I read The Princess and the Fisherman in less than a day – a page-turner, as they say. It wasn’t bad. Not brilliant, but not bad. Some Mills-and-Boon intrigue, at first: the heroine is a shy girl, secretive, without friends, but then a confident and seductive man approaches. He knows how to see her true beauty, but thinks of her as a sister, etc. Then things turn dark: he mysteriously disappears, leaving her a strange notebook. She learns that the life of this man is, in fact, far more difficult than she could have believed. All of this built around ethnic confusion, demanding parents, a conniving grandmother, and the Vietnamese tale that serves as a counterpoint (can I say “counter-framework”?). The book works well enough, formally: a story within a story, elegant sentences. More than anything, the book made me think.
Ethically speaking, the text and I are miles apart. Its main character is a proud melancholic. She constantly repeats three Japanese words (that I’ve forgotten) meaning: “the infinite melancholy of things.” Even in her adolescence the heroine is saddened by the idea of a lost childhood, by an unrequited love story, by a kiss never exchanged. In short, she’s a young old woman who sees her life in retrospect, apart from one great moment as she listens to the piano, feels uplifted by love, and becomes fully embodied to... Für Elise.
Alongside this melancholy there’s a kind of diffused Buddhism. When her grandmother consoles her by saying “in another life,” she means it literally – not in the above-and-beyond, in paradise, but another life on this earth. For ultimately the lovers seek each other from one body to the next, over successive reincarnations, and sometimes cannot find each other, but continue their search. And running parallel to these ever-returning spirits there is the cult of the dead, ancestor worship, and the anguish of the grandmother who has not correctly buried her husband. A strange mix of everlasting life (we can relax and take our time, we shall return) and immense loss (we lose more and more, every second, we leave beautiful moments behind us). In short, the antithesis of the existential position that Christianity adopts.
It is also marked by the implacable strength of fate. The tale that forms the counterpoint of the story is placed under the sign of destiny: two orphans consult an oracle, it predicts that the brother will marry the sister, and the prediction is realised. But the brother first attempts to kill his sister, to prove the oracle’s falseness (he is thus responsible for the initial rebellion, unlike Oedipus), then learns the truth by chance (not seeking to know, like Oedipus). Minh allows for some uncertainty in the story of her heroine and Nam, but there is nonetheless the impression that a kind of destiny is behind it. And the coldness of the characters is the consequence of this, of the destiny that acts by itself, that completes what it creates. Faced with this, it’s better to adopt a calm and detached attitude. The stoicism of Minh, then, is like that of old – noble resignation faced with an implacable lot. Contrast the panic of Julien, that lost
fugitive of Berlin Traffic. The second of the two pagan responses to the world’s disorder.
Should we see in this tale a literary genre that belongs to Vietnam? Where destiny holds the reins. Where determinism acts openly, through arbitrary and chance actions. Where nobody is responsible for anything, because everything is scripted in advance. Where the only possible choice is to enjoy oneself, or to suffer, before the spectacle of the world. A mode of existence that is aesthetic, before anything else.
We might amuse ourselves by contrasting the Vietnam of Minh with that of Stallone. Rambo IV opens with a scene of military cruelty, then Stallone hunts a serpent in the jungle. Cruelty of people and of nature, the aesthetic of horror – projected by the West onto Asia, where the horror is practiced, perhaps not just aesthetically. Another Julien said to me: “I would have loved to fight in Vietnam,” when we were children – “over there, they were real men.” Rambo, man of strength, but also the region of Asia, until recently, dominated by strength and arms – a place of the right. Is this because it’s between two worlds, between China and India?
lundi 30 mars 2009
lundi 23 mars 2009
Poland - 25 February 2008
Poland, the nation of a kind of mad dream. Gambrowicz, Andrzejewski, the superb dancer from Krakow whom I hosted for several days in Paris, the figures of Chagall and their magical creatures, the gypsy-Jews on their violins, the land of eccentrics. And John-Paul the Second, whose diary I read almost every day in 2006, and whose tomb is venerated in Rome like that of a saint. The Polish come en masse to World Youth Days and the prayers of Taizé. They will descend on Sydney, this year. This is where Central Europe and its joyful absurdity begins – here in Poland, not in the kitch of "alternative" Berlin.
Characters: that Polish girl who danced the salsa in Philip’s house in York, and who said about an ill-fated love story that “people can be so fake.” And another one, a vegetarian from Warsaw, who visited a Chinese supermarket in Belleville where they sold living crabs and had the idea that she could save one, grab the creature from the aquarium and start running, pursued by an angry clutch of Chinese. Both of these women belong to the same Polish literary genre: the comic!
Is this because Poland is the antithesis of Germany? A Judeao-Christian land, an anti-pagan land. And therefore a place where the comic is preferable to the tragic. An odd sequence to enthrone Benedict XVI after John-Paul II if we see things in this way – it marks a sad return to nature after a detour via the Baroque and joyful artifice.
Characters: that Polish girl who danced the salsa in Philip’s house in York, and who said about an ill-fated love story that “people can be so fake.” And another one, a vegetarian from Warsaw, who visited a Chinese supermarket in Belleville where they sold living crabs and had the idea that she could save one, grab the creature from the aquarium and start running, pursued by an angry clutch of Chinese. Both of these women belong to the same Polish literary genre: the comic!
Is this because Poland is the antithesis of Germany? A Judeao-Christian land, an anti-pagan land. And therefore a place where the comic is preferable to the tragic. An odd sequence to enthrone Benedict XVI after John-Paul II if we see things in this way – it marks a sad return to nature after a detour via the Baroque and joyful artifice.
Germany - 25 February 2008
The protagonist of Berlin Traffic flees Paris to escape the old-fashioned city with its symbolist cameos and enamels, the corpses in its catacombs, the capital’s eerie ghosts. In Germany, what does he find? An activist dancer, some work as a gigolo, and finally a role in an adaptation of Solaris. Still old things, then, only somewhat less old.
Berlin should make us suspicious. The city is too cool to be straight. Previously, it was a battle ground; we now see its struggles recycled as kitsch. I’ve noticed a very dangerous Berlin kitch that dominates today’s European culture under a yodelling air and wir wollen alle wider kinder sein. One doesn’t even need to work, here – life is cheap, one can always squat. In short, there’s an ethic of easy recycling, reaction to the more noble art of keeping things in shape. Out of which comes, no doubt, the anguish that Julien brings very clearly to the scene: Berlin, the city where old age is terrifying; for Berlin caters only to a youthful ethic, a sort of laziness marked by gluttony and lust.
Now, when young we’re expected to produce something beyond our own needs, for we must also consider the elders and the children. But in Berlin the ethic is just-enough-for-yourself. “I live in a great apartment,” said Martin – “it’s heated by coal.” The coal needs to be carried, then – fine for the young, but later?
I will resist the temptation of the Berlin model. I will not become an honorary citizen of Prenzlauerberg, where I drank beer as a nineteen-year-old.
What is the genre of this novel? Somewhere between pornography and noir. An erotic spy novel. Berlin, city of spies – a legacy of the cold war, no doubt. The genre entails secrecy, but also false identity, fake name, gadgets, money; legitimate things become blurred. Theft itself is in a dance of death with the law.
The protagonist of Berlin Traffic moves from Paris – city of sterile poetry in a rigid and decaying style – to Berlin, the city of the spy thriller. It’s an attempt to reconcile the cheeky pop of Les Halles or Belleville with the rarified salons of the Left Bank, and recycle all of it in a cosmopolitan crime novel, with erotic salons and the traffic of stolen artworks. Excellent – after all these years we still haven’t finished with kitsch. As for espionage, how boring! The Pagny sur Moselle affair was already a spy story. Between France and Germany could we not find something beyond secret intelligence?
I also notice that, once in Berlin, the character finds a new form of seriousness. Because Germany is a peasant country, even in Berlin; because we believe in Mother Nature, here; because in Germany we can enact a neo-Greek melancholia. (Crista Wolf is an excellent example – for all her talent, I could never get beyond the first chapter of Cassandra).
There is something to consider in this fascination for antiquity and the displaced Mediterranean, that forms one of the motives of literary history in France as well as Germany, from Racine’s Iphigenia to that of Goethe, passing via Du Bellay's Roman Antiquities and Goethe's Roman Elegies. Something of the kitsch of Berlin, of Paris and of Julien’s book resides in these museums of the northern plains full of Greek fragments and Egyptian gods, thoroughly nationalised, source of a richness “immemorial.” I remember a retired teacher in Alsace speaking with emotion of the “Island of Museums,” in Berlin, before her smorgasbord of stoneware from Soufflenheim. It’s another form of recycling or recuperation that is at stake, here. Recycling somebody else’s past, which we take for our own. Another kind of theft. Now, the Biblical commandment tells us: “thou shalt not steal.”
Pondering these words, I might almost inscribe the commandment as the motto of my landed and nautical notebooks: “thou shalt not steal.”
Berlin should make us suspicious. The city is too cool to be straight. Previously, it was a battle ground; we now see its struggles recycled as kitsch. I’ve noticed a very dangerous Berlin kitch that dominates today’s European culture under a yodelling air and wir wollen alle wider kinder sein. One doesn’t even need to work, here – life is cheap, one can always squat. In short, there’s an ethic of easy recycling, reaction to the more noble art of keeping things in shape. Out of which comes, no doubt, the anguish that Julien brings very clearly to the scene: Berlin, the city where old age is terrifying; for Berlin caters only to a youthful ethic, a sort of laziness marked by gluttony and lust.
Now, when young we’re expected to produce something beyond our own needs, for we must also consider the elders and the children. But in Berlin the ethic is just-enough-for-yourself. “I live in a great apartment,” said Martin – “it’s heated by coal.” The coal needs to be carried, then – fine for the young, but later?
I will resist the temptation of the Berlin model. I will not become an honorary citizen of Prenzlauerberg, where I drank beer as a nineteen-year-old.
What is the genre of this novel? Somewhere between pornography and noir. An erotic spy novel. Berlin, city of spies – a legacy of the cold war, no doubt. The genre entails secrecy, but also false identity, fake name, gadgets, money; legitimate things become blurred. Theft itself is in a dance of death with the law.
The protagonist of Berlin Traffic moves from Paris – city of sterile poetry in a rigid and decaying style – to Berlin, the city of the spy thriller. It’s an attempt to reconcile the cheeky pop of Les Halles or Belleville with the rarified salons of the Left Bank, and recycle all of it in a cosmopolitan crime novel, with erotic salons and the traffic of stolen artworks. Excellent – after all these years we still haven’t finished with kitsch. As for espionage, how boring! The Pagny sur Moselle affair was already a spy story. Between France and Germany could we not find something beyond secret intelligence?
I also notice that, once in Berlin, the character finds a new form of seriousness. Because Germany is a peasant country, even in Berlin; because we believe in Mother Nature, here; because in Germany we can enact a neo-Greek melancholia. (Crista Wolf is an excellent example – for all her talent, I could never get beyond the first chapter of Cassandra).
There is something to consider in this fascination for antiquity and the displaced Mediterranean, that forms one of the motives of literary history in France as well as Germany, from Racine’s Iphigenia to that of Goethe, passing via Du Bellay's Roman Antiquities and Goethe's Roman Elegies. Something of the kitsch of Berlin, of Paris and of Julien’s book resides in these museums of the northern plains full of Greek fragments and Egyptian gods, thoroughly nationalised, source of a richness “immemorial.” I remember a retired teacher in Alsace speaking with emotion of the “Island of Museums,” in Berlin, before her smorgasbord of stoneware from Soufflenheim. It’s another form of recycling or recuperation that is at stake, here. Recycling somebody else’s past, which we take for our own. Another kind of theft. Now, the Biblical commandment tells us: “thou shalt not steal.”
Pondering these words, I might almost inscribe the commandment as the motto of my landed and nautical notebooks: “thou shalt not steal.”
samedi 14 mars 2009
Australia - 24th February 2008
Australia as anti-American. Like it, “a land of opportunity,” “young and free.” Like it, massacres of Aborigines, ghosts, cemeteries of unknown ancestors, nature’s extremes. And the language shared, the culture shared. But when Europeans fought to leave for America and then kept on longing to return, it was by force that they were sent to the Australian colonies at first, and later via assisted passage. Like America, it’s a land of immigration, but without a globalised mythology. This is not the land where all needs are met; it was never seen as the hope of the nations. And yet, when Philip tells his students that he is Australian, most of them say: “oh, Australia – my dream!”
Germany - 24th February 2008
It was at the Australian embassy in Berlin that my visa application was processed. It was there that the administrative decision was made about the possibility of my journey and my settlement in a new nation. Berlin, place of transition. We’ll need to ritually celebrate that when we arrive.
vendredi 13 mars 2009
Cambodia - 22 february 2008
Cambodia was a part of French Indochina. My language is still spoken there, they still cook baguettes, and French groups visit to see the ruins of Angkor.
Philip went there in the summer, for a fortnight, sent by ICB as an international volunteer to train local teachers of English. For him, Cambodia is a country of South-East Asia – it’s on the big map that he stuck to the wall of the living room, just beneath Laos, to Thailand’s east. And it’s also the home of an Australian friend, political refugee with her parents after the persecutions of the Khmer Rouge. They were part of the Chinese minority, and practised Christianity. Different visions of Cambodia, then. I could add that of Marc: Angkor Wat, a masterpiece, a marvel that you have to see to believe.
Then there is geography: lowlands, swamps, the jungle. There are freshwater dolphins – the guides claim that you can sometimes spot them in the capital! I consult a map, and see that Cambodia (unlike Vietnam) is not oriented from mountains to the sea, but centred rather on the lake of Tonle Sap, in the centre of the country, slightly to the west. A coastal range the “Cardamom Mountains” blocks the flow of water to the west in the direction of Thailand – and all the water of the basin that forms the body of Cambodia flows into Phnom Penh along the Mekong, which later seems to become a marsh. The great temple of Angkor Wat is located just north of Tonle Sap, and Phnom Penh at the confluence of the river into which it drains and the Mekong.
Philip went there in the summer, for a fortnight, sent by ICB as an international volunteer to train local teachers of English. For him, Cambodia is a country of South-East Asia – it’s on the big map that he stuck to the wall of the living room, just beneath Laos, to Thailand’s east. And it’s also the home of an Australian friend, political refugee with her parents after the persecutions of the Khmer Rouge. They were part of the Chinese minority, and practised Christianity. Different visions of Cambodia, then. I could add that of Marc: Angkor Wat, a masterpiece, a marvel that you have to see to believe.
Then there is geography: lowlands, swamps, the jungle. There are freshwater dolphins – the guides claim that you can sometimes spot them in the capital! I consult a map, and see that Cambodia (unlike Vietnam) is not oriented from mountains to the sea, but centred rather on the lake of Tonle Sap, in the centre of the country, slightly to the west. A coastal range the “Cardamom Mountains” blocks the flow of water to the west in the direction of Thailand – and all the water of the basin that forms the body of Cambodia flows into Phnom Penh along the Mekong, which later seems to become a marsh. The great temple of Angkor Wat is located just north of Tonle Sap, and Phnom Penh at the confluence of the river into which it drains and the Mekong.
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