Category: Theater

Posted on

Drôle de genre and remettre en cause

The end of December is a time of personal reflection for many people, as we think back on what happened in this old year and make resolutions for the new. The French expression for self-reflection is se remettre en cause. The same expression, without the reflexive pronoun, is used for the re-examination of any matter, large or small, individual or societal. Indeed, French social and political thought has a strong strain of calling into question subjects that were previously thought of as settled, re-opening discussions that many thought closed. Based on my limited views of both countries, I’d say that France is overall a more radical society, while the United States has become decidedly more conservative over the past 50 years. The spirit of remettre en cause in France lies behind everything from calls to overhaul the retirement system to the alarming percentage of French people who swallow homeopathic remedies. The French constitution was amended 16 times from 1996 to 2008; the US Constitution was amended only once in the last 50 years — to ratify a proposal made in 1789 !

I recently read two contemporary plays built around the theme of remettre en cause. Each one operates at two levels: an event happens within a family that causes them to revisit settled questions in a new light, which allows the playwright to re-examine a larger social issue together with the audience. The first play is Drôle de genre, by Jade-Rose Parker, which premiered at Théâtre de la Renaissance, Paris, in February 2022 (I’ll write about the second, Demain la revanche, by Sébastien Thiéry, in another post).

Drôle de genre has the form of a drawing-room farce. It’s staged in the main room of an upscale apartment and has lots of biting dialogue with witty zingers reliably hitting the audience’s funny-bone without particularly injuring the other characters. There are people trying to stop each other from revealing information and lots of shouting. But all this disguises a more serious tragedy. In the opening lines of the play a woman in her fifties, Carla Dumon-Chapuny, tells her husband that she has cancer of … the prostate. This is her way of revealing, after 30 years of marriage, that she is transsexual and was born Carlos, a man. While the sexual reassignment surgeon did an excellent job on all the observable parts of her anatomy (even in the marital bed), the prostate was left in place.

Carla’s husband François is the mayor, nominally a man of the Left and a strong supporter of LGBTQ people, doesn’t take the news well at all. He’s incensed by the decades of deception, angry at Carla, and concerned for his political career (it’s election season). It turns out he’s more a supporter of other LGBTQ people, not of his own wife being trans. The revelation also forces him to reexamine their whole married life. Does this mean he’s gay? Should this change how he views their choice to adopt a daughter 25 years ago? Carla argues that she’s the very same person François has lived with all this time, so why should one medical letter with a diagnostic result change anything? But François isn’t interested in anything beyond limiting the damage to his political career. He forbids Carla from telling their daughter Louise, as much for his own sake as out of concern for her.

Speaking of Louise, she knocks on the door at the start of act two, come to dinner with her fiancé Rachon and a big announcement: she’s pregnant ! When Carla shares her news («Je suis un homme.»), Louise is lovingly supportive while François is even more angry and alienated from the whole family. But then Louise shares some more news: she’s decided to go in search of her birth parents to discover her origins and why they gave her up for adoption. This drives Carla and François back together in joint opposition, as they insist that they are Louise’s real parents, and she shouldn’t need anything more. In fact, she should be grateful they took her in and provided her with everything for years! Louise accuses Carla of hypocrisy:

Louise: Toi, tu as eu la chance de te trouver et tu as fait en sorte de devenir la personne que tu étais. Moi, je me cherche encore. Et j’ai besoin … Non, je n’ai pas «besoin», j’ai «envie» que vous me souteniez dans ma quête d’identité.

The dialogue gets more and more heated from there, Rachon gets himself in trouble too, and finally they each storm off one by one, to the exit door or the spare bedroom. Act two ends with Carla alone in the relational ruins of her living room, dancing the death scene from Swan Lake in a way «qui traduit à la fois le rejet, le désespoir, et la solitude».

Act three is short, though not sweet. It is an exact replay of act one, right up the point where Carla Dumon-Chapuny tells her husband that she has … un cancer du sein.

Noir. Le lac des Cygnes (thème principal) rugit, déchirant.

FIN

Sleep well, kiddos.

Overall I thought the play was an interesting effort to blend vaudeville farce with a serious treatment of a delicate subject. I think it has limited goals, and it succeeds on its own terms. Playwright Jade-Rose Parker stated «J’avais envie de faire une pièce grand public […] La comédie est un bon média pour cela. Drôle de genre n’est pas une pièce militante, […] mais j’espère qu’en sortant, il en reste quelque chose. Je voulais une pièce qui interroge, qui fasse réfléchir sur le monde d’aujourd’hui, et sur soi». The play is not terribly deep and the characters are barely more than their few traits, but Jade-Rose Parker’s writing is witty. Her jokes stay on the safe side of the wokisme line, though she doesn’t sugar-coat society’s continued failure to allow trans people to live openly without cost. This is her first produced play; should I have the occasion to see her next one, I’ll buy a ticket.

A few final notes, one language and one theatrical. When Carla first says to Louise that she is a man, her daughter at first misconstrues this as an announcement that Carla is biologically a woman who feels herself to be a man. Here’s the lines clarifying the situation:

Louise: Quoi ? Tu veux devenir un homme ?
Carla: Non, J’ÉTAIS un homme. (Se reprenant.) J’AI ÉTÉ un homme. Dans une autre vie, il y a très longtemps.
Louise: Quoi ? Tu veux devenir un homme ?
Carla: Non, J’ÉTAIS un homme. (Se reprenant.) J’AI ÉTÉ un homme. Dans une autre vie, il y a très longtemps.

The capitalization is rendered that way in the script, drawing the listener’s attention to the correction of which past tense to use. The best description I’ve heard yet of the distinction between the passé composé and imparfait is that the passé composé is a bounded tense, while the imparfait is an unbounded tense (another, less helpful phrasing I’ve heard for this is that the imparfait is for actions that were ongoing or continuous in the past). Carla’s first stab at explaining things uses the unbounded imparfait, but she corrects herself to the passé composé to emphasize definitively that her being a man has ended. I don’t know how you would translate that distinction cleanly – “No, I was a man … I used to be a man.” doesn’t cut it. The French version is a neat grammatical trick of dialogue that may not be available in English.

The theatrical note is this: Jade-Rose Parker indulges in a short bit of fourth-wall breaking during act two which I imagine is very effective. At the peak of his rage, François claims that by “passing herself off as his wife” for 30 years, Carla has effectively taken him hostage. When Carla points out this analogy is ridiculous, François asks the audience for validation:

Francois: […] Moi ça fait trente ans que (désignant Carla) cette personne me prend en otage !
Louise: PAPA! Tu ne crois pas que tu exagère ?
François: Moi j’exagère ? C’est la meilleure ! Moi, j’exagère ?? (À la régie.) RALLUMEZ LA SALLE !

La salle se rallume.

Rachon: Mais qu’est-ce que vous faites ?
François: Un sondage d’opinion ! (Au public.) Qui parmis vous pense que j’exagère ? (Rachon va pour protester, François lui impose le silence avec la main.) Je rappelle pour mémoire que ce monsieur (désignant Carla) se fait passer pour ma femme depouis plus de trente ans !
Carla: TU DÉBLOQUES !!!
François: On va très vite le savoir ! (Au public.) Allez-y, allez-y !!! Levez la main !
Carla: Non mais tu vois bien que les gens n’ont pas envie de participer à ton petit numéro pathétique !
François: (à une personne au premier rang) Monsieur, vous pensez que j’exagère ? Exprimez-vous, bon sang !
Rachon: Mais pfff !!! Mais évidemment, vous faites voter le carré or ! C’est du CSP+ ça, c’est votre électorat ! Non, si vous voulez vraiment sonder la France, il faut aller au fond, là-haut, dans les derniers rangs, sur les strapontins derrière le poteau ! Là où les places sont à dix balles, où ça sent le peuple, le chômage, la conserve premier prix !
François: (se retournant vers Rachon) Non mais vous êtes odieux ! Vous entendez ce que vous dites, un peu (À la régie.) Éteignez la salle !

I can envision the uncomfortable tension among the audience as each person tries to calculate whether an actual hand-raising response is expected, or whether they can sit as passive spectator. What exactly does not raising my hand endorse ? And if I do raise my hand, what have I just committed myself to in front of my friends and the community of theater-goers? It’s a microcosm of the real-world situation where we reveal our political convictions through inaction as much as through action. If it is this unsettling to be put on the spot in a theater performance, no wonder it can be so hard for some citizens to wrestle with these political issues in real life.

Happy remettre en cause, everybody.

Posted on

Odds and Ends

I’ve read / watched to a lot of excellent English language books / movies / television. I’ve also consumed a lot of ordinary stuff, and more than my fair share of absolute junk: insipid novels, low-brow sitcoms, cringeworthy comic books or comic-book movies. In French, though, I’ve mostly read things recommended to me by someone, and that’s mostly good stuff. The past couple weeks, though, I’ve strayed from the recommendations path a bit, with the predictable result that the stuff I’ve consumed has … a range of quality. But it’s all part of expanding my cultural literacy, so it’s all good.

Le viandier de Polpette: L’ail des ours

Le viandier de Polpette is a quirky but charming volume of bandes desinées by Julien Neel and Olivier Milhaud. I picked it off the shelf of the French Library completely at random. It features Polpette, a former army cook who now runs the kitchen for the adult son of a nobleman in their mountain redoubt, Le Coq Vert. The book interleaves lovingly presented country French recipes with a vague plot about the Count’s father coming to visit. There’s a lot of running gags among the other denizens of the Coq Vert, including a retired British colonel and a stereotypical French proletariat. And there’s also a firebrand of a young woman who walks around with an entourage of unleashed pet ferrets. Oh, somewhere in there we encounter the rather large titular animal who may or may not be a bear, and who seems to have no relationship to garlic. The overall effect is off-beat, shall we say.

I did pick up a number of vocabulary words from this book:

  • capiteux – se dit d’un vin, d’un alcool qui monte à la tête, d’un parfum très fort.
  • la minerai – roche présentant une concentration élevée minéraux utiles (si inutiles, on l’appelle la gangue).
  • châtelain – propriétaire d’un château.
  • chaland (vieux) – celui qui achète habituellement chez un même marchand.
  • gargote (f) – restaurant où l’on mange à bas prix une mauvaise nourriture.
  • amenuiser – rendre quelque chose plus fiable, moins important. réduire, diminuer. Cf la menuiserie, «amenuiser une planche».
  • la guigne – (familier) malchance persistante; déveine, poisse. Avoir de la guigne.
  • ça barde – (populare) cela devient dangereux, en parlant d’une action; cela devient violent, en parlant d’une discussion.
  • être givré – (familier) être fou.
  • couver – entourer quelqu’un de soins attentifs et excessifs de tendresse.
  • d’ores et déjà – dès maintenant.
  • jaja – (populaire) vin rouge.
  • toupet – (familier) audace, effronterie. «Quel toupet !»
  • un encas – repas léger préparé pour être servi en cas de besoin.
  • un fantassin – militaire de l’infanterie.

Balle Perdue

The movie Balle Perdue (2020) is available on Netflix, and is in French, so I watched it. I haven’t seen any films from the Fast and Furious franchise, but I imagine they are similar. There’s a great deal of high speed car chases, various souped up vehicles with enhancements like hardened front grills, turbo thrusters, and sharpened forklift attachments. Inevitably, most of the cars crash, with the exception of our hero’s. It endures one non-fatal collision after another, yet somehow not only keeps functioning, it magically appears without dents or scapes just seconds later during the same chase. Not a great job of film editing. There’s also a lot of shooting, as there’s a lot of (corrupt) police officers involved. The plot, such as it is, involves a brilliant but wayward young car mechanic who enhances cars for a criminal gang, gets arrested and sent to jail, but is then paroled under the sponsorship of a police captain who wants his own fleet of enhanced police cruisers to catch the bad guys.

This works out great, until the police captain figures out too many bad guys are still getting away, and starts to suspect a leak in his department. Naturally, this being a French police movie, large parts of the brigade are corrupt and in the pay of the drug gangs. The police captain is murdered by his lieutenant, who then pins the crime on the wunder-mechanic, who flees and then has to clear his name and expose the corruption. This gives the film an excuse for lots of gun battles and dead bodies in addition to the high-speed car chases.

Not a lot of vocabulary here, but always good to hear rough accents and street language.

Skidamarink

Guillaume Musso is one of the best-selling French authors of the 21st century. He’s written over twenty books, primarily mysteries and thrillers, and sells more than a million copies a year. His first novel, entitled Skidamarink, appeared in 2001 and made very little impression. It sold a few thousand copies and got tepid reviews before going out of print. But it was re-published in 2020 with a new forward by the author, and was subsequently recorded as an audio-book. This is how I came to listen to it — I browsed Audible.com for French mysteries, saw this as a recent publication, looked up the author and found he was widely celebrated in French popular literature and clicked “buy”. Only when I listened to the forward did I learn that it was Musso’s first book and not a recent one.

The forward also had an interesting bit about the book’s place in the Musso canon. Apparently, Musso doesn’t think much of it: it was a first novel, he wrote it while he was teaching school, his editor for the book was his mother. But when his later works became popular, fans went looking for this early work. Prices for used copies skyrocketed on auction sites, and low-quality pirated scans circulated on the web. Musso writes that he held off from republishing the work because he thought he’d revise it first, but then kept prioritizing new works. So in 2020, he finally greenlighted the re-issuance of the book with its original text. In the forward, he notes “the faults in its quality, but also the quality of its faults.” He also notes the similarities with Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code, but points out that his book was published two years before Brown’s blockbuster.

Skidamarink book isn’t terrible, but it’s pretty shoddy. The mystery is shoddy somebody stole the Mona Lisa painting, cut it into pieces, and sent them to four seemingly unconnected people. The thief also sent literary quotes from Victor Hugo, John Dunne, and the like and summoned the four civilians to a secret meeting in an Italian church. Subsequent events convince the four that their lives are in danger if they don’t work together to decipher a series of cryptic criminal threats that the thief issues through the media, like murdering prominent business leaders and poisoning gated communities. The whole thing is a bit too rococo and (as Musso writes in the forward) romanesque for my tastes.

But the audio book is in French, which is really all it promised to be. Listening is a bit of a challenge, not because of the clichéd expressions, but because of the narrators unfamiliar accents, especially as he tries to differentiate three Americain characters and one Italian.

Glenn, naissance d’un prodige

Glenn Gould was a Canadian classical pianist who lived from 1932 to 1982, dying of a stroke at the age of 50. His 1956 recording of Bach’s Goldberg Variations was one of the best-selling classical recordings of all time. He had an unusual style, crouching over the keyboard as he played and humming audibly to himself. After a short concertizing career as a young artist, he retreated to the studio where he made dozens of recordings right up to his death. He was a pop icon and a bit eccentric, but recorded interviews make it clear he was quite intelligent and could speak affably about his life and his music without difficulty.

I point this out because Ivan Calbérac’s play Glenn, naissance d’un prodige, paints the title character as far more eccentric, to the point of being paranoid and incoherent. Perhaps Gould was that way in private or in down periods, but there’s enough public footage and interview recordings of him being fairly normal that the play’s presentation rings hollow. The script is otherwise undistinguished, presenting a sequence of biographical sketches that offer little beyond the biography section of his Wikipedia page. There’s a homey portrayal of Glenn’s father, and a depiction of Glenn’s mother as both narcissistic and obsessive, but given the distorted presentation of Gould himself I put little stock in these as accurate characterizations of his parents.

But the play was featured in the September 2022 issue of L’avant-scène théâtre, so I read it. I noted several unfamiliar vocabulary words as I went, which are always valuable to me:

  • un brochet: poisson ésocidé des eaux douces [pike en anglais].
  • écueil (m): (litéraire) tout ce qui fait obstacle, met en péril; danger, piège. Litéralement, une tête de roche couverte par moins de 20 m d’eau.
  • espiègle: personne vive; malicieuse mais sans méchanceté. De Till Eulenspiegel. espièglerie.
  • voilage (m): Grand rideau de fenêtre en voile.
  • limace (f): mollusque pulmoné terrestre sans coquille externe [slug en anglais].
  • décoifant: surprenant; dérangeant les cheveux de quelqu’un.
  • dithyrambique: très élogieux, d’un enthousiasme emphatique, outré. Dithyrambe – cantique consacré à Dionysus.
  • clavecin (m): instrument de musique à cordes pincées et à clavier.
  • parti pris: opinion audacieux; idée fixe a priori.
  • fêlure (f): fracture incomplète d’un os.
  • luxation (f): déplacement des 2 extrémités osseuses d’une articulation.
  • convier: inviter
  • accaparer: occuper exclusivement quelqu’un, lui prendre tout son temps; absorber.
  • larguer: abandonner quelqu’un, quelque chose; s’en débarrasser.
  • foutoir (m): (populaire) endroit où règne un désordre extrême.
  • fiston (m): mot d’affection adressé à son fils ou à un jeune garçon [kiddo en anglais].

Other than that, I’ve been doing French crosswords and collecting vocabulary words from children’s books. But this post is long enough, so I’ll write about that in an upcoming article.

Posted on

Une idée géniale, Théâtre du Boulevard

L’avant-scène théâtre paused publication during Covid and then published more than 2 issues a month for a while in order to catch up. It’s now reached the point where the date on the cover more or less matches the date on which the magazine arrives in my mailbox. It was impossible for me to keep up with the flow of arrivals when they came 3-4 times per month, but now that they’ve settled down I’m going to make an effort to read each play within two weeks of its arrival. We’ll see how it goes.

The August 2022 issue features the play Une idée géniale. This is a light-hearted work of fluff that is described in the surrounding commentary as théâtre du boulevard. All the classic elements of a 19th century farce are present in modern form. The front matter specifies a familiar set with plenty of opportunities for coming and going (a living room with doors leading to the kitchen, the basement, the bathroom, the front entry, plus stairs up and a window out). The main actor (who as it happens is also the author, Sebastien Castro) plays three separate characters – a pair of twins (one of whom is coincidentally an amateur actor) plus an unrelated man who just happens to be look just like them. And the plot revolves around a jealous husband who tries to derail his wife’s nascent affair with the doppelganger (le sosie) by hiring the actor to impersonate his wife’s lover and act boorishly. All the predictable twists and turns ensue.

Yet for all its familiarity, the play avoids being trite. The characters are sketched out with novel particulars, the writing is clever, and the timing precise. Castro shows that the portes qui claquent form may be well-worn, but if handled deftly it can still provide an evening’s amusement. I read it in two quick sittings and laughed out loud a several times. Sometimes we want theater to have meaning, but sometimes we are happy for it to be a source of simple, goofy pleasure. Here are two examples of the camp-y humor which brought a smile to my face:

CATHERINE [la voisine]: Au fait, j’ai rapporté Schubert à Arnaud.
THOMAS: (prenant le petit sac, intrigué) Schubert ?
CATHERINE: Ah ! mais je suis bête, c’est le match, ce soir. Arnaud est chez son ami.
THOMAS: Ah ben, non, justement, il a pas pu y aller.
CATHERINE: Oh, c’est dommage, il se faisait une joie.
THOMAS: Je sais mais il a eu un accident.
CATHERINE: Qu’est-ce qu’il s’est passé ?
THOMAS: Il était dans sa voiture… Et paf ! Crevé.
CATHERINE: Comment ça « crevé » ?
THOMAS: Ça doit être l’usure …
CATHERINE: Mais vous voulez dire qu’Arnaud est …
THOMAS: (regardant dans le sac et en sortant deux CD) Des CD !
CATHERINE: Décédé ? Mais quelle horreur !

French phonetic word-play (des CD / décédé), gotta love it. Recall that « crevé » is both the expression for having a punctured tire and also a familiar expression dying.

Here’s another excerpt that is all about the delivery:

ARNAUD: Et après on parle de la tenue …
THOMAS: Alors, vous avez de la chance, la costumière de la troupe est une amie et elle m’a prêté deux trois choses pas inintéressantes. Quand on a monté Mary Poppins, j’ai dû reprendre le rôle au pied levé parce que la comédienne principale s’était fait renverser par une voiture deux heures avant la première. C’était horrible. En plus, les mauvaises langues ont dit que j’avais fait exprès de griller le feu.

Comic gold.

Arnaud (José Paul) et Thomas (Sébastien Castro)

Vocabulaire

As is perhaps clear from these two excerpts, the form may be throwback but the register of the language is modern and familiar. Here’s a list of vocabulary words and expressions from the script that were new to me, many of them slang. Definitions largely drawn from Larousse, with some additions from Wiktionary or the like.

  • toucher sa bille: être compétent; connaître bien (familier). «Il touche sa bille en bricolage».
  • une patère: support fixé à un mur, en forme de disque, de boule ou de crochet, qui sert soit à suspendre des vêtements, soit à soutenir des rideaux, des tentures, etc.
  • ahurir: frapper quelqu’un d’un étonnement qui le laisse interdit. «Cette réponse m’ahurit». Souvent comme adjectif «ahuri» = surpris au point de paraître stupide.
  • un coup de bol: un coup de chance.
  • faire un carton: tirer sur la cible; avoir beaucoup de succès; marquer des points; réussir.
  • vétuste: qui est vieux, détérioré par le temps. «Une maison vétuste».
  • mouais: (familier) marque l’affirmatif, forcé ou contraint, ou tout simplement une affirmation de pratique , et non de principe, par «obligation». Exprime un accord réservé, sans adhésion réelle.
  • se barrer: (populaire) s’en aller, partir, s’enfuir. Aussi familier: se tirer, se casser.
  • paf !: (interjection) exprime un coup frappé, une chute, un incident imprévu.
  • enliser: mettre / maintenir quelqu’un ou quelque chose dans un état d’inertie, de stagnation, qui empêche d’évoluer; enfoncer. Souvent «s’enliser», ou avec les sables mouvants.
  • cachet: (m) prix d’une leçon particulière (de piano, de dessin, etc.). Aussi rétribution d’un artiste, d’un journaliste, pour une représentations, une émission, etc. [there are other more common meanings of cachet].
  • au pied levé: sans avoir le temps de se préparer.
  • griller un feu: passer un feu de couleur rouge, sans prêter attention à sa signalisation. Ne pas s’arrêter.
  • un beauf: (populaire) type de Français moyen, réactionnaire et raciste, inspiré d’un personnage de bandes dessinées (voyez le chanson de Renaud).
  • Bouygues: un opérateur de télécommunications, comme Orange, SFR. Fondé par Francis Bouygues dans le contexte de reconstruction de la France après la Seconde Guerre mondiale. Société parente du chaîne TF1.
  • frangin, frangine: (populaire) frère, soeur.
  • être à cran: dans un état d’irritation qu’on a peine à maîtriser.
  • avoir le cran: oser, avoir du courage.

  • avoir les crocs: (familier) avoir très faim. Cf croc, croquer et croque-monsieur.
  • changer le fusil d’épaule: changer d’avis ou d’opinion.
crocs d’un chien
  • racaille: (f) populace méprisable; catégorie de personnes considérées comme viles.
  • le trac: (familier) peur ou angoisse irraisonnée que quelqu’un éprouve au moment de paraître en public, de subir une épreuve, etc. «avoir le trac».
  • paumer: (populaire) perdre, égarer.
  • foireux: (populaire) qui fonctionne mal, raté, sans valeur. «une idée foireuse».
  • vénère: (familier, verlan) énervé; en colère.
  • usure: (f) détérioration progressive par frottement, érosion, utilisation.
Posted on

Un amour de Blum

This afternoon we saw Un amour de Blum, by Gérard Savoisien, at Théâtre du Chêne Noir. Two actors tell (a dramatization of) the real-life story of Léon Blum, a former President of the French Council, and Jeanne Levylier, a long-time admirer of Blum who is 20 years his junior. Both are Jewish, he a socialist politician and she a cosseted Parisian bourgeoise. It is 1940, and we find Blum held as a political prisoner by the Vichy government. Jeanne arranges to visit him frequently, and soon expresses her love for him, leading to an unlikely amorous affair. She follows him from prison to prison, somehow free while he is jailed. Eventually, she makes the decision to join him in his imprisonment in Himler’s hunting pavillion just outside the concentration camp at Buchenwald. The two manage to survive and are liberated by the Americans in 1945.

The plays themes are about finding love in times of great hardship, transmuting fear into courage, and also living life with dignity to the end. The performance was very well acted, but the text is a bit repetitive. I think I understood most of the language, will double check that when I read the text which I purchased after the show. Overall enjoyable, but not hors du commun.

Posted on

Vole Eddie, vole !

The current issue of L’avant-scène théâtre (dated 15 April 2022 — they are still catching up from Covid disruptions) features the play Vole Eddie, vole ! by Léonard Prain. Rather than put it on the pile to be read in due course, I uncharacteristically picked it up as bedtime reading the night it arrived, and finished it in a single gulp. Prain has picked an unusual subject for a French play: the story of British ski jumper Michael Edwards, aka “Eddie the Eagle”. Eddie competed in the 1988 Winter Olympics in Calgary and made history despite finishing last, as he was the first British athlete ever to qualify for the Olympic ski-jumping events. His efforts to qualify for the Olympics by completing a 70m jump in a formal competition attracted a cult following worldwide, and he became a star of the 1988 Olympics despite his guaranteed losing status (top jumpers reach 120m).

The story is well documented (on Wikipedia and elsewhere): Eddie came to skiing late, did not have the typical body type for skiers, and wore thick corrective lenses. As a teenager he tried out unsuccessfully for the British national downhill ski team, so switched to ski jumping where there was no British competition. Eddie self-funded a quixotic campaign to reach the Olympics (self-funded, as the British national sports organization ignored him). He spent years living in his car and eating meager rations to save all his money for travel and skiing fees. According to the play, at least, his parents had little to offer him, and his father was dead set against Eddie’s folly.

Given the events recounted are relatively recent, I found myself asking “Does the play add anything to the tale ?” I’m not looking for novel details or scandalous revelations, but rather some insight or human exploration of Eddie’s character and odd journey. Alas, I find myself answering “No”. The dialog is smooth and the language descriptive. The play is designed to be performed by just three actors: one plays Eddie, one plays all the other male parts, and one plays all the other female parts. We see Eddie’s mother and father, his teachers and school coaches, his school peers (both dismissive and competitive), and eventually journalists, sports-casters, and race officials. The character of Eddie is presented as forever a child, with a good natured humor and more than a touch of buffoonery. He is never angry, though he does argue with his parents about his choice to ski rather than follow his father into the family plastering business. In all, not a lot dramatic or thought-provoking.

But it was a pleasant exposure of a fun story, a bit of an amuse bouche as it were. Speaking of which, I’m off shortly to travel to Avignon for the annual theater festival there. I hope I will have lots of blog posts for that!

Updated (2022-07-07): Check out this photo from Avignon:

La distribution à Avignon: Léonard Prain, moi, Sophie Accard, et Benjamin Lhommas

That’s me with the cast of Vole, Eddie, Vole ! I randomly came upon the three of them on this opening afternoon of Festival Avignon. They are here performing the show as part of the Festival OFF. We chatted a bit and I said I’d come see the show. I’ll update my review if I manage to make it to a performance.

Posted on

Les Soeurs et les rivaux

Two recent issues of L’avant-scène théâtre feature plays that each, in their own very different ways, examine the relationship between a pair of people with long histories of conflict and amity. In Les Soeurs Bienaimé, playwright Brigitte Buc gives us an unexpected reunion of two sisters in their 40s, Michèle and Pascale, who meet after a 25 year hiatus. Pascale, the younger, long ago fled the dysfunctional family and its rural farm for Paris. Michèle stayed all these years and struggled to care for parents who aged poorly and then died in this provincial community that itself has decayed with time. Now it is Paris that Pascale is fleeing, as her life there has recently been complicated by mental health problems, marital issues, and drug addiction. Michèle is none too happy to have Pascale back, with her notions of rediscovering “authentic village life” and fantasies of converting the farm into a tourist hotel. The interactions are dominated by adolescent-worthy insults, competition, physical scuffles, and recriminations, but in and among the gaps there is some exploration of their shared past and commiseration at their shared dissatisfaction with their separate presents.

I found Les Soeurs Bienaimé rather weak: the themes were well-worn, the characters were flat and unengaging, and the writing was unremarkable. A few days after finishing the play, I happened to listen to an episode of the podcast Le Masque et La Plume that reviewed it, and I discovered that they had a similar critique of it. Glad to have my opinion backed by competent authorities.

Élysée, by Hervé Bentégeat, is an entirely different kind of work, but one that again features two long-time rivals: French Presidents François Mitterrand and Jacques Chirac. The play exhibits several imagined but historically possible conversations between them and at various points in their storied political careers.

Mittérand was elected twice back when presidential terms lasted 7 years, and served from 1981 to 1995. Chirac succeeded him and was also elected twice, serving from 1995 through 2007. However, their relationship is far deeper than predecessor and successor. Chirac ran in the first round of the 1981 election as a candidate of the center-right, but was not among the top two vote getters. Those were Mitterrand, a socialist with grandiose ideas, and incumbent President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing. D’Estaing had entered office as a center-right candidate, but had moved to be more and more conservative over time, especially on immigration. Chirac had been d’Estaing’s prime minister, but resigned in 1976 and ran against him in the 1981 contest. After his defeat in the first round, Chirac remained opposed to d’Estaing, and his opposition was so intense that he formed an alliance with Mitterrand and threw his support behind the Socialist. It was enough to bring Mitterand to power, and would eventually lead to Chirac being named as Mitterand’s prime minister in 1986. This Left-Right alliance was unusual enough that it earned its own sobriquet: the relationship was dubbed la première cohabitation. It didn’t last long, though, and Chirac quit in time to run against (and lose to) Mitterrand in the 1988 elections. Chirac prevailed on his third presidential campaign in 1995, by which point Mitterrand was old and sick with an abdominal cancer that claimed him a year later. As you can see, the two men had a long, deep, and complex relationship.

The play opens in 1996 with Chirac preparing a funeral oration for Mitterrand and musing on the legacy of the old man, both for the nation and for Chirac personally. From there we go backwards in time, first with a brief scene in 1995 showing the transfer of power from Mitterand to Chirac, and then with another in 1994 showing Mitterand exhorting Chirac to run for president a third time. However the bulk of the play takes place in 1981 and shows the uneasy negotiations around Chirac throwing his support to Mitterand against d’Estaing. The alliance was orchestrated by a third French political figure, Philippe Dechartre. He was a government minister under de Gaulle and then Pompidou in the 1960s, and somehow a trusted friend and advisor of both Chirac and Mitterand. According to the play, Dechartre was instrumental in bringing the two men together in 1981. Historically, Dechartre was indeed the person who arranged to release his own statement of support for Mitterrand, ostensibly a personal opinion but published on stationary branded with the letterhead of Chirac’s party, Rassemblement pour la République. The statement was widely viewed and thought to sway over 100,000 votes in Mitterrand’s direction, well more than the margin of victory.

I don’t know how Élysée comes across for an audience already deeply (or superficially) familiar with all of this French politics from the 1970s, 80s, or 90s. I was only vaguely familiar with the outcomes and knew nothing of the intrigues that made it happen. I knew the names Mitterrand and Chirac, of course, but couldn’t have told you the dynamics of any of their elections. Cohabitation was a hazy thing that I knew the French did at some point, but I was just as likely to confuse it with colocateur if I wasn’t careful. So for me, the play was an impetus to go read several Wikipedia pages about French elections from 40 years ago. But I can’t say I found much else in Élysée to recommend it, and I doubt it will have any staying power as a piece of literature. Still, curious to contrast the “we’re adversaries but not enemies” attitude of French politics back then with the “you are my mortal enemy” attitude of American politics today.

One curious footnote: the play debuted in January 2021 and the role of Philippe Dechartre was played by his real-life son, Emmanuel Dechartre. Dechartre fils is an established stage actor who has been treading the boards since the late 1960s. One has to imagine that he was sought out for this role, if only for the publicity value. He probably does an excellent impression of his father, though, and the age is now right. His Wikipedia page has an extensive list of theatrical appearances, but stopped in 2018. I just now updated it to include Élysée.

Posted on

Venu de loin, où comment comprendre un fléau ?

For homework this week, my teacher asked me to write a review of a play I saw recently. It wasn’t a French play (though it was Canadian), but I didn’t feel like writing about any of the French plays I’d read recently. So I dashed off 1000 words in about two and a half hours, then did some light corrections with my teacher. Here’s the edited version. Nothing special, but a good exercise in writing — something I’ve done less of lately than in the summer and fall.

Est-ce que la comédie musicale sert à comprendre un fléau ?

« Il s’agit du 11 septembre, cette comédie musicale ». Voilà la phrase qu’on entend partout dans les comptes rendus de Venu de Loin, la comédie musicale canadienne créée en 2017 et jouée encore (où bien, encore une fois après une pause covidienne) à Broadway. Les chroniqueurs plus raffinés se nuancent en disant « Mais vraiment, il s’agit du 12 septembre », parce que les auteurs Irène Sankoff et David Hein nous montrent des sentiments et des actions qui se déroulent dans les jours qui suivent cet attentat et à 2 000 km de là. Ces deux observations sont correctes, mais après avoir lu ces constatations plusieurs fois, j’ai commencé à me demander: Pourquoi est-ce que c’est notable ? Pourquoi l’air de surprise autour de ces remarques ?

C’est normal que les sept arts traitent les fléaux. Le quatrième art nous donne des romans comme La nuit de Weisel, À l’Ouest, rien de nouveau de Hemingway, ou La peste de Camus. Le septième art nous rend La vie est belle, de Benigni, le troisième Guernica de Picasso, le premier Mémorial des anciens combattants du Viêt Nam conçu par Maya Lin. Bien sûr qu’on dit « Il s’agit de l’Holocauste. » ou « Il s’agit de la guerre civile espagnole. », mais on le dit sans être étonné. Mais c’est rare qu’une comédie musicale, enfant vulgaire du cinquième et sixième art, aborde un tel sujet.

La comédie musicale américaine a ses origines dans les petits spectacles ménestrels créés dans les années 1820. Elle est restée dans le domaine du burlesque pendant cent ans avant d’évoluer un peu au début du XXe siècle. Mais ce n’est qu’avec la création de Oklahoma en 1943 que cette forme passe d’un ensemble de chansons populaires défilées sans organisation à une histoire intégrale qui utilise les chansons pour faire évoluer l’intrigue. Les œuvres de Stephen Sondheim (mort il y seulement quelques mois) ont encore transformé ce genre en accordant aux comédiens des arias qui ne font pas évoluer l’intrigue, mais qui approfondissent leurs personnages. Ces arias  traitent de sujets sérieux comme la nature de la réalité, le but d’existence, la mort, l’amour, et les remords. Mais Sondheim reste au niveau personnel, évitant les grands événements dans la société (avec l’exception de Les Assassins, qui ne fonctionne guère à mon avis.)

Est-ce que la comédie musicale convient à la tragédie ? Je ne parle pas d’une exploitation comme Les Producteurs (spectacle de Mel Brooks à l’affiche actuellement en adaptation français par Alexis Michalik). Ça, c’est une farce pure qui utilise l’idée d’une comédie à propos d’Adolf Hitler pour illustrer ce qui est carrément destiné à faire un four théâtrale. Non, je parle d’un effort sérieux à utiliser un art léger pour dire quelque chose de sincère et d’honnête à propos d’un fléau. Ce n’est pas du tout évident. Jeudi 24 février, 2022, j’ai assisté à l’enregistrement d’un épisode de Programme tard avec Stephen Colbert à New York. C’était l’après-midi du jour même où les armées russes ont lancé leur invasion de l’Ukraine. M. Colbert a essayé de faire sa chronique humoristique quotidienne, mais le sujet lui a résisté. Il n’a pas pu trouver les mots qui nous feraient rire de cette guerre immédiate en éclaircissant quelques vérités subtiles. Ces blagues sont tombées presque sans réaction, pendant que le public bougeait inconfortablement à sa place. 

Deux jours plus tard, je suis encore allé au théâtre pour voir Venu de Loin. Cette fois-ci, la comédie a bien marché, soutenue par le drame et la musique. Le spectacle ne commence pas avec l’attentat du 11 septembre, mais avec les présentations des habitants ordinaires de Gander, Terre-Neuve, Canada: la femme qui s’occupe des animaux abandonnés; l’enseignante qui accueille ses élèves ce premier matin de la rentrée; l’agent de police qui n’a rien à faire que donner des avertissements au cocitoyen qui ne ralentit pas assez au passage piéton; la jeune journaliste qui commence son boulot à la chaine locale; le chef du syndicat des conducteurs d’autobus, qui font la grève. Chacun nous adresse quelques répliques qui annoncent sa routine matinale ou comment elle l’a basculée. Quelques minutes plus tard, ils entendent parler de l’attentat à la radio, et ils sont alertés que certains avions vont se poser à l’aéroport tout de suite. Encore, on nous présente des personnages, maintenant les occupants des avions: un homme d’affaire anglais; une grand-mère de New York; un couple homosexuel de Los Angeles; un chef de cuisine égyptien; la commandante d’un Boeing 747. En quelques mots, ils nous parlent de leurs occupations, leurs destinations, leurs vies. Et puis, leur déboussolement d’avoir atterri au Canada sans avoir été prévenu.

Par la suite, nous voyons les événements plutôt logistiques que dramatiques. Où héberger 7 000 personnes dans une petite ville de 9 000 âmes ? Comment les munir de vêtements, de nourriture, de médicaments ? De quels téléphones et ordinateurs peuvent-t-ils se servir ? Imbriqués dans ses questions prosaïques sont des petits discours, fugaces, à propos des sentiments profonds: la perte, l’isolation, la peur, la mort, et la haine. Les morceaux musicaux sont des tapisseries de voix, pas en chœur mais en séries. C’est quoi l’émotion d’isolation pour un homme d’affaires, une commandante, une grand-mère, un New Yorkais, un Égyptien ? Est-il universel ou particulier ? Ces sujets sont lourds, mais les paroles sont parsemées de petits gestes, un humour naturel exprimé par les personnages pour apaiser leurs propres anxiétés et pas seulement pour faire rire le public. Nous nous identifions avec chacune de ces voix, nous nous troublons et, pour ceux parmi nous qui avons plus de quinze ans, nous nous rappelons nos émotions de cette journée et cette semaine pénible.

Est-ce que la comédie musicale sert à comprendre un fléau ? Avant d’avoir vu Venu de Loin, je dirai «seulement avec difficulté». Le seul exemple que j’aurais identifié c’est Cabaret, qui se situe à Berlin dans les années trente. Il réussit à un certain point à représenter la particularité de souffrance du fléau à venir, mais il y avait trop de scènes burlesques entremêlées. Avec Venu de Loin, je peux répondre sans hésitation. Ici, nous voyons la démocratisation du deuil, et un petit triomphe de la communauté. C’est ironique, pourtant, que ce n’est pas un triomphe américain, mais canadien. Est-ce qu’une telle vertue serait possible au sein des américains, qui ont lancé une offensive massive dans les années après le 11 septembre ? Dans une scène brève, un New Yorkais noir nous raconte «Mon père m’a téléphoné et m’a demandé si j’allais bien au Canada. Comment pourrais-je lui dire que je n’allais pas bien, j’allais mieux que bien ?»

By the way, if you are intrigued to hear the songs the cast album is very good and available on all the usual streaming services. If you want to see the acting as well (which I recommend) but can’t make it to a local or New York production, they filmed a performance of the show and released it on 11 September 2021 to mark 20 years since the attacks. I haven’t seen the filmed performance, but it it is available on Apple TV.

Posted on

Jacques et son maître, par Milan Kundera (à Diderot)

Yesterday I read the play Jacques et son maître: Hommage à Denis Diderot en trois actes. The play was written (in French) in 1971 by Czech writer Milan Kundera. It is a «variation – hommage» on a novel that I haven’t read, Diderot’s Jacques le Fataliste et son maître, which was started in 1765 and published in installments from 1778 to 1780. The novel is apparently a series of philosophical dialogues between a servant and a master, including numerous digressions, bawdy stories, and presentations of new fables (e.g. La Gaine et le Coutelet).

The play is much the same, although Kundera fiercely corrected anyone who called it an “adaptation” of the novel. Instead, it honors Diderot’s original but uses modern theatrical devices like breaking the fourth wall from the opening lines, having characters openly question the talent of the (absent) playwright who is scripting their lines, and staging multiple plays-within-a-play. For all that, though, it remains light-hearted and easily accessible, more entertainment than social commentary. At a guess, it has updated the dialogue of Diderot and dropped most of the philosophy.

The original Diderot

To the extent that is philosophical investigation remains, it centers on whether our destinies are our own to shape, or whether «ce qui nous arrive de bien et de mal ici-bas est écrit là-haut». If our fates are already written, then what sense does it make to hold others responsible for their actions, good or bad? In the case of Man and God, this question has one import, but of course Jacques and his master consider it in the context of Character and Playwright, where the answer is (perhaps?) more clear. However as his master asks, «est-ce que tu es un salaud parce que c’est écrit là-haut ? Ou est-ce que c’est écrit parce qu’ils savaient, là-haut, que tu étais un salaud ? Quelle est la cause et quel est l’effet ?» Kundera doesn’t offer much by way of answer, but the audience doesn’t really care.

The bulk of the play is telling and retelling variations of the same story of love triangles (well, really lust triangles) gone wrong: man dallies with woman, then manipulates his friend into marrying his pregnant mistresses; woman is spurned by man, then manipulates her former lover into marrying a disguised prostitute; man offers to help friend hide a secret tryst with a woman, then sleeps with her himself; man offers to arrange a night of debauchery for his friend, then tips off the authorities to expose friend in compromising position. Throughout it all, Jacques tries to tell his master the story of how Jacques lost his virginity, and how that lead to his falling in love with a different woman. There’s lots of ribald details about the sizes of the women’s breasts and butts. It’s a little cringy, but the women are triumphant and the men ruined often enough that it’s still possible to produce this play in 2021 (Théâtre Montparnasse) without attracting too much opprobrium.

The play reminded me a bit of Fin de Partie by Beckett, which was written 14 years earlier. Each has the central dynamic revolve around a servant and a wheelchair-occupying master. Each has a lot of recurrent bits of dialogue and stories that are lengthened each time they are told. And each questions what controls and is controlled by the world we see on stage. But Beckett’s work is far more brooding and gloomy while Kundera’s is whimsical and ironic. None of Kundera’s characters take themselves all that seriously. Moreover, the Kundera dialogue is far more familiar and free than Beckett’s, which is turgid and formal. Perhaps it’s just easier for a Czech to write in French than an Irishman?

Some Vocabulary I Learned

There were a number of words and colloquialisms I learned while reading the play:

  • faire la noce – faire une partie de plaisir ; mener une vie de débauche.
  • un bambocheur – Personne qui aime faire la fête.
  • se toquer – Avoir brusquement un vif engouement pour quelqu’un ou quelque chose
  • un ardillon – Pointe de métal d’une boucle de courroie, de ceinture.
  • un tendron – Très jeune fille (d’âge tendre).
  • une grue – Populaire. Femme de mœurs faciles et vénales ; prostituée.
  • se fourrer – S’engager dans (une situation embarrassante).
  • une crécelle – Moulinet de bois formé d’une planchette mobile qui tourne bruyamment autour d’un axe.
    • voix de crécelle – aiguë, désagréable.
  • une raclée – Volée de coups.
    • filer (= donner) une raclée à qqn.
  • pouilleux – Misérable et sale.
  • une jante – Partie circulaire à la périphérie d’une roue de véhicule.
  • un essieu – Pièce transversale d’un véhicule, dont les extrémités entrent dans les moyeux des roues.
Posted on

Un Prince, pièce d’Émilie Frèche

Now that I’m done with Camus, I can catch up on some back issues of L’avant-scène théâtre. Last night I did a quick read of their July 2021 issue, which featured the play Un prince by Émilie Frèche. Weighing in at just 21 pages it’s barely more than an extended scene, an unbroken monologue by a single character (“un homme”) played by Sami Bouajila. The play first made an appearance at théâtre d’Antibes in November 2020, then had a much delayed and then abbreviated run at the same theater in July 2021. I had heard of Antibes, but didn’t really know where it is until I looked it up on a map (it’s in the far south east of France, between Cannes and Nice, just 60 miles from the Italian border).

The play shows a French man of Algerian descent, now homeless (as the the French say SDF = sans domicile fixe) and living in an abandoned construction site. The man’s father moved from Algeria to France in search of a peaceful life with economic opportunity, but the man’s own life didn’t work out that way. After 20 years of growing up poor and another 20 years of working at low wage jobs, he finds himself destitute after the factory he spent years at relocates to Algeria (!) in search of cheaper labor. The man sits among the piles of sand and gravel, somewhere between half- and fully-deluded about the nature of his situation, speaking of his goats and his fields of agranier.

Des chèvres dans un arganier.

We learn in bits and snatches the story of the man’s father, his own childhood, his life as a young married person, his economic dissipation, and his multiple refusals to accept help from the French social services. In the end the man concludes that France is not a land of peace at all, but one of constant economic warfare. Throughout the tone seems wistful rather than harsh, and at times a bit playful.

The solo actor Sami Bouajila is apparently quite famous; he’s appeared in over 50 feature films since 1991 and garnered 2 César awards, including the 2021 prize for Best Actor in the film Un fils. I’ve never seen him in film, but you can get a small taste of his stage performance from this teaser promotion for the July 2021 production of Un prince.

https://vimeo.com/596663608

Not a bad play, and one which I would have enjoyed more live than reading. But nothing that makes me want to go seek out more by this playwright.

Posted on

Camus, Covid et l’Avenir

I’m only about a quarter of the way through reading La Peste by Albert Camus, but I like it very much so far. It’s quite different in style from Les Justes and also from what I remember of L’Étranger (which I last read some 35 years ago). So far it’s got a straightforward narrative style, chronicling the imagined events that follow the return of bubonic plague to Oran (Algeria’s second largest city) in the 1940s. Bubonic plague still exists in the world today, but it is easily treatable with antibiotics if identified early enough. However antibiotics like penicillin were not in widespread civilian used until the mid- to late-1940s, and so far they don’t factor into the story.

La Peste reminds me a bit of Michael Crichton’s Andromeda Strain, though of course Camus got there a couple decades earlier. But where Crichton went for medical techno-babble (which even by the 1980s hadn’t aged very well), Camus focuses on the human reaction to the slow-motion realization that the Black Death has returned. These age very well, I’m afraid, and resonate quite all to accurately with modern human reactions to Covid. I’m also told (though I hadn’t noticed it on my own yet) certain parallels with other calamities that struck the world in the 1940s.

I wrote up some musings on Camus and Covid (700 words) for this week’s French lesson. Here’s the text after some light revisions with my teacher.

Camus, covid, et l’avenir

Je viens de recevoir un email qui annonce les dates du festival d’Avignon 2022, qui a lieu d’habitude les trois dernières semaines de juillet. Je dis «d’habitude», mais en fait les dates précises sont plus aléatoires que prévisibles. Cette année on commence le 7 juillet, mais pendant les derniers dix dernières années le jour J variait du 4 juillet au 7 juillet sans modèle. Quelquefois on commence le jeudi, autres fois le dimanche,  le lundi ou le mercredi. Et la date de fin est aussi arbitraire que la date du commencement. Et le festival 2020 a été totalement annulé à cause de la crise sanitaire de Covid-19. J’aurais bien voulu réserver un logement pour le festival il y a trois mois (car les hébergements au centre ville et bon marché sont rares), mais sans savoir les dates c’est trop aléatoire. Maintenant, avec l’arrivée d’omicron, le nouveau variant du virus, c’est encore possible que l’agenda du festival 2022 soit bouleversé. J’oublie quel petit malin a dit «La prévision c’est difficile – surtout quand il s’agit de l’avenir».

Ah, l’avenir, l’avenir. Pour moi, c’est incontournable – au moins, je souhaite accueillir l’avenir dans quelques années, sinon soit lui soit moi serons morts. J’ai passé ma jeunesse à jouer aux échecs, une entreprise ou on reste presque immobile pendant plusieurs heures en ne contemplant que l’avenir, où chaque coup est évalué en fonction des contre-coups possibles. Un peu extrême pour un gamin, j’admets, mais la fascination pourc l’avenir est un trait inné chez tous les humains. Le psychologue Daniel Gilbert écrit dans son livre Et si le bonheur vous tombait dessus : «Ce qui différencie l’homme de tous les autres animaux, c’est qu’il pense à l’avenir.»  Pourtant, il y a souvent un manque d’imagination parmi ces penseurs de l’avenir. Mon beau-père, bien muni en  adages qu’il estime sages, dit souvent «L’avenir n’est pas simplement une extension  du passé». Bien que cela me peine de l’admettre, j’ai peur qu’il ait raison.

La tendance à fouiller le passé pour prévoir est évidente sur la page Wikipédia qui concerne La peste, roman d’Albert Camus qui est paru en 1947. Après les parties typiques pour un tel article (historique du roman, résumé, personnages), on découvre une toute petit note au-dessous du titre Augmentation des ventes en 2020:  «En 2020, avec la pandémie de covid-19, le livre connaît un regain d’intérêt, notamment en France et en Italie, en raison de la ressemblance entre ce que le livre raconte et ce que vivent des populations dans de nombreux endroits du monde». Sans doute, l’auteur anonyme de cette page (un Bourbaki moderne) a totalement raison, car il peu probable que j’aurais commencé à lire ce premier chef-d’œuvre de Camus si la pandémie ne s’était jamais passée.

J’ai pris connaissance de La peste pour la première fois cette année après avoir entendu un entretien à la radio avec Marylin Maeso, qui a écrit un livre La fabrique de l’inhumain. Elle revisite La peste et le prend comme un point de départ pour parler des phénomènes sidérants et variés: la guerre, la torture, le terrorisme, etc. Elle constate nos incapacités à les confronter avec l’humanité, et cite les observations de Camus sur le désaccord entre l’échelle humaine et la taille des fléaux:

« Les fléaux, en effet, sont une chose commune, mais on croit difficilement aux fléaux lorsqu’ils vous tombent sur la tête… pestes et guerres trouvent les gens toujours aussi dépourvus. Quand une guerre éclate, les gens disent : «Ça ne durera pas, c’est trop bête. » … Nos concitoyens [étaient] humanistes : ils ne croyaient pas aux fléaux. Le fléau n’est pas à la mesure de l’homme, on se dit donc que le fléau est irréel, c’est un mauvais rêve qui va passer… Ils continuaient de faire des affaires, ils préparaient des voyages… Comment auraient-ils pensé à la peste qui supprime l’avenir … ? »

Albert Camus, La peste

Je trouve ces phrases de Camus, écrites il y a soixante-dix ans, vraiment effrayantes. L’annonce d’Avignon arrive et je me hâte de réserver les billets d’avion, en imaginant que l’achat lui-même pourrait éloigner de la France cette peste contemporaine. Ça ne durera pas, ça fait déjà dix-huit mois. Y en a marre de l’incertitude, je déclare que c’est le Covid qui est annulé pour 2022 et pas le Festival d’Avignon. 

«Ce qui différencie l’homme de tous les autres animaux, c’est qu’il pense à l’avenir.» Pas seulement penser à l’avenir, mais défendre l’avenir, insister sur l’existence de l’avenir. Avec mon cerveau de joueur d’échecs, je vois clairement la possibilité de la résurgence de la crise sanitaire. Et je vais attendre quelques mois avant d’acheter les billets pour Avignon. Mais en même temps, je vais identifier les spectacles auxquels j’irai, je vais faire des recherches chaque semaine pour des logements disponibles au centre ville, et je vais informer mon patron de mes dates de vacances en juillet. Je ne suis pas prêt pour que le Covid supprime l’avenir. 

I imagine I’ll have more to say once I’ve finished the book. Meanwhile, I spent several hours yesterday planning my trip to Avignon in July. One can hope …

Things I Learned

  • For the beginning and end of a multi-day event, use la date de commencement and la date de fin. The phrases date initiale and date terminale aren’t strictly wrong, but are clunky.
  • Speculatif is used for financial dealings or for way-out-there scientific research. For an action taken with a lot of guesswork, the outcome is better described as aléatoire.
  • Un variant, une variante have subtly different meanings and domains of use. The masculine form is reserved for the context of biology and genetics. The feminine form is for music, art, language, and chess openings. Roughly speaking, une variante corresponds to the English “variation” (“theme and variation”, “Queen’s Indian defense, Nimzowitsch variation”), while un variant corresponds to the English “variant” (“omicron variant”).
  • Malin can be used as an adjective or a noun. It has a range of meanings along a spectrum from pretty negative (“evil”, “wicked”, or “demonic”) to moderately positive (“smart”, “astute”, “clever”). Ideas like “sly” and “crafty” are in between these two poles. However the phrase « petit malin » is more along the lines of “smart alec”, “wise guy”, or “slick character”.
  • On passe son temps à faire quelques chose. I would have thought it was en faisant qqch, but that’s not grammatical.
  • Fascinating: the proper locutions are être fasciné par or avoir la fascination pour. Choosing the right preposition in French is one of my enduring challenges.
  • Inné means “innate” or “inborn”, and here again choosing the preposition trips me up. In English, a characteristic or ability is innate to a person. But in French, there are multiple possible prepositions following inné. The most common is inné chez qqn, but you can also use inné en qqn, inné dans qqn, or inné à qqn. I haven’t been able to discern if there are rules of when to use which preposition, or if it is purely a stylistic choice.