Emile Zola, The Belly of Paris: Reading Notes, part 3
Observing how the church of Saint Eustache can be seemed framed through the massive arches of Les Halles, the painter Claude Lantier observes to Florent: “Since the beginning of the century, only one original building has been erected, only one that is not a copy from somewhere else but has sprung naturally out of the soil of our times, and that is Les Halles. Do you see it Florent? A brilliant work that is a shy foretaste of the twentieth century. That is why it frames Saint Eustache. There stands the church with its roseate window, empty of the faithful, while Les Halles spreads out around it, buzzing with life.”
Lantier and Florent go on an excursion into the countryside, where they smell thyme in the air and see produce growing in rich soil. Florent finds himself “deeply contented in the wholesome and peaceful earth. For about a year now, the only vegetables he had seen were bruised from bouncing in wagons, yanked from the earth the night before and still bleeding. . . . The Les Halles they had left that morning seemed to him a sprawling mortuary, a place for the dead scattered with the corpses of the once living, a charnel house with the stench of decomposition.”
Lantier tells Florent of a series of subversive prints entitled “The Battle of the Fat and the Thin” that depicts several episodes in the conflict throughout the history of mankind of “two opposing groups, one devouring the other to grow fat and jolly.” [Very strong resonance to Eugene Sue’s “History of the People” here]. “The Fat, bursting from their enormity, prepare for the evening glut, while the Thin, doubled over from hunger, look in from the street, stick figures filled with envy.”
Lantier classes both himself and Florent as clearly among the Thin and notes that Florent is surrounded by the Fat where he lives at the charcuterie and where he works among the fishmongers. The “large bosoms”of the Fat, he warns, have it in for Florent as naturally as a cat chases a mouse.”
The radical group of which Florent has become the leader draws the attention of the master gossip of Les Halles, the aged and thin Mademoiselle Saget, who goes rom stall to stall in Les Halles, trading gossip for morsels of food. From one of her observation points of a park bench she “seemed to stretch taller and glide along each story, right up to the round flaring eyes of the attic windows. She gawked at the curtains. She could develop an entire drama from a head that appeared between two curtains.” When she extracts the secret of Florent’s past, “her little feet barely touched the ground. She was carried by her delight as though caressed by a breeze. . . . Now the whole Les Halles neighborhood belonged to her. There was no longer a missing piece.”
Claude Lantier perceives the impractical nature of Florent’s detailed plans for the uprising. He tells his friend: “you approach politics exactly the way I approach painting. . . . You’re an artist in your own field. You dream politics. I imagine you spend entire evenings here, gazing at the stars, interpreting them as infinity’s ballots. Then you tickle yourself with your ideas of justice and truth. It’s also true that your ideas, like my paintings, strike terrible fear into the hearts of the bourgeoisie.”
Florent’s dreaming of revolution extends to his designing banners for each nonexistent cadre. When Lisa discovers the red armbands and flags in his room, she resolves to denounce him to the police. When she does so, she discovers that Florent has already been denounced, anonymously, by nearly everyone she knows. The police have been aware of the movements of the “dangerous” revolutionary since he landed back in France.
When Florent witnesses Marjolin beheading fattened pigeons for market, he nearly faints – revealing his ill-suitedness to the role of revolutionary leader. He is arrested at a politically useful time and led off like a lamb. As the novel ends, he is sentenced to return to Devil’s Island.
The thin idealist expelled, The Beautiful Lisa stands in the doorway of the once again thriving charcuterie, “taking up its entire width. Her linens had never been so white. Her rosy cheeks had never been so refreshed or so perfectly framed in smooth waves of hair. . . .This was total tranquility, complete happiness, lifeless and unshakable, as she bathed in the warm air. Her tightly stretched bodice seemed to be still digesting yesterday’s happiness. Her chubby hands, lost in the folds of her apron, were not even outstretched to catch today’s happiness, for it was certain to fall into her hands.”
Sunday, August 30, 2009
Abstemious Radicals
Emile Zola, The Belly of Paris: Reading Notes, Part 2
At the fishmarket, Florent befriends Muche, the wild son of The Beautiful Norman. “The Beautiful Norman’s son was growing up wild in the fishmarket. He had been brought there when he was only three and spent his days squatting on a rag surrounded by fish. He slept as though he were a brother of the great tunas, and he woke up among mackerel and whiting. The ragamuffin smelled so fishy that people almost wondered if he hadn’t emerged from the belly of some giant fish. For a long time, his favorite game when his mother wasn’t looking was to build walls and houses of herring.”
The job at the market almost seduces Florent, making him forget Devil’s Island: “after seven years of suffering, he had fallen into such a state of calm, in a life so perfectly ordered, that he barely felt alive. He simply drifted mindlessly, each morning caught by surprise to find himself in the same armchair in his cramped office . . . in the ceaseless racket of the market that made him dream of a swelling sea surrounding him. ”
But “little by little, an uneasiness began to eat at him. He became dissatisfied, accusing himself of all sorts of indefinable faults, and began to rebel against both a physical and mental emptiness.”
“Florent was upset by the magnitude of food that he lived with. The sense of disgust he had felt at the charcuterie returned even more forcefully. . . . His own stomach, the small stomach of a thin man, was turned when he passed the heaps of wet fish.”
“As was his destiny, Florent returned to politics.” Florent falls in with a group of “radicals” who meet in a side room of a wine shop and debate revolution. All of them are thin and near-abstemious: having just one glass of wine or beer, or liquor each which they stretch-out over the course of hours of political posturing. “Florent took a sensual pleasure in these meetings.”
Florent tried to recruit the malleable Querau to the radical cell, but The Beautiful Lisa gets wind of it and tells her husband where their real interest, as prosperous business owners, lies: “To please those who have nothing we are supposed to give up earning a living? Of course I take advantage of every opportunity and I support a government that is good for business. If they commit acts of evil, I don’t want to know. As for me, I know I don’t commit them.”
Lisa is increasingly impatient of Florent, whose very thinness is a sign of his bad character. “He . . . . never skips a bite for all the good it does him. His bad instincts feed on him so that he can’t even gain a few pounds.” Troubled that Florent’s thin presence seems to be souring their once prosperous business and household, Lisa visits the Abbe Roustan at the nearly deserted Cathedral of Saint Eustace to ask his advice for whether she should denounce her radical brother-in-law.
In a perverse twist on the romantic tale of Paul et Virginie, Zola tells the story of the two foundlings -- the chubby boy Marjolin and the waif Cadine -- who grow-up together at the market, living lives of sylvan sensuousness amid the plenty and the rot of Les Halles. Taken in by an old vegetable seller, the two small children share a bed into which they smuggle stolen turnips and carrots as well as ”stones, leaves, apple cores, and dolls made of rags.”
Cadine is industrious from an early age; Marjolin lazy. Cadine is also sexually precocious, and when she and Marjolin are forbidden to share the same bed at home, they find numerous hiding places in the market to continue their intimacy. “It was in the basement of the poultry pavilion that they were able to sleep together. It was their special tradition, and finding a way to sleep against each other, the old way they had lost, made them feel warm. There by the slaughterhouse table and the big baskets of feathers, they could stretch out.”
“They lived like happy young animals, ruled by their instincts, satisfying their appetites in the midst of mountains of food, where they had grown like plants made of flesh and blood. . . . Neither of them ever left Les Halles for for more than a few moments. It was their perch, their stable, the colossal manger where they slept, loved, and lived on a huge bed of meat, butter, and vegetables.”
At the fishmarket, Florent befriends Muche, the wild son of The Beautiful Norman. “The Beautiful Norman’s son was growing up wild in the fishmarket. He had been brought there when he was only three and spent his days squatting on a rag surrounded by fish. He slept as though he were a brother of the great tunas, and he woke up among mackerel and whiting. The ragamuffin smelled so fishy that people almost wondered if he hadn’t emerged from the belly of some giant fish. For a long time, his favorite game when his mother wasn’t looking was to build walls and houses of herring.”
The job at the market almost seduces Florent, making him forget Devil’s Island: “after seven years of suffering, he had fallen into such a state of calm, in a life so perfectly ordered, that he barely felt alive. He simply drifted mindlessly, each morning caught by surprise to find himself in the same armchair in his cramped office . . . in the ceaseless racket of the market that made him dream of a swelling sea surrounding him. ”
But “little by little, an uneasiness began to eat at him. He became dissatisfied, accusing himself of all sorts of indefinable faults, and began to rebel against both a physical and mental emptiness.”
“Florent was upset by the magnitude of food that he lived with. The sense of disgust he had felt at the charcuterie returned even more forcefully. . . . His own stomach, the small stomach of a thin man, was turned when he passed the heaps of wet fish.”
“As was his destiny, Florent returned to politics.” Florent falls in with a group of “radicals” who meet in a side room of a wine shop and debate revolution. All of them are thin and near-abstemious: having just one glass of wine or beer, or liquor each which they stretch-out over the course of hours of political posturing. “Florent took a sensual pleasure in these meetings.”
Florent tried to recruit the malleable Querau to the radical cell, but The Beautiful Lisa gets wind of it and tells her husband where their real interest, as prosperous business owners, lies: “To please those who have nothing we are supposed to give up earning a living? Of course I take advantage of every opportunity and I support a government that is good for business. If they commit acts of evil, I don’t want to know. As for me, I know I don’t commit them.”
Lisa is increasingly impatient of Florent, whose very thinness is a sign of his bad character. “He . . . . never skips a bite for all the good it does him. His bad instincts feed on him so that he can’t even gain a few pounds.” Troubled that Florent’s thin presence seems to be souring their once prosperous business and household, Lisa visits the Abbe Roustan at the nearly deserted Cathedral of Saint Eustace to ask his advice for whether she should denounce her radical brother-in-law.
In a perverse twist on the romantic tale of Paul et Virginie, Zola tells the story of the two foundlings -- the chubby boy Marjolin and the waif Cadine -- who grow-up together at the market, living lives of sylvan sensuousness amid the plenty and the rot of Les Halles. Taken in by an old vegetable seller, the two small children share a bed into which they smuggle stolen turnips and carrots as well as ”stones, leaves, apple cores, and dolls made of rags.”
Cadine is industrious from an early age; Marjolin lazy. Cadine is also sexually precocious, and when she and Marjolin are forbidden to share the same bed at home, they find numerous hiding places in the market to continue their intimacy. “It was in the basement of the poultry pavilion that they were able to sleep together. It was their special tradition, and finding a way to sleep against each other, the old way they had lost, made them feel warm. There by the slaughterhouse table and the big baskets of feathers, they could stretch out.”
“They lived like happy young animals, ruled by their instincts, satisfying their appetites in the midst of mountains of food, where they had grown like plants made of flesh and blood. . . . Neither of them ever left Les Halles for for more than a few moments. It was their perch, their stable, the colossal manger where they slept, loved, and lived on a huge bed of meat, butter, and vegetables.”
"A Whole World of Things that Lived on Fat" ("The Belly of Paris" begins)
Emile Zola, The Belly of Paris: Reading Notes, Part 1
Zola’s “The Belly of Paris” shows consumerism’s –- and specifically food’s -– power as a kind of political soporific, drowning the middle class in prosperity and contentment.
An escapee from Devil’s Island, Florent Quenu, returns to Paris starving and, ironically, in the back of an overflowing cart of vegetables headed for Paris’ central market. He had been arrested as part of the popular uprising of 1851, though, in reality, he slept through the action, waking only when he was arrested. This presages Florent’s dreamy, impractical –- indeed, gentle -- side as a revolutionary.
In Florent’s absence, the modern market of Les Halles has been built, a vast cathedral of consumerism replacing the old medieval market. When Florent hears a “peal of bells,” it is from the market buildings, not from nearby St Eustace cathedral (which we later see is nearly deserted). “Florent looked at the huge market emerging from the shadows. . . . . [its buildings] seemed like some kind of oversize modern machine, a kind of steam engine with a cauldron.”
“These markets were like a huge central organ, furiously pulsating and pumping the blood of life though the city’s veins. The uproar from all the stocking and provisioning was like the chomping of the jaws of a colossus, at one end the cracking of whips of the big buyers driving their wagons to the local markets, at the other the plodding clogs of the poor women who sold lettuce door to door carrying off their baskets.’
The malnourished, bedraggled Florent takes refuge with the family of his half-brother Quenu, whom he raised as a boy. Quenu and his wife Lisa – known as “the Beautiful Lisa” have become highly prosperous – indeed, fantastically fat -- as proprietors of a charcutrerie located adjacent to the market. “They looked brimming with good health, solidly built. . . . . The two in their turn looked at Florent with that uneasiness that fleshy people always feel in the presence of someone who is extremely skinny. Even their cat was puffed-up with fat and stared at Florent suspiciously with dilated yellow eyes.”
The atmosphere of the kitchen behind the charcuterie: “A whole world of things that lived on fat. . . . Despite the excessive cleanliness, grease dominated; it oozed from the blue and white tiles, shone on the red floor tiles, gave a gray sheen to the stove, polished the chopping block to the glow of varnished oak. And in the vapor from the three continuously steaming pots of melting pork, the condensation, falling drop by drop, ensured that there was not, from floor to ceiling, so much as a nail that did not drip grease.”
One evening, in the kitchen, the morose Florent is urged to tell the story of his privation and escape from Devil’s Island as a kind of bedtime tale for Lisa and Quenu’s equally plump daughter. The little girl takes it as a fairy story, laughing at the idea one could like three days without eating.
Florent has befriended the artist Claude Lantier, who dreams and talks obsessively about the paintings he wishes to undertake, but never completes them. Lantier finds inspiration in the excess of the modern market but –- another thin man –- actually eats very little. “He found something extravagant, crazy, and sublime in all the vegetables.” But “it was obvious that it had not occured to Claude at that moment that all those beautiful objects were there for people to eat. He loved them for their colors.”
Florent is ill-suited to life in the environs of the market: “Florent felt out of place. He recognized the inept way in which he, a thin and artless man, had fallen into a world of fat people. He realized his presence was disturbing the entire neighborhood.” And he finds his principles fading in "the fatty repose of [their] sleepy kitchen."
Nevertheless, to please Lisa, he agrees to accept a job at the market as temporary inspector in the fish pavilion. Once introduced into the fish market, he falls in with The Beautiful Lisa's rival, the saltwater fish seller known as "The Beautiful Norman."
Zola’s “The Belly of Paris” shows consumerism’s –- and specifically food’s -– power as a kind of political soporific, drowning the middle class in prosperity and contentment.
An escapee from Devil’s Island, Florent Quenu, returns to Paris starving and, ironically, in the back of an overflowing cart of vegetables headed for Paris’ central market. He had been arrested as part of the popular uprising of 1851, though, in reality, he slept through the action, waking only when he was arrested. This presages Florent’s dreamy, impractical –- indeed, gentle -- side as a revolutionary.
In Florent’s absence, the modern market of Les Halles has been built, a vast cathedral of consumerism replacing the old medieval market. When Florent hears a “peal of bells,” it is from the market buildings, not from nearby St Eustace cathedral (which we later see is nearly deserted). “Florent looked at the huge market emerging from the shadows. . . . . [its buildings] seemed like some kind of oversize modern machine, a kind of steam engine with a cauldron.”
“These markets were like a huge central organ, furiously pulsating and pumping the blood of life though the city’s veins. The uproar from all the stocking and provisioning was like the chomping of the jaws of a colossus, at one end the cracking of whips of the big buyers driving their wagons to the local markets, at the other the plodding clogs of the poor women who sold lettuce door to door carrying off their baskets.’
The malnourished, bedraggled Florent takes refuge with the family of his half-brother Quenu, whom he raised as a boy. Quenu and his wife Lisa – known as “the Beautiful Lisa” have become highly prosperous – indeed, fantastically fat -- as proprietors of a charcutrerie located adjacent to the market. “They looked brimming with good health, solidly built. . . . . The two in their turn looked at Florent with that uneasiness that fleshy people always feel in the presence of someone who is extremely skinny. Even their cat was puffed-up with fat and stared at Florent suspiciously with dilated yellow eyes.”
The atmosphere of the kitchen behind the charcuterie: “A whole world of things that lived on fat. . . . Despite the excessive cleanliness, grease dominated; it oozed from the blue and white tiles, shone on the red floor tiles, gave a gray sheen to the stove, polished the chopping block to the glow of varnished oak. And in the vapor from the three continuously steaming pots of melting pork, the condensation, falling drop by drop, ensured that there was not, from floor to ceiling, so much as a nail that did not drip grease.”
One evening, in the kitchen, the morose Florent is urged to tell the story of his privation and escape from Devil’s Island as a kind of bedtime tale for Lisa and Quenu’s equally plump daughter. The little girl takes it as a fairy story, laughing at the idea one could like three days without eating.
Florent has befriended the artist Claude Lantier, who dreams and talks obsessively about the paintings he wishes to undertake, but never completes them. Lantier finds inspiration in the excess of the modern market but –- another thin man –- actually eats very little. “He found something extravagant, crazy, and sublime in all the vegetables.” But “it was obvious that it had not occured to Claude at that moment that all those beautiful objects were there for people to eat. He loved them for their colors.”
Florent is ill-suited to life in the environs of the market: “Florent felt out of place. He recognized the inept way in which he, a thin and artless man, had fallen into a world of fat people. He realized his presence was disturbing the entire neighborhood.” And he finds his principles fading in "the fatty repose of [their] sleepy kitchen."
Nevertheless, to please Lisa, he agrees to accept a job at the market as temporary inspector in the fish pavilion. Once introduced into the fish market, he falls in with The Beautiful Lisa's rival, the saltwater fish seller known as "The Beautiful Norman."
Saturday, August 01, 2009
Prospero breaks his staff: "Endless Things" concludes
John Crowley, Endless Things (Book Four of the AEgypt Cycle): Reading Notes, Part V
Last section of "Endless Things" centered on the moment when Prospero "has to drown his book and break his staff." Like Bruno, Dee, and Kraft before him, Pierce leaves magic behind as "when the world has gone on," when one world has ended, "you must live in it without magic." It seems clear at this pointh that both the pagan and the Christian world systems have been expelled, replaced by absence, spiritual remoteness -- a void.
Last section of "Endless Things" centered on the moment when Prospero "has to drown his book and break his staff." Like Bruno, Dee, and Kraft before him, Pierce leaves magic behind as "when the world has gone on," when one world has ended, "you must live in it without magic." It seems clear at this pointh that both the pagan and the Christian world systems have been expelled, replaced by absence, spiritual remoteness -- a void.
Returning to the Faraway Hills from his European quest, Pierce meets and falls in love with yet another Rose -- Rosamund Corvino (Roo). Pierce, his questing days over, goes to work for a plastics factory and lives at a rundown motel: the Morpheus Arms.
At the wedding of Spofford and Rosie Rasmussen, the local band "The Orphics" have been renamed "The Rude Mechanicals." In a Shakespearean sense, the world now a place for low comedy rather than fairy stories. Spontaneously, Rosie's daughter Sam sings a wordless song "long and lilting, without shape or repeat, and endless melody" a song "not for human ears."
"Sam couldn't know that the song without words she sang was the last breath to be breathed, the last spirit exhalation of the previous age, or the first of the new, same thing."
It is revealed that the scholarly mage Frank Walker Barr -- Pierce's mentor -- has disappeared in Egypt, where he was on an archaeological expedition: another withdrawal of the fantastical from the now thoroughly quotidien world. [And one can't help imagining Beau Brachman's Olds 88 sweeping up through the desert to collect him].
Pierce and Roo travel together to Latin America. On a hike in the mountains, Piece confesses his perverse past loves for the masochist Rose Ryder and his imaginary son Robbie. Roo sees in Pierce's incestuous fantasy a desire for his own father's love; so Robbie as Eros, as magic, dispelled into the language of pop psychology, of recovery.
After Pierce and Roo are married, they travel to Rome, but it too has lost its mystery -- and terror -- for Pierce. In the Campo dei Fiori, site of Giordano Bruno's martyrdom, they come to the statue of the monk, at the base of which is a young couple spoon, sweetly oblivious to the history of the place. Wordlessly, Roo buys flowers, roses, for Pierce to place at the philosopher's feet: "Swallowing in embarrassment and grief, with the incurious eyes of the hylic youth in their beauty upon him, he laid them at the statue's base, and stepped away."
Roo and Pierce return to Latin America to adopt a child and end up becoming parents of twin sisters: Maria (Mary) and Jeusa (who they rename Vita). Washing dishes one night, Pierce, not unaffectionately, tells Roo that in an archetypal sense she is the "crone," the woman in the hero's life that comes after the mother and the beloved and who "humiliates and challenges the hero and charges him with interpreting her commands and unriddling her harsh riddles, to labor under her sanctions until liberated."
To which Roo replies, also not unaffectionately, "that is such bullshit."
At Roo's insistence, Pierce has isolated himself in a retreat house, an Abbey (but of recent construction) to finish the work of sorting through Kraft's final manuscript. "It reminded him of the welcoming and comforting structures of stone and timbers built in the wild places by the government just a few decades before, when labor was cheap and hopes were high, the lodges and the nature centers of state parks, the riparian works and dams, places Pierce loved to come upon as a boy."
While at the Abbey, Pierce once again confronts the Y-shaped moment of decision between salvation (which is also intolerant) and sinfulness (which is also innocent). He looks for counsel from the retreat coordinator, Brother Lewis, who is at first kindly but then sternly condemns his marriage to Roo as "a great wrong" due to her having been previously married. That night, Pierce wanders from the Abbey grounds and finds himself at the "Paradise Lounge," a strip club. His attention focuses on a lap dancer with shaved pubic hair ("Edenic," Pierce thinks). "When you get to hell," the lapdancer says seductively, "mention my name. You'll get a good deal."
Pierce feels exulted for a moment, but then empty. And he has the revelation of how distant creation is from everything we know as meaning.
The "realm in which all is contained" is beyond heaven and beyond meaning, both of which lie within. That realm "provided all that was needed for the world to be, but it touched nothing here. It made nothing, altered nothing, wanted nothing, asked nothing, urged nothing; the fact of its existence beyond existence had nothing to do with what went on here, didn't shine through it as a dome of many-colored glass. No. This world shone with its own light, and its light is all the light there is."
The Y-shaped decision between salvation and damnation has no greater meaning than the world that is becoming. "Here at this place, existence divided in two, before and after, though nothing, not an atom, had changed because of it, or would."
The book ends with a hike up the mountain over Blackbury Jambs to see the monument to one of the town's luminaries -- Hurd Hope Welkin, whose struggles with demons now appear to have been simple psychological delusion. Sam, who could once see spirits is now an anthropologist, who looks for clues to human behavior in evolutionary biology.
The Welkin monument includes a massive harp through which the wind plays in "perfect concord." It marks the closest Pierce and his loved ones can get to heaven.
"They had come up as far as it was possible to go."
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