Chabrol, Gégauff and retracing old steps

In Chabrol's Une partie de plaisir (1975), the main character is played by the writer Paul Gégauff. Gégauff plays a troubled and domineering husband, his (de facto) wife is played by his real-life first wife Danièle Gégauff. In the movie he kills her by kicking her head in a graveyard; in real life they were already divorced by this time ... their real daughter also plays their daughter in the movie. In real life Gégauff was stabbed to death by his second wife on Christmas Eve 1983, at the age of 61. Chabrol and Gégauff worked together on fourteen films.

In the film at one point Gégauff's character drives in the night and stands outside the house he and his de facto wife and daughter lived in and rented, the house his grandmother had lived in and the house he was born in ... after disturbing the calm balance of his family life in that house, they packed and left and the family fell apart. After marrying another woman he drives at night to stand outside the house, recalling a line in Flaubert: "comme quelqu’un de ruiné qui regarde, à travers les carreaux, des gens attablés dans son ancienne maison." ... "like a ruined man gazing in, through the window, at the people dining in his old house." (Penguin Classics, p.40)

Gégauff takes his new wife back to the opening "idyllic" scene of the movie, re-enacting the scene with putting a small crab on a fishing hook, the girl catching a fish, a foghorn blowing eerily. This attempt to recreate an old vivid memory is repeated in Woody Allen's Annie Hall (1977), but the Chabrol scene is more profound, more moving and more disturbing.

The cracking veneer of manners

Flaubert captures well the gap between feeling and politeness ... "et les mots de ma fille et de ma mère s’échangeaient tout le long du jour, accompagnés d’un petit frémissement des lèvres, chacune lançant des paroles douces d’une voix tremblante de colère."

"and the words mother and daughter went back and forth all day long, accompanied by a little quiver of the lip, each woman uttering sweet words in a voice trembling with anger" (Penguin Classics, p.40)

Incongruities and Absurdities

Mark Twain on how to tell a story: "To string incongruities and absurdities together in a wandering and sometimes purposeless way, and seem innocently unaware that they
are absurdities, is the basis of the American art." (From How to Tell a Story and other essays 1897).

This remark seems a century before its time. We are now well accustomed to the sort of short story scattered with quirky and off-beat observations that is the sort of "Mac Story" (to paraphrase Donald Hall) mass produced by MFA-style courses in creative writing.

Two camps

«Это ведь только в плохих книжках живущие разделены на два лагеря и не соприкасаются.» - Lara in Dr Zhivago: "It is, you see, only in bad books that people are divided into two camps and do not come into contact." Only in bad books and we might add post-Nazi-occupation western Europe.

Everyman a Faust

«Каждый родится Фаустом, чтобы все обнять, все испытать, все выразить.» - this from Zhivago's notebook. "Each is born a Faust, to embrace everything, experience everything, express everything."

The calamity of mediocre taste

«они не знали, что бедствие среднего вкуса хуже бедствия безвкусицы.» - Pasternak in Doctor Zhivago (Part 5, Chapter 7) , an interesting aphoristic phrase ... "they didn't know that the calamity of mediocre taste is worse than the calamity of tastelessness". Средне - coming from middle and average - means "middling" or "mediocre" ... so what is this calamity of "middling" taste, "so so" taste?.

"Sie sind ein Burger auf Irrwegen, Tonio Kroger — ein verirrter Burger."

Genius Loci - happiness, une plante particulière

"Il lui semblait que certains lieux sur la terre devaient produire du bonheur, comme une plante particulière au sol et qui pousse mal tout autre part." - Flaubert.

"to her [Emma] it seemed that certain places on earth must produce happiness, like the plants that thrive in a certain soil and are stunted everywhere else." (p.38, Penguin classic)

This idea, which Flaubert places in the mind of the foolish young Emma - only two pages he has mentioned her passion for Lamartine, a poet he did not respect - but perhaps it is not such a silly idea. Flaubert presents Emma's dissatisfaction with the calm and peace of her existence as a misunderstanding of happiness: "it seemed quite inconceivable [to her] that this calm life of hers could really be the happiness of which she used to dream". It is Emma's dangerous restlessness which propels her forward into trouble.

Lawrence Durrell championed the idea of spirit of place, and it is everywhere in his writing from Justine to Caesar's Vast Ghost.

Inclined towards the tumultuous??

The character sketch of the young Emma in Chapter 6 of Part 1 of Madame Bovary captures some key elements of the restlessness which leads her towards trouble.

"Habituée aux aspects calmes, elle se tournait, au contraire, vers les accidentés. Elle n’aimait la mer qu’à cause de ses tempêtes, et la verdure seulement lorsqu’elle était clairsemée parmi les ruines. Il fallait qu’elle pût retirer des choses une sorte de profit personnel; et elle rejetait comme inutile tout ce qui ne contribuait pas à la consommation immédiate de son coeur, -- étant de tempérament plus sentimentale qu’artiste, cherchant des émotions et non des paysages."

The Penguin Classics translation seems to strike a somewhat different tone ... the first sentence, for example, transposes Flaubert's fairly direct imagery into a different register, almost Miltonic in its abstract grandeur.

"Familiar with the tranquil, she inclined, instead, towards the tumultuous. She loved the sea only for the sake of tempests, the meadow only as a background to some ruined pile. From everything she had to extract some kind of personal profit, and she discarded as useless anything that did not lend itself to her heart's immediate satisfaction - endowed with a temperament more sentimental than artistic, preferring emotions rather than landscapes."

The phrase "ruined pile" hits a strange note - somehow too Gilbert & Sullivan for this context, and the last phrase "cherchant des émotions et non des paysages" loses some of its simplicity.

Lydia Davis' recent translation discards "inclined towards" in favour of the simpler "turned toward" but keeps "tumultuous", and it is good to see no mention of a "ruined pile". Davis sticks closer to the French with "greenery", and her concluding phrase better mirrors the rhetorical balance of the original.

Here is Davis' translation: "Accustomed to the calm aspects of things, she turned, instead, toward the more tumultuous. She loved the sea only for its storms, and greenery only when it grew up here and there among ruins. She needed to derive from things a sort of personal gain; and she rejected as useless everything that did not continue to the immediate gratification of her heart, - being by temperament more sentimental than artistic, in search of emotions and not landscapes."

Beware of books

The last sentence of chapter five of Madame Bovary is a succinct expression of the engine that propels the story. It deserves to be as famous as the first sentence of Anna Karenina - Все счастливые семьи похожи друг на друга, каждая несчастливая семья несчастлива по-своему - or Tale of Two Cities - "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, ..." and so forth. Flaubert writes:

"Et Emma cherchait à savoir ce que l’on entendait au juste dans la vie par les mots de félicité, de passion et d’ivresse, qui lui avaient paru si beaux dans les livres."

In Geoffrey Wall's translation for Penguin Classics it is: "And Emma sought to find out exactly what was meant in real life by the words fidelity, passion, and rapture, which had seemed so fine on the pages of books." "Fidelity" here seems like a mistake.

Lydia Davis' recent translation offers: "And Emma tried to find out just what was meant, in life, by the words "bliss," "passion," and "intoxication," which had seemed so beautiful to her in books."

Books can be perilous - we know this from Paolo and Francesco in Canto V of Dante's Inferno. It was their reading of the story of Lancelot which was their dangerous path, and when they reached the part where Lancelot kissed the smiling lips of the Queen, they kissed and their fate was sealed. At the end of the canto, Dante faints from pity at this story.

Quando leggemmo il disïato riso
esser basciato da cotanto amante,
questi, che mai da me non fia diviso,
la bocca mi basciò tutto tremante.

Everything is beautiful at the ballet, as Edward Kleban's lyrics in the A Chorus Line song go, and fidelity, passion and rapture are generally "si beaux dans les livers".

Emma and Francesca are each driven by the desire to know and to experience things of which they have read. There is almost something of wanting to apply the scientific method to the world of the emotions which leads us into the world of Freud.  But more simply there is simply the desire to fully live, to experience what there is to be experienced and not let life pass by shut off from the big experiences.

Flaubert's close ups

Flaubert writes cinematically. The following paragraph reminds me of scenes like the opening of Bergman's Cries and Whispers, and of that febrile distortion of focus I remember from lying in bed sick as a child, where the clock on the far wall with a dog's face seemed so close.

"Il arriva un jour vers trois heures; tout le monde était aux champs; il entra dans la cuisine, mais n’aperçut point d’abord Emma; les auvents étaient fermés. Par les fentes du bois, le soleil allongeait sur les pavés de grandes raies minces, qui se brisaient à l’angle des meubles et tremblaient au plafond. Des mouches, sur la table, montaient le long des verres qui avaient servi, et bourdonnaient en se noyant au fond, dans le cidre resté. Le jour qui descendait par la cheminée, veloutant la suie de la plaque, bleuissait un peu les cendres froides. Entre la fenêtre et le foyer, Emma cousait; elle n’avait point de fichu, on voyait sur ses épaules nues de petites gouttes de sueur."

Bovary's hightened sensitivity is clear ... the fine detail, the flies drowning in the cider in the bottom of the glasses, and all this culminating in noticing the small beads of sweat on Emma's shoulders.