty photographs and mildly condescending language in abundance, but nope! No actual heads! Move along, move along!”)
But we all love France, reader, because really, only in France could the minister of culture get away with freezing a city tribunal to insist that a mummified head (a human head, reader. a head. that once belonged to someone.) should not be returned to its Antipodean home, on the grounds that such an “atteinte injustifiée au patrimoine national” might set a dangerous precedent that would cause the historic and artistic centers of France to dissolve.
… I had written additional commentary. But it is completely unnecessary, I realize. Atteinte! Injustifiée! Patrimoine fucking national! Is anyone else snarfing her coffee / falling about / trying not to burst into horrified, humiliated tears?
Douce France, cher pays de mon enfance, bercée de tendre insouciance, je t’ai gardée dans ma tête mummifiée… Douce France… la la la…
I work in a small independent bookstore in a small suburban town. The store has its limitations, but we justify its failings (an over-emphasis on tchatchkes, for example) with mushy-liberal soundbytes about how it’s “important” to have a bookstore in New Eden, and “supporting” independent bookstores is also “important.”
It’s not that I don’t believe those things. I do, firmly and totally. But, of course, there’s more to the bookstore problem than the comfort of wistful, wealthy New Edeners.
Because we’re such a small store, and because most of our clientele is so wealthy that they don’t bother to pay attention when I tell them their totals before swiping their Amex cards, we sell everything at full retail price. This means that even with my substantial discount, I can still generally get what I want — new — more cheaply on Amazon or at a megastore. Used, in like-new condition, I can get virtually anything I want for next to nothing on Amazon or eBay. These services are also substantially more convenient — we don’t have a huge inventory at New Eden Books, and special orders generally take five or six business days to arrive.
Now, while I realize that these differences are likely due in large part to the systemic favor conferred on big corporations by the publishing industry, I have trouble not believing that Amazon and the megastores are a democratizing force in the world of books. The two statements are not mutually contradictory.
The French have solved some of the problem with their “prix unique du livre” — by law, a new copy of a given edition of a given book must cost the same amount absolutely everywhere. (The same applies to cigarettes and gasoline.) This means that the only advantage the big chains have over independents is the size of each store’s inventory. The phenomenon, encouraged by the prix unique law, of flourishing specialized bookstores balances out this advantage. “Yes,” I think to myself, “I can get lots of books at Gibert Joseph, but I can get better books, and talk to knowledgeable salespeople, at Ombres Blanches.” The law has also encouraged a boom in the production of “livres de poche,” cheap (three-to-six-Euro) paperback editions, frequently of books that are also published in nice, expensive editions. And because the great publishing houses stand to gain a lot from the livres de poche market, these cheap editions are frequently very well executed. Gallimard’s Folio imprint, while not as bibliogasmically gorgeous as their fancy editions, produces excellent, frequently excellently annotated, editions of middle- and high-brow books. For this I am deeply endebted to them. In short, for a long while the law enchanted me as an example of a spot where, for once, socialisme à la française was working.
Then it occurred to me that the imposed market-control probably means that the price of books is set somewhat higher than it is in American megastores. So perhaps, while maintaining the illusion of socialistic idealism, the prix unique du livre in fact reinforces the status of books as an élite commodity.
Don’t worry, all this isn’t leading to some grand statement. I don’t know what the solution to these problems is, but I think about them more or less constantly at work. As I watch how hard the store’s managers have to fight to keep our little place alive, as I watch customers become frustrated with having to wait for a special order and huff off with a “Whatever, I’ll just go to Borders,” I realize what a miraculous thing a small-town bookstore is. I already know many of the customers by name. I have whole conversations with two-thirds of the people who come in, even if they don’t buy anything. In a town that’s, um, hardly known for its intellectualism, we at New Eden Books maintain a healthy bibliophilic haven.
But the reality is that on my salary, even with my discount, I can’t afford to buy as many books as I read at New Eden Books. I realize that I should discipline my book-buying habits, borrow most of what I read from the rather good town library, and only buy what really matters to me. Then I would be better equipped to support local bookstores. But I like books. I like their materiality. I need to own them. I am a book fetishist. I am therefore a full-scale devotee of Amazon, Borders, and Barnes & Noble (in that order). There will be more on this, I’m sure. For now, the point is: goddammit, I want it both ways!
This is me not posting about the obvious. There will be no weeping, wailing, nor gnashing of teeth (’specially not gnashing). There will be crossing of fingers and hoping against hope.
Look: not posting.
There. Now, to bed.
You know things are bad when the lead story in one of a nation’s most powerful newspapers is an effort to convince people that a victory for the lead candidate in that nation’s upcoming election won’t cause widespread riots.
That’s right: French people are worried that before the man running on a security platform even begins to exercise the duties of his potential office, he may become his own greatest security threat. And they’re not wrong.
Jesus lap-dancing Christ, I can’t wait until this is over.
I have been, err, abstaining from recording here my anxieties regarding the second round of the French presidential election, which will take place this Sunday.
But today, Jean-Marie Le Pen outdid himself, calling on all those who voted for him in the first round to “abstain” from voting on the sixth. That’s right: si vous ne pouvez pas voter pour moi, mieux vaut ne pas voter du tout. Just in case you were under the impression that fascism is good for democracy, Le Pen is here to demonstrate that, after all, no. It’s not.
In his speech he accuses the Parti Socialiste (PS, represented by Evita Perón — I mean Ségolène Royal) and the Union pour un Mouvement Populaire (UMP, represented by Nicolas “Hose the Arab scum!” Sarkozy) of hijacking French politics and marginalizing France’s political, well, margins. Even if you don’t understand French, watch the video to get an impression of his persona. In addition to his usual Evil Turtle aspect, Le Pen here displays his Petulant Fascist Child side — he didn’t get what he wanted, so now he’s throwing a tantrum. What he wanted was, at best, a repeat of the 2002 election in which a divided left produced a right-wing second round, with Le Pen facing off against Jacques Chirac (who subsequently won the presidency by the biggest landslide in the history of the Cinquième République). A nice consolation prize for poor little Jeannot would have been to maintain his usual 15-18%, the figure at which his party, the Front National (FN) has stabilized in regional elections in recent years.
Unfortunately for the FN, that nasty Sarko shamelessly (on that point, at least, I agree with Jeannot) stole his votes and he scraped a measly (to him) but terrifying (to us) 11%. Now, in a way, it’s a shame that Le Pen couldn’t get over himself and endorse Sarko, who has been happily riding the FN’s magic carpet of anti-immigrant invective — such an endorsement might have done more harm than good to le petit Nicolas, and thus boded well for France.
Instead, Le Pen is asking his electors to disenfranchise themselves voluntarily in this second round. Don’t get me wrong. I sincerely hope that none of Le Pen’s supporters will vote on Sunday, because if they vote, they will vote massively for Sarkozy (though to my startlement I read a report stating that 16% of those who intend to vote intend to vote for Royal). I am merely astonished that Le Pen openly acknowledges his desire to shut down all public discussion, and if he can’t do that, to remove himself and all his followers from that discussion. Today’s declaration is, in effect, a call to abstain from democracy as it is defined by the République, to abstain from the culture of debate that the Parti Socialiste, Royal, Bayrou, and Sarkozy have, more or less willingly, embraced.
You’re perhaps thinking, “Okay, yeah, so what do you expect from a fascist?” Anything and everything, including today’s speech. But I never cease to be astonished that the French electorate supports this man in such tremendous numbers. Of course, his supporters will tell you, “He’s not a fascist; he’s an extremist.”
Comme on dit dans le sud, ohputainmerde.
In the past year, I have fallen in love on at least three occasions. As it usually goes in my life, these loves have taken as their objects not people (with all their flaws, their insecurities, their needs, and their demands on my heart and my time), but books. I fall for the content, I fall for the physical object, I fall in love with the love itself.
In a rare twist of fate, this time I have also fallen — utterly, irreparably, reader, fallen for the author of those three books, one Marguerite Yourcenar. Quick slap in the face for you self-satisfied Anglophones: Yourcenar is one of the great dames of French letters (there are about ten of them; they’re easy to keep track of), the first woman to be elected to the Académie Française (there have only been four, of whom three are still sitting), and the author, most famously, of Mémoires d’Hadrien and L’Œuvre au noir, two of my love-objects. Hadrien is just what it sounds like. L‘Œuvre is a remarkable sweep of sixteenth-century Europe, through the biography of one Zénon, iconoclast and alchemist. Both are generically and topically historical novels whose style and philosophical impulses are fundamentally modern. A third suitor for my affections, Alexis, ou le traité du vain combat, is discounted because it makes me angry that Yourcenar wrote it when she was just a bit older than I am now, and I deem that Unfair. (I keep a poster of the famous portrait of Virginia Woolf at twenty on my wall to remind me that she did not publish anything of real value until she was past forty.)
The current affair concerns Yourcenar’s memoirs, Le labyrinthe du monde — or at least the first volume of them, Souvenirs pieux. This volume also happens to be the clincher in my Author Love complex. My wildest amours (with living beings as well as books and dead beings) generally evolve from what I call a brain-crush. If I have a crush on you, reader, it is likely because I find your mind unbearably elegant. It is also likely that much of the elegance I find there is mysterious to me, and therefore all the more attractive. There is nothing sexier than a puzzle.
I am in love with Yourcenar’s mind. I am in love with its historical turn. Reading Souvenirs pieux, I see immediately the impulses that guided her to write historical fiction, or were perhaps shaped by her prior inclination toward historical topics. I mean “history” here in its simplest sense: the notion that objects, individuals, people, have a past and that that past matters. That things come from somewhere, and cannot be addressed without addressing the problem of their provenance.
She writes, describing her own first days, in her mother’s room, where she was born (and where her mother died of fever a few days after her birth):
Cette fillette vieille d’une heure est en tout cas déjà prise, comme dans un filet, dans les réalités de la souffrance animale et de la peine humaine; elle l’est aussi dans les futilités d’un temps, dans les petites et grandes nouvelles du journal que personne ce matin n’a eu le temps de lire, et qui gît sur le banc du vestibule, dans ce qui est de mode et dans ce qui est de routine. Au haut de son berceau se balance une croix d’ivoire orné d’une tête d’angelot que par une suite de hasards presque dérisoires je possède encore. L’objet est banal: pieux bibelot qu’on a mis là parmi des nœuds de ruban presque aussi rituels, mais qu’auparavant Fernande a probablement fait bénir. L’ivoire provient d’un éléphant tué dans la forêt congolaise, dont les défenses ont été vendues à bas prix par des indigènes à quelque trafiquant belge. Cette grande masse de vie intelligente, issue d’une dynastie qui remonte au moins jusqu’au début du Pléistocène, a abouti à cela. Ce brimborion a fait partie d’un animal qui a brouté l’herbe et bu l’eau des fleuves, qui s’est baigné dans la bonne boue tiède, qui s’est servi de cet ivoire pour combattre un rival ou essayer de parer aux attaques de l’homme, qui a flatté de sa trompe la femelle avec qui il s’accouplait. L’artiste qui a façonné cette matière n’a su en faire qu’une bondieuserie de luxe: l’angelot censé représenter l’Ange Gardien auquel l’enfant croira un jour ressemble aux Cupidons joufflus fabriqués eux aussi en série par des tâcherons gréco-romains.
There are those curious “hasards dérisoires” — personal history reduced to quasi-absurd happenstance. There is the self-consciousness of the woman looking back on the infant girl who is “déjà prise” — taken, held, stuck, trapped, snatched, entangled (our blessed tongue requires so many iterations for what that tiny French participle accomplishes). There is the violent shift from the banality of a religious trifle to the death of the elephant, the colonial market, the dominance of earth and animals by men. There is the nod to the artisan, and the rejection of his trivial craft. And the last, sudden, astonishing shift to the Greco-Roman “tâcherons,” there, it seems, simply to signify that no distance, historical or otherwise, is so great as to destroy the extraordinary chain of correspondences Yourcenar establishes among things and persons in the world around her infant self.
She goes on to describe the female laborers who have painstakingly crafted the linens on which she was born, in which she was swaddled — the women, badly paid and badly treated, who enter into a system of exchange with another female figure, the boutiquière who sells their crafts in turn to the prosperous Monsieur de C., Yourcenar’s father, who will in turn gift them to his wife, Fernande. No object in these memoirs is innocent, no item or persona or aside left undisturbed by the author’s roving imagination.
For these are, after all, imagined histories. As she details the history of her mother’s family, beginning in the mid-seventeenth century in quasi-feudal Gueldre, she says straight out that certain of the details, while certainly not lost, would require “plus de recherches que ces précisions n’en valent.” Like the dizzying zoom-effect that conjectures simple objects into grand historical life, the conjectural sketches of Yourcenar’s ancestors bear witness to the mind of the novelist at work. I understand, suddenly, why the distant, hardly apprehensible subjects of her two greatest novels; why the peculiar, winding and frequently detouring narrative of each. I understand why all the forces of Renaissance European history seem to coalesce around Zénon’s head, why Yourcenar chose a pensive scholar-emperor for her classical opus.
In Yourcenar’s world, everything is historical, in that simplest sense of the importance of the past, and the artist’s duty is to make that apparent, and make it beautiful. I am in love with this woman’s mind.
1. The Supreme Court ruling on Gonzalez vs. Planned Parenthood and Gonzalez vs. Carhart:
I am as frightened and enraged as everyone else is. I am also in awe, yet again, of Ruth Bader Ginsburg. I don’t know what else there is to say.
2. The Virginia Tech killings:
I think Horace’s post on academic freedom and the dangers of pathologizing students is very apt. Universities, even and especially primarily undergraduate institutions like my little alma mater, are at risk as it is of returning to operating in loco parentis. Adding “security” questions into the bargain will only alienate students from faculty and vice versa, and both from their administrations. Good pedagogy and healthy relationships do not stand up under the influence of mistrust and paranoia. It is not VT’s fault that a very troubled individual shot dozens of innocent people to death. Universities are not and should not be equipped to deal with massacres, lest it lead to the kind of fight-fire-with-fire mentality exhibited in this outrageous Daily News opinion piece. So let us mourn, continue to love each other as well as we know how, and, in the immortal words of Crosby, Stills and Nash, teach our children well.
3. The French présidentielle:
I took a vow months ago not to speak, write, or converse in non-verbal signs or grunts about this topic. If you’re desperate for my opinion, it is well summed-up by the image that decks the cover of this week’s Economist. Monday will teach us things, and then we will be waiting again, perhaps to learn more, or only to shake our heads, on May 6. We cannot know, because the French electorate is notoriously unpredictable. My guess? Nicolas Sarkozy is simply going to be the next Président de la République, and all we can do is cross our fingers and hope he knows what he’s doing. In the words of a famous French comedian from the banlieue: “Nicolas, je connais plein de jeunes des banlieues qui vont voter pour vous, et vous savez pourquoi? Parce que comme ça, au moins vous ne serez plus au ministère de l’intérieure.”
4. The American presidential:
I re-take my French oath. Foutez-moi la paix.
5. Imus:
Hooliganery notwithstanding, Tenured Radical still has the best take on this I’ve yet seen. And Gwen Ifill remains high on my list of heroes.
There. I did it. I commented on Current Events. Your regularly scheduled narcissism, snark, conveyance of senses of superiority and other items totally irrelevant to your life will continue shortly.
