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.